This is China! blog

A statement a Chinese plant manager of a Western factory made during a meeting with Western managers of the company became a light-hearted joke later in the evening over hot pot. During the afternoon meeting one of the Western managers had made a point about the central government’s internet censorship policy. The plant manager replied, without missing a beat, “You have been mislead by the foreign press”. The Western manager paused a moment, off-balanced by the remark. He had only been in China a couple days, and so was not used to the bluntness with which Chinese can address friends and coworkers. The Western GM, a long-time resident of China, laughed. The plant manager was serious; however, he quickly lightened up because of his travels outside the country and his work over the years with Western colleagues.

I have recently been struck by the number of such conversations with well-educated Chinese who may work in Western companies and who have traveled outside the country. Most of the Chinese professionals with whom I’ve talked are in their mid-thirties. They are stunningly conservative about the government and issues such as censorship (“Well, the government wants to protect the people from the bullying of foreign countries,” one manager told me).

The conversations remind of the first time I met an elderly Communist Party member, a professor at the Foreign Language University in Beijing. Tears came to her eyes as she recalled how the Communist Party in 1950 had realized she was a gifted student and whisked her from the dire conditions of the countryside of Tianjin to the hallowed halls of the Beijing university system for the highest level education. Years later, she would be sent to the countryside for something she had written during the 100 Flowers Blooming period, a perceived slight of Party leadership; and then again during the Cultural Revolution.

Today’s Chinese young professionals seem just as much attached to the country’s leadership as past generations – despite hardships – no matter how progressive they may seem at work.

Technorati Tags: china, chinese middle class, education, middle class, social trends

Last week I had two separate conversations: one with a group of Westerners in Shanghai; the other with a couple Chinese friends. In both conversations the discussions turned to the anxieties and plans of young Chinese professionals. One of the Westerners in the first group told me how several of the young Chinese professionals with whom he works despair of the modernity of Qingdao, where the Westerner lives. “Pollution, crowds, the higher cost of living,” were reasons the Westerner gave for their anxiety – and for their motivation to live abroad, in a Western country.

Two days later, during lunch with two Chinese friends in Suzhou – both high-level professionals managing an American operation – they echoed the exact same sentiments. The CFO was adamant he would not buy any more real estate in Suzhou: “It’s a bubble,” he said with conviction. We talked about the introduction one day of property taxes. “One day!” the CFO bellowed. “Sooner than you think!” My Chinese plant manager friend – the CFO’s colleague – agreed, but added he did not think when the property market resets itself the Suzhou market will suffer terribly.

Still, the plant manager went on to say, the Suzhou Industrial Park will have companies adding more to employee Provident Funds, up to 6% more; while employees will pay 3% less.  The Provident Fund is meant to help professionals in the economic development zone save to buy their own homes. “But the city is actually going to take more out of the individual’s Fund to pay for increasing social services.” They were both adamant that the demographic shift involving the rapid aging of the Chinese population had already begun, and that even now there were fewer employees to pay for an individual’s retirement services than before.

They, too, talked about how many of their own friends – all Chinese professionals, all in their mid-30′s – were looking for ways to emigrate to the West.

The CFO summed up his sentiments this way: “We work for our mortgages, now; and we all work for the government.”

Technorati Tags: china, demographics, middle class, social trends, urban development trends

Last month the China Economic Review cited that university grads in China were making about the same amount in salary as migrant workers. Today’s New York Times takes the story a bit further by citing that its the lucky grads that find a job at all nowadays. Disillusioned, exhausted and flat broke, new university graduates don’t even have the ubiquitous McDonald’s jobs to kick off their post-grad careers. (Me, I started out shuffling bagels). From the NYT article: “College essentially provided them with nothing,” said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system. “For many young graduates, it’s all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability.”

