How green is my valley

When the Chinese do things, they do things on a grand scale. In Suzhou city there are the most beautiful "old gardens" and the Suzhou-ren (Suzhou people) have extended their love for gardens in the modern areas of the city. We have marvelled at how open pieces of land is transformed within days in a lush new "instant park".


All over town you see many old blue trucks driving around with huge trees on the back. These trees are destined to be planted somewhere in a public park or next to a highway. Camphor trees are the most common and you also see a lot of beautiful Chinese maples with their beautiful burgundy leaves. It is amazing to see how they transplant these huge trees. Normally the trees are planted and then supported with a bamboo structure around it. Every morning big trucks filled with water (think fire engine) come around and hose the new trees down in order to settle them and get them growing. This also creates many jobs. All throughout the day hundreds of people can be seen tending trees, pruning shrubs, cutting grass and busying themselves with gardening on a big scale.




In global news, reporting in general, is not about China and its great environmental record. I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much China is involved in the fight against climate change and alternative sources of energy. China itself is feeling the effect of climate change. Beijing in the north sits with a big problem on its doorstep - the Gobi desert. Due to global climate change, the Gobi is encroaching on Beijing at an alarming pace, something like 2 miles per year in all directions. This spring Beijing has been hit by severe sand storms. There are even sand storm forecasts on television.

On the topic of deforestation I read this article in the China Daily about China's reforestation efforts:

China will spend 60 billion yuan (8.77 billion US dollars) annually on its greening, or tree-planting, campaigns in an effort to have 20 percent of the country's land covered by forests by 2010, an official said on Wednesday.
Jia Zhibang, head of the State Forestry Administration, said 16.66 million hectares of trees must be planted in the next two years in order to increase the forest coverage rate to 20 percent, from 18.21 percent at present.


That means in two years they want to plant enough trees to cover a size more than the Western Cape (or for a different perspective - almost as large as the UK)! If you plant a thousand trees on a hectare (that's covering 10% per hectare) that means it's 16.6 billion trees! That's surely a huge amount of carbon credits! It also means it equals twelve trees for each person in China or almost three trees for every human being on the planet! Thanks China!


Over a 20-year lifecycle, the right species in the right conditions can absorb over 40,000 tonnes of CO2 per square kilometer. So a plantation of 100 square kilometers can absorb 4 million tonnes of CO2 over 20 years. That’s equivalent to taking 50,000 cars or more off the road during that time (based on annual emissions of 3 to 4 tonnes for the average car and its usage). China's tree planting efforts therefore relate to 166,000 square kilometres of forest to be planted, thus the total amount of CO2 that will be removed over twenty years equals 664,000,000,000 (664 billion) tonnes of CO2. In car terms that is "removing" 8300,000,000 (8.3 billion) cars from the roads, equal to 1.5 cars per person on planet earth over the next 20 years!

The article went on by saying that in 2008:

A total of 540 million people joined forestation efforts in the past year, planting 2.31 billion trees in mountains, city parks, on campuses and along highways and railways.
China is the third largest country in the world in terms of area, with 9.6 million square kilometers of land territory behind Russia and Canada.
The country's top legislative body, the National People's Congress (NPC), passed a resolution in 1981 to make it the duty of all citizens above the age of 11 to plant trees annually. Tree-planting activities are usually carried out in March and April, the spring time for most part of the country.
This was described by former U.S. Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore as "the largest tree-planting program the world has ever seen," during international climate talks in Poland in December.

Happy tree planting, your biggest ally is China!

Don't play us a song Mr Piano Man

"For anyone who has ever wondered who in the world buys Richard Clayderman records, it's the Chinese, and there are a billion of them." Douglas Adams - "Last chance to see"

Errata - Douglas Adams wrote 'Last chance to see" in 1988, since then the Chinese population has grown to 1,338 billion according to the CIA World Fact Book.

In most public places we entered thus far in China, your ears are the first of your senses to suffer information overload. Whether it is from the shear noise of a crowd of people shouting at the top of their voices to be heard above all the others shouting at the top their voices or whether it be the Chinese pop music blaring out through the speakers, your ears suffer an enormous b(l)eating. I have learned to treasure silence...

In some of the more suave Chinese establishments there always seem to be piano music playing in the background, giving your ears a brief respite from the noise. At first I did not consciously recognise the music playing in the background but after a while I recognised the unmistakable sound of the one and only master pianist for the masses... Richard Clayderman. There is something about Richard and I am not sure what exactly it is...Sure, his tunes are popular...Three chord simplicity worked for the Beatles so Richard figured it'll work for him too. Richard has been around since the late 70's and he entered my childhood somewhere around primary school and judging on the zing in my ears when hearing his music, I realise that I might have OD'd on his music together with "Hooked on Classics" back in the eighties.

