Jeff takes James for a walk in China. JB West and JB East present: See You In The Hague! #64

2023-11-19

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James Bradley: Hello, this is James Bradley. I’m known as JB East because I am in Saigon and there’s another JB. We call him JB West. Of course, he’s the famous Jeff Brown and he’s way out there in the West in France. Hello, Jeff.

Jeff J Brown: Hi, James.

James: Hey, Jeff just went to China twice. Jeff, what months did you go?

Jeff: I spent almost a month in May, and then I spent a full month at the end of September and into October.

James: And where did you go, Jeff?

Jeff: I went to the southern region of China, as well as the central part of China.

James: And as listeners know, Jeff has lived in China, and knows China well. But we thought we’d touch on three themes today with Jeff’s trip: Infrastructure, social civility, and economic productivity. I was listening to a professor out of the University of Singapore, and he said, that one important thing to know about China is everything the Anglo-American press has said about it in the last 40 years is a lie that for some reason, the press in the English language continually downplays.

China is falling apart, that it’s just not going to make it. And so, we’re so inundated by negativity about China, we thought it would be great to have Jeff’s realistic eyes on the prize here. So, Jeff, why don’t you take it away? Talk to us. You said you wanted to talk about first infrastructure. What are you talking about when you say infrastructure?

Jeff: By infrastructure, James, I’m talking about commercial buildings, apartment buildings, low-income housing, highways, train tracks, metros, ports, all kinds of infrastructure that go to supporting the people. And like you said I just read an article where a guy made a snarky comment that, well, Guizhou Province already now has 11 airports, and China doesn’t need any more airports and trains and skyscrapers and I went back and checked.

Well, Guizhou has 38.5 million people. He compared it to Missouri, which is the same size and area in the United States. And Missouri only has 6.2 million people. And then I checked, well, Missouri has eight airports with 6 million people, and Guizhou has 11 airports with 38 million people. And I think that’s where people get derailed, if you’ll pardon the pun because they forget that China has 1.4 billion people, almost 20% of humanity. And it is as big an area as the United States or Canada. So, it’s a massively huge country, with a massive population.

And it is still urbanizing. It had more rural people than urban people up until 2014. I mean, the United States went urban back in the early 20th century, as did Europe. So, it’s still urbanizing at a very rapid rate. And that’s why they are building millions and millions of low-income housing. I was stunned everywhere I went even down to third and fourth-tier cities, with skyscrapers and buildings going up everywhere and low-income housing just kilometer after kilometer after kilometer of low-income housing, these low-cost apartments.

Metro’s going in everywhere, and even in the smallest hamlets and villages, they were widening the roads and improving the roads and the byways and the bridges even just out in the middle of nowhere. So, China believes in infrastructure and I think another reason people get off track on infrastructure in China versus in the United States.

In Europe, we’re thinking about the next quarterly report for Wall Street and what’s going to be our profit in three months. Whereas in China they’re thinking about 30 years, they’re thinking out, they build cities. And then it may take them 20 or 30 years to fill those cities up. So, they’re patient, they’re visionary, and they know that infrastructure is what drives the economy, not just in the short term by providing jobs and using materials but it will pay off in spades going out 10, 20, 30 years.

James: Can I just make a comment?

Jeff: Please.

James: I just toured the War Museum here in Saigon for about the seventh time over the last decade, and I said to my friend when we came out, that America would be the most super country with free health care, free education, just gleaming trains smooth highways, not a pothole in the country. If all this money that we spent on these wars, I mean, that is another thing. China is not only planning but also putting money into the interior. I mean, inside their borders, we are every day in the news.

You can see that $100 billion goes out to Ukraine. Israel, one of the richest countries in the world, immediately needs American money. We are building blood banks in Guam for the coming war with China. We’re building a Maginot line out in the Pacific. I mean, it’s also just the fact that America has spent trillions of dollars overseas, which only you know what I mean. It’s made billionaires out of a few, but we don’t. We’re not investing in our people.

