I hate to spend my limited blog-posting time on political matters when I could be describing my aborted trip to the border of North Korea in mid-winter (I am being deliberately sensationalist here) or frothing at the mouth about the iPad, but duty calls. I picked up the gradually improving state mouthpiece “China Daily” Thursday morning to find a front page headline, “Bill Gates Says China’s Internet Censorship ‘Limited.’” I waited for the firestorm to hit the China blogosphere, but so far largely in vain, so I guess I have to lob a molotov cocktail myself.

Here is what Gates said: “…fortunately the Chinese efforts to censor the Internet have been very limited. You know, it is easy to go around it.” Here is a partial list of sites (i.e. ones I can think of off the top of my head) that are currently blocked by the Chinese government: Facebook, Twitter, several domestic Twitter clones, Youtube, Google video search, all Blogspot sites, Danwei and several other English-language China news sites. Here is a partial list of sites that have in the past been blocked: Google, The Guardian, the New York Times, Wikipedia (all of it, in English and Chinese,) Flickr.  All of these are general interest and basically non-political. In addition, Google and other search engines are monitored and will be selectively blocked for a limited time if you search for something bad.

If blocking Wikipedia, currently the closest thing we have to a compendium of all human knowledge, is “very limited” censorship, I’m curious as to what kind of censorship Gates would consider extensive, and I invite him to live without Wikipedia and the Times for a week and see if he wants to revisit his opinion. As for being “easy to go around,” it’s beside the point - the government’s goal is not to completely stop information, it’s to manage what enough people see that the population remains tractable. If the current measures stopped doing this to the government’s satisfaction, things would get much more serious immediately. And, of course, it’s a slippery slope - last week the government announced that it would now monitor and censor text messages between private parties in the name of decency, and that cell phone accounts of offending individuals would be frozen. Is that limited too?

I think there’s an argument for a company like Microsoft to be in the Chinese market and follow the rules. But to freely offer that’s that censorship is no big deal - apparently simply to curry favor at Google’s expense - is pathetic and shameful, and I think everybody should be angry about it. I am.

Just to expand on the atypical trip:

I know it’s a long trip when there’s a plane flight that does not involve Shanghai. To review, it’s Saturday night, but rather than being home I am in “rural” Henan province - meaning a city of 1 million that I had not heard of until this afternoon - a couple of hours north of Wuhan. Increasingly it seems that our clients are very urgent to get their projects underway, perhaps fearing rightfully that soon the government will pull back on the flood of stimulus money, and weekends are ignored.  Our presentation to the local officials is early tomorrow morning.

The reason I am involved in a presentation in a city I had not heard of before is a little complicated - no, scratch that, it’s pretty straightforward. The client specifically requested that our international firm present an international person, our boos (who fits the correct profile) has to attend another client function, so I was called in at the last minute to, you know, be white. This is not the first time this particular issue has arisen, and I am not happy about it. Aside from being distasteful on its own merits and insulting to our Chinese staff (although they seem to accept it as a fact of life and chalk it up to our uneducated clients) it is professionally dangerous to me; I don’t want even a whiff of an idea that my function is to hang around and be a caucasian frontman. Since I am hobbled at work by highly imperfect Chinese I am sensitive about this, and complained a lot when this trip came up. I was mollified by being brought into the project team, but if it comes up again I think there will be trouble.

Anyway, during the drive from the airport the rain got heavier and gradually turned to snow, and the driving conditions got quite hair-raising: as usual, there were a lot of trucks on the highway, and the client’s driver seemed to me to be going faster than conditions really permitted. As the oldest guy in the car (I think) and the only one with a young child, I suggested that we slow down a couple of times - the first time the others in the group grinned and said, “it’s all right,” but after the car gave a couple of little shivers and the snow continued to get heavier, the second time we slowed down. (I’m pretty sure I was also the only one in the car with extensive experience in winter driving.) In any event, we arrived without incident. My primary worry now is getting home tomorrow, but the snow has stopped and with any luck I will have several hours of weekend before Monday arrives again.

