Wishin' and hopin' and waitin' (via MSN)
In Hebei province northwest of Beijing, road construction has caused a traffic jam of biblical proportions with the backup stretching over 100km over the course of 9 days. At this point, things seem to be clearing up, but it’s taken almost two weeks. You might be asking yourself how this kind of thing happens, well, it’s difficult to say, but being 10 weeks into a 12 week internship in Hangzhou, I think I can provide some insight. In California we have multiple highways going everywhere. Want to go to SF? You can take 101 or 280. LA? You can take 5 or 101 or 99. In China, it doesn’t really work like that, there’s generally just one road between any two given places, despite the huge infrastructure build up. Part of the reason for this is the huge demand for development, there isn’t time/money to build up multiple routes to the same location. Another contributing factor, one that I think is much more interesting, is the mentality of “if it works this way, lets keep doing it this way.” To be fair, I didn’t come up with this theory entirely on my own, it was influenced by students from the biggest local university. They lamented that creativity was sorely lacking in the current and future generations of Chinese leadership and I think this traffic jam supports that notion. What does this mean for China in the long run? I don’t know, but it is something I will definitely watch.