Jeff: That’s true, James. And it’s a good comment. China is not an imperial expansionist country. They’ve got one military base in Djibouti, which is actually to help their ships around the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to avoid piracy, especially from Somalia. And so, the 50 million overseas Chinese around the world who are out there building things, selling things, buying things, and creating commerce and revenue for everybody.

And Europe’s just as bad as the United States. I mean, they’re spread out now all over Africa and the Caribbean and Ukraine and Israel and we can see it here in France, we’re becoming poorer and poorer. And the infrastructure is falling apart. And we have higher and higher inflation. And we’re being bankrupted by the same policies that you just talked about.

James: So, tell a little more about infrastructure like what does it mean to like what are you here? I mean, what does it mean to the Chinese? Do they read that our infrastructure is falling apart in America and theirs is increasing? I mean, is that a topic of conversation?

Jeff: Yeah, it’s in the media, of course. The Chinese government wants to show the people how they compare with the West. And of course, they have images of drug addicts on sidewalks wallowing in their vomit and human feces on the sidewalks in San Francisco. And of course, they do that because it makes them look good and reminds the Chinese people that they have a pretty good life, after all.

And because all around the world after 50 years of post-war propaganda, there’s still this feeling among many, many Chinese that somehow the United States and the West are superior to China. And so, they yeah, they know it. They know it. And I think the Chinese right now just practically take for granted the incredible infrastructure they’ve got. I mean we were zipping around as you like to say 305km an hour on low-cost high-speed trains all over the place, metros, electric car taxis, buses, the airports are just staggeringly beautiful and big and busy.

So, it’s just hard to describe. You know, I lived in Shenzhen for three years from 2016 to 2019 and back then they were saying, oh Shenzhen has 12 to 14 million people. And so, I came back four years later and it has 17 million people. So, they have increased their population by 3 million people in about four years. And there is just construction going on everywhere you look. You turn your head left, there’s construction, you turn your head right, there’s construction, you turn around, there’s construction, there’s construction in front of you and be it metros, apartments, skyscrapers, office buildings, parks, businesses, et cetera.

You name it, it is just flat-out developing at a geometric rate. So, it’s hard to describe unless you see it. I went to Changsha, the capital of Hunan and the center of China. I went to Hefei, which is supposed to be one of the poorest cities in China. And it’s just exploding. It has 10 million people. Changsha has 12 million people. And they’re just building, building, building, building, building. So, they’re not doing this for employment. They’re doing this for long-term planning, planning out 10, 20, 30 years from now as China urbanizes more and more.

James: When you say I went to these cities, how did you travel between those cities?

Jeff: Well, the only plane I took was from with my business partner because it was October 1st, National Day, and it’s pretty far. We took a plane from Shenzhen Airport to Hefei Airport, but other than that, all the other legs that we did, they were we had one slow train, and all the others were high-speed trains. And you know them as well as I do. They’re fast, they’re efficient, they’re clean, they’re inexpensive, they run like clockwork. I mean, when I was there in May, I got on the internet to buy a ticket from Shenzhen to Changsha.

This is not Beijing and Shanghai. These are, like two second-tier cities Changsha and Shenzhen. And there were 58 high-speed trains a day. 58 high-speed trains a day between Changsha and Shenzhen. And there’s probably a hundred a day between Beijing and Shanghai and between Shanghai and Guangzhou and also Chongqing, the other major city near Sichuan. So, they’re running thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of high-speed trains a day. And they don’t miss a minute. They’re just basically like 300 kilometers an hour busses for Chinese people. It’s just amazing.

James: I mean, Americans have to imagine New York to Chicago, 300 kilometers per hour, 180 miles an hour. And your coffee doesn’t jiggle. If you look at your cup of coffee, it doesn’t have jiggle lines in it. I’ve taken the train from New York to Chicago, and it’s a desolate sad landscape. You know, the end of civilization it looks like. You know what I mean?

Jeff: Absolutely.

James: And it’s rickety, and it clickety. Now you’re talking. You just mentioned three cities like you use 17 million, 10 million, 12 million. I think New York City. And I might be wrong. I think New York City is about 7 million.

Jeff: 8 million.

