Read the Tea Leaves: China Will Be Top Exporter
JINHUA, China - All the tea in China is proving to be a lot of tea these days, as hillsides across central and southern China are bulldozed to make way for tea farms even as many young Chinese are losing interest in the beverage.
China still has millions of tea lovers who lavish the same attention on their beverage that oenophiles devote to wine. The finest grades of green tea, made from the most delicate baby leaves and roasted in a pan by hand, sell for hundreds of dollars a pound in Shanghai and Beijing.
But Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonald's, KFC and other Western businesses have come up with many other ways to slake thirsts in China, especially that of young Chinese. Shifting tides in tastes are creating waves over winners and losers both at home and abroad. Teahouses in China already are being replaced by coffeehouses, and Starbucks, with more than 140 stores, has spawned a cottage industry of copycats.
With tea in abundance in China, more and more is being shipped abroad, by third-generation tea farmers like Pan Jintu, who wants to supply green tea to Starbucks stores in the United States.
"Many people love tea now, so I foresee our business will grow," he said, standing amid his rows of tea bushes, as women in broad hats plucked tea leaves in the surrounding hillsides here.
But expanding sales by Chinese tea growers like Mr. Pan are causing alarm in other developing countries that depend on growing tea, like India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe.
While the growth of China's textile industry with the end of global textile quotas has attracted more attention as a threat to poor countries, China's tea industry also poses a challenge to some of the world's poorest nations. China is now poised to become the world's largest tea exporter by tonnage, overtaking Sri Lanka this year and Kenya next year.
Wide swaths of people across Asia depend on the tea industry for survival. Particularly vulnerable are countries that suffered from the tsunami last December: Indonesia, India and above all Sri Lanka, where income from the growing, processing and transport of tea helps feed nearly a tenth of the people, according to the Asian Development Bank.
Yet China's re-emergence as the world's leading tea exporter invokes a centuries-old pattern: the British East India Company, which bought its tea from China, held a monopoly on supplying Britain until 1834. Only when that monopoly was broken did other countries become big exporters. The saying "I wouldn't do that for all the tea in China" came to mean a refusal to do something even for a large and valuable payment.
The history of tea itself reaches back to ancient times in China. The earliest known literary references date back nearly 5,000 years, when Emperor Shen Nung is said to have discovered the infusion when leaves dropped into his hot water by chance.
Green tea is widely believed to have some medical benefits. Black tea, which may have similar benefits, is used in everything from Darjeeling to Earl Grey and is made from the leaves of the same tea plants as green tea, though processed differently.
But after millennia of popularity, tea consumption in China is growing by only 2 percent a year, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. By contrast, Chinese figures show tea production rising 8.7 percent last year and rapidly accelerating as recently planted tea bushes reach maturity and as inefficiently managed, state-owned farms are turned over to output-conscious entrepreneurs.
For the last three years, Beijing has set as its top goal the alleviation of rural poverty and high income inequality between coastal cities and rural areas, to the benefit of the tea industry. Municipal and provincial governments now vie to offer subsidies to an industry seen as an answer to lingering poverty and unemployment in the countryside, and are paying up to half the cost for the planting of new tea farms and the building of tea-processing factories.
Beijing has also eliminated an 8 percent tax on tea production as a way to increase rural incomes. Tea promotion policies, which also include heavy spending on research institutes to develop better strains of tea as well as subsidies, do seem to bring greater prosperity to tea-growing areas.
A 100-mile drive on the modern, four-lane highway from here to Hangzhou, at the northern end of east-central Zhejiang Province, passes dozens of villages bulging with new, three-story homes built of brick or concrete and featuring the garish green or blue tinted windows now in fashion here. Every few miles stands a new brick factory with a towering chimney belching smoke.
Jin Yuemei, a 54-year-old peasant near Hangzhou, paused before dousing nearly waist-high tea plants with an anticaterpillar pesticide and described how her home now held a television set, a refrigerator and even a couple of air-conditioners. "Everyone has these things," she said. "We are quite rich now."
