From Sandton to Shanghai

(Challenges of the Rainbow Nation. Copyrighted by Zapiro. Reproduced by permission)

Life in Shanghai is frequented by taxi rides. It makes sense. Taxis are cheap, cover the city and follow a relatively standardized process. Once in, the challenge that awaits you is to tell the driver your destination in pitch perfect Mandarin or get a blank stare in response.

Having hopefully been understood, the driver will inevitably comment on your excellent Mandarin. One gets over this language praise rather quickly. The utterance of only a couple of words in Mandarin generally gets fantastic reactions from most Chinese people. It is merely a sign of courtesy and should not be believed in a hurry.

Shanghai taxi drivers and for that matter taxi drivers in China’s largest cities have a relatively impressive, if simplistic knowledge of South Africa. If your Mandarin gets you further into the conversation, there is about a 95% chance that your newly acquired Chinese friend will say: ‘Yes - South Africa is the land of diamonds, Mandela and crime.’ Dig a bit deeper and ‘gold, wealthy country and beautiful scenery’ might come out too. I once found a guy that could even tell me our last 3 country presidents.

Crime is the disturbing stereotype though. ‘South Africa is a dangerous country, people get killed all the time there,’ is the common response. What I have realized is that the large number of ethnic Chinese living in South Africa - up to 300 000 people - are one of the reasons why such detailed news makes its way back to Chinese shores. Interestingly, because Chinese people living in South Africa are often perceived to be a cash-based society, they are specifically targeted and stories of gratuitous violence travel quickly back to Shanghai taxi drivers.

As a South African living in China, crime is a fascinating concept for me. I always explain away our terrible reputation in South Africa by saying that our country had a long history of institutionalized violence, our income inequality rates are dangerously high, we were ruled by and iron fisted government during recent decades and the social fabric of traditional societies have been largely destroyed.

Then after some thoughtful thinking on these points, I realized that the past 50 years in South Africa and China’s history were actually not that different. In South Africa it was called Apartheid. In China, Chairman Mao led the country through a series of violent purges culminating in the brutal Cultural Revolution. The difference is that now, South Africa is one of the most violent nations on earth and violent crime in China is ridiculously low.

Yes, China has the death penalty and South Africa does not. Ditto that South Africa is democratic and China is still ruled by the strong arm of the Central Communist Party - who still has much bearing on the day to day lives of its populace. But it is too simplistic to suggest that if South Africa became an autocratic-ruled, death penalty-driven country overnight that crime’s pervasive footprint would necessary alter substantially.

Authority is something to be respected in China and this has roots in strong Confucian values. It is not merely people respecting the emperor or designated leader of the day but a system of organising social relationships - sovereign to subject, parent to child, husband to wife and elder to younger sibling. In Mao’s quest to create an egalitarian society, he was initially dismissive of Confucian thinking but grudgingly realized its importance in self-ordering a billion-strong nation.

It is ultimately because of this authority that China can boast its long history. Power is not destabilized unless absolutely necessary and Chinese people will sometimes blindly follow this authority against superior individual moral judgment. When power is destabilized for whatever reasons, it is usually the result of a long series of weak leadership decisions where it is clear that China’s highest leadership clearly do not have the mandate of heaven on their side any more.

And this is where the difference comes in. China’s millenniums long culture and history provide a very stable long-term base beyond the short-term events that might seem so devastating at the time. When these destabilizing influences materialize, like the kind of changes that Mao wrecked on China for over 3 decades, there is an innate Chinese understanding that normalcy will prevail in the end for the simple reason that it always has.

Whenever I try to contextualize China’s turbulent last century, I always return to a quote from Nora Waln in her China-based book called The House of Exile: “I asked what this war was. Shun-ko’s husband answered: ‘It is not a war. It is just a period. When you are adequately educated in Chinese history, you will comprehend. We have these intervals of unrest, sixty to a hundred years in length, between dynasties, throughout the 46 centuries of our history.”

Returning back from a recent trip to South Africa, the biggest thing that struck me was how much of South African outlook was governed the prevailing issues at the time. It was a scary day to day existence with a wary eye cast on the future. People had such an uncertain idea of what challenges the next month would bring let alone what 10 years into the future held.