James: Okay, 8 million. And then the surrounding area might be 14, 15 million. You know, the Northern New Jersey and the Long Island suburbs. Okay. So, you’re talking about Shenzhen, which I saw in 1975. It was, but it was nothing above a one-story pig farm hut. It was not much hardly anything there. Just an example of poor China. And now you’re talking about 17 million people living in that city.

Jeff: There was nothing there before 1980, except as you said. Well, it was basically a fishing town with 20,000 people. They also had sea salt, sea salt drying fields, harvesting sea salt and fish, and of course, pig farms and gardens. And now it’s just one of the most amazingly beautiful, relaxing, well organized, well planned. 50% of Shenzhen has parks and greenery. 50%. And it’s big. They just started the metro there I think in 2014 or something like that. It is now the sixth-largest metro in the world. It has many more tracks than the New York subway.

So, they’re going to double what they’ve got now. It will have almost over 1,200 kilometers of metro lines by 2035. And when I was driving around Shenzhen, you could just see metro lines were going in. You could see the long construction sites going along boulevards with the cranes going along for hundreds of meters as they’re putting in more and more metros. They’re cheap. It costs about 30 to 40 US cents to take a metro ride at the most a US $1 to go all the way across the city. 16,000 electric buses.

30,000 electric taxis. And as you said, you were there. You saw it, James. Pig farms, fishing boats, and salt-drying planes. And now, today, it’s just one of the most spectacular, beautiful cities in the world. And it’s very telling, because if you go up on a skyscraper in Shenzhen, you look across the river into Hong Kong, in the New Territories, and there’s almost nothing there. I mean, the New Territories in Hong Kong are virtually empty.

If the Chinese had that, that would all be developed in low-income housing, shopping centers, schools, hospitals, infrastructure, roads, metros, everything. And it’s been like that for 150 years in Hong Kong, and almost nothing is being developed there. So, it’s just two ways of looking at how to take care of the economy in two different ways of how to take care of the people.

James: What are those two ways?

Jeff: Well, for me, it’s the capitalist system where profits trump people. And then China’s communist socialist system, which puts people before profits. And I think that’s the difference. They don’t want to develop the new territories because it’s not going to be profitable for the ten families that own Hong Kong. And every Hong Kong dollar you spend in Hong Kong goes into the pockets of one of those ten families. They own everything there. And whereas in China, all the land is publicly owned. There’s no private dirt. And so, the country can be developed in the interest of the 1.4 billion citizens and not ten families owning one city like Hong Kong. So, yeah, capitalism and profit versus socialism and people.

James: Well, what’s the ownership situation like? Can I buy my own house? Can I buy an apartment building? Can I buy a block of apartment buildings and have a multi-generational? Can I have a Trump family business over three generations?

Jeff: Absolutely.

James: Fred Trump started the Trump Organization many years ago out in Queens. Can that happen in China?

Jeff: Of course. The only difference is, is that the dirt is publicly owned. And so, you have to look at renting and leasing land in China, just like McDonald’s does around the world or any other business around the world. You have to think in terms of long-term leases. So, you can lease a building, you can lease green land and develop it. And it’s a 70-year lease. And they have even to avoid gouging, after 70 years, people taking advantage of somebody who has built a building on that land and has developed it.

They have very strict rules as to how much the renewal of that 70-year lease can cost so that it does not destroy the person who made such a big investment in that land. I can go get an apartment. I can go get a villa today if I want. I can go buy one for, it’s a 70-year lease and it’s fungible. If I die, it goes to my heirs. And after 70 years, they can keep it going into the next generation and the next generation.

James: So, the second point you wanted to talk about was social civility. And it’s interesting. I was down in Singapore last week with a Chinese friend that I have had since the 19, I guess, 1970. So, I’ve known him for unbelievable. Yeah, like 50 years, more than 50 years. He was a student at the University of Wisconsin, and he lived in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Australia for many years, like a decade in Australia.

