Monday, March 31, 2008
Source: Time Magazine,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1137697,00.htmlProvided by: Sng Sze Ying
Monday, Dec. 05, 2005
Sex and the Single Chinese
By Hannah BeechLi Li has lost exact count of how many men she has bedded, but she knows the number is far above 100. "I don't keep statistics," says the former journalist, 27. But she isn't averse to kissing and telling. For the past couple of years, Li has kept a blog--written under the pen name Muzi Mei--that has chronicled everything from her penchant for orgies and Internet dating to her skepticism toward marriage when it means staying faithful to one man. This fall the Beijing resident posted a recording of her own lovemaking sounds that would make Paris Hilton blush. More than 50,000 people simultaneously tried to download the 25-minute podcast, crashing the host server. Despite government attempts to censor it, the sex diary is so popular that Li's pen name is intermittently the most searched keyword on China's top search engine. "I express my freedom through sex," says Li, unapologetically. "It's my life, and I can do what I want."
Freedom in the bedroom is a novel concept in China, where for decades communist minders dictated most aspects of people's private lives. Dressed in baggy Mao suits--hardly outfits to set the pulse racing--citizens of the People's Republic had to ask permission from local officials on everything from whom to marry to what kind of birth control to use. But these days many Chinese are walking on the wilder side. Sparked by the easing of government control over individual lifestyle choices and the spread of more permissive, Western attitudes toward sex, Chinese are copulating earlier, more often and with more partners than ever before. Today 70% of Beijing residents say they have had sexual relations before marriage, compared with just 15.5% in 1989, according to Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. A survey taken last January of seven major Chinese cities found that among those 14 to 20, the average age of first sexual experience was 17.4, while those 31 to 40 had lost their virginity much later, at 24.1 years old. Says Fu Zhen, 28, a teacher in Shanghai: "My parents' only entertainment came from revolutionary movies, so they were very conservative about sex. My generation, we see everything from everywhere, and we are hungry for new experiences." As if to underline the point, Fu has adopted the nickname Carrie--as in Bradshaw, of Sex and the City.
All this hanky-panky is spawning new industries. Lingerie boutiques are proliferating in the big cities, and last month's Sex Culture Festival in the southern city of Guangzhou attracted more than 50,000 people eager to procure the very latest in adult toys--70% of which are now manufactured in China. One of the most popular? The "erotic butterfly," specially designed for women.
But China's sexual revolution has also brought unpleasant side effects. Although sex education is supposedly mandatory in Chinese middle schools, "many older teachers are too embarrassed, so they tear out the pages about sex from the textbooks," says Hu Peicheng, secretary-general of the China Sexology Association in Beijing. With little knowledge of birth control, an increasing number of unmarried women are getting pregnant in a culture in which single motherhood is still taboo. A survey by Shanghai medical researcher Yan Fengting found that 65% of urban women undergoing abortions in 2004 were single, compared with just 25% in 1999. Rates of sexually transmitted diseases are skyrocketing too, with HIV infections growing most quickly among Chinese 15 to 24 years old. Brothels barely disguised as beauty salons crowd the streets of China's big cities, while certain suburbs are known as "concubine villages" because of their high concentration of mistresses.
Those extra temptations--which the communists largely eradicated after taking power in 1949--have wreaked havoc on marriages, with 1.6 million Chinese couples divorcing in 2004, a 21% rise from the year before, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. "Before in society, we had a sense of right and wrong," says the China Sexology Association's Hu. "Now, we can do whatever we want. But do we have any moral standards left?"
Younger Chinese aren't too concerned. A poll by a Beijing magazine found that one-third of Chinese under the age of 26 had no problem with extramarital affairs. In a country where there's little political autonomy for young people, at least there's plenty of free love. "Maybe in the past, everyone was obedient and listened to the old grannies who lectured on who you could have sex with and in what position," says blogger Li. "But we don't have time to listen. We're too busy having sex."
My Comments:
As global citizens watch China’s growth closely, all inevitably thinks that a certain degree of western influence on China is good as the people of China calls for more democracy like in western countries. However, I think we fail to realize that there are certain undesirable effects on the social development of China. Rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases can affect the productive capacity of the young population, who are the future of China.
Yet the fact that this phenomenon is growing in China is indicative of a relatively more liberal Chinese society as compared to the past. With more younger Chinese people getting interested in the western culture and hence the desire for more freedom in expression, the government’s attempt to limit these western influences will only set themselves on more problems like an army of young dissidents ready to revolt the government to call for more social freedom. This is something that the government cannot afford as past experiences from social unrests also stemmed from the same few reasons, proving that young people has the ability to spur on political and social changesLabels: Chinese culture, posted by Sze Ying, taboo topics
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Source: Newsweek,
http://www.newsweek.com/id/81564Provided by: Sng Sze Ying
The Bitter-Sweet Taste Of Success
China's rise is empowering its legions of working women. But they're finding the rewards aren't so sweet.
Huang Hung
Updated: 11:16 AM ET Dec 22, 2007
I am an agony aunt—a print and online advice columnist—in China. By accident. I used to write a column on sex, but it was considered too risqué by the censors. So we changed it to a Q&A format instead. In the beginning, my editors wrote the questions. But after two issues, real letters started to come in from readers. A year and a half ago, I also started to write a blog, which became very successful.
The questions I receive offer fascinating insights into what it's like to be a woman in China today. Since the column started, we have received a total of 14,397 letters, 90 percent of them from women. Most of the writers live in urban areas and hold college degrees. A quarter of them write me about affairs with married men, usually the women's bosses. To get a sense of their concerns, consider the following sample:
Dear Huang, I have been in a romantic and sexual relationship with my boss for five years. I am now pregnant with his child. His wife has known about our relationship all along but refuses to give him a divorce. I am comfortable being his concubine, [si nce] he is very kind to me: he bought me an apartment and has promised to pay all the expenses for our baby. But my parents, who are Communist Party members and very conservative, think it is immoral and want me to leave him and have an abortion. What s hould I do?
