Day 29 - Wednesday, Nov. 13 - Shanghai to Hanoi (Part 1)

The Bund - Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank (l), Customs House (f)

Breakfast with Kathy and Becky, plus Lisa later.  Most of the others are there for a last hug, including Stanley and Pingping.  We’ll all be leaving at different times, them home, me on to Vietnam.

       With my spare half-hour, I follow Pingping’s advice and poke my head into some of the magnificent buildings on the Bund.  All have guards, some also have police.  Few wave me away.  With motions, I ask if I can take photos; all but one say yes.  The Custom House has traces of the British age, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel - once the Shanghai Club - is quite posh, but the tail and both ears have to go to the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (once the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp.) with its painted ceiling.

Waldorf-Astoria, ex-Shanghai Club

       I get back to the hotel just in time to see Stanley off - turnabout of our roles - and give him one last hug.  Then Gil and Margie, Kimm and Jane and I share a ride to the airport, where we say our final hug-byes.

A few musings on China.
       First, America thinks it’s the bee’s knees, but frankly it’s been left in the dust.  America is out; China is in... unless things change drastically on one side or the other.  America is yesterday; tomorrow belongs to China.  Again.
       What is flagrant everywhere is the massive effort to keep up with the exploding population, by building high-rises, and to catch up with the Western world by building infrastructure - highways, mostly raised, tunnels, bridges, high-speed trains, subways and even a mag-lev line out to Shanghai Airport... Several of my fellow travelers have been here in China before and all are stunned by the transformation.
       Of course, all this has been made easier by China’s top-down government.  As Stanley said last night on the bus coming back from dinner, if you were told to do something by the government, you just said “yes”.  You didn’t question the order, or you would pay.

Ex-Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank

       At breakfast I asked Stanley a question.  In this luxurious hotel, I saw the new Chinese rich acting with the staff in ways that were... let’s just say “lofty”.  I asked him if such people were still living the principles of Communism or whether they had bought into a world of privilege in their minds.  He basically said “the latter”.  (One thing about our trip:  there were no minders.  We could talk freely.)
       If we follow China’s history of cycles, which Professor Murphy has explained in his presentations, one wonders how long President-for-Life Xi - and thus a simili-emperor - or a Mao Redux - will survive, and what China will become.  Will it stay a communist country, albeit following a different form of communism from Lenin’s?  Or will it come over to the dark side with a form of Chinese capitalism?

TAKE-AWAYS (and remember, this was pre-covid):

- everything is huge;
- all schools are not equal and alike; students pay tutors so their children can pass entrance exams into the better ones that lead to a more enviable future;
- vehicles are photographed on highways, and facial recognition is rampant in the streets.

Or as summed up in an article by the New York Times that I read after my trip:  “China’s historic growth streak was fueled by the creation of an extensive, modern network of highways and railways, the strong entrepreneurship of its people, its skilled work force and a government that was willing to set environmental and labor concerns aside for the sake of ever-greater economic output.”

All this runs through my mind during the three-hour flight to Hanoi.