Understanding China – Part 7
Tourists visit a lantern fair in Qilihe District, Lanzhou, northwest China’s Gansu Province, Dec. 28, 2024. China is gearing up for the upcoming New Year 2025 with festive decorations and various activities nationwide. (Photo by Chen Yonggang/Xinhua). Source
This is another in a series of essays that discuss some of the differences between the West – primarily North America – and China, and also to explain to foreigners some of the facts of living in China. This essay contains a list of random items that others might find interesting. It includes links to some short videos of Chinese cities. This is the list of topics:
The Scale of Things
Factory Prices in China
More About Safety and Crime
Homeless Beggars
Dangers of Cultural Colonisation
The Scale of Things
Shanghai
China is a very large country with a very large number of people, and the sheer scale of things is sometimes difficult to absorb. As one example, when I moved from my last house to my new one, the moving truck recorded 183 Kms. between my old house and my new one – all within the city of Shanghai. Shanghai is so large we sometimes have different weather forecasts for different parts of the city.
Another striking thing is the scale and volume of housing construction. Each year, China builds enough new homes for about 25 – 30 million people – which means more or less an entire Canada is being created in new housing stock every year. And cities like Shanghai Beijing, Guangzhou, build as many new homes and apartments as are built in many countries in a year. China has more than 100 cities that have a population of over 1 million people, many over 10 million, and more than a few in the 20-30 million range.
China has more teachers than Canada has people. Each year, China’s universities graduate more people than the population of many countries. Lists like this can go on indefinitely.
China has more high-speed trains than the entire rest of the world combined. Trains traveling between the large centers like the Shanghai-Beijing route, often leave every five minutes, and those trains are always full. The airlines are similar. On routes like Beijing-Guangzhou, flights leave every 30 minutes all day. The airplanes are full, too.
When I had my import-export business in Canada, I also had a retail shop in the city. I was contemplating moving that shop to a central office location in the downtown core where it would be connected to several bank buildings. The real estate agent told me the rent was so high because he could guarantee that every month at least 80,000 people would walk by the front door of my shop. But in Shanghai, a friend once canceled a retail promotion in a mall because, in his words, “We were hardly getting 10,000 people an hour.”
I once visited a factory that made, among other things, ballpoint pens. Their minimum order was one 20-foot container. With another factory making a similar product, their minimum order was one million items – and if you wanted two colors, that would be two million items.
YiXing is a small city in Jiangsu Province, famous for its teapot industry. The area has a particular kind of purple clay that is used mostly for making small teapots which, when handmade by famous artists, regularly sell for 10,000 RMB each. That’s a lot of money for a 3-inch teapot. The entire city is of Yixing is more or less given over to this industry, and a huge new factory mall has been built, with 10,000 shops in it, all selling these teapots. 10,000 shops in one mall. I have never seen so many little teapots in my life.
YiWu is the world’s largest supermarket. YiWu is a small town (it’s actually a city with more than one million people, but in China that’s a small town) in Zhejiang Province, 45 minutes by high-speed rail from Shanghai. The surrounding area contains countless thousands of smallish (and some largish) factories producing vast amounts of small goods – hand and small electric tools, umbrellas, bags and luggage, toys, giftware, small appliances, kitchenware, small electronic items, adhesive tape. The products are mostly standard utilitarian items we generally refer to as commodities.
YiWu has the largest commodity markets in the world. Source
With this intense concentration of manufacturing clusters, YiWu has the largest commodity markets in the world. The largest wholesale factory market in YiWu, the International Trade Center, consists of eight 5-story buildings totaling about 5 million square meters and containing about 80,000 shops, each shop owned by one of the small area factories. It is so large that the aisles in each building have street names, and maps are normally required for navigation. To save you the arithmetic, if you spend 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, with only 1 minute in each shop, you would need more than 8 months to visit all of them. And that’s only one market of about 20 in the city. Many markets specialise in a particular product: umbrellas, artificial flowers, stationery, toys, candles, cosmetics, fashion jewellery, bags and leather products shoes, tissue, cloth, socks, lingerie . . . A typical market would be a large building with 2,000 shops selling only belts or costume jewelry.
Shanghai Subway Line 14 Yuyuan Station, China. Source
In China’s major cities, Metro stations are larger than you might imagine, and thus a good place to become permanently lost. Some of these stations interlink several Metro lines and are so large they cover several city blocks, like a small city underground, and must have 100,000 people in them at any time of day. The very large ones have thousands of shops along all the passageways, and so many exits from the systems that you can end up very far from where you wanted to be.
Shanghai at dawn.
The size and scale of the apartment complexes here, is startling at first for a Westerner. There are many apartment communities with maybe 40 high-rise buildings each, all with parks and pools and playgrounds interspersed, and sometimes there are 10 of these complexes in close proximity to each other. The buildings in Western cities look mighty small compared to those in China.
Factory Prices in China
We read much in the public media about companies having moved to China because of the low-cost manufacturing environment, but we usually (and incorrectly) attribute that to low wages rather than to manufacturing efficiency. China’s factories, manufacturing processes, and supply chains are renowned for their efficiency, but often poorly understood by the public in other countries. This often results in factory prices that are so low it is sometimes impossible to believe the information can be true. I recall one time being in what was essentially a kind of “factory shopping mall” where thousands of factories displayed their goods, and where prospective wholesale and corporate buyers could view many products while avoiding the inconvenience of actually traveling to all the different factories. One item that remained in my memory was boxes of AA batteries, the ubiquitous ones we use for small electronic devices. A box contained 25 packages of 4 batteries each – 100 batteries in total – and the factory price for the box was around USD3.00. Three cents per battery.
