The Digital Life

The Digital Life


The View from China

April 10, 2015

Dirk: Hey Jon, it's Dirk reporting here from Beijing, China. I'm just wrapping up the Chinese leg of my trip to Asia. I've been here about a week and a half and getting ready to fly out today and China's really incredible. I'm much more impressed with China than I expected to be. There's a few different themes that I'm thinking about as I reflect back on these days. The first one is the way that China is really the first world meeting the third world, and not just meeting but sort of being totally intertwined with each other. In the big cities, you have big city infrastructure, big streets, buildings, cars. Things generally are moving the way a big city would in the US.

Now, here there's also a lot of scooters, a lot of bicycles, pedestrians, and there's a certain chaos factor to how the transportation moves, to how people move. It has a whole of the infrastructure look and feel of the first world but there is also this anarchy to it, very loosely controlled anarchy, let's say, which is a little different. You've got these big cities, I've been to a few of them now, with big city infrastructure, but right beside them and even right as part of them is third world farming. China's full of farms. When I would take a train over a long distance, it is rural for long stretches, but basically all of it is full of farms, other than when the terrain in the form of hills or mountains was inhospitable to farming. There are just farms and farms and farms and farms, and there, I did not see a single tractor.

It is all people on their knees and hands farming. There's oxen who are pulling older, sort of pre-tractor, pre-combustion engine equipment but then you'll have these farms and they'll be on the edge of or even part of a bigger city and a certain part of that city in a certain way. The interrelationship between those things and the juxtaposition between those things is really, really very interesting. You will in the city as well, see signs of the third world rural areas. You'll have an old Jalopy truck that is just full to bursting with garbage or full to bursting with bamboo or something else.

Even though in the most modernized and the more wealthy sections of the large cities, there still are these reminders that the country as a whole is in different stages of development, very different, very interesting. Another thing that really I'm taking away is that the scale here is really unimaginable. We talk about it a lot, the 1.3 billion people. Surely on the show, we've talked a lot about the size and the opportunity and threat that China offers to the west, but it's only in being here and experiencing some different things that I'm really, I can fully understand. The one that sticks out the most in my mind is I saw a performance.

It's called Impression Sanjie Liu and it's an outdoor performance, so there's sort of an ultra amphitheater. There's maybe, I'm going to guess 10,000 seats in this thing. Apparently, the show goes everyday and some nights, three times a night. Every week, let's just call it 10 times but it could be up to 20 that this performance happens. Now, about 10,000 people, it's in a rural area. It's way out in Western China. It's not near the biggest cities, and the stage, first of all, the stage is inclusive of 12 hills that locals call mountains, these sort of steep jutting but relatively short although obviously really, really tall, many stories high, natural, natural structures, but this stage has also a lake or at least part of a small lake that is in front of and framed by these hills and mountains and then a lot of stage they built on the side as well.

I was trying to estimate, compared to a show on Broadway, how much bigger the stage was, not just what you could see but what they were actually using, whether it be people on it or with lights. It was at least 300, 500 times bigger than a Broadway stage, a large stage, probably the largest I've ever seen.