• EPA Office of the Inspector General recommends EPA enforce Clean Water Act
• Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote
• New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion
• Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes
• First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational
• Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Last week, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the EPA’s internal monitoring organization, the Office of the Inspector General, found that the EPA’s current approach to controlling excess nutrient deposition into the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River was not working.

The OIG report described an EPA process that, after 10 years of recommending a set of procedures to the Mississippi drainage states, had resulted in the following:

the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico had become the second largest on record and the second largest dead zone in the world.

Further, the report found that, “[i]n the 11 years since EPA issued its strategy, half the States still had no numeric nutrient standards at the end of 2008.”

The states involved have claimed that the costs of creating their own numerical nutrient limits are onerous, and while the states could adopt the EPA standards, “many States viewed EPA’s criteria as overly protective.” And given that the largest sources of nutrients are agricultural states, the OIG report claimed that the political ramifications and costs to agribusiness were likely significant.

In 2001, the EPA published rules in the Federal Register which said that the EPA would force all states in the Mississippi River watershed would be forced to adhere to EPA standards if the states didn’t come up with their own standards by 2004. The OIG report found that “about one-third of the States did not have a nutrient criteria development plan or were not in the administrative phase of adopting standards.” Further, the report found that “States knew that EPA would not use its promulgation powers so the States were not pressured to accelerate progress” and that “EPA had not established measures to hold itself accountable for achieving the goals of its 1998 strategy” by a 2007 audit.

As a result of the findings of the report, the OIG recommended first and foremost that the EPA determine what waterways needed numeric nutritional standards to protect clean water downstream and that the nutritional standards be set according to the authority granted the EPA by the Clean Water Act. The EPA disagreed with these primary recommendations, claiming that:

“a strategic approach to leverage resources and existing authorities” for “waters of regional, local and multi-State value” is the best way to establish effective standards.

In response, the OIG report said “[h]istorically, EPA has said it would use its authority to set standards as a motivator and then failed to set standards…. These States have not yet set nutrient standards for themselves; consequently, it is EPA’s responsibility to act.”

———-

Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote

According to a new article in the Center for Public Integrity’s “The Climate Change Lobby” series, there are now 1150 companies and organizations registered to lobby Congress on climate disruption legislation. This represented an increase of 31% in the total number of organizations lobbying Congress on this single issue.

The article guessed that at least $27 million was spent lobbying Congress leading up to the House vote on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES).

———-

New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion

What do you think erodes land faster – glaciers, rivers, or human farming? According to new data from various glaciated regions around the world, this is a trick question. Specifically, a paper recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience shows that all three erode land at approximately the same rate.

Previously, glaciers were believed to erode landscape at a rate faster than rivers. New information presented in the paper shows that this is not the case. In fact, the rate of erosion appears to change in proportion with the stability of the land that the river or glacier is eroding – in highly tectonically active areas like the Himalayas, glaciers and rivers both erode the land faster than in tectonically stable areas like Australia or the Oregon coast. In addition, erosion from glaciers and rivers appears to roughly match the rate of tectonic change – areas that are uplifting at a rate of 10 mm per year tend to see glacial and river erosion cut through the terrain at roughly the same rate.

There are a couple of other interesting observations described in the paper as well. For example, glacial erosion appears to increase as glaciers are retreating. The paper describes a number of possible mechanisms for this (namely increased flow of meltwater washing away sediment from the base of the glacier and glacial acceleration scraping off more terrain).

the time-dependent variability in glacial erosion rates we are seeing instead suggests that the erosional impact of glaciers is far greater during periods of warming at the end of a glacial cycle than when averaged over a full glaciation (~10⁵ – 10⁶ yrs). Several studies have recently documented a synchronous increase in retreat, ice loss and acceleration of many of the outlet glaciers in Greenland and Patagonia. Such synchronous ice loss and flow suggests that, contrary to previous conclusions, sediment yields and thus calculated erosion rates are more rapid during glacial retreat…

This suggests that glacial melt as a result of climate disruption will cause a significant amount of additional erosion to those areas that are presently deglaciating, namely Greenland, Alaska, Patagonia, and similar regions of the world.

In addition, the authors point out that lowland erosion from agriculture is approximately the same as the fastest glacial and river erosion, and much faster than river erosion in the tectonically stable lowlands would normally be.

[I]f we compare these erosion rates with rates from overland flow associated with conventional agricultural practices, as compiled previously, we see that farming erodes lowland agricultural fields at rates comparable to glaciers and rivers in the most tectonically active mountain belts (Fig. 3). In other words, the relatively recent advent of farming practices has accelerated erosion of many lowland basins at rates on a par with alpine erosion, rates that far exceed long-term rates not only of uplift but also of weathering and soil formation.

The image below is the aforementioned Figure 3.

Thanks to lead author Dr. Koppes for a copy of her paper for my review.

———-

Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes

According to an Associate Press article, wind farms can be mistaken by Doppler radar as tornadoes. Specifically, the spinning blades at the top of a 200 foot tower look like the rapidly rotating winds of a powerful thunderstorm or a tornado. And in places like Texas, where there are lots of both wind turbines and tornadoes, turbines have generated erroneous tornado warnings.

As with all plans, the law of unintended consequences reigns supreme.

———-

First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational

The BBC reports that the first tethered deep water wind turbine is now operational in the North Sea off the coast of Norway. The Carboholic first covered the Hywind deep water wind project back in June, when it had been installed but was still undergoing testing. But now the turbine is adding 2.3 MW to the Norwegian electric grid when it’s windy out 10 km in the North Sea.

According to the BBC article, part of the reason that the turbine was placed in the North Sea was because of the severity of winter storms. The idea was to test how well the turbine withstood potentially damaging winds and seas over a two year test period. In the video that accompanies the BBC article, Hywind asset manager Sjur Bratland estimates that it’ll be at least another 10 years until deep water floating wind turbine technologies are advanced enough to deploy widely. According to the BBC article, part of that would be the development of turbines that are smaller, lower to the water surface, and that produce more electricity per turbine, up to 6 MW.

———-

Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Two new articles in Reuters last week pointed to a known but little publicized problem with hybrid vehicles and wind turbines – the large scale use of rare earth metals in the motors, batteries, and generators used in hybrid vehicles and turbines.

The first article points out that the Prius uses 1 kg of the rare earth metal neodymium, 10-15 kg of lanthanum, and trace amounts of terbium and dysprosium. These are used in the electric motor as a lightweight alternative to iron magnets and in the high capacity nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries. The problem is that the largest source of these elements is China, and the Chinese government is limiting exports specifically to ensure a supply of the rare earth metals to Chinese industry. As a result, Toyota and wind turbine manufacturers are looking to rare earth deposits in Canada, Vietnam, and a previously worked mine in California.

The second article is about the California mine. The mine used to be the largest source of rare earth metals in the world until Chinese mine production drove the price down so far that mining in California stopped being economical. According to the article, the mine not only has the largest known deposit of rare earth metals in the world, the ore has very little uranium or thorium, two elements that make extracting the rare earth metals more expensive. And with the development of a new extraction technology, the mining company expects to be able to start extracting 1,000 tons of refined rare earth metals from the mine per day by 2012. Just in time for the mine to fill in the expected gap left by Chinese export restrictions.

Given that the U.S. could possibly be trading a dependency on Middle East oil for a dependency on Chinese rare earth metals, a domestic source of elements critical to renewable energy would be a good thing to have.

Image credits:
Science Education Resource Center
Nature Geoscience
REUTERS/David Becker

Snark aside, Bondelli does a nice job of addressing Hough, who “argues that the increase in lifetime wages for graduates no longer makes up for the financial burden of university education and the ensuing student loan burden.” He also takes on one of the GOP’s most successful and devastating canards, explaining that

In 2003 when I was lobbying against tuition increases in Arizona, a Republican state legislator argued that a college degree is a personal investment that the students are paying for their own future financial prosperity.

I second Kevin’s thoughts (and encourage you to click over and read the whole post). However, I also think the response needs to run even deeper. In truth, as stupid as that Repub legislator’s argument was (and in all likelihood, as stupid as the legislator was), it’s an argument that wins over a lot of people if you let its underlying assumption go unchallenged.

Bondelli touches on the point in quoting University of Rhode IslandVice President for Administration and Finance Robert Weygand, who explains that

Public colleges need to promote and publicize the work they do for the community and their contributions to economic development. Well-publicized proof that they make a difference to the state, and not just the earning potential of individual graduates, is meaningful to lawmakers, even in tough times.

The underlying issue that must be dragged out into the light and stomped is that somehow a nation’s education policy is all about individual investment. This is “ownership society”-style bullshit and it traces its “intellectual” roots back through the eight-year lie that was the Reagan administration and into the conservative academic framework laid in the 1960s by the likes of Daniel Bell. It culminated in rhetorical low-water marks like “government isn’t the solution to your problems – it is the problem,” and unfortunately the Newspeak linguistic cross-patch that this crowd inflicted on an easily-duped public is still working its corrosive magic today.

The answer we give when faced with this kind of cynical forked-tonguery must make clear that it’s not about Little Billy choosing whether or not to invest in his future. Instead, the question is about what’s best for the nation. In a society where only the top 5% of economic elites can afford a quality education – and we’re heading in that direction at a rapid pace – that means that 95% of the nation’s intelligence, 95% of its genius, 95% of its creativity and insight and inventiveness and problem solving capacity, 95% of its scientific potential – 95% of that nation’s possibility is at risk. It’s likely doomed to go unrealized.

Imagine that nation engaged in a highly competitive global marketplace with countries that make refining their intelligence, regardless of class or station of birth, a top priority. Imagine a nation that’s much like America in size and socioeconomic structure and overall potential. And imagine that while we’re keeping 95% of our brighest and best away from learning as best we can, they’re moving heaven and earth to get their brightest and best all the education possible.

Let’s go a step further and make this a math question. The US has a population of around 300 million. Statistically speaking, “genius” is a term that (as flawed as it may be) refers to the top 2% intellectually. So that means that America is home to roughly 6 million geniuses. Now, say we only provide quality educational opportunities to the richest 5%. That leaves us with 300,000 of our best minds honest to their sharpest potential.

Now consider that other hypothetical country, call it AltAmerica. Same numbers, only this time you educate all your geniuses. Our 300,000 is now up against their 6 million.

Which nation do you think innovates the best products? (I start with that example, because obviously nothing matters besides feeding the consumerist beast, right?) Who more quickly comes up with cures for diseases? Who creates solutions to pressing social challenges? Who is best able to provide for the common weal while preserving the environment?

Over time, which nation comes to dominate and which one fades?

A nation that adopts a “let Billy decide whether to invest in his future” policy will be, in short order, at the mercy of a nation that makes educating Billy a top priority.

If you don’t like my math, fine, adjust to your liking. But the dynamic remains (and I’m framing the discussion in a restrictive fashion, as well, because you don’t have to be a rated genius to be smart enough to change the world). And by the way, I do have a couple of specific nations in mind. Neither of them has a population of 300 million, either. Both have over a billion people, and they have more honor students than we have students.

That politician that Kevin references is either stupid or corrupt, or maybe both. But whether he’s acting out of class-based malice or simple butt-ignorance, the policy he espouses would, over time, reduce the US to the equivalent if a slobbering backwater surrounded by thrumming, intellect-powered New Atlantises. No doubt he’d like to keep the rabble in its place, educated only enough to provide unquestioning labor for the power elite’s enterprises, but the dangerous fact is that he hasn’t thought this thing all the way through.

Which also demonstrates, by the way, that not everybody in that 5% elite is exactly rocket surgeon material. So maybe my scenario above was actually a little … conservative, if you will.

Thanks to Kevin for taking this issue head-on. I hope he won’t mind me adding my two cents…

It’s an image most Westerners recognize immediately: A lone man standing in the middle of a five-lane street, blocking a line of tanks. Single-handedly, “Tank Man” prevented the tanks from advancing on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

Tank Man was one of more than a million Chinese students from universities across the country’s capital who converged on the square in April of 1989, demanding democratic reform. The resulting stand-off between students and the government lasted a month and a half and, eventually, led to a military crackdown. As many as 3,600 students died and more than twice that number sustained injuries.

The picture of “Tank Man”—taken by photographer Jeff Widener of the Associated Press—was one of the most famous stories captured during the confrontation. Now, issued to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, comes another compelling story: Lake with No Name by Diane Wei Liang.

Liang writes about her own experiences as a student during that tumultuous time, providing a first-person account of the political turmoil. Although not in the square at the time the military and police swept through, she was on hand as bloody, beaten survivors began to straggle back to Beijing University.

What makes Liang’s book so compelling, though, is the second plot that threads its way through the first, entangled with each other like a pair of long, magnificent Chinese dragons. Even as her country finds itself wrapped in tumult, so too does Liang find her heart in tumult. Lake with No Name is, at once, a first-person account of the student democracy movement, and it’s also a sad love story.

“Love without hope is the most miserable kind of love,” Liang writes. While hope seems to spring eternal for her, she still manages to seem plenty miserable.

There’s no “woa-is-me” to the book, though. It’s apparent Liang has a deeply romantic heart, but she avoids sentimentality and romanticism. Her relationship troubles stem from her own inability to communicate freely with the love of her life, Dong Yi, as much as they stem from the grand, unclear machinery of destiny.