More About Safety and Crime
Many foreigners ask if Chinese cities are really safe, and the answer is a resounding “YES”. Women are not concerned about walking alone late at night, and street crime is almost non-existent. This is true in other ways as well. I sometimes shop in Aldi or other supermarkets where there are no cashiers; you scan and your groceries, pay with your phone, and leave the store. There is no one to check your bags when you leave. I have spoken to managers about this, and they tell me they have no losses due to shoplifting.
I once dropped my passport in the back seat of a taxi. I realized the loss only the next morning and, while I was having a coffee and contemplating the enormous inconvenience of coping without my passport and the trouble to obtain a replacement, my doorbell rang and the taxi driver was there with my passport. As another indication, a foreign couple left a nice backpack in the basket of a rental bicycle as a kind of test, and returned more than five hours later to find the bicycle still there with the backpack still in the basket. All the other bicycles had been taken for use, but not this one, people correctly assuming the owner would return.
Homeless Beggars
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates that 39,471 veterans are homeless on any given night. Source
There is no such thing in China. There are no beggars to be seen on the streets anywhere. Even in a city the size of Shanghai, with maybe 30 million people, I might see one such person in a year. And in any case, the Chinese would be too ashamed to beg. Another reason is that Chinese are naturally entrepreneurial and independent. An old woman whose husband has died and maybe has an insufficient pension, will go to a wholesaler and buy some bunches of green onions, carrots and baby watermelons and place them on a nice white cloth somewhere on a sidewalk, and sell them. She is there most of the day, people are happy to support her, and she earns enough to live on. There are no homeless people in China, and certainly not on the streets. The reason is that the government looks after these people so they aren’t homeless.
Dangers of Cultural Colonisation
An European oil painting exhibition is held along a section of the Liangma River in Beijing, capital of China, June 16, 2023. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao). Source
Nursing Homes are entirely a Western cultural construct and don’t exist in many parts of the world, certainly not in China where the family is a natural unit and young people typically take care of their elderly parents. Some American firms are attempting to promote nursing homes in China because they are immensely profitable, but the acceptance of these would destroy Chinese family culture in the process.
A perfect example of toxic cultural colonisation was reported in the Chinese media in July of 2014, this being a “house-for-pension” scheme that encouraged elderly Chinese to transfer full ownership of their home to a private American vulture corporation in exchange for some extra cash in their hands and the “right” to continue living in the house, but with responsibility for maintenance and liability for loss. A pilot project involving insurance companies was begun in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Wuhan, where it reportedly met with “absolute rejection” as it so richly deserved to do.
Apartment towers are seen in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen Aug 28, 2015. Source
I must say that reading of this plan made me angry. A home is the main asset and security for all Chinese, and is a legacy for their children after they die. I can scarcely imagine a more frontal assault on Chinese traditions and culture, or a greater betrayal of the Chinese people, than to promote such an idiotic scheme. There is no way this abomination originated in China; this is very much a Jewish attitude, where the vultures and vampires circle the vulnerable, looking for a revenue stream anyplace they can find one, regardless of the social or human costs. The people who hatched this God-forsaken egg should have been arrested on charges of treason, and then shot. Such toxic cultural infections will never end, so long as the American and Jewish vulture funds are permitted into China.
Any homeowner can obtain a bank mortgage on a partial value of a home, at far less cost and no risk, compared to what was being proposed. And most often, if they need cash, they could do this within the family, at no cost and no being terminally infected by the American values of greed and anti-social capitalism. There are enough ways for insurance companies in China to make profits without preying on the elderly. As Warren Buffet once said, “There is enough money to be found in the middle of the road. You don’t have to look in the ditches”.
Xi’an is one of China’s loveliest historical cities (think Terracotta Warriors), where we find a school with one of the finest campuses in the world, hectares of green grass, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, flower gardens, lovely condominiums and townhouse residences for the faculty and students. The school was built with surplus profits of a local state-owned tobacco company that wanted to give something to the community. The firm not only built the school but pays the annual operating costs. Such an attitude from a corporation leaves Westerners speechless. A similar example is China’s State-owned enterprises using their excess profits to build low-cost residential housing. The Americans raise every manner of moral and philosophical condemnation of such practices, virtually claiming it is against the will of God for a corporation to provide social goods at cost when an American firm, if permitted into the arena, could reap billions in profits.
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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 34 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chap. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
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Other works by this Author
Democracy – The Most Dangerous Religion
建立在谎言上的国家–第一卷–美国如何变得富有
NATIONS BUILT ON LIES — VOLUME 1 — How the US Became Rich
Police State America Volume One
BOOKS IN ENGLISH
THE WORLD OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
NATIONS BUILT ON LIES — VOLUME 2 — Life in a Failed State
NATIONS BUILT ON LIES — VOLUME 3 — The Branding of America
False Flags and Conspiracy Theories
Police State America Volume Two
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2025
