URSABLOG: Multiple Entry Visa

Sleepless In Shanghai

Jetlag and nicotine addiction drove me out of my hotel room and onto the street in the middle of the night. It was a small hotel on the fifth and eighteenth floors of a tall block, and the lobby was shared by other small hotels (with rooms on other floors) and other businesses. People were asleep on banquettes. There was no security around. They had found a place to stay. On other nights they were there again too.

The building – two blocks away from the more expensive and Western-branded hotels of central Pudong – was shabby and old, well at least old for Shanghai standards. And in these streets there was something a little less shiny going on, but also not loud; humble and unobtrusive. Migrant labourers getting by, people on the make, asking if I needed a massage. Cheaper restaurants away from the shinier food courts in the malls. And those malls had empty shops, all opening soon, but with no definite branding on show yet. A general feeling that the steam had gone out of the economy, with an almost tangible sense of sad, pointless drifting.

This Was You

I spent a day teaching at the Shanghai Maritime University for their international Master’s course. At one point, showing time charter rates and corresponding values from 2000 to 2020, I pointed to the highs – and lows – and it dawned on me.

“This was you,” I said, as I pointed to the peak of all peaks in 2008. “This was also you” I said as I pointed to the stimulus-driven mini-peak between 2009 and 2012. “And this also was you” as I showed the desperate bottom in 2016.

What I meant was the market highs before the financial crisis of 2008 were driven by the insatiable demand of China for raw materials and commodities on one side, and the insatiable demand of Chinese manufactured goods from the rest of the world. And then after the crisis, the bazooka. And then, because Chinese shipyards had mushroomed out of green or brown fields to produce the ships that people were desperate for, they created the supply, and oversupply, that caused such a disastrous slump, for the dry bulk market at least.

All signs of China’s success, with no US shipbuilding renaissance in sight even though the prices were high enough for even them to make a profit. Sometimes I get flashes of inspiration through teaching, and the students were aware enough to take the insight. I think it gave them pride and pleasure.

Later on, during a team market exercise I usually do, I was struck further by three different distinct groups: aggressive men, evolutionary women, and another group that just wanted to buy as much as possible. All of them playing the long game? None of them were surprised by the numbers involved, which still astound me, but maybe that’s because I lived through it.

Leaping To Conclusions

My first lunch of the week was with a friend, and he took me to a nice large room in a restaurant, well-lit and overlooking a garden. He asked me what I wanted to eat. I said I ate everything.

After a while, he went away and then came back to ask whether I ate bofra. I didn’t understand. He said it again, until it sounded a bit like bullfrog. I dismissed this as impossible – frog maybe, but specifically bullfrog? Something was being lost in translation.

I was getting frustrated and embarrassed. Not to mention hungry. Was it a salad, a fish, noodles of some kind. In the end my friend got his phone and then showed me a picture of what he was offering. There was a great big, green bullfrog. So he ordered, and it was delicious. So much so it put a spring in my step for the rest of the week.

At The Exhibition

Marintec was massive, and packed. The N halls were full of foreign stands, the kind you see in every maritime exhibition around the world. I passed through quickly: I know what Classification Societies are, and know that South Korean yards, are big, beautiful, and making big plans with the US.

The W halls – the Chinese ones – were far more interesting. I was hustled by reps – mostly women – wandering the aisles, asking whether I wanted anchor chains, mooring ropes or machinery spare parts. I declined politely, but I felt I was walking through Shimbashi.

That said, there was an energy, a desire to engage that brought home to me that Chinese shipyards, and Chinese shipping in general, has a large and dynamic hinterland. And it struck me that the ships that I order, buy and sell on behalf of clients are made up of so many different parts and systems that their complexities – and operation – are far beyond me. But all are essential, and I should really pay more attention to them. I didn’t buy any mooring ropes though.

Don’t Broke The Broker?

On Saturday, killing time before my flight in the evening I went to Yuyuan to buy some cheap tat for presents. I went into one shop and bought two waving cats (actually they are meant to be drawing up fortune of one kind or other from a well, at least that is what my Chinese students told me) as well as some red purses and a fridge magnet of Chairman Mao, which I find I am fond of. The woman said 450 yuan, and I was horrified. “Too much!” I said. “How much you wanna pay?” “400” I said, the instinct to negotiate kicking in. She agreed with alacrity. I paid and only afterwards did the mental arithmetic.

I thought I had got a good deal, but it was terrible. I went around afterwards kicking myself for not saying 200. Or less. But I was a little confused with the exchange rate, and tired, and it wasn’t much money anyway – well at least that’s what I told myself. But I was a mug, and had been mugged. And it bugged me for the rest of the day.

Woman In The Park

To shake off the feeling I went for a walk and found a peaceful park surrounded by skyscrapers. The sun was beginning to set but it was still pleasant, so I lay down on the still scorched grass for a rest, with my purchases scattered around me.

After a while, a little way off, I saw a woman – barefoot – with a white woolly plant-pot hat wander around until she was standing in front of me about ten metres away. She waved. I ignored her, after all what was a Chinese woman with Hello Kitty badges doing waving at a western tourist lying on the grass? I had succeeded in being intermittently invisible for most of the day. But after a while – having checked behind me – I realised that she was waving at me. I smiled.

She came up to me.

“I’m depressed. My mother was mean to me. My grandmother too.” And so began a rather uneven dialogue where she downloaded her rather disjointed and inarticulate griefs. I asked her a few questions – Where was she born? Where did she live? – but she started telling me that only foreigners understood, the government didn’t care about the people, she was very unhappy. She asked me no questions at all about myself, except if I was in a hurry. I said I wasn’t.

But as the conversation got more alarming, and she started crying and looking into my eyes pleadingly I became more uncomfortable. This was following a by now familiar pattern when people recognise something kind and sympathetic about me, and decide I am the solution to their problems. But then I noticed a 360-degree security camera about 50 metres away, and it seemed to turn its eye and focus on me, scrutinising me. I wondered whether the woman – who was becoming increasingly distressed – was a plant, deployed to root out soft-hearted westerners like me, and turn me against my own country, or for some other unknown but invidious purpose.

I dismissed this notion as fantasy – what the hell would they care about me? – but nonetheless it shook me out of my complacency. My soft western heart hardened and getting up I told my new friend that I had to go and meet someone before I flew. She didn’t hear me, but as I said goodbye and walked off, she seemed deflated, and the tears came again. I turned back after a while, and saw her in exactly the same position, kneeling, shoulders slumped, staring at the grass, a picture of dejection. Human pain and the damage we do to each other is universal, apparently.

Drones On The Bund

As I walked along the Bund, loudspeakers were blaring out in Chinese and to their “international guests”: No drones, flying them is forbidden, the area is a controlled airspace. I was under the impression that the whole of China was a controlled airspace, but this is obviously a thing, because they weren’t telling us to do, or not to do anything else. I looked up: the red PRC flags fluttered – unironically – on the tallest points of the old bank buildings facing the flashier side of the river and as I wandered through the crowds in the fading light of the cooling Saturday afternoon, it felt like it was exactly the right time to start heading for home.

Simon Ward