South African’s short sightedness has resulted in an extremely emotively-fueled and impatient country. Enough good trends happening at the same time create a rosy outlook into the near future, while the simultaneous occurrence of a series of negative events habitually plunge South Africans into a spiral of doom and gloom. Because our past was built on such a recent foundation, there is no way to contextualize these smaller trends within a larger and more reassuring framework.

In all of this, I am reminded of a Xhosa saying: “Ningadinwa nangamso” - do not get tired of tomorrow. For as soon as we tire of tomorrow we have nothing of importance to live for, no individual or national purpose to strive towards. At the moment South Africans seem to be tiring of tomorrow, whether it is the mobs fueling xenophobic violence across South Africa’s townships or the white South African families on one way tickets to Perth. Chinese people on the other hand are relishing in yearly increases of household income levels and consistently sustained double digit economic growth rates.

As Sir Francis Bacon once said, ‘Hope is a good breakfast but it is a bad supper.” Not only do South Africa’s leaders need to start making our dinner more attractive by serving up enticing menus for the future, but the present lukewarm breakfast is currently being served with tasteless flavours of crime, social disharmony and unimpressive leadership displays. In some cases, breakfast is not being served at all. And all of this news is filtering back to Shanghai’s world savvy taxi drivers.

(3 minutes of silence in Beichuan near the earthquake epicenter. Photo: European Pressphoto Agency)

There are lots of things I would like to write about the devastating earthquake to hit Sichuan Province.

I would love to say more about how the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was on a plane to the disaster zone within 1 hour and 22 minutes and talk about how he was bleeding from stumbling over collapsed rubble. I would like to talk more about how George Bush hightailed it in the opposite direction on Air Force One when the Twin Towers can tumbling down or how it took a week for him to fly over Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.

I would like to explore the idea that natural disasters are often a prelude to seismic shifts in Chinese affairs. The massive earthquake that hit Tangshan near Beijing in 1976 was only 2 months before Mao died and the subsequent opening up of China to the rest of the world after China had withdrawn into its shell during the preceding 500 years. Or how in the first place, it was a lightning strike that razed the Emperor’s Imperial Palace to the ground and under this ominous sign that the mandate of heaven was on shaky ground, China closed doors on the world.

I could talk more about how the political pettiness of Tibet seems years away already when more than 50 000 have died and many took their last gasps beneath building rubble. How even the unstoppable Olympic Flame will be stopped in tracks for 3 days of national mourning. Or how sad it is that it needs such a huge tragedy to show the world that maybe China’s Communist Leadership is not quite the bumbling, emotionless human rights disaster that seems to always crop up in the last paragraph of most foreign articles on China like a big ‘but’ at the end of an argument.

I could say more about how the earthquake was so powerful that my wife and most of Shanghai’s financial district so many thousands of miles away had to be evacuated as the long waves from the Sichuan epicenter swayed the huge concrete forests to dizziness. Or about a fellow South African student who slept outside in the rain for days in Chengdu as 140 aftershocks of level 4 or more pummeled the buildings that remained defiant to gravity.

Standing on my balcony yesterday with all these thoughts flowing through my head, a national 3 minutes of mourning kicked off at 2:28pm to commemorate the dead and give channel for a national outpouring of unified grief. Only the silence was not silence as people had been encouraged to sound every car horn and air raid siren in the country. It reminded me how Chinese people like to set off loud firecrackers to chase the evil spirits away and bring luck to new businesses, new years and new homes.

In my case, every single barge that littered the Huangpu River was simultaneously sounding their fog horns in what was one of the loudest noises I have ever come across. The silence was truly deafening for me and a couple of Chinese people that scrambled to the river to pay their tributes.

I lost a few precious years months off my life last year. Thanks to the Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People’s Republic of China and I can even tell you exactly when this happened. Here is the story…

The Ministry of Environmental Protection ranks 84 Chinese cities on a daily Air Pollution Indices basis according to three major air pollutants - sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and inhaleable pollutants.

According to the stats, Shanghai averaged an Air Pollution Index (API) of about 68 for 2007. The higher the number the higher the air pollution levels, but more on that later.

Beijing is blessed with an air pollution triumvir of heavy industry in the north east, huge annual sandstorms from Inner Mongolia whose sand particulates pick up more pollution and inland proximity away from coastal breezes to disperse the pollution.

