URSABLOG: Gilded Cages

About fifteen years ago, in Nanjing, I was in a taxi and in genuine fear of my life. I was being taken to the airport by someone who had obviously been taught to drive on an Atari video game: accelerating and braking forcefully and abruptly, changing lanes with carefree abandon, weaving through the multi-lane highway as though he were being chased by a rogue squad of police cars. It was partly my fault: I had made the mistake of expressing my concern that I would miss my flight. Whether he understood or not I will never know, but I was tossed and turned over in the back seat of a car without seat belts, wondering whether I had done enough in my life to justify a relatively early exit. The car arrived at the airport, screeched to a halt, and spat me out ruffled, wretched and wrecked, but alive.

This memory resurfaced last week as I once again found myself in a taxi in Nanjing. I had just spent one and a half hours of blissful peace on the train, being whisked from Shanghai at speeds approaching 350 kilometres per hour, arriving on time, almost to the second. It was all so smooth: I presented my passport at the security gate, and after that I was in the system. The system was nonetheless strict: we were told not to eat smelly food or take off our shoes (obviously a recurring problem) but as I settled into my seat, I watched the skyscrapers of various minor cities dotted around the Yangtze River plain pass by my window, in the beautiful early autumn sunshine. It was the bluest of blue-sky days.

I arrived in Nanjing feeling relaxed and almost refreshed. Then back into real life: after the usual confusion in the taxi rank, my driver, giggling over my attempts to communicate, launched his beaten-up car into the mid-morning traffic. For one moment I thought he was the same driver as before, but no, he had just been taught at the same driving school. At one point a cyclist cut across his path, and in tones reminiscent of Athens traffic, he let loose a torrent of abuse. I almost felt at home.

Earlier in the week I had attended a Roundtable Discussion at the North Bund Forum, invited by the Shanghai Maritime University, to participate in Medium Term Solutions To Green Propulsion. The Forum was held in a beautiful building: the Grand Halls in Shanghai, and my discussion was in a room reminiscent of those you see in CCP events, with tall ceilings, beautiful wall paintings and a spectacular view across the Huangpu River towards Pudong.

I was amongst academics, consultants, representatives of national bodies, various NGOs and the IMO of course, and the mood was sombre – this was the Monday after the Friday debacle at the IMO, when the Net Zero Fund (NZF) was kicked, with the help of the US and their friends – firmly down the road for at least another year. They were so close, and then they couldn’t get the package over the line. The conversations over coffee were disconsolate and depressing. The mood in the discussion was not much better.

Being the only person around the table who was – as far as I could tell – in the actual business of shipping, i.e. a shareholder and director of a shipbroking company that needs to do deals to survive, I realised that either the Shanghai Maritime University or I – or both – had made a mistake by allowing me to be there. I wanted to know exactly where the product was – the ship – that could be ordered that would cover these new regulations, if and when they came into effect. Another thing that was glaringly obvious was that although there were dark mutterings about Greece and Cyprus letting the European side down by abstaining in the vote to delay adoption of NZF by a year, the European side was dominated by liner shipping. I was being treated by the others seated at the very impressive roundtable like a rebellious and awkward upstart who not only had the temerity to try to make money in the market, but in the tramp market as well.

There were a number of themes that had to be discussed, and – as usual – I expressed my opinions on most of them. Adoption of new, greener fuels? The market will decide, the charterers won’t pay for it anyway (whatever their good intentions), and we will need new designs not just new engines. Being an early adopter of new, unproven technology? Most shipowners cannot afford the risk – despite the wrong impression that they have billions of dollars to play with – to be first in the game, especially when being first can be wrong. Why does Greece have the largest private fleet in the world? Because they mostly buy ships that work, and make money in the market that exists – eventually – rather than the market that people at conferences like these are dreaming of, the one they think should exist. The very able moderator of the discussions duly noted down every comment.

The roundtable discussions finished, we hung around for a while exchanging cards and so on, and I left, intending to head off into the Shanghai afternoon. But no, it was not over yet. We had coffee and I was somewhat farcically ushered into a plush anteroom to meet various dignitaries; the dignitaries dismissed me with mild disdain.

We were all then gathered into the main hall to discuss the results of the roundtables, but before we could do that we were made to suffer the same old tired presentations on how innovation through technology – still as yet unspecified – will, by sharing data and taking a ‘holistic approach’ (dread phrase), magically change the world for the better. I also saw and heard that ‘green corridors’ were the future and the self-congratulatory back slapping that followed left me scratching my head. How do they work? And who actually benefits?

Then the moderators of each of the different Roundtable Discussions reported back to the Hall. I was quite happy – and pleasantly surprised – that some of my comments in our working group made it to the summary, and even more gratified that some of the usual boring ones did not.

I am, as regular readers know, regularly dismissive of the current US administration’s knowledge of shipping, and have more than once been critical of their attempts to remake world trade. That view still stands, more so after their muscling in at the last minute to scupper the NZF proposals. I am also generally supportive of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the world. But what am I to make of what I saw on Monday?

And then it dawned on me. The world of international shipping – with all its associations, bodies, NGOs, pressure groups – are all on the same carousel, and it is being driven by liner shipping. Tramp shipping is looked down on as being an unsophisticated, greedy, vulgar, less reputable member of the shipping family, and anyone who works in it, or worse makes a living from it, must be a little dodgy, cutting corners and ignoring rules, apparently not paying taxes and generally being shysters on the make. That the most successful are Greek – and are almost being blamed for their success – left a bad taste of arrogant racism in my mouth, similar to that I experienced during the Euro crisis of the 2010s.

Ignorance of the business of tramp shipping, and of the people who invest and work in it, results in the adoption of clumsy regulations that work very well for ships that can disperse the extra costs to their millions of customers – the people that send and receive the millions of containers that traverse the world – but less so for those shipowners and operators who only have one customer at a time – their charterers – in tramp shipping.

I don’t think that the science behind the creation of NZF is necessarily a scam, but I was left with a feeling that the merry-go-round that surrounds it is at times a self-serving ecosystem that has its own politics, economics, compromises and pay-offs. And to gain a place on the carousel you have to speak the language in the right accent. And the right accent is the liner shipping one.

Liner shipping is like the wonderful trains in China that speed you along to where you want to go. To gain access to this world you present your ID or passport, and once that has been accepted, and as long as you play by the rules, everything is fine. Tramp shipping is like the taxi drivers of a chaotic city, with many different apps and many different side hustles, without structure or organisation. Each has its own rules, but however smooth and elegant the trains are, taxis are more fun.

At one point in my latest Nanjing taxi ride, we were stuck in traffic down a leafy boulevard, and I suddenly noticed that the birdsong was especially loud. And then I saw why. There were birdcages hanging from some of the branches of the trees: residents had apparently taken their birds outside to enjoy the good weather, and the wild birds were enjoying the company. And I thought to myself, would I rather be in a cage, well cared for, well fed, and well imprisoned? Or outside, in the trees, free: insecure, never knowing when the next meal is coming, feeling the cold, the wind, the rain, fearing the predators, but not having to wait for the good weather to come to be taken outside to enjoy it? It is not true that the caged bird never sings, but only real freedom can give its song more meaning. And if you listen carefully – I found – you can tell the difference.

Simon Ward