Great China Leap (1), Prelude, I'm back to 1800s

the day I came back from my last China trip, my wife and I had a chance to walk over along the river next to our community,

"This is unbelievably beautiful, isn't it?", my wife said. I couldn't agree more. At one side of the road it's a Golf course, the other it's bushes, small trees, reeds in dry yellow at
the river bank and rural beaches. Through the slender silhouette of the reeds we could see ducks swimming around. On the horizon is the south part of the Manhattan skyline, simmering in the warm winner sunshine beneath the lightly blue sky.

"Sure", I said, "you'd never have anything like this in Beijing or Shanghai... a totally natural and beautiful setting with 15 minutes of commute to the business center. But, you know, the price in Beijing or Shanghai, or even ShenZhen, is higher than here."

"Not just that." my wife pointed to a few high rises under construction at the river front, "so we have, let's see, 6 or 7 high rises going up, less than 1 or 2 development projects in Beijing or Shanghai, and all the sudden the local real estate market gets totally flooded. What happened?"


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When I flied back from Shanghai and waiting for a transfer to LA, I sat next to an old gentlemen in San Francisco's airport. He's a retired professor from New Mexico, and has been working in China for a Japanese energy company since 2000.

"You must have seen the most dramatic changes in China", I said.

"You kidding... every month I go back to US and then back to Shanghai, it's different. I have never seen anything like that in my life. And I talked to people here and they don't really believe me.

You know, every time I come back, I feel like I'm back to year 1800."