I highly recommend reading David Leonhardt’s In China, Cultivating the Urge to Splurge in the New York Times on the 24th, It’s long, but spot-on, with great photos (the left sidebar, not so much the slide show) and goes beyond what you’d think given the title.

My experiences align directly with the observations David Leonhardt makes, particularly one I haven’t highlighted: the odd juxtaposition of overcrowding and emptiness. For example, the hospital in Tianjin was full for outpatients but only one of the diagnostic machines were running and most of the rooms were empty. The Hilton in Beijing seemed to have very low occupancy, as measured by people in elevators and at breakfast and China Dailies in front of hotel rooms. Huge restaurants can be ghost towns too (though many are teaming with people). The highway from Beijing to the Great Wall had sparse traffic, and the one from downtown Tianjin to the economic development zone had almost none. My guess is that, like Third Ring Road, all of these will fill up faster than one could imagine – but it’s also possible that misguided government investment is wasting a lot of money. The Tianjin hospital, according to The Wall Street Journal (Hospital Caters to China’s Wealthy and Poor, 1/4/07), cost $91 million as wasn’t turning a profit yet. It would be hard to imagine that it is now, although so much is so cheap here that it is possible.

The NYT article added to my list of favorite China factoids:

• Chinese per-capita consumption is $2,500 a year, while it is $7,000 in Brazil (where GDP is 1.5 times higher), and in the U.S. it is $30,000.
• China and Hong Kong have 89 billionaires; Japan has 22 (with an economy almost as large).
• 160 cities in China have over 1,000,000 people (there are 9 in the U.S.) – ever hear of Quingdao, for example? It has over 18 million people, while New York has less than half that.*
• 350 million people will move into cities in China in the next 20 years.

And, a side note on censorship: while researching some links for this post, I clicked – or tried to click – through to the reference within the article to “Falun Gong” but it was blocked. There are also no results for “falun gong” in Bing. On the other hand, there are now results in Bing for “Liu Xiaobo”, which there weren’t ten days ago. But both terms are currently blocked from a Google (now in Hong Kong) search. I’m sure the shifts in censorship are tea leaves to read, but I have no idea what they mean.

* I was told this by a super-reputable person. The best citation I could find was 1990 data, when the number was 99. I’m sure that it’s 160 now if it was 99 20 years ago. But this does point to one of the challenges blogging and in understanding China. Writing stuff like this I feel a semi-journalistic responsibility to get the facts right, but I don’t have the resources to do so. I end up like most (all?) bloggers – I generally take a source’s word – caveat lector (reader beware).