One of the many water towns near Shanghai.
Some China Facts
The Scale of Things
Chinese New Year – Fireworks and Firecrackers
Chinese Leather Goods
Massage Parlors
English, Bad English, and Chinglish
A Note on Chinese Food
Civic holiday
Nothing is Funny in China
My new Ayi
Shanghai Telephone Book
China has no Obesity
Some China Facts
1.4 billion population (maybe more)
750 million employed people
80+ ethnic groups
86% literacy
260 million students
11 million teachers
1,000 universities
260,000 secondary schools
555,000 primary schools
200,000 kindergartens
666 cities
3,240 TV stations
900 million mobile phone users
350 million land lines (phone)
800 million internet users
486 airports
Borders on 15 countries:
The Scale of Things
The Building Scale
The size and scale of the apartment complexes in China is startling at first. There are many of these with anywhere from 5 or 6 to 40 buildings each, all with parks, swimming pools and playgrounds interspersed, and sometimes there are 10 of these complexes in close proximity to each other. Each of these can easily house 5,000 to 10,000 families. There are “villas” as well – single homes, but not so common and a much more expensive use of land.
The quality of the apartments in these complexes ranges from very acceptable to gorgeous, with commensurate pricing. In Shanghai, it is possible to buy a very nice one-bedroom or two-bedroom apartment for $200,000 or less, the prices rising with proximity to the downtown core. At the high end, one complex of four high-rise buildings in Shanghai was constructed with each floor being one apartment of about 500 square meters, or nearly 6,000 square feet, and a price between US$10 million and $20 million. The buildings in North America look mighty small and impoverished compared to these. In the photo below, the different styles represent different housing projects.
The scale and volume of housing construction that occurs in China is striking.
The scale and volume of housing construction that occurs in China is striking. Each year, China builds enough new homes for about 25 – 30 million people – which means more or less an entire Canada is being created in new housing stock every year. The city of Shanghai alone builds as many new homes and apartments as are built in Canada in a year. Similar for Beijing, Guangzhou … It staggers the imagination to contemplate such a vast scale. China has more than 100 cities that have a population of over 1 million people.
And everything works. Services and utilities are fine, transportation is great, the developments are full of shopping centers that make Western malls look like baby toys, and those centers are full of shoppers. The large cities in China all have single department stores or malls that fill an entire square block – sometimes several of them all next door to each other.
Shanghai’s Deep-Water Port
Westerners are constantly dumbfounded by the scale of things in China. So many places, events, items are almost beyond comprehension. As one example, Shanghai built a new deep-water port in the city to handle the largest container ships in the world. That doesn’t sound exceptional, but a port this size requires hundreds of thousands of workers, so Shanghai built an entire new city (within the City of Shanghai) to house the people who would be working at the port. A new city of 800,000 people just rising out of the mud on the waterfront, complete with houses, parks, a little inland lake, shopping, transportation systems, libraries, everything. A city within a city, just to accommodate the marine traffic at the port. In the West, we could hardly conceive of something like this, but the Chinese just make a decision and do it. Decide today, and tomorrow you have 600 backhoes and 400 dump-trucks, and the ready-mix people are already lining up to pour foundations. They not only built the largest deep-water port in the world, but a new city for nearly one million people to support it. It was all finished and occupied within a year. We can’t fail to be impressed.
Building a Hospital in Wuhan
At the onset of the COVID pandemic, as the numbers of infections rose beyond the capacity of local hospitals, Wuhan needed additional hospital capacity, so they planned, designed, and built two large new hospitals. These were not “flimsy bare-bones barracks” as described in the Western media, but were identical to any fully-equipped modern hospitals. They were modular concrete units designed for rapid assembly, in a manner similar to setting shipping containers side by side, with full accommodation for A/C, heating, ventilation, negative pressure, abundant electricity, and more. Once assembled, these units function as a whole, and are a regular hospital with all the equipment and facilities one would normally see in any hospital.
The first was built in ten days by 16,000 men, with three shifts working 24 hours a day.The second hospital was larger, and completed in only 6 days. To clear and level the site and lay the substructure, there were 240 pieces of construction equipment working on the same site at the same time – also 24 hours per day. The Chinese media posted time-lapse videos of the construction process, which were astonishing to watch. Such hospitals were built in several cities in Hubei Province.
Chinese National Holiday
You may have seen the celebrations for China’s 60th anniversary, one of the most impressive sights being the precision of the parade. The photo below shows various contingents, each containing a group of around 30 rows of 50 people each, walking and performing in perfect lines, keeping perfect time in unison for such a long distance that it seemed impossible. It was the same with the military vehicles and other content. They were all moving at exactly the same speed and were all so perfectly lined up that it seemed they must be physically connected together.