As a result, Beijing’s API for 2007 was over 90 and hence the reason why some top athletes with asthma problems are considering staying away from the Beijing Olympics later this year. One such example is Haile Gebrselassie - Ethiopia’s long distance legend - who will not take part in the marathon (but probably in the 10 000 meters)

But if the Olympic athletes have it bad, spare a thought for us brave souls living here outside of Olympic time. We do not have the luxury of cloud seeding (to artificially induce rain), cutting half the traffic off roads and closing down the biggest polluting factories that will all kick off around the Olympics and end soon thereafter!

Now, according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection’s API categorization, Shanghai’s 2007 average of 68 is qualified as good and ‘Daily activities are not affected’ (In China ‘good’ is relative). This means for most of last year, I led a healthy, happy life.

The API scale goes from 1 to 300 with anything in excess of 300 being heavily polluted. According to their website, (I quote directly without grammar amendments!) the effects of heavy pollution to health are that ‘The exercise endurance of the healthy people drops down, some appears strong symptoms remarkably. Some diseases appear earlier.’

Recommended counter measures are for: ‘The aged and patients should stay indoors and avoid strength draining; the ordinary should avoid outdoor activities.’

So, keep in mind that these are the effects of an API of 301. Now on 19^th January last year, Shanghai’s Air Pollution went up to a staggering 412 - the first instance of months taken off my life. If that was not bad enough, a couple of months later on 2^nd April, the API soared to 500 taking with it more of my precious heartbeats.

While pollution is an ugly reality of living in China, it of course does not help getting too paranoid about this either. It is a (big) downside to living here, but upsides abound too. However, if you are living back in South Africa (or any other nice place with daily challenges) and wondering about all the worrying negative externalities to living there, here is some advice:

“Take a deep breath of fresh air, peek out of your window at the blue skies, step outside into warm sunshine and then click here to see Shanghai’s (上海) latest air pollution that has just passed through my lungs.”

Straight across from our flat is a captivating view of Shanghai’s financial skyline that speaks of the city’s soaring aspirations. In many ways, these big brash concrete, iron and glass edifices are a sharp rebuff from the elegant sandstone colonial buildings they glare down at across the riverbank.

But for me, the most interesting story comes from the river itself. It is an unpretentious tale whose lead characters ply their daily trade like a silent armada answering the call of the invisible hand. As the late afternoon sun sets into smoggy haze, hundreds of barges carrying their stock of building sand, coal, timber and ore plough upstream through the muddy waters to return days later from some unknown destination - with a cargoless spring in their step as they chug towards the Yangtze River to repeat the cycle all over again.

Ship borne cargo is as popular as rail here. Almost 10% of internal Chinese freight is transported by the myriad of rivers and canals that dissect China’s south eastern seaboard. China has a proud history of navigable passage. Amazingly the world’s oldest and longest canal is not the Suez or Panama Canal, but the Hangzhou - Suzhou Grand Canal that spans a distance longer that Cape Town to Pretoria. It dates back to the 5^th century BC and was finally completed in its present form 1500 years ago - a full 1400 years before the Panama Canal!

Staring across at the daily unfolding river scene is mesmerizing. In many ways, China’s silent armada is a defiant spectacle to behold as they pass through the shadows of the city’s 100 storey skyscrapers. It juxtaposes what China is and what it wants to become - or at least the story that it wants to tell the rest of the world for now. Like so many things in China though, somehow this discontinuous affair seems so natural for a country in the throes of such a defining growth spurt.

(Will the Dubai Burj soon have a Shanghai Rival? Source: Imre Solt)

Shanghai is about first impressions and built to capture not just your attention, but your imagination as well. The Dream of the New China is represented no where else in the country as clearly as in this city. Shanghai is China’s new face for the rest of the world.

Step off your plane at Pudong’s brand new international airport and the Maglev train whisks you into the city at 431km per hour. A short while later you will be dwarfed by the city’s futuristic Financial Centre with half a kilometer high buildings rising out of what were rice paddies not that long ago. It is hard not to be impressed by this sight.

Tourists to China always joke at China’s love of being the best, first, oldest or longest. It is surprising that the Guiness Book of Records were not started here first. Want to ride on the world’s longest bridge, see the world’s highest mountain, biggest company, most populous country with the longest continuous civilization then you have come to the right place. Whether you take all the statistics with a pinch of salt or not is another question.

