Tianjin by Taxi

How well do you know the person you're sleeping with? How well do you know your friends? I'll bet I know a lot about my friends, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that I know everything. Sooner or later, that friend might surprise me. Once in a while, people you thought you knew like the back of your hand will blow you away with a dark secret. Maybe we'll end up like the neighbour on TV: "Ted? Well, he was really a nice guy. Very friendly. I don't know why he cut off their heads and put them in the freezer."

I ask these questions only because the news out of North Korea has got me thinking. Not about nuclear weapons. When North Korea tested that kinda-sorta-maybe-working bomb last week, the media and the world's capitals responded with, you guessed it, condemnation and outrage. My immediate reaction was, "Who cares?" They were going to build one eventually, and there wasn't a chance that someone was going to use force to stop them. North Korea was more or less getting on with the show.

My concern with the news out of North Korea is that we are taking North Korea seriously at all. Not the nuke part. That's serious business. I don't want Tokyo to glow in the dark, and I would rather Seoul not evaporate in a cloud of dust. But why are we listening to anything Kim Jong Il has to say about any subject whatsoever?

Let me go off on a tangent here. I think it ties in. I went touring in Tianjin, China the other day. I thought I knew all about China, and I'm willing to guess that you do, too. Our shoes are made in China. Our coffee cups are made in China. The Chinese have a lot of people, and they have a really big economy. And...what else?

In Tianjin you find a lot of things, or at least you try to, if you can work your way through the smog. China is the smoggiest place I have ever seen. They burn coal like mad, and a drive from Tianjin on the coast, to Beijing a hundred miles distant, is hell on a still day.

Los Angeles is nothing compared to Tianjin. In fact, it is laughable to see LA movie stars buying hybrid automobiles in order to 'do their part.' In Tianjin, the regular folk ride a lot of bicycles (not to do their part, but because Communism has made them dirt poor, something else the movie star might care to think about) than cars, and still the air is a deadly cocktail. When the visibility is literally a few hundred yards, sightseeing trips seem pretty pointless.

Tianjin is a very good example of Coyote's Law #1: if you want to know how well a country is doing, take a taxi ride or visit a construction site.

That easy. If you really want to know a people, nevermind the museums and the art galleries. They're boring and, being museums, they're full of old stuff that hasn't been relevant in at least a hundred years. Don't bother visiting the monuments, either. Sure, they're big and worth a visit if you have the time, but they're not nearly as good as a cab at exposing culture. In Tianjin, I went to the Great Wall of China to look at the Great Wall, not the China. I almost didn't get to see either, because of the smog.

Taxi drivers will show you how corrupt a country is. First clue: get in a taxi and notice that the meter is broken, or has never been used. Second clue: ask the driver how much a trip is going to cost. Then haggle with him. Third clue: when being dropped off, try not to punch your friend in the jaw when he laughs and says he got the same ride for five bucks less.

Construction crews tell you if the place gives a damn about its own people. First clue: the guys on the makeshift scaffolding are not wearing boots or hardhats. Second clue: the guy with the jackhammer rattling in his hands and asphalt flying past his face is not wearing goggles (though if he has a jackhammer, the country might be 'developing.' Some places still use pick and shovel to tear up the road. In barefeet). Third clue: though they're only being built, the buildings already look old and you know that it will take ten years to finish the project. In Tianjin, you run out of fingers pretty quickly when trying to count the number of unfinished buildings that have been left to fall down.

Anyway, by following Coyote's Law #1, I can report to you that China is pretty much flunking the test of prosperity. If so many American jobs are being done in China, it must be news to most of the Chinese. All I see beyond the smog is begging, rubble, and the economic rot of Communism at its best.

Modern China started out with Mao and the usual pitch of a worker's paradise. Lenin, Marx, Mao, Castro, the rest, they all sold people a bill of goods that said men were equal. Just as it easier to destroy than to create, their respective countries all sank into the abyss that comes from bringing people down to the lowest level.

Mao perfected this, though it would be hard to find anyone in the West who is even aware of the fact.