Beijing built a practice location to prepare for this event, with people practicing for 5 to 8 months. One newscast claimed that soldiers and others each wore out three pairs of shoes during the practices. The red flag in the photo is composed of cards held by people marching in the group, and on occasion, they flip the cards to reveal a new picture. The precision of everything was just astonishing, and fascinating to watch.
China’s 60th anniversary. They were all moving at exactly the same speed and were all so perfectly lined up that it seemed they must be physically connected together.
China’s 70th anniversary. Satellite images of the parade moving through Beijing’s streets gave an idea of its vast scale. Source
Chinese New Year – Fireworks and Firecrackers
Firecrackers and fireworks are a staple of Chinese New Year, a dramatic way to welcome the New Year. These are not so widely available today as in the past, perhaps pollution and the occasional fire dampening the enthusiasm of city officials. But even in the large cities there are still areas where these pyrotechnics can be enjoyed without limit, and this is certainly true of the smaller centers and all the rural areas. Midnight is the magic moment.
But first, let’s see what we are dealing with. Fireworks come assembled in a cardboard box with the rockets arranged vertically, and all the fuses interlinked and timed so they detonate in a set order and with a programmed delay between rockets. Small fireworks might be in a smallish box containing 5X5, so 25 small rockets. The larger ones are maybe 60 cm high and are in a 10X10 box, so 100 large fireworks. You sometimes see larger boxes with 200 or more, all firing in sequence, one every few seconds. The larger boxes have larger tubes, bigger rockets that go higher and have a bigger explosive bang and an increasingly beautiful light display.
The firecrackers are another matter entirely. This is a bit difficult to describe, so the pictures will help. The firecrackers are laid on a large central fuse, with the fuse of each individual firecracker twisted around that central fuse. See the first photo below.
That long strip is then rolled into a wheel, which is generally unwound and rolled out for detonation, as you can see in the second photo.
Thus, when you light one end, the burning fuse eventually detonates all the firecrackers in turn. A small wheel might contain only a few thousand firecrackers while a large one can contain 15,000 or more. The photos will give you an idea of the extent. Here is a brief video of the extent of firecrackers used in some communities. [1] (Click on the “x” at the top right corner of the pop-up, to remove it and see the video.)
It is possible to ignite the fireworks without unrolling the wheel, as the woman in the third photo is doing, but this is something a sane person will do only once. When unrolled, the firecrackers ignite in pairs, and quite quickly too but, if left as a wheel, the fire will very quickly spread through all the fuses and detonate all the firecrackers. If you have not actually witnessed this, you cannot conceive of the amount of noise and volume of smoke created by 15,000 large firecrackers detonating within 30 seconds.
Here is one story of many similar I could tell. I spent a Chinese New Year’s Eve with a family in Shanghai who live in a community compound containing maybe 40 apartment buildings of varying heights, from 12 to 40 stories, interspersed among small walkways, rivulets, gardens. I calculated roughly at the time that the community contained around 5,000 families.
And at midnight – the magic moment – all the 5,000 families from all the 5,000 apartments went outside into the walkways and simultaneously lit all their fireworks and firecrackers. Very quickly it was impossible to hear anything, for the noise. And soon it was also impossible to see anything, except incessant flashes of light, for all the smoke. You honestly cannot imagine this without actually experiencing it. The show lasted for 20 minutes or more, after which the ground was covered with a layer of red firecracker paper 2 or 3 inches thick. What an experience; Thousands of fireworks launching at one time, repeatedly for 20 minutes. And millions of firecrackers exploding at the same time.
I did a rough calculation at the time that we likely had 5,000 boxes of fireworks of varying sizes, but assuming a modest average size, that would have been about 250,000 fireworks rockets. And every family would have had at least one roll of firecrackers. Again, assuming a modest average of only 5,000 per household, this would give us a total of 25 million firecrackers. Try to imagine all this detonating within 20 minutes or less, in a rather small and confined area. Now, imagine this occurring simultaneously in every one of the tens of thousands of similar communities in Shanghai. Now multiply all this by 1.5 billion people in thousands of cities and rural areas. And people ask me what I want for Christmas.