The early part of the memoir recounts Liang’s childhood, an unhappy period marred by the notorious Cultural Revolution. The government relocated Liang’s family, and forced her parents to live separately. She was bullied at school. At one point, her home is destroyed in a massive earthquake.

Liang writes about these things with simplicity and honesty. Her personal story provides the political and cultural context that leads to the pro-democracy movement of 1989.

“I was excited to be part of life and renewal,” she writes, once the demonstrations erupt and she’s swept up by them. “I looked ahead and saw students marching in step, flags flying above their heads. I looked behind and saw tens of thousands doing the same. The enthusiasm of my generation shot excitement into my veins. ‘This will be a new world!’ I thought.”

Laing also has a talent for capturing beauty, which frequently reflects the love she has for her country. For instance, while on a mountain-climbing trip with a friend, she watches the sun rise over the plains below her. “On the horizon, the rich land of my ancestors fused into the sky, in golden rays of light, and I could see no border or limit. So this is China, my motherland,” she writes. “As the sun rose above the horizon, light exploded, radiating hundreds of thousands of rays to the earth, penetrating air, clouds, rocks, beings, everything seemed suddenly transparent.”

Liang’s memoir seems like an attempt at creating transparency, too. Lake with No Name provides an excellent glimpse of life inside one of the world’s most enigmatic countries during one of its most pivotal times. The literary face Liang gives that larger story is beautiful and sad—and ultimately wonderful.

I say goodbye to China with a ride in a taxicab.

I’ve been grading papers and need a break, so I leave my hotel room and catch a cab out front. I show the driver the card I have, furnished by the hotel, that has a list of popular tourist spots printed on it in English and Chinese. I point to the line for Tiananmen Square. The driver nods, and off we go.

The “I honk, you move” rules of driving fascinate me. The roads are bedlam, but my driver seems so unperturbed that I can’t help but relax.

I take in the surroundings as we go. Beijing, on the whole, is not a beautiful city, and it doesn’t have the cosmopolitan flair of Shanghai, but in my short time here, I’ve grown to love it nonetheless. As in Washington D.C., there’s always a museum to visit, a park to stroll through, a site to see.

The cabbie drops me near Mao’s Tomb. I pass through the security checkpoint uneventfully. In some closed-off part of the tomb’s grounds, I hear soldiers drilling. Their boots clomp loudly on the pavement.

I take more photos and jot down more notes. After a few minutes of scribbling, a pair of high school students approach to ask what I’m up to. “I’m trying to write down as much as I can so I don’t forget this place,” I tell them.

Even with everything I’ve been able to write about China so far, I’ve hardly scratched the surface of all my notes, and yet even still, I don’t feel like I’ve written down enough.

Just to the north of Tiananmen Square, for instance, past the Tian’an Gate, sits Sun Yat-sen Park and, beyond that, the great Forbidden City—home of the former emperors and the soul of the Middle Kingdom.

One of the open plazas in the outer
section of the Forbidden City

Beijing is a planned city, built around the fortress-like palace, which serves like the heart of a dragon. Tiananmen Square, the dragon’s head, sits to the south and the dragon’s spine runs north to the Bell Tower in the Hutong—or so explained our tour guide there. In 2008, the dragon’s tail was extended straight north even farther to terminate at the Olympic Village.

The Forbidden City is the only thing I’ve seen in China that makes Tiananmen Square seem small, and I’ve not had time or space to write about the City at all.

I’ve not written about the Hutong district, with its public bathrooms and its narrow streets full of rickshaws and the government’s frantic efforts to preserve the old way of life that once existed there. I’ve not written about the Temple of Heaven or the Big Bell Temple or the Summer Palace. I’ve not written about so much.

The two young men who watch me scribble my notes, it turns out, are visiting family in the city. “We come from a province seven hundred miles to the west,” they tell me. “Can we walk with you and practice our English? We never see Americans where we are from.”

Like everyone else I’ve met in China, they are friendly and polite and curious about America. By the time we finish chatting, we’ve strolled the entire length of the square. I take their picture and we take our leave, and I feel better for the encounter.

I walk down Chang’an Avenue, toward the Silk Market. I feel like haggling one last time for one last something-I-don’t-need.

CNN’s Jaime FlorCruz, one of the most
senior journalists working in China

On my way, I pass into the city’s diplomatic sector and the neighborhood where we met with CNN’s Jaime FlorCruz. A Phillipino expatriate living in China meeting with American students in a Tex-Mex restaurant—it’s the kind of salad bowl/melting pot experience one might expect in the United States. But the international flavor was just one more aspect of the modern China.

“There is no one China,” FlorCruz told us. “There are many Chinas.”

In just my limited time here, I’ve seen for myself how true FlorCruz’s words are.

As I walk, I see a lone Chinese flag—five yellow stars set against a stop-red background—fluttering against a backdrop of steely glass. I see China juxtaposed against modernity, and the two create a complementary reflection. It’s Yin and Yang.

But beneath the surface, the balance hangs together with “fragile glue,” as FlorCruz put it.

“There is this centrifugal force pulling China in all these directions,” he said, citing national pride, economic growth, quality of life, increasing environmental awareness, and even the country’s membership on the United Nations Security Council. “If there is no anchor, no moral compass, this place could implode,” FlorCruz said.

The Chinese suffer from an identify crisis, FlorCruz suggested. “Most of the country is rudderless in terms of ‘What does life mean to me?’” he said. “They are trying to get back to their sense of values, ethics, philosophy. Right now, making money has become the goal. But now that the country has made all this money, what is it for? People are questioning that.”

For instance, China has more millionaires than the U.S., and yet it also has farmers living on less than $300 a year. In Beijing, I’ve seen shiny black Audis drive pass horse-drawn carts loaded with watermelons.

Everything I could have possibly imagined about China has been true—and so is the opposite. And I’ve only been here two weeks, so I think of all the things I haven’t seen.

The one thing I’ve seen the Chinese cling to tenaciously, though, is their sense of history, which dates back more than five thousand years. It makes America still look newborn. I have also noticed that even as the Chinese embrace Western pop culture they show a deep pride in being Chinese.

Despite government controls on information, the Chinese are well informed about what’s going on in the world and in China. The average person in China is better informed than Middle America, FlorCruz said.

“We need to treat China seriously,” he insisted. “Don’t underestimate them.”

And we should try not to misunderstand them, either, I would add. It’s so easy to do when stereotypes are built on Chinese restaurants and Chinese laundries and old kung-fu movies.

But this is an old culture, well aware of its history and accumulated wisdom. It’s a huge society, well aware of its strength and numbers.

“They come from a different direction, a different history, a different trajectory,” FlorCruz told us.

We mustn’t confuse “different” with “inferior.” We mustn’t underestimate.

I wish everyone could spend a week or two in this magnificent country. Whatever faults the government might have, the people have been nothing but wonderful to me—kind, friendly, curious, and helpful. I would never think of Beijing as Mayberry, but that’s just one more way China has surprised me.

“We should all wish China success,” Flor Cruz said. After all, he said, “They are as human and as humane as we are.”

I hail a taxi for the trip back to the hotel. The driver could be the Chinese version of the guitarist from my college band: a little overweight with a big smile and a shock of jet-black hair. He takes my hotel card. Like many other cabdrivers, he wears white cotton gloves, the kind museum curators wear.

After reading the card, he gives a big friendly nod like a St. Bernard, and then off we go. He honks, others move.

Look out, world. China is coming through.

“You have never been to China until you’ve climbed the Great Wall,” Chairman Mao once declared.

By that definition, the twelve days we’ve spent in the country thus far don’t qualify.

I can see Mao’s point, though: it would not feel like a trip to China unless we visited the Great Wall. We’ve all been looking forward to the chance to finally see it, and now that we’re nearly done with our trip, the Great Wall feels a bit like the grand finale.

The most visited section of the Great Wall is called the Badaling, about fifty miles northwest of Beijing. We’re going to a slightly less touristy section, about forty miles from the city, called the Juyong Pass (also called the Juyongguan Pass).

“Wait’ll you see this place,” my colleague, Carl Case, says. “You’ll see why it’s a little less touristy.”

Situated in the Guangou Valley, the pass served as the most important gateway through the Wall from the capital to the territories north. A huge fortress sits at the center of the pass. Once upon a time, the fortress helped protect the Middle Kingdom; today, it serves as a gateway for all the tour busses.

From the valley floor, the Cuiping and Jingui mountains rise up like Yin and Yang on the east and west. Cuiping stands 150 meters high while Jingui—the mountain we’ll climb—is 350 meters high. That’s just under a quarter of a mile tall.

But the path to the top is a lot longer. The mountains twist and turn and fold back in on themselves like a Chinese dragon, with the Wall riding the ridgeline of the dragon’s back.

“This is where people find out how strong they really are,” Carl says. “This is about mental toughness.”

The Great Wall of China stretches for some 4,160 miles, although, if you count all the branches and offshoots, it’s closer to 5,500 miles. 

The first sections were built just after 700 B.C., although Emperor Qin of terra cotta warrior fame is generally credited with being the guy who ordered construction of the first parts of the Wall as we know it sometime around 220 B.C.

Time proved to be the worst foe of the Wall, and sections fell into disrepair over the centuries. In 1368, the first year of the Ming Dynasty, the emperor ordered reconstruction of the Wall, following the general footprint of Qin’s original structure. They started their work at the Juyong Pass and took some 100 years to complete the full project.

During the course of construction, somewhere between two and three million people died. They were buried within the Wall itself.

Parts of the Wall have again fallen into disrepair, and no one has ever done a comprehensive study of the Wall’s condition. But in 1992, government officials undertook a massive renovation project at Juyong Pass so it could serve as a tourist area.

We’re one of the first busses there, but the lot fills up by midmorning. “Less touristy,” as Carl described it, is only a relative term.

Carl tells us that a student last year counted 1,604 steps to the top. “I’ll see you there!” he says, and off he goes. Four of the grad students on the trip take off with him, determined to beat him. If one of them does, Carl will buy them a drink. (He will get to keep his money.)

I resolve to take my time. “So I can take notes on the way,” I tell myself.

The lowest section of the Wall, from the fortress to the foot of Jingui Mountain, is crowded with people. Parasols are popular with the ladies, as are high-heeled shoes. “For climbing the Wall? Are you kidding?” I ask myself. The slope upward isn’t strenuous, but it’s not gentle, either.

The Wall here stands over thirty feet tall and a little over ten feet wide. The idea was that four horsemen could ride side by side. Near the fortress, where our tour bus passed through, the wall was over fifty feet wide.

At the first tower, I catch a breather to take in the view. I’m up above the fortress and have a good view of the nearby dam. Above me and to my right, a little pagoda sits alone on a ridge that juts out from the mountainside.

The Great Wall is already turning into the Great Stairway of China. The wall has narrowed into a steep staircase that leads to the next tower. At its narrowest point, the Great Wall is just over four feet wide.

The stairs are uneven, too, so  so it’s really even more appropriate to call the Great Stairway of China the Great Uneven Stairway of China. Their unevenness makes the going tougher because it’s impossible to find any kind of rhythm. Emperor Qin’s achievements included standardizing money and standardizing the written language. Why couldn’t he standardize steps?

On my way up, I pass a stair sweeper singing to himself as he swishes his switch broom in what might be rhythm to his song, although I can’t quite tell over the throbbing of my heartbeat in my ears.

As I near the second tower, the Great Staircase of China turns into the Great Winding Staircase with a Single Rickety Handrail of China. The path switches back on itself precariously as it rises into the cool shade of the tower.

Workers constructed towers every 300-500 meters. The Wall has about twelve hundred of them in all. Builders averaged about one tower every five days for five straight years. They served as observation decks, weapons storage, and battle platforms. Today they serve as places for tired climbers to rest.

Traffic thins out past the second tower. No more parasols. No more high heels. I hear people huffing and puffing in German, French and Australian. “Chinese keep going,” says one man, pausing for a scrap of shade. “Japanese stop.”

All along the stairs, people cling to shade the way a lizard clings to a rock in the sun.

I finish a flight of stairs and come to a straight stretch of about fifty feet or so. I can’t stop because it’s in the open sun. The temperature is in the mid-nineties. Sweat rivers down my back, and I can feel my brain drying up. I am glad I brought water with me. “You don’t need to carry any up with you,” Carl had said. “You can buy some at the top.” That’s assuming a person makes it.

There’s a tourist shop at the third tower. A tourist shop? Who has to lug all that kitsch up here to sell it? “T-shirt?” a vendor asks. “Hat? Chinese lantern? Painting?”

How about some oxygen?

Hikers sprawl in every bit of shade. “Enough is enough,” one British woman says. “It’s not clever to keep going, is it?” “It’s a bloody long way to the top,” her husband replies.

Red-tasseled good luck charms hang from a display. I already feel lucky for having made it this far.

I continue up, falling in behind a young woman who has “Hongda” written along the bottom cuffs of her Capri’s. I have no idea what the word means. It’s just something to focus on so I don’t have to think about dying. She also wears ankle socks with pom-pom bunnies on them. I want to stop again, but I urge myself onward. “Keep your eyes on the bunnies,” I say. “Follow the bunnies.”

