China: Two stories and the fortune of nations

What you need to know:

Sometimes, human connections are what we need to become and remain humble amidst our ignorance and thirsty in our search for knowledge

We take a short drive and arrive at a very busy and noisy factory with lots of people. We start at the storage halls and see endless piles of tyres of different types – including wheelbarrow tyres – and sizes, packed and ready for shipping. I learn that 10 million pieces of tyres were shipped to Nigeria last year from this town alone. We move to the factory floors and Mr Du looks very proud and smiles broadly. I ask a silly question: are these your machines too? He get animated, and speaking loudly to beat the factory noise, leaps near one of the machines and points to his company label on it. He says he manufactured these about seven years ago, but he doesn’t manufacture them anymore as technology improves so fast and each few years there is a “new generation” of manufacturing technology that’s more efficient.

We drive off from the tyre factory and someone in the car mentions something about rubber gloves. I respond that we import those too. Mr Du suggests that we pass through a nearby rubber gloves factory just to see how simple it is to produce them. We enter the factory and I immediately see another side of China’s manufacturing. A heavy, pungent smell quickly reaches the insides of my nostrils and down my throat. It is an old, rickety factory held together, you would be convinced, by a miracle. Among others, I am met by a short, sturdy man, who even with a couple of his front teeth missing and crooked, he smiles with jolly impulsiveness. In his dusty and worn factory uniform, he shows me around. The factory floor size is relatively small, almost the size of two typical school classrooms. I witness a very simple process of gloves manufacturing. And here, they produce the quality you ask or willing to pay for.

This is the type of factory that authorities in my country Tanzania would close down. But for the past 30 years, these “backyard factories” have driven manufacturing boom in China, making the country account for more than 32 per cent of the world’s industrial output. Almost all those famous China goods – the Christmas decorations, your favorite election campaign material, and so forth – hawked in Africa’s popular local markets, stores and on roadsides, come from these factories. With people like Mr Du producing newer, cleaner and AI-driven factories, and with more Chinese people attaining middle class status and seeking higher wages, these types of outfits are increasingly disappearing. Alongside this, so is the once-expected movement of outsourced jobs into Africa, especially with AI and robotics potentially eliminating many factory jobs and making low wages there less of a competitiveness factor.

It is early evening and I hit the road towards south of Qingdao. As I leave town, I notice hundreds of new skyscrapers under construction. You would think that half of the world’s construction cranes are here in Qingdao. I wonder who will live in all these new housing units. Then I remember that the world’s greatest migration of people in the past 40 years happened in China: 300 million people moved from rural to urban China. So, this beloved historic city of Mr Du’s, which was once occupied by the Germans and then the Japanese, is still, like most of China, under construction. I decide to go to rural China, somewhere that’s not very famous, where there is no airport or bullet train transport, to get a sense real China. In every nation, there is that defining spirit of the people, the basis of its ethic and the underpinnings of its values.

We eat dinner and talk about Kung-fu, its history and philosophy and its disciplining effect, especially on the mind on those who learn it. Then, in the middle of the dinner, an old gentleman with a stern bearing busts into the dining room with a loud greeting. Everyone at the table stood up. I quickly follow. He gives a Kung-fu greeting (two hands coming together, one hand with a fist, touching open palm in the other hand). We all do the same. He continues to speak. We remain standing, silently. The young MBA man, his son I later learn, who was sitting next to me, vacates the seat and the old man comes and sits next to me. His name is Fan Qinbin, and he is a Kung-fu Master who runs this school which has 10,000 students – all living here on his compound. He conveys authority and commands respect but he is also very charismatic. We immediately get along very well. The only challenge, and I took it in a funny way, is that when he starts speaking he doesn’t pause for translation. Well, he is a Master, why should he? And my translator is captivated by what the Master is saying to bother translating for me with same level of detail, length and care.

China: Two stories and the fortune of nations

What you need to know:

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