Now he’s in Singapore. And I said Patrick, it’s unbelievable. If you look back at 1970 when I met you, it’s the West is going down and the East is going up. And he said, yes. And we have maintained the civility in the East. He said, in the East you know, it’s I can’t remember what he said, but it was something about human relations that the respect for each other and just a nice civilized glance of life. So that’s what he thought was a big difference between the East and West after 50 years. And what do you mean by social civility?

Jeff: Well, first off, I’d like to point out that it wasn’t always like this in China. When my wife and I lived in China from 1990 to 1997, it was a hellhole. I mean, it was a social hellhole with Deng Xiaoping, with the reform and opening up, he basically just unleashed the dogs of capitalism at the street level, not at the corporate level, but at the street level they just unleashed the dogs of capitalism. And it turned China into just a concrete jungle of fear. Everybody was lying, cheating, stealing. You know, corruption was everywhere.

No one trusted anybody. Everybody was worried about everybody else ripping them off. There were shysters and crooks everywhere. This was the reform and opening up that and of course, all of this was what caused the protests in Tiananmen in 1989. It wasn’t all the CIA color revolution, freedom, and democracy. The people were outraged at the corruption. They were outraged at what had happened to the market. They couldn’t buy anything. They couldn’t find anything. And inflation was about 30%.

That’s why they had Tiananmen. And so, it was like that for seven years. And it was awful. And we lived there and worked there. We had started our family there with our two daughters during that time. It was like a drug. It was like a drug high. It was like being on amphetamines every day. It was exhausting. And it was a dog-eat-dog mob of crooks. Organized crime came back after the Mao era, and there were hookers everywhere and prostitutes, like in Shenzhen.

When I would go there, there was a prostitute every ten meters on the sidewalks. It was like a gold rush town with no laws and no civility. And so that all changed by the time Hu Jintao became president around the time of the Beijing Olympics, they realized they could not put that kind of face to the world. And so, they started to try to clean up some of the excesses for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

But it was XI Jinping who became president in 2012. That’s what he’s the one that said, okay, enough of this crap. And he’s the one that got all the tittytainment watching Dallas and Friends and all these other crappy shows on TV, those all went out. Let’s get back to Confucianism. Let’s get back to Daoism. Let’s get back to Buddhism. Let’s get back to traditional Chinese values. And obviously, if the government is corrupt, the people are going to be corrupt.

So massive, massive, massive cleanup of corruption, and as a result, the people became, no one was no longer corrupt. They re-found those Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist principles of civility, honesty, reciprocity, and solidarity. And so, my message to the world out there is, is that societies can change for the better. You know, when I go and I see what’s going on in the United States and what I see here in France, and how it’s getting coarser and coarser and more and more corrupt and more and more violent and more and more crime, it can change for the better, because the Chinese did it.

So, from the time we left in 1997 to the time we came back in 2010 for our second tour or time in China, up until 2019, it was like two different planets. And the second planet is the one that your Singaporean friend was talking about. Here in France, they use chainsaws to cut open the cages that hold the butane bottles for kitchens and for heating and stuff. In broad daylight, they’ll come out with chainsaws and cutting open cages at gas stations and stuff and ripping off butane bottles to sell on the black market.

In China, you’re walking around Shenzhen, they leave their full butane bottles on their motorcycles. Nobody takes them. Nobody locks the motorcycle. Nobody locks an electric motorbike. They are still locking most of the bicycles because I guess they may be just a little bit too easy to take. But the civility on the streets, the way they treat each other, the way they’re nice to each other and I just want to say on this second trip, I was with a business partner and she’s my age, a little bit younger than me.

And I always kind of took a lot of this stuff for granted, but it was being able to step back and look at how the Chinese were treating her as an older woman, a grandmother, a mother, and she was treated like a goddess. I mean, she was treated with so much respect and honor that I didn’t used to think about it because I just kind of took it as normal. But to watch that happen to somebody else with me really opened my eyes as to how pleasant stress-free, honest, and relaxing it is to be in China with the Chinese people and how they treat each other with so much respect and dignity.

James: Looks amazing.

