My image of China is very different from that of my parents, who came here in the late 80s to teach in Hefei. To them, China was the post-WWII third-world, more like the Southeast Asian peninsula and the CIS than Japan or Europe. They describe a Shanghai with limited nighttime lighting and an Anhui province with few paved roads. That time was at the very beginning of the implementation of the transformative economic policies that took root over the following decades.

I grew up with a very different impression of China as a result of that transformation. Indeed, even though throughout the 90s and 2000’s the country was ‘coming up’ in the media portrayal, I find that my subconscious perception of it today is that it is ‘already here.’ The prominent role that operations in China have played in the business community has combined with my personal relationships – highly educated close friends and professional acquaintances who grew up in China and moved here as adults – to make me think of China as any other fully developed nation. Intellectually, I am aware that there are still two Chinas; that there remains substantial lag in rural quality of life, and that even in the cities the Hukou legal and implicit social caste systems can maintain sub-standard livelihoods for migrants. I know that my friends and those I encounter professionally remain the exception, not the rules. Nevertheless, that knowledge hasn’t been enough to stop me from viewing my trip to Beijing and Xuzhou any differently than a trip to Barcelona. While that might be foolish, I could argue that the United States maintains plenty of impoverished communities, albeit at a different magnitude in scale and depth, and that doesn’t particularly impact the perception of it as a fully developed country.

Prior to leaving, our interaction with our client has so far reinforced that view. Despite being a state-owned enterprise, the nature of our communication has been (again, so far) been entirely within the realm of corporate cultures I've experienced in private Japanese firms. I'm curious to see what new norms I might find when we meet in person.

My arrival in Beijing has, for the most part, validated my perception by being exposed to only the narrow slice of society that has any business at the Beijing Airport and the Haidan district where Tsinghua University is located. In those limited spaces, everything from the airport layout to customs & immigration services down to the highway signage is as familiar in form and function as it would be in any city in the US.

The pollution is the only reminder that the PRC still faces challenges that are fundamentally different from most OECD nations. It hit me as soon as I got into the most external chamber of the airport, not only visibly but the smell, like tobacco smoke. I wonder what systemic issues pollution is manifesting. In my limited (as a caveat) understanding of it, particulate matter pollution is not like climate change – it is not a cumulative effect that takes decades or centuries to reverse; I would be very surprised if the pollution in Beijing today was not generated within the last year, if not the last week. Furthermore, having received some Chemical Engineering education the technological problem does not seem terribly daunting; regardless of its generation source (e.g. coal plants, cars), the technology to retrofit plants with scrubbers and filters is readily available and vehicle emissions standards could certainly be implemented in China as easily as anywhere. I’m sure the problem is more nuanced, but with such a dramatic impact on quality of life I am curious as to any features of political architecture that might be preventing its resolution. Perhaps it would raise production costs across a variety of industries by too much (I’ve heard that many industries are attracted to manufacturing in China not because of labor costs but because of environmental standards), or perhaps it would have too strong an impact on energy costs in a coal-dependent generation environment. Whatever the cause, I know enough intelligent, capable people that have moved to the US from China to know that to avoid a long-run brain drain, to be serious about fostering entrepreneurs in high-value-added industries, China very likely has to start raising the quality of life through such public goods that make people want to live here. On the plane, I met a Master’s student in Materials Science at Xian U. coming back from a conference in San Diego; he spoke perfect English and had done research abroad, and he not only wanted to do a PhD in the States, he wanted to live there permanently.