Some 30 percent of my readers, meanwhile, seem to have a hard time finding a partner at all. Here is a typical complaint:
Dear Huang, I am 32, and have a master ' s degree in English. I am also very good looking, if I may say so. But I have problems finding a spouse. One of the problems is that I am not a virgin. The other one is that my graduate degree is intimidating to Chinese men. My friends suggest that I li e about both and even get an operation [to simulate virginity]. Is this the only way I can get someone to love me? Should I do it?
Such problems are far from unique, and say a lot about the attitudes of Chinese women. Most of us now face acute dilemmas over what roles to play in the country's booming new market economy. Although we have gained economic status as China has grown richer, we have not really gained in social status. Chinese society is still deeply traditional, and Confucius said that "a virtuous woman is without talent." This notion remains deeply rooted in Chinese culture. We don't like highly educated, highly paid professional women. Deep down, many Chinese remain very skeptical about the value of successful woman when it comes to relationships, families and social environments. When women make money, it is considered disruptive.
That said, China has enjoyed official gender equality for more than 50 years now. In government agencies and state-owned enterprises, men and women are required by law to receive equal pay. Indeed, Chinese women never had to fight to achieve formal equality: it was handed to us instead on a silver platter. Ironically, this might not have been a good thing. For it has left Chinese women unequipped to deal with gender issues in the current market economy (as opposed to Communist China's old, state-run system). In addition, we have failed to develop a moral structure that would help us women understand the complicated social issues that arise from wealth. Remember that polygamy was abolished in China only when the Communists took over in 1949. My grandmother always said that it was good to be the first in school but the last in marriage—meaning it was more important to be the most favored wife than it was to be a smart student. Such attitudes still linger.
As a result, the kinds of compromises and decisions Western career women now make all the time remain difficult and morally burdensome for their Chinese counterparts. Consider the case of my communications director: only two months after she was promoted to that post, she asked me for a demotion. When I asked why, she replied that she did not want to give her fianc? the impression that she was too focused on her career. What's wrong with that? I asked. She said that in his family, a "good woman" was one who made her husband and her family the priority of her life.
As all that suggests, China may be changing fast—but there's still plenty of work for us agony aunts to accomplish.
My Comments:There is undeniably a marked improvement in gender equality in China, especially after Mao Ze Dong proclamation that women "cover half the sky". I think we should applaud China for this achievement, considering how China is eager to propel herself forward in the global economy by acknowledging the capabilities of the female population who used to be looked down upon. Economically, women have proven to be helpful in building the country ever since China moved into a market economy. However I agree with the author that, even so, women’s social status is far from desired, simply because people of China are still traditionally rooted in their values, especially towards marriage and sex. In the past, women do not have much say in everything. Men often wield the power of decision-making. However China’s rapid growth has allowed gender equality to happen but this has resulted in the inertia in changing their attitudes towards working women who now has a fair share of roles in decision-making and also able to earn money and support the family. Hence we cannot entirely blame the Chinese people for their reactions towards such rapid social changes that the older generation and the opposite gender are unprepared for. Furthermore, Confucius ethics such as "a virtuous woman is without talent" as quoted in the article, and other teachings has long been deeply rooted in the minds of the Chinese, especially that of the opposite gender.Labels: posted by Sze Ying, social status of women
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Source: Time Magazine,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1713335,00.htmlProvided by: Sng Sze Ying
Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008
Smoke and Mirrors
By Bill Powell/ShanghaiNo country except the U.S. is crawling with more venture capitalists looking to fund green-energy deals these days than China. The rush has not yet reached dotcom-boom proportions, but VCs and entrepreneurs see big opportunities in helping the country cope with its horrendous pollution problems through alternative-energy development. Deals are getting done. China is applying green principles to the construction of entirely new cities such as Dongtan, an area outside of Shanghai the size of Manhattan, which will use recycled water only and generate electricity using biomass. Last year, 3.4 gigawatts (GW) of wind energy were added to China's electrical grid, making the country the fastest-growing market for wind power in the world. And by 2020, China will quadruple its nuclear capacity from 10 GW to 40, again the fastest rate of growth globally.
But to anyone laboring under the impression that China is well on its way to a carbon-neutral future, reality can be sobering. Despite progress on the alternative-energy front, demand for power is expanding at such an extraordinary rate that it can only be satisfied by the combustion of vast additional quantities of coal, oil and natural gas. For example, between 2008 and 2030, the incremental increase in China's consumption of oil alone is expected to equal India's total annual oil consumption today, according to the International Energy Agency. "The government is being very aggressive in its pursuit of hydro, nuclear and renewables," says Jone-Lin Wang, a senior director at Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), a U.S. energy consultancy. "But overall you're not really moving the dial that much over the next 10 to 20 years. These things take time."
Time is not on China's side. The government has announced plans to add an astonishing 1,300 GW to its electrical generation capacity by 2020. (The U.S. is currently capable of generating 1,000 GW.) The goal is for 25-30% of this to come from clean and renewable technologies. But even if these ambitious targets are achieved, some 70% of China's electricity will still come from coal-fired plants in 2020. That's down from about 78% today.