Jeff: Yeah. And this all happened after 1997. We’re talking 1997, 2007. We’re talking about 15 years. So, if the Chinese can make that kind of radical change for the better but it all boils down to the leadership. If the leadership is corrupt like it is in Europe, if the leadership is corrupt and criminal and venal like it is in the West, in the United States and Canada, the people are going to reflect what the leader, the government projects. In the West, the governments are projecting theft, greed, violence, autocracy, aristocracy, and arrogance. And so obviously, what are the people going to be? They’re going to mirror exactly what their governments and leaders do.

James: Well, what happened? You said 15 years of change in China. I would guess you’ve seen in those 15 years a change in France and the West also. I mean, it’s like a seesaw. One side’s up and one side’s down.

Jeff: Yeah.

James: What is happening? What would you do? If I came down from Mars and asked you about this, that seesaw what would you say?

Jeff: Well, they said what happened was, is XI Jinping became president. And he said we cannot keep up this lifestyle. We cannot keep up with this society where we have 10 to 12% annual GDP growth per year, filthy fetid waters, filthy fetid air, crime, and crime and criminality on the streets. No one trusts anybody, corruption in the private sector, corruption in the public sector, corruption in the military. He just came out and just said, this cannot stay the way it is.

It got a little bit better. Like I said, Beijing, the Beijing Olympics started. Ironically, it was XI Jinping who oversaw the Beijing Olympics. That was his portfolio. And but it was he who talked to the people. He just leveled with him. And the people were talking to him. And we are sick of this. We’re sick of breathing garbage. We’re sick of drinking garbage. We’re sick of filthy streets and filthy everything. We’re garbage all around Beijing, with mountains of garbage bathrooms that were ankle-deep in feces.

They were just saying, we’re sick of this and we want a change. And he basically emulated and said, I agree with you and get rid of the corruption. Get rid of the corrupt generals, get rid of the corrupt bureaucrats, get rid of the corrupt party officials, get rid of the corrupt private corporations who are desecrating our land and our water and ripping off the people and stealing from the people. So, it was sort of like a come to Jesus moment for the people and the government that we are going to make a change in the way we treat each other, the way we govern, and the expectations of the people are going to change as well.

James: But President Xi did not install the Western leaders. I mean, how do you explain? You just described the problem in the West was leadership. Why did that? I mean, how do you what happened there?

Jeff: Well, let me ask you this. When was the last great president, the United States had who represented?

James: John Kennedy.

Jeff: Yeah, John Kennedy, he was the last president, I agree, who had the interests of the people in his heart. And I think we can also safely say, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So, you look at all the others in between Eisenhower and Truman on their imperial exploits around the world in Vietnam and Korea, et cetera. And then you had Johnson doing the same thing as you pointed out Gerald Ford was CIA. Ronald Reagan was just a neoliberal, a face for neoliberal destruction of the safety net in the United States and deregulation, removing restrictions, on Wall Street and everything else.

Bill Clinton, I mean, these are not good leaders. And the only one who seemed to try to do something for the people was Donald Trump. And now we’ve got Biden, whose family’s mafia, they are a criminal gang. They are a criminal family. They run the Mafia in Delaware. And you and I’ve done enough reports on the Bidens and the Democratic Party in Ukraine and everything else. Our governments have just been corrupted since John F. Kennedy and it shows in the way the people are acting and treating each other.

And it shows in the way that the country is being governed. France is no better since. Charles de Gaulle. You know, that was the end in 68. That was the end of France’s hope to be a country for the people and all the succeeding presidents have just been horrible. So, we just have bad leaders. And because we have bad, corrupt, venal, autocratic, aristocratic leaders, the people respond accordingly.

James: The last thing you wanted to talk about was economic productivity. We’re reading about the housing crisis in China, the slowing economy, blah, blah blah, the lockdowns. There are a lot of articles warning about economic reversals all around the world, but also in China. What did you see in the field?

Jeff: I’ll tell you what, James. I saw people humping, thumping, jumping, working hard. I saw productive forces everywhere I went. I saw people buying, selling, trading, moving, going. It was just like a nation of 1.4 billion people, just like a beehive of social and economic activity. As I told you, I saw construction everywhere in a big city like Shenzhen. We took taxis. Well, even in May, with a friend of mine, we drove about 100km outside of Changsha and saw the countryside out there and also in Guilin, and took a taxi 70km outside of town.