I am in rural Chongqing, just a few kilometers from Guizhou, in one of the poorer areas of China. My day today went like this: A quick hike up a boardwalk into a deep valley with a stream running down the bottom (we are doing a national park plan), then sloshed back and forth in a bumpy bus on a bumpy mountain road for hours, occasionally stopping to look at stunningly lovely scenery, and to jack the bus out of a hole the front wheel had fallen into, then a banquet with government officials, a party secretary on one side and a vice district mayor on the other, with many toasts, then over to the local tourism office (at 8:00pm) to collect materials for our planning study. Back to the hotel at 11:00, very tired and missing home.

Well, it’s a brief snapshot of a rather atypical day, but there it is.

I was back in Hubei this weekend, ina small tourist city. We arrived around eight thirty on Friday night, and after checking in to the hotel I went for a little walk. The moon was out, and with a light breeze it was warm but comfortable walking around. There were people strolling, and groups of people eating on the sidewalk (on little wooden stools around plain tables, please don’t think of umbrellas). There was a small river, lined by willow trees, lit by colored spotlights, and spanned by a stone bridge. I walked along the river a short ways and found a night market, with more outdoor tables of people drinking beer and eating grilled mutton. People were laughing, kids were running around, and yet it was quiet, much quieter than Shanghai, because there was no traffic. There was an occasional car or scooter on the street, but mostly it was just people. The air was clean.

I have come across this before - in some places, small town life in China seems so attractive. The pace of life is slow, there is lots of green, it’s peaceful and seemingly simple. I’m sure if you lived it it would get less simple, or you would realize that simple includes having to drive for an hour to get brewed coffee or cheese, but when you walk into it unexpectedly - because a lot of rural China is in fact loud and dirty - it’s tremendously seductive.

So there was an opinion article in the Times the other day by Dickson Despommier, professor of public health at Columbia, who is writing a book on urban farms and has a company to consult on urban farms, pushing urban farms. I came across the same idea (from the same source) a few years before referenced in How the World Works and still remember it, because it seemed to me at the time to be one of the more breathtakingly naive concepts I had ever come across. In summary (I won’t try to be fair, you can read the article yourself or go to www.verticalfarm.com) it is, wouldn’t it be great if farming was done in skyscrapers?

Back then, I wrote in response:

I don’t know if this is a worse idea from the theoretical or practical perspective. Let’s see:

Theoretical: I am an environmentalist, but it drives me crazy to see ostensibly smart and credentialed environmentalists focus so hard on one variable - in this case, land - while ignoring all the others. Sky farming would save on land and transport - at the cost of vastly increased energy and infrastructure costs. Are we really going to save the earth by replacing the sun with millions of grow lamps?

Practical: This proposal bends over backwards to optimize cheap inputs in favor of expensive inputs. Replace farm land with high rise construction, the sun with electrical energy, and throw in exceptionally complicated technological control and management. “Green” skyscrapers with integrated solar panels, cogeneration systems, black water reclaiming etc. are REALLY expensive. The idea of building an advanced green skyscraper in the middle of a city for the purpose of growing food is economically absurd. Not financially difficult as a result of weird pricing forces, like solar and wind power, green building, or other sensible things, but fundamentally economically absurd.

To solve the population/land production mismatch, why not just apply some of the professor’s strategies to farmland already in use to make it more productive and sustainable? Build more greenhouses, collect and recycle agricultural waste and runoff, reduce pesticides and non-organic fertilizers when you can? You can do all these things without building a skyscraper on the most expensive land you can find, for pete’s sake.

(How lucky for me that I always seem to come across the urban farming idea on slow work days…)

Since then the proposal seems to have taken some steps towards reality. Instead of new green skyscrapers, the proposal is now for a five story building on an eighth of a block, and it’s now called “urban farming” instead of “sky farming.”We’re getting closer to a concept known as “gardening” which I think makes a lot of sense.

