This morning I was on “Today on Beyond Beijing,” a current events talk show hosted by Chris Gelken, on China Radio International (CRI)’s English language service. The topic was evaluating President Obama’s trip to Asia, and particularly China, this past week. You can listen to the show (or download it) on the CRI website here. Click the link to the first hour.
I was interviewed live on Al Jazeera again Monday and apparently caused a bit of a stir. I repeated the point I made in my blog post, that I think President Obama would be much better served encouraging China on market-oriented reforms than pressuring it to strengthen the Renminbi. The news story on their website describes my comments as follows:
Patrick Chovanec, an economics professor at Tsinghua University said that the currency issue was a “red herring”.
“I think it’s a big distraction from some of the more substantial issues that he should be talking about,” he told Al Jazeera from Beijing.
Chovanec said the US faced a very similar situation with Japan in the 1980s, with chronic trade surplus and Japan accumulating currency reserves, and that doubling the yen’s value actually increased the trade surplus.
“If Obama wants to achieve real results, he should be pressing the Chinese on market-oriented reforms that open the Chinese market and help unlock savings in China rather than pressing them on the currency itself,” he said.
It’s not really that the strengthening of the yen was responsible for increasing Japan’s trade surplus, which is the way they make it sound. It’s just that the change in the exchange rate didn’t have the expected effect because structural issues in the Japanese economy made it unresponsive to price signals. I’m concerned the same would be true for China, unless the focus is put on substantive market reforms. It’s a question of where to spend political capital to get a meaningful result.
Apparently Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley has been arguing something similar, which I didn’t realize until a moment ago when I googled “red herring”.
If we can see anything at all about the world around us, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants. I am grateful for the interest “The Nine Nations of China” has generated, and for the people who have told me they learned something from reading it. But I think it is also important for me to recognize those whose insights and ideas have preceded mine.
In my submission to The Atlantic, and the drafts I shared with friends and colleagues, I noted that in the Chinese language, there is a rich and varied academic literature on regional variations and groupings within China — so much so that it is virtually an area of study unto itself. I cannot even count the number of Chinese researchers who have written in this field. In the English language, a number of scholars have formulated frameworks for China ranging from five to twelve “macroregions,” “zones,” “market segments,” or “nations,” including William Skinner in 1977, Lauren Swanson in 1989, Geng Cui and Qiming Liu in 2000, and Mark Elvin in 2004. Anyone who has a copy of Jonathan Spence’s “The Search for Modern China” — a standard textbook — will have run across one version of Skinner’s macroregions on page 77. Regretfully, none of these frameworks have been widely disseminated or adopted outside of an academic context, and are simply not part of the popular discussion about China.
The “Nine Nations” framework presented in my article was conceived and developed independently of these sources. It is the product of 24 years of travel and approximately three years of active research. It concurs with my predecessors in certain respects, and differs substantially with them in others. Had I been writing an academic paper, I would of course have cited each of these intellectual antecedents and delineated precisely how I agreed or disagree with them in turn. This was not an academic paper (although I teach at Tsinghua University, I am a business practitioner, not a career academic). It was an attempt to introduce an important way of thinking about China into popular discourse, in business and public policy, where it has until now been absent. For those whose interest has been piqued by my article, I would definitely urge them to look up the academic literature that preceded me and compare and contrast it with my own conclusions.
I realize that the map is what grabs most people’s attention, but if there is any real originality in my proposal — and I believe there is — it lies not in the map per se but in the regional descriptions that support it. This is the meat of the matter. I was taken to task by a fellow China blogger who observed that my map looks similar to Skinner’s macroregions, implying that I merely copied it. I did not copy it, but I am gratified and reassured that Skinner, a pioneer in this field, reached similar conclusions to the ones I did. More importantly, in the areas where my findings diverge from Skinner’s — Shaanxi, Shanxi, Guangxi, Anhui, Taiwan, Wenzhou and Shantou, the entire northwest half of China including Tibet, Xinjiang, and Qinghai — they do so because of what I see as the animating force or character that defines each region. And my understanding of that aspect comes from my personal experience traveling, living, and doing business in those places. I have tried to capture the sense of this defining spirit in the names I’ve given each “nation,” and to offer some flavor of it in the short descriptions such an article allowed.
