Stage 1: Completed

There is always a sense of nostalgia when your life changes dramatically. I guess even prisoners might feel a hint of it on the day of their release. Which is not say that Beijing was a prison. It’s just a city I could never really get warm with that nonetheless is home to a lot of people I will miss. Except for one weeklong trip I didn’t travel recently, trying instead to spend my remaining weekends with my local friends. The Hutongs become more inviting in late spring and summer, with lots of cafés and bars opening up their rooftops and alleys that remain lively until the wee hours.

Time for a resume, the most important question being the one that I will have to answer an estimated 100 times when I’m in Germany: 

My room

My class

My mates

How’s your Chinese? Depending on the day and my mood, my answer will range from “I manage to get around” to “I’m pretty impressed by my progress”. Objectively speaking, I still can’t read a newspaper properly, I still fail to understand conversations that are not about everyday topics, I still fail to express nuances or emotional content. But as it is our nature, we don’t usually compare ourselves against an ideal but against others and on this measure, I’m pretty satisfied. I learnt faster than expected by the university and particularly in speaking and listening (as a pretty social person these two were always more important to me) I’m well above the level I’ve been tested in (HSK5). And even for the challenges that lay ahead of me I can see light at the end of tunnel as my Chinese slowly becomes good enough for unsupervised learning, meaning I can read a magazine or hold a conversation and while not getting 100% right I’m still good enough to get the gist and thereby improve. One thing I should’ve done better and more is talking Chinese to Chinese, not just exchanging phrases with cashiers and waiters, but longer conversations with friends. To be fair, there’s barely a foreigner I know doing that, since the kind of Chinese people you become friends with are the ones who’ve experienced Western culture in some way, which usually means they know English pretty well. Which brings me to my thesis that I’ve learnt more spoken Chinese in the few weeks traveling alone in China than in the eight months studying in Beijing in an international environment.

How’s China? I think I talked about that in length before, so I’ll just drop a few words here: Big, fast-paced, competitive, cold, miraculous, challenging, inhospitable, crowded, delicious, exhausting.

Could you imagine living there long-term? Not really

Did you find a girlfriend? No, fortunately I won’t have to make a decision between breaking up or maintaining a long-distance relationship with limited chances for survival

What’s next? First, holidays from China. Since the guidelines for when to start our internships are relatively loose, I can afford to go to Germany for nearly three weeks in exchange for working a bit longer at the end of the program in December/January. I am really looking forward to the time with my family and friends. For once, simply because it’s time spent with them, but also because I do need a reminder of my other, normal life as a German among 80 million others every now and then. China has a lot of annoying sides, but one thing is undeniable: It is exciting and challenging. Just compare the burgeoning app-economy with the current situation in Germany where I still have to go through a fucking bank transfer or have the right amount of hard cash with me if I owe a friend money. On top of that, as an expat in China you automatically live kind of a high-live (not necessarily in terms of money spent, but rather because the expat community mostly consists of people in politics and business). I am objectively very well aware that quality of living and my environment in Germany are far better, but I do need to see it with my own eyes every now and then to not get trapped in my fascination for the pace of live and opportunities that come with it in China.

After that break I’m heading back to Beijing to extend my visa under adventurous circumstances. A Chinese philosophy of living or dealing with problems is subsumed as yĭróu-kègāng (以柔克刚), overcoming hardness with flexibility. I was always skeptical of this approach, and trying to get my visa extension for the internship clearly showed its limits. While the company which is supposed to provide the documents and lots and lots of stamps (Chinese really love stamps, no matter if they actually make sense or give authority to a piece of paper) took a flexible approach, meaning everything they did was about right, but not entirely up to standards, Beijing’s foreigners office preferred to take a hard stance, meaning they rejected my first application due to insufficient documentation. The extension process, once initiated, takes 10 days during which the foreigners office retains your passport, so travelling internationally is impossible. Because of my limited time in Beijing I had two options, I could either cancel my weeklong trip to Manila and Singapore in the week before my final exams to guarantee that the visa extension would run smoothly, wasting 300€ in the process, or use my one remaining day in Beijing after coming back from Germany and before continuing to Guangzhou to go the office and apply. The latter option has the risk that if my application is rejected again I’ll have to somehow start my internship later or travel back and forth between Beijing and Guangzhou (2500km distance), since the only place to extend my visa is Beijing. I took the risk nonetheless since I didn’t see why I should (literally) pay for the stupidity of whoever at the company had so carelessly drawn up the first application document. Whether to regret or rejoice at that decision, I’ll know in three weeks.

