More on China

Like I said before, I know a lot more about Japan than China. Japan is known for being very efficient. One quick exception: Whenever the government gets its hands on a single yen, it immediately starts tearing up perfectly good roads and “repairing” them. That doesn’t quite meet my definition of “efficient.” However, there’s no denying that they make efficient cars, mass produce goods in efficient factories, and have a rock-solid efficient and reliable train system.

China, on the other hand, is very much chaotic. I’ve speculated up about a million possible reasons for this, including the following: The government doesn’t create or enforce laws for a lot of “frills” because it doesn’t care; the rapid growth of the Chinese economy has created a lot of change that hasn’t been “refined” to be user-friendly yet; nobody cares because that’s just how Chinese people like it… The list goes on. Let me give a few examples to make it more clear what I’m talking about.

In a department store in the West (or in Japan, or any other first-world country), you

1. take goods off the shelf,
2. take them to the cashier,
3. pay for them,
4. and leave.

In a Chinese department store you

1. take goods off the shelf and
2. give them to a guy at a desk.
3. The guy writes out a receipt and gives you two carbon copies, which
4. you take to the nearest cashier,
5. and then pay.
6. The cashier stamps one of the carbon copies and gives it back to you.
7. You take the carbon copy back to the first guy,
8. who gives you your stuff,
9. and then you leave.

The only reason for this that I could think of is that China is supposedly still communist, and this way they can employ twice as many people doing the same job. A guy from 上海 I talked to, however, said that it may be to prevent the cashiers from stealing from the registers by creating a longer paper trail. Another friend suggested that it somehow deters shoplifters. My first reaction upon seeing this system, though, was that in the West the guy at the desk would have been downsized years ago. It’s just not efficient; it wastes the customer’s time and the company’s resources. I wonder if some stores may be forced to change when the whole world converges on China for the 2008 Olympics.

Another example: 北京 has a fairly small set of subway lines. In order to buy a ticket, you have to talk to someone in a booth. When you go down to the platform, you hand your ticket to a person in another booth about five feet away from the first one. This person rips the ticket and keeps it (in Japan you need your ticket to get out, but not in China). For some reason, the ticket system consists solely of having customers move pieces of paper from one booth to the other. There is no 自動改札, there are no ticket vending machines, and they have no way of knowing which line you ride, even though the prices are different. My guess is they’ll probably have an improved system in place before the Olympics, but who knows?

A friend of mine accused me of having nothing good to say about China. I apologize for coming off as too critical. I had a great time in China, and I highly recommend anyone to go at least once. I’ll try to put up a post later detailing the good things I noticed.

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