The other thing I’ve been taken to task over, by some, is my use of China’s present-day provincial boundaries as the basis for my own. I made this decision consciously, for one very simple reason. Most of the contemporary data available on China — such as GDP, industry figures, or detailed demographics — is broken down by province. Once you start to drill down below that it gets very patchy and inconsistent, and starts to obscure and confuse as much as it reveals. As a private equity investor, I have learned that there is such a thing as illusory precision in finely-chopped data — it is better to see the forest than every single tree. For people in business, in particular, who want to use the Nine Nations framework as a source of insight, most of the data they will have on hand will be provincial. Does a breakdown by province miss certain nuances? Yes. But it more than makes up for it in sheer functionality, and the ability to formulate useful, empirical comparisons.
For those who have concerns regarding originality and attribution, and The Atlantic’s editorial perspective on these issues and how they were handled, I would urge you to read Jim Fallows’ comments on his blog at The Atlantic here.
The Atlantic just published an article I wrote called “The Nine Nations of China” (九色中国). You can access it, in the form of an interactive map, here.
China often seems like a monolith of 1.3 billion people, but it’s not. It’s a mosaic of distinct regions, and understanding those regions is vital to understanding China. This article presents a framework for how to think about those regions, what they’re like, and why they matter. It’s the product of over 20 years of business travel and personal exploration that covered every one of China’s 31 provinces, plus Taiwan. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg — I hope to expand on this framework and explore it further in various venues, including this blog, in the weeks and months ahead.
I want to make one important observation, especially for my friends in China. This is a conceptual framework, not a political statement. It does not predict or advocate the break-up of China into pieces. It’s meant to offer readers a richer way of seeing China in more than one dimension. The use of the word “nations” (which I translate in Chinese as “colors”) is simply meant to emphasize just how large and distinct each component of China’s mosaic really is.
The chart below really drives that point home. If each of China’s nine distinct regions were actually a separate country, they would account for eight of the 20 most populous nations in the world. The smallest would rank between Britain and Italy. That’s pretty astounding, and it demonstrates how inadequate it really is to keep painting our image of China with one giant brush.
World’s Largest Nations By Population, 2008
(If China’s Nine Nations Were Broken Out Separately)
| Rank | Country | Population |
| #1 | India | 1,140,566,211 |
| #2 | The Yellow Land | 358,790,000 |
| #3 | United States | 304,059,724 |
| #4 | Indonesia | 237,512,355 |
| #5 | The Crossroads | 226,260,000 |
| #6 | Brazil | 196,342,587 |
| #7 | Pakistan | 171,852,793 |
| #8 | Bangladesh | 154,037,902 |
| #9 | The Metropolis | 146,850,000 |
| #10 | Nigeria | 146,255,306 |
| #11 | Russia | 140,702,094 |
| #12 | Shangri-La | 131,520,000 |
| #13 | Japan | 127,288,419 |
| #14 | The Back Door | 111,510,000 |
| #15 | Mexico | 109,955,400 |
| #16 | The Refuge | 109,770,000 |
| #17 | The Rust Belt | 108,740,000 |
| #18 | Philippines | 96,061,683 |
| #19 | Vietnam | 87,558,363 |
| #20 | The Frontier | 86,320,000 |
| … | ||
| #29 | United Kingdom | 60,943,912 |
| #30 | The Straits | 59,080,000 |
| #31 | Italy | 58,145,321 |
Sources: National Bureau of Statistics of China and U.S. Census Bureau
Even though Kim Il-Sung died in 1994, officially he is still the “Eternal President” of North Korea. So when official visitors call, they are expected to present not one but two gifts, one to Kim Il-Sung and the other to his son, the country’s current ruler, Kim Jong-Il. All of these gifts are reverently collected and displayed in two extensive underground galleries burrowed deep into Mount Myohyang, several hours north of the capital. As tourists, we weren’t expected to offer any gifts, but we were taken to visit this exhibit as part of our one and only overnight trip outside Pyongyang. When I first saw this item on our itinerary, I thought it sounded kind of boring, and maybe you’re thinking the same. Quite the contrary, it turned out to be one of the most bizarre and memorable places I’ve ever visited.
Mt. Myohyang is located in the mountains that dominate the northern half of the DPRK and ultimately rise higher and higher to form a rugged boundary with China. We drove there after sunset, so we couldn’t see a thing along the way, except for a few lights in the distance that one of our minders told me was a Fiat joint venture auto plant. After several hours of unrelenting darkness, we arrived at the Hyangsan Hotel, a pyramid-shaped tourist facility built in 1986. Although it’s described as a “luxury” hotel, it proved to be a lot more spartan than our quarters back in Pyongyang. The beds were hard as boards and there was certainly no BBC, just two channels with poor reception featuring the staple fare of North Korean TV: an army drama on one, women in colorful hanboks (traditional Korean gowns) singing patriotic folks tunes on the other. We soon fell asleep.