So, when Dubai announced plans to build the world’s highest building, it must have been something of a slap in the face for Shanghai’s top brass. After all their efforts of cultivating the world’s most modern city out of Pudong’s rice paddies, along comes along a little desert usurper to contruct the Burj Dubai.

The Dubai Burj planners have cloaked their building in mystery and have not announced its exact height yet. However, the monolith is already at 611m (far surpassing Taiwan’s Tapei 101 - at 508m it was the world’s tallest building) and is rumoured to be heading over 800m into the heavens.

Sip cocktails from the 87^th floor Sky Bar of Shanghai’s Jin Mao Tower and the helicopter-like view is magnificent. Look straight down and you will see a golf driving range occupying one of the most prime land spots in the city - a strange anomaly until China recently announced plans to build the world’s city’s tallest building on that spot.

This is where it gets interesting for me. The Burj will be finished in 2009 and then the records will become clear for China and their team of international architects to peruse. China’s new mega structure will start its construction process in 2009 and it is ‘proposed’ to reach 580 meters.

The city planners have always envisaged a triumvir of buildings dominating Shanghai’s Financial skyline. This will be their last shot at another Guiness Book of Records. In something of a faux pas, China’s official news agency - Xinhua - recently claimed that the ‘Shanghai Centre’ would be the world’s tallest building surpassing the Burj which is still under construction at 555m.

My prediction is something of a long shot. Shanghai will definitely soon have the world’s second and third tallest buildings by 2010. Whether building plans ‘change’ to challenge the Burj is something to watch. However, given Shanghai’s large empty office rate in Pudong and the difficulty of building on what is essentially swamp land with a high water table is something to be seen.

Whatever the case, there is no doubt that China would love to occupy number 1 spot to add to all is many other highest, tallest records.

(Shanghai Winter wonderland - View from our apartment. Photo: Julian Hewitt 29 Jan 08)

I have officially decided not to wish a Shanghai winter on my worst enemy. For a city that sits on the tropical cyclone path in summer, the past 4 days of continuous snow have been rather bizarre - blanketing the city in a layer of snow not seen in decades. The result has been a rather bone chilling experience.

Shanghai’s unique aquatic positioning with the Huangpu River cutting a swathe through the middle, the Yangze bordering on the north and the East China sea to the east mean that the air is heavily moisture laden. Throw in bouts of freezing weather, poorly insulated apartments with single glazed windows and I am waking up to temperatures of 7 degrees Celsius in my room.

My winter woes however, are the least of China’s. The country has been hit my some of the worst weather in half a century. The eastern and southern part of the country, often far removed from winter’s icy hand, has taken particular strain with major train lines, freeways and airports having to shut down due to the severe snow storms.

The situation is definitely reaching breaking point with the world’s largest annual human migration on the doorstep. Over the next couple of days, over 50 million plus people are preparing to return home for the upcoming week-long national holiday to celebrate Chinese New Year with their families.

Transport disruptions will hit China’s migrant labour force particularly hard. Chinese New Year is often their only opportunity every year to return to distant families in the far flung corners of the country. In the case of Shanghai, the city’s 6-7 million migrant community make up a third of the city’s total residents.

In addition, the inclement weather is placing severe strain on China’s electricity supply. Luckily this is not affecting the measly heaters in my flat, but the cold weather has spiked electricity usage and the snowed up transport systems are battling to supply China’s coal fired stations fast enough.

On the 7^th February, China will welcome in the Year of the Rat. People born in the Year of the Rat are supposedly good at adapting rapidly to any unforeseen changes. Let us hope China’s snow tribulations are not an inauspicious end to the Year of the Pig - noted for being one of the laziest of the 12 Chinese Zodiac animals.

There might be some pretty big problems to sort out in the next few days.

I recently had a ‘Rip van Winkel’ moment arriving back in Shanghai after being away for the Christmas week. I returned to find that the city’s transport infrastructure had morphed overnight.

In a single day, a mind-boggling 58 new metro stations were added to the city’s transport network. Shanghai now had 3 new metro lines while another 2 lines had been extended. It felt like I had been snoozing for a few years!

To put it into context, the 80km Gautrain was started in 2006 and only one section of the journey will be finished (hopefully!) by the 2010 World Cup. By contrast, with the bare minimum of fanfare, Shanghai has quietly added 96km of metro lines within a single year. And this was not even newsworthy enough to make a single non-Chinese newspaper.

