Hu Wants You

As China's president tours America, the government in Beijing is on a campaign to get tourists beyond the country's big cities -- and into its vast interior.

By STAN SESSER AND MEI FONG
April 22, 2006; Page P1

GUIZHOU PROVINCE, China -- Chen Hua Jin, a resident of the beautiful village of Langde, slung onto the side of a mountain above a fast-flowing river, has just cooked her visitors a hot-pot lunch of local pork, tofu and greens. They're delighted, and she's happier still, having just earned $10 in a place where the average family income is $250 a year.

With its breathtaking limestone mountains and terraced rice fields, Guizhou is one of the poorest provinces in China. Now, tourism is coming to the rescue. As the 43-year-old Ms. Chen cooks, the women of this Miao tribal village, wearing colorful native costumes, perform a dance for a busload of tourists from Hong Kong, which is a half-day trip away, divided between a plane and car. Other women sell textiles and jewelry from tables set up along the steep stone walkways.

SEEING THE REST OF CHINA

Two-day, three-day and five-day options for business travelers who are interested in a side trip after their work is done.

China is beset with rural poverty: The growing income gap between the rich of the coastal cities and the rural poor is a major issue for the Communist Party. In response, the government is pouring $10 billion into the tourism infrastructure of dozens of scenic but impoverished areas -- from historic sites along the old Silk Road, to mountains considered holy by Taoists and Buddhists, to national parks. For travelers, this means an alternative to China's teeming metropolises -- and a break from the crush of tour buses that plague a growing number of sites. But in many of these places, there are still obstacles that may intimidate some tourists, from language barriers to a lack of indoor plumbing -- even the occasional restaurant where the specialty is dog. While Western-brand hotels are expanding into the interior, others are aging state-owned institutions with suspicious-looking stains on the carpet and extremely hard mattresses.

Guizhou Province, the size of Minnesota and home to 39 million people, serves as a prime example of what is now available. Cut off from its neighbors by its towering mountains, the province had long been isolated. But now visitors can fly nonstop to its capital, Guiyang, from Shanghai, Beijing and many other Chinese cities, disembarking at a gleaming modern airport with super-efficient baggage retrieval and check-in. From Guiyang, the gateway city of Kaili, where tourists who visit the ethnic minority villages can stay in relative comfort, used to be a bumpy seven-hour drive on a winding country road. Now it's a 2½-hour ride on a divided four-lane expressway. New hotels in both cities offer comfortable accommodations with free, high-speed Internet access, at the bargain prices of $85 a night in Guiyang and $50 in Kaili.

With its crystal-clear rivers and unpolluted air, the valley presents a side of China that visitors to the eastern and northern parts of the country might have despaired of ever seeing. During four days in the area, we never saw another Westerner; only 270,000 foreigners visited Guizhou Province last year, including the businessmen who stayed only in Guiyang.

Scenes from Guizhou: A child from the Miao village of Qinman

Very few of Guizhou's residents speak English, even in Guiyang's two five-star hotels, imposing huge hurdles for anyone who wants to tour the province without first hiring a guide, car and driver. And of Guizhou's 2,000 tour guides, only about 35 are English speakers; they'd quickly be overwhelmed if Americans and Europeans started arriving en masse.

Although Guizhou's 49 ethnic-minority groups, each with a distinctive style of dress and many with distinctive cuisines, represent an enticing tourist attraction, China didn't fully open the province to foreigners until 1997.

Working with the provincial and local governments, the United Nations World Tourism Organization formulated a master plan to bring tourists to seven ethnic-minority villages of Guizhou's Bala River Valley as a demonstration project in how to alleviate rural poverty. "Tourism in Guizhou is the only sector that can uplift the quality of life," says Xu Jing, the tourism organization's regional representative for Asia and the Pacific. "They tried other sectors like minerals and forestry, but it cannot be sustainable from a long-term perspective. Instead of cutting the trees, tourists can look at the trees."

The new project hasn't resolved all the problems of traveling in Guizhou. Although Guiyang's airport has been upgraded to international status, no airline has yet started international flights, so travelers in Southeast Asia, which is relatively close, can't add Guizhou to their itineraries as a short hop.

