This is China! blog

“But I don’t want to buy a live chicken,” I whined to my wife. “And I certainly don’t want their old chicken.” I cooed at my son, who I gently rocked in my arms as I paced the living room.

“But I already told them I’d buy the chicken,” my wife pleaded. She was embarrassed she had committed to a transaction that was clearly nonsensical, and that I hadn’t even been apprised of. She had been at her parents home, where her eldest sister’s inlaws were staying to help her sister with the baby. Chinese way. They had brought with them nearly a dozen chickens to the city to make sure mother and child ate well. Now, two months later, there was only one chicken left. The Good Luck Chicken. And it had to be sold, and then eaten by the buyer so their grandson would grow up healthy. The plan then was for them to come to my home with a live chicken; we buy it; they slaughter it; and then everyone have a chicken-in-soy-sauce party. Oooh, good fun.

“Why don’t they just sell it to one of the neighborhood restaraunts? There’s plenty of them around.”

“They wouldn’t buy the chicken,” my wife replied. It seemed she had already been through the same round of questioning with the family. “The restaurant owners didn’t trust the chicken was still healthy. It’s skinny now, and old.”

“You mean, with that huge family you’ve got – all those aunties and uncles and cousins – no one wants to buy the chicken?”

I asked my eight month old boy, “You don’t want to eat an old, skinny chicken, do you, Asher?” I’m sure he said emphatically, “No.”

“See, even Ash doesn’t want to buy and then eat their chicken. Can’t they find someone else to buy it?”

“My father tried for several hours to sell the chicken, curbside, but no one trusted the chicken was healthy.”

“So your relatives don’t want to buy the chicken; the restaurants don’t want to buy it; and strangers on the street don’t want to buy it. Why again am I being asked to buy it?”

“Because it’s good luck for their son; and they can use the cash to buy something for the boy.”

“I’d rather buy something for my boy,” I grumbled.

Eventually, I relented. “I’ll tell you what,” I offered as an olive branch to my now-sullen wife. “I’ll buy the chicken; but they don’t come over. They’ll be loud, the baby won’t be able to sleep and will become cranky; you’ll also become cranky because you’ll remember how boisterous they can be. And I don’t eat the chicken. Deal?”

She brightened. “Ok!” she said.

The chicken was, indeed, tough.

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

Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, recently published a frank and enlightened opinion piece in the New York Times. He writes on the upcoming visit President Hu Jintao of China will be making to meet with President Obama this month. He makes the point that both countries have an opportunity to shape history on the same order as the summit meeting between Deng Xiao Ping and Jimmy Carter thirty years before, marking the opening up of the Chinese economy.

He also makes an incisive observation about American society and its economy:

The United States’ need for comprehensive domestic renewal, for instance, is in many respects the price of having shouldered the burdens of waging the 40-year cold war, and it is in part the price of having neglected for the last 20 years mounting evidence of its own domestic obsolescence. Our weakening infrastructure is merely a symptom of the country’s slide backward into the 20th century.

Finally, he implores the two leaders to do something at a high level that would be contrary to decades of diplomacy between the two countries: cooperate.

For the visit to be more than symbolic, Presidents Obama and Hu should make a serious effort to codify in a joint declaration the historic potential of productive American-Chinese cooperation. They should outline the principles that should guide it. They should declare their commitment to the concept that the American-Chinese partnership should have a wider mission than national self-interest. That partnership should be guided by the moral imperatives of the 21st century’s unprecedented global interdependence.

Come on, guys, listen for once.

A good American friend of mine who has been living in Shanghai for eight years has been hiding out to finish writing his book in a small town of 40,000 in Zhejiang province called Wukang, near Moganshan. He recently told me over cups of coffee  in Shanghai that the local government in Wukang has finished its mission: its infrastructure projects are all but complete and they’ve moved most if not all the people from the surrounding countryside into flats in the city. Now, the city is populated with unemployed and unemployable country folk. Which brings me to a very nicely done white paper sent me by the Economist Intelligence Unit about the urbanization trend in China (about which I write in chapter 3 of my book, China Inside Out) and the market opportunities in what the report calls China’s Champs – the up-and-coming x-tier cities.

