There was a bit of a problem with the train tickets yesterday and so, for the first time in China, I travelled second class and second class is really quite alright apart from the little kids who were running up and down the aisle making noise as little kids everywhere tend to do and then there was this crappy piped music whining all the way into the carriage.
Of course, back in Europe you don't see so many little kids on trains but rather middle aged and older ladies sitting peering out of the window, chewing the cud and thinking about the sort of things middle aged and older ladies think about and this is indicative of the fact that back in Europe we tend to drive between cities unlike the Chinese, who would usually prefer taking the train and back in Europe we all, especially middle aged and old ladies, prefer our peace and quiet. Anyway, the journey was hunky-dory and we arrived after a comfortable ride, despite the "re nao" and I even managed to read a wee bit and there was an interesting bit in Joseph Stiglitz's, "Making Globalization Work", where he writes about the Koreans moving away from an economy based on rice to an industrialised based economy, when he says that "the only way to learn how to produce steel is to produce steel, as the Koreans did."1 Yes, they did and the Chinese are already manufacturing more cars than Germany and while the quality is still a bit crappy and nobody in Europe wants to buy them at the moment the signs are ominous; the construction, the development, the increasing wealth, the emerging middle class, everything is there and while there are no general laws in history the more I see of China and the Chinese the more I am tempted to say that I wouldn't bet against them and as I said back in Suzhou, while they don't quite get it right or always get it right, they are obviously getting a lot right a lot of the time.
1 Joseph Stiglitz "Making Globalization Work" (Penguin, London 2007), p70
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