MY FIRST year as a China correspondent is drawing to a chilling end with the country's coldest spell in 38 years. There is nothing quite as goosebump-inducing as getting on a plane after a short break in Singapore's 28-degree heat and getting off six hours later in Beijing's -16 degree winter.
I was lucky to have even landed in China's busiest airport, which had morphed into a ghost-town after a snowstorm on Jan 4 shut down 2 of its three runways and forced more than 90 per cent of flights to be cancelled or delayed. I was even more blessed to have gotten a cab, the grumpy cab-driver nursing a cold told me as we truddled at 40km per hour down the expressway to my office in Raffles City Beijing.
"Yesterday, the roads were packed with snow and very few dared to drive their cars out. Today, everyone ('da jia") is out to clear the snow."
He wasn't exaggerating that much - there were really scores of people everywhere, swathed in People's Liberation Army coats, shovelling little piles of muck into furrows of increasingly grotty snow. I found out later that the Beijing city government had mobilised 300,000 people to clear the snow.
ST Photo: Sim Chi Yin
There wasn't any mention of snowplows or any sort of impressive China-made heavy-duty machinery that get featured with such clockwork regularity in the state-owned CCTV's evening news to showcase the economy's breakneck industrialisation. Instead, the most high-tech tool available appeared to be bamboo brooms, which were immensely effective... in making nice calligraphic patterns in the ice.
Why are sheer mass manpower - and bamboo twigs - apparently still a preferred solution for clearing snow?
It was a puzzle that my colleagues and I discussed as we huddled in a cafe - still bundled in our winter gear because it felt like zero degrees inside - and gripped onto steaming coffee cups for dear life to thaw our fingers.
I haven't come up with an answer - probably because my braincells are deep-frozen and my energy is spent damming up the Niagara Falls output from my runny nose everytime I step into the open. (I confess I also wasted quite a lot of time regretting that I didn't join the crowds in Ion Orchard's Uniqlo outlet snapping up puffy winter coats last week - because now that I'm back in Beijing, I'm too cowardly to brave the windchill outside to buy some from the Uniqlo here.)
But I can verify that Beijing does in fact possess snowplow trucks. I saw a convoy of four machines lined up neatly on the road outside my home last Wednesday night at 11pm, while a pack of workers milled around with their trusty brooms.
With a new bout of snow expected to hit Beijing on Friday, we shall see which prevails in the "Bamboo Men vs Machine" puzzle.
ST Photo: Sim Chi Yin