One reason China is so power-hungry: beginning in 2002, the country began dramatically expanding its heavy industries such as steel and aluminum production and auto manufacturing — capital-intensive businesses that are huge energy hogs. Five years ago, the ratio of heavy industry output to gdp in China was 55%; that rose to a staggering 120% last year. Today, light and heavy industry accounts for nearly three-quarters of the country's energy use. As a result, China is not a particularly efficient consumer of power, lagging well behind Japan, the U.S. and other developed countries in the amount of economic output it generates for every gigawatt consumed. Hoping to become 20% more energy-efficient over the next 12 years, Beijing in 2006 ordered heavy industries and local officials to develop more judicious consumption strategies. The government also increased pressure on provincial governments to enact strict building codes to make new office buildings and shopping centers less wasteful.
Laudable moves, but there's another reason why China is becoming as addicted to hydrocarbons as the U.S.: the middle-class dream is coming true for tens of millions of mainlanders, who are buying their first cars, computers, clothes dryers and other electrical appliances. Some estimate that China last year surpassed the U.S. as the largest producer of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, yet the impact of the country's growing consumerism has barely started to spread across the world's energy and environmental landscape. To put matters into perspective, consider China's massive Three Gorges Dam, a $29 billion project that displaced millions of peasants in return for a big jolt of clean, affordable hydropower. According to a forecast by policymakers at Beijing's Sustainable Energy Program, electricity demand from air-conditioners purchased by Chinese in 2008 alone will exceed the total capacity of Three Gorges Dam.
Air-conditioners? What if 300 million Chinese decide to buy suvs? "The Chinese are sort of like the Americans," says CERA's Wang. "They like big cars and houses." That's an observation likely to darken the outlook of even the sunniest of solar-power advocates, and knock the wind right out of the sails of wind-power fans. No matter how much China invests in green technologies, it looks like it won't be enough.
My Comments: I think China's efforts to cut pollution is reasonably commendable and successful for a country that is living beyond its own means. Yet due to several reasons, China has and will become the victim of its own success, as these environmental policies can have several impacts on the chinese society. Socially, the lives of the common people are in one way or another affected by China's plans to improve environmental conditions. Large-scale projects like The Three Gorges Dam is one good example to show that while it is a generally successful one for generating "cheap and affordable hydropower", it was done at the expense of the welfare and interests of the local people who lived near the dam. In a society where it is susceptible to social unrests, the forced displacement can easily incur the people's wrath and spark social upheavals that is detrimental to not only the social stability, but also to both the economic and political stability of the country as well. While efforts are aimed at solving environmental issues plagueing China, social problems like this will inevitably result and have a snowballing effect. Also, the effectiveness of China's plan to tighten regulations and enforce stricter rules on building codes to make office buildings and shopping centres more environmental friendly, remains to be seen and observed. Although on the surface level, "the government increased pressures on provincial governments" to enact these stringent rules, there is still uncertainty in whether this would work. After all, there is often a lack of political will amongst the provincial governments to prioritize environmental protection efforts over economic prosperity. Presently the provincial government are already running into deficit in funds for economic and social development of their respective provinces, hence there is less likely a chance that more funds will be given to them to invest in expensive green technology. Even if they do recieve funds from the government or earn enough from investments to fund these projects, corrupted provincial governments would not put this money into good use. Therefore, I agree with the author's stance that, "no matter how much China invests in green technogies, it looks like it won't be enough.".Labels: air pollution, China's Environmental Issues, posted by Sze Ying
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Source: Time Magazine,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1647228,00.htmlProvided by Sng Sze Ying
China's Me Generation.
By Simon Elegant. July 26, 2007.
Six friends out on a friday evening, the seafood plentiful, the conversation flowing. Maria Zhang — big hoop earrings, tight velvet jacket and a good deal of meticulously applied makeup — starts to describe an island that everyone is talking about off the east coast of Thailand. It has great diving, she says, and lots of Chinese there so you don't have to worry about language. Her friend Vicky Yang is hunched over a borrowed laptop, downloading an e-mail from a pesky client on her cell phone. An actuary at a consulting firm, Vicky needs to close a project tonight. While she phones a colleague, the dinner-table conversation moves on to snowboarding ("I must have fallen a hundred times") to the relative merits of various iPods ("Shuffle is no good") and the sudden onrush of credit cards in China. Silence Chen, an account executive with advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather in Beijing, tells the group he recently received six different cards in the mail. "Each one has a credit limit of 10,000," he says, laughing. "So suddenly I'm 60,000 yuan richer!" The talk turns to China's online shopping business, before that is interrupted by the arrival of razor clams, chili squid and deep-fried grouper.
The one subject that doesn't come up — and almost never does when this tight-knit group of friends gets together — is politics. That sets them apart from previous generations of Chinese élites, whose lives were defined by the epic events that shaped China's past half-century: the Cultural Revolution, the opening to the West, the student protests in Tiananmen Square and their subsequent suppression. The conversation at Gang Ji Restaurant suggests today's twentysomethings are tuning all that out. "There's nothing we can do about politics," says Chen. "So there's no point in talking about it or getting involved."
There are roughly 300 million adults in China under age 30, a demographic cohort that serves as a bridge between the closed, xenophobic China of the Mao years and the globalized economic powerhouse that it is becoming. Young Chinese are the drivers and chief beneficiaries of the country's current boom: according to a recent survey by Credit Suisse First Boston, the incomes of 20- to 29-year-olds grew 34% in the past three years, by far the biggest of any age group. And because of their self-interested, apolitical pragmatism, they could turn out to be the salvation of the ruling Communist Party — so long as it keeps delivering the economic goods. Survey young, urban Chinese today, and you will find them drinking Starbucks, wearing Nikes and blogging obsessively. But you will detect little interest in demanding voting rights, let alone overthrowing the country's communist rulers. "On their wish list," says Hong Huang, a publisher of several lifestyle magazines, "a Nintendo Wii comes way ahead of democracy."
