This is China! blog

Susan was fast approaching 30 years old when she and her husband of several years chose to have their child before they both grew much older. Already, Susan had had a successful career the previous five years in a major Singaporean commercial real estate company, her first job out of university. Unique at the time in the late 1990′s, Susan had gone to university in Europe, where she said she spent the loneliest four years of her life. Then, another two years studying for a Master’s degree in the UK before returning to China to work. Though originally from Hunan province, she chose to work in Shanghai, even though her husband’s work kept him in Hunan province.

“My parents think I’ve been distracted long enough by the birth,” Susan told me in the lounge of a five-star international hotel in Shanghai. “You know, the time it took to carry the baby, and then the six months I spent at home with the baby.

“They think I’m wasting time in real estate, too, and that I should go into the financial sector.” She shifted in her chair, uncomfortable still from the hundred pounds she had gained when carrying the baby, but couldn’t shed. “All my classmates are in the financial industry, making a lot more money than I am.” I asked her if her parents wanted her to make the change for the prestige of being in the financial industry or just for the money. “Both,” she said, and chuckled.

“My father is a government official. He and my mother have always worked, always been doing something they felt was important. They’re workaholics, really. I wasn’t a boy, and I was the only child, so they want me to continue on with their wishes.” She rolled her eyes in the same way young Western women do when they find an idea or statement odd. “I like my job though. Marketing. But it’s such hard work. So don’t be surprised if the next time we meet I’m in the financial industry.” She took a sip of green tea, looked thoughtful.

I asked her if she felt any stress from the prospect of having to support her parents when they retired. She answered, “My father is already 60 years old. He’ll be leaving government soon, but he has no intention of retiring. He’s talking about consulting with companies that want to invest in Hunan and helping them with the government. He’ll never retire; and they never want to rely on me.”

“That sounds very unique,” I said, considering what her parents professed ran counter to what most Chinese family in the Mainland expected from their children. Many parents expect to live with children after their children marry, especially those in the countryside. In the larger cities, however, the living spaces are simply too small to afford multiple generations to live together. The pressure is less to support the parents’ everyday living in the larger cities, though the new grandmother might live with the couple for a few months until the wife is back on her feet.

“The most stressful thing right now is thinking about how to support the baby’s education. It’s going to be so expensive to get the baby the best education at the best schools.” She seemed to shudder at the thought. Her comment put me in mind of another discussion about education she and I had had the year before. We had been having lunch at a Cantonese restaurant in downtown Shanghai.

“Chinese parents,” she had said then, “do not give their children much choice in what they should study. The most important thing is studying for the examinations. The parents put a lot of pressure on careers that will bring in money the child can use to support the rest of the family.” This is an important point in light of the increasing burden a single child will have to carry as the the new century develops.

Children born after the One Child policy came into effect in 1980 now have an inverted demographic pyramid bearing down on their shoulders. The Chinese call it the 1-2-4 problem: One child is supporting two parents and four grandparents. Actually, when the parents have their own child, the equation extends outward just a bit more to become a 1-3-4-8 issue, with the man of the house the sole support of his nuclear family and parents on both sides of the family). Actually, when a son or daughter marries, and assuming both partners work, then the married couple  just have a 2-3-4-8 challenge on their hands until relatives become ancestors. However you do the math it all sounds rather grim.

The strain will only become greater on young adults as in twenty years or so the elderly population explodes, with about 40% of the population over the age of 60. (We’ll call that the 40-60 problem). Very few children will have the luxury then of saying to their parents, “I want to be a poet,” Susan explained to me. They will have to early on become bread-winners to support a stable of relatives.

Including , one day perhaps, our Hunan-born, Western-educated, Shanghai resident, Susan herself.

The China Daily a couple weeks ago had an article,  “Young Couples Splitting from Tradition”, that highlighted the stresses and strains of marriage on the fruits of the one-child policy: the little emperors and emperesses of China. It seems they’re finding it difficult to get along:

Gao and Deng, who were both born to single-child families in the 1980s, filed for divorce at the Mentougou District Court in Beijing early this year, citing constant arguments over the housework, local media reported.”