But Despommier still claims that “the real money would flow once entrepreneurs and clean-tech investors realize how much profit there is to be made in urban farming.” This is highly nuts and doesn’t pass a first level in-your-head economic analysis. You can use the numbers the author provides in his op-ed: let’s start with land.

Production in an urban farm, he says, is 10 to 20 times a normal dirt farm. This would mean (I think) that the five story farm he proposes would produce as much as 100 acres of farmland. OK, this gets you close to parity in terms of urban land cost - although certainly not in Manhattan. But you’ve still got to build a building, and a building with intensive lighting, water, energy, waste removal etc. requirements (because, you know, you still have to artificially provide all the stuff you get for free when you grow plants in the ground outdoors - see where I’m going with this?) - perhaps comparable to a light industrial food processing plant. Despommier says he thinks he can build his five story prototype for $30 million. That would be a development cost of about $300 per square foot, in Manhattan, which means one of us is missing something. But even if he’s right, this is only the capital costs - we have not touched energy, maintenance, labor, or any of the other ongoing costs that are necessary to sustain such productivity. The thing does not look even close to covering costs to me - or to put it another way, since he spends a lot of time on how we are losing a lot of productive farmland, food costs would have to go to places none of us want to see for this to make any kind of sense.

I am not against urban farms. There are undoubtedly places in any big city where an urban farm would be great, and areas of the world in which intensive industrial agriculture could have a lot of advantages. I am also not against thinking outside the box, re-imagining how our society should work and our cities should look, and in general trying to avert the general catastrophe that global warming might be. What makes me spend way too much time writing about this is that this guy has spent a lot of his and his students’ time, and has gotten a lot of press and a certain amount of support, all on the basis of how great it would be, without ever having taken it to the logical next step of does it make sense? He addresses lots of details, but he seems to have never tried to put the thing together even in a rough way. I find this kind of loose thinking extremely annoying.

“When people ask me why the world still does not have a single vertical farm, I just raise my eyebrows and shrug my shoulders.” Well, yes. Exactly.

Well, no posts for a while. All of us swapping illnesses, HIHO XX starting new daycare, work, generally overwhelmed by life. In recovery now. So I’ll just put up a link to a James Fallows post about every China resident’s favorite old chestnut: Beijing or Shanghai? It’s a dog or cat, New York or LA, Minneapolis or St. Paul, England or France, Yankees or Mets, [er, tried hard to come up with a pop culture reference involving Survivor or American Idol or something but couldn’t fake it. Sorry] kind of difference which is supposed to say a lot about the person answering it. But it’s enduring because there are such strong distinctions and legitimate reasons to love and hate both of them. Conventional wisdom: Beijing is cultural, artistic, conservative, earthy, genuine. Shanghai is flashy, urbane, international, aristocratic, shallow. But then there are the physical differences: Beijing is enormous and sprawling and divided like an onion by an infinity of super wide ring roads perpetually clogged by traffic jams, while Shanghai is an enormous collection of downtowns and neighborhoods connected by a street network and an increasingly good metro system.
The reason I’m linking, though, is that Fallows raises the awkward question which I have sometimes asked myself: is the reason why I love Shanghai’s urban design above all other Chinese cities because it was laid out and built by foreigners?

I travel a lot - maybe not as much as some, but it seems like a lot to me. It causes a lot of difficulty in our lives, but I get to see a lot of the country (China, I mean) in a way that I never would otherwise - in a way that I haven’t even seen the U.S. Friday morning I found myself in a dingy office in a small tourist town in Hubei province, deep in the Chinese heartland. I had arrived at the Xiangfan airport three days previously - itself a city I had never heard of before, but still an hour and a half’s drive from our destination - and immediately had the sensation of being in the “real” China, the romantic China of the foreigner’s imagination which apparently never fully goes away, no matter how long you are immersed in the actual real China. This is the China of crumbling temples, peasants plowing the rice fields with water buffalo, and misty mountaintops capped with daoist shrines - and indeed I saw all of those during my trip, although I feel compelled to note that the peasants all seemed to have satellite dishes and brand new motorbikes. (I wanted very much to see a peasant plowing his field with water buffalo while talking on his cell phone, and if I had had one more day I’m sure I would have, and I am not joking.)

