Since I haven’t posted on my blog in such a long time, I thought that I might as well reflect on everything that is has been going on.

First off, apparently, the iPad isn’t doing too badly (see my last post: http://reflectionupon.com/2010/01/27/apple-ipad/). I’ve personally seen quite a few of the gigantic iPod Touches and they seem fine and do what they are supposed to. I’ll say that this is just Apple making a product and people buying it just because it’s Apple, and my opinion still stands that it won’t be the “next big thing”. That’s not to say touch based interfaces aren’t the next generation of user interfaces, but just that the iPad won’t exactly change everything like some people say the iPhone did.

Talking about iPhones, I recently got the Samsung Captivate (Galaxy S) and I love it! I won’t ramble about how great it is, but trust me, it’s amazing

This summer, I spent nearly two months in my mother country, China. One of the biggest complaints that people hear me say is how awful the pollution is. There was a period of around three to four days when in Shanghai, there was just plainly stunning skies with white puffy clouds gliding across the bright blue background. But generally, the visibility is so bad, even looking across the HuangPu, the Oriental Pearl is fuzzy and the sky is just gray with a tint of yellow in it. To be sure, China is moving towards being more green, especially with hydroelectric (Three Gorges Dam) power, but there are just so many coal fired plants and factories in China.

Tourism Commercialization

ShaoLin Monk Performance

My other big observation (though it is also a bit of a complaint) is that many of the places we visited weren’t really that authentic and were definitely way too geared towards tourists. We went to the ShaoLin Temple in DengFeng, Henan and I just felt the place was so commercialized with all the new buildings and their performance. Granted, it was destroyed fairly recently (less than 100 years ago) and had to be rebuilt, but the current temple just doesn’t have that true historical feel to it. According to XinHuaWang, they have two luxury bathrooms that costed 3 million yuan. Yes, they should have nice clean bathrooms, but 3 million yuan spent on bathrooms for use by both tourists and the monks is just ridiculous. It just goes to show how the historical place which is famous for both its ShaoLin martial arts and its Buddhist monastery has  just become a tourist area. We went there and got to see their performance of the Shaolin martial arts and clearly the thing was entirely geared to please the audience. And there was plenty of the typical touristy “take your photos with the monks” and “get your DVD of the ShaoLin monks”.  And what’s more, the tourism group that runs the place along with the city of Deng Feng is going to be listed as a stock in Hong Kong or Shanghai in 2011. Yes, soon you’ll be able to invest in the Shaolin Temple. Now just stop and think about that: an ancient Chinese/Buddhist temple preparing an IPO with its 150 million yuan/year ticket revenues. Oh, and the monks have toured internationally including New York and London. Yes, it’s a business opportunity, and I’m not expecting the monks to live a life that doesn’t fit the 21st century with flushing toilets, cellphones, and computers, but it just strikes me how commercialized the Shaolin Temple has become. Fortunately, the historical and culture aspects of the temple aren’t going to be a part of the venture.

Tourism Buses at the Terracotta Warriors

And in various other places in China, you have a similar story of turning everything into a tourism site. At the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an, you literally had to walk a good 15 minutes from the gigantic parking lot filled with tourism buses through a street lined with shops selling various items before reaching the actual historical figures. They even had a little electric shuttle (that you had to pay for, of course) to bring you directly to the site if you didn’t want to walk.

Also, temples are sprouting up everywhere, which isn’t in itself a bad thing, but these are tourist temples. I visited a temple under construction near Shanghai in a satellite city called AnTing (which by the way, is an automobile center in China), and everything about it was brand new. The temple itself wasn’t really made with traditional Chinese interlocking wood, but with nice modern cement. Everything about it was just recently made, the Buddha inside was just recently carved. The only part of it that was “historical” was that it was where a temple used to be.

Everywhere you go in China, you’ll run into this rapid over development of tourism. I’m fine with the places catering towards visitors, but not to the degree where you are building luxury bathrooms in a temple where in the surrounding countryside, there are hardly any decent bathrooms for the residents.

In my next post, I’ll talk about a very great part of Chinese cities: public transportation.

Sources:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-04/08/content_7940163.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/6831187/Shaolin-Temples-kung-fu-monks-prepare-IPO.html