Awesome, but the Price is too High

Wuxi, the place I went in China, is around 225 km from Shanghai. It took us around 2.5 hours by taxi to get there; an average speed of 90 kmph. The 6-lane highway (at least that entire 225 km stretch) was awesome: even US highways felt bumpier by comparison! The exit ramps had clearly visible signs (in Chinese, of course); and you never got blinded by the lights of oncoming traffic on the highway. And there was a lot of highway/road construction going on everywhere; but none of it was blocking existing roads. Even more unbelievably, everyone, including trucks, followed lane discipline; horns were almost never heard. If I didn’t know I was in China, I would have sworn that I was in a Western country.

We visited Shanghai over the weekend: it was a 45 minute ride in the train at 300 kmph! (It takes me about the same time to go from office in Bangalore for a measly 11 km distance). Shanghai has European style open double-decker buses for tourists; the skyline looks like Manhattan; and unlike even New York and Chicago, the roads were wide (of course, that might be because Shanghai was planned to be the Chinese show case city and exploded only in the last 20-25 years, but still, it blew us away). Shanghai even has a ferry ride you can take, and if you time it right like we did, the lights turning on (all at once, more on that later) in the skyscrapers as it gets dark is a sight to behold. We took the MagLev train from the the heart of the city to the airport, and that hits a peak speed of 450 kmph.

Experiencing all that, you won’t be surprised that one of my Indian colleagues commented, “I don’t know why anyone clubs India and China in the same bracket! They look like a developed country, not a developing one.”

And yet…there’s always that nagging feeling: can all of China possibly be like this? How representative of the country is all of what we saw? Could a non-communist country ever get the land to build (and continue to expand) their highways at this speed? Would any of us ever be comfortable with random vehicle photos being clicked on the highway, not because you broke a rule, but just to remind you that the government could check where you had been (this doesn’t happen in Shanghai where terrorism would be a justifiable reason; it was happening close to unimportant exits on the highway far from the big city)?

An apolitical colleague remarked that maybe India needs a dose of communism to get things done, the same point Deng Xiaoping made in 1961:

“It doesn't matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.”

But he was the minority: none of my Western or other Indian colleagues felt we wanted our countries to ever become communist. We love our Facebook’s and Google’s, neither of which is accessible in Big Brother’s country. And we want the freedom to turn on the lights in our building when we want, not via some government controlled master switch.