'Alibaba' feels at home in China

By Li Xing from New Delhi and Liu Wei from Beijing (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2006-11-20 17:44

Dr Arvinder Singh is itching to travel again. The destination: Beijing, or Shanghai, or maybe Baoshan, a small city in Yunnan near the border between China and Myanmar.

It was in Baoshan, where Singh smelled something closer to home in India.

Arvinder Singh

"When I woke up in the morning in Baoshan, I had a feeling that I was walking towards India," he said. "Baoshan gives me that feeling that India is not far. Somewhere there is the smell in the air."

Singh, 45, is resident fellow economist at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and honourary fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi.

Since January 1997, he has visited China 15 times, making stops and giving lectures in universities across Indian's northern neighbour, from Beijing, Shanghai to the southern tip of Hainan island, or from Hangzhou in the east to Chengdu, Xi'an and Lanzhou in the west.

In Hainan, he said he'd never seen so many and such heavy coconuts, and coconuts drinks are stored everywhere. In Lanzhou, where he spent a week in June a few years back, he said he'd never seen so many watermelons.

He has attended economic forums at Bo'ao, Hainan, and involved in a number of multilateral projects, such as the Forum on Regional Cooperation among Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar with Indian government, which has got him to travel to Kunming, Yunnan's capital.

Singh said he made a conscious decision to work on China as a young budding economist having just finished his PhD.

That was 25 years ago. He recalled that people were surprised that he should waste his talent on China. No economist had taken it seriously working on China, he said. The Centre for Chinese Studies, which is 40 years old, has been studying history, culture, politics, and foreign relations.

"Until I joined, there'd been no economist at the centre," he said.

"But I found China fascinating," he said. "In normal education I was never taught about China; I was taught about Soviet Union or North America. But China was so close. When I read it, it looked that someone must start talking about China.

He also believed that as an Indian, he would be offering a different perspective from that of the Western scholars. "It was not so easy; we didn't have materials, or opportunities to travel, for instance," he said.

But things have changed, especially that "China has rediscovered India and India has rediscovered China," he said.

"Today if someone asks me what I work on, I say China, they are not surprised anymore," he said.

Moreover, he is witnessing the history. "I am part of the history," he said.

Whenever he visits a city the second time, it is transformed. "The same street is no more and new buildings have gone up, and I find China is the most booming place on earth today."

Academically, he has discovered that his Chinese colleagues are good listeners. "My lectures in China somehow have also found their way to Stanford or Harvard in the United States," he said.

"Dr Singh is very open-minded, and has an in-depth understanding of China-India relationship and the two country's economic development," Lu Feng, deputy director of Peking University's China Centre for Economic Research, said in Beijing, who began to know Singh in 2000, when the Indian scholar delivered a speech at Peking University.

"He differs from many other international experts on China in his willingness to conduct fieldwork," said Gao Haihong, director and senior fellow at Department of International Finance and Trade, Institute of World Economics and Politics, of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"He is always willing to communicate with Chinese people, he visits China frequently, and tries to know various types of people to get an in-depth understanding of China," said Gao, who got to know Singh during his visit to India last year.

In fact, Singh said his motto is to walk and to go to places off the tourist map. He has ridden buses to outlying rural counties outside big cities "to experience the daily ordinary life of the Chinese and see the real thing (China)," he said.

Of course, he has invited stares: A Sikh, he wears a mustache and the turban on the head. People also ask him questions, such as where he comes from.

Once in Shanghai, an elderly man asked him if he worked in some luxury hotel as a door man, as Sikhs used to work as police patrol or guard in old Shanghai in the early half of the last century.

"But Chinese children always know I've come from India," he said, often spicing up the conversation with his a little accented Chinese.

He has also heard people say, "Alibaba laila (Here comes Alibaba) !" he said.

Wherever he goes on his own, he also tries to locate a Kentucky Fried Chicken or MacDonald's, where he said he could always get people talking in English and generously offer a little bit of history or things about the locale.

"I never find it hard to communicate with him, because he really knows many Chinese people's habits," Gao said. "When we talk about academic issues, he can be very serious, but he is also very humorous in daily life."

Sure he misses home food while traveling in China now and then, especially after 10 to 15 days. "I cannot survive on unknown food."

"I would go to a small restaurant, enter into the kitchen, make them open the refrigerator and pick up the vegetables that we have in India," he said. "I would also tell the cook how to cook it."

Has he encountered "unhappy" moments? There was this one time, when an elderly man in Kunming asked him why India, such a great country, would allow the British to rule it for more than 200 years.

"It was shocking to me in the street when this question came to me," he said.
But that does not really count as "really negative" in his whole experiences in China.
He said he has more than 100 Chinese friends to count on. "Wherever I am in China, I have some 50 telephone numbers in my pocket," he said.

Sometimes he calls and asks his friend to tell the taxi driver where to go.
"I am so privileged, I have such so good friends in China," he said.

He has also reciprocated the friendship.

Professor Lu recalled that Singh took him to many bookstores and introduced some really useful books to him during Lu's visit to India in 2004 and 2005.

"I left some money for him for some books he gave me to help my research, but when he came to China again, he brought me new books," Lu said.