So it continues to strike me that the Chinese do city development a little bit differently than we do in the states. Hard to say if it’s better or worse, but it is strikingly different. On my ride, I just headed south to get out of town (not hard to do as we live on the southern edge of the city). It only takes a couple miles and I’ve already lost all the big buildings and all the symbols of city life.
Except the roads. I’m riding my bike on a road that has 4 major lanes going in each
direction, plus a boulevard divider where there are another 2 lanes plus a bike/taxi/bus lane. That makes 14 lanes of road going through the countryside. The Chinese take the whole ‘build it and they will come’ thing to a new level. Now I know a lot of people in the US see this as a sign of impending financial collapse for China as they overdevelop their infrastructure just to keep people working. But it’s hard to see it that way from this side of the pond. Changchun has 8 million people in it. I don’t know the growth rate of the city, but it has to be at least 5%. That means 400,000 people move into Changchun every year. If you wait until the people come to start building the infrastructure, you’re going to have major slums as no one will be able to find housing. So the Chinese build massive roads to nowhere, and then build massive housing complexes in the middle of nowhere, in the hopes that they will be filled with people in a couple years. So far in Changchun, they haven’t been wrong. Laughably oversized infrastructure from a year ago is now filled/overflowing with people and businesses.
Of course the funny thing is they build these roads in segments. So you go from my 14 lane road down to a 2 lane road down to a muddy dirt path pretty much instantly. The attached pictures may look like random shots, but they are taken from the same location: facing north, 14 lanes of traffic. Facing south, a sign that says you can’t go this way.
The other funny thing is the luxury housing developments. The Chinese have always lived in high rise towers in the city and hovels in the countryside. Now that they have crazy amounts of cash they want to live in a luxurious house in a gated community. The only problem is no one in Changchun knows what a luxurious house is supposed to look like. So I think they just go on the internet and look for pictures from ‘the lives of the rich and famous’ and figure that’s as good a guess as any. I didn’t take enough pictures of the new development just south of nowhere, but the one summed it up pretty well. The palatial estate with the statues of Greek gods surrounding the fountain in the courtyard of the grounds is what they are going for. The other pictures had people taking their boats across the pristine, glassy blue waterway with a cloudless blue sky. So pretty much everything Changchun can’t offer is what people are being told they should want. There was also the British Tudor mansion with a British executive walking to his Bentley. It just fascinates me to see what the nouveau riche in China think is a proper demonstration of their wealth and position.
Two other random thoughts this weekend:
1) I’ve passed a lot of combines lately on the road. 6 to 7 new machines driving down the road one after another to a shipping location I assume. In the past, I have never seen combines in the field or being shipped/driven. I have only ever seen people in the fields. I have to believe the reason for seeing more farm equipment is with all the migration from rural to urban locations, there is a fear that the remaining rural population will not be sufficient to plant/grow/harvest all the food out in the fields. Hard to know the real answer to this one, but this would be a huge change for Chinese farming practices.
2) I’ve also seen a lot of semi-trucks driving down the road with sea cargo containers on a flat bed trailer. Until this summer, I had never seen this before. My assumption is that in previous years all the cargo containers were being used to ship stuff overseas. With the economic downturn, less stuff is getting shipped. The Chinese economy is still growing at 8-9% so they are still making/consuming stuff in this country. So I’m assuming someone decided instead of building more and more semi-trailers to haul goods throughout china, they just converted the cargo containers into a semi-trailer by adding a simple undercarriage. Again, hard to know the truth on this one, but interesting to wonder why the change.
