Musings on China
Between 2012 and 2019, I spent almost a year working in China. Now they are in major lockdown again.
Article Highlights:
The Omicron variant of SARS-COV-2 has reached China, resulting in over 370 million people being under some form of lockdown.
Shanghai has been under strict lockdown for over 3 weeks, leading to unrest and seriously affecting its commercial operations and shipping.
If China fails to contain Omicron, manufacturing, exporting, and shipping could be affected to a much greater extent, disrupting supplies to many countries at a time when they are under stress from sanction-related shortages stemming from the Russia-Ukraine war.
China has fascinating history and culture. It is a panoramic and culinary smorgasbord. Check out my slideshow below for a visual educational treat.
I realized during two years in the Philippines as a Peace Corp Volunteer how necessary it was to learn the language if I wanted a solid understanding of the culture. It took me at least a year to get relatively fluent in Cebuano, the local language. By the time I left, I finally had begun to master local humor – which I discovered, because of its nuance, was arguably the most difficult aspect.
I spent enough time in China to get a solid sense of the place, but unfortunately, I never learned the language. Some people learn language by sight, others by hearing. I learn by sight.
I was able to learn a Filipino language because I could pull out my well-tattered dictionary laden with phonetically written words, look up a word, and remember it after seeing it a few times. Fortunately, there were only a few sounds in Cebuano that do not exist in English, so learning the new sounds was relatively easy.
That approach was a ‘no go’ in China. Chinese written characters represent ideas and objects, not sounds. I had two options for learning Chinese – memorize the characters and what they represented (for reading), learn pinyin for each character so I would understand its pronunciation, or learn by hearing sounds, which was complicated by the many tones used. Pinyin is a system of spelling Chinese using the Roman alphabet.
Unfortunately, none of these approaches worked well for a sight learner like me, therefore, I learned very little Chinese. Every time I tried to pronounce Mandarin words; my Chinese colleagues could not understand me. It didn’t help my language skills that I was usually worn out from teaching by the end of the day, with little energy left for study.
On the last day of my last China trip, I handed out course certificates to our students. I decided to read their Chinese names instead of their adopted Anglicized names. They found that rather amusing – and, per their feedback, I actually pronounced a few of them correctly. It only took me seven trips to China and nearly a year in-country to make that much progress!
I once went on a business exchange trip to Russia for two weeks. Russian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which has 33 letters. Within one week, I was able to memorize the sounds for all letters and then pronounce written words. My colleagues and I kept seeing the Russian word “ресто̀ра̄н” on many businesses. We jokingly called these a pectopa, pronouncing the word how we would if it was spelled using Roman letters. Upon learning the Cyrillic alphabet, I discovered the correct pronunciation was ‘restoran’. Now we could identify where to eat!
Oh, if Mandarin had only been this easy! I learned as many Russian words in two weeks as I learned in China over nearly a year there spread out over seven, I’m embarrassed to say.
During my time in China, I had many opportunities to observe Chinese culture, but because I never cracked the language, my perceptions are not complete. Nevertheless, my time there taught me a lot, some of which I shall share in this issue.
I thought it was a good time to talk about China because Omicron Covid has now reached China, and I would not be surprised if that increasingly puts China in the news. In fact, I would not be surprised if what is now happening in China overtakes the Russia-Ukraine news.
After all the craziness with Covid over the past two years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) response to Omicron is still unnerving. The level of lockdown instituted by the CCP is creating outrage in parts of Shanghai, and dismay abroad. It takes a lot to get the Chinese population upset enough to complain publicly, but the CCP has succeeded in doing so.
China has locked down the city of Shanghai, home of at least 25 million people, for over three weeks. When China locks down a city, no one can leave their apartment, unless maybe a couple times a week to buy food – if they are lucky. The extreme lockdown has led to supply chain caused food shortages, and this has resulted in protests.
