Category: Beijing

Fermented Art, Beijing Style

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From Time Out Beijing:

Veteran Beijing artist Gu Dexin . . . first turned European noses at a satellite show of the Venice Biennale in 1995, when he dumped three hundred kilos of raw beef into three glass coffins set in a local casino.

In the heat of summer, poisonous gases from the rotting meat quickly forced officials to clean up the show. This shy enfant terrible of the art world went on to astound European audiences in a succession of shows, placing raw meat or fruit in public places and letting them rot.

Up until this year, when he installed raw pork at the Legation Quarter, the formula has served him brilliantly. Part of the force of this current show is the absence of decay — resulting in a sterile and odourless silence.

The Fall of GM

Seth Roberts2 Comments

There is nothing new about large industry leaders, such as General Motors, going bankrupt; in The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen gives many examples and an explanation: complacency, also called smugness. We’re doing well, why shouldn’t we continue to do things our way? They fail to innovate enough and less-complacent companies overtake them, often driving them out of business. Complacency is human nature, true, but it’s the oldest mistake in the economic world. (I’ve studied a similar effect in rats and pigeons.) In the 1950s, complacency was surely why the big American car companies rejected the advice of quality expert Edward Deming. In less-complacent Japan, however, his ideas were embraced. This doomed the US car industry. Much later, Ford was the first American car company to take Deming seriously, which may be why Ford is now doing better than GM or Chrysler.

The further away you are I suspect the more clearly you see complacency for what it is — a failure to grasp basic economics (innovate or die):

“Chinese financial assets [in America[ are very safe,” [Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner said. His response drew laughter from the [Peking University] audience.

China and Electric Cars

Seth Roberts5 Comments

According to the New York Times,

Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles within three years, and making it the world leader in electric cars and buses after that.

Since I live in Beijing, I am glad to hear this. The story omits an important detail. Every day in Beijing, dozens of electric bikes zoom by me as I ride my non-electric bike. There are 30 or 40 models available, average price about $300. This means when battery makers make car batteries, they will build on a wealth of experience derived from making millions of bike batteries. This isn’t China with cheap labor, as Americans usually imagine the situation; this is China with more experienced labor. It isn’t obvious that American car makers can ever catch up.

The article continues:

Electric vehicles may do little to clear [China’s] smog-darkened sky . . . . China gets three-fourths of its electricity from coal, which produces more soot and more greenhouse gases than other fuels. A report by McKinsey & Company last autumn estimated that replacing a gasoline-powered car with a similar-size electric car in China would reduce greenhouse emissions by only 19 percent. It would reduce urban pollution, however, by shifting the source of smog from car exhaust pipes to power plants, which are often located outside cities.

Please. It is far easier to clean the output of a few hundred power plants than a few hundred million cars.

The United States Department of Energy has its own $25 billion program to develop electric-powered cars and improve battery technology, and will receive another $2 billion for battery development as part of the economic stimulus program enacted by Congress.

I think it’s too late. If the $25 billion were used for rebates to encourage electric car buying, as the Chinese government is doing, that might work, but there aren’t any decent American-made electric cars to be bought.

In related news, Tsinghua University (above all an engineering school) undergraduates who come to America for graduate school now account for more American-trained Ph.D.’s than any American school. In case you think that American engineers are better trained than Chinese ones.

Do They Eat Dogs?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

From a post about life in Taiwan:

Don’t they eat dogs and other odd stuff like snakes?
No. They don’t eat dogs.

I think a small fraction of restaurants in Beijing serve dog, but I never encountered one and I never saw dog meat for sale. In Seoul, however, they obviously eat dogs. I saw dog meat for sale in a traditional market. The dogs were alive (as many animals are in Asian “wet markets”). I later saw a booklet aimed at visitors to Korea that dismissed dog-eating as some sort of urban legend.

Organize by Function

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Andrew Gelman makes an excellent suggestion:

At the airport they have different terminals for different airlines, with flights leaving from all over the place. Why not have a simpler system, where all the flights to Chicago leave from one section of the airport, all the flights to L.A. leave from another section, and so forth?

Flight as commodity. He adds:

Imagine a bookstore where the books were arranged by publisher and you had to look at the Random House books, then the Knopf books. etc.

A big bookstore in Beijing called Bookstore City is organized like this. On the other hand, the last 20 years of American retail have seen the rise of the opposite of Andrew’s suggestion: Whole stores devoted to one brand, such as Apple or Nike or Samsung.

Some Beijing stores (or collections of stores) are hyper-organized-by-function. An electronics mall near me contains dozens of booths, each with a big selection in a narrow niche, such as laptop cleaning products, videocams, computer cables, laptop bags, disk drives, and so on. Whereas an electronics superstore might sell ten different laptop bags, the laptop-bag booth probably had 60 different ones. Not so different from the Beijing Zoo. This is why I love shopping in Beijing. It really is a shopper’s paradise.

