Train trips in India and China

Christmas and New Year was spent in India attending a cousin’s wedding and a nephew’s thread ceremony. It’s always fun going back to the country of my birth. I love the food, the music, the great value for money and energy of the place. But It’s also depressing seeing how slowly it changes. India’s stagnation was made even more evident, when six weeks later, I visited the beautiful town of Guilin in Guangxi.

Arrivals at Mumbai Airport set the tone. The automated fingerprint check, designed to streamline entry into the country, bureaucratically first demanded two thumbs, then four right fingers, and finally four left fingers; in Hong Kong a thumb imprint is sufficient to gain entry. More ominously, my fingertips were too dry, and like so many Indian transactions a bit of grease was needed to lubricate the process.

It was as recently as 1985 that India’s and China’s GDP, on a PPP basis, were the same. Now China’s is more than double India’s. And the gap feels widest in infrastructure.

The six hundred kilometre journey from Shenzhen North to Guilin, on China’s marvellous new high-speed train, takes just over three hours. It’s as good as the Eurostar, or the Japanese Shinkansen except cleaner and cheaper. The round trip cost just US$100 (plus US$20 booking fee to approved reseller China DIY travel – which provided useful videos of the station layout and a reassuring customer service function). The tickets are fairly easy to buy online. Unbelievably, China’s first 70 miles of high speed line was built just ten years ago – in time for the Olympic Games; now there are over 16,000 miles of track crisscrossing the country. China has two thirds of the world’s entire length of high-speed track. By way of comparison the USA (roughly the same size as China) rail company Amtrak operates 21,000 miles of rail, none high speed – built over 150 years!

Chinese High Speed CRH2C clone of the E2-1000 Shinkansen – my inner trainspotter is freed

I travelled from Mumbai to Pune by train for New Year, much to the amusement of my relatives. Most of them were familiar with the concept of railways…some had even used them in their youth before planes took off…so to speak. Usually they go by road. Mumbai-Pune is a distance of 150 km and takes just a couple of hours on the new Expressway. Taxis are affordable and there are many different classes of coach. I made the train journey around twenty years ago. The only discernible change was nomenclatural: Mumbai’s stunning Indo-gothic railway station is now Chhatrapatti Shivaji Terminus (CST), not Victoria Terminus (VT). Not before time – fifty years late which is par for the course for Indian Railways.

I’d left it too late to book online so I had to go to Dadar station to buy my return ticket. Indian Railways has 1.5 million employees, the role of most of whom was seemingly to frustrate my journey. I speak pretty good Marathi, but even so I found myself sent from one room to another, one queue to the next, struggling to make sense of their Byzantine system of reservations and quotas necessary to sit on an inter-city train. I finally secured a Tatkal ticket, a special quota released just the day before travel, for the journey to Pune. The clerk told me the best she could get me for the return leg was a weight-listed ticket which meant there was no guarantee of a seat. She recommended I book online next time. The process took over two hours. Somewhat uncharitably, I told her there was a place in Hell reserved for staff working in IR. The price of the train ticket even, with the Tarkal surcharge, was around Rs700. Barely £7.80 one way. And therein lies the problem.

Railways need investment. But, poor Indians need cheap fares. How to bridge this political junction? In China the high-speed service doesn’t displace the cheap, slow service; it augments it. The trains run above the standard lines, elevated sometimes two storeys above ground – transport’s nod to the old TV show Upstairs, Downstairs.

The chasm in development between India and China isn’t a private sector, versus public sector issue. Both countries’ railways are state owned. Nor is a story about Indian bureaucracy, China Railway employs 2 million people, many of whom occupy make-work jobs like scanning luggage, or standing outside stations officiously demanding to see passports. India and China governments well understand Idle hands are the devil’s workshop and use their state owned enterprises to remedy this.

In my novel The Rising Tide, the UK government mandates “designated jobs” which are reserved for humans, and which businesses are not allowed to mechanise or computerise. Though the novel is sci-fi,  this detail isn’t made up; it is simply telling is as it is in Asia.

China differs from India because its leadership have a plan about how to modernise and are ruthlessly implementing it. In Yangshuo, we met a European businessman who’d settled in Guilin and owned a DNA testing company. Originally he hired other westerners, but slowly visas of less skilled staff were being rescinded and the workforce sinified. As with China’s nuclear power stations and high-speed trains, Western of Japanese designs are studied and then copied. Just because Trump’s a jerk, it doesn’t mean he’s wrong on everything. China allows favoured state owned companies to borrow on a massive scale so they can modernise. Maybe the Chinese economy will go belly up when the debt goes sour, but the infrastructure being built is real.

