Eastern Promises: B.C. Trade to China
With Sichuan sifting through rubble, B.C. is freshly confident it can sell the Chinese on wood homes.
Humans have a knack for myth-making, and we particularly like stories that culminate in beauty, riches, earthly bliss. Shangri-La, the fountain of youth, El Dorado: the tales we tell in earnestness and optimism may in fact provide a blueprint to our darker needs and anxieties.
When Pat Bell, the B.C. forestry minister, got back recently from Shanghai – a city whose name, slang for “obtain by unscrupulous means,” should inspire caution – he had a glowing report from the promised land. Within four years, he said excitedly, China could go from buying two per cent of B.C.’s forest products to buying 25 per cent.
Bell’s use of the conditional tense is in line with the tenor of 20 years of official announcements about the trifecta of B.C., wood and China. Here’s Council of Forest Industries (COFI) president Ken McKeen, circa 1987: “Look at it this way: if everyone in China bought one eight-foot-long two-by-four, it would use up half of B.C.’s lumber production.” And COFI president Ron McDonald, circa 2001: “It’s mind-boggling. With 1.26 billion citizens, China has enormous potential as a destination for B.C. lumber.”
In B.C. forestry, it seems, hope springs eternal. Although China’s huge market has always been a gleam in the eye of local manufacturers, none has yet come close to actually tapping the potential. But that doesn’t keep us from talking about it. And if Oscar Wilde was right that the basis of optimism is sheer terror, the American housing meltdown should spark a fresh round of songs of hope for B.C. wood products.
To Frank Li, a Chinese-born lumber exporter based in Vancouver, the pronouncements are enough to trigger faith fatigue. “They go to China and sign agreements and issue hopeful statements,” he says in Beijing-inflected English. “But because they’re unwilling to change how they do business here, it doesn’t change much.”
Li’s company, Golden Maple Leaf Enterprises – the name itself a near-perfect mix of Chinese and Canadian savours – has five employees in Vancouver and another 25 split between warehouses in Dalian, Chingdao and Tianjian. Li is a small player – in 2008 Golden Maple Leaf’s timber exports to China were 13,000 board feet, less than one per cent of what B.C. sent across the Pacific – but he has a keen cultural understanding of how Canadian lumber sells in China.
Li thinks that the B.C.-China forestry relationship has two problems that handshakes, photo ops and memoranda of understanding can do little to solve. The first is a biggie: the Chinese don’t build their homes out of wood. And it’s not just that they don’t – they can’t. Half of China's people live in tall buildings, in high-density cities of brick and steel – a landscape inimical to wood. It’s not Richmond, says Li: “There are no townhouses there.”
The second problem for the province’s producers is much smaller. In B.C. we produce boards in imperial lengths – from six to 20 feet, in two-foot increments. It’s annoying for the Chinese, who use metric measurements, to have to deal with non-standard board lengths, says Li. There, they want everything in three- or four-metre lengths. “You know, the guys in Canada, they don’t want to change anything!” he says.
COFI executive director Paul Newman deflects these criticisms. The real problem isn’t wood’s inappropriateness as a Chinese building material, he says; it’s the “lack of Canadian ingenuity and imagination” in coming up with new applications. “We see lots of good reasons why wood fits China well,” says Newman. Like? Well, he says, “producers here are extremely motivated to do business in China.”
Fresh off his Chinese trade mission, Pat Bell told the Financial Post that China was finally opening up to B.C. wood. In real terms, he said, “it means potentially four sawmills in B.C. that wouldn’t have been running in 2009 that can run,” adding, coyly, that 2009 could be the year that exports to China surpass a billion board feet.
That’s possible, of course, and the conversation about exports to China often swings away from what’s actual and toward what’s possible. Asked whether he thinks the province’s fortunes will rise in the coming year, Li’s voice grows fragile. “I hope it’s going to get better,” he says with a sigh. Girding himself, he speaks again: “I believe it will get better.”
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