Cruising the Yangtze and the World’s Most Dangerous Hike

« Return to China

The real fun was watching the Italians interact with the Americans, drinking beer with new friends from Denmark and Australia and Germany, a sense of camaraderie at the sheer weirdness of it all, the breakneck pace of development in China. From hotels to traffic, shopping malls to museums, everything is in place except efficient systems to manage it all. It’s not their fault. It took the west 50 years to figure out room service and credit cards and how to serve ketchup on the table. The Chinese are doing it in months. The opportunity for foreign consultants is enormous. I ask a driver why China doesn’t have a global car brand, since most cars in Asia are made in China anyway. He tells me they do. They just suck. In a brand new hotel, there are cracks in the marble floor. Buildings less than a decade old are yellow with rot and water stains. The government called it “tofu construction” when new bridges and roads collapsed in the New Immigrant Cities along the Yangtze. This is partly due to corruption and the misappropriation of funds. This is partly due to the fact that Chinese labour is cheap, and cheap labour don’t make the world’s finest craftsmen. But this will change, in time, because it’s as if the leaders of China today have just assembled their first piece of Ikea furniture. They took shortcuts, ignored the instructions thinking they knew what they were doing. We’ve all done it. Then we reach stage 6 and that little fix we did in stage 2 screwed everything up and now we have to start all over again, and do it right. When they get it right, half a billion middle class are going to go shopping, and every multinational will turn their greedy eye to the east like Sauron towards the ring. Sorry, Lord of the Rings on the in-flight.

Back on the Yangtze. I got married. I did kung-fu. After showing my TV show to a couple people on our cruise ship the Yangtze Star one night, I became the group clown, and started volunteering for everything and anything. Hence a traditional wedding ceremony, complete with a veiled wife and transvestite mother-in-law. Hence an improvised kung-fu fight scene on the cruise ship. I shared a room with 6ft 8inch Thomas, a Dane living in London who convinced me to visit Sri Lanka. The Star drifts between the famous 3 Gorges, still impressive considering the water level is considerably higher it has been, bringing us almost eye level with ancient hanging wooden coffins left in caves by the Ba people. I picked up a book called Dragon Bones by Lisa See, a murder mystery on the Yangtze that explores the cultural and political impact of the inundation, the world of Chinese art smuggling, and the rise and suppression of sects like the Falun Gong. I could share what I learned, but its better if you just read the book if you’re interested. 40 hours in transit, and I’m ready to go home.

In the excellent documentary Up the Yangtze, which explores the changes on the Yangtze through the eyes of workers on a tourist cruise ship, the narrator tells the story: America and China are driving up the road and reach a fork. Right is Capitalism, Left is Socialism. America turns right. China turns on its left indicator, and turns right too.

35,990ft on Air Canada
Approaching Vancouver

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