The girl stops to ask me for the time, which halts my pace. She keeps going; I begin to worry about the Great Cardiac Arrest of China.

I notice the little lonely pagoda I had been measuring my progress against is suddenly way, way below and behind me. I keep trudging upward.

The next tower reeks with the stench of urine. There are pools of it under each window. I don’t stay although I desperately want the shade.

The next leg of the journey is relatively easy: an uphill ramp that passes another shop. I don’t even have the breath to say “Booyah” to the vendors as they try to sell me something.

The ramped section leads to sixteen steps downward—agonizing because those are sixteen steps of lost ground I’ll have to make up. I plod along.

I hear cheers above me. As other members of the group make it to the top, those already there give cheers. I get one, too, when I finally arrive. I am number twenty-two out of twenty-four and, as it turns out, the last one who’ll make it all the way. It took me an hour and twenty minutes.

“I made it in twenty minutes,” Carl tells me. “Beat my old record by two minutes!”

I’m too exhausted to throw him from the battlements. Instead, I smile and nod and take in the scenery. Beijing’s famous smog is gone. The day is sunny and clear and glorious, and I can see the Wall wrap itself over mountain after mountain into the distance.

It is one of the most accomplished feelings I’ve ever experienced.

Now I have been to China. I have climbed the Great Wall.

We eat like emperors—literally.

White’s Grand Courtyard could not get any more yellow: yellow seat covers embroidered with blue and black dragons, yellow tablecloths, yellow picture frames and decorative panels and window valences. A yellow throne sits at the center of the room for the prince. Two golden cranes flank the throne, each holding a yellow-stemmed red rose in its beak.

Red columns entwined by ornamental gold floral patterns rise up from a red marble floor to a ceiling painted with elaborate dragon and phoenix designs. The dominant colors are green, blue, and white, but the dragons and phoenixes and the trim are all gold.

Yellow is the color of the emperor, and once upon a time, no one but the royal family could use it.

The restaurant tries to recreate the atmosphere of the royal dining room from the Qing Dynasty era, from 1644-1912. Petunia and begonia-bedecked gardens fill the courtyards around the dining room. In back, tables sit around a pool teeming with large schools of koi, and a small dining pagoda sits on a land bridge that straddles the pond.

It is, by far, our most lavish dining experience in a country that has been filled with fantastic dining experiences. But even this meal, as elegant as the restaurant is, still feels pretty typical.

The tables are round, with four pairs of chairs set up at each. Ironically, at some restaurants there are eight chairs but only six table settings—the way hot dogs in a package never match up to the number of buns.

Each setting consists of a small plate little bigger than a coffee saucer, a small handle-less cup for tea, a wine glass, a shot glass that looks like a miniaturized sherry glass, and a pair of chopsticks. Sometimes the chopsticks come wrapped in paper or, in fancier restaurants like the Grand Courtyard, they have their own embroidered slipcases. The chopsticks stretch out where American silverware would otherwise be, with the thin tips resting on a small bone-china stand.

In some restaurants, to the left of the plate, a wet washcloth-like napkin sits folded in a small basket. We wipe our hands with the napkins and place them back in the basket for use during the meal if we get our hands sticky or greasy. It’s hard to hold chopsticks with greasy hands.

Chopsticks pose their own unique challenges. They operate on one of the simplest principles of physics: the lever. The bottom chopstick, tucked against the fleshy part of the thumb, remains locked while the forefinger and middle finger move the top stick. We’ve nearly all tried them at Chinese restaurants back home, usually to the accompaniment of laughs at our ineffectiveness. But by this point in our trip, we’ve all become experts. Some students will still use silverware if given the chance, but most of us have taken the “When in China…” approach.

Most of the table is covered by a circle of glass about four feet in diameter, balanced on a lazy Susan that allows the glass disk to rotate.

Each meal starts with cold appetizers, usually some sprouts of some kind, little slices of glazed tofu, perhaps a leafy vegetable of some sort or some hot-mustard cabbage rolls spicy enough to clear sinuses in three seconds flat.

Today we have leaves that look like some kind of lettuce, but we also have a plate filled with chrysanthemum and carnation petals mixed with a colorful assortment of other flower petals. “This was the concubine food,” our host explains.

A waitress in a traditional dress and elaborate headgear pours us each a cup of tea, and another comes by with Coke, Sprite, or beer—although, because of its three-percent alcohol content, it tastes more like beer-flavored water.

At one restaurant, we find Yanjing beer, brewed in Beijing, with a ten-percent alcohol volume. The beer and the soda all come in one-point-five liter bottles, although the beer comes in green glass and the soft drinks come in bottles not to dissimilar to our own.

We could get water, too, but we’d been advised against it before the trip. China’s water isn’t as clean as ours, so there’s no telling what foreign material might do to our digestive tracks. Bottled water is safe, so we drink that to stay hydrated during the days.

I pick some sprouts with my chopsticks, then twist the lazy Susan so the student next to me can have some. In another twist, the next cold appetizer comes, but already the waitress brings the first dish: venison. The venison gets set down on a free spot on the lazy Susan a few place settings to my left, so I wait for it to make its way to me. By the time it does, though, the next dish—an elongated bowl full of spongy-looking yellow stuff that turns out to be fish skin—gets set down.

Nearly all of our meals have been this way. We’ll usually get five or six entrees per table, usually containing at least one chicken dish, one pork dish, and one beef dish, then a mixture of whatever else. At one restaurant, we get a mixture of pork and squid that proves to be a highlight of the entire trip for me.

Each restaurant has its specialty, too. In Xi’an, we had the incredible dumpling buffet and, the next day, we went to a noodle restaurant where the chef, called a Noodle Master, hand-stretched the noodles right in front of us. He pulled the long batches of dough like taffy, making each strand thinner and thinner until they could be chopped into short segments and shredded into dinner noodles.

Xi’an’s weather makes the people there dependent more on wheat-based foods like dumplings and noodles, but in Beijing and Shanghai both, we had plenty of white rice with each meal. Chefs cooked the rice enough that it clumped together, making it easy pickings for the chopsticks.

In Beijing, we have duck—once called Peking duck, before the city was renamed in modern times, now called Beijing duck. A chef slices off strips of meat and pieces of crispy skin, which we put on small thin pancakes almost like tortilla shells. We add some spring onions, sprinkle with duck sauce and roll them up to eat.

Another restaurant featured a buffet that featured a couple hundred dishes, including eccentric foods like silkworms and locusts (yes, I tried one of each). A live alligator, its mouth fastened shut with a plastic zip tie, sat in a cage on the counter, ready for slaughter. The buffet included a soup made from one of the gator’s predecessors (it tasted like chicken).

Most meals will have a soup, which usually comes out later than sooner. We sample vegetable soups, egg-drop soups, and duck soups. Some of us scoop some rice into our soup bowl, too.

In most restaurants, including the grand hotel, we eat in the main dining room, although many restaurants feature private one-table dining rooms, complete with their own wait staffs, for intimate gatherings. My faculty colleagues and our host, Professor Enlin Wang of the Beijing Institute of Technology, have several such meals during the week.

In places where we order ourselves, restaurants provide a picture menu. Some have English subtitles, but most of the really local places don’t. When the waitresses don’t speak any English, ordering a meal becomes a guessing game, but the results generally turned out well.

Every meal ends with watermelon. In fact, we have watermelon at every meal. It’s China’s favorite dessert. Except at the buffet, we don’t find cookies or cakes. “The Chinese generally don’t eat sweets,” a colleague tells me.

Enlin tells us one day that a visitor could eat something different every day in China and never taste it all because of all the combinations. I sure believe him. It makes me wonder why I always limit myself to the General Tso’s chicken when I’m at home.

“Foods at Chinese restaurants in America tastes almost nothing like what you’ll find in China,” Roger Perkins told me in Shanghai. That has certainly proven to be true, as well.

The tea girl never gets too far, hovering just beyond our table with her tea pot, painted yellow with blue dragons—the sign of the emperor.

Before we finish our meal at the Grand Courtyard, Enlin raised his glass to those of us at the table. “Gambay,” he says with good cheer, and our drinks go bottom up. The waitresses swoop in to refill them.

While we never get a typical household dining experience, the meals we do get prove to be sources of good food, good company, and good cheer.

What more could any emperor want?

“Tiananmen” means “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Ironic, then, that most Americans know it, if at all, as a scene of violence and bloodshed.

photo by Jeff Widener, A.P.

June 4 marks the 20th anniversary of the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on protestors who’d gathered in Tiananmen Square. The incident made headlines across the world, and the image of a lone protestor blocking a line of tanks proved especially powerful.

The protesters had camped out in the square since the April death of a pro-reform Communist Party official, Hu Yaobang. By June 4, after a great deal of international attention that embarrassed the Chinese government, tanks and troops rolled in and started cracking skulls.

Western news outlets reported yesterday and today (June 3 and 4) that no media would be allowed near Tiananmen Square on June 4th. Soldiers and uniformed and plainclothes police stood at attention everywhere in the square this morning, and visitors were being searched.

But visitors to Tiananmen Square are always searched. I was searched when my group first visited the square on Tuesday, May 26. I was searched again when I went there on my own last Sunday. The searches were similar to the same thing I went through at the airport: carry-on bags and metal items got sent through an X-ray machine, and I had to pass through a metal detector. We were allowed to keep our cameras with us.

Standing in Tiananmen Square for the first time really drove home how significant the crackdown was which the Chinese government refers to as “The June Fourth Incident”).

First of all, it’s impossible to appreciate how wide and vast Tiananmen Square is. It’s the largest public square in the world, even beating out the public courtyard at the Vatican. It can hold a million people—just as it was doing by June 3, 1989.

China’s Great Hall of the People, opposite Tiananmen Square

The square sits opposite the Great Hall of the People, roughly China’s equivalent of our Capitol Building. In essence, that made the protests a direct slap in the face of the Communist Party and central Chinese government even though the demonstrations were peaceful.

In the resulting military action, thousands were injured. The number of killed various from 241 (the Chinese government’s official number) and 2,600 (an unofficial number once given by the Red Cross).

While I certainly don’t condone the government’s decision to clear the square, I can understand it a little better than I once did. China is not, nor has it ever really been, ruled on principles anywhere close to ours. Authoritarian rule has always been the way there—for five thousand years. We forget how old and ingrained that is.

On Sunday, as I strolled the square, I saw a few extra plainclothes police near Mao’s Tomb. Nearby and just out of direct sight, soldiers were drilling in a closed-off portion of the square. I have no idea if that’s normal or not; it’s just what I saw and heard on Sunday.

I’ve also heard that the government was blocking internet access and it was blacking out CNN. It was trying very hard to be sure that no one remembered the events of June 4, 1989.

I didn’t register as a journalist before I went to China, so my dispatches have been under the radar screen I suppose. But from my own perspective, I’ve not had any trouble blogging since I got to Beijing (although I think some of my e-mail was reviewed or filtered or something). I couldn’t access YouTube, which I only tried to access because I’d heard from my students that it was off-limits. They were right. On Tuesday, students suddenly couldn’t access hotmail, either.

I actually had more trouble in Shanghai than in Beijing. In Shanghai, I couldn’t log on to LiveJournal, although I never had a problem logging into or posting at Scholars & Rogues (I suppose we at S&R need to start being even more subversive!).

In Tiananmen Square, looking south toward Mao’s Tomb

But I’ll be honest: I didn’t feel comfortable talking about Tiananmen Square in my dispatches other than to provide a description. In my post about Mao’s Tomb, I didn’t feel I could talk about just how oppressive Mao’s regime was. Maybe it was just my good manners because I didn’t want to run the risk of causing headaches for my host from the Beijing Institute of Technology—which is, of course, a government-run school.

Tiananmen is one of the “Three T’s and an F”: Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan, and the Falon Gong (a cult-like religious group that stirs up a great deal of political controversy). Those are the taboo subjects. The government actively discourages and represses coverage of those topics, although I was able to discuss the “Three T’s and the F” openly with tour guides and people I met.

The same day we visited Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall, for instance, the president of Taiwan was in town for talks on more open relations. The few Chinese citizens I spoke to about Taiwan expressed delight that relations between the mainland and the island had thawed considerably over the past year or so.

My students, colleagues, and I had a chance
encounter with a Tibetan monk (pictured center).

That same day, our group also had a chance encounter with a Tibetan monk near the gates of the Forbidden City, just a stone’s throw away from Tiananmen. The students thought he looked cool and all wanted their photo taken with him, but I’m not sure if they realized what a rare encounter or a big deal it was. “Imagine what he must feel like,” one colleague said. “People around here must be looking at him like he’s some kind of trouble-maker.”

It’s too bad the government frowns on discussion of those controversial topics because the rest of the world doesn’t get the full story. Any P.R. person knows it to be true: Tell as much of the truth as you can because otherwise people will think you have something to hide, and their assumptions will usually be far worse than the actual situation.

I’m no expert on Tibet, for instance, but talking to ordinary Chinese folks—who are, far and away, an apolitical bunch—they see the Tibet issue much differently than Westerners do. A Chinese princess married the Tibetan emperor in 640 A.D. to unite the kingdoms, and in Chinese minds, they’ve been one kingdom since and that’s that. Their sense of history comes not from the Communist Party but from a long oral tradition, so they aren’t just spouting party propaganda.