We took another taxi in Zhangjiajie and went out about 50km outside of that town, really got into the countryside, farms, food everywhere, people selling their produce on the roadsides all over the place, grapes and squash and watermelon and the rural areas are rich and prosperous. The cities are spotless and clean and the roads are good. All the infrastructure is good. Restaurants everywhere, businesses everywhere, small shopkeepers everywhere, service industry barbers and clothes cleaners and repairmen.

And it’s just it’s like I don’t see that here. I don’t see that in France. I don’t see that in the United States to the extent that I see it in China. And you sent me an incredible table from the IMF that uses purchasing power parity GDP. So, this is not Chinese propaganda. This is a table from the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, that shows that China’s GDP, productive GDP is three times bigger than number two, United States. Of course, the United, as you said, the United States and Europe are literally bankrupting us.

We the citizens, with imperial adventures all over the planet spend money all over, everywhere, but where we need to be spending it, which is in Oklahoma and Wisconsin, where you and I grew up. The interest on the national debt is part of the GDP. In the United States, the military is mostly overseas. And it’s about what, I don’t know, a third or almost I don’t know what part portion of the budget the military is in the United States, but it’s massive, over $1 trillion a year. That’s all going overseas.

And so, as you said, in China, it’s local, it’s localized. And it’s just people are moving, it’s just like, well, it’s just like Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi. You just step out on the sidewalk and there’s activity. People are moving and doing and selling and buying and moving and transporting. And it’s just staggering. And then you come back here and everybody’s like being paid not to work. People are not working. Things are not working. Things are broken, things are falling apart. And that’s just not the way it is in China which is why the IMF showed its productive GDP is three times as big as the United States. So, it’s hats off to the Chinese.

James: You know, today I was at lunch with a friend. When we came out, I saw something that shocked me. I wanted to take a picture of it, and it was the first homeless I’d seen. I’ve been in Vietnam this time for about a year, and in the last year I remarked to friends that when I do interviews in the United States, in Washington or Madison or Los Angeles, I say to the interviewers, I say, when you go home tonight, you’re going to drive from your studio home and you’re going to see homeless, right?

And they always say, yes. And I say, I can’t find any homeless here. If you gave me $1,000 to go find some homeless on the streets of Ho Chi Minh, I can’t find them. And I look everywhere. I saw some guys sleeping on the street when I came out of the restaurant, and I took my phone out to take a picture. And then I realized they were construction workers on a lunch break.

Jeff: Hahahahahahahaha the afternoon nap, the Asian afternoon nap.

James: But they were in the shade in this construction site. And I thought, oh my God, my first homeless. You know, I wanted to figure out why there were no homeless here. And I had never seen any. And they had to take their shoes off of rest because they were putting in a 15-hour day. So that’s the homeless in Ho Chi Minh City. They’re working their butt off.

Jeff: Yeah. Great story, James. That’s a good one.

James: But I find in talking to Americans, I mean, do you know, there’s homeless in Wausau, Wisconsin, I bring up Wausau, there’s like 40,000 people and there’s homeless. There are soup kitchens in I mean, they’re living under the byways and of Milwaukee and Madison. It’s unbelievable. And what I find with Americans when I say homeless, it’s like a name. It’s like a category it’s like everything’s normal. But yeah, we have some homeless, like it snowed, you know what I mean? Like, it’s just it’s normal life.

But the mosquitoes are out in summer and we have some homeless. And I say to them, I say, those aren’t homeless. Those are poor people who can’t afford a home. And they’re shitting on the street there. And I’m in Ho Chi Minh and there are zero people who are so poor that their bottom is sleeping on the cement. We don’t have degrading poverty in Vietnam. But Americans, they don’t get it. You know, they have a nice house and they drive. And the homeless is like you know what I mean? It’s a name.