In 2003 the Chinese government made divorce far easier than in the past by no longer requiring a mountain of paperwork be completed by complainants and a thirty-day waiting period during which everyone with whom the couple comes in contact tries to talk them out of the divorce. Now, it takes a mere 30-minutes, though adjudicators can throw the cases out if they seem just plain stupid.

The marriage of Wang Jing, 24, and Chen Sen, both from Beijing, only lasted 18 months as Wang complained her husband had become addicted to online games, missed meals and did not care for her when she was sick.”

A few years ago I had known a lovely local Suzhou couple in their late twenties whose relationship seemed to be made in Chinese-matrimonial heaven: they were classmates, the families were old friends, and they had a lot of friends and classmates in common. Leonard and Lei Lei, born and bred in Suzhou, are archetypal of the kind of pressure, expectations and distractions that can tear a young marriage apart in modernizing China. The couple seemed perfect, by Chinese middle class standards: both locals, both classmates, the parents of both children knew and liked each other, and all were of the same rising socio-economic status and rising. Both offspring in their late twenties, Lei Lei, the bride – a pretty, wide-eyed and intelligent young lady who but for her height would have gone on to be a professional model – and the groom, Leonard: a pudgy, good-natured bloke who frequented KTV parlors and partied at discos. Indeed, both bride and groom would appear at the hotest discos in town several times a month.

Each of the couple still lived with their families, though Leonard’s family had bought the couple a lovely two-bedroom apartment in a clean, middle-class apartment block in the south part of the city. Lei Lei had personally supervised the decoration of the apartment, which was a throw-back to the bright colors, polka-dot-and-daisy patterns so popular in Britain in the 1960s. They invited friends and classmates to a house warming party at which guests marveled at the miniature flat-screen TV in their dining area and the huge 42″ screen in the den that anyone could watch from the plush sofa wrapped in fuzzy red fabric. The plan was the small room would likely one day soon become the baby’s room. They would be moving into the freshly renovated flat after the wedding banquet, less than a month off.

After Leonard and Lei Lei returned from their honeymoon they invited all their friends to one of the more trendy discos in Suzhou. The couple had just returned from several weeks in Thailand, with several days spent in Bangkok. His wife had cut her long, gorgeous hair to something short and frizzy. It wasn’t very attractive, as Leonard noted loudly. His wife ignored him. Leonard waxed enthusiastically about all the exotic performances he had seen on the streets and in the nightclubs of Bangkok: the lady-boys, the strippers – male and female, the cheap prostitutes, the discos. Oh my!

It was as though Leonard had been to the Promised Land. Within weeks of returning to Suzhou with his wife he was in discos around the city three sometimes even five nights a week. Sometimes he would give me a call on a Sunday night and ask if I was game to go out with him for an evening of fun, dancing and drink. I wasn’t difficult finding an excuse like, “I have to work tomorrow; don’t you?,” for him to relent. Eventually, he figured out I was not the party animal he seemed to aspire to. Still, the times I did take him up on his offer to party at the latest Chinese disco I was surprised to see his wife was no longer accompanying him.

Instead, with friends and classmates in full view, he was saluting another woman, who, it became quite apparent, was his girlfriend. Though it had been several months since I had seen Leonard, I was shocked and disquieted by the rapidity and publicity with which he had repudiated his marriage to a woman I took to be quite intelligent, attractive and charming. I would not see Leonard for a long time after the revelation. Several months later I would learn from some of his childhood friends that he had gained a divorce.

Leonard had cracked. He simply wasn’t ready for the responsbilities of marriage, especially with the near-immediate expectation to pump out a baby within months of the Banquet. I had understood family members and his oldest friends had tried help him through the transition to being a householder and husband, but he would hear none of it.

