Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [88]
The restaurant we entered was encouragingly crowded. Kenny did the ordering. “I will tell you what it is after you have eaten it,” he said. “In China, we eat everything with four legs except the table, and anything with two legs except a person.”
“My only request,” said Jack, “is no dog.”
“You don’t want to eat dog?”
“No dog.”
“I better get the waiter again.”
Soon, in a sizzling spiced hotpot, Kenny stirred the meat.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s delicious.”
“Good. This is goose intestines. And those are cow veins. And that is lamb.”
Jack was sweating from the spiciness.
As we ate, we continued to talk economics. “American debt, both public and personal, now runs into the trillions of dollars,” I said. “China sits on more than a trillion dollars in reserves. Should the Chinese Politburo choose to, it could blow up the American economy at will. This is something that is beginning to make many Americans nervous.”
“Yes,” Kenny acknowledged. “But what do we really have—paper, IOUs, nothing. We lend you the money, but we have nothing to show for it. Just paper. Nothing tangible. But you use that money we lend you, and what do you get? Tanks, fighter jets, aircraft carriers. You use that money that China lends you to secure your oil supplies. You get something very tangible, very important. We just have paper.”
I must confess that I had never looked at things from that perspective. But Kenny was onto something. Official statistics suggest that the Chinese economy grows at roughly 10 percent per year. Unofficially, the rate is far higher, more like 20 percent. That level of growth can only be maintained by secure access to energy, and with oil depletion far outracing the discovery of new fields, it is inevitable that for the next decade or two—or even longer should we fail to move on to a post-carbon-based energy world—resource competition is likely to characterize U.S.-China relations. And that could get very ugly indeed.
But perhaps that level of tension might be offset by increased democracy in China?
Kenny scoffed. “In America, you are always talking about freedom and democracy. But China is a different place. We are not ready for that. We have fifty-six different minorities here. How do you think they’d vote? How do you think those guys who gave you the prostitute cards would vote? If some politician gave them one yuan, they would vote for them.”
Provided, of course, that the voting age was reduced to twelve.
“In China,” Kenny continued, “you will find educated people in the cities. But China is a very big place. Most people are not educated. Most people—900 million—live hand to mouth in the country. Their votes would be bought. So China needs to do this slowly, at its own pace. Now, what we need are opportunities.”
Kenny paid the bill. We offered to pay but were quickly waved off. Indeed, we had been warned not to press too hard. In China, the distinction between host and guest is important.
“So what do you guys say? Are you ready to go to a nightclub?”
“Rock on. Let’s party!” Jack enthused.
We walked a short distance to the nightclub. Though Guangzhou might be China’s wealthiest city, this particular nightclub suggested that the city wasn’t swaggering like Shanghai. True, inside the club, there were rap videos on the big screen. A lounge. A bar. Enthusiastic dancing. Loud, loud music. We could barely talk. But it wasn’t hip like the clubs in Shanghai are. I’m not sure why this was so. But perhaps it was just us. Jack went to the bar and ordered Long Island Iced Teas for all. Then another. It wasn’t really my drink, but what the hell, I thought, we were in a nightclub in Guangzhou. I did a yeah, yeah, let’s