It is not just Shanghai that has locked down though. At least 373 million people in 45 Chinese cities have been fully or partially locked down over the past couple weeks. This is more than the entire U.S. population and represents 40% of China's GDP. Since China is the world’s largest exporter, these lockdowns will affect much of the world if they continue, not to mention their impact on the Chinese economy, productive capacity, and global shipping.
When China locks down its cities, it means business. It locks down virtually everything – businesses, work places, and in relation to the rest of the world – ports. This short CNN clip describes what has been going on.
That CNN report is mild compared to some of the online videos I have seen coming out of Shanghai. There are many stories and videos of people who are very low on food, videos of people being forcibly removed from their apartments for not getting a PCR test, and people being beaten for trying to go to the supermarket to get food without permission.
Up to now, the Chinese population has been largely compliant with lockdowns as they have sporadically emerged around the country. They are certainly more compliant than we Americans, but that’s not surprising as their culture is generally accepting of authoritarian actions, a trait I have observed in broader Asia.
I concluded that Chinese cultural compliance is largely rooted in Confucianism. Confucianism is a rationalist philosophy emphasizing the family and social harmony while deemphasizing spiritual and religious values. It professes humans are fundamentally good, teachable, and perfectible through personal and communal endeavor, especially through self-effort, and by promoting virtue in a morally organized world. It teaches respect for elders, ancestors, and authorities.
These priorities present themselves regularly in Chinese society. Furthermore, they provide a natural fit for an authoritarian communist governmental structure that disregards all religions and holds its leaders as supreme authorities.
Chinese culture expects deference to elders and especially to authorities, both of which often align with conditions of wealth and the status wealth accords. An interesting example of this is illustrated by the advent of motor vehicles, because when automobiles were initially introduced, only the wealthy could afford them. Out of deference to these wealthy drivers, pedestrians were expected to stop for cars – a completely opposite paradigm to Western traffic rules.
Coming from this starting point, Chinese traffic ‘rules’ were unlike anything I had seen before. During my time there, cars had proliferated, but motorcycles, pedicabs, and especially scooters had really taken over the streets, and even sidewalks, in the case of scooters. The cities I was in have now moved to installing Western-style traffic lights, but on intersections without lights, it seemed more like a free-for-all, which explains why my employer forbade us from driving.
I found it always necessary to look in all directions before crossing a street, or even changing my direction of walking on the sidewalk. By ‘all directions’, I mean 360 degrees, because I never knew when a quiet electric motor scooter might sneak up from behind. I sometimes wondered how I would explain myself if I had to be sent back to the U.S. for medical reasons because I was run over by a 15-year-old school girl on her scooter!
After observing the traffic patterns for a few years, I concluded there was an unwritten logic that kind of went like this – the bigger vehicle always has the right-of-way. The general priority sequence appeared to be: dump truck-> bus-> car-> motorcycle-> scooter-> Me. After all, the little guys don’t have much power to argue!
Actually, it wasn’t quite that bad since people did look out for pedestrians and anyone on foot was protected at stop lights. Nevertheless, it was always necessary to keep an eye open when out for a stroll.
Getting back to the Shanghai lockdowns, according to the NY Times, these actions have been taken:
all international flights to and from Shanghai have been halted
many roads to the city’s two airports have also been closed
the government performed P.C.R. tests on 25.67 million people
the government has not allowed residents to go to grocery stores
the government has put together tens of thousands of cots in two convention centers as quarantine centers - but they don’t have showering facilities
Trucks have been prevented from coming in and out of Shanghai. I have seen videos of truck drivers dumping their produce on the road because they were prevented from unloading it in Shanghai. These supply chain disruptions have led to local food shortages. This is not particularly surprising.
Local city governments have coordinated food deliveries to those locked down. Imagine trying, over the span of a couple days, to coordinate door-to-door food deliveries for 25 million people!
Chinese have a very different management style than I am accustomed. Here in the U.S., those at lower levels of the workforce have a reasonable amount of autonomy, and along with that, leeway for some decision making. Mid-level managers have even more decision-making authority. The executive at the top makes the highest-level decisions.