Side note: the Xiangfan airport is probably the smallest I’ve ever been to - after landing, the plane (a 30 seat regional jet) simply rotates in place and taxis to the terminal on the runway, and you step off the plane and stroll the 50 meters to the one story terminal with the smell of spring grass in the air and swallows darting around in front of you. It was a beautiful spring evening, and that is an arrival experience which is tough to match.

In any event, there I was in the dingy office. One overhead fluorescent bulb, white plaster walls with calendars and a map of China as decor, two messy desks and a bench, upon which I and my young colleague were sitting. This was the office of a local travel agency, and we were there to ask the manager (owner?) about tourism trends in the area. As the representative of a comparatively expensive foreign firm that usually works for locally important clients (and as a foreigner myself,) I am used to the honored guest routine - effusive welcomes, banquets, etc. However, it doesn’t really suit my personality, and so in this case I was delighted to find that my lowest-status interviewee was the least impressed by me. If she was surprised to find a foreigner in her office asking her questions about itineraries and source markets, she didn’t show it, and without being rude it was clear that she was doing us a favor by letting us try to pose her questions between phone calls (she had two cell phones and a land line,) text messages, questions from her staff, and furiously typing booking requests on her computer.

This was one of the experiences that gave me the strong impression that, at least in this corner of the country, there is no worldwide recession apparent. There may be big office vacancies in Shanghai, huge factory layoffs in Guangdong, worried policies issued weekly from Beijing, and sliding home prices in all the big cities, but in Hubei over and over we heard about not enough hotel rooms to fill demand, and everyone appeared to be too busy to pay attention to trouble elsewhere. Maybe that’s because the big wave of growth which has been transforming the coast for ten or fifteen years is just now hitting the hinterland - I saw lots of opportunities for infrastructure improvement, unlike in the Yangtze delta - or maybe it’s because it takes a while for this stuff to filter down, or maybe it’s because the stimulus spending is working. In any case, this part of the heartland is still booming.

Look, I am sorry to venture into the political, but I have felt a rant coming on and I can’t hold it back any more.

President Obama (still fun to type) ran on a ticket of being inclusive and bipartisan and all that, and it’s important to keep your campaign promises. Many people (my father included) think the partisan divide is a danger and really value Obama’s conciliatory instincts. I admire the sentiment, and normally I would share it. I don’t consider myself a partisan or even particularly liberal person any more.

But. The current times call for quick decision making and a firm direction. The Republican party had eight years in power, during which time they did everything possible to benefit themselves and their funders, to the express exclusion of the opposition party, and at the expense of the public good, a concept for which they appear to have an active contempt. They have wrecked virtually every major effort of government, foreign and domestic, in so spectacular and urgent a way that to modify policy to any degree simply to appease them (to any extent more than is necessary to pass the Senate) is itself an irresponsible and odious act.

Which is to say: Take the helm and go. You need one Republican vote in the Senate. Get it and don’t look back. Be partisan. Screw them.

So I’m walking down the street on the way to my bus stop a week or two ago, minding my own business and hurrying because I am late, as usual. Suddenly a length of thick rope appears around my ankles - I stop and look around, startled, and realize that the rope has come from above; a window washer has thrown it from the four or five story facade, aiming for his confederate just behind me, but through carelessness has almost hit me instead. At the same time I notice that the rope has a weight or hook at the end of it and that it would have clocked me but good, and this point I’m pretty mad. My rage is further fuelled by the fact that the guy’s partner on the ground, far from being appalled and apologetic, seems pretty nonchalant. “Goddamn!”* I swear in Chinese. “You almost killed me! You should be more careful!” I’m pretty sure I did not get this completely right. The guy laughs “No problem,”** amused at the foreigner sputtering, trying vainly to say something that will hit home and make him mad, too. I’m not the kind of guy who looks for fights, but at this point I take a step towards him: “You think this is funny?” He relents and gives me a completely insincere “sorry.”