The next morning, after breakfast, we had a rare opportunity. For the entire trip, I don’t think I had stepped more than 20 feet from one of our minders, and even that made them nervous. Just outside the hotel’s front door, though, there was a long, straight driveway that stretched maybe 100 feet to meet the main road. At the foot of the driveway there was a small bridge over a rock-strewn stream, which wound its way between two misty hillsides whose trees were just turning autumn red and gold. Local villagers were riding past on bicycles, and every so often a truck would drive by, its open cargo bay filled with North Koreans hitching a ride. Several of us asked whether we could walk down to the road “to take a picture of our hotel” (which qualifies as a “good thing” to take a picture of). Our minders could hardly deny such a flattering request, but watched us warily from, what to them, must have been an uncomfortable distance.
It might seem silly, but it was essential to ask permission. A few months before, a 53-year South Korean woman, a tourist visiting a similar tourist enclave (Mt. Kumgang, along the country’s east coast), woke early and strolled down to the beach by herself to watch the sun rise. She was killed — shot in the back of the head — by a North Korean soldier who must have taken her for a spy. Conflicting reports said she had actually been shot twice, once at point blank range. So you didn’t play games with these folks. You didn’t wander off. “Stay with the group” was more than your typical tour guide’s happy chatter.
Our first visit that morning was to the Pohyonsa Buddhist monastery, a charming collection of ancient temples and pagodas set in a thickly wooded valley. As we admired the elaborately painted panels and roof timbers, and soaked in the serenity of the pristine surroundings, a monk or two stood gazing at us from shadowed doorways. But Pohyonsa, which dates from 1024 AD and was reconstructed in 1979, is more a monument to Korea’s cultural heritage than a functioning religious community. According to official government statistics, more than half of the country’s population are practicing Buddhists, but outside sources place the actual number at barely more than a million, or less than 5%. The cult of Kim is a jealous god, and the real places of holy pilgrimage on Mt. Myohyang are across the valley, on the opposite slope: the father-and-son treasure houses of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, officially known as the International Friendship Exhibition.
The Exhibition is comprised of two separate tunnel complexes carved deep into the mountainside. The entrance to each is a set of large metal doors at the base of an imposing marble pagoda-like structure, which you reach by walking up an asphalt driveway. Unsmiling guards in crisp military uniforms stand at attention outside, holding automatic rifles — otherwise, you might think you had happened upon the garage door of some Asian tycoon’s vacation mansion. The first pavilion we approached belongs to Kim the Elder. The doors rolled open as though someone had spoken the magic word “Open Sesame” at the entrance to Aladdin’s Cave. Once we filed in, they shut behind us with a resounding clang.
Inside, absolutely no photos are permitted. They’re not taking any chances, either: all cameras must be surrendered to the cloakroom immediately upon entering. That’s too bad, too, because one glance at the palatial marble interior told us this would be a place worth taking pictures of. Each “exhibition” is really a vast underground museum, a labyrinth of rooms filled with glass cases containing every doo-dad and gee-gaw the Kims ever collected in their 60+ years of rule. The official tally is 223,500 items from 180 countries, displayed in over 150 rooms. The rooms are arranged by geography, with several countries – such as guilt-ridden Japan – accounting for several chambers. One great hall is devoted entirely to gifts the Elder Kim received from fellow dictators: medals and plaques given by Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, and Nicolae Ceauşescu, all comrades in a sort of mutual admiration society.
When I say every doo-dad, I mean it. Some gifts are huge, like the bullet-proof limousines and railway cars sent by Joseph Stalin. By most are tiny, the size of a small clock or sports trophy, and reading the inscriptions often proved a surprising source of amusement. One item was from the Communist Party of San Marino (a tiny country of 30,000 people), which can’t be comprised of more than a dozen or so regulars. But that’s the big leagues compared to the “Study Group of Kim Il-Sungism for Latin Americans in Scandinavia” or a similar Kim fan club catering to Nigerians in New York City – truly, I kid you not. And you have to figure, these guys are probably the ones who splintered off from the original Kim Il-Sungism study group because it didn’t meet their standards of ideological purity.
Regardless, the North Koreans are pretty wowed by it all. Like Kim Il-Sung’s mausoleum, the gift exhibition is part of the indoctrination circuit; every work unit in the country is regularly cycled through. In their eyes, the seemingly infinite collection of treasures and awards is testament to the adulation the entire world feels for the Great Leader and his son, the Dear Leader. Nowhere was the gap between their perception and ours more evident than in the rooms devoted to gifts from South Korea.
