Quilt Wars in China

Could a simple bed quilt be accused of stopping progress in today’s China? In Shanghai, apartment dwellers whose windows face south have a daily habit of hanging their bed quilts outdoors in the sunshine. They bring them in at night.

For those city dwellers whose windows face north, the only option is to take the bed quilts downstairs to the sunny side of the building, tie a rope between two trees and let their quilts take a “sun bath.” This has been a long standing tradition.

Tradition dies hard in China. People have their favorite trees and when a quilt is hung out in the sun, it doesn’t matter that a new driver is trying to drive their car through the space between the trees where the quilt now hangs. 

It’s a daily battle, explains a Chinese friend from Shanghai, as we drive down from a day of skiing in the Colorado high country. As a new driver herself, she tells me that when she drives, she never talks. “There is so much I have to notice.”

Quilt wars aside, I have also learned that so many young people have moved from the countryside into urban areas that there are many ghost towns in rural China. 

The only occupants of the ghost towns are the elderly. When one of them dies, there is no one able to bury them. Someone must dig the grave, but all the young men have moved to the city. It is against custom for women to dig a grave. So the old men must do what they can to bury the dead. 

In addition to shifting cultural patterns as China modernizes, another American icon is shifting the eating patterns of city dwellers. There are now more than 100 McDonalds fast food restaurants in China. My Chinese friends tell me that the country has now become the world leader in flipping and serving burgers and fries.

Like the “quilt” trees of Shanghai, tropical forests are rapidly being convered into paper and pasture land for a seemingly unstoppable, super-sized world economy.