Chinese Leather Goods
The West is inundated with denigrating nonsense about “cheap Chinese goods”, but the reality is far from this. China makes consumer and other goods of very high quality. Most of the products of the so-called “luxury brands” – LV, Hermes, Gucci, and so on – are made in China. The truth is that Chinese factories are capable of making whatever a buyer demands, to the very highest quality levels. There are no Chinese salesmen traveling to the US with offers to sell cheap frying pans that will self-destruct in 6 months. The reason Wal-Mart in the West sells only that cheap junk is because that is precisely what Wal-Mart ordered from the factory.
I frequently purchase shoes that are made in China with an impressive level of quality. The pair pictured here are beautifully made, with real leather soles, and cost only 275 RMB which is about $35. These and others are so well-made they show little or no signs of wear after several years of use. The quality of consumer goods available in China is truly impressive.
As another example, I bought a leather travel bag that is also beautifully made, and of fine leather. It’s a perfect size for a simple overnight bag, and easily carries a laptop and all the essentials, and is also cleverly designed with handles, backpack straps and shoulder straps. I purchased this bag about 15 years ago and it is still as nice as when purchased. It cost 500 RMB – about $65 at the time.
A third leather item is a sheepskin bomber jacket which I had custom-made for me by a factory in Haining – a small city about 1 hour from Shanghai. The jacket is of lambskin, with a removable rabbit fur collar and lining. All my requests and instructions were perfectly incorporated, and the workmanship was just excellent, with many small high-quality details and many pockets. It is exceptionally warm, impervious to wind and cold. I paid 2,000 RMB (about US$250). A similar jacket in a Western high-end shop would have cost ten times that price.
Massage Parlors
Massages are deeply integrated into Chinese society and culture, a normal part of a normal day. It necessarily follows that massage parlors are common and plentiful. What does not necessarily follow is that massage parlors in China are precisely (and only) what they purport to be. Massage parlors in most Western countries, and certainly in North America, are seedy establishments with no trained or professional staff, and are most often a front for prostitution. Not so in China. It is very common for anyone, after an exhausting day at work, to go for a full body massage and then have dinner. With friends, two or three of us will often be in the same room, carrying on long conversations during the massage.
In most good hotels it is possible to call for a masseuse to one’s room, and this is purely for a professional massage; nothing illicit or untoward takes place. The cost is about US$20. Foot massages are also very popular in China, with many establishments offering these, and costing $10 or less.
I recall one news item (on CNN if I recall correctly), stating that a Chinese government office was located on a street “near multiple massage parlors”, taking advantage of public ignorance of the above facts and trying to portray that government department as some kind of sexually-perverted establishment. Not very nice.
English, Bad English, and Chinglish
A great many people in China speak English acceptably well, many being perfectly fluent. But equally, there are still many who do not, sometimes with humorous results in signage and other things. I frequently encounter charming expressions that are worthy of cataloguing, and there are the signs containing fractured English which I sometimes enjoy sending to friends. With some of these, it is easy to understand how the error was made. Like the sign at an airport that directs ‘inconvenient passengers’ to a particular place.
Some of the errors are simple spelling mistakes, like the door in a hotel that said ‘STUFF ONLY’ instead of ‘STAFF ONLY. Sometimes the meaning can be incomprehensible, like the sign that tells you to ‘close the door omnivorously’. Often, this happens where someone with a dictionary finds a meaning represented by many different words and has no way of knowing which words are in common usage for that meaning. Like the shop named ‘Unsightly and Peculiar’, or the ‘Very Suspicious’ supermarket. I imagine the first shop wanted to refer to odd or unusual things you don’t see very often. I can’t imagine what the ‘suspicious’ was. And if ‘complimentary’ means ‘free’, then ‘uncomplimentary’ must mean you have to pay.
But all these are merely errors with a foreign language. True Chinglish is a literary treasure that deserves to be ensconced as a UN Heritage Language, catalogued, and preserved. It is not only delightful but possesses a persistent charm all its own, with expressions like “I will back soon”, or “We will always together”.
A Note on Chinese Food
China has the largest collection of different foods of any nation in the world. There must be at least hundreds of thousands of different Chinese dishes. Each province has dishes unique to that province, as does each major city. But within those locations, the number of different foods is too large to even contemplate counting. And these dishes are either totally different from all others, or are prepared so differently they bear little or no resemblance to a similar food in another location.
One of the sad things about living in a large city is that restaurants and bakeries disappear with a disappointing frequency. I have so often discovered a dish in a restaurant that was so delicious I would want to continue eating even if I was already too full. But the next week I discover that the restaurant has either closed its doors or moved somewhere, or changed the chef, and the search begins again.
