The Holiday Hangzhou

We arrived into a wet and windy Hangzhou today and we should have looked at the weather forecast before deciding to come here. Anyway we booked into a very nice hotel and then took ourselves down to starbucks, had our coffees, surfed a bit on the internet and then went for a walk along the west lake before having dinner and after dinner we walked around the town a bit.
The read on the plane was interesting; a preface in the airline's magazine in IELTS 6.5 English, explaining why the economic reforms in China conform to Deng Xiaping's "Chinese road to socialism" and not, as some commentators in the west are suggesting, to a neo-liberalist doctrine of the sort that we associate with the "reaganomics" of the eighties. In my opinion neo-liberalist economic policies that would, in fact, put the Chinese in the pockets of the IMF and the World Bank and consequently leave them dependent on the west. Now, I have already voiced my own opinions on this in some earlier posts. Moreover, I also don't believe in the "trickle down" theories of the Washington Consensus that would accompany those neo-liberalist policies. However, I also find it absurd to think that there is going to be some magical redistribution of wealth in China once China has sufficiently developed.
Close to the west lake in the city centre in Hangzhou there is a smattering of nice restuarants, cafes and up-market shops and just down the road from those plush eateries and malls there is a sales centre for Ferraris and Maseratis, walking in the rain towards the car showroom we were stopped every ten metres or so by children holding begging bowls sustained in their hope by the knowledge that some money will come trickling down in the immediate future and in the less immediate future all the money is going to be shared anyway.

The picture above shows the west lake in Hangzhou.