New York Travel Notes

Published: 2019-02-15

New York, a melting pot that continues the prosperity of the last century.

This article contains some thoughts after a short study trip to New York. The material mainly comes from my observations while traveling and conversations with friends I met there, including former classmates working locally, my host family, and classmates from language lessons.

Vignettes

In 1620, the Mayflower carrying a group of Separatist Puritans landed on the North American continent, beginning the civilized history of this new land. This also established the United States from the start as a country shaped by colonization, immigration, and religion. At the same time, American history has inevitably been a story of pursuing freedom and self-governance and addressing multicultural conflicts. Today, walking the streets of New York, you can still see the results of that historical sedimentation.

Manhattan is among the oldest neighborhoods in the United States. In 1640, the Dutch built a tall wall to defend against English colonizers; it was later torn down by the English and named Wall Street. Today Manhattan is densely packed with buildings where sturdy, timeworn architecture and modern styles echo each other. From time to time an elegant Gothic church or a classical museum inspires a sense of reverence. From the Empire State Building, Manhattan’s orderly, well-considered layout is visible at once; the flowing yellow taxis slice the stone-colored building blocks into distinct neighborhoods. Walking from the southern end of the Brooklyn Bridge to the northern end, you can fully appreciate New York’s balanced skyline. Built in 1883, the bridge radiates a feeling of steel—its strong lines face the distant, sacred Statue of Liberty across the river, signaling a resolute, inviolable ambition. In New York, buildings over a century old are everywhere, and long-standing commercial brands occupy them—testimony to the deep history of this city’s modernization.

Differences

Regarding differences between China and the U.S., most can be traced to history, institutions, and religion. Of course, New York represents only part of America—for example, public transit is very developed in New York, but elsewhere in the U.S. people generally drive. Also, in New York you can go out late and have a great time, but in many other cities safety is a significant concern; even if people go out at night, due to long-standing labor struggles for social welfare, working overtime has become less accepted, so many shops close in the evening. Consequently, television remains the most important household entertainment in many American homes—a point I felt keenly with my host family.

Institutions

Many public facilities in New York are quite old, showing no signs of imminent repair. For example, compared to China the subway is dirty and chaotic: exposed wiring, almost no interior decor (aside from flagship stations like Wall Street), and because the New York subway runs 24 hours, every morning you’ll see several homeless people sleeping in half a car, making the air stale and pungent. It’s hard to reconcile such conditions in the core city of a developed country.

First, the issue of subway repairs relates to the country’s institutional setup. Representative democracy means government policy actions must wait for votes and budget approvals before execution; the concept of taxpayers carries significant weight in the U.S. Moreover, subway riders are largely foreigners and lower-income people, so many feel if it still works, there’s no need to spend heavily on renovation or rebuilding. In contrast, China’s infrastructure capability draws global praise for being fast, accurate, and forceful—our institutional advantage.

Democracy is a good thing, but its weakness is internal resource consumption; it challenges policy focus, sustainability, and execution efficiency, and can easily cause a nation to lose its center. That is why almost all countries that claim democracy supplement governance with religion.Plato believed the prerequisite for achieving the most universal democracy is for everyone to become a philosopher—which is nearly impossible; what is possible is only to approach it asymptotically. Compared with Europe, the United States is certainly not the most democratic country, yet it has the most robust legal system and is one of the most competitive forces in globalization. This owes much to astute politicians and entrenched interests. Democracy exists to prevent the state from violating individual rights; it is a mechanism for institutional self-correction.Every country actually balances between democracy and centralization—and China’s development does not rely entirely on key individuals.

Culture

What’s good about the United States is that it has both the tolerance of democracy and the strength of centralization. Here we must consider the limits of that tolerance, which also helps explain why there are so many homeless people in New York. Lee Kuan Yew said:

Europe’s high-welfare policies can sap social vitality, while the U.S. is not a high-welfare state, so it has remained competitive. After becoming developed, Singapore has been vigilant about avoiding becoming a high-welfare country like those in Europe.

In fact, in the U.S. a homeless person who is willing to accept assistance can, step by step, receive aid, obtain housing, get medical treatment, access free job training, and move toward a stable life. But because of their own choices—refusing to work, preferring idleness, or drug abuse—this idealized social assistance cannot save everyone. Even so, society tends to tolerate them and at least not expel them. I once saw an interesting comment on Zhihu about this.

