Max Report from China

By Michael Max, LAc

Everywhere in Beijing are the lingering images of the 2008 summer Olympiad: the five “fu-hua,” the golden circled “2008 Beijing,” sky-high apartment rents, menu prices that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, a new ring road of subways along with a much needed north-south line. The laid-back Houhai area, which once was home to quiet cafes, has transformed into a neon lit bar district, and the crumbled truly old districts have been re-built into a Disneysque version of their former selves. Missing too are the wide-eyed stares, as the sight of a foreigner has become not so foreign.

Beijing’s snarl of traffic, regulated by the laws of mass and momentum, has not changed a bit. It requires a particularly keen and diffuse sense of peripheral vision combined with a visceral sense of the surrounding swirl of motion. It would be folly to follow the signals of green and red in China; it is only the peristaltic surges of movement and pressure that can be trusted when navigating the intersections and roadways here. Like finding the right acupuncture point, a certain opening in traffic will tip the flow in favor of the pedestrian; master that kind of “gongfu” and your ability to understand the movements of qi will increase by sevenfold.

The new train stations that service the ever-increasing number of high-speed trains are structures from a science-fiction spaceport story. These new high-speed trains, some of which reach speeds of 330 kph, are not imports; they are Chinese technology. The Middle Kingdom offers not just the traditional fare of old culture and medicine or cheap labor producing shoddy product; they have learned a few lessons from the Western and Japanese powers that have used China as a base for cheap manufacturing. Now they don’t just produce; they design as well. The two foreigners I happened to be sitting across from on the fast-train to Nanjing are here with a team of Chinese and Germans working on green, environmentally sustainable communities of 250,000 to one million. Green development, of both economy and infrastructure, it is this kind of thinking and progress that will give China an expertise and exportable technology that could quickly leapfrog the development models we use in the States.

For a long time we have prided ourselves on how we generate the new ideas, and the world then manufactures them into products. We are rapidly looking at the turning of a tide. It is not a one-sided turning, it never is; even as I look toward some work in the publishing industry in here in the Middle Kingdom, I realize that in the West we have now have books that are more than worthy of translation into Chinese.