Shanghai is currently the 7^th longest metro in the world and boasts a 234km long network. Both Shanghai and Beijing have plans to extend their metro lines beyond the 400km mark within the next few years. This will put them in reach of the longest lines in the world.

Coming back from recent trips to the USA, the iconic New York subway looked rather hagged in comparison. Maybe Paris Hilton is right. On her first visit to Shanghai she made arguably one of her smartest comments.

“Shanghai looks like the future!” she poured fourth.

(A New York Subway Platform in its ‘not so finest hour’. Photo - Julian Hewitt, Oct 07)

(Shanghai’s New Line 6 Platform. Photo Wangjianshuo)

(The old and the new of Shanghai. Our first apartment is in the distance. Photo: Julian Hewitt)

Bordering the East China Sea on one side and flanked by the Huangpu River on the other is Shanghai’s Pudong District. For all intents and purposes, Pudong is the golden child of the Chinese economy. The reason for this is that it does what no amount of facts, figures, GDP growth rates and statistics can ever do – and that is quite simply that Pudong puts a face to China’s economic miracle.

Go back 15 years and Pudong was essentially a smattering of low lying buildings and a collection of small scale agricultural plots supplying fresh produce to the city. Fast forward to 2007 and Pudong’s riverfront vista has to be one of the most impressive skylines in the world. Take Johannesburg’s tallest buildings and you would need to double their height to get a proper sense of Pudong’s scale.

Stare across the river at night and a rocket-like TV tower adorned with giant red spheres rises almost half a kilometer into the sky. Its impressive structure is bathed in light to capture every ounce of your imagination. To its right two massive skyscrapers compete for attention. The Jin Mao Tower stands at 88 storeys and has recently been eclipsed as the 95 storey World Financial Centre nears completion.

Someone one said that Pudong’s rice paddies were watered with money and it is a great metaphor to describe the frenetic-paced development taking place here. This really struck home when I recently tried to locate our flat using Google Earth’s satellite imaging. Instead of a huge complex that housed over two dozen, 30 storey apartment blocks, I found a vast track of dusty land and an old Chinese community nestled in the top corner.

The image on my computer screen had a rather surreal museum-like quality to it, and I felt a compulsion to locate other Shanghai landmarks I knew had not escaped the passage of time. Whole blocks of Shanghai’s old town replete with mazes of alleyways and old men playing Chinese Chess on the side of the road now stood in forlorn states of demolition. A massive swathe of industrial land between Shanghai’s bottom two bridges has been completely flattened to give way to what will blossom into the city’s 2010 World Expo venue.

It seems that Shanghai’s history is measured in months and years, not decades and generations. It’s the sort of change that affects living here on a month to month basis. For example, when we first arrived in the city, a gravel road connected our flat to my wife’s business school. Now, a brand new 2-lane highway has taken its place. The metro line I travel on everyday has been extended by 4 stops and a brand new line bisects it one stop up.

But it is the sheer scale and ambitions of the city’s development that I find most exciting. Shanghai’s 4000 plus skyscrapers already exceed that of New York City. The city’s 130km long metro line has another 400km in the planning or construction phases. The total figure will soon surpass the length of the London Underground. At the same time, the world’s longest trans-oceanic bridge is currently under development between Shanghai and the major seaport of Ningbo to the south. The 36km long bridge will reduce the current 4 hour journey to 1 hour.

To try and get a sense of the city’s dynamism, I enjoy frequenting a coffee shop alongside the Huangpu River to absorb myself in the many facets of the fascinating vista in front of me. The Huangpu is definitely no Riviera, so there are no yachts, no cruiseliners and no private jetties to be seen. It is a dirty, muddy coloured working-river punctuated with a plethora of barges going about their daily coal carrying, ore transporting duties.

The river makes for a perfect canvas to describe Shanghai. On the Pudong side, the massive skyscrapers and one of Asia’s most important financial hubs tower over the river. On the opposite bank, the elegant sophistication of classy sandstone buildings point to Shanghai’s strong colonial influences. In one panoramic view, Shanghai’s cosmopolitan past, industrial present and aspirational future make for rather odd acquaintances that merge into the city’s present.

