Guangzhou in 1999 (photo: Radosław Pyffel)
RP – “I didn’t expect that, you know, as I had read a lot of books about the Maoist time and that was pretty much different with Guangzhou. I have to say that Guangzhou was pretty much different comparing to other cities in China because that was the first … that was the vanguard of the Chinese policy of opening up and that was the vanguard of Chinese reforms. And also, you know, usually when I had this picture of China, the image of China – that was [the] Great Wall and … imperial China, Beijing, and these kinds of images but Guangdong was pretty much different from that. It was much more liberal, I can say. The weather was different. It was very hot, it was very warm. And there is a Chinese proverb that ‘the mountains are high and the emperor is far away’ – so that was different. I started to learn Chinese before I had come to China and I was unable to communicate. So even the taxi drivers, they laughed at me because they couldn’t understand me. So that was quite a disappointment, you know, because I’d been practising so hard. And, you know, I had a Chinese teacher and she was always [nodding] her head in approval so I thought that my Chinese was, I don’t know, at least good enough to communicate but when I arrived at the airport, nobody could understand me so that was quite a disappointment. But I started to study really hard and in the next few months, people started to understand me. I had a good intonation and I started to be understood.”
I begin my interview with Radek Pyffel, Poland’s point man on China, by asking him how difficult it had been to learn the language. “Maybe,” he replied, “you want me to switch to Chinese or shall we start a conversation in Chinese?” It’s on rare occasions like this that I always pull out a trusted phrase that I learned by heart ten years ago [when still deciding which country to move to, to teach English – I ended up choosing Poland obviously]. ‘Wŏ hēn xĭhuān hē zhōngguó chá’ – I’m very fond of drinking Chinese tea. And here I’ve reached the limits (the limes) of my Mandarin. Pyffel laughs approvingly at my weak attempt and responds fluently in a flurry of impenetrable rising and falling tones, stressed and unstressed syllables, that clearly signal how far he must have come since that fateful taxi ride twenty years ago.
RP – “It’s a good question actually because it started in the 1990s … when I was studying at Warsaw University. And that was a very strange idea that came into my mind in the 1990s because we have to understand the context and the context is that at that time … that was a very special time for Poland and I think the whole [of] Central Eastern Europe because there was the reintegration with the West so everyone was thinking about studying and learning western languages. So a lot of my classmates, my colleagues, they were going to UK, USA and western Europe – and I decided to go in the opposite direction. I still don’t know why Chinese – usually they say it’s a destiny – but I was pretty much sure that I wanted to study Chinese and nobody believed it made sense at that time. All of my colleagues they found it a completely pointless idea. They said, ‘Why do you want to study Chinese?’ There were so many opportunities at that time when, after 45 years of communism, Poland had opened up and you had these opportunities to go to visit western European countries and I decided to start studying Chinese. Maybe because of the influence of my father, you know, because as a little boy I was getting postcards from North Africa – from Sudan and Egypt. So then I could see the postcards and I could see the pictures of my father talking to the people on the streets of Egypt and Sudan. So I decided to go out of Europe, which was not very common in Poland in the 1990s.
“Was it difficult? Well, I would say … it’s a completely different language so it’s got a completely different structure, so definitely for the European, I guess it’s much easier to study Spanish, Italian, Swedish or any other European language because the structure is very much the same. And in Chinese you have tones, the writing is different, so you have to learn how to write characters. So..! I think the first six months of studying Chinese, that was learning actually, developing the methods of learning and absorbing the language. But I think after one year I was able to talk on the phone in Chinese and slowly, gradually, step-by-step I started to speak Chinese. Now I can communicate – which is very useful, in China especially, because usually when anyone from Europe [is] going to China, sometimes it’s very hard to understand what’s going on around you so I think the language helps a lot.”
The Border Village Where East meets West
Pyffel co-founded a Polish-Asian think tank in 2007. Nine years later, he was appointed as Poland’s representative (alternate director) on the board of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a newly-founded development bank which the Economist had suggested in 2014 would be used by China “to expand its influence at the expense of America and Japan, Asia’s established powers.” From here, Pyffel told me, he moved to PKP Cargo, “the second largest railway company in Europe” (after Deutsche Bahn), where he acts as a proxy of the management board in Eastern markets, regularly travelling to Belarus, Kazakhstan and of course China. Who better to talk to, then, about the Brave New World of Belt and Road?
