Okay, so I’ve made my point.

Driving in China is like going on a suicide mission. You’re putting yourself on the road with drivers who do not care who has right of way, who do not abide whether it’s green or red, who pass at high speeds when we are winding around mountains, who only accelerate when they are headed towards oncoming traffic… need I go on? The list of horrific situations I have observed first-hand doesn’t end.

So, if I don’t have a driver’s license in China. Then how do I get around? I am at the mercy of audacious taxi drivers and reckless bus drivers. Some might call them valiant; I call them foolhardy. Most in China accept it as ‘normal.’ But the fact is these dare devils put my life and hundreds of others’ lives at risk every day.

China is experiencing an auto boom. As more and more people are able to afford their own private vehicles, the Chinese are embracing a way of life North Americans know and love all too well – car culture. This is especially clear in Zhejiang, where wealthy entrepreneurs take to the roads in their Mercedes Benz, Porches and BMWs.

Part of the allure is the freedom to travel without adhering to bus schedules and crowded trains. Another thing is that whole showing off-面子 bit.

At the end of 2007 (the latest numbers I could find) – over 121 million private motor vehicles were registered across China, an 11% increase from 2006. No doubt, there are more Chinese drivers on the roads today in 2011.

China is now the world’s second-largest auto market, behind the United States, with about 8.5 million vehicles sold in 2007. And with so many new cars on the road, the Chinese government has embarked on an ambitious road-building campaign.

At the end of 2010, China had 46,000 miles (74,000 kilometers) of expressways, according to the China Ministry of Transport. That’s just a thousand miles short of the U.S. interstate system.

By 2020, China expects to have 53,000 miles (85,000 km) of expressway. Considering the work is now 90% done, it’s probable the expressways will be completed ahead of schedule. And, this grand total doesn’t even include expressways already built by provincial level governments, such as the five ring roads in Beijing, the extensive road network in sprawling Shanghai and the expressways of Hong Kong.

In this country, it’s now possible to travel from north of Harbin (in Heilongjiang or Manchuria, close to the Russain border) to the resort island of Hainan, south of Guangzhou and Hong Kong. This is a total distance of 2,700 miles (4,400 km). From east to west, a driver can go from Shanghai to near the Myanmar (Burma) border, beyond Kunming – a distance of 1,800 miles (3,000 km). In the future, it will be possible to travel from the Russian border in Manchuria to the border of Kazakhstan in Xinjiang, a distance of 3,500 miles (5,700 km).

The expressways have profound and immediate impacts on the villages, towns and cities it reaches.

Here in southern Zhejiang, the building of the Jinliwen Highway in 2005 connected the cities of Jinhua and Lishui to the eastern coastal city of Wenzhou. Along the way, it passes through Qingtian County, where I am now living.

The $1.5 billion project has made it a lot easier to get around in these parts. And I much prefer taking the straight-as-an-arrow expressway than the old National Highway 330, an old two-lane road that snakes along the Ou River and twists and turns around mountains leaving me with a bad case of motion sickness every time.

Highway 330 changed the landscape in southern Zhejiang dramatically: factories replaced rice fields; peasants became entrepreneurs. The Jinliwen Highway has only (literally) sped up this process, manufacturing factory boom towns along its route. With such speed there are, of course, more accidents.

Today, I traveled to the city of Lishui for some research. Unfortunately, the bus took the old two-lane highways and not the new expressway. On my way back to Qingtian I noticed some posters leaned against the grimy walls of the Lishui bus station.

Describing the photo on top, the caption reads:

Feb 6, 2006. Driver Li Mou, in a state of extreme fatigue, was driving his vehicle on the Hangjinqu highway passing the city of Yiwu, when he collided with a N06590 tractor trailer and caused his own H41009 coach bus to fall 7 to 8 meters in the ditch. 7 people wre killed and more than 10 were injured in this major accident.

Again, translating the caption for the photo on top:

On August 17 2008 at 6:30 p.m., driver Zhu Mou was operating a F14645 truck when he abruptly stopped on the Jiasu Highway about 24 km outside of Suzhou. All of the cars were able to stop and pull over on the shoulder but the FB2399 car was following too close and collided, killing 3 people in the F14645 car instantly.