A year later I received a phone call on my mobile phone whose number I would not recognize. It was Leonard, who had moved to Xiamen, in Fujian Province, just north of southernmost Guangdong. He was calling his friends in Suzhou to update them with his new mobile phone number. He was fine, he told me, working as a salesman for a mobile phone company: the same job he had had in Suzhou. “The clubs down here are great!,” he enthused, “and the women so beautiful!” He seemed not to have changed much from when I had seen him the year before.

I had gathered from the distance and relative remoteness of Xiamen from his friends, family and past in Suzhou that he needed to go somewhere where he would not be afraid of being knifed by a family member or close friend of his former wife. Whatever the ultimate reasons for the divorce and move, it was plain that Leonard’s life was merely a symptom of the stresses of a society in perpetual motion; with dire implications not only for its youth ,but for its elderly, who are increasingly looking to their married children to support them in retirement.

During a recent visit to a local Suzhou Starbucks I suffered a bit of cultural dislocation. Four local boys clad as any American lad in his energetic mid-teens would be dressed – baggy basketball shorts hanging off flat butts, down past the knees; tent-sized white T-shirts emblazoned with this or that brand name; boat-sized sneakers – were paired off at a couple laptop computers, buzzing with excitement. They had up on their screens websites displaying graphics – not pornography – and were in deep discussion about layout, color and general all round hip-ness. It was a scene like any other in an American suburb. I was deeply disturbed by the ordinariness of it all.

When one of their even younger friends came along – a bouncy, pretty girl looking to be about twelve years old, her hair bobbed short, her tennis skirt neat and pressed, her high tops as hip as any I had worn in my Keds days – the boys pretty much ignored her. Still, she pressed to see what the boys were all a-titter about as the four congregated around one of the laptops. They were tracking one of the boy’s QQ online-conversations, which they all seemed to find quite amusing. QQ is the most popular online instant messaging application in China, with hundreds of millions of users of its messaging service and website portal.

I thought then about the Green Dam initiative, which has the Chinese government attempting to mandate that software be placed on all computers sold in China after July 1st of this year that ostensibly blocks pornography and politically sensitive sites. Of course, such localized access to private and corporate computers implies a great deal of potential for misuse by a government that has made known its preferences for well-filtered information. Western corporations and Chinese citizens have been very vocal about their dislike of the directive.

And yet, in an evolving society in which parental supervision goes no further than ensuring a child studies up to twelve hours a day, there’s little awareness of or value placed on the sorts of parental control software that parents buy for the family computers in the West. Or even of a parents’ responsibility for policing their child’s habits in cyberspace. Besides which, most parents in China who can afford to buy computers for their children are themselves working upwards of twelve hours a day, six days a week so they afford the middle class way of life that’s opened up to them the last ten years. They have little time or energy left to themselves to police what their children surf on their computers.

Indeed, it seems China has just as much a challenge filtering out pornography and predators as the West does. The frequency of stories seems to be growing of unwary children and even young adults giving out personal details to sexual predators in QQ encounters, and of con men (and women) trapping the unwary in websites that convincingly dupe consumers. A Chinese friend is particularly annoyed with his sister, a single local woman in her twenties who seems to think nothing of passing on her phone number and address to head shots of men dressed in the same sort of white tuxedo men wear for wedding photos in China who profess they are actually single.

It’s these domestic cyber-roots of the perverse I think the government should be more concerned about than, for instance, censoring a loosely knit cult that performs a set of breathing exercises and shouts rude things at the powers that be. In the least, the government should be educating parents about all the new dangers lurking in their fast-modernizing society. Certainly, four thousand years of history never readied China for what awaits its net-savvy youth.

After all, if a society cannot protect its own children; then who will?

Ms Shen (not her real name) is a charming young Shanghainese in her late twenties who represents the new breed of Chinese professional: bright, inquisitive, professional in demeanor, willing to challenge what’s presented her, articulate. As I do most Shanghainese, I asked her where her parents were from, always excited when they say one or the other is originally from Suzhou. In her instance, as well, I told her she looked like a Suzhounese. Suzhou is only 75 km away, and there are a great many Shanghai people for whom at least one parent was originally from Shanghai. I was wrong in her case.

