This is China! blog » Chinese Middle Class

Property Value Woes

Bill :D — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:08:46 +0000

A friend and I today walked past an apartment complex that overlooks Golden Rooster Lake (JinJiHu) in Suzhou. The faces of the apartments are dirty and worn. He lives in one of the apartments, which now sell for more than US$1 million. He rents, though. He’s had numerous problems in the apartment, from leaking pipes through faulty sliding doors to a recalcitrant toilet through electricals that shut down when he and his apartment mate run the washer/dryer. I said to him as we strolled down the sidewalk, “So that’s what a million dollar apartment looks like?” We laughed. “When did they build those things,” I asked. “Five years ago? Six?” He answered, “Six”. I told him I remembered when construction had started, even went into the sales office to pick up a brochure. At the time the apartments were facing the lake were selling for about US$150,000. I told him, “Even if I had a million dollars I wouldn’t buy the place.”

Later on in the day he sent me the link to a website that’s translated the words to a popular Chinese song that’s just gone viral in China. It’s about the stratospheric heights to which property prices have aspired, and the dashed dreams of average Chinese to ever manage home ownership. It’s a witty and sad video, very creative. Highly recommended: Huang Zheng’s “Sell” Music Video

NOTE: If I was one of the characters in the video, my head would burst.

China Property Woes: An un-American Response

Shown the Money

Michael Jackson Heard Rolling In His Grave

Bubblicious

Image Credit: World Wide Real Estate: The China Bubble

Award for Best Title for a China Book: “Fat China”

Bill :D — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:40:34 +0000

With all the new China books coming out each month it’s always good to see something by Paul French, Chief Representative of Access Asia and prolific writer of some of my favorite books about the original China Hands. Now, he and his partner at Access Asia, Matthew Crabbe, have come out with a new one titled, Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation. Paul had told me about the project last year December, just before Christmas. I loved the title when he told it to me. He loved the title, too. The British publisher thought it was a gas, also. The American publisher hated it; something to do with political correctness. However, having lived here in China so long I’ve forgotten what that means. So I still love the title.

The tip sheet Paul emailed me about Fat China describes the book as: “An in-depth analysis of the growing problem of obesity in China and its relationship to the nation’s changing diet, lifestyle trends and healthcare system. “

It’s a huge and important issue in the modernization of the country. As difficult as it is to get one’s arms round the problem, it’s good someone took to it head on.

Warlords in Suzhou

When Journalism Made a Difference

Book Review: A China Hand’s Story: – Something to Crow About

The Charitable Generation

Bill :D — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:53:29 +0000

Last year I blogged about a Shanghainese friend named Grace who organized and hosted a charity event for her own birthday. Recently, while sipping tea at a traditional Suzhou tea house, we gabbed about the continuing trend for young Chinese professionals to give charitably where they can. Grace gave the example of couples who have received red envelopes of money from well-wishers for the birth of their child who, in return, would like to show their thanks in a special, sustainable way. For instance, she offered, “they may want to give a gift of Fair Trade Coffee, or give to the person’s favorite charity.”

“The older generation,” she explained, “just wants to save money when giving gifts.” Now, with money more plentiful, “younger people want to do something special for others.”

Of course, it’s tough to tell whether this is a major trend or if Grace is a particularly unique individual in China’s rush to wealth.

One Egg Can Go a Long Way

China, Where Are You Going in Such a Rush?

Bill :D — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:12:26 +0000

A couple Sundays ago, late morning, workers began shearing stone tiles at a curbside near my apartment building. They were laying sidewalk tile by tile, by hand. Their weapon of choice was a grinder they would use to painstakingly slice the stone to fit snugly with those they had already fitted. The noise the stone cutters make is akin to fingernails scratched on a chalk board, or a dentist’s drill boring into a tooth. I eventually went to bed after 12:30am, some fourteen hours after they had started. A neighbor told me the next day he had gone to bed at 1am, and the workers were still at it. The next morning the granite slicing was still going on, at 7am, though I cannot say with certainty whether it was the same workers.

And then the question occurred to me: “What’s the rush?” “It’s Sunday,” I thought, “why not take the day off?” And then, in the evening, I mused, “It’s night; why not sleep?” Not just with manic stone masonry, but with everything in “the country that never sleeps” that is in overdrive. Whether property development or manufacturing production work or servicing customers or going shopping, the sense of having achieved a supersonic speed of life is palpable. It’s no wonder that a Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Psychology report in 2010 presented that in a sampling of 50,000 urban workers 60 percent were “sub-healthy”. The Chinese Academy of Sciences report stated, “”While one in 10 Americans will encounter situations where they need help from mental health professionals, most Chinese turn to their families and friends when they need help,” according to the China Daily. Chinese culture, though, believes mental health issues are shameful, a loss of face to the disabled individual and to his family. So, basically, most people genuinely suffering from the stress of economic development at the speed of light are screwed.