For now I’m pretty happy I took this one week to meet to old friends briefly. One is a mathematician / data-scientist in Manila’s start-up scene (the type of qualifications that make company’s HR departments drool uncontrollably) during the week and a DJ on weekends (the kind of qualification that is the foundation of our friendship – we met at a techno club in Manila two and a half years ago). The other one used to be my student buddy during my exchange semester in Taiwan and thus one of my gateways to Chinese language and culture, though she herself is more Latina than Taiwanese. Born and raised to Taiwanese parents in Latin America, she studied in Taiwan and is now working in Singapore.

I spent only two days in Manila, just enough to see my friend, go out twice and visit one amazing art museum in the outskirts overlooking the city. There are a lot of positive things to say about Filipinos, like their openness, friendliness and relaxed composure. There are unfortunately at least as many negative things to say about their government and Manila as a city. Under Duterte, the country went from economic gridlock to economic gridlock and killing drug traffickers and -users indiscriminately. Inflation is high and the country remains a poorhouse in a booming region. Gridlock is also the first word that comes into mind when thinking of Manila. In the absence of a larger plan, the city is mostly a product of private investments through which traffic somehow has to find its way. Streets are zig-zagging between high-rises, highways end all of a sudden and for 15 million inhabitants there are 3 metro lines. Jakarta and Manila compete annually for the title most congested city on the this planet and studies have repeatedly named dizzying numbers for the cost to the economy of the hour-long commutes their inhabitants have to endure. Maybe growing up there one assumes an air of resignation towards the chaos around, but I would seriously go insane if I had to get to work and back every day in this traffic. On average, walking is about as fast as taking a car in Manila (to get to the museum in the suburbs 20km away, we needed about 2,5 hours on a Saturday).

The traffic is horrible...

The poverty is striking...

But you really can't complain about the nightlife in Manila

Singapore then is about as opposed to Manila as it gets. I don’t know if there’s a place more orderly, organized and planned-out than this tax haven at Eurasia’s southernmost bit of land. The downside: It’s expensive and quite boring. Though I have to admit that after uninterrupted months of Beijing’s gigantism and coming straight from Manila, I did appreciate this dull flawlessness. If you are an ambitious, talented person in your 20s or 30s and primarily concerned with your career and making money, this is the place to go. Salaries are high, standard of living is high, pressure is high and people define themselves through their jobs even more than in other large cities. I think there’s a direct correlation between the amount of urban-affluent generation Y people in a given area and the number of third-wave coffee shops that also sell instagrammable salads, super food, juices and avocado + x dishes and somehow manage to appear like they all belong to one franchise despite usually being individual stores. Well, in Singapore those are everywhere.

Having a pool at 1,5m distance from your bed is one of the better
features of living in a tropical country

My friend works in HR for a local competitor to Amazon and managed to find time for me even though I came from Monday to Friday (being able to leave work at 6pm is anything but sure in office jobs in Singapore). She’s no doubt ambitious and really likes her surroundings for now, but her long-term plan is to save up money for an MBA program in Europe that will make it easier for her to get a work visa for the Schengen area and eventually settle there. Smart move, if you ask me. Which brings me back to the beginning of this post – I should be grateful for the privilege of being able to live and work in Europe without a visa and think twice if I wanna exchange that for smog-suffused Chinese cities just for the thrill of being “where things happen”.

Nothing in particular

As Beijing is becoming an oven, my two semesters here are nearing their end. Just a few more Chinese lessons and weekends spent in Wudaokou or Sanlitun and I’ll depart from this place – most likely without returning for a greater amount of time. I’m surprised how unfamiliar I am still with this city, at night I barely recognize the streets that surround my university. There are a couple places I know inside out and then there are the ring streets and metro lines connecting those with each other.

My mistake probably is having been to Taipei before. Once you’ve experienced Taiwan, every other place in East Asia pales in comparison. Did I mention I went back yet another time? No? Well I did, from the 1^st of May for five days, making use of the labor day holiday from Wednesday to Saturday (funny side note: When there are holidays during the week, China often shifts the weekend so that workers have more than a single day off – you might get Thursday and Friday off too if Wednesday is a holiday, but then you’ll have to work on a Sunday instead. I still don’t know if there are exact rules for these occasions or if it is decided on a case to case basis). Do I have to tell you again how great it was? I don’t think so, but I’d like to show one picture that showcases one aspect I admire about Taiwan.

