Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

Guangzhou is one of the most advanced cities in China.  It is still about 10 years behind HK.  There are more poor areas that I came across in Guangzhou than in HK.  The quality of food is below that of HK and LA and is more expensive than LA and about same price as HK.  The hotel is a great deal though.   We stayed at a Holiday Inn for about $70 a night.  It is better than any Holiday Inn I have ever seen in the U.S.  Plus this included a great breakfast buffet.  The taxi service is a lot better than 10 years ago and we avoided the disaster where I was stranded at the wrong train station by a poor taxi driver the last time we were here.

The bureaucracy of China is much more difficult to negotiate than in HK.  We had business there that require adherence to Chinese laws and working with banks.  It was difficult but then I guess working with American banks is not that easy now as well.  I would say that HK is way ahead of Guangzhou in finance and banking.  I know that China eventually want the financial center to be Shanghai.  But by talking on the phone with banker in Shanghai, it does not appear that they are up to par with Hk yet.  But maybe they will catch up in the next 10 years.

We did have a free day so we went to my wife's mother and my own ancestral villages in Taishan.  Taishan itself is modernized and so there is a nice highway going from Guangzhou to Taishan.  It took about 2 hours on the highway with a stop at a nice, large rest stop along the way.  So that part of travel was painless.  Once you get to Taishan, the task to find the right village gets more difficult.  Even with GPS, a good driver and stopping to ask people, it was difficult.  There are no accurate addresses and English and Chinese translations of names often don't match.  Seems like all the villages look the same with a huge entrance and a huge courtyard.  Both villages had a courtyard with a basketball court.  I believe that those, along with a narrow road leading from the main road to the village entrance, are built with money donated by oversea Chinese.  My mother in law said that years ago all those areas along with the road would just be dirt and mud.

The houses in both villages are old and not in good shape.  Except the house that my father built in the 1980s to replace our original ancestral home.  That was by far, the newest house in both villages.  In both villages we were greeted by only a few people.  Most of the villages are empty because young adults have moved to the cities for work.  The few old people are taking care of few young kids in the villages.  The fields, which look better than expected, were leased to northerners who migrated to Taishan villages.  So Taishan people, who used to be one of the poorest people in China, are now landlords!  But obviously, even though the draw to move to other countries or HK isn't as big now, the population of the villages are declining as opportunities in the cities are greater.

The old theory of parents "eating bitterness" to improve the prospects of children is long ingrained in Chinese people.  That is one reason why people move out of the country and away from the family.  The next generation of these immigrants seemed to have done well in the past.  But recent studies in China and Hk seem to say that people leaving the villages to work in the cities leaving children behind to be taken care of by grandparents, have not seen success with their children.  Such children left behind, partly because they couldn't go to schools in the cities due to crazy residency laws, have been found to have high drop out rates and depression.  They ended up just as poor as their parents were when the parents were young despite the rise of Chinese economy.  So if the government change rules and allow people to bring the kids with them to the cities, it would mean more over population of the cities and demise of the villages!