Transportation Costs

My students are in the middle of a three-week project that I assigned them. At this point, they have written up a dialog, which they will be performing next week. Because they are international trade majors, I asked them to act out a lunch meeting wherein they would get a chance to work with business and trade vocabulary as well as general usage (i.e. ordering lunch) vocabulary. So one of the things I've been hearing a lot about is transportation costs.

Then, yesterday I went to buy train tickets for the upcoming national holiday. I discovered that the biggest problem with national holiday is that everyone is off. So by the time I (well, actually, one of my students) got to the ticket counter, there were no more sleeper tickets to Guilin (where I was hoping to meet an old friend from Beijing), there were no more sleeper tickets to Chengdu, none to Lanzhou, none to Hangzhou... Would I like to get a seat instead of a bed, asked Jiang Wei (my student). Well, lets see...all of those destinations are 16-20 or more hours away by train, so that doesn't really seem like a vacation to me.

We went to the travel agent next door to the train station to see about buying plane tickets instead. I knew they would be more expensive, but I didn't especially want to be stuck at Shengda for the week. And I figured they wouldn't be much more than two or three times as expensive as the train (which would have been about 300 RMB [about $35-40 US] to most of the destinations I mentioned). The quoted price to Guilin: 1680 RMB, more that $200 US; to Chengdu 1680 RMB. One way. To round-trip, plus add in the cost of a hotel and food for the week, and I would have been looking at an entire month's salary. Highway robbery. Part of the problem is that, at least from the air, Zhengzhou is a relative backwater (although it is a major train hub) and I would have to fly through Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou.

Backwater, highway robbery, these are terms from a previous age of travel. But the fact that they are still in heavy use indicates something about the state of the world; transportation costs are still a limiting factor. Furthermore, it seems that transporting goods or information or even money is still a major source of wealth. If you look at the richest people in the world today, most of them attained their wealth through what amounts to either a bridge tax or to highway robbery. That is to say that they made money by charging people to use some type of transportation, or they took it from people who were on the road. Bill Gates essentially bought up railroad land (intellectual property in the digital world) when it was cheap and made a fortune on it when the track was laid. Many other rich Westerners made their money in investments; they bought a boat and then charged people to ferry across the river. The alternative paradigm in more overt kleptocracies is to just rob the people, whether in the form of oppressive taxes or just taking their stuff.

The Nazi ideology (if they can truly be said to have had one) made a distinction between this sort of parasitic capitalism (which they attributed to the Jews) and productive capitalism (which they attributed to good Germans). This is clearly a false dichotomy, not to mention racial essentialism: without roads and boats and Internet Explorer, other businesses that actually produce things would not function. At the same time, it is bothersome to notice the enormous amount of money that goes to people who did nothing more than own land in a good location or have money to invest or have an army to tax the people. It seems to me that the farmers and craftsmen or musicians or writers aught to see the lions share of the profits. Instead it is the investors in and owners of the companies that make French fries and sell jeans and CDs and books who take the most money home. I tend to find this system of ownership problematic; the system is primarily at fault, not the owners and investors (although I still have major league issues with unethical owners and irresponsible investors; what you do with your money votes much more powerfully than anything you do in a polling booth).

The problem, a problem encountered by a million armchair revolutionaries before me, is that you can't fight a system. The Nazi's ideology was simplistic and reductive, but it provided a concrete enemy; a scapegoat certainly, but nevertheless concrete. There is no such simple solution if you consider the problem in its greater nuances. The Chinese Communists solution was a bit closer to reality: they targeted the actual parasitic capitalists, as well as the Japanese imperialists, rather than those perceived to be parasitic based on some racial characteristics. The problem that emerged was two-fold: despite the egalitarianism of the WWII-era Red Army, a new sort of class divisions emerged; and once the true class enemies had been dealt with; there was no longer an easy target for the revolution.

I'm still uncertain how to resolve this, which I suppose puts me in some pretty good company since thousands of years of thought have done little to change this. In the days of the Roman Empire, Northern and Western Europe was undeveloped because it wasn't on the Mediterranean. River transport was an order of magnitude more expensive than sea transport; land transport was two orders of magnitude more expensive. Hence the term backwater: any place off the major sea routes, even those on river systems, was backwards compared to the open-water ports. This is to a great extent still true. In America, even the major rail hubs and river ports are backwards compared to the coastal cities. In China, development is clustered, as it has been for two-hundred years (since the West forcibly reopened China to ocean trade), along the coast. Beijing is a bit inland, but all the other major development areas are on the ocean: Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Shenzhen... The other major exceptions are Wuhan and Chongqing, which are on the Yangzi (a very navigable river, especially compared to the Huang He). Even though Zhengzhou is the biggest rail hub in Central China (it has the biggest rail station in all of China), it is a backwater compared to these port cities. Hence, I am at the mercy of the bridge trolls and robber barons. And I am going to Xi'an for vacation, not because there were any sleeper beds left (there weren't), but because it is only six hours away, so I can deal with being stuck in a seat.