If you go beyond the glitzy shopping malls and watch the city at work, whether it is the investment bankers in Pudong or the huge informal recycling community, you can start to tap into the essence of the city. What Shanghai does have in large doses is the kind of edgy energy than seems to punctuate some of the most dynamic cities in the world.

It is the same raw energy that you will find it in places like Johannesburg or New York City. Like Shanghai, these cities are melting pots of civilizations that attract people from far flung corners to play out their greatest dreams, or at the very least, to be standing in the theatre of those more fortunate.

There can be something quite disconcerting about watching the world change in front of your eyes. I like to call this the privilege of change – the opportunity to quite literally watch a society transform in front of you. I was lucky to live through South Africa’s political transformation and now I am living in the middle of one of the greatest economic miracles in modern times.

Despite all the paradoxes that change brings, there is one thing that I am certain about in Shanghai. While money does not grow on trees, it can do wonders for dusty tracks of land and rice paddies…

From Sandton to Shanghai

Julian Hewitt
11 April 2007 11:59

Yesterday started with a walk to our local expo centre - the one whose white, wave-like roofs catch my eye very time I stare out at the view from our 20th-floor alcony.

Normally, a R10 taxi ride would have sufficed to get to the expo centre in Shanghai. There is something eeply gratifying about walking to a place when you now other people would have travelled across the world to get to the same spot.

Business people from around the world make the long lights, expensive hotels and jet lag part of the price ag to get into the city now at the centre of the world economy.

After a scenic riverside walk, we arrived at our destination half an hour later, showing our international passports to get in free of charge. The trade fair is one of Shanghai’s largest and one that fills up every inch of space that nine aircraft-hanger-like halls can offer. Last year, the six-day fair brought in USD3,3-billion (about R24-billion) of business, not far off the GDP of many African economies.

Walking through rows and rows of consumer goods, sports equipment, ornaments and clothing, it was easy to start imagining the same products lining the shelves of Clicks, Mr Price and Cardies back at home. The Chinese mean business and this is a place of one-stop deal-making. Not only can you purchase just about any consumable the Chinese economy can deliver, there are fancy restaurants to charm the buyers, meeting rooms to
negotiate the deal, translators to bridge the language divide, legal services to
help with contracts, police offices for disputes and freight companies to get the
goods safely home.

Later, we found ourselves in a much smaller school hall helping to sort out clothing donations from expats that were being boxed up and sent to far away, poverty-stricken Yunnan Province. These are just some of the contrasts that make up daily life in Shanghai.

It was not that long ago that I had the idea of moving from our Sandton home to live in Dube, Soweto. I wanted to experience a different dimension of our country. My Zulu was conversational at best, but I had spent time working with a number of primary schools in Soweto and felt drawn by the strong sense of community.

But Wayne Gretzky, Canada’s renowned hockey player, once famously said that the trick is not about skating to where the puck is, but rather skating to where the puck is going to be. And, from a South African point of view, China looked like the place to be heading to — not only is the world becoming a smaller place, but China is playing an increasingly bigger role in the global goldfish bowl.

And so, instead of Soweto, my wife and I have now been living in Shanghai for half a year. As opposed to brushing up on my Zulu, I have been studying Mandarin at a top local university for the past semester. It seems like two incompatible decisions — Shanghai or Soweto — but life nowadays is all about dealing with paradoxes. In this case, it was a question of balancing local knowledge and global awareness.

While China is part of the daily business news in South Africa, while companies like Sasol, SABMiller and Naspers have made big strides in China and while Africa is a big part of China’s global picture, the bridges that straddle these divides are not very wide. Take Shanghai as an example. Shanghai is a city of 20-million people and the financial face of China. In the whole city, there are a total of three South Africans studying at local
universities and, at a guess, less than 10 young professionals making a career here.

On the governmental side, although South Africa has good relations with its Chinese counterparts, I have been told that there are few if any Mandarin speakers in either the department of trade and industry or the department foreign affairs.

Compare this to Australia, which has a whole team of Mandarin speakers working within their governmental trade negotiation unit. Perhaps we are catching up. In July this year, the first employees of the department of foreign affairs leave Beijing as fluent Mandarin speakers after an intensive language programme.

But the point remains: for all the opportunities that China opens up to South Africa, and for all the challenges it poses, there is much scope for us to learn the language and understand the business and cultural aspects of a society that is rapidly shaping international affairs.