pumpkinstrokemarrow

First, it seems that the Great Wall of China is not a great wall at all. It is a wave of walls of various shapes and sizes built over some hundreds of years. Furthermore, contrary to popular wisdom it is unlikely that you could see many of them from the moon as they have weathered into the landscape to the point of invisibility.

Second, the life of a village near Peking is more like the life of a village near London than I expected. People are a lot poorer. But they do have cell phones, nearly all the children have left in search of the better life, there is village politics complete with scandals about their version of planning permission, they do have yuppies buying second homes and they do have fake restaurants selling genuine country food like your mother used to make for the city folk on days out. Just like we do. Nor had I realised that Peking is in the far north of China, with the plain it sits in fringed to the north west by mountains. A bit like Turin only rather larger.

Third, the life of everyone involved in a small factory in south China is rather precarious. In the sense that the competition is ruthless and everyone involved plays to win. The bosses are out to extract the most they can out of the workers and the workers are out to extract the most they can out of the bosses, with the game being played out with rather less rules than we seem to need these days. And most people are prepared to work outrageous hours in outrageous conditions in order to better themselves. What chance to we have at kettle making against people like this?

But the overall tone is optimistic. There are all kinds of problems, not least the very large number of very poor people, but things are getting better. The country is getting richer and people will play along as long as it carries on doing that.

Unlike the dismal tone of two articles in roughly the same space in a recent NYRB. One about the condition of Russia, which the article thinks is more or less in the grip of a more or less corrupt and certainly overblown security service. Maybe not as violent as the security service under previous management but probably more greedy. Also riven by internal feuds, presumably about division of spoils. The other about the insecurity of a regime in China which finds it hard to be honest and open about the horrors of fifty years ago, which sends decent people who decently dissent to jail and which spends huge amounts on other aspects of internal security - something which goes there under the name of stability maintenance. About a country where an awful lot is wrong and which might easily pop-off.

Who knows? The US was a rather rough and ready place 150 years ago and look where they are now.

But I do know that educating people in this country about kettles can be difficult. Someone was reported in TB as explaining that some factory workers in Liverpool were resisting management attempts to cut their pay. So I say, well, if the factory workers in Liverpool want to be paid ten times as much as factory workers in Wenzhou, the kettles they make are going to cost ten times as much, no-one will buy them and the factory will go bust. Is that the outcome we want? Answer: just stop the Chinese kettles coming in then everything will be OK. We can pay ourselves as much as we want. At which point I turn to football in desperation.

There seemed to be no chance of getting through with the point that as a trading country in an open trading world, we are in for a bad time if we persist in paying ourselves a lot more than other people. Particularly other people from places with very large numbers of very poor people. Clearly not cut out to be a politician.