China- a small attempt to give you a kind of "feeling"

(received by email: author unknown)

A nice way to describe the indescribable :

"There is a saying among long-time China residents: If you visit China for a week, you can write a book. If you are here for a month, you can write an article. If you are here for a year, you are so confused about what is happening that you can barely write a few sentences.

What is remarkable about living in China is that the number of different explanations and views for what is happening here. Given much of the opacity of what exists here, rarely is anyone entirely right or wrong when they voice their opinions. Do beware the self-proclaimed China Hand, though. Any true China Hand would hesitate to say they understand everything that is going on beneath the surface. Attend any conference, and you’ll hear the most respected prognosticators hedge their bets in terms of explaining today’s China and what will happen tomorrow.

However, there are some people who have done a wonderful job of describing the China dynamic with a metaphor. Jim McGregor, a genuine China Hand who authored One Billion Customers, offers one of the most poignant explanations. “China is all about business,” he has said. “It’s simultaneously the world’s largest start-up and the world’s largest turnaround. It’s a great country coming out of a 200-year slump.”

In a speech I gave at a conference recently, I described China as a country experiencing “societal gigantism.” Gigantism is the medical condition in which people grow and age at hyperactive speed. It is like a baby that is born one day and grows a beard shortly thereafter. And if you can think through the stresses and strains of that growth, then you have an understanding of what is happening in China in a nutshell.

Without some numbers or comparisons, though, it is difficult to picture what is really going on.

For example, according to the World Bank, China is home to 20 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities. Many people think the pollution in China is created by cars or the coal-burning factories, but have you thought about the effect that smokers have on the environment? The World Health Organization claims that one in every three cigarettes consumed around the world is smoked in China. In fact, China produces 2.29 trillion cigarettes each year, according to a 2010 article in Caixin. Somebody figured out that if you took all the cigarettes produced in China and lined them up end-to-end, they could circle the world 60,000 times. That would be a difficult run, even for a non-smoker.

Not interested in cigarettes? What about pigs? Well, according to a wonderfully creative blogger who calls himself “China Mike,” China is the world’s largest pork consumer and producer, with approximately one pig for every three people. Mike cites a Wall Street Journal report that China has more pigs than the next 43 largest pork-producing countries combined. The US comes in a distant second with 65.9 million.

It’s also important to know that everything is not what it appears to be. While Beijing has 19.6 million residents, they are not all above ground. According to the Telegraph, nearly one million people live in underground bunkers. Help for these folks, however, is on the way. More than half of the 124 skyscrapers now under construction around the world are being built in China.

If you are a time buff, then consider this: In China, 34 children are born every minutecompared to 7.9 in the United States. According to other sources, every 60 seconds, there are 227,000 tweets being fired off on Sina Weibo vs. 98,000 on Twitter.

Some facts can help you understand deeper trends that are emerging in China. For example, according to the "China Sugar Manufacturing Report," China produced10,738,000 tons of sugar in 2009. Other official statistics report that nearly 100 million Chinese people are obese. Paul French, the author of Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines Are Changing a Nation, has summed it up like this: “People have more money to spend and so food shortages are a thing of the past – famine to gluttony in two generations – a massive achievement.” Take that a bit further and you can understand why one in ten adults in China have diabetes. That’s some 90 million diabetics. My thanks again to China Mike for highlighting this very important fact.

And if you are worried about sugar consumption in China, just think about what is happening in the beer industry. According to a 2010 article in The Economist, Europe is no longer the world’s biggest beer market; that title now belongs to China. The growth – nearly 10% a year – is all the more impressive considering that not so long ago, Chinese consumers barely drank beer at all.

Meanwhile, the lovestruck should beware: China’s divorce rate is on the rise. According to the BBC, the reported divorce rate in China is 20% at present; a total of 1.96 million couples broke up in 2010, a 14.5% increase from the year before.

And yet China is the largest producer of adult toys, turning out some 50% of the world’s products in this category. It also serves as the world’s largest consumer. And if these relationships blossom, ladies, you need not worry, as the diamond market is flourishing. China has pushed aside Japan to become the second largest diamond market in the world; only the US sells more diamonds. And according to The Economist, by 2050 there will be 60 million more men of marriageable age than women in China.

Unfortunately, raising a child in China may be even more stressful than finding a husband. By the midway point of first grade, students are expected to recognize between 300-500 Chinese characters. It has even been reported on several occasions that elementary students in China will sometimes seek help from university math students to solve their homework problems. And every year, some ten million high school graduates compete in the world's largest college entrance examination – "the battle that determines your fate," as one student referred to it.

And for those of you who really want to bust some myths, try these facts:

China Mike points us to the statistic that there’s a higher percentage of women in China’s parliament (21.3%) than in the US Congress (16.8%). And, according to Guinness World Records, the world’s tallest woman is Chinese. Yao Defen stands 2.33 meters (7 ft 8 in) tall. By the time she was 11 years old, she was already towering over her classmates at about 6 ft 2 in.

And yet she must still look up to the tallest man in China, Bao Xishun, who has been measured at 2.47 meters (8 ft 1 in) tall. He goes by the nickname of Xi Shun or “the Big Guy.”

Want to explain China in an easy way?  You can forget the facts and figures and interesting metaphors.  Just say “China is gigantic. Gigantic like Yao Defen and The Big Guy, Bao Xishun.” That will be enough."

 Remark: there is a box of cigarettes (20 cigarettes) available for a price of about 70 usd in China. The sales figures are impressive....