This picture is taken at a IKEA restaurant tray-return counter in Taipei. Usually your task as a customer is restricted to placing the tray on a conveyor belt, but in this branch people have to separate the trash, put the cutlery in designated boxes and then put the tray with the remaining tableware in shelves. Because this process is rather laborious, queues often build up. Nonetheless, everybody I observed precisely acted out on the instructions and I don’t think it’s because of an obedient way of thinking they did so, but out of empathy with the staff. The same is true for the streets of Taipei. There are virtually no public trashcans. While this would cause Berlin to look (even more) like a dumping ground, Taipei’s streets are so clean you could spill milkshake on them and lick it off the ground.

Besides the accent – Beijing Mandarin sounds vulgar to Taiwanese, Taiwanese Mandarin sounds gay to Beijingers – I always have to readapt to the local manners. Beijing is straightforward, loud and darwinistic, Taipei is polite, unintrusive and empathetic. So when I rush into Taipei’s metro with no regard for the queue I feel just as embarrassed as when I receive and annoyed glance from a fruit seller in Beijing after wasting his time with unnecessary phrases of civility (“I’d like to ask” “Please”).

After an estimated 5 days of spring weather, the relentless summer heat renders daytime outside activities infeasible, but sitting outside in some Hutong bars in the ancient city center at night has become a great way to spend a Friday. Ever keen to travel and see more places, I stopped myself from booking to many trains and flights for the last weeks here so that I can spend more time with the many great people I met and befriended here. That’s the one part I really hate about constantly moving, as great as it is to have new acquaintances and friends all over the world, leaving a place, particularly the people there behind sucks, even more so if that place is not a city you can come over to for a weekend visit, but one that requires you to sit in a plane for 10-hours. What’s a bit different in Beijing is that up to this day, the number of mainland Chinese, let alone Beijing locals I know is deplorably low. The people I am around are a wild mix of foreign born Chinese, people from Macau and Taiwan, Germans, other Europeans and Americans. Most of those will move away in foreseeable future as well, less than a handful actually has long-term career or life plans in Beijing.

Is 10 months long or short? It’s long enough I think, I’m happy to get a break from my environment here (not just the city, also the classroom-style studying and student dormitory). That being said, my fascination for Chinese and China won’t wane, it just needs to replenish after a year of full-time, high-intensity studying of nothing but that stuff.

Economics with Chinese characteristics

Right in the middle of the most stressful time of the semester I thought it’s about time to write again. Quite a few things have happened. Friends visited, family visited, it rained (yes really, that’s worth reporting) and I got an internship which by extension means I’m going to move to Guangzhou in July.

Spring activities: Chilling...

Trying to pose like middle-aged Chinese women

Spring is the time when family and friends are visiting their offspring / mate abroad. I’m not entirely sure why everybody is coming here the same two months, but it’s probably a mixture of climatic (in China) and holiday (in Germany) reasons. The problem in China is, unless your visitors know some Mandarin, they can’t really do that much besides visiting main attractions if you’re not with them, so you better have plenty of time when they are around. This came at a cost for university in my case, but then again, applying the language in daily life is just as important, isn’t it?

Spring is also the time when something ominous happens in the skies of northern China: Clouds start to form. You easily recognize that, because other than smog, real water vapor forms discernable objects. At some point, even more ominously, out of these objects water is falling, allowing more modest plants to blossom, thus adding some color to a city that I thought was eternally grey. I never knew just how good the smell of fresh rain vaporizing on the ground can feel until I moved here. I neither figured out how the grass and trees that are not irrigated survive the 8-month period with virtually no precipitation (since this is China’s capital, it wouldn’t be too surprising if every park and roadside tree were manually irrigated either). Anyways, spring is a short and intense period, with temperatures ranging from below zero to 30+ all within one week.

Sometimes, just sometimes, Beijing can be charming

Yet the explosion of outside activities that I’m used to when the men and women of Berlin recalibrate from their hibernation mode is not so present here. Clothes tend to get shorter (on some girls longer to protect the pale color of their skin) but the number of people outside doesn’t increase much. Beergardens and open-air restaurants seem to be an expat-thing too. Problematic levels of air pollution could be a reason, but Beijing people usually don’t care about those much, so I guess it’s mostly a cultural difference. If you look at how developed Asian cities like Singapore or Hongkong were basically built to minimize exposure of their citizens to the tropical climate around them, you realize how romantic our concept of being out in nature is.