Her father’s side was Shanghainese a couple generations back, while her mother was from Zhenjiang, near Nanjing. Still, she seemed proud that part of her family was from Jiangsu province. I asked what she spoke in the household when she was growing up. She answered Shanghai-hua (Shanghai “speak”). Her mother had come to Shanghai to study, and had learned to speak the local dialect when it was all that was spoken in Shanghai, back in the day.

Shanghai-hua, though, is different enough from Mandarin to be, well, another language, really; as different from Mandarin as Portugeuse is from Italian. Suzhou-hua – of which I speak probably four words, which tickles the locals to no end – is a kissing cousin of Shanghai-hua, as is Kunshan-hua and Changshu-hua. Suzhou friends tell me they can understand Shanghai-hua but cannot speak it; though, with time and immersion, they’d likely be able to pick it up pretty quickly. Move a little further west of Changshu in southern Jiangsu province – to Wuxi, for example, just a forty minute drive from Suzhou – and the dialect switches to something Suzhounese cannot even understand.

Indeed, it seems this language divide has its roots in the Three Kingdoms period, when the Wu, Wei and Jin empires were at each other’s throats for dominance of China after the fall of the Han dynasty a couple thousand years ago. John Woo’s recent Red Cliff films are about the battles of the period. Shanghai-Suzhou dialect comes from the Wu Kingdom, interestingly, and has been passed down through the generations by word of mouth.

Now, it seems, Shanghai-hua is disappearing. “Very few young people nowadays speak Shanghai-hua,” Ms. Shen told me. “I speak it, but I know a lot of young Shanghainese who can understand it when it is spoken to them, but cannot speak it themselves. Instead, they speak Mandarin.”

“Like Cantonese in the States with American Born Chinese,” I said. “One ABC friend of mine told me he used to hate it when his relatives spoke Cantonese to him: he said it sounded like they were always pissed at each other. Still, I think now he can’t even understand it.” I asked her, “Why do you think it’s disappearing? is it that Shanghai has become more international, or because of the Chinese from other parts of China come to Shanghai to live and work?”

She said without hesitation, “The wai di ren [literally, outside people; the term Chinese use for Chinese that have moved into their 'hood; not always necessarily a positive connotation]. So many Chinese from other parts of the country have moved to Shanghai. The first language choice is Mandarin, then English. Only the older generations now speak Shanghai-hua, with themselves, and with their children and grandchildren. And in the countryside of Shanghai municipality they still speak Shanghai-hua. But in the city, it’s disappearing.”

Such is the cost of “mandarization”.

I was taking a stroll through Xin Tian Di, a renovated cobblestone neighborhood that is popular with tourists and with locals who want to see and be seen. Just as I was about to cross the narrow lane that separates the two portions of the plaza I saw a middle-aged Chinese man in shabby blue working clothes craning his neck to look into the plaza across the lane from me. A private security guard walked up to the workman and blocked the workman’s view. Then he gestured crossly at the workman, and said something gruffly. The workman became agitated and responded in kind. The security guard stepped menacingly toward the workman, who stepped back, offered one last word in defense of his self-respect, then walked away.

As the lane opened for pedestrian crossing I considered that the workman was clearly from the countryside – one of the “Floating Population” the local governments needed to build their roads and buildings and clean their streets and apartments – and that he may even have participated in the renovation of the very same neighborhood that made it a cash cow for its private owners and government nannies. And yet, there he was, denied access to a public venue by a kid who was more likely than not himself from the countryside. Though there were no signs outside the walking street that prohibited the entry of migrant workers – as there had been signs at park entrances in Shanghai during the colonial occupation of China that read, “No Dogs or Chinese Allowed” – it was clear Shanghai practiced a bifurcated social system against its own citizens. Ironic, as I told one Western friend, as likely 80% of all Chinese now in the Chinese cities are first- or second-generation country “bumpkins.” Indeed, it is an insult to city dwellers to either indicate or call them out right nong min – peasants.