I stumbled on this description of the Clayderman brand of music when I tried to make sense of what I am hearing in China:

"Some see him as a symbol of Kitch. Clayderman has a curious market niche on third world countries, a fact mainly attributed by critics to his commercially oriented performance of local and very popular music (especially love songs), and cheap well distributed records. Some Chinese music teachers attribute the popularity of his music in mainland China to the increase in the number of piano students in the 1980's. Some people believe that the inverse is true, that there was an increase in piano students due to Clayderman".

Irene's theory is that when Richard became big in China (in the eighties), it marked a very significant period in China's history - the incident on that square in Beijing, and Deng Xiaoping's reforms that shaped modern China. Clayderman's music is maybe a sort of commemoration of a very significant period in Chinese history.

The Chinese are clearly besotted with the man and if you hear piano music it is almost guaranteed to be Richard Clayderman. Sorry, Lang Lang you'll have to practise harder!

May day, May day!

This is an extract from the government sponsored website Chinese way.org on "Tips for living in China":

3. Cars
Never, ever assume pedestrians have the right of way. Cars will not necessarily stop for you. Cross with a group if possible at a designated crosswalk. A car won't stop for a single person necessarily but will stop for a group because the driver doesn't want the car to be dented. Chinese really love their cars. (emphasis added)

On Friday China with the rest of the world, celebrated Worker's day. Naively I thought that it would be a good idea to head out of the city to a scenic spot with clean air and big skies close to Suzhou, to see what our neighbouring towns have to offer in the line of scenery and recreation. Did I really think I was the only guy in Jiangsu province who would come up with that idea??! Well about 40million other people also thought it would be a good idea to head off to the "country" and enjoy scenery and the "slower pace" of the countryside...

Slower pace took on an entirely new meaning. Our fifty kilometre journey to Lake Taihu took us close to three and a half hours! It was like the worst rush hour you can imagine with each and every car trying to push to the front. I had about seven hundred near death experiences and my only consolation was to say to myself, "well no one is going at more than 2km/s per hour so we'll probably survive a car crash today!" We passed about twenty bumper bashings. I had high hopes of obtaining a Chinese driving license but realised that I would be limited to drive around the block at 2am in the morning.

On the positive side of things I can say that the Chinese are extremely tolerant drivers and they really love their cars, even though it feels like there is no obeying the rules, they have "the love of their cars" in common. Forget the Germans' superior technology. The Chinese have perfected the car hooter. I cannot imagine anyone venturing on the roads with a broken hooter. Driving on Chinese roads without a proper working hooter is like venturing out in your car with a flat tyre. They don't use their hooter in the normal aggressive manner that Westerners normally use it. It's not a tool to invite or inflict road rage. It's a communication tool used on every other car that comes into the driver's personal space to say: "Hey buddy, how are you this morning? Isn't it a great morning in the fastest growing car market in the world? Love your new Chery by the way...I'm pushing in front of you, have a great day! Oh and please don't bump my car because we don't want to stand in the sun now for four hours, do we?" (Each letter represents a hoot).

If the constant pushing in front of other cars, the constant hooting, the constant braking hard in front of other cars would happen in let's say Jozi, there would be such carnage with people flying out of cars and wielding the variety of traditional weapons they normally carry with them. Not one rude sign, not even a mumble under the breath of our friend and driver for the day to his fellow Chinese drivers. Just absolute patience.

Lake Taihu is really beautiful but beautiful scenery is best enjoyed in peace and quiet. I was quite surprised to see that a good old "braai" or BBQ is also big in China. Thousands of tents lined Lake Taihu while people BBQ'ed and enjoyed a really beautiful day.

We had lunch at a very traditional "inn" on Taihu's third island. I am quite an adventurous eater and like new tastes but I get really "queasy" and lose my appetite along with my sense of humour if I get a whiff that hygiene levels are not up to standard...The two funny looking dogs walking around the kitchen and washing up area, where they also kept the "catch of the day" in something that resembled an old bath tub, were difficult for me to deal with. Also, I realised that I have a problem with anything having a grey colour on my plate. Good food cannot be grey! Maybe because "grey" rhymes with "decay". The lunch was not bad, but I experienced a bit of serious mind over (grey) matter.

Our traditional country lunch

After our very traditional lunch we headed off to a place that was described as a Wild West resort with horses, fly fishing, go-carts and rock climbing. It proved to be quite a fun afternoon and the kids enjoyed the outing very much. I did not see anything in the line of fly fishing and the horse riding is not all that much to write home about, but it was fun. Thankfully on our journey back the traffic dissipated and we made the journey back in no time. We ended the day with a light dinner and a family massage.