What’s extremely fascinating about traveling in China is that it’s not built yet, there are still huge swaths of people and resources moving as provinces and cities scramble to boost their economy and be part of the country’s transformation. And as I stressed before, you just can’t understate the scale of development when a country has 1,4 billion inhabitants. It means that even the smaller cities Europeans might know (Qingdao, Hangzhou, Chengdu) are bigger than Europe’s largest cities. Building homes for hundreds of millions of people in cities with the population of Austria is nothing like what we’re used to. A housing developer usually builds dozens of buildings next to each other, not semidetached houses on a suburban side street, but 30+ storey apartment blocks, each easily inhabiting more than a 1000 people. Thus, a single development project might house more people than a mid-sized European city. To sustain the daily needs of those people, often a shopping mall and for larger projects concert halls, museums etc. would be added. The initial infrastructure usually consists of a grid pattern of roads the width of highways and some bus lines, later metro-, high-speed-railway-stations and actual highways might follow. Within a few years, whole neighborhoods and cities are built from flat land and the most stunning part about this is, they often remain uninhabited for years to follow.

Typical suburban development I visited near Suzhou: Endless lines
of apartment skyscrapers

 

And some higher ones for luxury penthouses and office space

No ambitious project would be complete without a mega-mall

And a landmark where people can take selfies

Does this picture have symbolic character?

Yet despite my condescending remarks, you can't deny it's impressive

One reasonable way to divide China is by urbanization. Among the cities, there are 4 tiers, from fully developed metropolis to provincial city. Housing is being built everywhere, but the demand is absurdly distorted. Extreme inequality in allocation of resources (for a number of reasons each worth an own article, to name a few: rapid development needs focal points; China is traditionally a centralist, top-down state; Chinese people care a big lot about namedropping, be it universities, companies or cities) means that everybody is trying to make it to Beijing and Shanghai. Those cities have all the best universities, the best healthcare, the best infrastructure, nearly all the biggest companies and by far the highest wages. The downside: To own a house or apartment in these cities remains a pipe dream for all but the richest few percent of the population. To give a comparison: The price of a 3-room family apartment in Beijing’s city area, not necessarily central, adjusted for income would be like having to pay 3 Million Euros for the same apartment in Munich. Even unadjusted, China’s major cities have long surpassed ours in property prices. Renting is comparatively cheap (I have to stress “comparatively” here, the income-to-rent ratio in Beijing is still the worst in the world), but China is still culturally conservative and family-orientated, so owning an apartment is widely considered a prerequisite for starting a family as a man. Despite being some of the largest cities in the world, land is scarce in Beijing and Shanghai and newly built flats are sold in an instant at fantastic prices even in a sluggish market.

On the other hand, projects in the hinterlands of 2^nd and 3^rd tier cities are often devoid of people for years after being constructed, though most of them eventually fill with life. The most obvious question then is: Why would any investor do that? The general, vague answer is: Because the market environment is very different, which is to say less demand-driven. Whereas a city and subsequently private investors in Europe react to a surge in demand, Chinese local governments try to create demand instead, hoping that a seemingly unstoppable high growth will eventually pull people out of poverty (= the villages) into the middle class (= their newly built suburbs). They have more money to spend and levers to pull when it comes to incentivizing investment and don’t mind creating overcapacities because they don’t have to be profitable. What’s more, Chinese local administrations are measured against certain KPIs, very often that is the local GDP growth. The country that vows itself to socialism with Chinese characteristics has a meritocratic style of governance that is more similar to the way capitalist companies function. Mayors of cities are usually in place for 5 years only and their next position will depend on whether they perform well during their legislative period. Since huge construction and infrastructure projects boost the current GDP and enlarge the leeway for future GDP growth, they are one of the favorite pastimes of local governments in China. Sometimes you can recognize a well-conceived concept behind them, sometimes they are just a pretense to save the mayor’s career and funnel some money into his daughter’s husband’s brother‘s construction company that surprisingly won the tender.

In addition to that, even private enterprises come with a “Just do it” mentality that is at odds with our conservative and frugal way of investing. I too still struggle to understand how pouring squillions of dollars into dubious land development projects or young start ups in extremely competitive markets with little potential for differentiation (Bike Sharing) would be a good idea. The real damage, whether it be small or big, of those misdirected projects will only be known once the Chinese economy as a whole cools down considerably. Investing in a place to live is a huge decision and therefore one of the first things to be postponed when people face uncertainty, which in turn pulls down the prices. Most experts agree that China does have a housing bubble and crossing the country by train you’d agree with them. However, nobody can reliably predict the size of it or the time it will burst. So for the time being, we’ll continue to see ghostly cities popping up in the most random places. For anyone who is interested in the “real” China, visiting one of these odd, megalomaniac suburbs is more telling than the glitzy first-tier cities or puffed up tourist sights.

Break

I’m hereby announcing a hiatus from blogging! That is for two reasons:

-          - I managed to skip a course and am now on a quite advanced one! That’s good news considering my goal was to learn as much Chinese as possible this year. It also means that I have to write essays and prepare presentations every week and homework increases exponentially.

