Geoff Fors in Europe (Mark van der Hoek in China)

Tom:

Just went to your site and saw Mark Van der Hoek's "In China" story. I guess I told you I lived in China at the end of 2001 in Shanghai and Beijing, and have dozens of photos. I tried to go to every radio/electronic venue I could and messed with the phones and wiring wherever I stayed. I lived with the locals and spent most of my time where tourists never go. Guangzhou is in Canton which is rather radically different from Shanghai or Beijing. I would have loved to be in a place as clean as the ones in Mark's photos. Where I was in Shanghai looked like the beginning scenes in the Harrison Ford movie "Blade Runner." The night-time picture below is of Shanghai Stadium. I lived about 1/4 mile to the left. The street is Xietu Road, a major artery into urban Shanghai.

 

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I was mainly interested in ham radio in China. It may sound strange, but traditionally, ham radio was an indicator of a country's economic success and its level of personal freedoms. Countries without ham radio are the most oppressive and usually the poorest. Since about 1989, ham radio became available to the public in China and personal stations were allowed. Prior to that, only "club" stations were allowed, and supervised by the communists. I met a number of Chinese hams who were enthusiastic and very energetic about the hobby. Not too many of them are technically oriented, due evidently to technical knowledge being doled out by the government and a lack of reading material for personal curiosity on the subject until recently. In general they buy Japanese amateur radios which appear to be modified for the Chinese market. I was somewhat surprised that there was money available to buy such things which cost in the neighborhood of $400-1000 US.

The fascinating thing to me was the motorcycle repair shops. They have motorcycles torn down in the dirt in front of their shops, parts strewn in the oil-soaked earth willy-nilly. I seriously doubt anything ever goes back together or works properly afterwards.

My favorite vehicle in Shanghai is what I call the "Cultural Revolution Truck." It is a steel rail frame with a single front wheel and two big ones in the back, and has what appears to be a 2-cycle gigantic engine out in the open in the front. The cab in the rear is a sheet metal affair and no two are exactly alike. The noise they make is deafening, having no muffler. I decided that most of the combustion was probably occurring about 6 inches outside the exhaust pipe. There are power take-offs and flywheels spinning about on the sides. It looks like an overgrown "Tom Thumb" with rubber tires (first steam engine in Britain.)

Every teenage girl has a cell phone in Shanghai and they seem to have them in use at all times. They buy what looks like little chips at street kiosks, which stuff into a slot under the battery and appear to give them prepaid airtime. Naturally, the cellular is all provided by outside vendors, although China wants to produce 3G stuff themselves. The air time cost is drastically less than we pay, but then the average Chinese income is US $ 50 a month.

Mark: It's not all outside vendors. ShendaTelecom in Shenzhen has a CDMA network that uses ZTE equipment. And there's a company called Huawei (located in Shenzhen) that is producing CDMA infrastructure. I just did a presentation about them to a client in India.

They don't have checking accounts in China and the whole place is just a cash economy. The wealthier people do have Visa, Mastercard, etc. which they evidently pay bills for by going to their bank. I was annoyed to search for ATM machines, finally finding one, only to see it had a sign which said "This machine only accepts credit cards issued in the People's Republic of China."

Mark: We did manage to find a couple of ATMs that would work with our US cards. After a few weeks of use, the one we were using ate the cards of two of my engineers. We figured that the Chinese noticed the transactions and decided they were'nt making enough money on us. If we came into the bank we had to pay a lot more for the privelege of getting our money.

One incongruity, at least in Shanghai, was the occasional sight of flashy looking young Chinese women, dripping with jewelry and driving brand new Mercedes Kompressor convertibles. I extrapolated a couple of ideas about what businesses they must be in.