I stopped to look at the posters for a minute or so, along with a few other travelers. The photos are pretty damn graphic – bloodied, mangled bodies on the scene are front and center.

I’m really puzzled as to why the government issued these posters and why they were at the bus station. Everyone taking the buses are relying on the alertness, skill and caution of the bus drivers and drivers of the trucks and private vehicles sharing the road. It’s one thing to raise awareness and caution against tailgating and driving while fatigued, but aren’t they targeting the wrong people here? We’re the passengers. We’re the damn victims.

Also, with so much emphasis on the tailgating and fatigue – what about speed? The speed limit is 60 km/h on those old highways, but on the way home, the driver was clearly hitting 80 k. He was typical of Chinese bus drivers: Passing on the left as the road was winding around a mountain side, accelerating toward oncoming traffic during that pass, and at one point during the trip home, the highway even became a 3-lane road, with our bus forging a middle lane with on-coming traffic forced to take the left shoulder. And then there is the honking honking honking at other cars as they pass and at children and old people walking on the side of the road. In China, the horn – beeeep! beeeeep! beeeeep! beeeeeeeeeeeeep! – is used perpetually, constantly, all the time, to warn people or other cars to get out of the way. Because in China, it’s you, the driver, who always has the right away.

I got home safe today, a little car sick and a little frazzled. I’m not sure what’s better – leaving your safety in the hands of other drivers or getting behind the wheel yourself and joining the madness on the roads in an attempt to ensure your own safety?

So, as I establish new routines here in this city, I’ve decided hiking on weekends will be a weekly exercise. There must be clear skies and fresh air to be found along Hong Kong’s coastlines and on the surrounding islands south and southwest of Central Hong Kong.

This past weekend, I visited the small island of Cheung Chau – 长洲 – just 12 km (40 minute ferry ride) from Hong Kong. The name literally means “Long Island.”

The Cheung Chau village is sandwiched in between coastal hills at both the northern and southern ends of the island. In 2007, according to government documents, there were over 23,000 people living there.

But like many of the outlying islands, Cheung Chau wasn’t always so populous. It was once a small, sleepy fishing village and a pirate’s cove – a place with renegades of the South China Sea could stash their booty. In the late 1800s, the fishing industry boomed. Trade and commerce picked up, and there was much to fish for. More recently, the island has become an attraction for tourists and Hong Kongers looking for some fresh air.

Stepping off the ferry dock on a Saturday afternoon, I was a bit surprised. First, by the modern conveniences available to visitors just steps from the boat: A Park and Shop grocery store and an HSBC ATM machine. !!!

And then, by the funeral procession that began.

I turned around, startled by the sound of a wailing oboe. And then, family members of the deceased came off the ferry all dressed in white. White, as opposed to black, is the colour of mourning in Chinese culture.

Apparently, a traditional Chinese funeral requires that immediate members of the family wear cheap, un-dyed white clothes; white shirts and pants for the men and white skirts for the women. Over the clothes, family must an outer garment made of thin, hemp sack cloth. The women must wear one corner of the sack like a hood. Men usually put on white headbands.

The clothing is the manifestation of poverty to symbolize that the family has sold everything to pay for an elaborate funeral.

Whether it was because the deceased was originally from Cheung Chau, or not, I’m not sure. But the island definitely has good feng shui 风水. It’s really important to the Chinese that their dead are buried in a comfortable place. On the hike, we noticed a small grave on the hillside facing the ocean. Indeed a nice place to be at rest.

* * *

After observing the procession for a few minutes, we entered the village square, where I noticed a long line up for the island’s famous fish ball. Of course, we had to have some.

Juicy, flavorful and cheap!!! Just about $1 USD for a skewer.

Further into the village, there was plenty of food for sampling. We headed toward the beach and ended up eating our way over there.

The beachfront was small, but clean and sandy.

We passed by this ancient stone carving that’s said to be over 3,000 years old. Its not known who made these drawings. Archaeologists believe the images might be sea monsters.