Most of the protests that have sprung up in China in the new century reflect the stresses and strains of a country that is urbanizing at a rate not seen in nearly a century, when American immigrants just off the boat at Staten Island would be shoved into the nearest ethnic ghetto.

In China, though, the leadership is trying to move a population nearly twice the size of the today’s United States into cities. In the same way American neighborhoods in New York boroughs erupted into protest as eminent domain mowed down their row houses to make way for superhighways, Chinese in cities of all sizes are trying to adapt to the waves of migrant workers that are trying to make a better life for themselves, while at the same the migrants are trying to keep from being kicked off the few rungs of the wealth ladder they’ve been able to cling to. Throughout the country great stresses and strains daily show themselves, and sometimes erupt in violent and unexpected ways.

And yet China needs its migrant workers. In the same way America needed immigrants from Europe to build its cities and workers from China to construct its railroads; in much the same way as Germany required Turkish labor to rebuild its war-savaged towns; and the rich Arab countries need Indian and Filipino workers – China needs its Chinese migrants. Without the numbers and “hunger” of its countryside cousins, the cities can neither have the hands and backs it needs to build and expand its urban centers, nor will it have the bodies to reside in the acres and acres of flats that now lay empty, waiting for some strange alchemy that will turn them from fool’s gold into something practical, yet likely unobtainable by the millions who built them.

I figured out today why China will explode; if I don’t explode first. I’ve recently moved to a nice, freshly renovated apartment surrounded by well-manicured gardens and a (partially occluded) view of JinJi Lake. One of the issues involved in newly decorated apartments in China is that there is a shake-down period due to the newly completely construction work: apartments in China come as empty cement husks that need everything installed by independent contractors from electricals through plumbing through gas connections; after which comes the incessant grinding of concrete walls and the noxious gluing of tiles to make it all inhabitable.

I’ve had to have the gas connections looked at twice already. The first fellow, from contract management company that oversaw the renovation, wiped wet soap bubbles over the pipes coming from the gas junction box installed over the kitchen sink, and dabbed at the connections under the sink as well. Though he too smelled the heavy odor of gas whenever we turned on the kitchen’s hot water tap, he could not find from where the leak was coming.

I asked him, “don’t you have a meter to tell you where the gas is leaking?” He answered no.

Then he hit on an idea, “Close the kitchen windows, but keep one slightly ajar; the gas is coming from the vent placed just outside the kitchen window. The wind is forcing the exhaust into your window.”

The windows were already closed. “But I smell the gas even when the windows are closed. I said, tight-lipped. “See, you can smell the gas now when I turn on the hot water tap,” which I did.

Undaunted, he said, “Then open the window just a little more so you can get some air.” I felt as though I was going to ignite the gas-laden air with my rising temper at any moment.

After the contractor left the apartment I sent a text to the real estate agent indicating the fellow who had come over was useless. I felt the situation was serious enough – watering eyes, scratchy throat, a bit of dizziness – to warrant a more thorough evaluation of the situation. The agent arranged for someone from the gas company to come over.

The technician from the gas company was a plump, jovial man who insisted on keeping the windows open while I ran the hot water tap. He denied smelling any gas, the cloud of which had forced me away the sink. Wordlessly, he ran the telescoped neck of his gas meter along the pipes above the sink and under the sink.  At least, I considered, he was a bit more hi-tech than the contractor. Like a geiger counter, the meter irked loudly when he met a joint under the sink.

Surprisingly, he came to the same conclusion as the contractor: “the problem is from the vent outside the window; keep the window slightly open and slightly closed so you can get some air into the kitchen and reduce the amount of gas seeping into the kitchen.” And then he added, thoughtfully, “And keep the kitchen door open to mix the air.”

“But that doesn’t solve the problem,” I said through clenched teeth. “And I close the kitchen door to keep the gas smell out of the living area!