The rise of China's Me generation has implications for the foreign policies of other nations. Sinologists in the West have long predicted that economic growth would eventually bring democracy to China. As James Mann points out in his new book, The China Fantasy, the idea that China will evolve into a democracy as its middle class grows continues to underlie the U.S.'s China policy, providing the central rationale for maintaining close ties with what is, after all, an unapologetically authoritarian regime. But China's Me generation could shatter such long-held assumptions. As the chief beneficiaries of China's economic success, young professionals have more and more tied up in preserving the status quo. The last thing they want is a populist politician winning over the country's hundreds of millions of have-nots on a rural-reform, stick-it-to-the-cities agenda.
All of which means democracy isn't likely to come to China anytime soon. And that poses challenges for Western policymakers as they try to engage China without condoning the Communist Party's record of political repression and its failures to improve the lives of the country's rural poor. China watchers say the Me generation's reluctance to agitate for reform is driven in part by a reluctance to tarnish China's moment in the sun. "They are proud of what China has accomplished, and very positive about the government," says P.T. Black, who conducts extensive marketing research for a Shanghai-based company called Jigsaw International. The political passivity of China's new élite makes sense while the good times roll. The question is what will happen to the Me generation — and to China — when they end.
For anyone who visited the workers' paradise when it was still the land of Mao suits and communes, trying to reconcile that China to the one that young élites live in today is disorienting. When I first visited China in 1981, I went to the People's Park in Shanghai with two traveling companions. Our obligatory Foreign Ministry "guide" ushered us through a special gate reserved for "foreign friends." A knot of young Chinese had gathered outside. As we passed, a few made loud comments about the unfairness of having parts of the People's Park reserved only for foreigners. One of my companions, a Mandarin speaker, agreed volubly in Chinese. Immediately a group of young Chinese men and women surrounded us and peppered us with questions that mixed naiveté and aspiration: Are there still slaves in America? Where did you learn to speak Chinese? Do all American families really have three cars? Can you help me go to America?
That discussion took place 25 years ago, the span usually allotted to a single generation. The naive, wary Chinese I met that day could be the parents of the group gathered for the seafood feast in Beijing. But there is almost nothing about the appearance, attitudes, life experience, education or dreams for the future that those young people in the Shanghai People's Park share with the likes of Vicky and her friends.
The most obvious change is demographic. Because of China's one-child policy, instituted in 1978, this is the first generation in the world's history in which a majority are single children, a group whose solipsistic tendencies have been further encouraged by a growing obsession with consumerism, the Internet and video games. At the same time, today's young Chinese are better educated and more worldly than their predecessors. Whereas the so-called Lost Generation that grew up in the Cultural Revolution often struggled to finish high school, today around a quarter of Chinese in their 20s have attended college. The country's opening to the West has allowed many more of its citizens to satisfy their curiosity about the world: some 37 million will travel overseas in 2007. In the next decade, there will be more Chinese tourists traveling the globe than the combined total of those originating in the U.S. and Europe. Rather than fueling restlessness among the Me generation, however, the ease of travel seems to provide more evidence that the benefits of globalization can be had without radical change.
There's another reason for the lack of political ferment: it's exhausting. Like anyone else, members of the Me generation are shaped by their experiences and those of their families. When their parents talk about the Great Leap Forward (a disastrous Mao campaign in the late 1950s that left 20 million to 30 million dead of starvation) and the subsequent chaos of the Cultural Revolution, they mostly tell horror stories that would put anyone off politics forever. That chapter in Chinese history, which officially ended with Mao's death in 1976, is ancient history to today's young élites. They have known little but peace and an ever increasing economic boom. "We have so much bigger a desire for everything than [our parents]," says Maria Zhang, 27. "And the more we eat, the more we taste and see, the more we want."
One event that the Me generation does remember is the crackdown on student activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But to young Chinese like Maria and Vicky, the Tiananmen protests are less a source of inspiration than an admonishment. Were popular uprisings like Tiananmen allowed to continue, Vicky believes, they would have provoked a counterreaction by conservative forces and led to a return to fortress China: no more iPods, overseas shopping trips or snowboarding weekends. "I think that the students meant well," says Vicky, who was 11 at the time and has only vague memories of what happened. But the crackdown that ended the demonstrations "certainly was needed."
Vicky embodies the shift in the priorities of young Chinese. She's a purposeful, 29-year-old actuary who rarely smiles but loves nothing better than a party. She and her friends meet so regularly for dinner and at bars that she says she never eats at home anymore. As the pictures on her blog attest, they also throw regular theme parties to mark holidays like Halloween and Christmas, and last year took a holiday to Egypt.
Encouraged by her new boyfriend Wang Ning, a keen snowboarder, Vicky decided earlier this year to take up the sport as well. To prime for it, she went to a mall in south Beijing that specializes in pricey, imported skiing gear. She chose a gleaming new snowboard made by the Colorado company Never Summer, emblazoned with colorful, psychedelic paintings of butterflies. Along with gloves, goggles and other paraphernalia, the new gear set her back about $700. When asked about the wisdom of spending a small fortune on equipment for a sport she may never take to, she says, "I believe you have to be fully prepared and equipped before you decide to start a new hobby." Besides, she adds, "even if I don't like skiing, think how nice [the gear] will look in the hallway of my apartment. Guests won't know that I don't use it." Vicky smiles to signal she's joking. But she's dead serious when she explains, over coffee at Starbucks, her lack of interest in politics. "It's because our life is pretty good. I care about my rights when it comes to the quality of a waitress in a restaurant or a product I buy. When it comes to democracy and all that, well ..." She shrugs expressively and takes a sip of her latte. "That doesn't play a role in my life."
