The World Gets Taller

"...the world is in the midst of a huge wave of tall building construction, both in number and in size. Some 36 buildings rise more than 300 meters, or roughly 1,000 feet, the threshold generally used to define “supertall” buildings, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a nonprofit organization based at the Illinois Institute of Technology. An additional 69 supertalls are under construction, the council estimates....

"'It is the modern equivalent of New York in the 1920s....'

"the center of gravity today has shifted from North America and Europe to Asia and the Middle East, where supertalls are rising at a frenetic pace."

Singapore Centre in Shanghai

I kinew there were a lot of Singaporeans in Shanghai, now I have a statistic from Channel News Asia:

"With 7,000 Singapore residents, Shanghai has the largest population of Singaporeans in China....

China is also Singapore's second largest visitor-generating market, with Singapore welcoming some 1.11 million Chinese visitors in 2007, a 66 per cent increase over the last five years"

China is the New Texas...

...everything is BIGGER

Beijing airport’s new Terminal 3 — twice the size of the Pentagon — is the largest building in the world....

The developers call it the “most advanced airport building in the world,” and say it was completed in less than four years, a timetable some believed impossible.

No Slowing Down

As the Chinese become more affluent, they are going to start gobbling up world resources like the Americans have been...

China has overtaken the USA to become the world's No. 1 industrial source of carbon dioxide, the most important global-warming pollutant, according to a scientific study to be published today.

The study and two others — one recently published and another coming — agree that China's carbon-dioxide emissions surpassed those in the USA in 2006. That's decades earlier than had been predicted by the International Energy Agency four years ago.

Management Skills in China

NYT article, on visiting a huge bookstore in China:

On shelf after shelf, I could see copies of Jim Collins’s “Good to Great,” Jack Welch’s “Straight From the Gut,” Tom Peters’s “Re-Imagine!” and just about everything the late Peter Drucker ever wrote. There was no management topic, no matter how arcane — the science of H.R. anyone? — that didn’t have its own section.

There’s a good reason for this. In the West — not to mention Japan and South Korea — management skills are a given. Graduate schools of management churn out M.B.A.’s, while instilling the basic processes and systems that virtually all multinational companies rely on. People who rise to the top of companies are the ones who have mastered the art of management. But there are also many first-rate managers who populate the middle ranks of companies. They are the lifeblood of most big companies.

Not so in China. “The shortage of managerial talent is huge,” said Zheng Yu-sheng, the associate dean at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. In the course of my two weeks in China, I heard this refrain constantly — and not just from business school professors. “We are constantly looking for chief financial officers who can speak Mandarin,” said Thomas Tsao of Gobi Partners, a Shanghai-based venture capitalist. “There just aren’t very many people here who have the range of skills you need in that position.”

Besides noting the huge appetite for management learning, he goes on to point out some of the hurdles facing business development in China: corruption, personal interests, relationship issues, and need for accountability.

There must be some applications here for people that want to help Chinese society develop and have management or literary skills that could use them to develop relationships with Chinese people.

Books on Global Christianity

I've only read one of these books, by Jenkins. Martin Marty is well-qualified to give us a comprehensive list like this.

My Top 5 Books on World Christianity
By Martin E. Marty, author of The Christian World: A Global History

A World History Of Christianity
Edited by Adrian Hastings
The fourteen historians who contribute to A World History of Christianity do what no single historian could do with much detail: write about Christianity in places far from Europe and North America, while doing justice to the places that have engrossed most historians of Christianity.
* * *
Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity
Lamin Sanneh
Gambia-born Sanneh, now teaching at Yale, does important work to place the story of Christianity in the Southern world in the minds of Westerners. Disciples of All Nations is the kind of comprehensive work that informed Christians and the community of historians can use as a guide.
* * *
The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Revised and Updated
Philip Jenkins
Jenkins is the exemplar of the "new kind" of church history, which deals with the background to the way the church is "going South." Like Sanneh, Jenkins dramatizes and, some say, over-dramatizes the meanings of this epochal shift in Christian locations and energies.
* * *
The Story of Christianity from Birth to Global Presence
Jakob Balling
Balling, a Danish historian, spends as much time reflecting on the story as he does writing his narrative. Sometimes sociological concepts crowd out elements of The Story, but his work will no doubt prompt others to take new looks at power relations in the churches, and help them assess their direction.
* * *
Christianity: A Short Global History
Frederick W. Norris
Norris knows where the Christian power shift is taking the church, and helps account for it. For Norris and many other historians (including Balling), the global story in the last two centuries is preoccupying. They provide charters for those who will bring new curiosity to the longer, wider Christian story.