Elsewhere, similar projects are under way. In the center of the country, Jiuzhaigou is a national park with stunning glacial lakes, waterfalls and a panda reserve. This year, airlines will be adding six flights from Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities. That has prompted local authorities to launch a $36 million expansion of the nearby Jiuhuang airport.

Non-Chinese speakers may have a slightly easier time in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, a semi-autonomous region of China, and Buddhism's heartland. In recent years, Tibet been in the news for its political woes. But with better rail, road and air routes in the works, its thousand-year-old monasteries are about to become more prominent. The world's highest railway, linking Beijing to Tibet, was completed in October. Starting at the end of this year, it will be possible for the first time to make the trip by rail, in 48 hours.

In the south, the central government is spending $324 million over five years to turn the little-known town of Zhaoqing into a showpiece that includes eco-tourism hikes and visits to Ming-era villages. One promised tour stop: Bagua Village, a pentagram-shaped hamlet built along feng-shui principles and populated with traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. Overall, the planned $10 billion investment in tourism infrastructure over the next five years is almost half the total figure of the previous two decades, according to the China National Tourism Administration.

The government is looking to do in tourism what it did in manufacturing two decades ago. Its decision to create "special economic zones" in the 1980s to boost foreign investment -- at a time when the economy was still largely state-controlled -- transformed peaceful rice farms into powerhouses that now make a large chunk of the world's sneakers, DVD players and flat-panel screens. But the development has been uneven, enriching mostly coastal areas and helping to trigger unrest in lesser-developed parts of the country. In 2004, the last year for which data are available, there were about 74,000 social demonstrations in China, compared with just 10,000 such incidents a decade earlier.

Another motivation for the government: China's economic czars are anxious to boost spending on services -- including tourism -- as the country tries to transition from being an export-led economy, which has it made vulnerable to a growing protectionist backlash from its trading partners. Some critics say protectionism is also at work in its travel industry. Foreign travel agencies chafe at China's slow pace in allowing outside competition, as is required by its membership in the World Trade Organization.

In the same way that China has taken manufacturing business away from higher-wage countries in Asia, its new push has the potential to redraw the region's tourism map. If it can develop a dozen new destinations, it could attract travelers who might otherwise take their vacations in other countries in the region, like Thailand or Japan.

Wang Ba

Already, China's tourism boom has meant growth opportunities for everyone from hotel companies to makers of camping equipment. French chain Accor, which has 34 hotels in China, is opening 30 more by the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Other hotel chains expanding in China include Sheraton, InterContinental and Super 8. For now, many of these companies are expanding in China's big cities and the surrounding areas. They face competition from local companies such as Shanghai-based Jinjiang Group, China's largest hotel operator, which has ambitious plans inside and outside China.

The investment in remote spots of China could give it a leg up on some nearby countries where poor planning and a flood of visitors have already stripped tourist attractions of much of their charm. In Guizhou, the ethnic-minority villages are largely pristine, a stark contrast with Thailand, where such villages have been often ravaged by the impact of uncontrolled tourism. The predominant minority in Guizhou, the Miao -- known outside of China as Hmong -- live in eye-pleasing wooden houses with roofs of black slate tiles. They're more likely to wear traditional dress than jeans and T-shirts. Although a visitor's interpreter has to translate, people will readily invite a foreigner into their house to talk. And the local cuisine is distinctive and delicious, emphasizing local fish cooked in sauces with a sour tang from pickled vegetables.

In Wang Ba, a Gejia-minority village of 1,200 people two hours north of Kaili, tourists pay for dance performances, buy handicrafts and eat in people's homes. A year ago, the villagers hit the jackpot when 34 members of the Harvard Alumni Association arrived, paying $5 each for lunch and $180 for a performance.

