China is Cracking Up
June 1st, 2010
Eurobiz Magazine recently interviewed me for an upcoming article on salary pressures on China operations and CSR-related activities companies may be investing in to retain staff and brandish their image in the local community. The same day as the interview Foxconn saw its 10th suicide of an employee. Keili Stremel, Deputy Editor of Eurobiz, asked me what my take was on the suicides. I told her I believed Chinese employee expectations for their lives had altered radically in ten years: in 2000, migrant workers in the millions worked at back-breaking jobs 12- to 14-hours a day 10-days a week, with a day off. They made a pittance, worked for the most part in squalid conditions, and saved most of their meager salary to send to the family remaining in the hometown. Chinese ten years ago could tolerate this condition because life on the farm was far worse and made even less money.
Now, young people of the same age but different generation have seen what the good life has to offer. And, frankly, they are in no more a rush than anyone else in this high-strung society to take their slice of all modernity and a consumer lifestyle promise to offer. However, modernity in China has become a relatively expensive commodity, and obtaining so much of what they see on the streets and on TV frustratingly far off. In a society in which the highest values an individual can obtain involve desiring stuff, acquiring stuff and showing the stuff off – NOW! – the dehumanization of the assembly line is like an emotional lobotomy. Even if a Chinese employee has a white-collar job, so much of what he or she should be able to acquire materially while they’re still young seems so much further off than before; especially that dream home where bride and baby make three – and grandmas and grandpas make seven – a great financial weight to carry, indeed. A cognitive dissonance has arisen in which people have to want things in order for the society to work; however, they have to want the policy-acceptable things that do not present a threat to any authority figure, in business or in government.
Mind you, all of this is happening at head-snapping warp speed, 24/7, with no sense of rest or reflection.
In other words, Chinese society is cracking up – not from an infrastructure point of view – but from a humanistic one. Anyone know a good shrink?
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