Cheng-just-du-it! (English)

Dear family and friends,

Dali offered a fresh insight into the growing mass tourism of China. Although not completed trashed by cheeziness, it makes it abvious that the time to visit this part of Yunnan is now. We took the bumpy bus from Dali, again back to Kunming to take our train to Chengdu. Admitted, a plane-ticket from Dali to Chengdu would have cost the same amount compared to a soft-sleaper berth in the train, and probably is more convenient. But flying violates our important rule to try to cross this Eurasian continent overland – we're here for travelling experience, not convenient experiences. Moreover, the soft-berth sleeper accomodation in the Chinese trains is very comfy. You can easily read a book, type your log and admire the changing Chinese scenery; in short: it's travelling at best!

The overnight railway from Kunming to Chengdu appeared to be a great relaxed tour. We had the complete softsleaper cabin for ourselves, allowing us to sit next to each other and gaze at the amazing scenery passing us by. In order to arrive in time in Chengdu, to fix our arrangements and permits to Lhasa. When I woke up after a good night's sleep it was still dark. I was still droozy and not quite awake, but after a considerable while something started to daunt. The train was occassionally in very lit areas; as if someone casted a huge light to our train – a 'bouwlamp' in Dutch... After a while in limbo, I decide to peak out from the train's window only to realize that we were riding in one of the world's longest subways. It took the train several hours, sliding through steep hills and terrains before we could see the landscape rather than just endless miles of concrete tunnels. Yunnan and Sichuan provinces are equiped with rough terrain with enough space to shy away from the rest of the world as minority people, or to expel unwanted politically dangerous activists into a no-mans land; and viewing some of the guarded and walled surroundings of some of the industrial terrains we passed – that's perhaps exactly what the Chinese government is doing..

I'm typing this message just after a long weekend in Chengdu. Chengdu has numerous of nice surprises, and of course as it happens with travelling two drawbacks. My good friend Emile Bouwman, a studymate from the Erasmus University is coming to join us together with his girlfriend Irina. Emile companionship always means that you have a great time, in optimal 'beer conditions', partying and flexible adventure. Currently Emile works as an IT-manager for APM Terminals in Shanghai, probably the worlds largest shipping terminal operator, a Danish company. He has moved to Shanghai in the beginning of 2008 and is experiencing the boom and bust in Shanghai to the fullest. One very welcoming aspect of Shanghai for Emile is that he can share this experience with Irina with his Russian girlfriend. He met Irina somewhat eight months ago in Shanghai, and I must say that she's a very friendly, independent young women – the fact that she left her hometown to start studying in Ireland on the age of sixteen surely has helped her to have a broad perspective on matters ànd to have a great stamina on drinking – a good combination for the weekend I must say!

Emile and Irina would arrive in Chengdu around eight pm on Friday's. Therefore, Lisanne and I decided head for arriving in Chengdu on Thursday's in order to have our preparations ready for Tibet, Lhasa (tickets and permit) ideally before the couple from Shanghai arrive. We decided to head for 'Sim's cozy guesthouse', ranked on top of the list of Chengdu guesthouses by the Lonely Planet. Sim's has a travel agency and would probably be packed with backpackers who want to venture a Lhasa-experience; the latter might certainly help as it has been rumoured that Chinese officials only allow foreign travellers to visit Tibet in groups, not in couples. The strategy is to hook up with a group and head for Lhasa ideally with the Sunday evening train. The reality being completely different..

..Soon at Sim's guesthouse the news about a recent close down of Tibet came to our ears. Due to the Tibetan new year on February 25th and traditional festivities due between March 10th and 14th the Chinese government decided to seal Tibet completely for foreigners. Last year during these Tibetan events, riots popped up in Lhasa and several hundreds of Tibetan monks were killed during the uprising. This time the Chinese government leaves nothing to chance and is effecting a complete lock-down. For us this means that no Tibetan permits are issued, hence no train-tickets and eventually no flight-tickets can be purchased to Lhasa. This obviously is a big set-back, as Lhasa should have been our gateway across the Himalaya's to Nepal, India and further. Now all these travelling plans are in jeopardy, as these circumstances put our overland travelling ambitions at risk. It is assumed that – depending on the scale of possible Tibetan upheaval – the Tibetan area will be opened from March 21st. Again, this will not correspond to our travelling plans – as March 21st will be the date to pick up our bikes in Karachi, Pakistan – not the date to start travelling through Tibet(!)..