Indian government agencies seem to be in thrall to their political masters to such an extent they have lost sight of why they exist. A couple of stories illustrate the contrast. One friend who recently returned to India from Hong Kong told us about Mumbai’s new monorail which ran past her window. It was decades in the making, and the design so badly conceived the twists and turns in the track mean it can only operate with four coaches, too few for the volumes of people Indian public transport is obliged to carry. The advert below was the front page of a major Indian newspaper. Why should a power company operating in a south Indian state decide to give away electricity for free to farmers? And why pay top dollar to advertise its political scheming in a Mumbai paper?

While we were in India, there was a tragic fire in a swanky nightclub and 14 young people died. The rooftop restaurant had been warned many times it breached fire safety regulations, but no enforcement action was taken; the municipal authorities staff either bought off, or too lazy to do their jobs. (Curiously Maya and I were in the mills complex earlier that evening, but weren’t cool enough to get in.)

The Indian private sector is thriving. On the trip back I used a mixture of Uber-Pool, local railway, private bus and Mumbai local train. The Uber-Pool and private coach were realistically priced, punctual and offered excellent service. The coach company located its station next to the Expressway junction, from a restaurant it owned, avoiding the terrible traffic jams afflicting Indian cities, and ensuring a second stream of income.

The Indian malaise is wonderfully exposed in my friend Victor Mallet’s new book River of Life, River of Death that puts paid to any notion that a stalled economy at least provides the natural environment some respite. Instead, decades of incompetence and population growth have poisoned, over-abstracted and defiled India’s holiest river.

Will I go by train again in India? Almost certainly. The view all along the route is breath-taking. It traverses Navi-Mumbai, climbs 600m up the Western Ghats to the tourist town Lonavla before entering the Deccan plateau. The journey is slow,  3.5 hours to travel the 150 km, but fun. I love the samosas and cutlets, and conversations. Indian travellers are anyway curious, doubly so hearing my so-so Marathi. In three hours you can become curiously intimate with these strangers you’ve never met, and will never meet again. And as Victor’s book points out, during the 2013 Kumbha Mela, Indian civic authorities displayed their quixotic genius, organising a clean and safe celebration enjoyed by millions of people in the largest human gathering ever. There is still hope for India.

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Review – Amitav Ghosh’s “The Great Derangement – Climate Change and the Unthinkable”

Ghosh’s non-fiction, short book on climate change The Great Derangement is a departure from his forte – the great Asian historic novel. It has all the classic Ghosh hallmarks with meticulous research: instancing the use of coal, oil and gas in pre-colonial Burma and China; a keen understanding of science previously revealed in his novel The Calcutta Chromosome; and the virtuoso use of language we expect from him.

The question the novel poses is why literature has been so perfunctory in its engagement with climate change. The evidence of clear-and-present danger from climate chaos has been with us for decades. As Ghosh observes, first hand in the case of a Delhi tornado, extreme weather episodes are becoming more common place despite their statistical non-likelihood. This could provide a human backdrop for any budding author of climate change fiction.

Ghosh’s explanation of literature’s silence is one of artistic viewpoints and time-scales. Classic novels have a small number of actors and the action occurs over periods extending from a few days to a few decades. Few novels attempt to handle people en masse or engage with time frames of centuries which is the horizon over which the impact of heightened greenhouse gas levels will fully manifest. Would Life in a Gulag been as successful as A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?

But, according to Ghosh, few authors have attempted the great climate novel. Ghosh’s list – Atwood, JG Ballard, McEwan, Le Guin, Lessing – puzzled me because scarcely any of the books listed were about climate change, they were largely big literary figures’ journeyman efforts at dystopic/alt-future novels. For instance, JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) quite understandably given its vintage doesn’t go into the science of why London is submerged. Lessing’s excruciating Canopus series uses sci-fi to unsuccessfully examine many social issues aside from climate change. McEwan’s Solar is a “McEwan” book starring a scientist working on solar energy. You could search and replace “solar” with “herpetology” and not notice any disruption to the plot.

Novels have engaged with climate change. My own novel The Rising Tide is more firmly rooted in climate science, in its consideration of the aftermath of collapsing Greenland ice-shelves, albeit fast-forwarded, seen through a teenage prodigy’s eyes. Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 writes of a post-sea level rise world which engages with how the human spirit will continue, after the climate fall. The YA book After Tomorrow talks about by refugee flows and monetary collapse triggered by climate change.

