Letter from China #2

June 14, 2010

Dear Friends and Family,

After two days of site seeing in Shanghai I took a train to Chengdu.  And here I am, 41 hours later.  The train ride was awesome.  I met so many nice people, got to jump right back into the language, and had a chance to compare the urban glamour of Shanghai, Nanjing, Xi'an, and Chengdu with the rural communities in between.

From what I could observe from my window seat, the standard of rural living is significantly higher than that of North Korea.  I was conscious of power grids, cell phone towers, some mechanized agriculture and irrigation systems, paved roads (with vehicles on them), and countless construction projects both of housing and transportation.  If education, science, and medicine are the three primary ideals of egalitarian development, it will be the elevated expressways, credit and loans, and cell phones that physically transform the economy and improve people's lifestyles.

After spending one day at the Shanghai Expo, and the next plodding through rural Jiangsu and Henan, I was overwhelmed not by any absolute level of wealth in the city or absolute level of poverty in the countryside, but by the stark contrast between the two.  To keep perspective, I kept trying to imagine what China's farmers thought of the 2008 Olympics or 2010 World's Fair, or how the urbanites of Shanghai would feel living in rural Shanxi for a few weeks.

Many of the people I spoke with on the train, who were neither Shanghai elites nor rural farmers, but mostly residents of urban Chengdu who were returning home after a visit to Shanghai, felt that the Expo was a bit over the top.  Still the presence of construction projects and technology in the countryside is evidence that someone is trying to do something about narrowing that gap.  I was also humored by how often folks mentioned that the Expo specifically, and China generally, had too many people.  I can't count how many times I heard, "人太多了."   

I also couldn't resist comparing my train ride across China to my road trips across the US.  Before my first cross-country road trip, I couldn't understand who in America had re-elected George Bush.  Over the course of those trips, my eyes were opened to how different peoples' perspectives are in different areas.  How and where we grow up must affect how and what we think about our own culture (national, urban, religious, "racial" or "civilizational").  If visible contrasts in standard of living are any measure of differences in perspective, then the differences between folks in Shanghai and the central provinces must be like night and day.

Of course, here in Chengdu, I don't anticipate chatting it up with many rural farmers.  As cities go, Chengdu seems to have its fair share of hussle and bussle.  Even still, economically, Chengdu is a few notches down from Shanghai.  Sichuanese classmates at UW and fellow passengers on the train have told me that people in Chengdu enjoy a slower pace of life than the East Coast.  I only hope my Chinese can get up to par quickly enough for me to appreciate the insights and perspectives of those friends I have the pleasure of meeting during this summer's brief few months.

My best,

Jacob