“Look,” I explained in staccato, “this stuff can be dangerous. I want to be able to wake up in the morning without having been gassed in my sleep; and I sure don’t want to explode while frying an egg. Now how do we fix this problem? Because there is a problem: I’ve never smelled gas like this in any place I’ve ever lived, including these years in China. Get some contractors to do something with the vent outside? repair the box?”

“Well, the box is actually a good brand – Japanese. We’ve even got that brand at the gas company.” So? I thought to myself. I guess I was supposed to bow down to their consumer savvy – or to Japanese brands without faults, I supposed. I looked steadily at him for some intelligent response. “But you may want to contact the manufacturer to make sure the seals are alright.”

Now we’re cooking with gas! I considered. We’re finally getting somewhere with this interrogation. I relaxed my posture a bit, uncrossed my rigid arms.

“But don’t tell the landlord I suggested this,” he said hurriedly. I’m not supposed to give advise.”

And therein lays the rub, it suddenly dawned on me as I ushered the technician out of my new home. We live in temporary times here in China, in which the impermanence of things is presumed, and quality a minor consideration as long as no one gets hurt. And as long as there are no headline-grabbing casualties, accountability is minor inconvenience.

Very seldom is a society’s development linear, smooth, gradual. China is no different. Indeed, it’s history of the dramatic and the incendiary is one of the reasons I came to China in the first place. And so we have societies – including China’s – developing through disruptive – even explosive, at times – events: a collusion and coincidence of arrogance, self-interest and lack of accountability of individuals, all dressed up as Culture.

But don’t tell anyone I ever said that. I’ll deny it all.

Devott, a services outsourcing consultancy based in Tianjin, recently published its research report on China’s Software & Information Service Outsourcing Industry.

The list of the top 10 outsourcing parks has no great revelations, other than it is the first report I am aware of that tries at the economic development zone level to determine the strongest players in the Chinese services outsourcing field.

Sometimes, the absence of a thing can be as strong a determinant as the presence of another. In this case, the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) was nowhere to be found on the list (yeah, yeah, so it’s where I make my home). Sure, there was the Suzhou New District (SND) which, to my surprise and with no intended slight to my friends in SND, was a bit of a surprise, especially since I think some parks in the Nanjing area are far ahead of SND in pulling out all stops to become services outsourcing platforms.

So I sent a gentle email to Devott asking why the exclusion of SIP. Their kind response was that SIP hadn’t returned the survey Devott had mailed out to SIP administrators. SO GET ON THE TRAIN AND CHECK OUT THE PLACE! was my unspoken response. You’re already in China, a stone’s throw away from most of these places. For crying out loud, when are businesses going to remember you have to eyeball everything in China – especially if any level of government is involved in the results. Put feet on the ground. Use a little elbow grease, as my mama used to say. Unfortunately, the profiles of each of the Top 10 in the list also read like government brochures.

Let’s hope the next consultancy to put out such a list gives its staff a bit of budget to work with when they put together a survey like this one.

It’ll pay off: at least, they won’t have a cranky blogger crabbing at them.

I stepped out onto the outdoor patio of the Suzhou cafe to find a group of five young girls uncomfortably squeezed onto two wooden benches, the table between them crowded with Chinese workbooks, cups of coffee and glasses of tea. They chirped and chittered at each other, disgorging passages of memorized text and frantically flipping through worn pages of exercises.

I asked them if they were studying for their college entrance examinations. They all called out, “Yes!” in unison, and tittered at the odd Westerner who took an interest in what they were doing. “When is the exam?” I asked.

“This afternoon!” they responded in perfect cadence. The question seemed to remind them they had better get back to work. They buried their heads back in the workbooks and mumbled Chinese mnemonics to themselves, now self-conscious.

Last week’s New York Times said of the examination system, called gaokao:

For the past year, Liu Qichao has focused on one thing, and only one thing: the gao kao, or the high test. Fourteen to 16 hours a day, he studied for the college entrance examination, which this year will determine the fate of more than 10 million Chinese students. He took one day off every three weeks.