People like Vicky and her friends represent the leading edge, the trailblazers for a huge mass of young, eagerly aspirant consumers. All over China, young professionals like these banter about blogging, travel and work-life balance. ("Work hard, play harder," says Vicky several times, repeating it in case she isn't heard.) If they can't afford to blow $700 on skiing gear, they want to be able to soon.
And so for China's leaders, placating the Me generation is seen as critical to ensuring the Communist Party's survival. By 2015, the number of Chinese adults under 30 is expected to swell 61%, to 500 million, equivalent to the entire population of the European Union. From issues of grave consequence to trivialities, the government has made clear that it will do whatever it takes to keep the swelling middle class happy. In Beijing, for example, newly prosperous residents are snapping up automobiles at a rate of 1,000 a day. The number of vehicles on the capital's sclerotic roads has doubled in the past five years, to 3 million. (By comparison, there are about 2 million vehicles registered in all of New York City.) But despite a grim pollution problem (Beijing air quality is among the world's worst) that could embarrass China during next summer's Olympic Games, the central government has made no move to curb vehicle purchases through regulation or taxes. And that, in turn, has made it harder for governments in the developed world to make progress in getting Beijing to do more to fight climate change.
That's just one example of the long-term impact of the government's focus on the Me generation. In an article in the official mouthpiece People's Daily published in February, Premier Wen Jiabao stressed that economic growth should take precedence over democratic reforms for the foreseeable future, a period that he appeared to indicate could stretch to 100 years. And yet for all its machinery of control, the party is vulnerable. Senior cadres from Wen on down have acknowledged in public that growing unrest in the provinces, as farmers clash with police over expropriated land or official corruption, could threaten the party's grip on power.
As a result, China's rulers face a dilemma: the very policies that cater to the urban middle class come at the expense of the rural poor. So far the government is erring on the side of the rich. In March the government pledged to address problems plaguing the country's peasants, such as access to medical treatment and schooling, health insurance and the disparity between urban and rural incomes. And yet a relatively small portion of the budget was set aside to address the concerns of the peasantry, with the bulk of spending still concentrated on stoking the booming economy.
Even more telling was the passage of what was widely viewed as one of the most important pieces of legislation to be put forward in several decades of reform: the revised law on property ownership. Pushed through despite objections from old-line conservatives, the law for the first time gave equal weight to both state- and private-ownership rights. But a look at the fine print shows that the law only protects things dear to the rising middle class: real estate, cars, stock-market assets. Farmers, on the other hand, will still be unable to purchase their land and instead will be forced to lease plots from the government.
If left unchanged, such policies could exacerbate China's rich-poor divide and create conditions for tumultuous social upheaval. The test for China — as the Me generation grows bigger, richer and more powerful — will be whether it begins to push for the social and political reforms that are necessary to ensure China's long-term prosperity and stability. How likely is that? Though they're not exactly clamoring for free elections, members of the new middle class have shown a willingness to stand up to authority when their interests are threatened. Last October police in Beijing attempted to enforce rules limiting each household to a single, registered animal no taller than 14 in. (35 cm). The drive sparked a rare public demonstration by hundreds of well-heeled Chinese, mostly young dog owners. Within a month, according to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, President Hu Jintao had intervened, ordering the Beijing authorities to back off. It was the first time most Beijingers could remember a public protest drawing a direct intervention by China's top leader.
It was hardly Tiananmen, but a small triumph for free expression nonetheless. And if the West hopes to see China become democratic as well as prosperous, it will have to find ways to encourage modest breakthroughs like these, rather than expect sweeping change. At the Gang Ji Restaurant, where the dishes have been cleared and fresh fruit and more tea brought in, the mood is reflective. "We are lucky compared to our parents," says Maria Zhang, who works as a membership manager in one of the capital's most exclusive clubs. "My parents had nothing themselves. They lived for me." Wang Ning, the snowboarder who runs his own successful advertising company, agrees. "We are more self-centered. We live for ourselves, and that's good. We need to have the strength to contribute to the economy. That's our power. The power to contribute. That's how our generation is going to help the country." China's future will be defined by whether they realize that democracy can help China, too.
Labels: China's ME Gen, chinese society, posted by Sze Ying
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Source: Time Magazine,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1713336,00.htmlProvided by: Sng Sze Ying
Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008
The Short March
By Bill Powell/ShanghaiOn a cold, gray afternoon a year ago, I stood on the deck of our newly purchased, half-constructed house about an hour outside Shanghai, wondering what, exactly, I had gotten myself into. My wife, a Shanghai native, and I had moved back to China from New York City in the spring of 2004, and 21⁄2 years later we had decided to take the plunge. We bought a three-story, five-bedroom townhouse way out in the suburbs, in a town called New Songjiang, a place that was then — and remains now — very much a work in progress.
We had come here that day to see how construction was progressing. Our house, along with about 140 others, was going up in a development called Emerald Riverside. It sits on the banks of a tributary that dumps into the Huangpu, the river that cuts Shanghai in two about 28 miles (45 km) to the northeast. On that dreary afternoon I gazed out to the other side of the river, looking at the only significant patch of land for miles that was not yet being developed — about five acres (20,000 sq m) of green that local farmers still used to grow watermelons, which they then sold to the migrant workers building this town. On the far bank there was a ramshackle one-room brick house, where three of the farmers lived — a husband, wife and teenage son. They had no running water — they bathed and washed their clothes in the river — and the place was lit by a single bulb. In every direction just beyond the watermelon patch, office parks and houses and apartment complexes were going up, forming a cordon around the farmland that was drawing inexorably tighter. As it is in vast swathes of China, the new was replacing the old, and it was not doing so slowly. It was doing so in the blink of an eye.
