The only way to ride was by rail. The flight to my destination in the southeast would have taken fewer than three hours and cost about $200 one-way for an economy seat, higher than usual because of the surging costs of oil. The train took 32 hours, but a ticket in the second-class berth, “hard sleeper”, cost around $60. So for a third of the price I traveled thirteen times as slow.
Author Archives: jansfield
Fly on the Hall
October 26, 2007 – 10:58 am
The party was bending over backward (by its standards) to project a sense of heightened openness and debate. It all seemed a most telling sign of the solidarity and policy consensus within the central leadership – but also their weakening hold on the rest of the country, including their own rank and file.
Mean Streets
October 9, 2007 – 1:00 pm
Chinese law in action can be about as manic as baseball umpired with a moving strike zone. Advantage: offense. Porous, under-regulated markets generally play into the pockets of the players as well as local authorities, be it through taxes, bribes or gate fees.
Where Less is More
September 7, 2007 – 12:53 am
America is the “developed” market, China the “derivative” one. So the gimmicky phrases we at first adopt to describe cultural currents end up doing much more to drive the trends once exported to China. So it is with LOHAS in the booming metropolises. There the appeal is obvious right now, given the glaring ills of the country at large.
Making of a Chinese Bad Boy
August 8, 2007 – 7:19 pm
For a small-market city like Milwaukee, Yi Jianlian is a miracle shot at the world’s biggest fan base. But to China’s hottest prospect since Yao Ming, Milwaukee signifies banishment to the countryside… at least Yi’s living up to the type-casting of his sponsors, acting true to the cliches of his me-generation, playing the rebel without much of a cause.
The People’s Heaven?
July 17, 2007 – 5:55 pm
A decade ago some of us in the West were worried about how we were going to feed China. Now we’re panicked about how China is feeding us….Not since the SARS crisis have the global ramifications of a scare opened up such an opportunity, both abroad and within China, to influence the way the country is regulated and governed.
The West’s Test
June 19, 2007 – 3:44 pm
Every time official rhetoric or semi-official debate heats up over democracy, China watchers take sides. The purists regard any conversation as meaningless innuendo, a striptease, designed to defer hardcore action. The romantics sees it as meaningful foreplay, a mood-setter, communicating the impulse, at least somewhere in Party-state, to take things to the next level. Truth is, the geopolitics of resurgent nationalism have become about as much of a stumbling block as the realpolitik of Party control. The liberal democratic models of the West are China’s suitors. And Beijing’s mandarins are stuck playing a highly self-conscious game of hard to get.
Anatomy of a Quiet Scandal
May 31, 2007 – 12:39 am
The current party leaders have established new internal accountability regime intended to hold the ministerial yi ba shou – or “number one man” – responsible for embarrassingly big-time screw-ups, in this case letting news of actual censorship become known…. Hong Kong and Chinese-language media overseas quoted sources saying that Long, who served as Beijing’s municipal propaganda minister and vice-party secretary before become head press censor was also implicated in corruption probe dating back to that time.
Those Seeds Unsown
May 16, 2007 – 4:45 am
Seeds of Chinese unrest are being sown by seed not sown at all.
The Drama of Dissatisfaction
April 18, 2007 – 1:40 am
The Chairman’s research rants on his native Hunan province four score ago helped convince his Communist Party cohorts that in China, a Marxist revolution would grow best not amongst the proletariat – then barely existent – but the peasantry…. He had his heart set on a newly enacted law to revive the use of so-called Farmers Professional Associations, the distant descendents of China’s traditional farming guilds that were formed in the 1980’s, but largely fell fallow in the 1990’s.