That is not what I witnessed in China. On many occasions, my Chinese colleagues would tell me they could not take action on a particular project until the ‘boss’ gave the go-ahead. Everyone would wait around for the word to come down for the project to begin. I’m not sure how high the ‘boss’ was in the organization, but since it seemed most of the workers I saw would be in a holding pattern, I assumed that boss was rather high up.
What was equally interesting about this structure was that once the boss made a decision, everyone at all the levels below immediately jumped into action, and the project was rapidly initiated.
So, in the case of Shanghai food distribution, confusion in the decision-making process or in the chain of authority could easily lead to disruptions in food distribution.
I realize these lockdowns are occurring half a world away, and you may think, “So what. We have all been through this.”
However, if this situation continues, and if it grows across China, the risk of global supply chain disruption escalates beyond the currently bottlenecked condition. This could create significantly more stress to supply chains.
Shanghai’s port passes the largest shipping volume in the world and represents ~20% of China’s total shipping. In fact, China has 7 of the top 10 ports in the world for shipping volume. A couple months ago, China shutdown the Ningbo port (world’s third largest) just south of Shanghai, causing all sorts of global shipping backups.
Shanghai sits in the delta of the Yangtze River, Asia’s longest, and waterway for such Chinese cities as Nanjing, Wuhan, and Chongqing (China’s largest city at over 30 million in the greater municipal area), as well as the Three Gorges Dam. The Yangtze is a major trafficway for raw resources entering and finished products exiting.
Shutdown of the Shanghai port has already caused considerable disruption. Some ships, especially those carrying refrigerated cargo, have left for other ports where they can unload. The graph below shows the impact of the Shanghai port stoppage. The 2022 backlog is almost ‘off the chart’.
Here is a map of ship backlog outside Shanghai port as of April 18, 2022.
Until the Omicron wave hit Shanghai, China had been relatively successful in keeping the coronavirus at bay through its zero-Covid lockdown policy. I have heard from some inside China that part of the reason Shanghai’s Covid outbreak exceeds that of other cities is that city officials chose to keep the ports and other commercial resources in operation for a time because they did not want to impede commerce, but this allowed the virus to spread.
Because of the high infectivity of the Omicron variant, however, every other country attempting zero-Covid policies (New Zealand, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore) has given up on that approach. It is not clear whether China will do the same.
Considering that Omicron likely cannot be stopped once it has escaped into the wider population, the possibility exists that China could shutdown most, and maybe all of its ports at different times, assuming it continues a zero-Covid policy. Of course, this would exacerbate already troubling global trade issues carried over from earlier Covid lockdowns, now multiplied by the Russian-Ukraine war and subsequent sanctions on Russia.
The production – to shipping – to retail distribution supply chain normally takes about three months, so it is only a matter of time before these disruptions spread to other ports around the world. It is realistic to assume that the Shanghai shipping backlogs will affect U.S. ports and thus our product availability.
These shipping blockages affect both exports and imports. In 2020, China was the United States' 3rd largest goods export market, although those shipments represented less than 10% of U.S. exports (Mexico and Canada are the largest buyers of U.S. exports). The top exports to China were electrical machinery, soybeans, other machinery, mineral fuels, optical and medical instruments, pork, cotton, corn, and other grains – in that order.
Perhaps more important, in 2020, China was the United States' largest supplier of goods imports (~18%), with the top import categories being electrical machinery, other machinery, toys and sports equipment, furniture and bedding, textiles, and a small number of agricultural products – in that order. Mexico and Canada provide ~25% of U.S. imports.
Shanghai’s situation is affecting other countries more than the U.S., as evidenced by 51% of German companies’ logistics and warehousing and 46% of their supply chains being “completely disrupted or severely impacted” last week by China’s Covid situation – and that is on top of disruption of Russian natural gas supplies. German industry, the powerhouse of Europe, is in a tight spot all of a sudden.
Shipping rates could be affected as well. Last year, an outbreak at the southern China port of Shenzhen slowed shipping >70% for nearly a week, causing a 20% spike in ocean rates to the US and Europe.