They Love LA

More Chinese tourists are headed to America, thanks to new agreements between US and Chinese governments. And when they come to the US, they come to California.

"The Chinese are surprisingly big spenders when they come here, doling out about $6000 each -- more than visitors from any other nation. They also tend to stay longer -- a California state tourism agency study found that Chinese visitors spend 24.3 nights in the country and 15 in California, on average, while most overseas visitors spend about 10 days in the state.

"Big cities will benefit most as the ranks of Chinese tourists to the U.S. grow by an expected 80% over the next three years, to 579,000 visitors from 320,000 last year. As a favored destination for the Chinese and the only American city served by all three Chinese airlines, Los Angeles could cash in the most."

Beijing Blue Sky Days Hit 244

Beijing is like an athlete trying to get into shape by walking on a treadmill yet eating double cheeseburgers at the same time. Polluting factories have been moved or closed. But auto emissions are rising as the city adds up to 1,200 new cars and trucks every day. Dirty, coal-burning furnaces have been replaced, lowering the city’s sulfur dioxide emissions. But fine-particle pollution has been exacerbated by a staggering citywide construction binge that shows no signs of letting up.

China’s unsolved riddle is how to reconcile fast economic growth with environmental protection. But Beijing’s Olympic deadline means the city needs an immediate answer. The ruling Communist Party envisions the Games as a public relations showcase and is leaving no detail untended. Scientists are cross-breeding chrysanthemums to ensure that flowers bloom in August.

Implications of a Realistic View of China's Poverty

China's political stability may be more fragile than thought. The country faces huge domestic challenges -- an aging population lacking any form of social security, wholesale problems in the financial system that dwarf those revealed in the U.S. sub-prime loan mess and the breakdown of its health system. These problems are as big as ever, but China has fewer resources to meet them than we thought.

And there is the environment. With poor air quality, acute water shortages, massive pollution in major watersheds and many other environmental problems, China needs to make enormous investments in the environment to avoid major disasters. Globally, it will be much harder to get China -- and India -- to make any sacrifices to address problems such as global warming.

For Americans, the new numbers from the World Bank bring good news and bad. On the plus side, U.S. leadership in the global system seems more secure and more likely to endure through the next generation. On the other hand, the world we are called on to lead is poorer and more troubled than we anticipated.

China is Smaller Than We Thought

The most important story to come out of Washington recently had nothing to do with the endless presidential campaign. And although the media largely ignored it, the story changes the world.

The story's unlikely source was the staid World Bank, which published updated statistics on the economic output of 146 countries. China's economy, said the bank, is smaller than it thought.

About 40% smaller.

China, it turns out, isn't a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed.

Education is Big Business in China

Here is an amazing success story (so far).

And there is room for many more schools like the SIAS International University in Henan, China.

Nine years ago, Chen launched SIAS International University with less than $2 million, 250 students and a healthy dose of gumption. Today, the school has more than 16,000 students and nearly 50 buildings -- including a Roman amphitheater, French and Italian restaurants and an administration hall with a domed Capitol-like facade on one side and a Forbidden City tableau on the other. A swimming stadium, with an Olympic-size pool, is rising amid lotus and wheat fields.

The school's faculty of about 700 includes 119 foreign instructors, mainly from the U.S. They teach English, history and literature and help students with debate club, cheerleading and marching band -- things unheard of in this country.

"When I left, China was rationing," he said. "Now, it has an abundance of tall buildings and everything. But it doesn't matter how much China grows, it is still lacking in education."

Beijing Transformation

Some nice reflections from this LA Times writer on the transformation Beijing has undergone over the past ten years. From my experience, it is hard for a westerner to comprehend the pace and scale of change in China. It is so unlike anything our societies have experienced or are capable of.

I found Beijing far more electrifying than Paris, unrecognizable from the city I had visited 10 years ago....The truth is this: There was the polluted, awkward, unfriendly Beijing I visited 10 years ago, and there is Beijing now, physically and psychologically transformed.

My International City

In LA, 53% of people speak a language other than English at home.

The data are part of a census report on social, economic and housing characteristics in the U.S. Nationwide, almost 20% of people over age 5 spoke a language other than English at home in 2006.

Some smaller Southern California communities recorded even higher percentages than Los Angeles, including East L.A. (91%), El Monte (83%), Santa Ana (83%), Alhambra (71%), Oxnard (67%), Garden Grove (67%) and Glendale (64%). The statewide percentage of 43% is up slightly from data from a few years ago.