The last section of Ghosh’s book is a quirky textual analysis of two decidedly non-fiction documents produced in 2015, the hottest year on record, Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Si’ and the UN-FCCC’s Paris Agreement. Literature’s disengagement is all too evident 2016’s Booker was awarded to a book about someone selling weed and water-melons!

For someone like me who works on climate change and energy issues as an economist, policy wonk and author the book was a fascinating exposure to some different perspectives on familiar material. Ghosh’s main weakness was the incomplete efforts to engage with the sci-fi genre which is the style of literature that best engages with long term social issues.  Thoroughly recommend.

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A week without plastic

Jo Ruxton, who helped set up WWF-Hong Kong’s marine programme some years ago, was in town in October and November helping our plastic litter campaign. After leaving WWF she worked with the BBC, and after that produced the excellent award-winning environmental movie, A Plastic Ocean, about the existential risk being posed by plastic litter.

Some factoids from the film: globally 300 million tonnes of plastic are produced every year, 8 million tonnes end up in the ocean. The macro- bits of plastic can be lethal to sea-life. The film has a harrowing scene of an autopsy on a sea-bird, its stomach distended by hundreds of pieces of coloured plastic. The Internet has many pictures of sea-turtles trapped and drowned in discarded fishing nets, or plastic six-pack rings garlanding birds’ necks.

Rather than decomposing, plastic becomes brittle in sunlight and disintegrates first into beads and eventually to microscopic granules. These are ocean plastics’ end point. Mechanics and physics have done their bit; biology and chemistry let us down. In the film Jo and others try unsuccessfully to find The Great Pacific Garbage Patch a mythical island which has reportedly developed in Pacific 1500 miles from San Francisco – like some evil, plastic twin to the imagined biological island in Yann Martel’s the Life of Pi. But instead of accumulating in a single vortex waste plastic disperses throughout the world’s seas its habitat ranging from the middle of the Pacific, to both the poles.

But it’s micro-plastic that the most insidious problem. The tiny particles enter and accumulate in animal food chains starting from zoo-plankton. Plastic’s surface area acts like a sponge adsorbing and concentrating toxins in the sea water, which leach out into the stomach after ingestion. Who knows what results the bioaccumulation of hormone disruptors in plastics and the food chain is having on our health.

What really hurts is banal uses to which plastic is put – shopping bags, drinks bottles, abrasive ‘grit’ in toiletries to name just three of the hundreds of uses. As Tanya Streeter puts it, “How can a disposable product, be made from a material that is indestructible?”. Plastic cannot be thrown plastic away, as in truth there is no away. To rid economy of this curse we use something biodegradable in its place, or properly manage its disposal: plastic either has to proactively recycled, incinerated or reused. If you want to donate to this incredibly worthwhile Plastic Oceans movement here’s a link.

Like most people who watch the film I ended up with SOMETHING MUST BE DONE feeling afterwards.

At WWF, colleagues in the education team have been working with youngsters to make biodegradable bioplastics we could use instead of the indestructible petro-chemical stuff. These are not new inventions – cellulose-acetate has been in use since 1865, viscose was patented in 1892 and used to make art silk, and even sausage casing, cellophane, used to make tape, has been in use since the 1930s. Maybe the plant based plastics aren’t quite as cheap as plastic, or don’t have quite the same physical properties, but since most plastic is used so fleetingly does it matter?

But I am no biochemist. Instead I tried to manage for a week without buying any throwaway plastic. I am not alone. Most of the plastic I throw away is associated with food. East Asian people are obsessed with food hygiene, and are not over concerned about over-packaging. See this art installation mocking Chinese over-regard for packaging. Some people prefer plastic cutlery to metal because, never mind the flimsy white crap is ineffective at cutting or piercing food, it has the virtue of being sterile.

Most take-outs near our office are sheathed in plastic wrapping, accompanied with chopsticks, and proffered in a flimsy plastic bag. I began my week scouting local eateries that presented food in flagrante – then I asked staff to hand them over to me as they were. Most staff struggled with the idea I might want to take the tuna-bun or dumpling in the doily it sat in. It’s not that they lacked the vocabulary: were familiar with the concept of ‘packaging’, and the concept of ‘no’. It’s the pairing of the two ideas that didn’t compute. The next day I started carrying my own plastic box and things became easier.

Most days I bring salads. Our downstairs supermarkets imports produce from outside Asia so its heavily packaged to keep it fresh during its flight. The local sell a huge variety of tasty, Mainland grown grown fruit and vegetable. It tastes good to me but a lot of local people shun it because of their distrust of the Mainland health and safety standards. All the milk sold in Hong Kong comes in Tetrapak, and most other dairy products come in plastic. But man can’t live on bread alone…he needs cheese.