-          - I certainly still could squish in some time for writing this here and there, but there’s really not much to write about since I came back (that’s the more important reason). I could bore you with very profane observations, the weather has become warmer recently and my favorite club updated its sound system, but there are so many interesting things to read that I better save all of us from this waste of time. I'll still be updating this blog if I feel like, but certainly not in a nearly weekly interval as I used to.

The only actually relevant development during the last weeks and still ongoing is me applying for internships. Due to my interests ranging from statistics to policy, from economics to Chinese, I’m pathologically undecisive about where I wanna work. That results in a scattershot application process, where I select a number of job offerings and companies that sound good to me but often have completely different specializations and demands for applicants. In the next step, I see which of these respond to me and ideally offer me a position, trying to figure out the working climate and culture in the meantime until typically one of the opportunities stands out for one reason or another. During this process I would usually have a minor crisis hating myself for avoiding a clear-cut career path, but this fades in hindsight as I enjoy trying new things and it didn’t really harm me yet to not be a 100% dedicated to, say, finance or marketing. Also, how could life be interesting if you already knew what you’ll be doing 10 years from now. I like surprises.

The end is near

I’m writing this last part of my travel blog on the train from Guilin to Beijing. That is around 2000km and a good example of how developed China’s infrastructure is. Besides driving yourself on the highway network which is not really an option for this kind of distance, there are flights, bullet trains and slower sleeper trains that go overnight. While ticket prices for bullet trains and flights converge for long distances, sleeper trains become an ecofriendly, cheaper alternative, though far from the South-East-Asian backpacker’s paradise cheap. China has been out of this league for quite a while. The upside is, standards in sleeper trains are so good that you don’t have to be adventurous or desperate to use them. When I took the standard “sleeper” class in India, I could travel 1000km for 10€, sleeping on a barely upholstered berth covered by dirt-stained articifial leather that would make you sweat instantaneously if it came in touch with your bare skin. Since no bedding was provided, you’d better bring a sleeping back. There was no AC but big, noisy metal fans attached to the ceiling, that, were you unlucky enough to get the upper berth, would run right next to your head. What can I say, the first time it was terrible, the second time I slept like a baby, you can get used to more things than you’d think. In China you don’t have to though, the berths are small but comfortable, bedding provided, AC/heating exists and people are actually quiet after the lights are switched off at 10pm.

Guilin is built around the jagged karst mountains

Sun & Moon pagoda, illuminated accordingly

The last few days were a disappointment in some way, but I have only myself to blame. The weather in the Guilin area has been outright crap for the last weeks with no improvement in sight and yet I wanted to spend four days there. Should’ve just stayed two days more at the beach in friendly Beihai. I entered the train after a cooling thunderstorm in Beihai at still around 20 degrees and exited only a few hundred kilometers north at Guilin station to 5 degrees and rain. Very much like Berlin in winter, with the difference that not all places here have heating, e.g. my hostel for the first night. Deciding to postpone showering the next morning, I quickly made my way towards Yangshuo on the quest for warmth and also some scenery (but mostly warmth really). Even if you’ve never heard of Yangshuo (阳朔), you have definitely seen photos taken or pictures drawn from the area (LIIIIINK). Its karst landscapes were the inspiration for generations of Chinese ink painters and truly are a beauty to behold. Even the miserable clouds added to the aesthetic and mystery of the jagged hills. It goes without saying that where there are sights, there’ll be crowds in China, but go away from the area under service by the tourist coaches and all you see are a few Westerners who also had the idea of renting a bike.

To me, this was the first time I’ve seen real Chinese countryside. I’ve been to smaller cities before, poorer parts of China, but never to actual villages. The Yangshuo area is probably not very representative (if any place can be) for China since tourism guarantees a decent income for most people, but even here one thing was strikingly visible: The absence of the middle-generation. All I saw was kids and old-people. 250 million people in China are migrant workers, easily more than a third of the workforce. The lengths to which parents go to guarantee their kids a better future are stunning and it’s very normal for Chinese children from the countryside to grow up with their grandparents, seeing mom and dad only a few times a year. It’s this type of dedication, poor peasants working in dismal manufacturing jobs in faraway cities to improve their and especially their children’s life a little, that brought China forward in the last decades. These days jobs have become better, salaries rose and mobility too, allowing parents to travel home more often, but the fact that many kids grow up away from them hasn’t changed. This is in big parts due to the Hukou (户口) policy that severely restricts the freedom of movement for Chinese citizens in their own country. You’re free to move and work wherever you want in China, however, most public social services to you and your family are only available in your own designated district. Imagine moving from a small city in East Germany to Munich for a job opportunity, only that you’ll have to send your kids to a private school now (if you can afford, else they’ll have to stay with their grandparents) and get no benefits from the municipal administration whatsoever.