China’s GDP growth figures are still not up to the double-digit rates they need to create enough jobs for the young people coming out of university, the potential foot soldiers of the country’s nascent services sector. Nor does much of the interior of the country have the infrastructure in place to bring its citizens up to the living standards many along China’s east coast enjoy.

Still, is this 24/7 craziness really necessary? It’s certainly not sustainable. Not over the long haul. One day, China will rest, I’m sure. But not because of a job well done. It will have been through karoshi – Japanese style overwork. With Chinese characteristics, of course.

China is Cracking Up

When Anger Explodes

Don’t Mess with Spring Festival

Coming in 2012

Bill :D — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 07:47:51 +0000

An American GM of a contract manufacturing company recently told me one of his staff was highly stressed. They argued about something relatively minor, an hour after which the staff member texted the GM and apologized. “I’m just worried about 2012,” she said.

“Huh?” I said.

“Yep,” he said. “2012.”

Apparently, Chinese blogs and forums are abuzz with apocalyptic conjecture about the devastation wrought on Chinese society come a new era ushered in by a blockbuster Hollywood film of the same name. The film did phenomenonally well in China, surpassed in box office receipts only by Avatar, another other-worldly movie based on the precept of the destruction humans have wrought their own world – with the cosmos rebalancing the equation.

Nevertheless, the collective stresses and strains of a society in fast forward, transforming every aspect of its way of life and its relationship with the rest of the world is clearly beginning to surface in the collective consciousness of the entire society. As one Chinese friend said to me with the recent earthquake in the Qinghai Autonomous Region in northwest China, “I feel nothing. China is having so many problems. I have become numb.”

Nevertheless, with natural disasters aplenty – always a part of Chinese history – and man-made ones as well, what seems to be cutting through the average Chinese’s numbness are the senseless suicides and the mass murders of children. Something, the Chinese bulletin boards all agree, is not right.

It’s too late, though, to get off this speeding bullet train.

China’s Jobless Recovery

Bill :D — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 07:16:43 +0000

Recently on the local Chinese TV news a reporter interviewed a young female university graduate who was at her wits end trying to find a job. She had graduated last year. The story was rather ironic, in that China’s economy is booming. Isn’t it? Of course, for most of those following the economic news it’s well known that most of the nearly US$4 trillion that went flew out of bank doors in China went to the State Owned Enterprises and local governments (through the aegis of “dummy” corporations they set up specifically for the purpose of fleecing the banks). Money that actually flowed into the economy went into heavy industry and big infrastructure projects like roads and damns and railways. Though China is always inclined to put a lot of people on projects, in this instance the economies are just not labor intensive enough to absorb the bright young things graduating from the universities. Last year some 7 million fresh graduates flooded the labor pool. At the time, nearly thirty percent of the graduates from the previous year still had not found jobs.

Now, with a flood of new graduates and graduates from last year and even the year before competing in a tight marketplace, salary levels for entry level staff will be depressed even more. The downside of all the competition, however, will be perfectly good candidates who don’t know how to play the employment game well enough and will be shouldered aside. Some will commit suicide at the futility of the sacrifices they and their families made to get them into and through university.

What a terrible waste.

Chinese Workers Extorting China Operations

Bill :D — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:12:36 +0000

An American friend recently told me that a Western GM he knows had two of his operators openly revolt. The GM’s plant is in China, and is not very large: it only has a couple operators to run its machines. The operators wanted a huge salary increase, or, they threatened, they would walk out. My American friend, who’s lived and worked in China more than ten years now, suggested to the GM he let the operators walk. “Or, to show them who’s in charge” my friend added, “sack one guy and give the other guy a pay raise.”

Chinese over the past ten years of their boom time have been quick to play the “resignation card.” The couple times it’s been played on me as a China operations manager I’ve simply responded, “When will you be leaving, then?” Of course, they typically over-estimate their value in the organization, and are heart-warmingly shocked when their manager has not only accepted their resignation, but is helping them out the door. Usually the kind of people that play that sort of extortion card are the ones that were not very helpful in the company to begin with.

It’s inevitable that more employees throughout China will attempt to stagger their employers with walk-outs, real and threatened. The Taiwanese and Hong Kong investors deserve it: they have a terrible reputation in China for low paying, low-lying bamboo ceilings that keep Chinese staff static in an employment crouch. The Japanese and the Koreans have slightly better reputations – but only just so. The Western companies are in better stead, because they predominantly pay their workers better than their Asian counterparts and provide better working conditions in general. However, Chinese workers in general are quick “when given a nose, to take the face” – as the Chinese saying goes. Western companies, then, need to do their due diligence on market rates for staffing levels. And hold tight to them.

