Last few days in China

I'm sorry it has been a few days since I posted last.  It seems that China's Congress which started today meant that in the days leading up to it they blocked contact with virtually every overseas social media site.  I was never able to see my own blog in China, but I could still log onto blogger, write new ones, and upload them.  In the last few days they wouldn't even allow that.

Monday the 5th featured a visit north in Beijing County to a large greenhouse area.  Now the Chinese have embraced capitalism in an interesting way.  I posted a little while ago about the richest village in China, and its business activities.  When the whole idea of capitalism was "allowed", some of the first entities to go out and form for profit companies were the military, and the various governments - central, provincial and villages.  The village we were visiting decided a few years ago it wanted to attract greenhouses and be a leader in flower production.  

Two layers of heat curtain in the house, one layer
on the outside.  As advanced as any you'll see in the US.

They did what any good Chinese village would do, they used their money and borrowing power to go out and build a few greenhouses and start a greenhouse operation specializing in potted flowering plants.  But they didn't stop there.  In the US, labor and heating are the two big costs for a greenhouse operation right?  Well labor is cheap here, really cheap.  How do we reduce the heating costs - the village went and built a massive, very clean, very efficient central heating plant utilizing deep wells, with a combination of heat pumps and heat sinks, supplemented by natural gas.  Their greenhouse was only about 3 acres, not nearly big enough to justify such an investment but they built 20 more such greenhouses and leased them to other enterprises, several which they themselves own.  Additionally they built a 50 acre park beside the facilities and each year they hold a huge tulip festival in the spring, and a chrysanthemum festival in the fall.  The village maintains about 40 of the acres and the different operations each have a display, depending on the festival, to exhibit their new varieties.  Pretty neat place.

The hog manure, once run through an anaerobic fermentor and
the solids are separated is composted in one of many
buildings like this one.  Pretty efficient operation too.

We then went to another village that had switched over from the individual farm model (3000 farmers all with their own 1/6 of an acre) to one large 500 acre farm that raised pigs and grew nursery stock and manufactured organic fertilizer from the manure.  The amazing thing - the farm, one of the largest hog operations in Beijing with 60,000 hogs smelt no more than many farms with 10 or 20 cows I have been on.  There is a continuous aerobic fermentor that processes all the manure on a continuous basis (each barn has a slatted floor with the manure being moved directly into a channel system and into the fermentor).  We couldn't go in close to the barns for bio security reasons, but we could see from a distance.  They were building new houses for the villagers (farmers.)  In almost any small town in the US they would be considered very high end condos - its virtually impossible, even in the countryside, to build single family housing units anymore, its illegal (uses too much land.)

Tuesday and Wednesday were free days.  Sort of.  I had a lunch with Dr. Shao the Secretary General of CEAIE and had a good opportunity to relay my experiences and speak about foreign exchanges in general; and Peggy kept me busy with site seeing.

Tuesday we did some things in Beijing since I needed to be in town for lunch.  We visited the Olympic City which is located in the center of the city.  It is massive and spreads like central park in New York City, through the heart of downtown Beijing.  It also sits virtually unused.  The "birds nest" holds concerts and while it brings in some money, it cost $441 million to build and barely breaks even.  The water cube looses over a million dollars each year.  The park itself is falling apart and has had little maintenance since the games.  It was a surprising contrast to the rest of the city.  You could tell it was a marvel in its day, but just 4 years later it sits virtually empty . . .

In the evening we visited some of the older parts of Beijing, the Hutong districts.  It was dark so not many pictures came out, but here is a picture of the style of house taken at an earlier part in the trip.  To think that this is what much of beijing used to look like just 10 or 15 years ago is amazing.  Development has its advantages, but it sure leads to the loss of a much different time.  Some of the house complexes we saw (still lived in today by the lower middle class people) were the same as they have been (with updated utilities) for the last 700 years.

Yesterday (Wednesday) saw a trip to the great wall.  I think the most impressive thing I have ever seen was the Grand Canyon.  The Great Wall is the next.  We got to visit a portion that while restored, looks out onto a much older section of the wall.  There isn't much to say - we've all heard of it.  Its a massive wall (which despite the common belief, cannot be seen from space), that didn't work (the Mongols just went around), but is still one of the most amazing feats of human achievement ever.  We visited the  Mutianyu portion, but the entire wall, and its branches measure 13,000 miles.  That's more than the distance from New York to LA - 5 times!  

Today (well very, very early this morning, as in 1:00 am) I checked into my hotel in Manila.  I had some great meetings with Eisenhower Fellow Dan Songco and PHILDRRA staff Mags as well as a brief orientation on some of the agrarian reform and fisheries issues facing the Philippines.  

Tomorrow morning I am off to see of the fisheries work in action and will likely be without wifi for blogging, but may have some facebook.  we'll see.

12 more days to go!