China: Business With no Customers

Hmm, just a bit of food for thought for today's shorter than short blog post. Sometimes a picture tells a thousand words. The following videos are of the new SoHo shopping complex in downtown Beijing. The centre consists of about 10 high rises and hundreds and hundreds of shops. Well, there were hundreds. Six months after opening, the place is almost a ghost town. In the first video, I take my camera inside the building.

I see so many of these kinds of places in China now. How does it all hang together if nobody is buying or selling anything. I don't know, to be honest. Part of the answer may lie in what some Chinese have told me. These places are just a front for dirty money - places where cashed up Party members hide their cash.

I couldn't help but thinking as I was walking through this place that there is at least some chance that the entire China edifice is going to come crashing down. To be honest, I have had an intuition of this for some time. But I don't like making predictions. Having said that, I would not be surprised if 2012 was a major shifting point for China.

 

The Cool Machine

 Soho at night

The Wan Chai district of Hong Kong is perhaps most famous as being the sleaze capital of the HK expat world, a hodgepodge of kabab shops, pubs and girly bars. There are also plenty of good, “clean” bars and restaurants there to make it a good night out with friends.  So it was that last night I made my way to a certain pub, walked in and sat down at the bar. On a small stage there was a talented Philippina band playing classics of western rock and pop, and I listed in appreciation as I waited for my friends. I was really enjoying the music, when a local Hong Kong man, perhaps my age, sat down beside me at the bar. He ordered a drink and then did what so many men do here in Hong Kong as soon as they sit anywhere. Those familiar with Hong Kong can probably work out what it was.

He pulled out a fancy i-phone-like device and became completely absorbed in it, ignoring everything around him. As far as I can recall, he did not look up once from the device in the 20 minutes or so I sat beside him. Then my friends arrived, and we moved away to a table nearby. We chatted over a drink for 30 minutes or so, then made a decision to move on. As I left I looked over and saw the same local chap at the bar. He was still there, completely absorbed in his device. I seriously doubt that he had listened to even one song the band had played, and he had certainly not talked to anyone.

One of my friends had been told about a certain groovy place across the way, and so it was that I found myself being whisked away by taxi to a quaint little jazz bar in the Soho area of Hong Kong. Soho is cool. Situated just a kilometer or so from the towering high-rises of Central, Soho is very hip and very, very hilly; its short, narrow streets are crammed together below old low-rise buildings. It’s a wonderful and workable mixture of the old Hong Kong and the new. The tiny streets are chock full of restaurants and bars. At night the clientele is mainly twenty and thirty-something expats and local Chinese Hong Kongers.

The street I was taken to was no place for cars – far too steep for that. Instead we climbed some very steep steps, and, after a little confusion, finally made our way down a dimly lit alley.

And there it was: the jazz bar.