Portrait of an LBX

As I sit and write this, we have already ridden most of the height and width of Shandong Province on roads of all sizes. In case you don’t know much about Shandong, I’ll briefly describe its position in China. At about 94 million mouths, it is the second most populous province. The birthplace of Confucius and Sunzi (author of the Art of War) in addition to countless other important historical figures, and the home to Mt. Tai, the most sacred mountain in China, it is the province where the Yellow River, the cradle of Chinese civilization, flows into the sea. Considering its traditional significance, its status as the home of China’s wine industry and some of the best fruit around, we expected Shandong to be a very pleasant place, especially after dusty, polluted Hebei. Maybe you can then imagine the disappointment it was to find Shandong to be fulfill many of our expectations of the worst parts of China. (more…)

After attempting in vain to resolve the situation between the hotelier and police in Wen’an, we begrudgingly set off on the road south out of town for another late start. Power and politics in China has a way of making you feel completely helpless, and it cultivates a natural instinct for self preservation and nourishes it until it becomes a way of life. This often means that a car accident victim will lie on the ground, bleeding from the head, while a crowds will simply look on. It is tempting to identify the phenomenon as part of Chinese culture, but after observing it for some time, I now feel that it is much shallower than that. Rule of law is secondary to the power of people here, and the legal system is not developed enough in most places in China to ensure your own protection if you choose to help an injured person. If the police are involved and the injured is someone of means, you could be arbitrarily punished because they are looking for someone to blame quickly. If the injured is a commoner, a laobaixing, he likely doesn’t have the medical insurance to pay for his rehabilitation and is looking for someone to blame for the accident (the guilty party has probably already fled the scene), and I have heard of numerous cases of someone stepping in to take someone in dire need to the hospital only to be blamed for the accident later. “I was just trying to help!” is met with the response of “What business is it of yours to help this person? You don’t even know him!” by the authorities.

So it is with this background that I recommended from the beginning of our incident at the hotel to try to stay uninvolved. Morally, it is difficult to watch an innocent person suffer, but in the context of power and law in China, it is much safer to let events simply unfold around you.

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Today was quite the day, as Hebei is quite the place. After last night’s hour and a half local police fiasco at our cheap little hotel, we assumed the whole affair done and laughed it off as just another example of why we should avoid third-tier, middling cities. As we left the hotel this morning, and I got my deposit money back, the laobanniang (boss lady) gave us three apples for the road and said she admired both the courage it takes to be on such a journey and the way we talked to the police as it displayed how much we know about China and that we got out of the situation much better than any laobaixing could have. When I asked her name, she said, “please don’t put my name into anything you might write about your trip. We laobaixing have enough trouble.” (more…)

Today marked our second day in Hebei and plenty of lessons learned. The first lesson we learned was that it is now officially corn season in Hebei. Other than the thousands of Chinese everywhere, the traces of giant industry, the very young forests of perfectly grid-patterned trees in between the industrial and urban centers, and the Arabic signs of Muslim Chinese enclaves, it’s hard to differentiate this place from Nebraska. Ok, so it’s not the Midwest, but there is a ton of corn everywhere – being shucked by families in front of their establishments, or already de-cobbed and drying along the side of the highway for miles and miles (see picture). Even a tax bureau had drying corn out front. I wonder if they’re using it for animals mostly or if here, as in the US, they are selling it to food companies to be put into all their packaged foods. This will need to be asked soon.

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