Traveling through Tianjin, I wondered how much people really know about China. I don't mean what they know in knee jerk fashion. What I'm talking about is real knowledge. Knowledge that you can only see with your own two eyes. We take it for granted that when various countries come to the table at the UN, they're like us. Why we take it for granted is, of course, the media. But the only way you are going to see the inside of a country is if they run a story that will somehow make us feel bad. There's two reasons for that.

One, the media pretty much hate themselves, and us, for being who we are and having what we have. Two, hating ourselves sells newspapers. Honestly, besides a documentary on cheetahs or a commercial featuring starving children with 1-800 numbers written beneath their faces, how much to you really know about Africa?

Same goes for China. I will bet you that people do not know that the majority of live bands in Chinese bars are made up of Filipino expats. Or that Budweiser beer is served ice cold. Or that the average price for a knick knack is, "One dallah!" Or that every bar plays American music, and many of them have posters of Elvis Presley on the wall. Or that the Chinese are just plain poor, poor, poor. CNN, Fox, Bloomberg, none of them have my respect anymore when they talk about 'the Chinese answer' to North Korea, because they are not talking about China at all. I even heard one commentator on Fox congratulate China for "...what the Chinese people have done."

There are no Chinese "people," not in the political sense. There is a small group of rich guys headed by a dictator, and then there are the construction workers wearing sandals.

When our Tianjin taxi got lost on the way to a club one night, the driver took us up a dark alley and stopped in front of a glass door. We were pretty sure we were going to get mugged. Turns out, he just wanted to visit his friend because she spoke some English and would help him with directions. We got out of the car, and instantly a frail woman with a bundle in her hands asked us for money. The bundle was a baby (this is the problem with traveling and wanting to see people; sometimes you see them, and it can rip you apart). The driver motioned us inside. On the floor of the shop were knock-off Louis Vuitton bags. On the walls were pirated season series of Lost, 24, and Law & Order. An entire season for only fifteen bucks, the lady said.

The Chinese might be a threat to the US economy, and they might seem like a bigshot when it comes to yelling at North Korea, but it sure doesn't look like it to me. Coyote's Law #2 kicks into effect here: when the apartment buildings have air conditioning units hanging out of every window, you know the place is in trouble. In China, the units are there, and they rust, leaving brown streaks down the walls. I was reminded of St. Petersburg in thinking that communist buildings just need a bath in order to get some dignity back.

Mao would roll over in his dungarees if he saw the China of today. They are losing the culture war in a hurry, if they haven't lost it already. When a state security guard stands overlooking the dance floor as the men swill beer and the girls gyrate to Metallica, something's up. Because the kicker is, all of the men are Westerners just in town on leave from a ship, an oil rig, a cruise liner, a mining expedition. They can afford the drinks. Meanwhile, the women are - surprise! - hookers. They're Chinese, and they're looking for money. Not being idiots, they go to the watering holes to find it. I doubt Mao thought his security force would end up guarding a pick-up bar for Americans.

China will not save us from the North Korea problem. They're too busy trying to sell the idea of a booming China to foreign investors that don't know enough to open their eyes and look around. Russia? Same thing. Don't believe me? Go check it out. I did.

After getting a taste of China up close and personal, I flicked on the TV news and watched as they quoted Kim Jong Il, and told us his demands, and paraded the experts through the studio to tell us what old Kim wants, and what the Six Party Talks will have to do, and blah, blah, blah.

We are listening to Kim Jong Il as if he is on the same level as us. He isn't. He starves his own people. He won't let them use something as evil as the Internet. If you are born in North Korea, the chances of you ever seeing the Eiffel Tower in person are exactly zero. Your life is worthless. The man is a tyrant and a scumbag. This we know.

When are we going to do something about it? Probably never. But at least let's stop deluding ourselves over and over again. Historians love to poke fun at poor Neville "Peace in Our Time" Chamberlain. He bought Hitler's line, and was run around so badly in the diplomatic talks that he might as well have been a dog.

Meet Kim Jong Il. Start barking.