One of the things about China that Big Business loves is the fact that labour is cheap. One evidence for this even in everyday life is the curious phenonmenon where everything can be delivered.

Pin ordered his train tickets home by telephone from our office; the tickets were delivered by a Hip-Hop-dressed Chinese teenager the next afternoon.

Today, we found out (from Ms. Yu Xiang Hui, our wonderful host) that the coffee shop downstairs does deliveries too! I could (if I wanted to) call downstairs to the coffee shop, order a cup of coffee, have it delivered to my office, and pay cash on delivery. Not that this justifies the fact they are charging 28 RMB for a cup of coffee (okay, so that's like the same price as Starbucks in the US, but we're talking about a place where 28 RMB is enough to feed me for 2 days [or three if I really stretch it], so coffee is definitely a bourgeois "thing"), but I am so tempted to just order a cup of coffee for the experience.

(Hum, the coffee server just swung by, it seems that even for deliveries they use real china cups, rather than the paper affair commonly used in American coffee shops. They even ask you roughly how long it would take you to finish the coffee and when would it be convenient to come collect the cups.)