Civic holiday
As something that would never occur in the West, Shanghai occasionally has an unexpected civic holiday. On one occasion, there was a huge conference in the city on a Wednesday, and the local government thought the traffic problems might prevent too many people from getting to work on time, so it declared a holiday. For this, most companies had their people work on the prior weekend – Saturday and Sunday – and take off two days after the Wednesday holiday. Thus, everyone worked through to Tuesday evening, then were free until the next Monday morning, the four-day weekend to compensate for the prior working days. Great idea.
Nothing is Funny in China
Well, that’s not really true. Chinese people smile and laugh as much as any other, but what is true is that there seems to be no word in Chinese for ‘funny’ or ‘humorous’. I’ve asked many friends and received many answers (all different), none of which reflect the exact sentiment in English. People often use a word that means ‘interesting’, and there are apparently many words that might mean ‘amusing’, but they vary much by the specific situation.
My new Ayi
I have had multiple housekeepers during my years in China, but one in particular stands out in my mind. If Rembrandt had been there to paint a picture of her, he would have called it “A study in slow motion”. Being paid by the hour had a particular meaning for this woman, her work magically expanding to fill all the time she planned on being paid for.
It was particularly irritating to watch her iron my shirts. Eventually my patience wore a bit thin, and I suggested 5 minutes was more than enough for one short-sleeved shirt. She argued eloquently that she needed at least 10 minutes, but she didn’t know that a surprise awaited her. I took the iron from her hand, laid out a damp shirt, and showed her that it could be ironed in two minutes flat. Big surprise. She had no idea I knew how to iron a shirt. Demonstration followed by a brooding silence, then shirts done in less than 5 minutes.
Well, not all silence. She grumbled quite a lot, actually. And on the way out, she informed me that many of her friends also worked for foreigners and were paid 10 RMB per shirt. But, if I recall correctly, she was being paid only 15 RMB per hour, which was a good salary at the time, about the same as a new university graduate might obtain. Had I agreed to her proposition, her shirt-ironing would have jumped from 3 to 30 per hour. I sadly had to inform her that her ‘flat rate’ was 5 minutes.
Shanghai Telephone Book
Most Western countries today have ceased publishing telephone books because of the Internet, but this is really a quite recent development. The books contained your full name, address, and phone number, for all businesses as well as individuals and, for all the prior decades, a phone book was an indispensable reference resource in the West, certainly in North America.
To my best knowledge, China has never had any telephone books, and it certainly has none today. No White Pages, no Yellow Pages. No nothing. How, you may ask, was that possible? Well, let’s think of Shanghai alone, with a population nearly as large as Canada. If we were to collect all the telephone books from every city, town and village in Canada and stack them on top of each other, we would have a book perhaps two meters in height. Now, imagine that you are in Shanghai and that all the people listed in that book are named Wang or Chen. Now, find your friend.
China has no Obesity
One of the strongest impressions I receive whenever I travel to North America (especially the US, but also Canada), is the sight of so many obese people everywhere. And this is not slightly overweight; it is one person containing the bulk of two or even three people. China has none of that. Anywhere in China, I see almost no one who is overweight. Some mothers and grandmothers force-feed their children because they believe that being a bit chubby is healthy and a sign of prosperity but, aside from the occasional chubby kid, we could say there are no fat people anywhere in China. In a normal month in Shanghai, I would not see even one fat person. I cannot know for certain, but I believe it’s the diet. Chinese food is healthy, and the Chinese do not eat the packaged foods that are ubiquitous in the West.
Media pundits today blame the obesity on “junk food” like hamburgers, potato chips, soda drinks, and so on, but this accusation is false. As far back as the 1940s and 1950s every kid ate hamburgers and potato chips, drank sodas, and we had no obesity anywhere. The “junk food” diet has not materially changed during my lifetime. The big change in the West was the huge shift to packaged foods that contain (perhaps minute) amounts of large numbers of chemicals. The manufacturers claim that the amount of chemicals in a single package is so small as to be inconsequential. That may be true for one package, but 5 or 6 packages a day for 40 years is a very different computation. And my conviction is that the rampant and extreme obesity is due to these chemicals. I am aware of no other dietary change that could account for it.
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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 34 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chap. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
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Democracy – The Most Dangerous Religion
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Police State America Volume One
BOOKS IN ENGLISH
THE WORLD OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
NATIONS BUILT ON LIES — VOLUME 2 — Life in a Failed State
NATIONS BUILT ON LIES — VOLUME 3 — The Branding of America
False Flags and Conspiracy Theories
Police State America Volume Two
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2025
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