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China’s Jobless Recovery

image credit: verytranslation.com

My Chinese father-in-law pulled a young woman out of a Suzhou canal last week. He foiled her suicide attempt. He was fishing at the time, which is how he spends his days in the early retirement of State-owned Enterprise workers. My wife told me he was on local Suzhou TV news to give a blow-by-blow account of how he saw the girl arguing with a young man and then throwing herself into the canal. He was the guy who called out to neighbors and called the police on his mobile phone and threw things at her/on her so she wouldn’t drown. He lent her the tip of his fishing pole to haul her in. Turned out the young man was her boyfriend.

The reporter asked him why he saved the girl. He answered, “It was the civilized thing to do.” Actually, his is a rare response in China, in which accident victims and suicide attempts are mere spectacles to most  passersby. Typically, Chinese on the Mainland do not lend a helping hand: often, when they do, it is they who are tagged by the hospital and even by the family of the individual they had saved for the medical bill. Most people simply do not want to get mixed up in the complexities of other people’s lives: theirs, they figure, is convoluted enough.

China Daily wrote in 2007, “Recent statistics show more than 287,000 people end their own lives every year on the Chinese mainland.” People’s Daily wrote about the high suicide rate in China, “But thanks to a significant decline in rural women’s suicide rates during the last 20 years, China’s national suicide rate declined from 17.65/100,000 in 1987 to 6.6/100,000 in 2008, well below that year’s global rate of 14.5/100,000,” according to Jing Jun, professor from the Department of Sociology at Tsinghua University. The highest proportion of women’s suicides is still in the countryside; many women suffer abuse within their households, often from husbands and even from in-laws. The favored method of offing oneself is ingestion of pesticides. In the cities, suicides among women seem more often to be related to sour relationships with the men in their lives. One police officer I had called in Suzhou to adjudicate a disagreement with a taxi driver said, exasperated, “Is that all this is? I’ve got a girl who’s taken drugs and is threatening to jump off building.” The neighborhood he mentioned was within a twenty minute walk of where I was.

Still, I am impressed and surprised my father-in-law did what he did.

Now if he’d only stop drinking bai jiu (fire water) when we meet for family dinners, slapping me on the back and speaking so loudly in my ear.

Technorati Tags: china, demographics, social trends, suicide, women, women's suicide

(This is a guest blog by B.S.D Mistry)

No matter how long you work in China there are still days when you hear stories that never fail to surprise, or even make you fall out of chair in laughter. My good friend Ed works for a huge US based manufacturer of fast moving consumer goods. They have a plant in Suzhou which has grown rapidly in three years from 150 people to employing over 800 line workers, most of which are young women between the age of 18 and 30.

A year ago the company launched a research project to reduce the rate of absenteeism , which Ed headed up. The results of the research determined the two single biggest reasons by far for missing work were having an abortion and visiting the sexual health clinic. The company decided to tackle the issue by introducing a health clinic with a nurse on site to treat STD-related diseases and tackle prevention by giving out condoms.

Ed now has a new problem. His company is giving away 1600 condoms every day (averaging 2 per person), which has left him scratching his head and facing a large bill. As to how these free condoms are being used one can only guess. Perhaps his workers have an active nightlife, or more likely someone is buying up all these freebies and making a profit. As with many aspects of Chinese life the answers remain sheathed.

With more protests erupting in South China arising over wages, I still hold with what I said in an interview back in May for the July 2010 issue Eurobiz Magazine, in the cover article, entitled, “Labour Pains”.

Employers have been slow to understand the increased financial pressures burdening this young generation. “These people know they have dowries to pay if they are in their twenties. They have to buy a house on top of the dowry. They have parents and maybe even grandparents they are increasingly expected to look after, and the cost of living across the board is rising at an incredible rate in ways that the figures are just not reflecting properly. Employers – especially the Western employers – are kind of clueless about the burdens that the Chinese employees are working under,” says Bill Dodson, director of strategic analysis at TrendsAsia and author of the upcoming  China Inside Out: 10 Irreversible Trends Re-shaping China and Its Relationship with the World.

It’s a very insightful article. Check it out.

Further reading: Strike in China idles another Honda supplier amid wage protests

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Further reading: NYT