This policy helped China as a whole because it kept people in their place and under control. Think of the slumification of metropolitan areas in countries like Nigeria or India. These developments didn’t make people’s lives better, neither did they help the cities those people swarmed to. The downside of China’s approach is quite obvious: Whereas in European countries the state does what it can (and in the case of Germany fails badly) to counterbalance the effects that growing up under less privileged circumstances has on children and grant the same opportunities to everyone, China doesn’t even attempt to. Be born in Beijing or Shanghai and a good life lies ahead of you. Even if you’re too dumb or lazy to perform well in the excellent local school system financed by the high taxes levied in your area, you could still marry a rich partner who wants to get the Hukou for your locale (this is one way to change your Hukou. Work is another, but rules vary depending on municipalities and of course the more desirable cities are, the harder it is to get one). On the other hand, be born poor in a small village in Gansu and well – stay there or maybe spend your best years as a guest worker in a mid-sized city. All I can say is that I’m impressed by the pragmatism and stoicism with which the people accept the crooked rules of the game and make the best out of them.

Actual vacation

My last 10 days on the road are more backpacking like I used to before I had friends I could visit in other cities. I think I mentioned before how annoying I find it to just hop from one sight to another, so I restricted myself to one Chinese province. I chose Guangxi for two reasons, first because it was close enough to Hongkong to not fly there and second because it has beach and warm temperatures even in February. When I was younger I really liked winter in Germany, but in the meantime I realized how much more pleasant tropical climate is. Maybe winters were really colder back then so that you’d have some beautiful snowscapes instead of the grisly, grey, depression-inducing mess that is Berlin from November until March.

My first station from Hongkong wasn’t in Guangxi yet, but just across the border from Hong Kong. Shenzhen, a fishing village 40 years ago, now a city of more than 10 million and the world’s manufacturing hub for IT hardware, is just a metro ride from Hong Kong’s centre. What it lacks in history it makes up with its high standard of living. It’s quite green and friendlier than most Chinese megacities feel. I only had an afternoon there, which I spent in a converted warehouse area (that might as well be located in London or Berlin) and my favorite corny tourist attraction so far, 世界之窗 or “Windows of the World”. That’s a theme park that has replica of hundreds of famous buildings and monuments in different scales, with the center being a 70 or so meter high Eiffel tower. But there’s also the Statue of Liberty, the Cologne Dom, Tower bridge and so on. It also has a dinosaur section and a bar area that is built in the style of a typical “European” inner city, including a church, cobble stones and authentic ancient-looking street lanterns. As my architect co-scholar said after seeing a replica of a church in a shopping mall with a big LCD-screen instead of an altar: “Die scheißen sich nix”, which is a friendly way of saying they don’t give a shit. I like that. The ingenuousness with which things that appeal are simply copied. It really is a sign of respect and admiration. Chinese like Europe and especially Germany for its architecture, lifestyle and nature. It’s just that sometimes they idealize and disparage it at the same time as a romantic, cute, old-fashioned thing from past, more of a display in a museum than an actual place with actual people living their lives there.

Also note the two towers of the world trade center in thiss model of New
York that looks like the city has been abandoned for a century

The next stop after Shenzhen for me was Beihai, a rather small city (1,5 million inhabitants) at the southern coastline of Guangxi, not very far from the border to Vietnam. Tourist sights are rare, but the weather was perfect, my hotel had a pool and was next to the beach and I needed some time to work and study anyways. I liked it so much that in fact, after checking the weather forecast for Guilin (8 degrees, rain), I decided to stay four days until the 17^th. For one night however, I took the ferry to Weizhou Island (涠洲岛), a rock formed by volcanic activity about 40km off the coast. Just a few years ago, it was barely known and a hidden gem, but with more and more Chinese tourists able to afford trips to the south, the tourism industry discovered the place and relentlessly developed it. I can see why many expats in China take the next flight out of the country if they want to go on vacation. Travelling in China can be fun, interesting, entertaining, but it can’t be relaxing. Unless you’re willing to explore very far off the beaten track, you’ll always have crowds of Chinese around you, with a surprising number of noisy children, given that the birthrate here is not a lot higher than in Germany. Along with the tourism come its unsavory side effects: Touts and charges for everything. It’s great that an otherwise underdeveloped island gets the chance to develop a local economy, but being treated like a money fountain that has to be squeezed as hard as possible just doesn’t leave you with pleasant experiences (and it wasn’t cause I was the only white person around, Chinese tourists were treated with impartial greed). I managed to have fun nonetheless, meeting some young Chinese who showed me how to properly arrange a seafood dinner (go to the market with the fresh catch, haggle hard (don’t be white), go to the restaurant, haggle hard, get fresh oysters for 40ct/piece) and showed me the island on scooters. I also went jetskiing by myself. It’s exactly the type of blowhard, adrenaline activity you’d think it be and hella fun. After another night in tropical Beihai, I’m now on the way north, slowly moving towards the cold reality of Beijing in February.