Pan Cheng Ya, Nanhua's mayor, said the village earned $60,000 last year from dance performances alone, with a thousand foreigners visiting. That has created new wealth locally. Some families have cellphones and televisions, and kids have new toys, he says. Still, tourism is proving far from a panacea. Almost all the young people go off to wealthy coastal cities like Guangzhou looking for jobs. Mr. Pan himself has to supplement his salary of $15 a month by working on construction projects. And now he has to deal with a new problem: the suspicion of the villagers that he and other local officials are getting rich from the tourist boom. "Money has become a sensitive issue," he says. "They think we get all the benefits. Whatever we tell them, they don't believe us."

--Cui Rong and Candace Jackson contributed to this article

Suitable Attire ?

Suit Goes in Washer, Dryer,
But Traditionalists Recoil:
'This is the Antichrist'

By CECILIE ROHWEDDER
April 20, 2006; WSJ Page B1

LONDON --Tim Blackshaw still winces about the night two years ago that a party guest spilled a glass of Chateau Lafitte 1975 down the back of his Christian Dior jacket, the fine red wine ruining the expensive light-gray suit.

Yet, as the 30-year-old chef browsed the racks at a Marks & Spencer PLC store here recently, that episode wasn't enough to persuade him to bite on the retailer's heralded new product: the first suit that can be washed, machine dried and worn without ironing.

"I am not sure it would come out looking okay," he says, even though it looks like the other suits hanging on a rack, with its brightly colored silk lining.

And therein lies the problem plaguing the wool/polyester/lycra suit like a stubborn wrinkle. The suit maker, Bagir Ltd. and its retailers, M&S in Britain and J.C. Penney Co. in America, are fighting powerful forces of anthropology and sociology with mere chemistry and marketing. Men, long accustomed to armoring themselves in creased-and-pressed formality as a sign of their status and aspirations, would have to risk not looking just so in professional situations.

"Suits aren't meant to be convenient," says Anne Hollander, a fashion historian in New York and author of a book about suits. "If you wear a suit, you are joining the company of respectable people."

She says men in general feel more insecure about clothes than women. "What men fear the most is something that makes them look like a fool," she says.

Thomas Horton, the 44-year-old chief financial officer of American Airlines's parent AMR Corp. expresses the befuddlement of many men when asked about the idea of a wash-and-dry suit.

"That would be hard for me to get my head around," says Mr. Horton, who like his boss, AMR Chief Executive Gerard Arpey, has his suits custom-made by Chris Cobb in Dallas. "It's a foreign concept. It's like starching your jeans. I wouldn't do that either."

But the retailers and the suit maker aren't aiming quite that high up the executive ladder. Instead, they are banking on the mix of convenience and price (about $225 in the United Kingdom and $177.99 in the U.S.) to lure in a certain type of buyer.

"There are a lot of very busy blokes about who wear a suit for work, who go through a lot of wear and tear and who'll want this because of convenience," says Stuart Rose, chief executive of M&S, the biggest seller of suits in Britain. Tim Danser, a buyer for tailored clothing for men at Penney, says, "The customer is time-compressed and, in middle America, also pocket-book compressed."

Kenny Cook, a 37-year-old desk clerk for Royal Mail in London, plans to buy one of the new suits for a friend's wedding later this month. Mr. Cook says he eats lunch at his desk and often drops a piece of his sandwich on his suits. "I can't be bothered to go to the dry cleaners," says Mr. Cook. "But I've mastered a washing machine."

The quest for convenience suited with style has been going on for decades. The first "wash-and-wear suits" appeared in the early 1950s, when polyester was invented, but they were more often the butt of jokes to indicate the wearer's humble circumstances. They have quietly occupied a small market niche.

In the summer of 2002, Bagir, which is based in Israel, decided to pursue the concept as a way to distinguish itself from garment makers in low-wage countries. At the time, suit makers like Bagir were also suffering because the trend toward casual wear was at its peak. One reason men were rejecting suits, market research showed, was that they thought of them as inconvenient. It came up with a washable suit that could be drip-dried. That suit, which needs to be ironed, is now M&S's biggest seller and has sold 750,000 since 2004. Penney also sells a version.

Despite the success, Bagir executives wanted to go further and make a suit that could go in the dryer. But heat from the dryer created a problem. In long trials, it would render the front of the suit either wrinkled or as stiff as cardboard. In tests, Bagir washed and dried the suits 30 times and checked after every five cycles to see that the garment's shape and color could withstand water and heat. Finding the right formula took over two years and $10 million.

