CONVENIENCES ARE NOTHING TO SNEEZE AT

Nov. 26, 1992
Los Angeles Daily News

    The moving van arrived yesterday from Minnesota with my furniture, so one thing I am grateful for today is that I don't have to sleep on the floor any more. That is a small thing, but it reminds me of how many small things we need to make our lives run smoothly.

      A complex and delicate social network delivered my belongings halfway across a continent, two minutes before the promised time of arrival. So for telephones and electronic mail, moving companies and credit cards, interstate highways and fast-food restaurants, I am duly grateful.

     Without these things, the ordinary tasks of life take so much time that there's none left over to get any useful work done. If this be infrastructure, let's have more of it.

      A friend from Chengdu, Sichuan, stayed with us in Minnesota for a few weeks on his first trip outside the People's Republic of China in 1984. Mr. Tian wasn't surprised to find Americans free and rich. He knew that before he came. What astonished him was how easy everything was.

      "Is so convenient!" he marveled over and over again, until all of us began to laugh as soon as he said it.

      One morning he watched in blank incomprehension as I licked stamps. He had a really nifty solution to the problem of attaching postage to letters, a travel kit that was a gift from his colleagues. It had a little bottle of glue, and its own tiny brush, all cunningly sealed so the glue wouldn't end up forever joining his shirts to the inside of his suitcase.

      Why should it have occurred to him that stamps came with glue already printed on the back? It didn't occur to us that they didn't.

      I would have appreciated one of those kits when I lived in China. Post offices had glue pots, usually with a few bits of dried-up glue in the corners and a liberal selection of trapped flies.

      A glueless stamp may be no more significant than a single droning mosquito, but it is one among a swarm of irritating and quite unnecessary inefficiencies that can almost bring useful work to a halt.

      We made airline reservations for Tian from Baltimore to New York, and he picked up his ticket at our usual travel agency. Another marvel. As far as he knew, in order to buy an airplane ticket you had to be in the city you were flying from.

      At the university where I taught in Shanghai, that particular inconvenience accounted for much of the work of the university's foreign affairs office. They entertained a lot of foreign scholars, and as a courtesy would arrange for tourist trips to the Li River in Guilin or the emperor's tomb in Xi'an. To assure the foreigner of a seat on the flight back, someone from the office would fly to Guilin and back, just to buy the return tickets.

      Chinese domestic air travel is desperately overcrowded, so you have to wonder why they were willing to fill up seats with people who didn't really need to be where they were going.

      Well, why not? Who would be better off - except people who wanted to travel - if airline travel was more convenient? It wasn't as if they had to worry about competition, since it wasn't allowed.

      In private enterprises, to the extent they are permitted, service is generally excellent. But many kinds of businesses simply don't exist. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to move across China, not just for me as an illiterate foreigner, but for anybody. No private housing market, no real estate agents, no moving companies, no anything.

      Most Americans work in service jobs and they scarcely exist in China. Jobs are badly needed, too. Even government figures say that unemployment, or underemployment, runs at 40 percent and private estimates range up to 75 percent. This tends to happen if everyone's job is preserved for life, even when he has nothing to do, and when no businesses ever fold no matter how much money they lose.

      There's nothing particularly ethnic or racial about the Chinese/American comparisons I am making. Hong Kong, which is about 98 percent Chinese, seems to be at least as well run as most American cities. The difference is political. The government in Beijing is corrupt, brutal and incompetent. Officials have no incentive to make life more convenient, so it doesn't happen.

      On the contrary, bureaucrats who have high enough rank to escape the maddening inefficiencies of daily life have every reason to make sure life is miserable for everybody else. That gives them all the more scope for discreet bribery.

      One might almost think that is what Congress is about when it passes complicated and useless regulatory legislation (and exempts itself from compliance). If constituents don't have any problems with the government they need help with, why will they cough up when it comes time for campaign contributions?