So chill and full of nice cafés and bars

You can have your (Chinese) written with Caramel. Taste is so-so,
but a great shot for your instagam collection.

A global hub retires

Hong Kong at present is a place in suspense. Gone are the days where the city was the gateway to China and Asia’s financial hub. It’s still a global city and has its very own special feel, but nobody really knows how much longer, and you get the sense of a place that has lived through its golden times. Many young people are moving abroad or to the mainland to look for work because the immense cost of housing makes Hong Kong unattractive to all but the highest-earning. The central Chinese government doesn’t seem to see any benefit in continuing to give Hong Kong its special status and thus squeezes its space with a mixture of competition from the neighboring cities, (regressive) reform and infrastructure projects to further connect it with the mainland (background info: Hongkong was returned to China from the British in 1997 under the “one country, two systems” premise, presumably until 2047. Currently the Chinese government gives the impression that it’s not willing to wait another 28 years until full reintegration). A new high-speed railway links it to Shenzhen and Guangzhou now, the two biggest cities in the so-called pearl river delta area. The world’s longest sea bridge was also opened last year, connecting Macao, Zhuhai and Hongkong over a distance of about 40km. A new set of policies made clear that the times when Hong Kong was one of the freest places on earth are over. Advocating independence can get you into jail now and “disrespecting” the Chinese national anthem will soon be punishable too. A foreign correspondent’s visa got cancelled last year on grounds of hosting an event with an independence activist. A mixture of strategic buy ups by mainland investors and self-censorship lets the media appear increasingly toothless. For instance, nobody in the allegedly free press would dare to propagate independence or expose high-level corruption within the communist party for fear of retaliation. On top of all that, tourism is a boon for the local economy but threatens to suffocate the city. In one year, Hong Kong has an influx of 65 million people, that’s nearly 10 times its population. Most of them are on short trips from the mainland, the improved connections help funneling through more people than ever before. Me, being there during Chinese New Year, could witness what that means. Streets in shopping areas and around tourist sights were barely walkable because of the sheer amount of people pushing, standing and queuing. I stopped going to any places that were mentioned on travel guides or blogs because it was safe to assume that coaches with hundreds of tourists would already be there. The good thing about Chinese tourists though is that they usually stick to the top spots and don’t bother exploring too much, which means if you go off-track just a bit you can still get a hassle-free experience.

Just a normal crowd in central Macao waiting to for their turn
to take a picture with the cities landmark

Why not building a mall that looks like Venice, put a channel in it
and then hire Italians as gondolieris, including the opera-singing?

So altogether Hong Kong gives a fairly sad impression and I sympathize with every local who is mourning the days when their city was rightfully admired as the (capitalist) pearl of the East. Those days won’t return, but it’s not like everything is going down the tube either. In fact, I enjoyed Hong Kong so much that I stayed seven nights in total, with a three-day break in Guangzhou for the Chinese New Year celebrations. It still has its very own character, this mixture of extreme wealth and poverty, incredible efficiency even when things look chaotic on the surface, big South- and South-East-Asian minorities and beautiful nature just a few footsteps from the center. 

Just a few kilometres away from Kowloon...

Old villages in rural Hongkong, most of the buildings are abondoned
and slowly decay

Talking about efficiency, Hong Kongs infrastructure is jaw-dropping. This might sound like a nerdy city planner thing to marvel at, but everybody who’s been to Hong Kong would agree. Combining the metro and the minibuses that go virtually everywhere where there are roads, cars are completely obsolete and not even faster. With its many, hilly islands separated by the ocean, the topography is not really conducive to creating a megacity, which makes the neatness and elegance with which highways, skyscrapers and railway lines are laid upon one another all the more impressive.