There is not coming to the realization that this is tens and tens of thousands, of desperately poor people in America. And they’re putting up with it like the frog in the slowly heating pan. So, we’re out in Asia and we don’t have homeless. Jeff, did you see any homeless camps and beggars when you come out of a store in downtown Philadelphia or New York? But you’re accosted by people who want you to look them in the eye and they want to tell you their story and they have their hand out. And it’s intimidating. I don’t experience any of that zero in Vietnam.

Jeff: Nor in China. Nowhere were to be found. And you know what the difference is, James, is, is that I’ll tell you what when we were living in Shenzhen from 2016 to 2019, I was riding my bike through kind of an isolated trail along one of the big boulevards. And I glanced into some bushes and I saw this guy in the bushes and I thought, what the hell? And I went and found him, and I went and saw him, and he was virtually naked.

And he was covered with just he obviously he had been hiding there for days and days and days and was probably mentally ill maybe schizophrenic and forgot to take his medication or bipolar and forgot to take his medication. Anyway, I just picked up, I just got my phone, called the police number. I forgot what it is 112 113 or whatever it is. And I said, here I am. Here’s a picture of the guy. He needs help and they came and got him.

You know, so that’s the difference. If somebody falls or if somebody passes out or something in the metro or somebody you know, there’s an accident or whatever, and people are hurt, the Chinese jump into action. I mean, there’s this real sense of solidarity and mutual support that just is no longer in the West. I think I told you the story about my business partner, she twice fell down in Paris.

She was having equilibrium problems with her ears, and she fell down at a train station in Paris one time about four years ago. And this was five years ago. And she fell flat on her face, and people just walked over her like she was a piece of garbage. No one offered to help her in a very, very one of the busiest train stations in Paris. And they just walked over her like she was a piece of garbage.

And so, she had just got up by herself and got out of there by herself. That would never happen in China. My gosh, you know, you just anybody that trips and falls, they turn around and they’re helping you and asking if you’re okay. And so, it’s just a whole different philosophy that I think maybe the United States and France had after World War Two, but it’s gone now. There’s nothing left of it.

James: Well so, folks come to China. And you know, I had a New Zealand couple, there golfers. I knew him from New Zealand and they just came through and they’re real Kiwis and they’ve traveled a lot in the West. They’ve never been to Asia, and they just traveled from Hanoi down to Ho Chi Minh. And they said they’re coming back in seven months. And they said, there’s a boom in tourism, New Zealanders coming to Vietnam, and has such a positive image.

Jeff: Yeah.

James: So come on out to Asia, folks.

Jeff: Come out to Vietnam. We spent two weeks traveling from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City back in 2017, something like that with my wife and our younger daughter and had the time of our lives. It’s a spectacular country and the people are so friendly and so nice and so helpful and so even though we had French passports, they were nice to us because they don’t like the French. We were living in China and they didn’t like the Chinese, so even though we had the wrong place to live and even an American passport, and my daughter also has an American passport they were still nice to us, even though we had the wrong nationalities.

James: But Jeff, I’d contest that and I’ve just I was just talking about that today that the number one most popular tourist here is an American. And number two is French. And it’s it doesn’t make any sense for what the Americans and French did. But the Vietnamese explained to me that after the war, a lot of Vietnamese went to France and America. And so, there are strong connections.

And they had built positive lives. But I was quite surprised coming to Vietnam, how I was received as an American. Hollywood has a real positive power. And in terms of war, it’s like a typhoon that the Vietnamese have had so many invasions that it’s a typhoon that Grandpa had one day. But everybody’s young here and they’re moving on.

But thanks for your tour guide to China. And it looks like it’s I mean, I would encourage people to come out to Asia not just to have a vacation, but it’s obviously the future. I mean, our children and our children’s children are going to be very influenced by what is happening in Asia. So come on out and see what Jeff has seen and see the future.

Jeff: And come out and see what James is seeing. And in Vietnam to see the future too. Thank you, James.

James: Okay, so this is JB East from Saigon signing off.

Jeff: And JB West in Normandy, France signing out as well. Thank you. Bye-bye.

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