The Chinese people aren’t exposed to the Dali Lama’s P.R. efforts—and we are. I emphasize that because we forget, in the end, that the Dali Lama is conducting a P.R. campaign. (I don’t mean to oversimplify, although I am, because I know there’s a lot more to the Tibet situation than I’ve even broached here—but that’s part of my point: there’s a lot more to the Tibet situation than we even realize.)

The silver lining is that the Chinese people find ways to talk about these things anyway. As CNN correspondent Jaime FlorCruz told us, technology provides ways around the government controls. As restrictive as the Chinese government can be with its censorship, it can only just keep up with the internet—it can’t control it. FlorCruz’s kids, for instance, can bring up YouTube on a whim by easily circumventing government blocks.

That trend will only continue as the number of online users grows (the online population in China already exceeds the entire population of the U.S.). The Chinese themselves call for more information.

“The internet is one of the most revolutionizing phenomena in China,” FlorCruz said. “The Chinese government can join it, ride it, sort of control it, but they cannot stop it or shut it down.”

“China is more capitalistic than any capitalist country.”

Amy, an employee at a jewelry booth
in Beijing’s pearl market, strings
together a strand of pearls after
striking a bargain with a shopper.

Roger Perkins of Cooper Industries told us that early on our trip. You’d have to see it to believe it, perhaps—but I’ve seen that firsthand several times on the trip, most dramatically at the silk and pearl markets. It happens on the scale of global companies, too.

“China is pragmatic,” says John Chen of Prometric, a company that specializes in testing and surveying. “When it wants to be capitalistic, it’s capitalistic. When it wants to be communist, it’ll be communist.

Chen likens China’s approach to situational management: different situations require different management approaches.

China needs the influx of cash that capitalism provides in order to continue to fuel its burgeoning economy. But at times, the country’s top-down dictatorial style allows things to get done that otherwise couldn’t happen in a democracy.

“India, for instance, is the most democratic country in the world,” Chen points out by way of example. “Everything gets debated to death and nothing ever gets done.”

In China, the government might say, “This row of apartment buildings needs to get demolished so we can put in this new highway,” and then it gets done, no argument. “For the good of the many, the individual makes sacrifices,” Chen says.

That seems pretty heavy-handed to most Americans, but to the Chinese, it’s been that way for five thousand years. “Chinese history has always been ruled by people, not by laws,” Chen says. “When the emperor is wise, everyone benefits. When you have a bad emperor, everyone suffers.”

Chen is one of several business executives who’ve spoken to us since we’ve arrived in Beijing. Most of what we hear expands on the things we heard in Shanghai, but the extra depth sheds a lot of new light.

“Everything in China is difficult, but everything is possible,” Chen tells us. “While regulation exists, there’s also flexibility because so much is left to interpretation.” That’s the upside to the central role individuals play in running the country.

The Chinese even have a word for it: Guanxi. It means “connections.” In America, relationships come about as the result of business deals, but in China, businesses deals come about as a result of relationships.

The system, as one might expect, is ripe for abuse, which creates headaches for companies used to Western business practices. So says Derrick Reilly, a partner with financial services company PriceWaterhouseCooper.

“If you don’t find fraud, then you’ve gotten it wrong,” Reilly says. “Businesses have to plan for it.” PWC recommends to its clients that they address it in their risk management plans. Chen echoes a similar sentiment.

Jaime FlorCruz, CNN’s China correspondent and one of the most senior journalists in the country, says corruption has always been part of the government culture.

“It’s a matter of life and death for the Communist Party to curb corruption,” FlorCruz says. According to a survey done in December and February by the American Chamber of Commerce in China (ACCC), corruption remains one of the most significant problems facing foreign companies doing business in China.

Businesses also face the challenge of protecting their intellectual property (I.P.). The same ACCC study cited it as another top business challenge.

The widely held belief is that China is a nation of copiers, and it only takes a trip through the Silk Market and its booths of knock-off products to reinforce that stereotype. But FlorCruz says, “China aspires to be more than a nation of copiers.”

Seventy-two percent of the business surveyed in the ACCC study said China’s enforcement of I.P. laws is ineffective. And enforcement is the key, says Matt McKee of the law firm Lehman, Lee, and Xu. He contends that China actually has good I.P. laws that are, in many cases, better than international standards.

For many years, though, China was so desperate for economic activity that it looked the other way on I.P. issues. “A black market was better than no market,” McKee says.

“If you’re the mayor of a city, and there’s a factory pumping out copies of a pirated movie, what’s more important,” McKee asks: “the thousand jobs that the factory has created or protecting the intellectual property rights of a big Hollywood studio that’s not putting any money into the local economy?”

But recently, Chinese companies have been stung by I.P. infringements. As more Chinese companies have trouble, McKee predicts the Chinese government will take a more active role in enforcing its intellectual property laws. “Now that it’s in the Chinese interest to enforce the laws, we’ll see stricter enforcement,” he says.

My overall impression is that the Chinese business climate makes things chaotic for Westerners. “It’s difficult but not impossible,” McKee says.

The key, according to McKee, is for companies to “gain China-knowledge,” to learn about Chinese culture and how business gets done in the country. It seems like common-sense advice, but Western companies frequently underestimate its value—much to their regret.

“In the U.S., there are generally understood practices to protect profit margins,” Chen adds. “In international markets, the ground rules are different…. Because the market is so competitive and so open, it forces innovation.”

Most of that innovation comes from the foreign companies because that’s one thing the Chinese educational system doesn’t emphasize. However, Reilly says he’s begun to see a shift lately as more Chinese get educated abroad and then return home to China for work.

For now, U.S. companies that operate with flexibility are generally benefitting quite well from China’s competitive environment. “U.S. companies are winning in China,” Chen says.

China, too, is benefitting from the innovation boom.

China isn’t bound by legacy infrastructure, such as
highways, bridges, and power grids, as it expands.

In America, for instance, we’re bound by “legacy infrastructure.” We have to build on what already exists, whether it be the highway system or a type of technology.

Developing countries like China can leapfrog legacy infrastructure because the infrastructure didn’t exist in the first place. They can learn from the trials and errors of developed countries and put the best, newest ideas into place right from the start.

“Companies bring the newest technology when they come into China,” says Chen.

State-of-the-art infrastructure improves China’s ability to move goods and services throughout the country. Foreign and domestic manufacturers have an easier time moving products to and from new manufacturing bases and consumer markets.

“A lot of China’s achievements stand side by side with a lot of challenges,” says FlorCruz. “Many of those challenges are unintended consequences of their economic reforms.”

The reforms—a bottom-up approach—were launched by Communist Party Chairman Deng Xioping beginning in 1979. “In China, we will let a small group of people get rich first,” he said. Those people would then fuel economic growth through investments, job creation, and contact with the West.

China still struggles, generally with great success, to continue to master the learning curve.

From multinational corporations to small shops like
this one in Beijing near the Lama Temple to
individual street vendors, capitalism is alive and
well in China.

But as capitalistic as China is, it’s important not to forget China is also still a developing country, and it has lots of room—and energy and desire—for continued improvement. By 2025, some economists predict China will have the biggest economy in the world.

It seems that a good infusion of capitalism was just what communist China needed.

Walking into the Beijing Silk Market is like walking into a combat zone. Shopping is a full-contact sport.

My colleague, Darwin King, negotiates a price for
silk scarves at Beijing’s Silk Market.

The Silk Market sits on Chang’an Street near the city’s diplomatic district. Six stories tall, the building is crammed chock-full-o every stereotypical Chinese product you could imagine: imitation Rolexes, fake Nikes, real silk, clothes, clothes, clothes, and cheap Chinese souvenirs.

Different floors feature different merchandise, crammed in stalls not much bigger than 10×12, although it’s amazing to see just how much stuff gets crammed into each little crammed stall. Ask for a particular size of style you don’t see on display and a salesperson will pry into some surprising cranny to pull out the goods you want.

Each stall comes with two salespeople—usually young women—although some stalls have three, some stalls have one. Personal selling is the modus operandi.

“Silk?” one of them asks as I walk by. “Silk scarf?” I wave my hand “No, thanks.” She shifts gear. “Fan? Chinese fan?”

I pass by, but the girl at the next stall is already ready for me. “Shirts? You need shirts? Silk shirts.”

As a Westerner, I have a target painted on my forehead. Sometimes, particularly with street vendors, if I answer “Booya”—Chinese for “Don’t want”—the vendors will lay off, but my booyahs have less effect in the Silk Market.

I’m on the prowl for souvenirs. My goal is to buy a new suitcase and then fill it with cheap Chinese junk to take home with me. If my plan succeeds, people will get Chinese Christmas presents for years.

“Paintings? Great Wall paintings?” “Fans? Chinese fans?” “You want jade? We have plenty jade.” “Tea sets? Chop-a-sticks?”

I stop at a booth that has plenty of Chinese-looking stuff: jade dragons, happy-looking Buddahs, ferocious-looking cat things that turn out to be pandas, and a hundred other knick-knacks. “You like to look?” the girl asks. “Come into my shop, look.”

Her stall is lined with shelves that leave a U-shaped floor space for browsers. What I don’t realize is that the store’s configuration is also a trap. As soon as I step in, the salegirl steps in behind me, closing off my escape route. She’s much smaller than I, but I’m bound by a Western sense of politeness she doesn’t share. I don’t stand a chance against a Silk Market salesgirl who’s going in for the kill.

“You see something?” she asks.

“I’m just looking.”

She holds up a jade ball with holes in it. Inside are two other jade balls, one inside the other. “You like? This jade ball bring happiness to your family. Has phoenix and dragon carved into it for long life and good luck. I give you good price.”

“I’m just looking.”

“Comes with free stand.”

I shake my head. She sets the ball down and motions to the wall of framed artwork on the wall to my left. “You like pictures? Which color?”

“No thanks,” I reply. I go to leave and finally realize she has me trapped.

She tries hocking a few more things, but I’m feeling too closed in to bargain. I’ve already bought myself some silks Hawaiian shirts for about $12 each and traditional Chinese dress for my daughter, so I know how the bargaining thing works, but I want to scope out the territory more before I commit to anything.

I struggle to get past the girl even as she tries to sell me jade elephants, little porcelain dolls, and a set of Baoding meditation balls. She goes back to her original pitch: “No family ball? You sure? I give you good price, friend.”

I walk away, and she grabs my arm to prevent me from going. I have to pull away even as she tries to drag me back. I stalk away, put-out by the over-aggressive sales tactic and not in the mood to buy anything any more.

I soon soften when my friend, Darwin, breaks down to buy some watches featuring a picture of Chairman Mao. Darwin is the perfect shopper for the Chinese economy. He’s one of the nicest, kindest people on the planet, so he feels bad when he has to play hardball with the salesgirls. He ends up paying more than he has to, and for good measure, he usually tips his salesgirls for doing a good job.

I can’t blame him on the last point. This bargaining, which I thought would be tedious, has turned out to be a load of fun. “You can’t buy entertainment like this at home,” Darwn and I agree.

Darwin has paid for his kindness in blood—literally. A salesgirl who grabbed his arm to prevent him from leaving left furrows in his forearm.

The girls Darwin talks to now have a much more pleasant demeanor. Their stall happens to be directly across from the girl who had tried to trap me earlier. She gives me a sly smile. “You come back?” she asks. “You come look. You break-a my heart for walking away. You break-a my heart three times!”

“You break my heart,” I tell her.

“We’re friends now. We talk,” she says.

She’s less aggressive with her sales tactics now, luring me back for another look. I eventually settle on a set of ferocious panda things, like yin and yang. My wife will like them because they look like cats. “Pandas,” the salesgirl assures me. “I give you good deal because we’re friends now.”

She picks up a calculator and punches in some numbers. “This is usual price, but I not give you this price. I give you better price.” She clears the screen and punches in something about four hundred yuans cheaper. “This my wholesale price, but I not give you that. I give you better price. I give you this.” She shows me a number that’s two hundred yuans lower still—and still about ten times more than I want to pay.

“Too much,” I tell her.

“Too much!” she exclaims in disbelief. “Why too much? That’s good price!”

“Too much.”

She punches in more numbers. “How about this? I can do this for you. You’re my friend.”

“Still too much,” I reply. “I want a bargain. Good bargain. I want something cheap.”

She passes me the calculator. “You tell me what you want. You give me number.”

I punch in something really low.

“You must be joking! That joking price.”

“No,” I say. “I’m looking for a bargain.”

“I no give you that price,” she tells me. She comes down another hundred yuans on her last price. “How about that?”

I punch in a number ten yuans higher than my last offer.

“What? I lose money! You breaking my heart!”

“You’re breaking my heart,” I tell her. “You won’t give me a good bargain.”

“You are American. You rich.”

“I am American,” I tell her. “But I’m a teacher. Teachers don’t make much money in America.”

She looks at me suspiciously. “I a student,” she tells me. “You don’t look like teacher.”

“I’m a teacher,” I tell her. “A poor teacher.”

“I give you best price. Best final price,” she says. Her number is still much too high. I wonder if anyone falls for that kind of price.

