Globalization comes from many directions. And can be observed in many ways. In one, as reported in the latest edition of Harvard Business Review, some researchers tried to tell where most economic activity was going on by reading the satellite images of lights on Earth.
The most lights come from the "contiguous lighted regions", led by the Boston-New York-Washington corridor, followed by about 30 others. In Asia, the two largest ones are the Shanghai-Nanjing-Hangzhou triangle in China and the area surrounding New Delhi and Lahore in India.
We know from ancient times that cities or clusters of cities on major transportation routes are more likely to boast the most prosperous businesses - like Xi'an that connected the Silk Road, and later Guangzhou and Quanzhou (a town in Fujian province) that connected the Silk Road to the sea.
But people certainly need new studies to update their knowledge - and to gain a better perspective of globalization, a new and still rapidly evolving phenomenon in today's world.
You can calculate the shipment of goods from ports, or numbers of passengers at airports. You can check each city's GDP and add them up to form one "mega-region". You can look through the registration of local corporations, measure a local economy's connection with the rest of the world, or you can use the annual FDI (foreign direct investment) reports.
These figures can all help. But they do not reveal the whole picture, especially the degree to which people are open to the changes that are happening, and can live happily together.
To be able to tell this is important because it shows not only just how much business is going on, but how much more a place can accommodate. For this purpose, a much more leisurely but equally useful measure is to survey restaurants.
If the variety of cooking styles is quickly growing, it may not only indicate that many people are coming to work in a particular place, but that the locals are also feeling more comfortable with it.
Expatriate professionals do not feel very comfortable working in places where they do not have access to their home cuisines. But once they do, it must be because the authorities had granted business permits to foreign restaurant owners, or the return of overseas Chinese setting up eateries.
When China was just opening up 30 years ago, there were just two or three self-styled Western food restaurants in Beijing. Even 10 years go, business people from Beijing's Guomao, or China International Trade Center, did not have many places to go during their lunch break. Now, in high-end consumer guides in Beijing, one finds restaurants featuring Ethiopian and Uzbekistan food. The Indian restaurant Ganges has opened several outlets.
Shanghai has had no problem embracing Western and Japanese restaurants. But the community of residents from Taiwan has also enriched the city's restaurant culture with many innovations.
At the same time, increasing domestic migrants, who flock to the prosperous cities looking for jobs, also bring their cuisines with them. Gradually, they attract residents of the various cities to their food, and in turn the migrants upgrade their lifestyles by serving more exquisitely prepared, hence more expensive, food.
This has been the case in the Pearl River Delta, a cluster of boom towns in southern China, despite the entrenched local food culture. Many Hunan and Sichuan restaurants have set up businesses which have their origins from migrant workers.
As reform progresses, one can be sure that in no time the restaurant culture in Chongqing, Xi'an and Wuhan will also change.
E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 03/17/2008 page4)
