Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
CONFESSIONS OF A HEARTLESS
CAPITALIST EXPLOITER
I hardly know
Asia. When I was a child, the ship my family was travelling on made short stops
at Colombo and Singapore, but I can barely remember the one day of sightseeing
we had in each of those cities. On ‘plane journeys to and from Europe, I have
sometimes found myself waiting for a few hours in an Asian airport before
making a connection. But an airport is an airport, and worthy of the
description Raymond Chandler gave to Los Angeles – “having all the personality of a paper cup”. I remember once having
to wait for a connection, groggy and headachy after hours of flight, in the
airport of Hong Kong, looking out the lounge windows at the neighbouring mountains,
and reflecting that this would probably be as near as I would ever come to
visiting China.
Returning from a
recent trip to Europe, however, my wife and I made a two-night stopover in
Shanghai. A practical and well-organised person (better organised than I am),
my wife calculated that a flight straight through from Europe, punctuated by a
short wait for a connection, would be altogether too exhausting. Twelve hours
from Amsterdam to Shanghai. Twelve hours from Shanghai to Auckland. Result?
Utter fatigue and sheer crankiness before we each had to return to work.
So a two-night
stopover in Shanghai we had, and a very refreshing thing it was too.
I am not such a
prat as to think this very brief tourist experience makes me some sort of
expert on China. Very brief visits give superficial impressions only. (See the
posting Unlaid Ghosts, with my
careful caveats against drawing big conclusions after a three-day visit to
Hamburg last year.) Besides, even before we made our brief visit, New
Zealand-Chinese acquaintances (my GP; my dentist) solemnly informed me that
Shanghai “isn’t really China”.
Apparently Chinese see central Shanghai as a big showplace which is nothing
like the way the huge majority of Chinese live. China’s third-largest city (a
mere 24 million inhabitants) is nothing like most of China’s provincial
villages and towns.
Taking all this
on board, we did the expected tourist things on our brief stopover.
We took a
night-cruise on the river, admiring the huge neon decorations on the sides of
all the new skyscrapers. My wife laughed during the cruise as I was five times
crowded by giggly teenage girls, children and some young couples wanting to
have their photograph taken with me. Apparently my beard, my panama hat and my
black corduroy jacket made me their stereotypical image of an old-time
European, as picturesque as a silk-clad mandarin would be to us.
Cor!
We did a morning
walk along the promenade by the old Bund, where office blocks from the 1920s
and 1930s were once owned by European colonial “concessions”. They now all fly
the Chinese flag as an ostentatious declaration of who today’s masters are. Our
guide told us, in the new narrative that Chinese are now taught, that they were
never owned or controlled by Europeans, only “rented”. She also told the
familiar story that in the days of European concessions, the park near the Bund
had a sign saying “No dogs or Chinese
allowed”. We were photographed by our guide, on a typically sea-foggy
Shanghai morning, with the skyscrapers across the river as a backdrop.
We visited a
silk factory (our tour being prologue to a sales pitch for Chinese silk
garments). There was an enlarged photograph on the wall, obviously taken in the
early 20th century, of a stately Chinese woman wearing a silk dress.
Our factory guide told me it was the wife of Sun Yat-sen. “Wasn’t her sister married to Chiang Kai-shek?” I asked. “You know Chinese history ”, said the
guide, surprised. I glowed with the self-righteous smugness of one who knows
enough to bullshit his way in history.
We visited the
preserved “old town”, crowded with hawkers and traders targeting tourists; and
the beautiful preserved mansion built by a prosperous imperial official late in
the Ming dynasty, 400 years ago, with its garden and artificial mountains and artificial
pools stocked with big goldfish.
All this was
done in the company of an amiable guide, and was very much the standard tour.
On our own, we
spent part of two evenings wandering along Shanghai’s mall-ified main drag, the
Nanjing (formerly “Nanking”) Road – flashy, neon-lit, lined with outlets for
Starbuck’s coffee and Pizza Hut and the like, and thronging with Chinese,
presumably from the provinces or out-of-town, who were as wide-mouthed and
gawking as we were. On our own, we also wandered, on our second afternoon,
around the streets adjoining our hotel. We were surprised to find that “massage
parlours” in Shanghai clearly mean what they mean in New Zealand – whorehouses
with a euphemised name. Disregarding the fact that I was walking arm-in-arm with
my wife, a tired-looking woman in a red dress, and with too much make-up, gave
me the eye from the doorway of one such establishment. As we were walking back
the same way, one of her colleagues gave me an inviting “Hell-ooo”.
Again – Cor!
So much crammed
into a mere 36 waking hours.
But all this is
beside the main point of my tale.
While on the
night-time river cruise, our young male guide was diligently pointing out to us
what all the glowing, colourful neon-lit skyscrapers were – a bank here; a
trading house there; a communications company over yonder. Finally, I said to
him “China is a communist country, but
what you are pointing out to me are all the signs of thriving capitalism”.
“Yes,” he said cheerfully, “China has its own form of communism.”
We already
understood this, of course. I was being just a little cheeky in making my
statement. But the uniqueness of China’s economic life was reinforced for us
the following afternoon when, in company with a woman guide, we visited the
city’s free, non-state-controlled, garment and clothing market. It is housed in
a large rambling building with dozens of tailors and traders each renting a
little booth.
Before we left
Auckland, my wife had been told of one tailor there who made excellent bespoke
clothes at high-speed and at low prices.
We headed for
him.
He measured me.
He measured my wife. We arranged for him to make a formal suit (with two pairs
of trousers) and a shirt for me, two shirts for one of our sons, and four tops
for my wife. The deal was that he and his team would make the garments that
very afternoon, and that he would be paid in full when he delivered them to our
hotel room the following morning, before we flew out.
Thus it came to
pass, with us trying on our made-to-measure garments before paying, finding
them of excellent quality, paying, and then dashing off to catch our plane
home.
And what did all
this cost? At the tailor’s booth, we had hoped that our guide would help us
with the expected bargaining, but her English proved too inadequate for the
task of conveying my wife’s instructions. My wife ended up doing the bargaining
via the tailor’s computer, bidding with him on screen.
Total final cost
for bespoke suit, shirts and tops (labour and nearly all materials included)?
2020 Yuan. The equivalent of between $NZ400 and $NZ500. From our point of view,
an incredible bargain, bearing in mind that such work, undertaken in New
Zealand, would cost at least ten times that price.
Which now raises
the awkward question: in making such a deal (as thousands of tourists do) were
we being heartless exploiters of people in another economy? Were we making a
“bargain” to the disadvantage of somebody who had no option but to agree to our
price?
I thought long
and hard about this, but in the end, I think not. Among other things, out guide
was surprised that we paid so much.
(She seems to have thought that we should have bargained harder.)
More to the
point, considering the price in terms of the exchange rate (1 Yuan
equals approximately 26 NZ cents) does not really consider the real purchasing
power of the price paid. Clearly the tailor was happy with the price and
also clearly, in China, 2020 Yuan could buy much more than $NZ400 or $NZ500
dollars could buy in New Zealand.
You can see the
whole deal still jangles in my mind a little – but I think I can clear myself
of the charge of being a capitalist exploiter. Apart from the fact that our
tailor was also a practising capitalist, I would argue that if I really were a
capitalist exploiter, I would be much richer than I am.
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