Sellers want brands so that they can charge more (and perhaps feel better about themselves). Buyers, unless they want to show off, want commodities for low cost and convenience. Nobody brags about what airline they flew. Until airlines start giving away cool t-shirts and tote bags, Andrew’s idea makes sense.

Plagiarism in Chinese Academia

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I was glad to read this article in the Christian Science Monitor about an attempt to reduce plagiarism among Chinese professors.

The latest fraud to rock Chinese academia centers on He Haibo, an associate professor of pharmacology at the prestigious Zhejiang University. [Not very prestigious, since I haven’t heard of it.] He now admits to copying or making up material he submitted in eight papers to international journals and has been fired, along with the head of his research institute. The affair has drawn particular attention because a world-renowned expert in traditional Chinese medicine, Li Lianda, lent his name as coauthor to one of the fraudulent papers. His tenure will not be renewed when his contract expires soon, the president of Zhejiang University has said.

The Beijing Sport University, one of three sport universities in the world, is near my university. It has a Ph.D. program. To get a Ph.D. you must submit three books! As one of their graduate students told me, no way you can do that without plagiarism. He had noticed that a book by one of his professors was simply a copy of another book.

This paragraph, however, amused me:

Stearns [a Yale professor who taught at Beijing University] says that he and his colleagues at Yale “do not believe letters of recommendation from Chinese professors, for we know that many of them are written by the students themselves,” and merely signed by their teachers.

He thinks letters from Berkeley are different? My system for writing letters of recommendation was more nuanced, after I learned that students had great trouble writing these letters. I met with the student and we wrote it together. This had two great advantages: 1. It showed the student in the best possible (i.e., truthful) light. 2. It was easy. Trying to write a good letter by myself was tough.

Thanks to Sheila Buff.

What to Do about Beijing Air

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Beijing’s dirty air is easily the worst thing about living there. You might think what to do about it is obvious. Many people do, including this man who wants to sell the expensive air filter he bought:

I remember the day IQair Sales Rep Justin Shuttleworth came to my place [in Beijing] to give me a demo. This guy has the easiest job in the world. All he does is come with his little air quality measuring device, show you how bad the air you are breathing is in your apartment (indoor air is sometimes worse than outdoor air for those who don`t know), and as the minutes go by, you literally see the amount of particles in the air go down, until it’s basically nil. This was the first time that I could actually smell the difference.

This is from an email list I’m on.

I got the same demo. But it had the opposite effect: It made me not want to buy the IQair filter.

The air coming out of the IQair filter was very clean, yes. But there was only so much it could do. More dirty air was always coming into my apartment and no matter how high (= noisy) they ran the machine the overall level of dirt was no more than cut by 2/3rds. I already had an air filter. The air it produced wasn’t quite as clean as air from the IQair filter but it was still much much cleaner than the intake air. The IQair machine cost about 11,000 RMB. My filter had cost about 1,000 RMB. For 1,500 RMB I could buy a bigger version of what I already had, an air filter that cleaned twice as much air per minute as the IQair machine while producing roughly the same amount of noise. Its output was slightly dirtier than the output of the IQair machine but the overall cleaning effect — the reduction in dirt — was much greater. I ended up getting two of the 1,500 RMB filters.

I think of this demo when I hear someone talk about how this or that traditional diets is better than our modern diet. They make a simple point: People who eat the traditional diet are healthy, people who eat the modern diet are unhealthy. Just as the IQair demo guy has “the easiest job in the world.” They inevitably conclude: Eat the traditional diet or at least closer to it. Just as the conclusion of the demo is supposed to be: Buy an IQair filter. It seems so simple.

But it isn’t so simple. Eating the traditional diet isn’t easy, just as the IQair filter isn’t cheap. Maybe their abstraction — their description — of the traditional diet leaves out something important. Just as the IQair people do not measure cleaning power per decibel, which turns out to be what matters. (I traded air pollution for noise pollution. I wanted the best deal possible.)

If you read Good Calories Bad Calories you may remember the Canadian anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson who spent many months with Eskimos eating what they ate. He came back and told the world “you can eat only meat.” In his conclusions and subsequent field experiment, he ignored the fact that the Eskimos ate a lot of fermented meat.

Beijing Shopping (stuff easy to get in Beijing but not Berkeley)

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Jane Jacobs said that one measure of a healthy economy is the choice it provides. A healthy economy provides abundantly at affordable prices; an unhealthy economy does not. Another sign of economic health, she said, is innovation: A healthy economy includes a constant stream of new products — nothing lasts forever. People in Norway are far richer than people in China right now, but what will Norwegians do when the oil runs out?