Kowloon, the island opposite to Central Hongkong with its famous glistening skyline is the grubby, lively part of the city where my hostel was. It looks like a steampunk fantasy at night, with neon lights, claustrophobically narrow lanes and house alleys, hookers and every inch of public space occupied by street vendors, food stalls and people. You can’t get more urban than this. There’s a portion of Indians and Pakistanis significant enough to give the place this peculiar smell of spices that I otherwise only know from India. The lack of space might sabotage the housing market, but it also helps create a buzzy atmosphere that I often miss in the vast, newly built cities of China. I also enjoy the shabbier sides that come with so many people living together on little space - if pretty and clean was my thing, I wouldn’t have spent the last 4 years in Berlin.

What happens when you have no space, but many people who want to buy
apartments.

Of course, places are just as good as the people you meet there, and Hong Kong had the best people I met on this trip so far (part of the reason is certainly that I was by myself for the first time). The city might not be Asia’s global hotspot as in the past, but the people are still very international and have a global mindset. I met a French guy who’s built and run clubs all over East Asia, a Chinese working for a pro-mainland propaganda channel in Hong Kong to get the citizenship (sometimes biographies can really be contradictory) and my lovely hostel reception lady is a local multilinguist who’s doing Chinese-Spanish translation as a profession during the day and for some reason enjoys nightshifts at a reception desk, going back to Spain to finish her master in interpretation in a year or so.

I came to Hong Kong not expecting much, for once because I constantly read about how integration into China is killing its vibe and also because I often heard it is a soulless finance hub. The latter is certainly not true, the former can be felt and might get worse, so it’s recommendable to see this bustling place rather soon than late.

Now for a quick excursion: As a welcome interruption to my personal travel plans, I got invited by my co-scholar Karin to join her and her family for Chinese New Year. With her in China and most of the family living there anyways, her parents flew in from Germany for holidays and new year celebration. New year celebration can be read as – you guessed it – eating. Several days in a row, with friends and relatives, someone was always keen to invite us to his favorite restaurant, from morning to evening, interrupted by brief sightseeing sessions. Since we were in Guangzhou (one hour by train from Hong Kong), the food consisted of Dim Sum mostly, which is not only steamed stuff, but actually more of a classifier for all sorts of small plates of food. Typical Cantonese cuisine stands out for its focus on seafood, the fact that it has sweet dishes (desserts in the European sense have no tradition in China) and that, if you wanted, you could eat everything, whether that be monkey brain or ox penis. The Cantonese will know a way to make it consumable. I stuck to more common dishes, which didn’t prevent me from a minor food poisoning. The funny thing about that episode is that not only me and a few other DAAD friends who were invited felt sick, but also Karin’s family. I couldn’t really enjoy seafood dim sum since then.

Besides eating, hongbaos (= 红包 / red envelope) are the most essential part of every Chinese New Year. They’re given from the old (working) generation to the young and contain, unsurprisingly, money. It’s not that easy to determine the right hongbao rate for someone, since it depends on a range of factors (how close is the blood relationship, how old, already earning some money, has a partner or not and sadly often also whether it’s a boy or a girl). We were told by Karin that first of all a scholarship doesn’t count as income so we can still count ourselves on the receiving side and second as foreigners the rules of Chinese courtesy don’t apply to us in a strict sense, meaning we neither had to bring hongbaos nor presents for her family. We all received some though, making me feel a little guilty towards Karin’s family, who was incredibly hospitable to all of us.

It's a bit tacky, but seriously one of the most elegant structures
I've ever seen - Canton Tower

Not Hongkong but Guangzhou (wins the dick comparison for the higher buildings)

Fuck, more food?!?

Being with a Chinese family, I was consciously watching Chinese TV for the first time in my life. That has nothing to do with the program being Chinese really, I haven’t watched TV the last years in Germany either. Watching CCTV1’s new year show gave me an idea of what historians call “modern Chinese nationalism”. There’s still some reverence for Mao and dutiful, ritual affirmations of communism, but the most important message these days is how beautiful, powerful and bigger than life the PRC is. There’s virtually no reasoning, just pure grandeur and emotions (which really triggers me, but then again, I’m German). People in traditional costumes dance together while video projectors show huge pictures of either pristine nature or symbols of national strength. A few people will sing something along the lines of “I love my China, my fatherland, we all work together for a better China, go China blabla”. While Beijing undertook some serious efforts to project this kind of stuff on an international stage in the past, it is becoming increasingly savvy in more subtle approaches that work better with a foreign audience. It’s a shame, some of the funniest propaganda videos were the fruits of former attempts. It seems the Party decided the two things that are supposed to hold China together are consumerism and nationalism, let’s see how that goes.

Now before I indulge too much in the little details of the last week and half, let’s call it a day. One more blog entry and I’m back in Beijing, which has kind of become a symbol for my normal life here in China. Until then, I’m gonna try to keep the °C as high as possible, preferably in some place in Guangxi that has access to the sea.