In the U.S., those willing to live like pigs can receive welfare and be cared for as such; those with basic capacity and motivation have opportunities to move into the second tier. (The top tier is out of reach.) It’s a give-and-take arrangement that leaves most people reasonably satisfied. You don’t see what happens in China—where people who clearly want an easy life are forced into the same arena as those aiming to be successors, fighting each other while capable people covet the top circle.

The U.S. is an immigrant nation, which fosters a culture of tolerance. So you shouldn’t be too surprised by the variety of people you see on the streets—unlike in China, where someone walking and singing might draw curious glances; I enjoy not having that. The U.S. offers special protections for vulnerable groups: child pornography is a serious crime, bars check IDs at the door, laws protect divorced women and workers, and pedestrians often have priority. For the average adult, you are an independent individual—free and expected to take care of yourself while following rules. That’s why New York subways have no security checks or platform gates, emergency doors are freely accessible, and museums generally only briefly check tickets at the entrance—fare evasion is genuinely easy. By comparison, I agree with a popular nickname for our citizens: “giant babies.”

Free speech in the U.S. is truly the polar opposite of mainland culture. Fellow students in class from other countries don’t download a bunch of apps they can’t use at home just because they’re in America. The internet has turned the world into a huge market, with Google, Instagram, Spotify, and YouTube as its oligopolies. But that model doesn’t apply to our country: we have a complete set of domestic apps that correspond to those services and serve a market of 1.3 billion people with excellent user experiences. In a way, our internet’s enclosure has helped fuel our current prosperity and can be seen as a form of trade protection.

Business

If you apply China’s market logic to the U.S., you might think there are many blue oceans, but that isn’t necessarily true. For example, Americans who live in houses rarely do laundry at home; they generally send clothes to laundromats. In China, not doing laundry at home would be a great user habit to cultivate—skipping the market education phase and allowing fierce competition in the laundry O2O space. Also, fresh-food supermarkets are a fiercely contested offline retail battleground in China today, but not so in the U.S. The Bible says: “If you see your neighbor working on Sunday, stone him.” So many American stores and restaurants (many run by Chinese immigrants, note) are closed or close early on Sundays. Moreover, Americans often don’t cook on Sundays and just enjoy their day. While younger believers are more open-minded, the habit persists. That makes Americans more inclined toward canned foods, which preserve nutrition better than fresh vegetables and are easier to store.

The U.S. has a long, deep modernization history, so it carries historical baggage that makes transitions between old and new less urgent and agile, especially regarding commercialization in the mobile internet era. China’s acceleration of urbanization, industrialization, and informatization has occurred over the past 40 years, allowing us to skip many transitional stages in development. For example, 1G/2G-era devices like brick phones and pagers faded away with little public experience of them here—we leaped from 3G into the global competition of the information industry. Or consider mobile payments: in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and other Chinese cities, a single phone can get you through an entire city, whereas in New York you still need a physical wallet containing a subway card, credit cards, membership cards, and some change. In my view,credit cards in China are no longer merely a payment instrument; they’re a form of consumer credit—and similarly you can think of services like Huabei and Baitiao. To some extent, the thorough development of mobile payments in our country and the exhaustive exploration of payment scenarios happened because we had an alternative, more convenient payment method before credit-card habits were established. In payment evolution, we effectively hit fast-forward.

We are in an era of technological transformation, and such change inevitably brings cultural shifts—especially in how we work and live. Many entrenched American habits allow people to maintain a relatively convenient lifestyle for a time; they selectively adopt technology to address more urgent needs. Ultimately, inertia and path dependence mean the U.S. may lag China in commercial implementation when the next technological revolution arrives.

Conclusion

Finally, a personal question I’ve derived: would you prefer the comfort of being swaddled and content, or the independence that comes with freedom? Which do you favor?

My current label for New York is: multicultural, with industrial-era architectural styles, a blend of fashion and depth, yet lacking a sense of technological futurism. So my impression of New York is:New York, a melting pot that continues the prosperity of the last century.

What impression do you have of New York?