Strangers On A Train

As I've always said, you don't know a people until you've shared home-brewed paint-stripper and smoked in the prohibited section between carriages on the overnight train between Chengdu and Xi'an with them.

Nixon didn't do dick while he was here and Kevin Rudd might be able to bang together a couple of sentences to nice public effect, but I have achieved more for international relations than either of those two try-hards, using only a 96 page notebook, an erasable pen and the translation function on a mobile phone. Besides, after a few shots of the rotgut liquor, my Mandarin and their English was flawless. Well... we did all come to some understanding at the very least.

As you and I are routinely told, China is the dragon. It will awake and rule the world. But no-one seems to have told the young Chinese this. The ones I've met and know, here and at home, are all painfully aware of the poverty.

If you lived here, you would be too. I cannot of course speak for the world's largest nation after only seeing chunks of a few provinces, but I can say the following:

One, when you travel through the countryside, it is largely empty. That means most of the people are in the city. Most of those people, it seems, live in appalling little, grey, concrete boxes. These things are depressing hovels. They stretch away in unending drabness and filth in just about every direction you look when you are in a decent sized city, and every city is a decent size. You can arrive in a town you've never heard about that's home to over ten million people. Imagine being able to say that about an American city. The scale of the horror is exciting to witness and I am deeply glad I am not a part of it. Think of the city scenes in either “Brazil” or “Blade Runner” and you only just start to get a feel for it.

Two, the place is in love with plastic. We were in the Chinese equivalent of a roadside diner in the middle of nowhere and all of our crockery was individually wrapped in heat-shrunk plastic after being washed. 1.3 billion people multiplied by three meals a day multiplied by... I can't go on and it's not much more than a small indicator rather than a real figure. But it is the way they are going.

Lastly, I have heard it said that 80% of the world's stuff (produced 'goods' from a factory floor) comes from here. When you see the depth of the smog and the unending mounds of production and waste, it fills me with fear and wonder. China is not just The Sleeping Dragon, it's the belching, farting, crapping and spitting dragon. Nothing this big can writhe around without knocking the other lizards out of bed.