I go up another ten yuans and hold firm. I have to walk away again before she finally gives in and says okay. She acts like I’ve hurt her feelings—until the money changes hands. When the deal is done, she drops her façade and seems delighted to have done business. She still tries to sell me more stuff even as she wraps and bags my ferocious pandas.

I’ve learned already to be on the lookout. One girl owed me twenty-five yuans for change and said, “Twenty, right?” I almost fell for it but caught myself even as I was about to say, “Right.” Other pouty-looking salesgirls have eeked another five yuans out of me. For me, that’s about seventy-five cents. For them, that’s cab fare to work.

I later go back to talk with my salesgirl, whose English name is Lina. She’s nineteen, and she’s been working in the store, which is owned by her sister, for four years. “I like it,” she says. “I get to tell people about Chinese history and tradition. I want to tell people what it is, what it’s meaning.”

Like most Chinese students, Lina has been taking English since third grade, and she speaks it well, but she’s self-conscious about it. She gets out of school at around 4:30 each day and then works in the shop until closing at nine.

She doesn’t like the bargaining, but she knows it comes with the territory. “I know what people are good and I know what people are tough,” she says, telling me that she had me pegged as someone in the middle.

“On a good day—a GOOD day—we make 300 yuan profit,” she says. That’s after the cost of merchandise, payroll, stall rental, and cab fare are all paid. On other days, sales are low enough that they lose money, although she never sells anything for below cost.

Only one person has ever come in and paid her first asking price. “I was surprised,” she says, laughing. “Most people come to China know you bargain.”

How can you tell if you have a good price? “If you like something, then it’s a good price. If you don’t, it’s not. That what I tell people,” she says. “A fair price is good for customer and is good for us.”

I do end up buying the family ball from Lina, and I give her big tip to thank her for her time and for the entertainment. Shopping in the market was the most fun I’ve had in China yet.

Nothing says “China” quite like a panda.

It’s no wonder, then, that the Chinese have used these famous black-and-white faces as emissaries around the world. There’s even a term for it: “panda diplomacy.”

Over the years, some 100 pandas have been sent to foreign countries as ambassadors of good will. Currently, around twenty-five countries host pandas, including four zoos in the United States.

I get to see them up close and personal, on their home turf.

Of course, I don’t actually get to see them in the wild. Pandas live in increasingly isolated pockets in the deep mountain valleys and alpine forests of Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces in the central part of the country. At last count, only about 1,600 of them remained in the wild.

But the Beijing Zoo has seven pandas on display on the day I visit. They are a star attraction, and they have a section of the zoo all to themselves.

I walk into the panda house just as the panda in the first enclosure walks right up to the plexiglass window. If the plexiglass wasn’t there, I’d feel the panda’s breath on my face. Although 99% of the panda’s diet consists of bamboo, they are still carnivores, and their teeth are still pointy.

Pandas have a specialized but inefficient digestive system. They’ll eat 8-10 kilograms of bamboos stems or as much as 38-40 kilograms of bamboo shoots in a day. A panda may spend as much as fourteen hours a day feeding.

The panda near the plexiglass wears a big grin, and its tongue lolls out from the side of its mouth a little. I know I’m anthropomorphizing, putting a human grin on a bear that’s probably just hot under all that fur on a day that has topped ninety.

I don’t see a sign with the panda’s name on it, so I don’t know if the bear is male or female. When the panda rolls over on its side to scratch its back on a rock, I still can’t tell. The panda wriggles back and forth on the rock, giving itself a fantastic backrub and looking like it’s having the time of its life.

Two others pandas have homes inside the panda house. One sits near a maintenance door, its forepaws wrapped around a big, shallow stainless steel bowl the way a drunk might be draped across a bar just before last call. Another curls up in the branches of a tree stand.

By their nature, pandas live solitary lives except to mate, so the zoo keeps the animals separated. In the wild, their home range may cover four to six-and-a-half miles. In the zoo, they get a few hundred square yards each.

Pandas reach sexual maturity at six and a half to seven and a half years, and their breeding season runs from mid-March to mid-May. After a gestation period that lasts four to five months, a pregnant female will hole up in a hollow tree trunk or a cave and give birth. Newborn pandas weigh about 150 grams—only about point-one percent of their mother’s weight.

The first captive breeding took place in 1963. Since then, sixty-five cubs from forty-one litters have been born, and since 2004, the cub survival rate has been 100%.

I look into the eyes of the panda by the plexiglass. Its small black eyes are almost lost in the big black patch that surrounds it, like a raccoon’s mask, only bigger. I have no way to tell what it’s thinking, but I can make a pretty safe guess that it’s happy by the vigor of its backscratching.

Early naturalists mistakenly believed the panda belonged in the raccoon family. According to the signs at the zoo—which were all newly installed just before last summer’s Olympics—there’s even some dispute today whether pandas belong to the bear family or whether they belong in a separate, closely related group.

A French naturalist and Catholic priest, Amand David, “scientifically discovered” the panda in March of 1869. He called it a cat bear, but the name was mistakenly reversed in translation to “bear cat,” which is where “panda” comes from. Russians and Germans called it the bamboo bear.

But pandas were well known throughout China and the Far East before then. Early Chinese emperors sent pandas as gestures of good will to the Japanese. The panda was seen as a symbol of peace, and anyone who flew a flag with a panda on it would be granted a ceasefire in battle.

When Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing came to Washington, D.C., following Richard Nixon’s trip to China, it paved the way for a modern wave of panda diplomacy. Since the mid-80s, though, the Chinese government only sends pandas on loan, in exchange for one million American dollars, ostensibly used for panda preservation.

The Chinese government also effectively used pandas as a P.R. tool for the country’s successful bid to host the 2008 summer Olympics. In 1988, China sent a pair of pandas, Qunqun and Xixi, to Calgary for the winter games. That year, while the pandas were there to coincide with the winter Olympics, the zoo attracted a record one-point-three-five million visitors.

The effort helped generate Olympic buzz that the Chinese then followed up on in the summer of 2001. Pandas Benben and Wenwen went to Moscow for “culture week” as the Olympic committee made its final selection. The extra attention the pandas generated supposedly helped tip the committee’s decision in China’s favor.

Today, the Beijing Zoo has a special Olympic panda pavilion. Linking the main panda house with the new pavilion is a wall comprised of 2008 pieces of hand-painted pottery bricks (2008, of course, being the year the Olympics came to Beijing). The paintings, by children from Beijing and Sichuan, one of the home provinces of the pandas, feature Olympic rings and torches, hand prints, a thumbs-up, scenes of athletic glory, well-wishes in Chinese and English, and hundreds of other designs. “One world, one dream,” one student painted. “I *heart* China.”

The same year the Olympics were held, a massive earthquake devastated the province. The inscription by the wall reads: “To look forward to Beijing 2008, to fight the Sichuan quake disaster, to preserve nature, and to build up a harmonic and beautiful homeland.”

Inside the pavilion, workers clean a large indoor enclosure while a panda munches on a bamboo stem, although when one of the workers wants out, the panda blocks the door. The worker, apparently familiar with the animal, has to try and pull the panda away like a sack of flour. The panda offers modest resistance, but it’s enough to throw the worker off-balance and he stumbles a few steps backwards. The panda goes back to its bamboo stem.

Three other pandas occupy enclosures outside, and two others have indoor habitats. I suspect that zoo officials rotate them so everyone has time outside and inside.

But just as impressive as the pandas, I think, is the government’s attempts to protect and preserve them. “Excessive logging and human activity” has created isolated “island-like” pockets of panda habitat in the wild. It’s difficult for pandas to cross from one pocket to another, thus decreasing the ability for the species to maintain genetic diversity.

In response, the government has set aside fifty-six nature preserves that cover fifty-one percent of known panda habitat—some 2,900,400 hectacres of protected lands. That’s a pretty substantial preservation commitment in a country as overcrowded as China. The question, really, is whether it will be too little too late.

Hopefully the panda will be a success story. Although uniquely Chinese in character, pandas have proven that they can capture the hearts of the whole world.

Chairman Mao looks a little waxy these days.

It isn’t for lack of trying. The Chinese government has gone to great pains to keep him looking fresh—at least as fresh as a guy who’s been dead since 1976 can look.

Just as the Russians have Lenin on display in Moscow, the Chinese have Mao on display in Beijing. Those Communists, it seems, love their embalmed leaders. (I wonder if Castro is making similar plans.)

Mao Zedong—or, as Americans learn it, Mao Tse-Tung—served as leader of the Communist army during the Chinese civil war of the 1930s, and then became leader of the entire country when the Communists eventually won in 1949. He served as chairman until his death in 1976.

And that’s when the legend of Mao took off.

Mao is to China what Abraham Lincoln is to America. That is, he can serve as a symbol that can mean just about anything to anyone. But most of all, he serves as a model of all that is good and great and inspiring.

Mao’s tomb even evokes the same kind of aura as the Lincoln Memorial—although the Lincoln Memorial features beautiful classical architecture while Mao’s tomb serves as one more example of Beijing’s monolithic Soviet-era box buildings.

The tomb, officially called Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, sits on the south edge of Tiananmen Square. The square itself is a wide expanse of concrete covering one hundred acres, making it the largest public square in the world. At the center stands a 125-foot-tall pillar called the Monument to the People’s Heroes.

Tiananmen Square, looking northward toward the
Tian’an Gate.

Otherwise, the square is as flat and open as…well, as flat and open as Tiananmen Square. It’s so big it defies comparison, although that’s hard to appreciate until you stand in the middle of it. There are rows of lampposts, and between the Heroes’ Monument and Mao’s Tomb, there are large planters full of dying salvia, wilting yellow chrysanthemums, and, at the center of each, a short palm. The weather has been dry and in the nineties, and it has taken its toll on the flowerbeds.

On the west side of Tiananmen Square sits the Great Hall of the People. In effect, it’s China’s capitol building. It’s another larger-than-life Soviet-era box building, although it has a bureaucratic majesty about it.

Technically, Mao’s Tomb sits in Tiananmen Square since the square’s massive southern gate, Qianman Gate, sits to the south of the tomb, but the size and scale of Mao’s Tomb effectively turns it into the square’s southern edge.

As I stand in line to enter the tomb, several street venders try to sell me watches with Mao’s face on them. In place of a hand to tick off seconds, Mao’s right hand waves back and forth. They’re so cheesy I have to get some—cheap.

But Mao’s Tomb itself is a solemn affair, and the Mao worship encouraged by the state is so strong, that I’m surprised to find Mao on the watch. His portrait appears on virtually all Chinese money, with the exception of coins and a bill worth one half of a yuan. A giant copy of Mao’s portrait adorns the front of the Tian’an Gate on the square’s northern border.

In front of Mao’s Tomb, two larger-than-life sculptures flank the entrance. The sculpture on the left depicts “The People” in various poses, representing various military branches, nobly assembling for readiness. The sculpture on the right features a similar scene, although “The People” proudly assemble for industrial and agricultural readiness. Each group carries a banner with Mao’s profile on it.

The line to get into the tomb wraps its way across the front of the building and through security. Visitors must show valid I.D.—they accept my N.Y. state driver’s license—and they can’t bring cameras. Several students with cameras in their pockets get turned away.

I pass a woman standing under a red umbrella next to a white cart. A sign in English says “Short informative book 1 yuan.” I pay up.

Nineteen seventy-six, the year America celebrated the bicentennial of its independence, proved to be a year of independence of a sort for China. Mao passed away that year, on the ninth of September. Shortly thereafter, the Chinese government began a series of reforms that eventually led to a more open, modern China.

Mao’s final years had been rough on the country because of the ill-fated Cultural Revolution. One person I’ve spoken to called the C.R. “nothing short of a catastrophe for China.” During the Cultural Revolution, the government persecuted intellectuals and called a halt to education across the country, all in the name of class equality and state security.

But Mao gets a free pass on it today. Everyone I’ve talked to thus far about the Cultural Revolution has put the blame elsewhere. One person said Mao was “led off track” and another said he was “deceived about the extent of the persecutions.” The youngest of Mao’s four wives and the rest of her notorious “Gang of Four”—some of Mao’s top lieutenants—are favorite scapegoats.

Mao himself is remembered as “the greatest Chinese leader of the 20th century,” according to the brochure, which calls the tomb “the most important memorial hall of the Party and the state.” The hall is “a focus for education in patriotism and the revolutionary tradition.”

Mao’s Tomb

Construction began in November of 1976, just a month after Mao’s death, and it was completed jus six months later, in May of 1977.

A red carpet goes up the center of the granite steps. At their foot, a vendor sells long-stemmed white carnations wrapped in clear plastic. The line shambles forward and up the steps, onto a colonnade. I have to take off my ballcap when I enter the building.

Inside, a white marble Mao sits Lincoln-like in front of a mural depicting the mountains, drawn in traditional Chinese style. The statue, two or three time larger than life-size, is surrounded by a thick rectangle of lush poinsettias, ferns, and palms, with shorter flowers in the front and the palms closest to Mao.

The people in front of me bought white carnations, which they place in a box so big it could almost be a sawed-off boxcar. It sits just in front of Mao’s statue, like a screen, filled with thousands of flowers that people bought just two hundred feet ago at the bottom of the stairs.

The line splits in two and we go in opposite directions. The half I’m with is told to form into ranks of two. We go around the corner, through a small hallway, and then we walk into the room where Mao lies in state. The gold characters on the white marble wall behind him say, “Long live the great leader and mentor Chairman Mao Zedong.”

