Thoughts on Wuhan

I took a short trip to Wuhan where an ex colleague, Jason Chow now teaches English at one of the universities - I believe it is the Wuhan Technical University. The freezing temperature (it dropped to 0 degree on my first night there) gave me more things to remember than the late night visit to the campus.

Jason rented a flat just across the campus. It is a commune flat (a kind of public housing). I was housed there the three nights I was in the city. There was a report in the newspapers today that Wuhan city has implemented a policy to restrict purchase of apartments to one each family.

I saw first hand the city as a huge construction site - everywhere something is being built, torn down to be rebuilt or modified. There are of course the big lavish (even opulent looking) condominiums as well as landed terrace houses.

The average salary of service personnel is between RMB750-RMB1000 (equivalent of S$150-S$200) per month. There are many job openings especially in the service sectors such as F& B and retails from what I saw. I do not have the numbers for the other sectors but can only presume that there is also a dire lack of manpower too in those areas.

Wuhan is a third-tier city so many of the youths or younger population would have left to the first or second tiered cities or overseas to seek out their living. What however is apparent when we walk the streets and malls (and these are mega-malls) - you see a very young population because of the city's reputation as a center of learning.

Some interesting anecdotes -

Where we stayed, hawkers still dry their fishes over the archway that serves as both entrance and exit to the commune (see pic). So walking by it involves a careful tip dodging to avoid the dripping the salt-soaked oil from these marine laundry.

A visit to the club shows the flaunting of wealth by the Chinese. Everyone drinks by the bottles or order by multiple of dozens for beer. Flowers bought for their loved ones are not in stalks but in huge bouquets of at least 20-50 stalks.

The Chinese love their liquor and their cigarettes. The latter actually adds to the already polluted air from the industries. Jason's regular cab driver told me that the national nature of these tobacco companies makes smoking regulation difficult to enforce or provide little or no motivation for any effort to do so.

The longer term effect of this will only be felt much much later but I dread to think of the costs of healthcare that the city would have to bear then. Incidentally, a report also mention this dilemma that healthcare authorities face in raising the awareness of smoking risks.

I paid a very high price for the 'bullet' train to Guangzhou - and back - of course with the benefit of hindsight we know now why it was so exorbitant - corruption - and the decadence is so widespread - from the rail minister to the officials across different agencies and departments. Nevertheless, the train did serve an important purpose - letting travelers reach the inner corners of China that would have taken much longer to do so.

Would I go again - I doubt...but perhaps to other parts of China.