I stood on the deck that day and watched one of the farmers who worked the watermelon patch, an older woman who would later introduce herself to us as Liu Yi, as she stared back at me across the river. I remember thinking to myself, My god, what must be going through her mind? Not only is the land she works on about to disappear, but there's this foreigner standing over there staring at her. Where did he come from and, more to the point, what in the world is he doing out here? The short answer is that my wife and I have become a tiny part of China's latest revolution. We got an off-the-shelf mortgage from the Standard Chartered Bank branch in town, plunked down 25% of the purchase price, and bought ourselves a piece of the Great Chinese Dream.
Best Years of Their Lives
For the past decade and a half, the frantic pace of urbanization has been the transformative engine driving this country's economy, as some 300-400 million people from dirt-poor farming regions made their way to relative prosperity in cities. Within the contours of that great migration, however, there is another one now about to take place — less visible, but arguably no less powerful. As China's major cities — there are now 49 with populations of one million or more, compared with nine in the U.S. in 2000 — become more crowded and more expensive, a phenomenon similar to the one that reshaped the U.S. in the aftermath of World War II has begun to take hold. That is the inevitable desire among a rapidly expanding middle class for a little bit more room to live, at a reasonable price; maybe a little patch of grass for children to play on, or a whiff of cleaner air as the country's cities become ever more polluted.
This is China's Short March. A wave of those who are newly affluent and firm in the belief that their best days, economically speaking, are ahead of them, is headed for the suburbs. In Shanghai alone, urban planners believe some 5 million people will move to what are called "satellite cities" in the next 10 years. To varying degrees, the same thing is happening all across China. This process — China's own suburban flight — is at the core of the next phase of this country's development, and will be for years to come.
The consequences of this suburbanization are enormous. Think of how the U.S. was transformed, economically and socially, in the years after World War II, when GIs returned home and formed families that then fanned out to the suburbs. The comparison is not exact, of course, but it's compelling enough. The effects of China's suburbanization are just beginning to ripple across Chinese society and the global economy. It's easy to understand the persistent strength in commodity prices — steel, copper, lumber, oil — when you realize that in Emerald Riverside construction crews used more than three tons of steel in the houses and nearly a quarter of a ton of copper wiring. There are 35 housing developments either just finished or still under construction in New Songjiang alone, a town in which 500,000 people will eventually live. And as Lu Hongjiang, a vice president of the New Songjiang Development & Construction company puts it, "we're only at the very beginning of this in China."
The Short March is underway across the country. "Everyone knows in its cities, China is building up — but it's also building out," says Jing Ulrich, managing director and head of research at JP Morgan in Hong Kong. In Beijing, a high-speed rail link will bring cities like Tianjin, 70 miles (113 km) away, into commuting distance by this summer. In places such as Chongqing to the west and Dalian in the north, says Ulrich, the same pattern of development is taking shape: up — and out.
Companies all over the world, who have fed China's long-running urban economic boom, are already beginning to benefit from its suburban phase. The average size of a house in New Songjiang is more than twice that of the average downtown Shanghai apartment, and now we, and our fellow suburban pioneers, are stocking up with stuff. In our house we have drapes that were made in Tianjin, and tile flooring from Kunming, but also bathroom fixtures made by Kohler (headquarters: Kohler, Wis.) and consumer electronics from Samsung and Panasonic. Our town's central shopping mall — which looks as if it could be in White Plains, N.Y., or the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles — has had a KFC and a Pizza Hut up and running for the past year. In late summer, New Songjiang passed through one of globalization's initiation rituals: Starbucks opened its first branch here.
The economic effects of the Short March are the easiest to discern. Others — political, social — are like aftershocks of an earthquake: you know they are coming, even if you're not quite sure when, or exactly how powerful, they will be. One, I'm certain, will be environmental. New Songjiang is supposed to be linked, by 2010, to central Shanghai when a spur on the light-rail system is completed.
But everyone who moves here will still own a car, because this is a suburb, right? When we lived in Shanghai, my wife walked out of our apartment to a street market a few blocks away to buy vegetables every day. Here, you drive to the store. In China, the car, almost as much as the new apartment or house, is a badge of honor among the newly minted middle class. If the neighbors I've met are any indication, many people will still drive into town rather than commute on a crowded train. This, despite the fact that it costs the equivalent of some $6,000 to get a license plate that allows you to drive on Shanghai's highways. Zhang Wenming, who lives just behind us, drives to work every day and says he'll continue to do so. But Shanghai is already gridlocked and smoggy and getting worse by the day. That's part of the reason my wife and I, with a 3-year-old daughter in tow, moved here — our daughter had developed a persistent hacking cough that she couldn't seem to shake. By 2010, in and around Shanghai there will be some 2,600 miles (4,200 km) of new highways that didn't exist in 2000. And millions of new cars will be traversing them. Shanghai may make Los Angeles on a bad day look as clear as a bell.
Ironically, all of these new suburbs in Shanghai, mine included, bill themselves as environmentally friendly. And relatively speaking, they are. There is green space here — large grassy parks and small lawns, which don't exist in the city. But things have hardly started yet. I recently asked a retired Shanghai city planner how much thought had gone into the environmental consequences of the Short March. He sighed. "We know people will probably have to drive more. There will be more cars on the streets everywhere. But there are other important factors to consider." Such as? He paused, and just rotated the forefinger of his right hand in front of him, over and over. His meaning was clear enough. Nothing is more important to China's leadership — nothing — than keeping the economy ticking over, in making sure those in the middle class have decent new places to raise their families, and that there are jobs for workers in places where, not long ago, there were only watermelon fields.