Poland is actually an incredibly important strategic hub on the logistics map of Eurasia. To emphasise this point, Pyffel tells me that the vast majority of trains travelling from Pacific Asia to Western Europe pass through the transhipment port of Małaszewicze (‘Mala’), a village on the opposite side of the Bug river from the Belarussian gateway city of Brest. It’s in Mala that the broad-gauge railway lines of the East (1,520 mm) meet the standard-gauge lines of the West (1,435 mm). Will Poland be able to maintain its position if new lines are built through Iran and Turkey? Pyffel is confident it will – “I expect that some new corridors will be established, will be developed in the future, but I don’t expect that it will be changed. So Poland will remain on the main route from western Europe to Pacific Asia, so maybe the volume will decrease, maybe it will not be 80% as it is now, maybe 70 or 60% but still the main route will lead through this part of the world.” He also notes that this is a growing market so this is also reason to be optimistic.
Radek Pyffel at Koźmiński University, where he leads the China Business programme
(photo: Radosław Pyffel)
He warns however that we shouldn’t be too narrowly focused on the logistics map and the new transportation corridors. This is all just part of the bigger picture of Belt and Road, which is essentially China’s way of going out into the world, of exporting its over-capacity and perhaps projecting its economic power into places like Africa and Central Eastern Europe. Some countries are more enthusiastic about this than others. Despite being the natural gateway from Pacific Asia to western Europe (“we are always on the way”), Poland sees itself as a loyal ally of the United States and, in addition to this, Chinese companies also have to swim against the tide of negative opinion following state-owned engineering and construction giant COVEC’s role in a high-profile unfinished motorway project which dominated news cycles in the run-up to Euro 2012. Hungary, on the other hand, is a far more receptive partner when it comes to Chinese investment and infrastructure (in terms of logistics hubs and operations centres). Africa is much bigger and the market there is less competitive. Although it should be noted that Chinese companies do still compete for business on the Polish market and the situation is dynamic.
We talk about the Confucian approach to education – “knowledge and self-development are highly valued in this civilisation and in this society,” says Pyffel, of the Chinese themselves and also of the Vietnamese who moved to Poland in the 1980s. The knowledge economy is a big part of a Belt and Road narrative which also includes people-to-people exchange, scientific cooperation and the establishment of think tank platforms. The Chinese, all these delegations that can be seen and heard visiting Poland so frequently these days, are very skillful at accumulating knowledge, collecting information and transforming it into ideas and solutions which are useful, not least in the development of the BRI project.
Poland’s place in the Brave New World of BRI
There has been much discussion in the US and Australia (both Pacific Rim countries) about how best to deal with the rise of China. I ask Pyffel about Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’ – is this as big a talking point in Poland as it is in the more strategically significant parts of the Anglosphere? “We [Poles] don’t believe there is any trap,” he says, describing received wisdom here rather than stating his own point of view. “There is no debate because nobody actually really believes that China is a real threat to the United States and to the current global order … (which) guaranteed Poland three decades of stability after 1989 and I think that everybody believed in the so-called idea of the End of History – so no-one really believes that China is a gamechanger and that the United States would have any difficulties to restore the global order as it was before 2016.”
What I found most interesting and perhaps surprising about my conversation with Radek Pyffel was his response to the question on one-way traffic. The figure he gives is 85% of trains going back to China empty, which sounds realistic, and obviously presents Polish businesses with huge export opportunities. The Chinese themselves are also keen to encourage trade as they scale the economic development ladder and begin to specialise in more advanced industries like 5G and artificial intelligence. Europe’s and more importantly Poland’s future role here, would – if the recently-established Shanghai International Import Expo is anything to go by – be to supply the high-tech superpower with food products and cosmetics, which need to be high-quality because we literally consume them and apply them to our skin. It’s a fairly sobering assessment for a nation which prides itself on the dizzying success of Warsaw-based games developer CD Projekt Red but it appears that Pyffel is very much the railway man and the pragmatist at that.
When Radek Pyffel moved to Guangzhou in 1999, he was surprised to see how many skyscrapers there were. In fact, even at that time, China was already home to four of the world’s ten tallest buildings – in other words, it had reached parity with the USA, which was home to another four. (Malaysia was home to the two tallest.) But whereas China’s entries on this list were all built in the 1990s, America’s had been built in the 1930s and the 1970s. Rewind 10 years to that ‘End of History’ year of 1989 and all ten of the world’s tallest buildings could have been found in North America. Fast forward to today and China is home to six of the world’s ten tallest buildings (all of which were built in the last ten years). The USA (like Saudi Arabia, the UAE and South Korea) is home to just one.
Autor
Thomas Riley
Thomas Riley runs the Flows and Frictions podcast for Strategy&Future. Originally from Manchester, England, he has been living and teaching English in Katowice since 2009.
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