In contrast, my Beijing shopping revealed that Chinese entrepreneurs have been able to develop products that the rest of the world will want to buy.

1. Electric bikes. They’re everywhere in Beijing. They cost $200-$400 and a few cents per mile, far cheaper than gas. I would have brought one back to Berkeley but inability to fix it stopped me.

2. Keyboard covers for laptops. Transparent silicone plastic. Easy to clean. How did I live without one? These are a new product in Beijing, actually, but they are very cheap, about $1. I can find them for sale on the internet for about $15.

3. Cordless floor sweepers. They use a rotating brush to clean the floor instead of a air pump, as a vacuum cleaner does. That they are cordless makes them very easy to use. In Beijing they are obvious and attractive; I bought two and brought one back to Berkeley. In America I’d never seen them for sale but after I knew they existed I managed to find an unattractive one in Berkeley hidden deep in a hardware store. The price (about $50) was roughly the same in Beijing and Berkeley, except the Beijing models are much nicer.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three products are “environmental” broadly conceived. Beijing air is dirtier than Berkeley air; my keyboard cover and my floors get dirty a lot faster in Beijing than in Berkeley. I think they are a sign of hugely-important things to come — China inventing and selling the products we need for a cleaner world. It’s been called the next industrial revolution; a better name would be the second half of the industrial revolution in which we clean up the mess left by the first half. As Jane Jacobs often said, the problem is not too many people, the problem is the undone work.

Beijing Shopping (the Beijing Zoo)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A Beijing friend of mine prefers to shop in Hong Kong, where clothes are cheaper than in Beijing. If you must shop for clothes in Beijing, she said, go to the Beijing Zoo. She meant a cluster of stores near the zoo.

When the movie Titanic came out, and I knew it cost a lot to make, I thought I’d lose money if I didn’t buy a ticket to see it. For the first time since Titanic I had a similar feeling: At the Beijing Zoo prices were so low it felt like losing money if I didn’t buy something.

On seven floors there were hundreds of shops, each crammed with some clothing item: dresses, scarves, shoes, jackets, pants, shirts, and so on. More shoes than anything else. (Few socks.) I wanted to buy shirts but the shirt selection was poor, consistent with the fact that the shirts I already have are from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. But because I could buy a $6 shirt that would cost $80 in America, I bought a few anyway. I was happier with the shoes I bought ($10 here, $100 in America).

I love shopping (but alas dislike owning) and especially love Chinese shopping because the sticker price is often just a starting point. It is like adding spices to food. At the first shoe vendor, the quoted price for shoes I liked was $40. I got up to leave. What’s your lowest price? I asked. $30. I started to leave. What’s your price? she asked. What’s your lowest price? I repeated. As I left, the price went down to $20. That’s your lowest price? I asked. Yes, she said, what’s your price? That was helpful. With other vendors, I started at $7 and gradually increased my offers to $10, at which point they were accepted — but only if I was leaving. Sometimes the sticker price was the actual price. For a jacket advertised at about $14 I paid about $14, even though another stall a few feet away had the same thing. I went back and forth between the vendors and $14Â was the best I could do.

I hoped to buy a winter jacket but to my astonishment couldn’t find one I liked. The student store at Tsinghua has about five winter jackets for sale and I would happily buy one of them ($50). Among hundreds and hundreds of men’s winter jackets at Beijing Zoo I didn’t see a single one I liked. Good excuse to return . . .

Beijing Shopping (photo mall)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

To get a light meter (to measure the intensity of morning sunlight) I went to Beijing Camera Equipment City (official website). On the ground floor were 50-odd small shops. They sold the stuff in any camera store, except far more various: cameras, lenses, cases, tripods, flashes, and so on. Some specialized by brand (e.g., Canon), some by product (e.g., tripods). About 10 stores sold the light meter I wanted (Sekonic L-308S). One didn’t have it in stock, but they could get it. How long would it take? Five minutes. That is, they would buy it from another vendor and resell it to me. The sequence of prices (in yuan) I was quoted was 1450 ($212), 1300 (same vendor as 1450), 980, 950, 940, 930, 920 ($135). One vendor wouldn’t sell it at 920, so perhaps that was a good price. Online I would have paid about $170.

One store had a discontinued model. The meter in the box (Gossen) didn’t match the box (Sekonic)! I would have gladly bought a Gossen but the manual in the box was for a Sekonic.

The second floor was . . . software. Fancy dresses (often wedding dresses), fancy dresses for children, costume jewelry, frames, colorful textiles, displays of the work of professional photographers. The smallest shop sold bags to carry home a fancy dress. All the photography-related stuff that ordinary photo shops don’t carry.