It's about the gambling

Interesting statistic about the differences between the American and Chinese gambling public. While Macau recently passed Las Vegas in producing more gambling revenue, Las Vegas has over 7 TIMES as many hotel rooms, and is probably better know as an entertainment capitol these days than just as a gambling destination.

As the Chinese grow in affluence, will their appetite for the whole entertainment menu grow to outstrip their hunger for gambling?

Macao last year overtook Las Vegas in total gambling revenue, thanks to China's economic rise and passionate bettors like Wu. But although money from gambling makes up virtually all of Macao's tourist-related revenue, it makes up about half for Vegas, which has more than 130,000 hotel rooms versus about 17,000 in Macao.

Trees and Global Warming

One environmentalist argues that a key to fighting global warming is to use more wood products, stimulating the planting of more new trees. He says that young trees absorb more carbon dioxide than old trees.

To address climate change, we must use more wood, not less. Using wood sends a signal to the marketplace to grow more trees and to produce more wood. That means we can then use less concrete, steel and plastic -- heavy carbon emitters through their production. Trees are the only abundant, biodegradable and renewable global resource.

China's Problems are Our Problems

What is happening on the other side of the world will one day affect our side of the world. A long and detailed article in the NY Times.

But just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.

Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.

Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union....

Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life.

China is choking on its own success. The economy is on a historic run, posting a succession of double-digit growth rates. But the growth derives, now more than at any time in the recent past, from a staggering expansion of heavy industry and urbanization that requires colossal inputs of energy, almost all from coal, the most readily available, and dirtiest, source.

Interpreting the Middle East

Some interesting observations in this LA Times opinion piece on the clashing worldviews when interpreting the conflicts in the Middle East. I agree with this quote: "ideology cannot be defeated by concessions."

...the Mideast's central conflict is not territorial but ideological. And ideology cannot be defeated by concessions.

Emissaries also still believe that "the Occupation" blocks agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. In the West, the term usually means the territories Israel conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967....

Instead, the heart of the problem is that many Palestinians -- Fatah and Hamas, in particular -- and even some Israeli Arabs use "Occupation" to refer to all Israel.

Ah, The Benefits of Central Planning

This article in the LA Times points out some of the cultural differences between American and Chinese societies, as well as some of the related political differences. Interesting observations.

It sounds good to me to not have to deal with hearings, environmental impact reports, high-priced labor, etc. Maybe LA would have a modern airport if we lived in that kind of environment! BUT, Americans would not give up their right to "participation," even with the accompanying lack of progress.

Primary factors I see in the Chinese ability to make fast and huge changes are:
1. The people's acquiescence to government action because of their belief that the relative good for society outweighs the personal cost they have to bear for progress. A supporting factor for this, but not the dominant factor that Americans would like to think it is, is their lack of recourse. Americans do not understand this profound difference in worldview and values.
2. The minimal cost of labor, which I would guess is roughly $5/day compared to probably $100/day in the US.
3. The lack of checks and balances in their top-down system, which ensures expedient action for decisions made by the leaders.

China seems little hindered by the pressures that plague transit projects in the West.

Financial woes sandbagged New York's Second Avenue subway for about 80 years until ground was broken this spring. L.A.'s subway system, whose westward march was halted at Western Avenue in 1996, has been constricted by environmental, political and financial pressures.

In China, labor is cheap, the land belongs to the government, air pollution is the primary environmental concern, and political pressure moves largely in one direction -- from the Communist Party leadership on down.

"If the government wants to do something, even if the conditions are not ready for it, it will be done," said Zheng Shiling, an influential Chinese architect who teaches at Tongji University in Shanghai.

Realistic Figures for China's Growth

A respected economist points out in this NY Times article how China's growth figures are wildly exaggerated. The point is not to discount China's growth, but to realize that even at a relatively fast pace, it will take a century to catch up with the US economy.

Using those numbers as a guide, if we consider China’s actual electrical use, which is relatively easy to measure, and do a little math, we come up with this estimate: The G.D.P. in China has been growing somewhere between 4.5 percent (using the average for a rapidly growing country) to 6 percent a year (using the highest rate for Japan), not at the 10 percent rate claimed in official statistics.

The official statistic for China’s overall growth rate is best regarded as an approximate growth rate of the economy of its cities.

The Value of Constraints

An eloquent and positive observation on creatively overcoming obstacles by a software developer, when commenting on efforts to get around manufacturers' limitations:

"It's about embracing constraints," said Chris Messina, 26, an entrepreneur from San Francisco and one of the event's organizers. "These constraints aren't holding us back. They are giving us focus."

Looking for more focus in your life? Pay attention to the walls you are bumping up against!