About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

We’ll get back to the “regular” Mind the Gap articles next Wednesday (I can hear the moans, I know…), but this Wednesday, I’d like to remain a traveller, and get local… or, eh, domestic, rather. I recently (well, actually, just today) went on a trip to the “other” metropolis in the making — Tianjin, about 100 kilometers southeast of Beijing.

I tell you, ladies and gents, there’s quite a big gap between internationalized Beijing and still-internationalizing Tianjin. If you thought that Beijing was Western Capital-ist already (and nearby Tianjin, itself just a hundred magnetic kilometers away from the capital, is just as Westernized), well…

The first thing I noticed was that Tianjin was getting more and more — American. Those of you given to zipping away on your Interstate freeways probably recognize the font right away. The CBDOK, so Tianjin must be a city. And how do you define cities? At the kiddie level, a city must have “tall buildings”. The more, the merrier.

Here’s how the capital turns out in terms of stratospheric structures:

Here’s the Tianjin variant: OK — remember, when I first visited Tianjin back in May 2004, I saw a misty, somewhat spooky, and a little broken-down city back then. Just about a hundred miles from the capital, and I see that kind of stuff — you know, somehow, it makes me quite frown-ish. I was thinking, hey, this is Tianjin: it’s supposed to build stuff just as good as Beijing. They’re both municipalities. They’ve got the land. Tianjin’s even got the sea right next to it. Tianjin has to do better than that!Tianjin did do better — cranes in Tianjin are about to surpass those in the capital in terms of the sheer quantity.

Ah, but Beijing has the central part of the CBD still — unbuilt. Want to play catch-up, Tianjin? Beijing’s still thinking… of building better, and bigger, buildings…

And yes, at that, more and more jams…

The Subway

Having being stuck in horrible jams since Time Immortal, yours truly is now a devoted subway convert (and that’s the case more and more with Mozart in the subway these days — or did they remove it?).

The first thing I notice was just how similar Tianjin subway stations look to the Beijing counterparts. All cubes. The Tianjin one is, in fact, a glass cube through and through (given that, did Beijing play catch-up when it opened its “glass cube” entrance at Dongsishitiao recently?).

Meantime, the Beijing variant is still cube-ish, but not all glass: Once you’re inside, however, Tianjin seems to lose out. Here’s the standard set by your big bro — the nation’s capital: Tianjin’s reduced to just about this: I say reduced because two things were massively reduced: peace and quiet (they kept on playing some really annoying cartoons; when Tom and Jerry debuted on Line 5 in Beijing some time ago, they at least were a bit more quiet), and the platform screen doors (it’s only half and half — I have a tendency to absolutely abhor “half and half” things).Copied Names

Tianjin should be sued whole.

Either that, or I’m seeing Beijing names in Tianjin itself. Take, for example, Fuxingmen Subway Station. Both of these stations are on Line 1 in both cities!

Beijing’s variant is this:

In Beijing, Fuxingmen is an underground-only matter. It’s old, it’s got a central platform, it’s a bit dark at times, but it’s an interchange for Lines 1 and 2.The Tianjin version of Fuxingmen station looks like this:

Believe it or not, it’s above ground, new, looks like a Beijing Subway Batong Line station, and is — new (I think I just said “new” two seconds ago). And nope, no interchange facilities here.Scarier is the fact that you are reminded that this is a blatant rip-off of the Beijing Subway, station name wise, by the station signage:

OK — now out of the Subway, and back on the roads. It seems like the capital has indoctrinated the Heavenly Ford (that’s what “tianjin” (天津) really means in Chinese): we have Yuquan Road, too: Traffic LightsHaving being puzzled by Tianjin through and through (the roads were the worst: virtually nothing lies exactly due north, east, south, west, and stuff like that, unlike the capital’s grid), I looked for my escape outside this metropolitan madhouse.

That’s where the traffic lights got me. They’ve a “combo” traffic light system where they have only one centralized traffic light — but it’s one where the arrow changes colors. If you don’t look and are used to seeing the green in the rightmost part of the traffic light, you’re in big trouble:

At the end of the day, I made it out of Tianjin alive. When I saw the Beijing lights again, I knew that I had survived to live to another day in one piece…