The fishermen in Cheung Chau and Hong Kong’s surrounding islands were and have continued to be superstitious about the sea’s powerful waves.

There are temples scattered around Cheung Chau paying tribute to various deities.

This was all fascinating, but we wanted to see those powerful waves that those fishermen so feared. From the beach, it was a 20 minute uphill climb through a forest of green trees.

The air smelled of flowers and grass and the sea.

Finally, we stood on a plateau of red granite to see this:

We spent much time staring out into the sea, listening to the mantra of crashing waves along the coastline, and even sat down for some meditation. A few months ago, back in my New York apartment, I was able to feel vibrations coming from what I believe to be my third eye. I have not been able to duplicate the experience, until Saturday, when I sat down on a Cheung Chau cliff side overlooking the green waters.

All that meditation made us hungry.

So, we made our way back down and ended up in a labyrinth of alleyways where the locals of Cheung Chau live. It was dinner time and we could smell stir fried vegetables and the pungent aroma of shrimp paste – an island specialty – being added to the flaming woks.

We peeked through windows to see flat screen televisions, modern tiled kitchens, people lazing on sofas and outrageously spoiled pets – something I’ve noticed to the extreme in Hong Kong…ah, a subject for an upcoming post for sure!

And then, before we knew it, the labyrinth ended and we were out by the docks again. This time, we followed the sounds of clanging dishes. It was dinner time and fresh seafood was screaming “Eat Me!”

So we did.

At the end of May, Cheung Chau’s famous “bun festival” begins. It’s a religious festival, marked by ceremonious prayers and processions that are supposed to bring health, wealth and happiness to the island. What’s great about living in a city like Hong Kong is that such religious festivals survived under British rule, whereas many such practices were banned and lost during the Cultural Revolution in mainland China.

The part of the festival involving the buns is one of the most popular and secular activity, however. The Bun contest not only involves the eating of white, fluffy sweet buns, but also a great physical demonstration in which contestants scramble up towers to grab the topmost bun.

Why do they do this? Well, like many Chinese traditions, this is supposed to bring good luck. The winner is especially blessed with good fortune for the year.

Not so in 1978. Apparently, the bun contest got a little out of hand more than 30 years ago when a tower collapsed  injuring over 100 people. The Hong Kong Government banned the contest after that, but after much lobbying by the festival organizers, the festival got a reboot in 2005 provided the towers were supported by metal scaffolds and that participants used safety harnesses.

I’ll have return to Cheung Chau to witness this myself in a month’s time.

Car curbing in Beijing is slated to last a year, until April 2010.

The “new” rules are a water-downed version of Olympic car controls. Previously, certain cars were banned from the roads starting at 6 a.m. and included the Fifth Ring Road, one of six that encircle the capital.

This one-year experiment post Olympics clearly isn’t going to have any kind of lasting impact. Curbing cars is one very small way to help improve Beijing’s green scene. And it’s an initiative that I think will only prove to annoy many Chinese drivers who have caught onto the American car-loving culture.

A paper I recently wrote about Beijing’s Olympic and post-Olympic environmental initiatives, talks about the steps Beijing took to green the city and the players involved with the environmental movement in China.

It started, with a 2008 makeover:

In preparation for the 2008 Olympic games, Beijing had a make over. The capital was nipped and tucked, as major transformations took place by order of the government.

Thousands of new trees were planted throughout the city and it became cool to sling a reusable shopping bag over your shoulder. Half of the city’s 3.3 million cars were pulled off the road during the Games, while rockets equipped with silver iodide were launched into clouds over the city to induce rainfall. Meanwhile, construction sites and factories were closed down temporarily.

A major media campaign lauding the government’s efforts gave voice to NGOs in China, non-governmental organizations that work hand-in-hand with the Chinese government and whose policies must be consistent with the state’s policies. And many Chinese citizens, from Beijing and beyond, seemed swept up in Olympic and green fervor.

But these environmental efforts were only temporary; part of a massive (and very expensive, state agencies quoted nearly 100 billion RMB dedicated to Beijing’s green initiatives) campaign in which the role of the NGO in China and the voice of the Chinese citizen remained just as hazy as the smog that continues to plague Beijing skies today.