In recent years, a number of South Korean business leaders have courted the Kims in the hope that, under their country’s “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with the North, they might be allowed to sell their goods or open a factory in the DPRK. As a matter of course, they sent samples of the products their companies make, which duly ended up on display in the International Friendship Exhibition. Entire bedroom sets from South Korean furniture manufacturers are set up on pedestals beside widescreen TVs, as though they were valuable works of art. Slightly outdated MP3 players, laser printers, and computer monitors lie protected in glass cases like precious relics of some lost civilization. But what looked to us like used belongings at a garage sale appeared to the North Koreans – who had never seen such things – like the world’s most marvelous technology laid out as tribute to the Great Leader. Their jaws dropped and their faces grew puzzled as they pressed noses against the glass between them and a dusty old VCR. Who could imagine such wonders? Who could inspire them but the Great Leader?
But as odd as that felt, something much weirder was about to unfold. We had nearly completed our tour of the Elder Kim’s treasure chambers when our resident guide, a middle-aged women in a bright hanbok gown, rather urgently directed us to line up in formation in front of a large wooden door. Her tone grew hushed and excited, and it was hard to decipher exactly what she was saying, except that behind the door was an “image” of the Great Leader that had been donated from Japan. It was so lifelike, she blurted, that it was almost like standing in the presence of the man himself. Many people, she said, experienced almost a religious experience upon viewing it. One Japanese girl fainted, she said, and later reported “it was almost like the Great Leader was entering my mind.” Before we could figure out what to make of all this, the door opened and we were ushered inside.
The room was bare and its lights dim. Along the wall opposite the door stood a smiling, life-size wax statue of Kim Il-Sung – the same kind you’d find at Madame Tussaud’s – his hand raised in greeting. With great solemnity, the guides motioned for us to line up in three rows facing him, arms neatly at our sides. I glanced to my side and caught the eye of one of my companions. From the look on her face I could tell she was thinking the same thing I was: We have just entered the Twilight Zone. I literally had to bite down hard on my lip to keep from breaking out laughing, as we bowed deeply in unison to this earthly avatar of the Great Leader. At Kim’s mausoleum, I found the idea of bowing upsetting and ultimately balked at it. This time, the whole situation was so surreal it seemed mad to take it seriously. I briefly considered falling to the floor in a fit and speaking in tongues – the Great Leader has entered my brain! – but doubted whether I could carry it off.
At this point I half expected them to hand us the kool-aid. Emerging from our face-to-face encounter with … whatever that was … we looked at each other with stunned expressions, words entirely failing us. The rest of the tour, including our visit to the Younger Kim’s underground display, passed in a haze. We saw the basketball signed by Michael Jordan that US Secretary of State Madeline Albright brought with her on her historic visit to Pyongyang, as well as a gun presented by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, both enshrined like holy relics before a gigantic – and rather flattering – gleaming white statue of Kim Jong-Il seated on a throne. I’m told there is also a standing stuffed crocodile presenting a tray of cups, courtesy of the Sandinistas, and some silver coconuts from Saddam Hussein, but by then it was all just a blur.
Soon they were loading us back on the bus, and it was time to head back to Pyongyang. This time it was still light out, and I stared out the window in a haze as we drove back along a shallow, winding river with gravel banks. Suddenly I realize that this was the Chongchon River valley. Our guides certainly weren’t going to point it out, but for any American with an interest in military history, this was hallowed ground. It was here, in November 1950, that Chinese forces that had secretly crossed the Yalu River surprised and almost totally destroyed the entire Eighth U.S. Army. Four whole U.S. divisions plus accompanying allied troops were (just barely) saved from complete annihilation by the heroic holding actions of the Turkish Brigade, but the army was broken. Defeat turned into a headlong, chaotic flight – the longest retreat of any American military unit in history. In 19 days of fighting, nearly 12,000 U.S. soldiers were killed, wounded or missing, not including 22,000 more crippled by frostbite or frozen feet. The army’s commanding general, General Walker, was killed when his jeep crashed along the road back to Seoul. All hopes of achieving a quick victory in Korea – which had seemed all but certain before the disaster – were dashed. The war was to drag on as a bloody stalemate for two and half more years, and even now has not officially ended.
We were probably among just a handful of Americans who had passed this way ever since. I bowed my head — for real this time – and thought about the more than 8,000 Americans, and countless others, still counted as missing from the war. Many of them, no doubt, still lay here, among the quiet forested hills and meandering streams. We couldn’t visit them, or pay our respects, but we could remember them.