Though the energy of the group of young ladies at the neighborhood cafe was frenetic, they hardly seemed nervous to me. Perhaps it was the phenomenon of a traumatic experience shared that put them at ease; or perhaps they had already gone through the worst of the battery of exams. Whatever the reason, I was glad I was not a young Chinese whose fate rested on a single set of exams, and whose desires were compressed by family expectations from the bottom, and by a government whose policies were stacked against the students from on top.

Chinese and Western media around this time of year focus a lot of discussion on the efficacy of the Chinese examination system. James Fallows recently published several letters from Chinese and non-Chinese alike on their experiences with and perceptions of the system.

One of the most telling points to surface about the examination system that Chinese had to say reminds a bit of what Churchill said of democracy: “Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Chinese believe that Western systems of university admittance – letters of recommendation, community involvement, extracurricular activities, essays, grades and test scores – are too easily rigged in China. And though certain cities have lower standards of entry for their own residents than for those from other cities – and especially from the countryside – Chinese see the exams as flawed yet objective-as-they’re-ever-going-to-be measures of intellectual ability and stamina, difficult to corrupt.

Nevertheless, I tend to side with one young Chinese lady in Fallow’s thread who just graduated university and is heading off to Harvard for graduate school. Her point is that it is not the examination system that is so much so much at fault as the locally-funded schools – which reminds me a great deal of the arguments State-side about how local schools are funded by the property taxes of the communities in which the schools are located: the ghetto gets zip while “the North suburbs” (or wherever one finds the affluent in America) gets a great deal more.

No matter the examination system in use, if the schools are funded well enough and teachers well-enough trained in China then Chinese would be passing the exams in the tens of millions each year, instead of just the millions. As it is, the Central Government is having enough difficulty generating jobs for the graduates of the new millennium, of whom there are twice as many now graduating per year as there were even eight years ago. Imagine if the government was then responsible for the creation and maintenance of high-end jobs for half its population, instead of just the small fraction it is now.

Certainly, the current elite (whether political and/or the nouveau riche) would find themselves under threat by a new, brighter group that would be far larger than them and emboldened to rock the boat 1989-style due to the lack of opportunities and because of a lack of forgiveness over how the elite had “rigged the system” to benefit itself.

Little do those young ladies I met at the cafe know.

Good luck to them, nonetheless.

I always enjoy attending book readings delivered by Paul French. Paul last year had published his excellent historical biography, “Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand.” This year his book on China, “Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao,” looks just a detailed and engaging as his Crow Book. Earlier this week French visited us here in the boondocks of Suzhou from Shanghai (at least, that’s what folks who can’t work up the gumption to take the 35-minute bullet train ride out here from Shanghai believe) to regale us with stories of how journalists of yore had little intention of being the dispassionate observers today’s newswriters cum entertainers claim to be. Back then, journalists all had an ideological bent that their editors back in their home Western countries either amplified (as in the case of many of the reporters for the Times of London), or simply ignored (as did the editorial gestapo of Henry Luce’s publishing empire, state-side).

French made the point that at the turn of the 20th century China was a far more important story than it is today. At that time, the lives of individuals and even of entire cities were at stake as the colonial powers tried to balance the chaos of the times that could bring a wealth of opportunity against the kind of chaos that literally meant the death of entire societies at the time. “In 1937 alone,” French said, “there were more than 40 books published about China.” As well, French elaborated, ALL the major newspapers of the world had teams of reporters and stringers throughout China: the New York Times alone had eight reporters in China, while The Guardian and the Times of London – the voice of the British Empire – had large China bureaus as well.

The media at the time had a front seat to the axis around which world history was being spun at the time: the Opium Wars; the Taiping Rebellion; the Boxer Rebellion; the Russo-Japanese War; the fall of the Qing Dynasty; and the Asian theater of War from 1937 through 1945; not to forget the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists that led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

By searching through on-site as well as online newspaper archives and talks with countless journalists who have been covering the China story off and on for the past thirty years, French uncovers such gems as the true impact of the Times of London’s coverage of the Opium wars and the Boxer Rebellion; and of the blind spot American foreign policy had because of the infatuation Henry Luce had with the Kuomintang and – as did so many others, including Carl Crow – with Madam Chiang Kai Shek. French asserts that if the American administration before, during and after World War II had understood the true depth of corruption and malfeasance of the KMT’s stewardship of China at that time, they would have approached the civil war that broke out after the surrender of the Japanese in a wholly different way.