I’ll return to the topic of plastic waste, and the policy environment, next post…

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Hangzhou and Disruptive Technology

Hangzhou is regarded by many Chinese people as the country’s most beautiful city. Its Xili (West Lake) is garlanded by stunning villas that have inspired artists and poets for centuries. Its delicate pagodas are filled with newlywed couples spooning over the water. The lake’s sub-divided waters are criss-crossed by delicate stone and wooden bridges and garrotted by a 3km grassy causeway. Around it but within the city’s boundaries are lovely restaurants, mountains, many excellent museums, rice fields and tea plantations all easily accessed by bus or bike. It’s always been famous within China and was even briefly capital during the Southern Song dynasty.

But apart from plaudits from Marco Polo it is little appreciated by westerners. For those that follow these sort of things – it briefly made primetime news when in hosted the G20 Summit last year. But few of our gweilo friends knew about it, or had visited it.

Maya and I went there during the mid-autumn festival in October. Along with Chinese New Year it is the biggest migrations of mammals anywhere in the world, no matter what David Attenborough silkily tells you about his wildebeest. Shockingly, Maya and I weren’t Hangzhou’s only visitors that week. Hangzhou’s gazetted must-see tourist attractions were rammed with tourists from seven in the morning till bed-time. I’ve always been baffled by how Mao persuaded his fledgling People’s Liberation Army to tour China’s inhospitable southern perimeter in Long March. Then I saw Chinese
mass tourism in action. Being frog-marched by a flag touting commander is in the genes.

As well as being beautiful Hangzhou has been punching above its weight in communications, trade and technological disruption for two thousand years. Fourteen hundred years ago it became the southern-most point of the Grand Canal. This immense and extraordinary engineering feat was constructed to transfer food from the arable Yangzi water basin to the hungry northern Yellow River basin. The canal is a 1000 miles long and its locks allow boats to climb 40 metres to bridge the different water sheds, thus integrating the North and South Chinese economies which has been so important in holding the immense state together the past two millenia.

More recently it has become a technology powerhouse. Not quite Shenzhen but it is the city where Jack Ma was born, studied and set up Alibaba. This US$460 billion market company is by some measures the world’s biggest internet company. Not only does this company own Taobao the world’s largest online market place by volume, it also runs Alipay China’s biggest online payment system as well as a whole swathe of other concerns including the second largest instant messaging site in China, a share in Didi the ride sharing app that beat Uber as well as my local paper the South China Morning Post. (You can hear so-so talk show host Barack Obama speak to Jack Ma about innovation, business and environment here).

But the real disruption I wanted to write about is the humble bicycle. Private ownership of bicycles was an emblem of communist China. Seas of clanking bikes threading through packed Chinese streets was a cinema cliché. Then it became car choked congestion. But in Xi Jinping’s communism with a Chinese flavour market economy bikes have made a comeback, and they’re shared. It seems a paradox but the sharing culture and other forms of communal ownership are displacing private vehicles in China. Bike sharing is being bankrolled by the tech giants: Alibaba (Ofo), Tencent (Mobike) and in Hangzhou half a dozen others. The industry is hugely competative with network economies of scale similar to online market places, and it’ll take time for the industry to settle down.

Our hotel owner suggested Maya and I download one of the app. (We communicated with him via Wechat’s incredibly effective speech translator.) For the next three days we’d pick up and drop off bikes bikes where we liked. Holding our phones over the bikes’ QR code unlocked it, when we were done we locked the bikes up again. There were occasional hitches but it worked pretty smoothly. It is obviously hugely popular with young and old. In some locations people scrambled for our bikes the moment we disembarked. (Hong Kong’s service GoBee.bike set up by Raphael Cohen is good but still glitchy, without the big-bucks backing of its Chinese rivals, that operates in Hong Kong’s New Territories.)

The same as many other cities in China a fast growing subway system is being rolled out in Hangzhou. Two lines are open so far, another eight are planned. The bus service is already incredibly cheap and effective. Why own a car? This is where the disruption comes in. The public transport system in China combining high-speed trains for inter-city travel, excellent subway for intra-city, and shared-bikes for the last mile is getting to be so good why own a car. It is hard to overstate what an immense impact this will have on the economy. The manufacture of cars, petrol/diesel extraction, their refining and sales, and the allied industries like car insurance, private car hire / taxis are a mainstay of every economy. But in a decade or so they may be superseded by vastly smaller public equivalents. And it will have effects on the topography of streets may change. Cars like wide roads and acres of parking, their socialised equivalents like narrow shady lanes and smaller compact city forms. It’s healthier too providing us around two hours of aerobic exercise each day.

