now experiencing the fragrant aroma of saigon
The mid-stream operators have started once again outside our window. Apparently Hong Kong is the only place in the world that ships are loaded and unloaded to small barges while at sea. It’s much cheaper than using the container port, but can be quite dangerous since ships, cranes and barges are all constantly swaying in the waves.
A couple days ago, I came to the sudden realization that the container ship traffic I’d been watching outside my window had come to a virtual standstill. The Shanghai Express and London Express have been laid up for weeks just in front of the house. Elsewhere in the harbor, anchored ships have been loaded full of empty containers, awaiting an end to the slump that may never come. Hong Kong is filling up with hundreds of thousands empty containers, so the government has proposed stacking them up like skyscrapers in the disused Kai Tak airport. All this as shipping costs are the lowest they’ve been in years. What will happen with the inevitable rise in fuel prices? Perhaps the walls are already crashing down.
I got up at 5:30 in the morning and traveled five hours to Panyu, only to discover that once again, the power was out for the printing company. Not only that, but inspectors from the environmental protection department were around, making sure that the printing company didn’t fire up their brand new 2000 kVA diesel generator. Apparently, a major portion of Guangdong and Hong Kong’s constant pollution is caused by the small generators that every factory uses to compensate for the flaky power. It’s also one of the major reasons that China has now surpassed the United States for deepest carbon footprint. The combination of shortage of power and shortage of labor is a real problem in the Pearl River Delta, and many companies are now pulling out of the area. I wasn’t able to start working until 10:30 PM. I didn’t get sleep until 5:00 AM, having only accomplished a couple hours of real work in all that time.
This is what’s on the other side of that freeway construction. Some of the last farmland around. According to China’s own estimates, arable land is being lost at such a fast rate that this year, for the first time, the country will no longer be able to feed itself. Most likely, the country is well beyond that point already, since much of the arable last is too polluted to be useable. I wonder how life in the West is going to change as China rushes toward becoming a nation of consumers rather than producers.
The countryside around Panyu is rapidly being converted from farmland into factories and freeways (the photo above is construction of the Guangzhou Dongsha-Xinlian Expressway). With the New Guangzhou Railway Station being built only a couple of kilometers away from here, soon even the factories will give way to Guangzhou’s urban sprawl. Hopefully, they’ll at least keep the billboards to remind people what the natural environment used to look like.
