China Tea

I was sitting in my overseas local, ‘The Bunch of Grapes’, in Galway, last week, wondering why it is that Brian Nolan is always running late, late for meetings, late for the pub and late for his own funeral no doubt! When in he walked, all giddy for a pint and a chat. Little did I know?

We were hardly into the first pint when Brian mentions time, well the year actually, asking if I knew what year it was, which I thought was strange for a guy that’s wearing a watch and has a diary in his inside pocket, but there it was out on the table, like a pregnant pause, and not wanting to disappoint him, I gave the required answer, only to be corrected, and admitting that I had forgotten that this was indeed not 2006, but instead was the Year of the Dog! Not that I am into Chinese culture any more than the wrapper on a fortune cookie, but frankly I’d missed the point!

And over the next brace of pints, Brian told me he’d just come back from a week-long trip to Beijing and Shanghai, on a personal trade mission to China as it were, to the land Marco Polo made popular (no, not the swimming pool game, the guy, y’know, the Italian explorer, no, no, not Chris, Marco…ah forget it, who’s on first?). The conversation, or rather the soliloquy, went something like this.

‘‘I was looking for an interesting business to get involved in, one that might satisfy the universal need for a weekly wage, while yet satisfying the pioneer in me. I was introduced to a rather unique Galway gentleman, who moved his machine parts business (for the textile industry) to China some 13 years ago, long before anyone I know had ever heard of outsourcing. He has been back and forth to China ever since, selling parts all over the world from his Galway sales office. After a follow up meeting, he invited me to come with him, to investigate a business opportunity there, automated mechanised car-parking systems. (That story is for another day!).

The fact that I agreed to go at all had to be prompted by the fact that Galway, far from being a Gaelic-speaking Celtic haven, was now to my surprise and delight, a multicultural Petri-dish. When I left Galway, in 1985, it had a population of less than 60, 000 people, all almost exclusively white and catholic and Irish. It now has a population of about 130,000 and includes almost every nationality under the sun. Polish, Slovakian and Lithuanian, mix with Africana, Australian, Romanian, Indian and Chinese on Quay Street every day, just as they do in New York or London, and not a blind bit of notice is passed on the rich diversity that now thrives here, replacing that homogenous, bland, pasty gruel that once was us!

This month alone there have been 4 store openings in Galway that caught my eye. An African food shop opened on Market Street, a Chinese shop (not restaurant) on Middle Street, a Russian shop in Knocknacara and a Polish/Latvian Pub just opened in Salthill. The radio is peppered with Polish and Slovakian language public-service announcements for safety at work, and the local paper carries adverts for services from job-seeking New-Europeans.

I was conscious of the presence of Chinese in Galway because they attended the International Language Institute 2 streets from where I live in Salthill. There are over 10,000 Chinese students in Ireland today, spread across every educational institution, and they are all paying handsomely for their fees and board, bringing in many millions of Euros to our economy annually.

It seems the Chinese view Ireland much in the same way the US did in the 80’s and 90’s. It’s a great stepping stone for doing business into Europe and it’s a safe and nurturing place to learn both the English language and European business methods. Ireland is in the right place at the right time again, and our love of learning once again stands to our advantage.

The large Chinese presence was explained to me by my father-in-law who told me that Bertie Aherne, our Taoiseach, had led a Trade delegation to China last year, accompanied by half the government ministers, the full Riverdance troupe, 2 GAA teams, and over 300 educationalists and business people, who managed in one short week to do trade deals in Beijing worth almost a billion Euro. (Co-incidentally, only 2 weeks ago the same Bertie led a similar delegation to India, and they also signed huge deals, especially in software, education, bio-tech and pharma-research)

Back to China, and our trip, well we arrived there, having travelled via Amsterdam and KLM (great airline). Beijing was amazing, not at all unlike any major US city, only bigger, way bigger. So too was Shanghai, a modern city of over 20 million people and it was actually walkable! High rises were everywhere, and construction cranes and trucks and traffic, my God, the traffic. Huge10-lane highways feed the cities from the futuristic airports, an anthill of activity, everywhere. And construction, everywhere, massive cranes tower over every block, (3 high-rise buildings a week being capped off in Beijing alone) and all because, I assumed, the Olympics were coming in 2008!

