I Love China

Firstly let me apologise for flooding this site with election posts that have very little to do with China.  But I have to say, even as a neutral non-American, this has been an incredible election with an incredible result.  I was born the year Martin Luther King was assassinated for his stand on civil rights exactly 40 years ago.  A few years before that, African Americans weren’t allowed to vote or go to the same colleges as whites.  They weren’t allowed to drink from the same water fountains on a hot summer day.  And yesterday, an African American was voted by America to lead them for the next 4 years.  I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the significance of that result and how far America has come in just 4 decades.  And the images of the thousands of jubilant Americans, black and white, celebrating with genuine joy on their faces was frankly very moving.

But now let’s move on and as promised, get back to the business of China blogging!  We’ll start with a nice photo from my trip to work the other day.  How often have you seen one guy carrying 58 boxes of shoes on a bus?  I think my bus route (yes folks, WoAi might be a captain of industry, but he still takes the bus to work) must pass some sort of wholesale shoe market, because for me it’s almost a daily occurrence.   It’s fine when like on this occasion, the bus wasn’t too full, but it can be very annoying when the bus is already crowded.

Shoe delivery guy (the one checking his mobile phone) – the two passengers in front of him are blocked in and have no way of getting off the bus.

The bus drivers HATE these guys too.  I once saw a driver see a guy carrying a few boxes and he shut the door immediately to prevent the guy from boarding and stood up and shouted at the guy in what I can only imagine was very colourful Shanghainese language.  I can see his point.  The bus is for public transport and using it for commercial purposes is in a way an abuse of the service.

In England of course, this would never happen because the shoe retailers would use a van or other vehicle to deliver their goods.  But this is China, margins can be very slim and costs need to be saved.  It costs 2 rmb for a guy to carry the stock on a bus whereas a taxi would be at least 5 times that amount.

Hurrah!  Congratulations Mr Obama and we’re all looking forward to change for the good.

The world just became a better place to live in after 8 terrible years.

When I installed the poll software, I was aware that over use would be a bad thing, so I’ve deliberately avoided the temptation to run polls all day long. However, I think this occasion more than justifies a poll, as a new leader of the free world is about to be elected and I think it would be interesting to see how the profile of my blog readers differs from the American people as a whole, where the split is surprisingly even.

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So, cast your vote here please and let’s see how the results look in a day or so (I am pretty certain that there’s going to be a clear winner here on the blog, regardless of how close the actual election results turn out to be).