Mao lies inside a glass coffin inside a glass room. He’s wearing a flannel suit that almost looks like pajamas, although most of the coffin is covered by a Chinese flag. A soft light illuminates his face.

He looks waxy.

In fact, some conspiracists theorize that Mao is frozen somewhere and was replaced by a wax figure because the real body wasn’t holding up so well. I could believe it.

On the far side of the glass room, I can see the other half of the line from the lobby. In fact, we’re just a few of the thousands of people who’ll come to the tomb every weekday morning to pay their respects.

The security guards at either end of the room keep us moving along, so we whisk through. The lines empty out in a rear lobby filled with vendors. It wouldn’t be China if someone wasn’t trying to sell me something. I could get plates, bronze busts, key chains, jewelry, charms. No Mao watches with waving hands, though.

Outside, I descend steps similar to the ones out front. Statues of workers and soldiers, also similar to the ones out front, flank the stairs. Beyond the gates, more vendors try to sell me trinkets.

I pay them no heed. I’m trying to figure out why my trip through Mao’s Tomb has left me oddly impressed.

Once more, China has surprised me.

We put that question to one of our guest speakers, C.J. Wang, who has spent a lot of time with Americans because he has worked as a translator (his English is outstanding). He’s now a small-business owner manufacturing various types of axles for American companies, so he spends a fair amount of time traveling to the U.S. for business. I mention this because C.J. understands Americans as well as any Chinese person can; he knows our quirks and idiosyncrasies. He’s sympathetic.

“American culture is well-received here,” he told us. “Chinese people, especially young people, like to wear Nikes. They like to wear jeans. They like to drink Coke. American culture is very popular.”

American’s themselves? C.J. said Chinese think Americans…

…are very generous.
…are very open-minded.
…are hard-working.
…are very noisy.
…have a weight problem.
…are spoiled. They have too much good stuff and don’t always appreciate it.

In international affairs, Americans are nosey. They are pokey. They enjoy being the world’s policeman.

“American’s like to have fun,” C.J. said. “They like to play hard. They work had and play hard.”

If Shanghai was New York City, then Beijing is Los Angeles. The city sprawls over some nineteen thousand square kilometers—all of which is clouded in smog.

The heavy traffic, smog, and city sprawl make
Beijing feel like L.A.

Beijing lacks the glistening skyscrapers of glass and steel that proudly advertise Shanghai’s modernity. Instead of building up, Beijing has built out. The city radiates outward in a series of rings with beltways, called ring roads, circling around.

Smack dab in the middle, where a typical city center might rise skyward, sits the Forbidden City, the former palace of the emperor back in the days when China still had one.

In that regard, Beijing might be more like Washington, D.C. than L.A. The two metropolises were both planned cities.

In ancient times, ruling dynasties constructed temples and palaces following the principles of feng shui, which seeks to find harmony by balancing the natural flow of unseen forces. Palace gates and temples pointed in specific directions in order to facilitate the flow.

In modern times, as the growing city needed a growing infrastructure, the government constructed the ring roads to facilitate transportation.

Beijing and D.C. are also alike, of course, because they’re the seats of government. Both have long cultural histories.

But with all the smog in Beijing, it’s hard to shake the comparison to L.A.

“In all fairness to the Chinese,” one ex-patriot tells my group, “the environment is something that’s becoming more important.”

Beijing is home to roughly 17.7 million people, but again, as in Shanghai, it’s tough to get a firm count because of the large number of migrant workers.

It’s obvious as soon as we arrive in the city that China recently slapped a snappy coat of paint on everything not too long ago. When Beijing hosted the summer Olympics in 2008, the event served as a huge “coming out” party for China, so the country bent over backwards to put its best face forward. (If that seems convoluted, in many ways it was.)

The Birds Nest (left) and the Water Cube stand
side-by-side in Beijing’s Olympic Village.

We pass the Olympic village on our way into town. The Bird’s Nest, the stadium for track and field events, stands right beside the edge of North Fourth Ring Road. Just next to it stands The Cube, the swimming facility where Michael Phelps won all his gold medals. The National Indoor Arena stands nearby, too. All the buildings are open to visitors for only a few yuan.

The area around the buildings remains open as a public park, with wide walkways for strolling pedestrians. In-line skaters zip by in single-file lines of three and four, weaving through the crowd as necessary. Groundskeepers water the patches of lawn that fill the irregular shapes between intersecting sidewalks.

We’re in China under the gracious invitation of Beijing University, one of China’s premiere institutions. (Scuttlebutt is that BIT is where China developed its version of “The Bomb.” It also served as the site of the Olympic volleyball competition.) BIT is one of several major universities in the city, which serves as the countries major center for education, although other cities and provinces have universities of their own, too.

The BIT campus sits just a couple of blocks down from our hotel on Zhongguancun St. South. The Beijing Friendship Hotel is actually a gated hotel complex with twelve buildings, including shops, restaurants, a mini-supermarket, post office, and spa. The Soviets built the complex as one of many construction projects intended as acts of good will toward the Chinese government in the 1950s. In a city full of ugly Soviet architecture, the Friendship hotel stands out as a luxurious exception.

In the evening, several of us explore a little bit of the neighborhood. Crossing the street is like performing our own daredevil act. We joke about playing “Frogger,” the 80s-era videogame where the player has to hop a little frog across a highway without getting splattered. There are fewer bicyclists that we saw in Shanghai, but there are plenty of cars to compensate. Beijing’s streets are wider and straighter, again reminding me of the boulevards of L.A. Except for the bridges around interchanges, there are no elevated expressways like there were in Shanghai.

We wander into the local supermarket, Chaoshife. Instead of front doors, we pass through wide strips of heavy transparent plastic, like the kind a grocery might have in a walk-in cooler, that hang in the doorway. We walk into an explosion of noise and bustle and groceries. The first five letter of the store’s name says it all.

Smells jostle in the air even more competitively than shoppers on the storeroom floor. I can’t identify any of them except for the individual cobs of corn being roasted on spits at the front of the store.

Every ten or twelve feet, a store employee stands next to a display or food stand, hocking items to passing customers. Personal selling is a huge deal, although shoppers have plenty of space to pick and choose from the shelves and racks and coolers themselves without molestation.

A deli counter features a variety of dumplings, including a special kind made only at this time of year for the upcoming Festival of the Dragon Boat: steamed rice and dates wrapped in a palm leaf. The meat section features traditional cuts of beef, chicken, pork, and lamb, but I also see pork feet and a breakfast food that turns out to be delicious: chicken sausage.

Across from the deli, three rows of crockpots simmer with beans, more dumplings, noodles, and things I don’t recognize. The seafood section features tables of ice covered with squid and various fish, including a something that looks like a stocky silver eel with a barracuda’s head and nasty teeth. A row of tanks with blue backgrounds holds ten or twelve species of live fish and a couple turtles.

“Your seafood can’t get much fresher than that,” my friend Darwin says. The clerk speaks no English, so I can’t ask him what anything is.

We take a ramped escalator to the second floor. To the left are more groceries and to the right is household merchandise, including clothes. That part of the store looks like an old Woolworths.

We pick up some bottled water and head back downstairs, where we discover blueberry-flavored popsicles. A pair of young girls on rollerblades follows us around a little, giggling and practicing their English on us.

On the way back to the hotel, Darwin and Carl and I crack into the popsicles. “Mmmm,” Carl says. “These will have to be a new China tradition for our trip.”

For the rest of our stay in Beijing, we’ll make several trips to the supermarket for more popsicles even as we explore the business environment and the rich cultural and political history.

From the grand sweeping history of a nation to the daily life of an average person, Beijing has a fascinating character all its own.

Wu Tao stands at the front of the bus, microphone in hand, radiating charm.

Wu “Harry” Tao (right) talks with St. Bonaventure
professors Carl Case (left) and Darwin King at the
Winter Palace in Xi’an.

As our group rides around Xi’an, Wu Tao serves as our tourguide. He stands in the bus’s center aisle and regales us with stories about the city’s past. He wears a dark t-shirt with a big numeral “8” on it—which has made him easy to find in a crowd—jeans, a pair of open-toed sandals, and a million-yuan smile.

When he points something out to us and tells us its name, he carefully repeats it and even spells it out for us to ensure we can follow him.

Tao is his given name while Wu is his family name, but Chinese custom puts the family name first, then the given name: Wu Toa.

Like many Chinese, Wu Tao has an American name, too: Harry. “Like Harry Potter,” he says with good-natured amusement. A lot of things appear to amuse him. He smiles freely and chuckles often.

The students are wild about him.

“I just want to go up there and pinch his cheeks,” one of them says.

Harry didn’t get his American name from the fictional British character, though; he got it from his school teacher, a ex-patriot from Toronto who’d come to China to teach English.

“He gave everyone in the class English names to help tell us apart,” Harry explains. In China, there are too many people with the same name—like Wu, for instance—so the teacher doled out America names in order to be able to distinguish his students when he called on them in class. It’s a typical practice throughout.

In college, Harry majored in English and tourism, which landed him in his current job at a state-run tourism agency. It’s a gig he’s been doing for fifteen years. He handles some sixty groups a year.

Between stories about Xi’an, Harry tells us a lot about himself and gives us insights into the lives of ordinary people in China.

Harry lives in a three-bedroom apartment with his wife and four-and-a-half-year-old son, Yoyo. “Like the violinist,” Harry says. Yoyo has an American name, too: Harrison. “Because he is Harry’s son,” Harry explains with another of his chuckles, and his whole face breaks out into another huge smile.

Chinese couples can have one child, although if the parents are, themselves, each single children they can petition the government for a birth certificate to have a second child. They children must be spaced at least four years apart. Having a child illegally means the child won’t have access to the health care or education systems. In the countryside, the government enforced the rule less stringently.

Harry’s parents also live with them. “It is hard to have privacy,” he admits, “but they do so much to help us. So much. That is the nuclear family in China: four grandparents, two parents, one child.”

Harry’s parents take their grandson to kindergarten in the morning, then typically go to the park for exercise. His father will do tai chi while his mother will line dance—an activity involving parasols, far removed from the American version.

Harry’s father will usually bring his pet bird with him in its small cage, and he and other retirees will have birdsong contests.

Harrison will spend the day in kindergarten from 7:45 a.m. until 6:30 p.m., when Harry’s parents will again pick him up. The schedule, including three meals, two snacks, and a nap, is designed specifically with working parents in mind.

As with most American families, Harry and his wife both work. In Xi’an, the eight-hour workday runs from eight a.m. until noon; after a two-hour siesta, workers go back from two p.m. until six.

For school kids beyond kindergarten, the day is similar. They’ll take four classes between eight a.m. and noon, get a two-hour break, and then take two classes between two o’clock and three-fifty. They might have sports or exercises after school.

Middle-school students at dismissal time on a
Sunday afternoon

Students aiming for the country’s prestigious colleges will enroll in middle and high school programs that frequently require work on the weekends. Each year, some 7.1 million kids will take college entrance exams—all on the same day across China—and about fifty-five percent pass.

College tuition in Xi’an runs about 2,800 yuans—about $415—plus room and board. Tuition in a big city like Beijing or Shanghai might run anywhere from between five thousand to twenty thousand yuans.

Ping pong is the country’s most popular sport, although soccer is gaining popularity. Basketball is huge, too, in part because of the success of NBA star Yao Ming, the seven-foot, six-inch center for the Houston Rockets, who hails from Shanghai. Basketball is also so popular because most schools have the space to accommodate a basketball court, while the space for a soccer field is tougher to come by.

Politics gets much less attention from people. “Ordinary people don’t care about politics,” Harry says. “Ordinary people care about our food, our clothes, our house, our future.”

Citizens gain the right to vote at sixteen, and they have nine parties to choose from, although the Communist Party is the only one that matters. “Look at [our political system] as one big red flower with eight tiny green leaves on it for decoration,” Harry says.

“Do people vote?” a student asks him.

Harry pauses. Pauses. Pauses.

“We have the right to vote,” he finally says, chuckling, his face breaking out into another of his smiles. “Most people don’t care.”

For all its influence, only one in twenty-four people belong to the Communist Party, giving it a membership of about 68 million.

Party members are not allowed to have any religious affiliation. In China, though, that hardly seems to be a problem. In the shaanxi province, where Xi’an is located,only about 750,000 people belong to a religion, Harry says. The province has about 250,000 Christians, about 150,000 Muslims, and another 350,000 fall into a variety of other sects like Buddhism and Taoism, although Buddhism is the largest organized religion in the rest of the country. “Most have no belief,” Harry says, adding that he and his wife are among them.

He chats freely with the students, answering their questions with politeness and honesty. When someone asks him about free health care for everyone, for instance, Harry shakes his head: “In China, there are too many people. Impossible.”

At one point, he mentions the fact that many young people from the countryside aspire to go into the army after they graduate from school because service guarantees a government job, which is better than farm life. “The People’s Liberation Army has three million soldiers,” he says.

“Three million soldiers to protect one-point-three billion people?” a student asks. “That doesn’t seem like enough.”

“We also have nuclear weapons,” Harry reminds her.