Yes, they used wooden or bamboo scaffolding and no one wore a hard-hat or hi-viz jacket and they worked 24-7 and looked the worse for it! But the buildings looked great! And once they finished it, they filled it with people and put an armed guard outside it! And then they start on the next new building.

And as for 9 million bicycles in Beijing, well that’s no longer quite true. Now they have 9 million cars, the models we stopped driving 7 years ago, and they sit in the traffic jams all day long. We moved so slowly sometimes that we were passed by bicycles and even by well-wrapped women sweeping the roads by hand with what looked like leafy-brooms. Progress? Welcome to the New West!

Well not quite! Truth is all this economic activity is being fuelled by the massive Chinese production machine, and it’s burgeoning and over-productive economy. China is now the fifth largest economy in the world, having recently outstripped Japan. At $2.3 Trillion it is the elephant in the living room that even the US cannot ignore anymore. And it’s growing, by a whopping 10% annually, and there’s no sign of a slowdown.

So how did a feudal agrarian society, become a mega-powerhouse in one generation? Beats me, except that with 1.3 billion residents, and a penchant for being able to make anything we make (albeit after a learning curve and a little help from the west), its no wonder really that their economy is booming. Yes it’s a flight from the land to the big cities and the factory jobs. Yes they only have one child per family, but yes, they looked happy, much as we did in the bustle times of the 60’s when all was new, and freedom was but a dream away.

The local Chinese currency is the RNB, or Yuan as it’s known internationally. It’s pegged to the dollar, with little fluctuation, much to the US Treasury’s chagrin and I for one found it went a long way. It was at about 100 RNB for 1 Euro, so at that rate, nothing seemed expensive, nor was it either.

The industries we went to see were amazing. The factories went as far as the eye could see (not too far sometimes as the smog could be wicked). Vast buildings and huge workforces blended in the din of industry and all working in unison, for the good of the motherland. The average worker earns less than $500 per month, but he and she (yes everyone works) were happy, or at least they were happy enough, and were hopeful of better times ahead for them and their offspring, albeit offspring singular.

You have to be self-reliant there though! Before you leave your Hotel or office, get the concierge to write the name of your hotel, your office, and the street address in Chinese characters on a card. Then do same for your destination, say it’s Tiananmen Square, get them to write it in Chinese on another card. Under their writing, you write what it is in English! Then venture out to the taxi or bus and show them the appropriate card. Works every time. Vital you remember this…because NO ONE SPEAKS ENGLISH!

In Tiananmen Square, watch out for soldiers. Well actually they will watch out for you, all 730,247 of them who in groups of 6 or 7 continuously march around the square (it’s as big as a small prairie and about as interesting) like automatons, randomly stopping, starting, changing directions, to-ing and fro-ing like short-circuited electric toy cars! But don’t let them fool you; they are all watching you, and only you!

I visited the Forbidden City, or Gung Go as it is known. It is a hundred acre city within a city, the largest set of preserved wooden buildings in the world, nearly 1,000 in all, pagoda palace after pagoda palace, all painted a dun red colour, all the more drab in the smog of Beijing. I marvelled at their technological abilities back in 1460, those mighty Ming men, back when we were barely able to thatch a roof in Ireland.

Sadly the Chinese of today don’t admire their own past, preferring instead to extol the virtues of the more recent revolutionaries that enabled them to take their place as a respected world player. The Forbidden City, within the Imperial city was in a poor state of repair, dilapidated and uninteresting, filled with empty dark and dull rooms, and not one Ming Vase to be seen! My guide was Roger Moore …yes the Roger Moore, but he was only one of several voices you could choose from the audio set I rented for the Forbidden City Tour. Unfortunately, without the tour, as there are no signs in English, you may as well be walking around Giants Stadium in the dark!

I kept expecting to see James Bond jumping from the Palace wall, racing across the pagoda tops, being pursued by the Chinese Keystone Cops, but he never materialised. Instead I was the James Bond for the Chinese there, as I was gawked at, poked, laughed at, and generally appreciated as being pretty much the only ‘Big Nose’ in the Palace that morning. I felt like Gulliver for a while, though I wasn’t much bigger than some of them. My photographs, with their tiny families, are now on several hundred mantelpieces around China. I hope they are not too disappointed!

Yes, the Forbidden City was a real disappointment as a cultural icon, but as I said, the Chinese are not over-enamoured with their past. They see a bright future instead, where they have all the money and the industrial capacity and maybe the Terracotta Army, and we, well we will have history I guess!