The food in China is gross, really bad, and mistakes can literally be fatal. I never, never drank any milk products, and you have to be very careful about the restaurants. The menus could be Halloween props. Most places serve dog, cat, pig's feet, pig's intestine, chicken feet, snake, slug, eel, fish head, fish tail, pig's brain, and so forth. I relied on my hosts to take me to appropriate restaurants. I drank Cokes or 7-Up out of cans most of the time, except that there is no Chinese way to say "up" so it comes out in Mandarin as 7-Happy. Japanese and Chinese beer is also safe and seems to help you feel better about the whole mess. A rule is to never, never buy or eat food being sold by a street vendor, if it is prepared food, especially anything on a wooden stick. Something like a chestnut would be okay.

Mark: I kept meaning to try those - they smelled good! Tom, they were cooked in a wok filled with small (pea sized) black pebbles. Stirred around in them to distribute the heat.

You see many vendors on the sidewalks with a cut-down oil drum and fire underneath, boiling what looks like well-used crankcase oil with a bunch of brown eggs floating on top. I was always taught that only rotten eggs floated, but maybe the Pennzoil 10W-40 affects that theory.Water is okay if bottled and sealed and from a reputable bottler (such as Coca Cola or 7 Happy or any Japan ISO 9002.)

Shanghai has no dung carts and they use commercial fertilizers. There are sewers under the sidewalks downtown, and they have vent gratings on the sidewalks at regular intervals. The smell is really something to behold. The tap water at my place in Shanghai was very good but I didn't try to drink it. Much better than what I have in Monterey, California which I don't drink either.

Mark: Oh, that all sounds familiar. The pictures I took look MUCH better than the reality. I didn't get any still photos of the garbage carts overflowing in the streets. One of these days I hope to have the time to do some editing of my video - I can pull some stills from that.

One refreshing thing about downtown Shanghai is that the women all try to look like something out of a 1968 issue of Vogue. They almost always wear dresses and high heels, their hair is professionally done, and they wouldn't be caught dead in jeans or without makeup, nylons and fingernail polish. There is a beauty salon on almost every corner. One funny thing is that many signs on the salons are in English, but proclaiming "Beauty Palor." Shanghai people see themselves as the New Yorkers of China, and have a kind of contempt for any poor souls unfortunate enough to come from other provinces. In a way, Shanghai is very much like Manhattan, but I was fond of pointing out that Shanghai is like a blend of Paris, Las Vegas and Bangladesh. I have very fond memories of Shanghai's Luwan District, which is clean and very much like Paris, with tree-lined broad streets and wonderful shops. I was there with my girlfriend, and wound up looking like a Sherpa pack-man carrying a huge pile of shopping bags full of her treasures, for miles and miles.

One last Shanghai comment- Beijing East Road. Also called "Hardware Road," I have never seen anything like it. Miles of nothing but hardware shops all next to each other, each specializing in some item of hardware. It was mind-numbing. One shop specialized in nothing but shim stock, another in bolts and washers, and on and on. It would take days to go through all of them. Shanghai has 17 million people, so I guess they need lots of hardware. Sadly, there is no "Electronics Road." There are a few stores selling components, but no "Radio Row" of shops selling surplus and old communications gear. I did import a number of crank-up Meggers (insulation testers) which are a loose copy of 1950's James Biddle units, and a cool looking 1950's style analog multimeter which the factory will sell you for $ 4 ! The police at the Shanghai Airport were not enthusiastic about the contents of my suitcase, especially since it was right after 9/11.

In Beijing they have little roach-coach vehicles which are sort of a mutant three-wheeled motorcycle with o.d. canvas bodies. See photo attached. They are out on the freeways and you have to be careful because you will be doing 90 m.p.h. and suddenly come up on one of the stupid things going along at 20 m.p.h. in front of you. You can usually spot them by the long trail of blue smoke coming out the back.

   

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Another thing about Beijing is that they have freeways just as we do here, however there are often advertising peddlers on the on-ramps who defy death by running up to your car as you drive by and stuffing flyers into your door handles or on your antenna, under the wipers, etc. The flyers usually are about real estate developments.

Air pollution in urban China makes LA's sky on a bad day look like rural Montana in comparison. The sun is just a little orange ball in a white/gray sky. I talked to some little kids who didn't know what a cloud was !