As the road leading back to Pyongyang left the mountains and reentered the plains, I spotted a train forlornly chugging its way through the empty fields, under slate grey skies. It was pulling empty tank cars back to China, to be filled with oil. This is the lifeline, the slender thread of support that keeps North Korea going. It seemed, at that moment, like a phantom crossing a landscape of ghosts, a land where the past still haunts the present, ruled by remote and terrible gods.
Next installment: What North Koreans believe, and the journey home.
All photos were taken by the author. Please ask permission before copying.
I was interviewed on Al Jazeera TV yesterday, for a report titled “China’s Empty City.” It centered on Ordos, Inner Mongolia, where a whole new city, constructed along central planning lines by the Chinese government, has been completed but stands entirely empty. The reporters at Al Jazeera originally approached me because of my recent blog post on “China’s Quality of GDP.” It’s one thing to write about massive state-sponsored construction projects that achieve GDP growth targets without necessarily creating any real value, but a couple of TV images can be worth a thousand words in illustrating the point.
You can view the report by clicking here.
It’s worth noting, as the report says, that despite the fact nobody lives there, virtually all of Ordos’ new apartment complexes are sold out — precisely what I was talking about in “China’s Real Estate Riddle.”
One of the more eye-catching fixtures of urban life in China is the habit some folks have of going out and about in their pajamas. In the more traditional neighborhoods, local residents will think nothing of running a few errands or chatting with friends on a busy corner — women in patterned cotton jammies with slippers on their feet, men stripped down to their t-shirts and boxers. I’ve even run into a few at the grocery store, looking like they just awoke from a rather ambitious stretch of sleepwalking. Where we live in Beijing, the patients at the nearby hospital often enjoy fresh-air strolls in the summer evenings, clad in nothing but their bedclothes – yet the sight here is so common it attracts little or no attention.
If the Shanghai government gets its way, though, all that is about to change. The city is notoriously fussy about its global image. The movie Mission Impossible 3 was banned in China for its scenes depicting Tom Cruise racing around streets lined with laundry drying from the windows, which Shanghai officials felt reflected badly on the city — never mind that’s what Shanghai streets actually look like. Now officials are concerned that, with the World Expo arriving in 2010, foreign visitors might find the city’s pajama-clad locals a cause for derision.
So, according to an article at ChinaHush.com, the Shanghai government is mounting a vigorous campaign to stop people from wearing pajamas in public:
Shen is the “Alley President” of Shanghai Pudong New Area Changlidong road Qiba residential community. At this stage, his work is divided into two parts, one is managing residential district daily affairs, and the second is “Welcoming the World Expo”. The activity of “Not going outside wearing pajamas, become a World Expo civilized person” is one of the elements in the second part.
Qiba residential district’s “civilized dress persuasion team” has activities twice a week, each is one to two hours. Shen Guofang said that the persuasion team has 10 volunteers, each wearing a red silk belt. They are dressed neatly and stand at the entrance of the residential community. When they see residents going outside wearing pajamas, volunteers approach the residents and dissuade them from going out like that.
“In just over an hour, hundreds of residents already accepted our persuasion, this event was very effective” Qiba’s website recorded the “achievement” of the first day of the activity.
The activity has been carried out for more than two months now, “with good results, the number of people wearing pajamas outside has obviously been reduced.” Shen was satisfied.
The entire article is well worth reading. In addition to providing plenty of amusing anecdotes, it sheds interesting light on cultural attitudes in China, where wearing pajamas in public has a long association with wealth and leisure, and where choice of dress is an expression of newfound personal freedom. Shanghai residents are apparently strongly split over the practice, with 42% describing it as “low class” or “uncivil” and 58% considering it “convenient” or “normal.” At least some of the pro-pajama majority are quite adamant in their resentment of the new policy, which they see as a violation of their civil rights and caving in to foreign attitudes.
If they’re lucky however, the Shanghai government will eventually lose interest and move on to other crusades. As Shen, the “Alley President” explains, pajamas are no longer his focus of attention: “This is not the main task at hand anymore, every 100 days there is a new initiative, we are following the plan, now we are at the stage of stopping people from running the red light.” Good luck with that.
On Friday night, I appeared on CCTV-9’s Dialogue program. The subject was the first trading day of Chinext, China’s new Nasdaq-inspired stock market for start-up companies. You can view the program here or by clicking on the photo below.
My blog suddenly went silent, but it wasn’t because my VPN was cut. On Thursday, October 29, my wife gave birth to a baby boy — our first. His name is William Chovanec (Chinese name: 程沃杰) and he weighed in at 7 lbs. 1 ounce (3.2 kg). Both mother and child are doing well.