Rather than just accepting the close-down, we decided to try our utmost to find travelling agencies that could support us anyhow. But first eat. Upon arrival at Sim's and after settling-down, we decided not to eat at Sim's. As the usual guesthouse who is overrun by Lonely Planet backpackers, Sim's cozy guesthouse offers everything you can expect from a 4-star hotel, including free wireless internet, western dishes and lazy cats that keep you company: certainly a pleasure for Lisanne! No western food for us please. Let's test our limbs and livers to some local stuff here! We took a hike nearing the center of Chengdu. Chengdu is Sichuan's capital and renowned for it's great cuisine – spicy and tasty! We settled for a bright-light restaurant serving hotpots. Eating standards in China are quite different than those in Western countries. In China, the brighter lit the restaurant, the more comfortable the restaurant owner is to serve you his/her food – therefore, the better the quality. Of course, the complete menu was addressed in Chinese. No problem with that, the Chinese are often very helpful and suddenly you have a young person standing at your table to help you translate the food. We opted for a wide variety of dishes: easy when a dish just cost you around twelve rmb – you can have a whole table of hotpot-tapas for a price of a maincourse in Holland. We choose just the stuff that was unfamiliar to us, but certainly took a Chinese cook a crate of Tsingtao beer to have enough imagination of crazy sounding dishes like 'duck's blood' (mind you, a vegetarian dish) and other stuff. All the tapas-dishes were served uncooked, and the idea was to boil the food into a hot pan that you shared with your company – something what we call 'fondue' and the Chinese would call 'hotpot'. Only in this case, the hotpot was completely filled wih red peppers, black peppers and explosive spices; mind you, the Chinese have been the inventors of gunpowder – I believe this invention originated from the hotpots(!). Bustling with fire, we needed a barrel of Tsingtao to keep our tongues luke!..

The next day, we've spend most of our times checking out the Sim's, checking in at the Binjiang Hotel – as booked by Emile – and checking for available routes, permits and modes of transportation to Lhasa. On our attempt, we tried half a dozen travel agencies, contacting Chinese and Dutch embassies and visiting the Tibetan Government Office in the Tibetan alleys south of Chengdu's center. The good things is that we've begin to discover Chengdu's variety of bustling places. The bad thing is that all our attempts ended up with no satisfactory result. Yes, you could travel to Lhasa without a permit, but then your faith lies in the hands of the Chinese police. Moreover, if you could make it to Lhasa, sneaking in the territory – you probably got stuck as no buses were probably going to Kathmandu. The reason for this being that the Chinese government had stopped issuing permits earlier in Nepal. And if no tourists could get into Tibet from Nepal, no busses could get into Lhasa from Nepal; therefore we reasoned that no busses would ride from Lhasa to Kathmandu as all available busses would already been used to get all foreigners out of Tibet. Keep in mind that we have a tight schedule of 100 days travelling to get from Hong Kong to the Netherlands, this does not take into account numerous of days getting stuck somewhere – we have to keep moving..

One of the tourist agents was very friendly and he recommended to go to a small cafe on Binjiang Lu, the street where our hotel was located. Always trust a local about local treats, but before this bar would be part of our itenary for the night I always try to check it out myself, before inviting my friends to join. Emile and Irina were coming to join us this evening and I surely wanted to give them the best available treat. Therefore, I quickly jumped in the bar at around late-noon. Actually, it wasn't quite a bar, you could mention it was more like a living-room. A great living-room, with a fridge full of exotic beers, ranging from German Hefeweize to Japanese Asahi. At the time the only one present was Andy, an Irish bloke who was eating is late-lunch. The place was called 'Divers' and is no-where mentioned in the Lonely Planet – and that's for a reason.. ..the place originates from 1999 and was founded by two guys who wanted to have a relaxed space to invite their friends when they would visit them in Chengdu. A few years later a Frenchmen had taken over the bar (a former guest) and since 2008 also this guy had enough of his livingroom-sized pub and decided to leave Chengdu. This caused a great dissappointment to six of his regular guests – so, to solve this issue, the six guests took over 'Divers' since that year. One of the owner was a Dutch guy called Mark. In the joint there, not larger than 25 sq/m, we met three dutch guys; all with their own stories, but one thing in common: when they arrived in Chengdu to were stuck to it like glue (that rhyme's!).

When Emile and Irina arrived, we soon went to have diner in an absolutely superb Indian restaurant, soon to follow with a visit to Divers. We were all astonished about the bandwidth, the quality and uniqueness of the places – must say this gives great compliment and characterization of Chengdu in comparison to Shanghai: Chengdu offers an amazing habitat for fine-diners, party-goers and lovers of relaxing loungy (sometimes dodgy) hide-aways. Besides Divers, the other great venue we discovered in the weekend was the No.1 Bar. The No.1 Bar is all you can ask for a great club experience: live music, excellent entertainment and a soft spot for westerners. It didn't take long before drinks were lined-up from all different alcoholic angles: whisky shots galore!