As I walked by an art exhibition in one of the Emperor’s palaces, (don’t be tempted, this is simply a tourist trap) a student/artist addressed me in English. ‘‘You English? German?, American?’’ I replied in the negative, then I said ‘‘You must guess where I am from’’ I gave her a few hints, ‘Green’, ‘Island’, blank stare, then remembering about the Chinese guy who won the recent European Snooker title, I said, ‘Alex Higgins’. Her face lit up, ‘‘Snooker, Ireland, ah, you champions, and great football too! China, football, no good, you must learn table-tennis’’.

We talked, staccato for a minute, then she said, ‘‘Ireland, a Republic, like China, yes? Ireland is a Republic before China, in 1948, yes!’’. Surprised, I said, ‘‘No, 1922’’, and then I remembered we had only adopted our constitution in 1948, and here was a little girl, telling me about my Irish history, in China!

Mao, whose poster hung from the palace gate (it was like 60 feet tall), it seems was quite a fan of the 1916 Rising against the British imperialists, and they still study that event, our Irish revolution in school in China to this day. Go figure? Padraig P, and all the boys, take a bow!

Hey, speaking of dishes, I loved the food there, the noodles, the vegetables, their beers and even their rice wine (mind you Poteen has risen considerably in my estimation having done ‘Gambei’, their bottoms-up toast with the rice wine once too often). When we dined they had a ‘Lazy Susan’ style set-up where the dishes kept going round the table. Super fun super food, but do learn to use chopsticks, as forks are not common.

I tried everything I was served, but I cannot tell you what anything was, or what they call each dish! (No point asking for anything in English, no one speaks it or writes it, or cares for it, Period!) Take my advice, drink bottled water and avoid the ‘Thousand year Old Eggs’. Mine had gone off sometime in the 15th century, but seems no one had noticed! I digress.

So there was China last week, at the World Economics Forum in Davos, Switzerland, making the other leading world economies quake, and behind it all, Paddy was there, inspiring them to greatness and to revolution! Who said revenge was a dish best eaten cold, eh!

A few practices that got on my goat…their habit of queueing, is not like ours. Picture a rugby scrum, or a stampede of buffalo in a narrow canyon….get the picture! Survival of the fittest! Manners would not rank high on their list of things to be proud of. Also their habit of hocking and spitting, everywhere, in streets, in trains, in hotel lobbies! And their smoking…as if the smog was not bad enough already. They would smoke two cigarettes at a time if they could…hilarious. No wonder they cough so much!

After a week in China, mouth agape, and a neck stiff from looking up, I left O’Neill’s bar in Shanghai (what, you think I can go a week without a pint?) and headed to the airport, glad to be heading home, but sad to part from an amazing country and a very welcoming people. They are in a situation that I think we Irish and Irish-Americans can empathise with. They are viewed by many, with suspicion, with racist hatred and with ignorance, just as we were not too long ago in England and the US. There is one difference though, there’s a heck of a lot more of them than there ever were of us, and they are learning our ways and adopting our lifestyles.

In one more generation their standard of living will be the same as ours, and their prospects brighter. I looked at this and decided that we have a new place on the economic ladder. We can become the conduit for trade, a middleman as such, making deals between the east and the west. We are quick to adapt, creative and innovative, 3 skill-sets that cannot be emulated by rote. Therein lays their Achilles heel, and our opportunity. In order reap this harvest though, we must get to know the Chinese, and understand them. Our children must learn Chinese, their language, culture and business acumen, just as their children learn ours.

Ireland should dedicate the next decades in developing business contacts in China, using our market knowledge and contacts in Europe and the US to manage their (the Chinese) trade, or at least get meaningfully involved in it, while taking full advantage of our relative ease of access to this vast market and the common bond of trust that seems to exist between us, for whatever reason, for we are not viewed by them as capitalist pigs, or as the Chinese put it, ‘The Wolf’.

No, that place is reserved for the bigger nations who were involved in colonialism and post-war capitalism. Remember, ‘The Wolf’ only has breakfast with his friends once!’’

Brian and I finished our Pints in the Bunch and parted our ways. I was exhausted, I mean I had only intended going to Galway for an hour or two, I never expected to travel to China between lunch and supper. Isn’t travel great all the same? Maybe I’ll get a Chinese take-out and rent a movie…hmm…what will I watch, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ looks good!

Myles Na G.

February 2006