The new dryer-friendly version is made of 45% wool, 52% polyester and 3% lycra. The man-made fibers, says Offer Gilboa, chief executive of Bagir, prevent the wool from going back to its origins "as a wet lamb." The wool content prevents the plastic feel of earlier, all-polyester suits. Many men trying on the new suit in London say it isn't shiny, scratchy or hot and looks like the other middle-priced suits at the store.

At M&S, the "Wash and Tumble Dry Suit" went on sale a few weeks ago and comes in gray, black, navy and classic British chalk stripe, as well as double- or single-breasted. It costs £129 (about $230), less than most department-store brands. At Penney, the pants and the single-breasted, two-button jackets can be purchased separately. Neither Penney nor M&S would say how many of the suits they have sold, but both stores said the suit was selling well.

Upscale U.S. retailers Barney's New York, a unit of Jones Apparel Group Inc., and Brooks Brothers, a unit of Retail Brand Alliance Inc., declined to say whether they would ever consider selling a wash-and-dry suit. At Nordstrom Inc., spokesman Deniz Anders says, "It is a great idea though it needs more development."

In at least one corner of the fashion world, the suit is drawing praise.

"For some guys, polyester carries a stigma but it shouldn't because of its high wool content, which makes the suit hang very well," says Jim Moore, creative director of men's magazine GQ in New York. "This is a real business suit." He notes that polyester is losing its negative image, as an increasing number of fashion designers, including heavyweights such as Giorgio Armani, use synthetic fibers in men's suits. "I don't think it's a suit that's for every single man out there," he adds, "but it has a sensible price and would be great as a starter suit, or for a guy who is traveling a lot."

But, in Britain, the new suit may face a particularly tough time, even though it costs £9.99 (about $17.80) to dry-clean a suit in central London -- about twice as much as on Manhattan's Upper East Side. In Britain, where casual Fridays never caught on, suits are still de rigueur for business.

"It's about the image you want to project," says Steve Hughes, a 39-year-old information technology consultant who says he dreads wearing the wrong suit to work. "What you wear is a reflection on you as a professional."

Catherine Hayward, fashion director of British men's magazine Esquire, says she didn't see a great need to wash suits to begin with. "It's not like men are going to the meat market where they get covered in blood, or doing gardening in them," she says.

For Marc Psarolis, sales director for upscale British clothes maker Daks, the reaction is much more visceral.

"This is the Antichrist of what we believe in," he sniffs.

日本男人年過40的中年恐慌

最近日本報紙層出不窮的40歲男子犯案事件，像是千葉法務局職 員殺妻、眾議院議員在六本木強行猥褻女生被當成現行犯逮捕、46歲和44歲的兄弟聯手殺害包括父母在內的家庭成員5人、NTT西日本員工以製偽鈔嫌疑被逮 捕、日本航海連盟的教練同時也指導北京奧運選手卻因向少女買春而被逮捕，連著名的從事耐震度偽造的姊齒秀次“ 前”建築師都是在40歲以上的年紀犯下離譜案件的男性之一。

　　男性過了40歲，已經是人生的折返點，也很多男性在此時已功成名就，上述也有不少人是在不錯的公司擁有不錯的職位或頭銜，讓人丈二金鋼摸不著腦袋為何他們會去犯下這些自毀前程的事，原因就在於被日本稱為「Midlife Crisis」的中年恐慌。

　 　「Midlife Crisis」中年恐慌是指人在人生的一半，也就是過了40歲的時候，開始慢慢感覺到精神和肉體上的衰老，但自己的心中卻仍希望自己還是很年輕，但心理與 現實之間的落差沒能成功消除，於是自己開始慌亂起來，不知道該怎麼辦，甚至有些人會在這途中迷失了自我。有些人會開始想自己的人生怎麼過得這麼地無趣，然 後煩惱自己是否該就這樣繼續無趣的人生？因而對自己的人生感到焦燥，每天開始憂鬱了起來。但這樣的反應也還是因人而異，有些人因此變得重度憂鬱而犯下一些 自己一生都沒想過的罪行，但也有一些人想開了，拋棄目前現有的一切，重新展開與過去完全不一樣的人生。