The worst thing about China is the beggars. Little girls about 3-6 years in age, they smell so bad they could be a weapon of mass destruction. They infest the train stations and the downtown areas and beg for 5 RMB notes (about .75 our money.) They are put there by adult handlers who found them in garbage cans or got them from families who didn't want girl children (1 child only is the law.) Had I found one of those handlers I probably would have killed him, in which case I would still be there somewhere in prison. There are places in China so depressing that I still have nightmares about them. I plan on returning next year with my improved knowledge.

Geoff

Even more comments on telephones in China!

"I had to comment again about phones in China. Well into the 1970's, hardly anyone in mainland China had (or needed) a telephone. In the Shanghai neighborhood where I lived, there was originally one telephone per 5000 homes ! That phone still exists. It is in a medium-sized concrete block shack, with an attendant inside. Located next to the sidewalk. There is a counter, and on top of that counter is an ordinary black rotary phone. The attendant takes messages when the phone rings, and charges people per minute when they make a call. I didn't look, but it's possible there was more than one phone under the counter to accommodate multiple customers. I don't think he's too busy anymore. He would always yell something at me when I went by, I don't know what, probably some 'Yankee go home' epithet or an maybe an offer to sell something useless, or maybe someone left a message for 'the American' years ago and he's still trying to deliver it."

"That 1949-80 telephone situation was largely a creation of the communists; prior to 1940 Shanghai had a well developed telephone system (although used only by the British and the foreigners) with regular telephone directories (more than they have now) and direct dial. Remnants of that system still show up in the flea markets, British made desk phones similar to Western Electric 202 types. I saw one of the 1940 Shanghai telephone directories on eBay, but the seller wanted a starting bid of $ 240 ! The seller was in Shanghai (convenient!), probably found it in an attic and thought he'd hit the jackpot. I don't think he got any bids."

"Today, you see every high-school age girl in Shanghai running around with a cell phone on her ear. How they afford it is a mystery, but I have come up with a theory that the modern Chinese Generation X (and earlier) crowd is out to spend everything their parents scrimped and saved for decades to accumulate. The parents always turn over their money to their children when the children come of age, starting with the eldest male. For every 20-something girl in Milpitas driving around in a new Mercedes CLK convertible, there's a set of parents at home somewhere, eating pigeons and washing laundry in the bathtub to save money. One generation from now, they will all be back in the laundry business full-time. The spending problem is acute in the old country, where they had no access to any consumer goods for so long. Now they are going ape. Rare is the house without cable and a big screen TV. Many houses have no kitchens or toilets but they have that TV. If the kids get any money, they spend it immediately. They are the ideal consumers, a dream come true compared to the tight-fisted American."

"Speaking of cell phones in China, the phones are GSM phones and contain a personality chip in the back under the battery. That chip contains the number and some account details. To renew your phone, depends upon the type of account you have. Typically, you buy a phone card at a subway kiosk and call in the numbers on it which credit your account with so-many more minutes or hours. China is primarily a cash economy so most people pay as they go in cash. The GSM phone works here as well, after changing the chip, which was a surprise to me as I didn't realize the carriers had built a GSM network in the San Jose area (or possibly the phones are dual mode? I haven't educated myself about this.)"

"Here's another frustrating thing about China. Companies and individuals are endlessly changing their phone numbers and e-mail addresses, like little birds flying from tree to tree. I had a China Electronics Industry Directory dated October 2001 and it's already useless. I have been trying to get in touch with a particular factory in Szechuan, for a production contract, for over a week, and all their numbers just give a fast-busy tone. So my Chinese assistant finally announced 'Well, they probably changed to a new 8-digit phone number last year, and I heard they merged with so-and-so.' None of the website addresses work either. No wonder nobody uses telephone books over there.  When I was in Shanghai, 60 percent of the people I tried to contact for business had phone numbers which were bad just a couple of months after they had e-mailed them to me!"

Geoff Fors in China (Mark van der Hoek in China)