Waxing and Waning?

New Grade for the Freeway - Yunnan

We just crossed over from Laos into Yunnan, a southern province of China. Two words describe my feelings about coming to China: curiosity and apprehension. I'll explain the latter in another post. The curiosity comes, more than anything else, from twenty years of hearing about the stupendous economic growth and development in China. The first stories I'd read described areas like the capital, Beijing, or Guangdong outside of Hong Kong, where new skyscrapers, factories, even whole cities were being built at a speed that hadn't been seen in anywhere in the world since the period after WWII - if ever. I remember talking to a neighbor from my hometown who took a trip to China with his wife around 1992. He was a very successful businessman back in Michigan; by many accounts the richest man in the county. When we visited in California shortly after their return to the States, he said if he were a young man then, he'd take a quarter of a million dollars and head straight to China. I didn't have the quarter mil but, knowing how well he'd done in his career, I got the point. His eyes saw a China on the rise.

Stories of China's emergence as a world economic player played on the front pages more and more frequently and with greater detail. Maybe four years ago my former boss took a trip to Shanghai. He returned with eyes wide in wonder. He said he'd never seen such a concentration of human energy. The famous quote making the rounds at that time was that three-quarters of all the overhead building cranes at use in the world at that point in time were in the city of Shanghai.

All this is old news now. I read the other day that China will pass France this year as the number four economy in the world. (Due to opaque financial reporting and doctored govt. statistics in China, many think it passed France some time ago and is much larger than officially reported.) Way out here in the Chinese hinterlands, I wasn't sure what we'd see. As soon as we crossed the border the difference was tangible. Laos is the scruffiest and poorest country in SE Asia. China's side of the border crossing felt like Thailand, now a wealthy country in its own right. The road north, though, was rough. For several hours we crisscrossed back and forth on an old road running beneath an under-construction super-highway.

The Chinese are punching an expressway, conceived no doubt in Beijing, from the provincial capital of Yunnan, Kunming - five hundred (+) miles north of the border, down through northern Laos into Thailand. You could say this is China's own version of a 'NAFTA' freeway. For the entire ride we saw small mountains carved out, forest cleared and overhead flyways built to smooth the route through areas filled with tribal (not Han Chinese) farmers who still have yet to run plumbing into their houses. Talk about imminent culture shock.

Seeing the juxtaxposition of something so sleek and modern slicing through a farm landscape reminded me of seeing the final stretch of I-69 between Lapeer and Pt. Huron get completed. My dad worked building the highways of Michigan . . . back when Michigan had an economy that the world envied. Four-lane divided ribbons of concrete crossed the state from city to city. I think his last job was helping to complete that stretch of 69 in the late 1980's. His and perhaps industrial Michigan's swan song?

I-69 Just east of Pt. Huron

I remember being a kid in Bad Axe in the '70's and '80's. Every now and then, the rumor would make the rounds that M-53 might get upgraded from a two-lane to a four-lane divided highway. The trip to Detroit and all the glamour of the city would be just an easy cruise away. Life in a small town would be salvaged from total provincialism.