Government support helped produce an 18.9 percent jump in Chinese tea exports last year, to 7 million, in a global market that is nearly stagnant, according to official Chinese figures released at a conference in Hangzhou on Sept. 28. Because of the sudden sensitivity, Chinese officials have become a bit reticent about their future levels of tea production, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
China's surge in tea caught many off guard. Tea growers in India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia invested in new processing equipment to produce green tea instead of black tea only to discover recently that China has become their looming competitor.
They are only now beginning to see the giant steps, like investing in infrastructure, that China is making to improve its tea-making capability.
Such advanced infrastructure far outpaces tea growers in India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia and other countries who make do with dirt roads and repeated power failures. The wide roads here lower costs to ship in diesel fuel to power the processing factories and ship out tea; electricity failures, a problem last year, have faded here as more generating plants are built.
"There's no way the containers could get to our farms," because the roads are too narrow and the bridges too low, said Ranga Bedi, a tea grower near Bangalore, India.
Tea production is a huge employer in countries around the Indian Ocean, including East African nations and Bangladesh as well as India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. But already, four dozen large farms producing black tea have shut down in the last two years, displacing tens of thousands of workers in southern India. Tea is one of the world's most labor-intensive crops, with leaves that need to be harvested weekly for 7 to 12 months of the year.
Although no one can yet read the tea leaves, several challenges could temper China's tea business.
With so many hillside forests cleared to make way for tea bushes, erosion has become a problem. "The central government will restrain them some, because if people keep developing tea gardens as they wish, a lot of trees will be cut down," said Dai Changhua, the deputy general manager of Bonna Tea Enterprise near here in Jiashan County.
Prosperity here is pushing up wages, so farms already are drawing migrants from other provinces, and have sometimes used prison labor over the years. The winters, though milder than in northern China, mean that tea bushes in central China stop producing new leaves for harvest from mid-October to mid-March. In contrast, tea bushes in warmer climes, like southern India and western Java in Indonesia, can be harvested all year long.
Finally, even a small appreciation in China's currency "will really affect our business," said Xu Hairong, the deputy director of the Tea Research Institute at Zhejiang University here.