The way how young Chinese entertain themselves is via good oll'clubbing. Once you get older, or you want to show off that you can burn the money, you rent a KTV-area; a separate Karaoke TV room in the club where you invite your friends and are served on a personal level. The young generation just wants to hop and endulge western stuff, so it didn't take long after we were spotted.. ..and been asked to stand on the podium to dance.. ..I guess there's no harm in some Dutch klompendans on stage. So Emile and I were standing in no-time on the highest floor try to keep in balance, not to fall of the wigly stage – I hope that the Chinese saw that as dancing.. ..well, we didn't care really. I said to Emile to dance a crazy as possible, like good representatives of the Ministry of Scilly Dancers; the idea is that if the Chinese would really like to imitate 'the West' than let's see this in practise.. ..and yes, there we went: waving with our hands as if we were the carroussel-monkeys of Chengdu – and the crowd loved it!! Soon the whole trendy Club No.1 was carrousselling away and another theory was verified: The Chinese love imitation of the West!

Wait a minute. What do you think about the name: The Flagship Club? It must be the most notorious, dodgy kinda place that you can image think of.. ..well, we got one in Chengdu and of course: we ticked'it off! In the midst of Chengdu there a huge eight-story high entertainment complex in the shape of a love-boat. The boat is a little bit off harbour, as the nearest piece of sea is situated about 2,000 km's in the East. That's no problem for the Flagship Club: it fairs well on the locals who want entertainment++. You've got your own dockside, aka – the bar. There are the cruisecabins readimade for KTV, HaveToB's and WannaB's. It's exclusive, on the basis that we were only allowed to walk around – guided – as we were virtually unstoppable by Dutch curiosity, goalsetting (read in this case: blunt, but with a hint of charm) and sheer size (1.85 and 1.94 to measure up!).

I would like to tell you about the club we visited after, but in all frankness – it was too vague, too late and too far to drive.. ..all stowaways ended up here to drink up their last bits of Tsingtao 'HANS' beers.

Anyways, we can recommend anyone to joint the nightlife scene in Chengdu. As with everything we came across in China: do it now, in about three or four years time all the Western mystery in the eyes of the Chinese is gone and replaced by their own confident state. And boy, do they have a lot to be confident about; China is definitely is going to rock the current World Economy boat. They surely understand that in the end of the day – by sheer scale – they are going to win, and that the playing field is not defined in geographic territory (they would never invade Europe or the US), not in sociological power (the Chinese have been playing their own game of political centralism, Confusianism and need not to learn from outsiders how to do this; they are the masters themselves), but in Economic advantage.

Books like Competitive Advantage, once composed by Michael Porter and the like in the late seventies, early eighties compare company impact on a micro-level. Here, in China – companies are seen as embedded FDI-money pulling entities in the context of what the Japanese would call Keiretsu, or the Korean 'Chebol'. The Chinese have reinvented their comparative 'Guanxi' to the current Global Economical Power Divide and is constantly reengineering this model. On the fiscal/legal side: first to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from US and Europe by catering in simple, yet opaque systems. Now changing them into complex, layered (regional to local, import/export levy, etc.) corporate governance structures – not to mention 'property ownership' in this context. Western companies see themselves being pulled in the investment machine with having to face to much sunk costs when they pull out; not to mention the search/switching costs involved to find similar workshop/output-performance, or lost market potential. In other words: they're into the Chinese system to their neck – they are (soon to be) part of the Chinese Reengineered Guanxi – and they love it. Like you love the ill-fitted spencer you once bought to show-off, but where everyone's telling you that you look a fool – but still you feel you need to wear it, knowing deep inside you don't want to anymore. But because you made the decision to buy it once: you feel to. In marketing terms they call this phenomena: cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is casing to make Western managers to make bad investment decisions, because they cannot opt out anymore; e.g. because there is no market anymore left to make the same relative growth numbers. And remember: we're all gazing at the promise of the Chinese boom; at nearly all expense. But also remember: the Chinese are renowned for their ability to draw out as many capital out of neighbouring country economics like Indonesia, Malaysia and Philipines. All countries where there is a young legal structure/system (Indonesia's is pretty much copied from the Dutch system in the late nineties), a growing legal culture, but no legal reinforcement in place.Only an average population of 7% Chinese is reaping 90% to 95% of the total Economics – Total Economics (GDP) of these countries. They (the Chinese) have the Guanxi principles to thank for this – now the Chinese are reinventing that same conglomerate (and diversification) thinking to draw out as much cash out-of-the-free-cash-flows from Western companies. The cognitive dissonance of the Western blindstaring on long-term results is causing manager's decisions short-term hubris, i.e. decision making on the basis of favoured (too positive) outcomes, rather than rationale.