China is Cracking Up

When Anger Explodes

Managing the Return to Normalcy

There’s No Place Like Home: Worker Shortages

China Property Woes: An un-American Response

Bill :D — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 01:01:38 +0000

The apartment complex middle manager stood on the balcony of my former apartment and gestured at the apartments just in front of us. “Those sell for more than 10 million RMB each,” he said, his round face excited at the prospect that the neighborhood was on Suzhou’s high-value property map. The property he was talking about faced a medium-sized lake around which scores of other high rises had gone up. He pointed at the new construction just a few hundred meters from where we stood, where high rises in various stages of completion saw a hum of ant-like activity. The site had awoken me the last year every morning at 6am as heavy machinery prepared the site for the work of the day. “Those have all sold out, and were even more expensive.” Some of them did not even have lake views.

But the overwhelming majority of residential construction of the high-end luxury sort in China, it’s no wonder Li Daokui, a professor at Tsinghua University and a member of the Chinese central bank’s monetary policy committee, indicated in a video interview with the Financial Times recently that the Chinese property market was even more dangerously perched than the American market before the housing bubble State-side collapsed. His point was basically that while Americans were fulfilling the American “dream” of buying a home, Chinese believe home ownership a necessity. The rapid and artificially stimulated inflation of housing property values in China has left the overwhelming majority of Chinese without the wherewithal to address that necessity. If housing remains so stratospherically out of reach of average, hard-working Chinese who are trying to play by rules clearly bent to the advantage of those in power, Li’s point that such a blatant inequity could ignite social discontent on a massive scale.

Meanwhile, with an inevitable correction (of questionable level, admittedly) in the market, new-money homeowners could find their investments turned to plaster-dust.

With such a dire prognostication, it’s no wonder his video interview is banned in China.

Shown the Money

Michael Jackson Heard Rolling In His Grave

Bubblicious

A Look Under the Hood at China’s Economic Engine

What’s a Civilization without the “Civil”?

Bill :D — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 08:50:47 +0000

They’ve ripped up the road in front of my apartment complex in Suzhou. One day, two months ago, white-washed barriers topped with basketball-sized lights went up on both sides of the street. The local powers that be needed to expand the road as an on-ramp onto expressway connecting Shanghai and Nanjing. The area has been filthy with no safety barriers or warning signs of the construction sight and dangers encountered in simply crossing the street to buy groceries. Construction starts from 6am, kicking up dust and tempers, and ends around midnight, seven days a week.

The lack of a civil society is the secret of China’s success. There were no civic council meetings about the implications of the expanded roadway; no consultations about the impact the construction would have on the environment (once a rich marsh land) and no certainly no townhall meeting in which citizens could air their opinions. The project was simply done. Without previous notice, without repercussion. The project just appeared one day. We all simply walked around the rubble that had once been a relatively out-of-the way apartment block.

China’s is a donut civilization: its civil society hollowed out millenia ago – if it ever had one. It is a civilization without the “civil”: an “-ization”, a process of ebbs and flows as cyclical leaderships dictate. The citizenry merely fall in line, protecting their own, promoting their own, ignoring the rest as long as the rest at any given time does not interfere with the accumulation of wealth and extension of progeny. The lack of civil society in China is evident in unkempt public places, fights on the streets, suicides in companies, viral violence.

It’s the lack of a civil society and the channels for airing local disputes, concerns and issues that is China’s greatest strength: Chinese have for millenia been able to mobilize the masses to build some of the greatest structures in human history and to bring nearly twenty-percent of humanity out of desperate poverty into modernity in thirty years. And it is China’s greatest weakness: when everyone is headed in the wrong direction at the same time the entire society goes into decline, like lemmings, following each other off cliffs. Chinese “-ization” has given the society three generations of young people willing to perform mind-numbing work in de-humanizing conditions for long hours, days on end.

It looks as though the next generation has a lower threshold for the lack of civility that has levitated China’s rush into a wealthier future. Foreign investors need to adjust their expectations for doing business in China accordingly. As Foxconn and Honda are already learning.

China is Cracking Up

Bill :D — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:17:37 +0000

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?

China Shudders

The Learning Organization

When Anger Explodes

Don’t Mess with Spring Festival

This is China! blog » Chinese Middle Class

Property Value Woes

Award for Best Title for a China Book: “Fat China”

The Charitable Generation

China, Where Are You Going in Such a Rush?

Coming in 2012

China’s Jobless Recovery

Chinese Workers Extorting China Operations

China Property Woes: An un-American Response

What’s a Civilization without the “Civil”?

China is Cracking Up

Talking About Living and Doing Business in China

The Learning Organization