For the global industry, the bigger worry is how much Chinese tea will be arriving in world markets. That flood of tea will grow only if people in China keep switching to other beverages. Starbucks sells tea, as well as coffee, in China, but it has found that Chinese customers prefer the coffee, said Christine Day, the company's president for Asia and the Pacific.
At a popular tea house in Hangzhou, a married couple of traditional Chinese medical practitioners savored a pot on a recent late afternoon but mourned that their 25-year-old son did not share their interest in the ancient brew.
"He doesn't like tea," said the husband, who only gave his family name, Ren, because of a wariness of foreigners that is common among older Chinese. "He doesn't like coffee, he mostly drinks Sprite, Coca-Cola and water."

   有点困，在sm看历史，然后看joke，看到打盹，joke的确实越来越不好笑了，而今天也确实有些困，天气原因？
   早上chinadaily的新闻好多，一口气看了7、8篇，工作还是比较轻松，打几个电话跟进一下各地的进度，沟通一下，决定听一会音乐放松一下，一看时间，11点半了，快下班了，-_-早上时间总是过得比较快。

   昨天mm又不想读书了，她知道该努力，可是就是没法静下心来，踏踏实实的开始准备，和雪说起这事，雪让我试着用别的方式劝说mm，我想了想，就用hold our dreams来鼓励mm，告诉mm，努力不是她一个人的事，是我们共同的责任。mm似乎很听得进去：）
   累了常听周华健的《一起吃苦的幸福》，昨天终于拟好了二期的学习计划，并按计划开始第二轮的复习，计划安排到辞职的时候，大概会在10月中旬辞职吧，大概还有50天，重点放在新闻史和传播学，英语上，katrina突然告诉我，离考试只剩下143天了，没有什么概念，觉得按着自己安排的时间去努力，应该是可以的。
   mm感冒了，早上发烧，给mm敷热毛巾的时候，想起在学校时有次也发高烧，舍友帮我敷热毛巾，呵呵，大学生活一去不复还啊：）

   经网妹多次催促，屡番提醒，决定更新一下blog：）
   这几天不算忙，读的书也不多-_-，周末本来想去莆田玩一下，结果因为错误的天气预报而取消了形成，错过无数小吃，哭！周五晚上看super girl，节目到快1点才结束，结果第二天呼呼到快11点，起来后和mm面面相觑，越来越佩服自己的睡功了，mm说目标是睡觉睡到自然醒，数钱数到手抽筋。哈，看来实现一半了，吃完午饭两个人呆在宿舍里面，我看了一个小时广告史，终于把7本书都过了一遍，mm上网上到n无聊，要玩游戏，我制止之，于是关上电脑两个人大眼瞪小眼，又无所事事了一番，于是想起要午休，继续睡觉。
   睡觉总是要醒的，呜呜，呆在家里折腾了好久，终于闷不住了，mm说要去见一个刚才厦门回来的舍友，看看她有没有变pp些，我立马揭穿了mm其实是想show一下自己的新衣服和新发型的动机。mm嘿嘿嘿嘿的换上衣服，出门，凉凉的风吹起来那个爽啊。
   见到mm舍友，没变pp，三个女人唧唧咂咂的，我数着学生街的美女一路走完，都没插上什么话，终于三个女人兵分两路，mm跟我说：回家吧。我倒，刚出门还没半个小时又回去，于是我钻进一家店里看了一下心仪以久的哑铃，看到一个超级可爱的小哑铃，大概5斤重，刚想拿给mm玩，-_-回头发现mm手里拿着一盒臭豆腐，被强迫在街上吃了一块臭豆腐后回家。
   关上门，又开始无聊，我在等笔记，mm读不进书，她上网，我看电视，相互影响，一直在探讨要不要吃晚饭这样的重大事件，这时，qq群里一闪一闪的，哇，有bg，遂蹭蹭，杀到福大让乖乖请了一顿桥亭，然后心满意足的回家了。
   周天又去东街，郁闷，从此不去东街了，女人的心思真奇怪，我说买双好牌子的鞋子，贵一些没关系，关键是要好穿和经久，mm试穿了无数双后仍不满意，后来又随便买了一双，希望不要重蹈一双鞋子穿一个早上的覆辙，更不要拉我再去东街，嘿嘿，我买了两件playboy的裤子和衬衫，可以储备到11月了，在以心痛价买下了一件pp的上衣之后，mm也决定到11月之前不再买衣服了。大喜。
   嗯，周末结束，继续上班，下午开始老板、主管都出差，我又可以安心的读我想读的书了。

好久没看蜡笔小新了，昨天累呼呼的从安溪回来，一进门的时候，在心里对自己说：你回来啦！虽然请了一天假，但是还是感觉来去都是匆匆忙忙的。
嘻嘻，mm终于也来了，昨天去逛东街口，说好了给我买T-恤和衬衫，@@mm总是拉着我去看女装，女鞋，化妆品，欺负我老实人啊，逛了一会发现饿了，在mm的带领下，杀到小巷子里面吃永和鱼丸-_-我不喜欢吃鱼丸，即使是永和鱼丸，综合考虑分析了一下，觉得应该是因为大一时在学校食堂吃的第一颗福州鱼丸太难吃了，给我造成长期的不良影响，mm好happy，把我的鱼丸也吃了
鱼丸吃不下，总不能“妖系”，蹭蹭蹭去吃麦当劳，原来在麦当劳上班的同事给了张优惠卡，去逛街之前刚用它撬门-_-，把钥匙锁在屋子里了，现在又可以派上用场了，真赞。hmmm，点了汉堡，薯条，中可。吃完继续逛街。
以后不逛街了，走了一个晚上才买了一件衣服，一双皮鞋，没有效率，mm说每次跟我逛街她都买不了什么东西，我倒，说得好像很无辜的样子，于是决定以后衣服都她买，嘻嘻，逛街的时间我可以看好多书，睡好多觉呢^0^
又来上班了，ms还是比较无聊，不管啦，完成该完成的工作，然后多学点东西，katrina今天怎么不上msn？难道辞职了？汗，才请假一天，感觉好像很多东西都不一样了，乱。