Spring in Kunming is usually sunny and warm. Every now and then a sudden cold spell interferes. The temperature drops ten, fifteen degrees to ten, twelve centigrade. Recently it went down to four. That is rare even in January.
‘Mild climate’, people say. But there is no heating here. During the first day higher temperatures don’t give way yet in homes and offices. After that you are numbed by cold sitting behind your desk. Twelve degrees? Nobody born in the West after WW II, used to heating, can imagine anymore what it is like to experience that continuously.
When communist reconstruction started in China after world war and civil war it was decided, forced by shortages, not to install heating in apartment blocks, schools, offices, factories, hospitals south of the Yangtse River – though in winter it can easily get below zero in many places there. That policy is still intact. They may have invented laughable ways of wasting energy in China (what about, in places where central heating does exist, radiators without regulators that can’t be switched off even if outside everybody is just wearing a T-shirt), leaving several hundred million out in the cold has to be commended as an efficient conservation measure.
Of course people improvised all kinds of heating devices, and today most can afford an electric heater. But the majority stoically accepts the cold. ‘Ah, just wear several layers of clothing’. People don’t whine in this country where hardship has been part of life for millennia.
During the first day the cold doesn’t give way yet in homes and offices, but outside it is driven away as abruptly as it came. Usually within a few days. This time it took two weeks.