At this point I realize I am screwed. There is nothing I can say which will not make me look stupider and further embellish the story he will tell to his mates later about the foreigner who got mad at him. I simply spin on my heel and walk away.

The moral is that you can’t swear in a foreign language, or at least you have to be damn good (so to speak.) I knew this before from having foreign friends who liked to incorporate English swear words into their patois, invariably getting the use, tone and/or spirit wrong and making themselves sound ridiculous. I think particularly of a Chinese friend who likes to say “Jeeeeeeeezus,” much too often. You’re much better off sticking to the facts and making your opinion clear from your tone of voice and body language.

*As near as I can make it.

**Can be one of the most infuriating phrases in Chinese, used as here to indicate that whatever objection you have raised is minor and unimportant. We heard it a lot during the house renovation.

I haven’t posted any staggering statistics recently, but not long ago the WSJ had a brilliant one:

“Much of the $586 billion stimulus package China unveiled this week will go toward building highways, railroads and airports. Already, according to official estimates, infrastructure spending had been increasing by an average of 20% annually for the past 30 years…” (Thanks to the Asia Logistics Wrap.)

It’s embarrassing that I had to ask a colleague who isn’t old enough to remember when Michael Jackson was cool how to calculate that number, but I did: An increase of 237 times since 1978 - incredible even if you assume that the 1978 number was something like the annual roads budget of Lorain, OH. Suffice to say that China has been building a lot of infrastructure in the last 30 years.

The result is that in the richer areas, China has infrastructure like a developed country - better, actually, since it’s all brand new. Roads, bridges, airports, subways, ports, a maglev… And as the WSJ article makes clear, all that stuff (except the maglev) has really helped people and the economy; it’s far easier to get around than it used to be, and producers have far more market opportunities than before.

But the big danger with big infrastructure is that it is subject to abuse for governments with something to prove, which is to say all of them. It’s so much easier to build another bridge than to address, say, a lousy health care system, or a retirement safety net, or anything “soft” or intangible. And then you can point to the bridge as proof that you’re doing something useful, even if you’re not. The danger is compounded when a booming economy has been masking bad decisions for a long time, and both America and China know something about that. And now the government has opened the floodgates of infrastructure spending in an effort to hold off the looming global recession, and I’m starting to get a bad feeling.

Today I was in one of the many small cities (190,00 population) of the Yangtze river delta. Their new city expansion zone, many square kilometers, was anchored by a boulevard that was at least 100 meters wide, with eight traffic lanes, three boulevards, and two bike/moped lanes. As a city-building piece it’s a disaster - what kind of buildings do you put on an urban street that’s wider than Park Avenue or the Champs Elysees, especially when you’re a county-level city in southern Jiangsu? - but it was intensively landscaped and really expensive, and this kind of excess can be found all over the place. The new 32 km Hangzhou Bay bridge, which does make sense to me, has at its center a five star hotel under construction - but who will stay there? Who is going to take the immense bridge/tunnel link across the Yangtze from Shanghai to Chongming island and Qidong, two small farm cities? I know the demographics of China are daunting - 20 million new urban residents every year, an economy that doubles in size every decade - but sometimes you have to wonder, is all this stuff really going to get used?

I buy the argument that the U.S. is in a “liquidity trap” in which people will not lend or spend no matter how low interest rates go (although I think the primary reason is not irrational fear but the fact that we don’t have any money) and I think infrastructure spending in America is a good idea and in many cases desperately needed. Ironically, I think it’s less likely to get wasted in the U.S. - the more “advanced” economy - because we’ve been cheaping out on it for so long. But in China, at least in the coastal regions that have been getting all the attention, I’m afraid the era of billion-yuan gold-plated knickknacks is upon us.

Ed: I am very gratified to see that the always excellent, actually qualified and serendipitally-named David Dollar, China economist for the World Bank, agrees with me. At least that’s how I choose to read it.