"China Inside Out" Chapter 6

For Chapter 6 of Bill Dodson's book, “China Inside Out”, there is a varying pattern in the writing. As with many of his other chapters, Dodson starts with an anecdote that will eventually lead into the main segment of the chapter. His first anecdote is about a Chinese town being built called Yantai. Although Yantai was new and being built with state of the art technology and got retrofitted with its own advanced airport. Despite all this, Dodson notes that the town is devoid of people. “'What if you hosted a parade and nobody came to watch?'”, he says in his book while describing how there were no residents to witness his police escort (Dodson 111). China had built Yantai, but business had yet to go there and populate it. This anecdote leads into one of the main points of the chapter about how there was so much empty real estate in China that is as of yet unoccupied. This pattern of starting with anecdotes (personal writing) follows through in the rest of the chapter, and after each, Dodson follows up with researched information. For example, following a personal story about his own visit to Dongguan, Dodson goes on to give researched facts about the city about various topics, including low wages: “For 25 years, Chinese from the poorer... provinces had been flocking to Guangdong to work 16 hours a day for less than US$10” (Dodson 114). This pattern continues as Dodson moves on to talk about Kunming, Chongqing, and the Ningbo Meishan Free Trade Port Area. Dodson is highly specific in his writing. A lot of his facts are directly about cities and their individual issues as opposed to general examples about even more general concepts. For example, about the new efficient Chinese public transportation: “By 2012, passengers should find that a train ride from Shanghai to Hong Kong along China's southern coastline will only take eight hours, instead of the 20 hours the trip used to require” (Dodson 129).