Harry and me outside the Xi’an airport

Harry remains with us during our entire trip, all the way through the check-in process at the airport as we head off to Beijing. Students stop to get their photo taken with him. I grab one too. He graciously allows us to snap away with our cameras.

“He was so good,” one student says. “He was awesome,” says another. The flock around him like he was one of the Beatles.

“Your trip is so smooth, my job is so easy,” Harry tells us with another of his smiles. “I hope you enjoy rest of your time in my country!”

One day, thirty-five years ago, Yang Quanyi found a head in his well. His discovery helped changed the face of China.

The date was March 29, 1974. Quanyi, a farmer in his thirties, was digging a new well, without much success, when he struck gold.

It wasn’t gold, literally—it was a head made from terra cotta, the same clay material used for making flower pots. And for Quanyi, it didn’t work out so great, at least not at first. When the government swooped in to investigate his discovery, Quanyi lost the lease to his land (there’s no private land ownership in China).

Subsequent archeological work revealed the scope of what Quanyi and his friends had stumbled upon: a lost tomb containing some eight thousand terra cotta statues, all smashed to bits.

Today, on what had once been Quanyi’s field , stands an extensive complex of museums and buildings, all devoted to the preservation of Quanyi’s find.

My group pulls up in our tour bus, one of dozens in the parking lot. Until just a few years ago, visitors pulled right up to the museums themselves after running a gauntlet of trinket merchants, amusement park rides, and food vendors. The government finally decided the carnival atmosphere was unbecoming of a site widely considered the Eighth Wonder of the World, so they cleaned it all out and created a garden park that leads to the museum complex.

The merchants and vendors previously set up in front of the museum complex now hawk their terra cotta replicas, animal furs, and other assorted trinkets in a marketplace village located at the exit of the grounds. Students will buy boxes and boxes of cheap replicas, forking over a buck a piece, not even sure why they want to load up on boxes even as they do. That will come after the tour, after they’re all wowed by what they see and on fire just a little bit to take some of the coolness home with them.

But when we first go inside the complex, Harry leads us over to check out the orientation film. The film, which looks like it was shot in the mid-eighties, appears on a series of screens that circle 360-degrees overhead.

The warriors, it turns out, are the legacy of Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of China, who unified the country in 221 B.C. He began construction of his tomb almost immediately, a project that took thirty-eight years and some 720-thousand laborers to complete. That sounds impressive until compared against another of Qin’s pubic works projects: The Great Wall. Qin, apparently, was keen on creating Wonders of the World.

“He was a great and cruel emperor,” says Harry, our tour guide.

To protect his soul in the afterlife, Qin ordered the creation of the terra cotta army, buried in an area just over a mile to the east of the emperor’s tomb. The warriors all held real weapons, and they all face east, toward the sea hundreds of miles away, because the empire’s enemies all seemed to come from the coast (especially since the Great Wall kept them from invading from the north).

Qin died at the age of fifty, but work on the tomb lasted another year, completed under the reign of one of Qin’s sons. Today, the tomb looks like nothing more than a big hill. Scientists don’t yet have the technology to properly excavate it, Harry explains, so they leave it for the future.

As a ruler, Qin’s son was worse than his father, and the peasants revolted. They overthrew the emperor, thus bringing to an end the Qin Dynasty. As part of their revolt, they looted the chambers that held the terra cotta warriors so they could seize the weapons the statues held. They smashed the warriors in the process.

From the movie dome, we file over to the first of the three buildings that cover the archeological pits.

The first building covers 16-thousand square meters and reminds me of Texas Stadium on steroids. It has high steel girders that form a dome, and although the top isn’t open, it’s covered with plexiglass to let in plenty of natural light.

The building surrounds a huge pit in the floor, and there at the bottom stand row upon row of restored warriors in eleven long columns. Large walls of unexcavated dirt separate the columns from each other, and at the rear of each column, tumbled heaps of broken statues not yet restored litter the earthen floor.

Near the front of one of the columns, a sign reads “Site of original well.” When Quanyi pulled up that first terra cotta head, who could’ve ever known that this is what laid in wait beneath the earth.

Once again, China offers up something so big in its sheer magnitude that I can hardly take it all in.

I follow the walkway all the way around the pit, peering down at the sculptures. I’ve been told that no two faces on the warriors are alike, but I want to be the guy to disprove that snowflake-like theory. I study the details: some have thin moustaches, some have sideburns, some have bare chins, some have moustaches that look like they came straight from a barbershoppers’ quartet. Some scowl. All look serious.

Each infantryman has his hair wrapped in a single bundle that sticks up toward the right on the back side of his head, but the style of each wrap is slightly different.

In all cases, the intricate craftsmanship amazes me.

At the rear of the building, atop an unexcavated part of the pit, archeologist have set up what they call the hospital area. It’s here that they reassemble broken warriors so the statues can be returned to the pit floor in formation.

Building two is much smaller, but building three is slightly larger. Like building one, the other two buildings cover pits full of partially excavated terra cotta warriors. Some have been reassembled while others, smashed, still lay embedded in the earth.

The warriors come in a variety of different styles. Aside from infantrymen, who come armored and unarmored, there is a general, infantry officers, cavalrymen, cavalry officers, kneeling and standing archers, charioteers, and horses. Building three holds displays on each type of figure.

Another figure makes a guest appearance while we’re in the complex: Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Most of us miss him, but a couple students manage to snap some photos in passing.

The museum complex offers so much to look at, including a giant replica of a terra cotta warrior and a pair of bronze chariots unearthed during excavations.

But perhaps the most unexpected thing to see if Yang Quanyi himself. He lost his farm when he reported his discovery, so he lost his livelihood. But he still seems to do pretty well for himself. He sits, like a rock star with dark glasses, at a table in the movie building. One after another, he autographs tour books, pocketing a portion of the proceeds. For a small fee, visitors can get their photo taken with him. It’s a little bit of capitalism at its finest.

The face of China is changing indeed.

Shanghai’s ever-present haze is made even grayer under cloudy skies. But after our flight takes off, we punch through the clouds to find plenty of sun. The cloudcover beneath us soon gives way, and I can see the landscape beneath stretched out like a broad canvas.

Farmers have painted square fields, bisected by the thin brown lines of roads and the dark green lines of irrigation channels. I see plenty of bright blue squares that, in America, one would take to be swimming pools, but in China, the squares indicate the corrugated sheet metal popular for roofing. Settlements dot the landscape everywhere.

I can’t spot a single undeveloped plot. That’s not to say there aren’t any, but from my vantage point tens of thousands of feet in the air, it looks like the Chinese have committed every square foot for habitation, business, or agriculture. I have no idea where any wildlife could possibly live.

The broad coastal plain around Shanghai eventually gives way to small clusters of hills that, in turn, grow into an impressive range of mountains. Atop the step mountains and in the deep valleys, I finally see wilderness.

But the topography isn’t the only thing about China that changes.

Suddenly, the mountains give way to the city of Xi’an, the City of Western Peace. (“Xi” means “west” and “an” means “peace.”)

Going from Shanghai to Xi’an is, in a way, like going through a time warp. If Shanghai represents all that is powerful and new about modern China, Xi’an represents all that is ancient and traditional.

Xi’an is a much smaller city than Shanghai, with a population of only about 8.7 million in the greater metro area. It’s infrastructure, although growing, isn’t nearly as developed as Shanghai’s.

But Xi’an is a far, far older city. It served as the capital of China for 1800 years, beginning in 221 B.C. when the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, unified all the warring states into a single country.

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda

By 119 B.C., traders had established the Silk Road, stretching from the Mediterranean on the western end, through Persia and India, to Xi’an on the eastern end. Islam came to China along that road. So did Buddhism. In the seventh century A.D., Buddhist monks established a Sanskrit translation center in Xi’an.

The city remains a textile-manufacturing center, producing cotton and silk. Only ten percent of their output goes toward exports. The rest stays in China. The city is also known as the Silicon Valley of China because of the many information technology companies located there. The other major industry is tourism.

Our tour guide, a smiling Chinese man named Harry, waits for us with a yellow flag over his shoulder. We’ll get used to following the flag as he holds it up above the crowds of people we eventually have to push through.

Harry takes us to dinner at a dumpling buffet, where we sample nearly twenty varieties of dumplings. (The maple and walnut dumplings prove especially popular at my table.) Dumplings are a local staple because they can be made from wheat, which doesn’t require as much water to grow as rice. For that reason, noodles are also popular. Xi’an only gets twenty-four inches of rain each year, so rice growing is impossible. “This year, we get less rain so far,” Harry tells us. “Is very dry. Very dry.”

We all cap off our day with massages. After days of traveling, it’s a welcome break. Xi’an, as it turns out, is famous for its massages. People come from all over China to attend Xi’an’s massage school, and people come from all over the world to get the massages. The divide us into groups of six, give use pajamas to put on, and have us lie down on tables. For a full hour, the massage masters work us over. I’ll sleep well, I’m sure.

Over two days, Harry unfolds one history lesson after another.

We visit a Buddhist temple, The Big Wild Goose Pagoda, built in 652 A.D. during the Tang Dynasty. As legend has it, the monks were deciding whether to embrace vegetarianism when a flock of geese flew over and the lead goose fell dead from the sky. The monks took that as a sign in favor of vegetarianism. They built their pagoda, seven stories tall, on the spot where the goose took its dive.

The Tang Dynasty Palace Music and Dance show

We take in a dinner theater production featuring traditional Tang Dynasty-era palace music and dance. The dancers wear silk dresses with long flowing sleeves that they can swirl in the air like long ribbons. The musicians play period instruments, heavy on the cymbals, with the tightness of a modern orchestra.

We walk the grounds of the Tang Dynasty’s winter palace, a complex of buildings nestled into the foot of Li Mountain. For four months of the year, the emperor and his entourage lived there because of the warm springs that bubbled up from the ground. They built elaborate bathhouses and beautiful gardens.

Part of the winter palace complex

The winter palace is also the site of the 1936 “Xi’an Incident,” a kidnapping and assassination attempt that forced the Chinese leader at the time, Chiang Kai-shek, to forge an alliance with Mao Tse-Tung’s Communist Red Army against Japanese occupiers. The two Chinese factions had been fighting a civil war, but Chiang’s own officers staged the coup attempt as a way to force Chiang into the alliance. Bullet holes still remain in the window of one of Chiang’s rooms. A sign nearby says the Chinese government has preserved the site for “patriotic education” purposes.

But far and away, Xi’an’s biggest attraction is the site of the terra cotta warriors—seven thousand clay statues entombed to protect the final resting place of Emperor Qin. They’ve been dubbed the eighth wonder of the ancient world, and it’s no exaggeration. (I’ll write more about the terra cotta warriors in my next dispatch.)

In two days, I’ve gone from the cutting edge of China back to the dawn of its nationhood. The story of the terra cotta warriors will, in a way, bring me full circle.

Shanghai wakes up quietly, as if it doesn’t want to rouse its inhabitants.

The Shanghai skyline at night along the west bank
of the Huangpu River.

In Yu Yuan Park, not far from the touristy section of town known as The Bund along the western riverfront, hundreds of people gather after first light to exercise. They give each other enough room to maneuver and then, all in slow motion, they outstretch their arms, shift their weight, pivot, pull back, swing, shift. For observers as uninitiated as I am in tai chi—the ancient art of shadowboxing—it’s hard to describe, but to watch is to see grace and discipline in motion.

The streets had been virtually empty all night. The ever-present blaring of car horns and the wails of emergency vehicles remain noticeably absent—a marked change from any major American city, like New York or Boston, where I’ve stayed.

When drivers do use their horns, it means “Get out of my way because I’m coming through,” not an expression of anger. “Road rage,” one Western ex-patriot told me, “does not exist here.” Even though traffic frequently looks like swarming insects instead of cars, the get-out-of-my-way system apparently works.

The streets do eventually fill up. What amazes me most is the number of people on bikes and motor scooters. Each street has a restricted lane for them. The bikes come in all shapes and sizes and ages. I see a few that must be so old they look held together with duct tape. It’s not surprising to see a man pedaling down the street with huge bags full of cans or Styrofoam lashed to the back. The heaps of bags dwarf the drivers, but onward they pedal, taunting the laws of gravity.

Construction noises join the soundscape: jackhammers, excavators, hammers, diesel engines, men yelling to one another. The entire city, it seems, is a construction zone. In May 2010, Shanghai will host the World Expo, so China is putting on its best face in much the same way it did when it hosted the Olympics in Beijing in the summer of 2008.

Shanghai, in many ways, is China’s showcase city. The central government made the choice several years ago to turn the city into a major world financial center similar to New York, London, or Tokyo, which explains the pro-business environment in the area. Fifteen years ago, the skyline on the east side of the Huangpu River, which bisects the city south to north, didn’t exist. Now, it’s home to the World Financial Center, the country’s tallest building—China’s answer to America’s World Trade Centers.

The Pearl Tower rises out of the
gloom on a morning clouded by
weather and smog.

A couple blocks away stands the Oriental Pearl Tower, a Space Needle-like structure with two giant orbs skewered on it. At more than 1,500 feet tall, the building serves as a giant broadcast tower, although it has observation decks for tourists, too.