If You Build It, Will They Come?
It has been less than 10 years since this land was nothing but farms and mosquito-infested swamps. The truth is, there are days even now when it still feels a little lonely. Tens of thousands of square feet of retail space have already gone up, about half of which sit empty, at least for now. On most days this past summer there was so little traffic on the streets in town that drivers didn't pay attention to the traffic lights — except, that is, the student drivers from the Li Zhong Driving School, who creep slowly down the town's wide, untrafficked thoroughfares. But life won't feel lonely for long. There are 200,000 houses and apartments either under construction or planned for this city. Multiply that by 10 — the number of satellite cities going up around Shanghai alone — and you get a sense of the economic forces at work. To the developers who conjured this place out of nothing, the payoff is as close to a matter of fact as any investment can be. Listen to Guo Guangchang, the co-founder and CEO of Fosun Group — whose subsidiary, Forte, is one of the primary developers here — and the message is clear: if you build it, they will come.
Guo, 40, is one of the richest men in China. He founded his company, now a huge conglomerate, in the early 1990s, with three friends from Shanghai's Fudan University. Today, like so many successful Chinese businessmen of his generation, he seems preternaturally calm when talking about why he believes the future is going to look a lot like the present: new houses go up, new houses get bought, more new houses go up.
We sat in his office on Shanghai's famous Bund, and I half-jokingly told him I was a little nervous about my investment. Analysts' reports these days are full of tales about China's real estate bubble. Was it possible that the skeptics might be right — that Shanghai itself is already overbuilt, and the suburbs Guo is helping create are a bridge way too far? He looked at me as if I were from another planet, then smiled politely. "There is only one Shanghai in China," he said. "People want to come here from all over the country. People need good quality housing at a decent price, and that will continue to be true for a long, long time. Sure, there might be periods where the market slows down a bit; but the underlying things that are driving it, no, they won't slow down." There are about 20 million people in Shanghai now, Guo noted. In 20 years, he said, that number could easily double.
And that's where the simple comparison to the U.S. after 1945 breaks down. Journalist turned businessman Jim McGregor, one of the most astute observers of modern China, says that the country is cramming three different eras of U.S. history into one. In U.S. terms, the postwar prosperity that fueled the flight to the suburbs is happening at the same time as the 19th century Industrial Revolution that lured people from the farm to the cities, and also as Progressive Era efforts to rein in the worst abuses of capitalism take shape. I asked Guo if he agreed. He nodded, but added a caveat: "What's different about China is the sheer scale of things. The simple fact is there are still 800-900 million people living in poor, agricultural provinces. That's about three times the population of the United States."
Guo, suffice to say, doesn't believe you can keep them down on the farm, and neither does anyone else. So people will continue to pour into Shanghai — and other major cities — and a good portion of the middle class will escape to the suburbs as the cities grow ever more crowded. So no, Guo added, he doesn't lose sleep over the prospect of real estate booms and busts here. "And neither," he added, smiling broadly, "should you."
The Floating Factory
China's move to the suburbs is critical not just to the country's economic future, but also to its politics. As the retired city planner said, there is nothing more important to the central government than making sure economic growth continues, and that the benefits of that growth are spread widely. More than anything, this is what gives the communist leadership legitimacy. All across China, towns like New Songjiang are built on the backs of migrant workers — people who have moved from other provinces to earn better money as construction workers. An estimated 114 million workers in China now are migrants, and roughly 15% work on construction sites throughout the country, usually far from their home towns or villages. Unlike manufacturing work, where millions of unskilled workers have full-time jobs, the migrants building China's suburbs simply move on to the next site when one is finished, as if they worked in a floating factory. Making sure there is a next one, therefore, is critically important.
In New Songjiang, indeed, most of my neighbors are here-today-gone-tomorrow migrants, not middle-class Chinese. Henry Ford famously developed the assembly line to make cars so cheap that his workers could afford one. That's not what's happening here. The people building the houses of suburban Shanghai have no real chance of ever owning one.
Consider Qiu Haiyan, 22, from Henan, a province in central China with an average per capita income of $1,100 per year. She first found her way here working on a barge that carries bricks up the river that flows past our house. Qiu has the build of an Olympic weight lifter, with thick, powerful legs, and she and other work-gang members would offload the bricks on a wide wooden plank attached to a rope that they would sling across their shoulders. The subcontractor who built our development estimates he used about 70,000 bricks at Emerald Riverside. Qiu and her work gang delivered all of them.
For lugging bricks 12 hours every day, in Shanghai's suffocating summer heat and stinging winter's chill, Qiu earned 1,500 renminbi (about $200) per month before she managed to get a job — and a raise — at a construction site not far from Emerald Riverside. Now she makes about $220 per month and, she says, the work is not as backbreaking. "We work about 12 hours a day," she told me one recent evening, sitting outside a big worker's camp, "and get one day off a week." I asked if she, like so many migrants, has family back home, and whether she sends money back to them. She nodded. "I support my mother and father and my aunt; they were farmers but are too old to work now. I try to send them something every month or two." She had last seen them two years ago, she said. And when would she see them again? She shrugged. "I guess when I can't find another job here."
The camp she lives in is typical of those housing migrants in the more prosperous cities across China. In a two-story building made of concrete slabs and thin aluminum sheets that seem no sturdier than cardboard, there is no heat, no water, and the workers, around 400 in all, sometimes live four to a room. It is freezing in the winter, stifling in the summer. Most of the workers are men. They cook their evening meals on small electric water heaters and, during summer and fall, after work they sit outside and smoke or play cards and drink beer; it's a hard life, and the workers find diversions wherever they can. One day last winter when our house was under construction, I noticed some Chinese characters scrawled in the dust underneath a windowsill. I couldn't read them so I called over to my wife to see if she could. She laughed. It was an important message: it named a local karaoke club as the place to go "for good prostitutes."
