9/14

9/14

http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_14?authkey=Gv1sRgCKf237ib4_jJqwE
Some of the panoramas are really nice and should be higher res to enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-7Kpv9iKks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1izQgwPcmuI

8:30am CST
I get up and do a very brief workout and hit the showers. Chen Dexin is still with us, and we're gonna spend the day cruising Nanning as well as checking out Lin Jin's other property in the city. Obviously Lin Jin has quite a bit of pride in having made his way into real estate investing from nothing, so between my mom's and Chen Dexin's interest in real estate speculation and Lin Jin wanting to show what his place was like, we definitely make checking out the spot a main attraction. The theme for the whole day is development and real estate.

In Nanning, there is a hill. And on top of that hill is a small pond. The site was sold by the county and rapidly capitalized upon as prime new real estate. The area was named Sky Pond after that pool of water. When we get there, it's obvious that this is an extremely nice neighborhood. The guard hands Lin Jin a keycard to access garages. We proceed to drive up some very San Francisco like hills. We park and check out the pond. The area around the pond has been carefully planted and a gardner was busy trimming one tree into a Dr. Seuss looking thing. The pond itself has also been potted underwater with lotuses and stocked with some goldfish. Around the top are the tall apartment buildings that are almost complete. Lin Jin takes us to his unit on one building's 8th floor. The building is done as far as the real estate developer is concerned, but his unit is still bare. He's still deciding what he wants to do with it. The views from his front and back balconies are... incredible. Not only do they show a very modern, clean city, but they also just how actively it continues to be developed. Both my parents and Chen Dexin are earnestly intrigued about buying the unit if Lin Jin ended up not wanting it. When we get back down to Lin Jin's car, some girls approached us with brochures. Apparently they were looking to sell their furnishing contractor company on us. From what I saw, about 50% of the units were finished on the inside and being lived in, as evidenced by people or laundry being hung to dry. The other half, possibly lived in, possibly being speculated upon like with Lin Jin's. I dunno if the buildings are being built to the code that comparable units are in the West (probably not, as the construction workers were wearing flimsy plastic shoes and bare excuses for hard hats. I even one guy jump on a leaned pole to get to the second floor of a building under construction, just out of convenience), but nonetheless, these are providing an incredible leap in the standard of living of the ever-richer Chinese middle class. They are getting to move from their crappy apartments into fairly luxurious spots, at a price they can afford. The deal with having a decent job in China is that the tax structure means that you can keep almost all of your income as savings. So give it a few years, and you have a big wad of cash and little to spend it on. That phenomenon explains the explosion in scooters and cars on the roads. The next step is in these new condos.

Real estate is booming and the government is keeping a very close eye on things. I'm not sure if it'll all be effective, but there's certainly tight controls in place. One thing the government does is to limit what pieces of land can be developed. It controls both the sale of land as well as approval of development plans. Thus, it is in strict control of how many new housing units are actively going on in China. At best, as sales figures come in for these units, the central government has an idea of how many people are shifting from their old homes into the new ones. But if, as seems to be the case, real estate speculation on the part of the upper middle class is rampant, then the government might overestimate the need for new housing, which could still lead to runaway conditions it wants to avoid. I assume the intended controls would be ok if the government secretly did some studies and modeling on what percentage of new homes are actually being used as long-term dwellings.

Some prime land in downtown Nanning was recently sold at 2,000,000 yuan a square meter, which is like $30,000 a square foot, which is unheard of. The developer plans to turn it into the tallest building in Nanning, to be used as a world trade center of sorts. We'll find out if that works out in a few years.

As we drove out toward the less developed areas of Nanning, we saw some "crop houses" standing on the sides of the road. The city government had already signaled its intent to move government buildings to this area, so the peasants that owned this land had wisely built bare-bones houses on it. The houses are sound but unfurnished and not intended for living or rent. Their only purpose is to cost fair market value when the government claimns imminent domain. When they're knocked down for the actual development of whatever the government wants to build here, they'll become a cash crop for the clever owners. Lin Jin said that there is grumbling that the government should just take the land and not pay, but it'll probably be treated fairly, as the peasants as a collective can make quite a scene, which the city would not want to reach the national government. If nothing else, I'm impressed that even the farmers have the cash to put on this sort of gamble. They're probably used to it with all the seasons and weather they have always had to deal with.

We take a break from all this watching to have lunch at a restaurant Lin Jin knows. He knows all the places we go to, since he's lived here for quite a while. The centerpiece of lunch is some steamed young chicken. It's like boiled chicken in that the primary source of flavor is the chicken itself. While it's being steamed, juices are collected and concentrated as a sauce. Some salt is added to the sauce. The way to eat it is to put on a lunch-lady glove and pick out a piece, and then dip it into the sauce and eat. It was really delicious. The meat was tender and really flavorful. I think it's in the spirit of a French roast chicken, where the showcase is how good the chicken meat is. I also get to eat the chicken feet and neck, which are huge amusement for me, since I love nibbling all the bits of meat off.

After lunch we go back to sightseeing. We hit up the new Guangxi Sports Stadium, a local bridge, a temple bordering the city, and a private hotel heavily used by top CCP officials. This last place we didn't really manage to get into. We claimed to be wanting to check it out to see if we want to say, but I don't think we were high class enough to pull it off. We manage to drive in enough of it to see how nice the grass was kept, and a couple of the buildings, but not much else. A very young guard gets in the road and tells us to back up outta there, so we reverse the car for at least a minute before we decide to try turning around in the narrow private way. We get outta there.

One note about Chinese family relationship terms:
The terms for aunt, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, etc. differ on the mother's side and the father's side. They also differ a bit between the north and south. There's a particular term for when some cousins have fathers who are brothers. For all other cases, cousins are "biao ge" cousin elder brother or "biao di" cousin younger brother. But when addressing a cousin whose son to your father's brother, the term is "tang ge" or "tang di," depending on your relative ages. Oh, and the relationship applies to female cousins, too. Not as cool as seventh son of a seventh son, but still an interesting partriarchal distinction. The male cousins are "tang xiong tang di," and are guaranteed to have descendants who share the family name.

In the north, one's wife is typically refered to by a term that's not awfully endearing. If you tried to convey the connotation to English, it might come across as "the old lady" or "the ol' missus." In the south, the typically used term is "loved one" or "person I love."