Some of the surprises (for me) in the report included:

• Hefei ranked first as an up-and-coming potential money-maker for companies invested in the city;
• Baotou (in Inner Mongolia) and Shenyang ranked second and third, respectively
• Wuhu (no,. 7) ranked above lovely Xiamen (14th);
• Anshan, in Liaoning Province, (no. 18) made it on the list at all (the city’s only redeeming feature is the great jade Buddha – recommended).

What struck me most about the list was that many of the cities are highly polluted (Hefei is terrible from automobile exhaust; Baotou is coal mining town; Shenyang is unpleasant, especially during the dust storms; and Changchun is simply toxic).

Now, that’s not to say the cities on the list do not have market potential; however, the report seemed more bullish to me than the average Economist output. The report estimates that urbanization and related wealth creation in the Champs cities will continue into 2035. The biggest obstacle the report suggested was perpetuation of the hukou, which essentially segregates country folk and city folk.

The report creatively identifies market opportunities in up-and-coming cities across eight categories: economy, consumer markets, IT connectivity, education, average wages, health care and industrial pollution. Suzhou ranked first for its output per head (yeah!), maturity of the economy and openness to trade, above Hangzhou, which ranked 10th for the same measure (in the never-ending battle between the two cities for who indeed has the most beautiful women – among other things).

In general, the white paper is a good read, and a good indicator of China’s boom towns over the next five to ten years. At least, it should get some armchair industrialists back out into the field. I am not as confident as the EIU, however, in the viability of the local economies over the next thirty years, based on my visits to many of these smoke-stack cities, and based on the fact that many of these cities are up-and-coming precisely because of local government economic gerrymandering, much like Wukang.Then again, Chinese cities across the board are increasingly finding their environmental sins catching up to them economically.

The report does not give weight to very real concerns that have the possibility over the next thirty years of putting the breaks on the micro-economies of these towns as well as China overall: the effects on GDP of pollution; of the loss of local ecologies and the cost of maintenance from the standpoint of livability – or of clean up; the costs to the local healthcare systems of pollution (with air pollution already killing an estimated 700,000 people per year throughout the country, and counting); the extent to which water is heavily subsidized and how rapidly dropping water tables in many of the regions in which the cities are located will have their water bills increased and perhaps water rationed from the near term on; and of the energy requirements of these cities (at least doubled over the next ten years; and only God knows the multiplier over the next twenty five years), and the extent to which the environment is able to continue supporting the opening of (by some accounts) as many as three new coal-fired power generation plants each week in China – with, of course, attendant pollution costs. Though, of course, there are business opportunities in the clean up itself, it would be naive to think local governments will slow down economic activity to give ready access to industrial “spoilers”, or that the revenue created through the clean-up would offset the costs already incurred to local health care and pension systems.

Finally, there’s what I call the Wukang effect, in which expensive, polluted cities are predominantly inhabited by an under-educated, under-employed majority that’s been moved into the cities from the countryside that makes substantially less money than the elite who live in high rises above the smog of the cities. Also, university graduates, despite the booming economy, are finding the job market practically nonexistent, with many bright young things making the same amount of money as migrant workers. In other words, come twenty-five years from now, there may not be the wealth at the level the report discusses; if, that is, consumers live long enough to spend all that supposed disposable income.

To get a copy of the EIU report, contact:  Martha.McCubbin@grayling.com. Also, you’ll find a very nice infographic of China’s Champs here.

Further reading:

China’s Golden Cities – Newsweek

World Bank City Rankings: An Explanation — china.org.cn

China Is Set to Lose 2% of GDP Cleaning Up Pollution

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.”

Related posts:

China’s Jobless Recovery

image credit: verytranslation.com

The Romanian online news site Hotnews.ro recently interviewed me about social, economic and political issues relevant to China’s current condition and future direction. Bet you think my Romanian is pretty good, huh? Actually, the interview was emailed me in English, the same language I used to answer the questions. The reporter, Adrian Novac, asked some pretty pointed questions, the answers to which you can find – translated into Romanian – in the article entitled Ascensiunea Chinei.