Perhaps the Americans wouldn’t have supported the KMT at all. Perhaps Harry Truman and not Richard Nixon would have been the first to open the door to direct relations with Mao.

Now that’s history in the re-making.

Read more about French’s book on Carl Crow’s life here.

Check out Paul’s blog China Rhyming, chock full of interesting bits about China now and China then.

On a recent visit to Chongqing an American friend named Pat told me how he had become caught up in one of China’s frequent protests about unpaid wages.

He had nearly completed construction of a factory in Chongqing – in south central China – when the electricity to the facility and to the trailer that housed his command post went out. Pat and a manager named Jim stepped out of the trailer to find out why the electricity had suddenly gone dead. Jim was an engineer who had been visiting from their North American headquarters to give Pat a hand with the facility for a few months during the construction phase.

When they rounded the corner of the factory where the power transformer was they found it blocked by a group of about twenty men. The were ill-clad, dusty street clothes and well-worn faux-leather dress shoes dirty with months if not years of construction grime. They were agitated, though about what Pat was unsure. The men, it soon became clear, were not from the main contractor’s company; but, instead, were subcontractors the main contractors had not paid yet. It seemed that with only the finishing work to be completed, the main contractors were nowhere to be found. The subcontractors had not been paid for several weeks.

Now Pat is about 6’3 and built rather solidly, while Jim, shorter, is stocky and muscular. They braced themselves for what they expected to be a fight. To Pat’s mind, it was wrong that the subcontractors should be looking to him for their money, and it was wrong that they should have been interfering with his operation. If he had to fight his way to the generator to switch it back on and then fight to keep it on, then he would. He made a quick estimation: he could probably take about five, maybe six of the guys, while Jim could probably take another half dozen. Of course, that left another five or six they’d have to figure out how to handle as the time came.

Just as they were about to rumble, though, Pat’s Chinese driver came up from behind them. “Is there a problem here you need my help with, boss?” he asked Pat. Peng had been Pat’s driver for the two years Pat had been in Chongqing building the factory. He had been Pat’s second employee, after Pat’s assistant. Peng was a bald, overweight Chinese who smoked his cigarettes in long, uniterrupted chains and who cursed loudly at every opportunity – much like his boss. Peng seemed fearless in traffic, getting Pat wherever the American needed to on time despite Chongqing’a onerous traffic jams. Though Peng did not speak English, he and Pat were able to communicate in a pidgeon Chinese that Pat had developed in his four years in China building factories.

Pat answered Peng, “No, I think we can handle this, Peng,” though he was thankful for the extra hands should that extra half dozen they were unable to account for become a problem. He was sure Peng was an adequate fighter, and he never seemed to scare easily; but Pat did not want to escalate the situation any further than the current standoff.

Peng stepped from behind Pat and Jim to square off with the wall of men. He smiled menacingly at the group. He said something to them in a low voice, in the local dialect, which was as distant from Mandarin Chinese as Portugese from Italian. The group quieted down. The fellows in the front of the group shuffled their feet, uncertain. A low murmur rippled through the crowd. They dispersed, at first falling away like the rotten peels of a banana, in two’s and three’s. Eventually, the once-anonymous lump in the middle, now exposed, dissolved as well.

Pat looked at Peng, who shrugged. “What the hell did you say to them, Peng?” Pat asked. Peng smiled, lit another cigarette, and sauntered off back in the direction he’d come from. It was after Pat told his Chinese assistant the story that Pat learned his driver was a member of one of the more notorious mafias in the area, and that he was well connected.

Guess it pays to have friends in low places.