　　其實，這樣的中年恐慌並不是只 存在於日本，美國就有研究指出，每4個美國人就有1個會有這樣的中年恐慌，而這樣的中年恐慌也不是只會發生在男性身上， 女性會從面容、白髮等外觀感覺到自己的衰老，然後拼命求助於美容、整形之類，來降低自己心理上及外貌上的差距，但在男性身上較常見到容易迷失自己做出超出 常軌的事，特別是在一些老實了半輩子的、將面臨退休的或是無法圓滿處理自己的人際關係的男性身上。

　　而日本男性為什麼最近冒出了這麼多 因為中年恐慌而犯下重大罪行的人呢？帝塚山學院大學的小田晉教授表示，由於日本這個世代的人是被獲勝就能得到所有的 社會教育所教出來的，所以成功欲望強，但同時也相對地以「萬一被發現就慘了」的理性來抑制自己本身的欲望，這種成果論的價值觀使得他們在過了40歲後突然 就因為承受不了長久以來的精神分裂而爆發。

　　而臨床心理師宮城麻里子表示，到了40幾歲就連工作也會變得具有批判性的分歧點。很多人做 著自己不喜歡的工作到了40幾歲，每天還得為了不喜歡的工作 早出晚歸，過著跟家裡的人每天說不到幾句話的生活，甚至造成夫妻失和，然後又在「再撐一下就過去了」的心理下，強迫自己繼續工作下去，而在長期的身心壓力 下漸漸迷失了自我。

　　再加上日本人個性較為壓抑，所以很多人平時就不懂得舒解壓力或是換個方式想，而且日本的公司最近紛紛從以往的年功 序列制改成仿效外資走向的成果主義 制，使得不少人在40幾歲原本以為自己努力了半輩子有功成名就的希望，卻在最後被公司調離權力核心，想到自己為了追求地位和收入不斷地上升，甚至幫公司做 出一些齷齪的事情，卻在最後被棄之不顧，頓時覺得自己的人生失去了希望。尤其是年幼在貧困的環境生長的人，更容易在無意識中產生強烈地自卑感，希望讓人對 自己刮目相看的心理而奮力地工作後，就容易走向極端。

　　其實，中年恐慌並不是太過可怕的精神疾病，而且也並非是他人的事，我們每一個人到中年時都有可能發生這樣的情形，為了預防自己產生中年恐慌，平時就要注意解放壓力，並多找家人聊聊或許能讓危機變成轉機也說不一定呢！

Dump Trash, Add Scavengers, Mix and Get a Big Mess

Zhu Feixiang, 46, leads a band of trash pickers from Anhui Province. "We don't steal," he said. "We don't rob. We only make a living." (Ryan Pyle for The New York Times)

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: April 3, 2006

SHANGHAI, March 28 — Song Tiping, a peasant from rural Jiangsu Province, and Bernie Kearsley-pratt, an Australian executive, would not at first glance seem to have much in common, and they do not, except for one thing: both were drawn here by the unlikely financial promise of garbage, towering mountains of refuse that attest to this city's status as a raging boomtown. And now they spend their days in a cat-and-mouse game, Mr. Song joining throngs of poor Chinese scavenging in the trash and Mr. Kearsley-pratt, who manages Shanghai's largest municipal dump, trying to keep them out.

Multimedia
Video: Shanghai Journal: The Dump

The Australian, who works for a French company that is helping manage this city's garbage, says his difficult job is made all the harder — indeed on some days he himself would say impossible — by the cruel fact that even in the heartland of a booming China, peasants can make far more money collecting plastic trash bags, tin cans and the rubber soles of shoes than they can as farmers or ordinary day laborers.

Most days Mr. Song, who came to Shanghai seeking a way to pay the hefty tuition fees for his eldest daughter, who had been admitted to one of the country's best high schools, spends several hours dodging monstrous earthmoving equipment in the landfill, one of the largest in Asia, to pick trash.

