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July 19, 2005 Now and then I hear or read someone who prophesies that China will surpass the US economically in year so-and-so, if it keeps growing at the present rate. The CIA World Factbook shows that the Chinese GDP is currently enjoying a 9.9% real annual growth rate, whereas the US GDP shows only 3.5%, but one must view some of the CIA’s statistics fairly skeptically when they claim that the GDP per capita in China, adjusted for purchasing power parity, is $6800 annually. I don’t know where all the money is going in that case. The average Chinaman sees only about $1000 a year, from my own observations. I feel no animus whatsoever towards the Chinese, and wish them all the prosperity they may have the good fortune to look forward to. In fact, it would not upset me terribly, if, in the year 2050, the Chinese economy did surpass that of the US. I consider myself cosmopolitan. The only thing is that I personally don’t believe that it will happen. China lags much too much to expect reasonably to catch up in a matter of a few decades. Even if the US should grind to a halt, just maintaining its present level without further development, I don’t think China is any position to catch up. Let’s compare transportation, as an exhibit in evidence. China’s area is 3,705,000 square miles; the US’s is 3,719,000, virtually identical. But the US has 2,588,000 miles of paved road, as against China’s 900,000, which is only 35% as much. But the qualitative factor doesn’t show up very well in these figures. Most American highways are much better built and maintained. For instance, I took a cab from Tanggu to Tianjin, about 30 miles. Not only was the traffic intolerable, but there was roadwork all along the way. Most of the time, we were going 5, 10, 15 miles an hour, dodging barricades and workers. This was not Ventura Boulevard. In a similar experience, after riding about 800 miles over dirt roads in Gansu Province and Xinjiang Autonomous Region, we finally came to a paved highway about 75 miles out of Ürümqi. What a relief! Until I discovered that there was road work all the way. We stalled, and jerked, and started, and stopped, rocking and knocking about from 8 PM to midnight. West of Ürümqi to the Kazakh border, we had slightly better highway, but most of the creeks weren’t bridged. The bus just went flopping and splashing through. That stretch of dirt road was something else. At one point we left the road altogether and were just plowing through the weeds. The bus got stuck in mud, and we all had to get out and push. The US has 142,000 miles of railway. China has only 45,000 miles. Beijing-Hong Kong service is good. I also trained from Beijing to Ürümqi a couple of times. Beijing-Dalian and Beijing-Tianjin are good routes. I took the Russian train from Beijing to Mongolia and back. That was good too. On one of my Ürümqi runs, though, the train broke down in Gansu Province, and they left us on the platform, saying there’d be a train in three days to pick us up. That’s when I started my bumpy bus ride through the desert. I noted that there were no trains to Tibet at the time, but there’s talk of building a railroad now. I considered the cost of flying too great merely to satisfy my vagrant curiosity about what would be just an impoverished country with a famous monastery. Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai have subways, but Beijing had only about 30 miles when I was there, in 1997 and 1998. I hear they’ve doubled that figure. But compare that with 750 miles for New York City. The US has 5000 airports with paved runways; China has 400. Don’t expect a break on air fares merely because you are in China. In another article I posted some time ago, I made a crude estimate that Chicago, which I chose as a typical large US city, may have nearly 60 times as much drivable street per capita as Beijing. Beijing has a network of hutong—pedestrian lanes or alleys. Cars can actually inch along there for making local deliveries, but they do not constitute what I call drivable streets, in contrast with the side streets of Chicago, which can actually be used by traffic. So if the condition of the transportation infrastructure is any indicator, China is destined to lag quite some time. Building interstate highway systems and international airports is no mean feat. I can’t see the Chinese making all that much progress in 30 or 40 years. But I suppose I could be wrong. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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