Another Lengthy Gridlock in China

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

09/03/2010

Another Lengthy Gridlock in China

Yet another gargantuan traffic jam has gripped the freeway that links Inner Mongolia’s coal fields to metropolitan Beijing, possibly exceeding a blockage on the same road that drew global attention last month, Chinese news sources report. More than 100 regional police officers manned the road, called the Jingzang Highway, in an effort to break the 75-mile, 10,000-vehicle gridlock, the state broadcaster CCTV reported Thursday.

Beijing News, a daily newspaper, reported Friday that 14,000 vehicles were trying to squeeze through the Lianhuatan toll gate in Inner Mongolia every day, compared with 6,000 at the same time in 2009. Officials attribute the jam to a sharp increase in Mongolian coal production, which not only has clogged with road with thousands of heavy coal trucks, but also has led to traffic-clogging highway repairs.

The New York Times