Were it not for dangers of the job, like being crushed by a bulldozer, inhaling noxious gases while wading knee-deep in fetid refuse or being beaten by warring gangs of scrap pickers for the mere prize of an unbroken bottle, it might even be considered a good job.

"We worked really hard as laborers before, doing 12- to-15-hour days for a mere few hundred yuan," about $35, Mr. Song said. "You have to work even if you are sick or tired. Here we are working for ourselves, and there is a lot more freedom — four to five hours a day, plus we can earn a lot more."

Each morning, on average, 6,300 tons of garbage arrives by barge from the central city. Mr. Kearsley-pratt's company, Onyx, won an international bidding competition in 2003 to replace an old municipal landfill next door, which had observed almost no environmental precautions, with a state-of-the-art dump — a fenced-in area slightly larger than New York's Central Park. To do so, Onyx has invested millions of dollars in heavy equipment, environmental measures and training.

The plan was for a plant that would safeguard the water table and produce enough natural gas to power a small city — in short, the cleanest, safest, most modern landfill imaginable — until the scavengers showed up. They came in ones and twos, like Mr. Song and his wife, and in roving gangs, organized according to their place of origin in the poor and far-flung Chinese countryside. Now, according to all sides in what appears to be a mounting dispute, what they have is one fine mess.

"Everyone has a big challenge when they come to China," Mr. Kearsley-pratt said. He warmed to his subject slowly, talking about how no living-room couch, no matter how abused, would ever make it from a Shanghai curbside to his dump, because someone needier than the owner would quickly haul it away.

Finally, he got to the meat of the problem: the scavengers who descend each day upon his dump like freebooters on a diamond mine. "As soon as you tip the truck there will be 40 or 50 people running all about the machines — quite big machines," he said. "I don't have the statistics, but quite a few people have been crushed like this."

Under the circumstances, tempers sometimes flare. With darkness approaching, as crews of Mr. Kearsley-pratt's workers in hard hats and orange jumpsuits rushed to lay enormous sheets of blue tarpaulins over a flat field of freshly laid garbage to discourage the pickers from coming onto the grounds at night, a female scavenger in her 50's approached a group of foreigners taking pictures of the scene.

"We are just trying to make a livelihood, to eat," she shouted. "Unless you have come to help us survive, we don't want your attention."

All about, as Mr. Kearsley-pratt looked on helplessly, scavengers were loading their day's haul onto pushcarts, onto rickety wagons hitched to the back of motorcycles to be sorted out offsite and sold to buyers who specialize in different kinds of refuse, whether rubber, plastic, aluminum or tin.

"Last year my daughter was admitted to high school and we have to pay 10,000 yuan for her registration," Mr. Song said. In addition to that, the equivalent of $1,250, he said, he also has to pay $125 for his second daughter's school. "We don't know where else to get jobs to support our daughters' education," he said, "and if not for this, there is no hope for us."

The landfill's management has thought about sitting down with the scavengers to cut a deal that would allow them to keep picking without endangering themselves or the dump's operations. But the potential bonanza of the trash has proved, like a gold rush, impossible to manage. The dimensions of the problem are on clear display most days, when 120 huge trucks per hour, freshly loaded with garbage from the barges, rumble down the plant's access road with squadrons of trash pickers on motorbikes following in their wake.

The city is vague about its plans for dealing with the trash pickers, saying only that they will be "phased out" eventually. "Right now, we don't have a city regulation on scavenging," said Wu Xiwei, an official of the city sanitation bureau.

Zhu Feixiang, 46, a scavenger who lives on the edge of the dump on a trash-strewn plot with sheep and dogs and more old plastic bags than you've ever seen, doubts the city will stop him or any others. "They can call the police, but it's not against law or regulation to pick garbage," he said. "We don't steal. We don't rob. We only make a living. Besides, recycling garbage benefits the nation."

Mr. Zhu, who leads a band of trash pickers from Anhui Province that other scavengers describe in fearsome terms, stopped raking the garbage blowing around in his yard to contemplate that for a moment. "Plus, we're dirty and we stink, so the police would never take us in," he said.