China Law Blog

Wow, those words! Made me totally fall for JFK.

I don't know about Kennedyesque (although he's certainly more so than Romney), but I just read a spot-on quote in Barack Obama's book:

"The majority of Americans are weary of the dead zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth. Whether we're from red or blue states, we feel in our gut the lack of honesty, rigor and common sense in our policy debates, and dislike what appears to be a continuous menu of false or cramped choices."

He does the hopeful stuff too, and I'm sure there's more of that coming in the book (I'm at chapter 2) but I thought that was a pretty eloquent summation of what a lot of people are thinking/feeling Stateside.

Hey, just went over and read Jianshuo's article. Well written. Sparked off a chain of thoughts in my own mind.

As Jianshuo indicated in the "We are in a hurry,...art work." passage, slowing down and spending more time, THE most luxurious thing in the world, for beauty and grace is seen as an unworthy compromise by a lot of contemporary Chinese people. Just three hours ago, my ex roomie, who just returned from a trip to west Europe, mocked the slow pace in France, Austria, Switzerland and all, you know. "Europe is hopeless. Look at all these people who don't know how to hurry up!" ,she mimiced, in pride and agreement, the words of her guide for the trip. Now, that guide has been living in the SLOW Europe for over ten years and obviously still hasn't started to appreciate the beauty and grace of not living in a hurry.

Does slowness really cut competitiveness? Think again. Take coating of a mega vessel. If you work nonstop regardless of the weather, you deliver months ahead of schedule but the ship goes into bad shape very quickly. If you go slow, however, the ship will be good for a long long time. Who's the winner at the end of the day?

Now look at the buildings that have been added on China's landscape in the past two decades. Look how badly they age. Look how undesirable a living space those condos from early 90s have become. The cracks, molds in my two-year-old government office building. Look at the nonstop patch work on brand new roads.

If you take into account the much faster depreciation rate of things made in a hasty fashion, a lot of time in defiance of sound technical standards, and average out the total investment to a much shorter life span of, say, 60 years, as opposed to 5 centuries or more, which is not too uncommon a life span of old beautiful creations, you'd see that rapid growth not balanced by care for beauty and quality, is costly and erases much of the good deeds it does to people in not too long a timeframe.

The tearing down and rebuilding of houses and roads can go on forever to keep the GDP growth look good, of course.But I hardly need to remind you of the resource depletion on the poor planet of Earth.

In this calculation, the sacrifice of beauty and grace for now is made in vain. So I wouldn't say, hey, let's wait till we get rich to start caring about beauty and grace. We'd have done too much of a mess to our cities, our Mother Nature, to be able to make a meaningful remedy.

I want quality things that last, now. Quality in design, material and workmanship. Beauty.

Anon,

I know.

Brad Kenney,

I agree with every word, but Kennedyesque.... Nah.

Handan,

GREAT comment. I completely agree. I am constantly working on this same sort of thing with my ten year old daughter. Don't rush your math homework, get it right. Getting it right the first time will actually allow you to finish faster. And in basketball, there is the trick of getting your shot off as quickly as possible, but actually making it takes precedence. There will always be a tension between speed and quality and speed and beauty and there will always be a need to find the sweet spot between them. China's history tells us it is absolutely capable of beauty, just now it is not so high on its priority list.

This is all too familiar: When you are hungry and poor, who has the luxuary to talk about beauty?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

When China is able to not just barely feed and clothe its people; when China becomes a developed country (by 2080 according to the Chinese government China will become a "moderately-developed country") you will see beauty, lots of them.

What do you think of the hyper-expensive prestige projects? What do you think about the, Zhengzhou University front gate, which apparently cost the same as the scholarships for 10,000 disadvantaged students? Ignoring the moral factor, is it beautiful? What about the Chaoyang district of Beijing? The CCTV towers? If they're not beautiful, then why is that?

Inst,
If you are calling the hyper-expensive projects a far cry from genuine care for beauty, I'm with you. It's all about something else, right? Vanity? Wrong planning guidelines?

CLB,
I'm deeply worried at the sympathy expressed in Jianshuo's article and some comments there for putting poverty alleviation way ahead of preserving and creating beauty, beauty in the wide sense. The logic is that beauty undermines efficiency in poverty alleviation and thus, what, hurts the human race? What hurts more? Exclusive focus on speed at the cost of all others or moderate but quality growth?

1: Europe could hardly have been called "developed" back when all those beautiful cathedrals and palaces were being built.

2: Given recent rapid advances in environmentally friendly technologies and the obvious waste resulting in rapid construction with a purely short-term outlook, surely it must be possible to achieve economic development, environmental protection, and beauty and grace at the same time? And have that development, beauty and grace stand the test of time?

China back then was capable of creating beautiful things, China today is still capable. But I think since China has fallen so much behind the rest of the world (the developed world at least), its priority is economic development and its culture is money-crazed. Understandable but sad. I hope China will grow out of this stage sooner and be like China again soon.