Hu Jintao, China's President, has said repeatedly that the gap between rich and poor is one of the government's central concerns. In New Songjiang, the reasons for his insistence become obvious. Theoretically, migrant workers are supposed to receive some health-insurance benefits from the companies that hire them. But many, particularly day laborers who hook up with small contractors, do not. I spent one evening a few months ago in the emergency room of the huge, modern hospital in New Songjiang. In the space of about three hours, five construction workers were admitted, including one who had tumbled three stories from an apartment building under construction. He survived, but had broken his back. I asked two of his co-workers whether he thought the company they worked for would pay his medical bills. One of them replied, "Probably not,'' and said if need be they'd take up a collection for him among fellow workers and hope that his family from neighboring Anhui province might also chip in.
Meet the Neighbors
There are 148 houses and townhouses as well as three 11-story apartment buildings in Emerald Riverside, and Fan Wei, the president of Forte and Guo Guangchang's deputy, says they are all sold. Slowly, as the day draws nearer that the town will be linked to Shanghai, people are beginning to move in. Until recently, one of our neighbors was Zhang Shuyi, 35, who owns his own small advertising agency. He lived just behind us with his girlfriend and a big mutt of a dog who occasionally scared the daylights out of our daughter, Abby. (Zhang, in typical Shanghainese fashion, sold his house three months ago for a 20% profit and moved to another place not far from here.) Another couple are both engineers who work for Intel, helping design the chipmaker's new factory in Dalian. Another young father, Chen Jun, 36, is a successful clothing wholesaler. These are not rich Chinese, but people who consider themselves solidly middle class. Chen says proudly that he's "the first in my family to own a car as well as a real house." Their homes are about the same size as ours, and they probably paid roughly the same price as we did ($165,000). Most have young children (this being China, usually just one) and have also brought parents or parents-in-law with them, also common in China.
Their reasons for moving way out here are familiar. For some, it's proximity to work. The old Songjiang, the neighboring town, is heavily industrial, with a string of modern factories — many foreign-owned — that runs for miles. One friend, a guy I play basketball with at a gorgeous new public sports facility, is an engineer for SMIC, the large semiconductor company that has a plant not far away. This friend — I'll call him Yu Xiang — has a cousin he has visited who lives outside Los Angeles, and says that New Songjiang reminds him of the area. "Now I call my cousin and kid him: 'I'm living in the Valley too, but at about a tenth of the price!'"
For others, as for us, it was the cleaner environment, a little bit of green and a lot more space. "I love it out here," says Chen. "It's quiet, and the air is better." Two couples we've become friendly with say they want to have a second child — now permissible in Shanghai since the government loosened the one-child policy a bit in 2004. All this at a price much cheaper than it would be to buy a decent apartment in Shanghai (let alone a house in the San Fernando Valley).
These motivations seem so universal that sometimes it's easy to forget where you are. But that's a mistake. There is genuine if sometimes subtle tension even in booming, middle-class China, and some of it is evident every time I go out for a bike ride, past the security guards at the entrance of Emerald Riverside. The developments here aren't exactly gated communities, but all of them are guarded, and for a legitimate reason: the fault lines between the migrants and the middle class are very real. Petty crime — theft, primarily — is common; and rarely do the two groups interact. Qiu, the young woman who loaded bricks, told me I was the only "rich" person she had ever had a long conversation with since she started working here two years ago. The only thing that unites the two groups is China's continued growth. My middle-class neighbors, like Yu Xiang, take it as a given. "As long as there is economic development that will allow me to work and raise my family in a nice new area," he says, "that's what I hope for now. My whole family does. We hope to stay here a long time."
The migrants, of course, hope to move on. Before my wife and I bought a car here, we used to call a guy named Shi Guozheng, 27, from Anhui, who was a taxi driver of sorts. Shi had a battered old van, and made a living transporting migrant workers back and forth to their home towns. He was married, and often his wife, Lin, was in the car on our journeys into town. Over time my wife and she became friendly. One day last summer, they had tea together and Lin told Joyce she was pregnant, and that she and her husband were moving away from New Songjiang to a neighborhood in Shanghai with a lot of new construction, where her husband would continue to try to make a living shuttling workers around. Lin came over to our house one evening just before leaving; Joyce was giving her some of Abby's old baby clothes. We sat up on our deck, overlooking the river and the ever-shrinking patch of green on the other side. I asked her whether, and when, she and her husband might settle down — and what they might do, and where. She just laughed. "Oh, we'd like to live back home in Hefei [Anhui's capital] some day, but we don't know when. It's better here for us, at least for now." A little while later, Joyce handed Lin the bundle of clothes, and off she went.
I've thought of that family frequently. People outside China always want to know what will spur political change, what will turn an authoritarian dictatorship to democracy. Conventional wisdom says it happens when a society develops a solid middle class with rising expectations. That, anyway, is the story of Taiwan and South Korea. But in China, my neighbors, even though they are often, in private, bitterly critical of the government, seem content to leave it well enough alone. Having made the Short March, they have a vested interest in stability.
I think trouble — and change — comes the day Shi Guozheng doesn't have another place to move to, another job to go to. It's not the people living the Great Chinese Dream — with the new house and the car and the dog and maybe a second child on the way — that the government needs to worry about. It's the people who build that dream for others, and then move on, hoping to do it again somewhere else. They, too, are vested in the country's economic miracle. But should that miracle somehow turn sour, look out.
Labels: chinese society, posted by Sze Ying, short march
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