During the Games last year in August and immediately afterward, Beijingers reported more blue skies, and seemingly cleaner air. But the haze and smog returned to the city as soon as anti-pollution regulations were lifted at the end of the Paralympics Games in September.

“Some of those efforts clearly have long-term implications for the environmental health of Beijing but by and large, what we saw in the immediate run up to the Olympics were short-term stop gap measures,” said Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

 “It seems to me pretty clear that they haven’t had any significant up take in environmental quality in air quality in Beijing since the Olympics. They’ve had good days, they’ve had bad days. The pattern has been pretty much the same as it has been in the past,” she said.

Michael Zhao, once a university student in Beijing and now a multimedia producer at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, agreed. 

“Sometimes there are pretty blue sky days and I have seen that there were a lot more blue sky days over the Olympic period,” he said. But “we’re still going to see a lot of really smoggy days, and by smoggy I mean you can’t see much out of your apartment window if you’re say 10 stories or higher. There’s this soupy, filthy air hanging over the whole city.”

Despite the inescapable smog hanging literally in front of citizens’ noses, it is one of the environmental concerns they might feel powerless to change. In a survey conducted in January by the China Environmental Culture Promotion Association, a non-profit organization funded by the Ministry of Environment Protection, 80 percent of the respondents felt China’s environment was in bad shape and more than half of the respondents were dissatisfied with government attempts to solve environmental problems. The respondents, nearly 10,000 residents in 31 major cities, reported their top environmental concerns not to be smog, but to be garbage, noise and pets.

Smog is formless, ambiguous, intangible, and therefore, seemingly unsolvable. You can’t pick up with your hands, and put it away in a landfill. And while there is a desire from Beijingers to have improved air quality, they also might not be willing to make the necessary trade offs to do so, such as limiting driving or having mandatory factory closures.

“On the one hand they want more clean air days but on the other, they’re not really giving up the urban conveniences that are, quite frankly, a large portion of the contribution to the problem,” said Zhao.

But, he admitted, the fault does not lie entirely with the citizens.

“The government hasn’t done a good enough job creating enough infrastructure like subway lines or bus lines to provide a really convenient public transportation system. It’s just a catch up game to provide a certain level of infrastructure for cities, while still you’re having people buying cars.”

Steven Andrews, an independent environmental consultant who spent several years in China, said blaming drivers was one way the government dodges responsibility for failing to enforce strict standards on factories and power plants.

“One of the things that was discouraging was environmental officials putting blame on the growing middle class for air pollution problems,” he said. “People can have an impact on air quality … but the vast majority of air pollution comes from the heavy trucks, the unregulated coal fire power plants, factories, and construction sites. Banning and putting blame on one group is not the solution.” …

The essay goes on to talk about the status of NGOs in China, which aren’t non-governmental at all. They should be called GNGOs – governmental-non-governmental organziations. Legal and institutional constraints have stifled growth of advocacy groups, civic organizations and foundations. The state acts as the (G)NGO’s supervisor and officiates, approves and oversees its operations. GNGOs also have a hard time starting up without access to a lot of funding.

Foundations, for example, are required to have millions of RMB to establish themselves in China. Large international NGOs can front the money, but small grassroots groups can’t.

GNGOs are also not allowed to raise funds from the Chinese public. And, when many GNGOs have trouble finding a sponsor, they often resort to registering as a company instead and are then subject in higher taxes.

“I think most grassroots organization, particularity those that signed on to be the advisors to the Olympics in 2001 were disappointed with what transpired,” said environmental expert Elizabeth Economy. “I think it was really a missed opportunity. They promised a green Olympics and they had seven, eight years to deliver on one. It was a real opportunity for Beijing to set itself up as model environmental city, as a showcase of environmental protection, thereby at least beginning the process of turning the country in a new direction. And they just didn’t. They waited for the last minute.”

Today, some of these last-minute initiatives were revived in Beijing, starting with limiting cars on the road.

Let’s see how far this initiative goes. I’m all for more blue skies in Beijing and less smog for all the 老百姓.