Zhejiang (the province containing Hangzhou) GDP per head is US$12,000, California’s GDP per head is about five times higher. But the difference in living standards is far from correlated. The Chinese city is safer, less congested, its 2000-year heritage rapidly being restored, and had visibly less income inequality at least in the 50 or so miles we cycled. If this is what relative poverty looks like it doesn’t seem so bad.

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Vladivostok: the edge of the Belt and Road

IMG_8141Vladivostok is a city of 600,000 in the Far East of Siberia. Russia grabbed it opportunistically in 1860, back when the Qing Empire had been enfeebled by the Opium Wars and the vicious Taiping Rebellion that left 20 million dead. Russia quickly consolidated its grip expelling the Chinese and transferring people from Ukraine and Belorussia: first by land and ship and by rail once the Trans-Siberian Railway was built.

Even though it’s only a stone’s (or perhaps a Scud missile’s) throw from North Korea, there’s no hint of the East in the local gene pool. Lonely Planet calls it San Francisco of the East, I suppose, because of its steep, low hills and wide roads, but the gaudy, mid-19th Tzarist buildings in the center, ringed by newer Soviet concrete blocks make it look more like Aberdeen or Edinburgh.

IMG_8149I’ve long wanted to go to Vladivostok. The word Vladivostok conjures a far-away, mystic place of exile like Timbuktu, Mandalay or Coventry. Over summer I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich vicariously commenting on many drafts of my son’s school essay. In the book the bleak Siberian gulag is set in a vast open terrain and a bitterly cold climate. The book gets the vast, openness right. Far East Russia is 20 times bigger than UK, but its population of 6 million (and declining) is but a tenth of UK’s.
IMG_8151
I came to the city to attend a WWF meeting about the Belt and Road Initiative. In a sense this Chinese policy is a reversal of 19th century balance of power. The Trans-Siberian Railway was totemic of Russia’s colonisation of the East; BRI’s signature investments are a series of railway lines and maritime routes linking China to Europe, Africa and Asia. Once upon a time all roads led to Rome, today Xi Jinping’s big idea is for Beijing to assume a similar co-ordinating role in the world’s nervous system.

Certainly you smell Asian money everywhere. Our hotel had Chinese, Korean, Japanese TV channels and a single English one (checkout the excellent RT state sponsored propaganda channel: my fave is the witty show Redacted Tonight). The menus and museum proffer information in Cyrillic, Chinese and Kanji scripts, Roman letters is fast vanishing.


IMG_8158I found the contrast between Hong Kong and Vladivostok jarring. The flight is only four-hour but you land in an alien environment. Everyone on the plane was young, Slavic and athletic looking, or they were me. The lack of diversity is at least in part due to Russia’s anti-tourism policy, you couldn’t invent a more Byzantine process to get a visa. The other big difference is Vladivostok has space to burn. There’s no jostling for territory on the roads, pavements, lifts, or restaurants. You can finally stretch your wings. Instead of Hong Kong’s fastidious maintenance of its infrastructure we have Russia’s worrisome neglect. Outside the center’s conference-friendly ambit roads are cratered and the paint on the old buildings peeling. A funicular rattles and creaks as it climbs from the touristic shore – where you can explore the inside of Submarine S-56 – to the hill-top’s viewing point. The people have so much environment, trashing it doesn’t seem to matter. Unlike Hong Kong’s 24/7 work culture, Vladivostok is more interested in having fun on the beach, going for a beer, playing football with the kids.

IMG_8131I liked the phlegmatic can-do-ness permeating the culture. Channel surfing you can catch Putin looking inscrutable and insouciant, not harangued and shifty like a Hong Kong politician. Instead of a shopping channels, I found a DIY channel where the presenter showed us how to repair a broken pair of glasses with glue and Sellotape (you too can sport the Michael Foot look).

But the trip left me curiously depressed. Vladivostok’s pocket museum reminds us that over the last 35,000 years the fertile lands were denuded of mammoths and the other megafauna by the aborigines: Udege. These were conquered by dynasties of Chinese, white Russian, communist USSR, Japanese finally reverting to Russia. Does wildlife have a chance within Xi Jinping’s Ecological Civilisation? My excellent WWF colleagues helped rescue a tiny Siberian community of Amur Tiger from extinction, as part of our wider Tx2 programme. Can the WWF network reverse the millennia long trends for development to obliterate wildlife and worsen climate change? I hope so.

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