To offset these Chinese delays, reports indicate that internal truck shipping here in the U.S. has been slowing. That slowdown appears to be caused by rising inflation suppressing demand, although the causes aren’t clearly defined.
Just this week, Shanghai leaders have finally allowed about 4 million residents out of their apartments, so the situation in Shanghai appears to be easing. However, over 26,000 people were reported to have positive PCR tests while showing little-to-no symptoms. Based on these testing results, it is likely infected people with minimal symptoms are roaming about in other parts of the country. This leaves me to ask, “How can China control the up-to-now-impossible-to-control Omicron?”
I recently read that a number of U.S. states now consider SARS-COV-2 endemic. We can call it whatever we wish, but the reality is most of the world is moving past the lockdown stage and treating Covid as endemic.
In that light, China will constantly be under infection pressure from outside its borders. As I see it, China has two choices – continue rolling lockdowns of multi-million resident cities until they either realize that won’t work, or they come up with an alternate control plan; Or, let the virus move through the population and provide treatment, similar to the approach of Japan, South Korea, etc. So far, they are opting for the most authoritarian lockdowns on the planet.
I have seen it written that China’s ultra-strict lockdowns are the ultimate conclusion of Zero-Covid policy. I could just as easily say that this is the ultimate conclusion of living under a totalitarian government. Based on my assessment from working there, I find that more accurate.
The question is, “Who will win? The CCP? Or Mother Nature?”
“Nature always bats last.”
- Unknown
Interestingly, the problems in China are providing yet more incentive to re-shore factories to America. That process takes years, however. In the meantime, the likelihood of growing shortages is rising.
China has a dynamic economy of hard-working people. It is a land of great contrasts, ranging from ancient truths to modern atrocities, from mysterious natural wonders to great social movements that have helped shape humanity. In many ways, it is a fascinating place that cannot be thrown aside due to the form of government it currently entertains.
Viewed in China’s multi-thousand years history, the current condition is a stopping point that will eventually lead to a greater alignment with the rest of the world, as long as the rest of the world can keep from adopting its model of governance.
It may not appear obvious currently, but actually this merging has already begun, considering that had China completely closed itself off to the world after it was taken advantage of by the British, leading to the mid-1800’s opium wars. Then in the 1980’s, China began opening its doors to the outside world.
We are told it now has the world’s second largest economy. If that measurement were performed based on infrastructure, manufacturing, and commercial activity, though, it would have the world’s largest economy, based on what I saw.
As is true with many countries, because the population has never experienced self-governance, they do not understand how to manage their society in an egalitarian way. I have observed this in other countries having authoritarian governments. This lack of experience, and the deeply rooted Chinese obedience to authority makes it difficult for the citizenry to transition to a fairer, freer system of government. I observed that many of the more educated would prefer that, especially after having studied in the U.S., even though it was not really safe for them to speak out on this.
Freedom requires individual responsibility; therefore, democracies such as the direct democracy of Switzerland, or democratic republics such as America cannot successfully arise without an evolved level of individual responsibility.
As I see it, this is why America’s many attempts at spreading liberal democracy around the world (often at the point of a gun) have not worked well. The citizens of those countries were not ready for it. Freedom must be earned to become lasting.
I have observed that we in the U.S., because these principles are embedded in our Constitution and in our American culture, are aware of this to a greater extent than in most countries. This, in part, explains why people around the world have looked to America as a beacon of freedom as well as opportunity. I have seen this expressed repeatedly in my travels to less developed countries.
There is much more I would like to share regarding my time in China – too much for one newsletter. I created an online slideshow in 2012 with 200 captioned photos. In it, I provide discussion on history, culture, my work, travels, and especially the food. My trips there were to train nuclear power plant operators and engineers.
It took a while to clean up the slideshow because Google retired the Picasa software I used to create it. If you would like to watch it, click the link below, then click on the first photo and it should open as a slideshow.
Click here to view Mark’s China Slideshow
Enjoy