In fact, the city boasts a lot of remarkable skyscrapers. Architects apparently tired of the traditional high-rise boxes so typical of the seventies and eighties seemed to lighten up and get creative with the designs. “There are buildings here that look like they come right out of the Jetsons,” says my colleague, Darwin King, an accounting professor who’s on the trip with me.

In some spots, the skyscrapers are densely clustered, while in others, they’re spread out a bit, with crops of apartment buildings growing in between. As we drive northwest out of the city on Friday afternoon, one student looking out the bus window marvels: “It’s just buildings as far as you can see.”

We also see plenty of things familiar to us: logos for Dairy Queen, Dunkin Donuts, Papa Johns Pizza and even Hooters, all written in Chinese and English. We see the dueling entities of world domination, Wal-Mart and Starbucks. The first ad I saw off the plane was for HSBC. “I wonder if they have a Park-N-Shop,” a student laughs.

The Chinese seem as curious about us as we are about them. Several parents bring their small children up to me to wave. “Hel-lo!” the parents say, holding their babies up to see the American with the Hawaiian shirt.

Jeff, one of the students with me, stands six-six. On several occasions, people stop him to ask if they can have their picture taken with someone so tall. He towers over them as they all smile and the camera flash goes off. One old man came up to him and stroked Jeff’s arm hair and laughed.

“Obama!” says a smiling woman to another group of students. She waves a newspaper with the president’s picture on it. “He from Hawaii!” The conversation can’t go much beyond that because the woman doesn’t know enough English and the students don’t know any Mandarin.

We cap off the day with a cruise on the Huangpu River. The buildings on both shores put on a magnificent light show, and the skyline is ablaze with colors. The top of the World Financial Center sparkles with lights like a thousand flashbulbs going off. The side of the Aurora building shows moving pictures—a humming bird! a flower!—nearly a hundred stories tall, and nearby the Citi Bank building flashes with a full-length screen that shows groovy Nuevo-psychedelic designs.

The boat makes its loop downriver then up, passing low-lying work barges, hulking just above the water with no running lights. A trio dressed like a mariachi band plays standards on electronic instruments. As the boat begins its final approach to the docks, the band strikes up “Home on the Range,” which cleverly transforms into “Auld Ang Syne.”

As I listen to the song, I can’t help but wonder if those “old acquaintances” that might be forgotten might not be a part of China itself. Shanghai represents everything new and modern about one of the oldest cultures on earth.

Today might be ending, but Shanghai represents a new dawn for all of China.

From space, the road system around Shanghai must look like a bowl of Chinese noodles. But traveling on the roads themselves feels like traveling the straight and narrow. The long, straight parkways, well-manicured, roll out across the flat coastal plain that surrounds Shanghai.

Component await shipment at Cooper Industries
outside of Shanghai

The business of the day is business, so we’re visiting a number of manufacturing companies. The industrial parks we visit are laid out in grids that keep things well organized and makes it easy for delivery and cargo trucks to move about. It’s just the most visible indication of the careful planning the government has put into place to attract companies.

We tour a few American-based companies as well as a German-based one, although all are quick to characterize themselves as “global companies.” One company manufactures parts for electricity transmission; another manufactures parts for auto transmissions and brakes; another is an aerospace manufacturer; another specializes in urban development.

China represents a key market for each of them. Business here is booming.

And it’s hard to imagine what China has NOT done to encourage those companies to set up shop. For instance, we visit a special free-trade zone that facilitates the movement of raw materials and processed goods in and out of the country. “This allows us to avoid import and export duties,” an aerospace manager tells us. “It allows us to respond to customer needs faster, too. Instead of shipping something here from the U.S., we can already have it on site.”

A light-up map of the Suzhou Industrial Park

In the city of Suzhou, 80 kilometers northwest of Shanghai, the Chinese and Singapore governments have created a planned city, called the Suzhou Industrial Park, that provides huge tax breaks for businesses, social security incentives for workers, and a host of other enticements for a pro-business environment.

“We have to be careful about how we market our products,” one engineer tells me. “There’s a perception that ‘Made in China’ means something inferior even though that’s not the case.” One way the company gets around that perception is that it creates products in China, then ships them to Mexico for assembly before they’re sold in America. All that shipping still makes the products cheaper to produce than if they were made and assembled in America.

Near the heart of the Suzhou Industrial Park

China also offers other key advantages for businesses. The country’s location makes it an ideal platform for doing business with other Asian markets. The country’s size means virtually any natural resource and raw material is available without having to import it.

The biggest incentive, of course, is the cheap labor force. “In America, labor costs are the number one concern for a company,” the engineer tells me. “In China, businesses don’t even worry about their labor costs because it’s so inexpensive here.”

For some companies, labor costs are as much as thirty to forty percent cheaper in China than in the U.S. At one plant we visit, workers make the equivalent of around $200 a month. That’s $50 for a forty-hour work week.

“Here, the worker efficiency is much higher, and their productivity is higher,” one manager tells me. “And the product we produce meets the same quality standards that workers in the U.S. have to meet.”

At the German company, laborers work on a series of modern—but not cutting-edge —machines to make bearings for automobiles. “The machines we use in our German plants are more fully automated,” one of our guides says. “That allowed us to ship the older machines, which are more labor-intensive to use, to this location because the labor is so inexpensive.”

Mandatory retirement for unskilled workers is 55 for men and 50 for women; skilled males can work until 60 and females until 55. After retirement, workers get a small government pension.

“We have a free hand in who we hire,” a manager tells me. That’s a big change from the days when China told each citizen where he or she would work and how to make a living. “It’s a competitive work environment for skilled workers. They are always looking for opportunity. They don’t consider company loyalty, so it can be tough for us to keep workers.”

The workforce presents other challenges for American companies, too. “Innovation and creativity are not taught in the school systems,” the engineer explains. “In that respect, the engineers we hire out of college are quite raw.” The challenges of teaching them innovation represent a significant—but not insurmountable—cultural challenge.

While the Chinese don’t seem to excel at innovation, they demonstrate excellent adaptability. One reason China’s business climate and infrastructure are booming is that the country has been able to take advantage of the learning curve other countries have experienced.

“Our plants in America grew organically, which isn’t especially efficient,” the engineer tells me. “When we built this facility, we could build it specifically to suit our needs.” The growth of the plant in America gave them a clearer, more efficient idea of how to build the plant in China.

The same thing is happening with thousands of other companies.

Chinese adaptability also translates as an all-out assault on intellectual property rights. For instance, millions of Chinese smoke like chimneys, but I’ve seen far more Zippo knock-offs than Zippos. “We have to defend our intellectual property rights vigorously,” the engineer tells me. “But even still, Chinese companies are learning from us. After all, our suppliers don’t just supply to us. Our competitors benefit from the same high standards we demand from our suppliers. So, at some point in the future our competition will be competing at a level not much different from us.”

For the time being, though, China continues to depend on foreign companies to help fuel the country’s explosive growth.

“The investment market here is so large,” the engineer tells me. “But that doesn’t mean the Chinese are just spending. ‘Investing’ means they’re getting better.”

China has a way of making me feel small.

It started the moment I stepped into the terminal at Pudong International Airport in Shanghai. It was about ten p.m. local time, but my body was telling me it was ten o’clock in the morning. I’d been traveling for twenty-four hours straight, but despite the extra leg room my seat afforded me on the trans-Pacific flight, I couldn’t get comfortable enough to sleep.

Perhaps it might have been my state of mental wooziness that made me feel so small. Or, it could be the fact that I couldn’t see the far end of the terminal walkway. It felt like one of those bad dreams where you’re walking down a hallway and the farther you go, the farther ahead the hallway stretches.

In this case, Pudong International stretches on for almost a mile. In total, the airport’s website boasts, the facility covers some 280-thousand square meters. Twenty-five hours of air travel seem to magnify that by more than the even the 6.8% exchange rate.

The interminable terminal walkway eventually led to a giant box of a room awash with florescent light. Everything looked so open and vast and clean. Think “Wal-Mart,” ten times bigger and empty except for a maze of retractable nylon barriers set up to herd me through quarantine.

From there, I passed into an even larger box of a room to go through customs, and beyond that, into an even larger room to retrieve my luggage. The Chinese airport felt like a Russian matryoshka doll—a small giant room leading to a larger giant room leading to another.

The luggage claim area led, of course, to an even larger room, where the other members of my group and I met up with our host from the Beijing Institute of Technology.

I had come to China as one of three St.Bonaventure faculty members chaperoning a group of graduate students on a class trip. I had never been overseas before, so this promised to be one of those “adventures of a lifetime” for me. Admittedly, China didn’t top my list of “must-see” places, but since the opportunity presented itself, I would’ve been foolish to say no.

I’ve been here only a day, and already, China has become “must-see.”

It has also made me feel very, very small.

The enormity of China is hard to imagine. It’s the third-largest country in the world in terms of size (behind Russia and Canada and just ahead of the United States) and the home of more than one billion people. That’s seven percent of the world’s land mass for twenty-two percent of the world’s population.

Shanghai, the largest city in the country, is home to more than 20 million people. Official government figures put the number somewhere around 18 million, but some two million immigrants live in the city as well.

That sheer volume of people creates logistics for housing. Apartment buildings, little more than stacks of cubicles, line the streets. Residents have so little space they have to hang their laundry to dry on pipes outside their high-rise windows. Many look like vertical slums. The resulting contrast between developing country and modern city is striking.

There’s construction everywhere. Everywhere! “The pace of growth is fast and furious,” one Shanghai resident told me.

Many rundown housing complexes are getting facelifts. Bamboo scaffolding and green mesh that resembles mosquito netting covers their exteriors as workers scramble around with paint and plaster.

Others tenements, which might stand three or four stories tall, are being torn down to make room for modern high-rise housing, displacing families that have lived in the ramshackle buildings for generations. Many are too poor to afford to live in the new buildings that take their place.

The bus ride from the airport into the city center takes us past one public works project after another. Between 2001 and 2010, Shanghai will sink more than $73 billion dollars into public works projects. Elevated highways are going up all over the city, as is a new subway extension. There’s even a maglev train.

Some of the money goes toward green spaces. The average per capita of green space in the city is about 11.5 square meters, totaling some 37.7% of the city’s area—an impressive amount of greenery for the densely packed city. Trees and shrubs and crammed into alleyways, between buildings, and into parks. Neatly manicured landscaping lines both sides of the major roads and fills the nooks and crannies around on- and off -ramps. Even the elevated highways have greenery planted in flowerbeds along the tops of their concrete walls.

Skyscrapers jockey for position with each other, although the Shanghai World Financial Center looms over all of them. At 1,614 feet tall, with 101 floors, it’s the tallest building in China. It looks like a giant bottle opener.

We cross the Huangpu River on the Nanpu Bridge, one of the world’s largest suspension bridges, and start a long spiral descent into the west-shore region of Shanghai known as Puxi. Coming off the bridge, the road makes three giant loops, dropping fifteen stories along the way, before spilling traffic out on ground level. The bridge and spiral ramp are engineering marvels.

It’s all so big.

The hotel sits only a few blocks away. As tired as I am, and as small as I feel, I’m glad to finally have a quiet place to unwind and, hopefully, catch a few hours of sleep.

China, I know, has big things in store for me in the days ahead.

I realized that there was a way to make the results independent of the currency exchange rate, and that’s how I generated the graphs below.

The figure below shows the 20 nations who’s CO₂ emissions contribute the most to U.S. emissions, sorted by 2006 (the latest year for which EIA data was available). China is the overall largest contributor to U.S. emissions due their high emissions and large amount of exports to the U.S., and these 20 nations represent approximately 98% of all offshored CO₂ emissions. The total CO₂ that the U.S. offshored to other countries was over a billion metric tons.

The figure below shows the top ten countries (responsible for approximately 85% of all emissions offshored) by percentage, with the U.S. direct emissions shown as well. Notice that the U.S. direct emissions are falling while the emissions by other nations on behalf of the U.S. are rising.

This last figure shows the official carbon intensity (CO₂ emitted per unit of economic production) as compared to the actual carbon intensity, as well as the total percentage of U.S. CO₂ emissions produced in other nations. Note that the actual carbon intensity is significantly worse than the official carbon intensity, although not as bad as I had calculated two weeks ago.

Ultimately, the conclusion or the original post remains unchanged – the U.S. has offshored its carbon dioxide emission problem to the rest of the world, turning their economies into dumping grounds for our own air pollution in the process.

Methodology

Relying on PPP and MER to convert imports and exports into CO₂ emissions results in a range of calculated values that vary according to how the PPP and MER compare to each other. This problem was eliminated by normalizing the value of the imports from other countries against the GDP of that country. Similarly, the value of U.S. exports to that country were normalized against U.S. GDP. Then the percentage of imports and exports were multiplied by total emissions in order to determine the CO₂ value of the imports and exports. Finally, a balance of CO₂ emissions due to trade was determined via simple subtraction.

All calculations were performed in current dollars, not “real” dollars (2000). However, since the calculations were normalized, this doesn’t matter to the accuracy of the calculations.

U.S. carbon intensity was calculated using the actual CO₂ emissions (including emissions offshored on behalf of the U.S. economy) divide by the U.S. GDP. GDP was converted from current dollars to “real” dollars for direct comparison against official EIA carbon intensity figures.

To see the calculations yourself, click here (zipped .xls file).