The question in economic reality is, in as much is China a threat to take over the power of Western companies? For simplicity sake I do not make any distinction between Rheinlandisch governance models, or Anglosakson governance models. In recorded history, China was by far the most powerful and innovative country in the world in the period 220 B.C. to 1450 A.D. Cast-iron, domestication of moat and rice, bronze alloy casting, gunpowder, complex water works are just a small number of inventions that leaped China into a great progression relative to the rest of the world. Oh yes, we had the Roman empire in that same period, but also remember that the Roman empire never completely seized Europe under its authority and that the Roman empire was an ancient counterpart of what is Japan now: a great copy-cat of existing inventions; only the Romans learned to perfect the inventions learned from the Egypts and Greeks and supported them sustainably by taxation, infrastructure and conformative ruling. Each conquered territory under the Roman empire was able to maintain their culture, habits and language – explaining the patch-work of Europe today. China in that sense, starting with its foundation by its first Emperor Qin, soon uniformed the language, its writings and taxation policies across the Asian continent. All authentic languages existing before 220 BC have been destroyed thoroughly and the replacing Sino-Tibetan language was soon to become dominant. Additionally, China maintain central ruling. First Chang'an (the current Xi'an) and later (for simplicity sake) Beijing ordinated its people with great enforcement by autocratic regime. This caused two great advantages: stability and scalability. Stability is needed for progress, in particular for China's larger projects in order to be able to provide a sense of security to the people; there is not a real social-security system, but luckily the country is stable enough for its people to minimize risk as much as possible. This also explain the great mobility of the people (trains are literally stacked with people) – without stability it's unsure if you can return to your hometown after conducting business in another province. Without stability you cannot take all your belongings and pick up your life as fast as you used to (with greater productivity!) when moving to another part of your land. You have to love your country for this stability. And if you don't and try to revolutionize against it, better do it good (like Mao Tse Tung) or you'll be certain to spend the rest of your life in gated worker's communities. That's the price of stability in a country with approximately 1.3 bilion people.. Scalability is good for politics and good for business. Remember, that in contrast to Russia, China first liberalized economics and perhaps than liberalizes politics. In former Sovjet-Union, this was effected the other way around. So, it doesn't take much though on where priorities lie for China: it's in politics. Scalability in politics ushered a lot of advantages complementary to the Stability factor. It allowed for mass-projects to be copied into each district. Allowed for an incredible fast pace of infrastructure development across the country (The Great Wall, the Trainsystem, the waterdams – to name a few). It also allowed for Beijing's ruling to have been explained only once, and to punish those districts that have lacked behind. Constant tensions between local districts and Beijing are especially notes in Tibet, Guang Dong and the Guanxi province, and Yunnan. Beijing has an controversial way of solving these tensions: mass mobilization. Loyal populations to Beijing living in less-fertile areas in China were simply moved by the millions to trouble-states e.g. the Han-people to Tibet. In other situations the oppressed people themselves fleed to areas where Beijing had a lesser grip; the Guang Dong province was long a corridor to the satellite states of China for overseas-Chinese. The other way around was also possible: local populations started to lobby with Beijing in order to sustain their way-of-living. A good example of this, is originated from the Guanxi province. A province where Beijing's power was needed for local Chinese clans to frustrate the present minorities residing in this territory. Minorities from Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar. Therefore Chinese families started to organize themselves in what we call 'Guanxi'. Often Guanxi is compared with the Sicilian maffia - or cosa-nostra – where families reigned in territories where few – here we go again – 'legal enforcement' is present. Therefore by organizing themselves, sticking together on the basis of family rules and loyaly they were able to organize lobbyist campaigns in Beijing and could influence military involvement in return for a more stable region. In this case: everybody's happy.

Because the Guanxi originate from the South-Eastern part of China, they could easily spread out their power to neighbouring countries, in particular Malaysia, Indonesia and Philipinnes. Although they had no formal power in these regions, they enjoyed a massive informal power by Beijing – who has benefit from gathering resources from these neighbouring states; being incredibly raw material resource rich. In one case, military and diplomatic power was in place with the confestication of Singapore (former Temasek) in the late fifties. Remember that China has trading routes that reached as far as French Polynesia (the watercumcumber is an authentic Chinese dish, but it only existed in the waters between Australia and French Polynesia)... ...more to come...

greetings Mike & Lisanne
p.s. for photos take a look at the Dutch messages..