Or, you can read the English answers below:

1. What exactly is China today: an aggressive Communist power bent on intimidation and domination, an emerging giant, a superpower? Is China an opportunity or a threat? You frame the question in a very Manichean way: good v evil; heaven v hell; master v slave; conqueror v conquered. China is a heavily populated country that has finally gotten its act together after 600 years of insularity and decay to take advantage of the technologies that abound in the world today and of the West’s profligate spending and extreme financial over-leveraging. It’s a challenge if you haven’t figured out where the opportunities lay.

2. Has China’s rise been good or bad for US and the world? No better no worse than the rise of the Spanish, the French, the English, the Americans, the Soviets. And before that the Moors, the Ottomans, the Romans, the Greeks.

3. How do the Chinese themselves see this impressive growing especially considering that various indicators suggest elites are cashing in quickly, while ordinary Chinese are falling behind and the country is also the scene of rampant corruption? What you are saying about China is also true today about America and Russia and the UK, most African countries, certainly the OPEC countries and, perhaps, even Romania (according to a British friend who did business there for the past two years. He finds his return to China to work refreshing after dealing with the government and workers in Romania).

4. Some are cheering the extraordinary boom of Chinese economy. For example, according to the Conference Board, a highly respected economic research association, China will overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy by 2012.  Others have argued continuously that the Chinese economy is in a delicate state. Is China going to have the kind of economic growth in the future that it has had over the past 30 years? In about 15 years the economy’s development will begin to slow as most of the cities have been built, as well as the highways and railways and airports; the population en masse will be aging with about 30% of the population over the age of 60 (by 2050, 60% will be over the age of 60). The social security system will begin to falter because the one child policy did not permit the creation of enough young people to pay into the retirement funds. China’s already desperate water problem will become extraordinarily difficult, with the occasional rationing we see today becoming a part of normal life. And China will never seem to have enough energy, as most of its population in 2025 will be in the middle class living in cities with cars and TVs and Iphone-25s.

5. Is China using capitalism to advance the cause of communism? How come the world’s biggest communist country ever created the most freewheeling market in world history? Communism in China died with Mao Zedong in 1976. The country was backward and bankrupt, without foreign currency to continue running the society. It could either follow North Korea, or it could follow its cousin, Taiwan. Now, it’s form of government – whatever the name – is much closer to that of its Asian neighbors than ever before, with countries that have had one-party rule for decades, with an occassional pause.

6. Many commentators argue that China’s growing economic might has yet to translate into the self-confidence needed to spur much-needed political reforms. China’s next generation of leaders are to take power in 2012. Should we expect after this date to see the democratic changes the world is waiting to happen in Beijing?  China’s leadership has made changes in its governance approach to the society far more dramatic than either Western Europe or even America. China thirty years ago was totalitarian; now, it is merely authoritarian. In some ways, local government officials are far more accountable to the people than in Russia or even Japan. China must and will evolve into a government structure that balances power somehow; the most effective is a judiciary that is not a slave to the Party. Whether or not Chinese people want or feel they even need the vote will be up to them.

7. Some say there are heavy social costs to such pushes: China is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, it has a vast waste and the physical environment is a disaster. Can’t they find the adequate solutions to stop the negative impact on the environment?  The government is applying itself to environmental issues; however, as has been and still is the case in the West, economic development always trumps environmentalism. China at least has a national policy and subsidies to support a grand push to the development and implementation of alternative energy sources; neither the European Union nor America does.

8. Everything made in China is cheaper than made in the USA and the rest of the world. Why? A surplus of young people born after the Cultural Revolution supplied labor to the factories at a time when the West wanted a lot of stuff made cheaply. Its government also held down wages to keep the export sector super-charged. That is changing dramatically this year, with companies increasing salaries as much as 50%. The last thirty years of China’s success and development have happened because of some very special trends that came into confluence. China will have to work harder the next thirty years to continue the same level of economic growth and sense of sacrifice on the part of its citizens.

9. Some say China’s success is “Made In The U.S.A” and that the American consumer has, in large part, financed the strengthening of the Chinese state through their purchases of cheap products made in China, which, in turn, has helped to destroy US’s manufacturing sector and the jobs. Are these commentators right? The US dollar is both a foreign currency exchange and a foreign reserve. That made interest rates the American government and its citizens took out on loans cheaper than it should have been if, for instance, gold had remained the reserve. Americans, still clinging to post-World War II sensibilities about its economic preeminence dismantled the regulations and oversight that would moderate how it financed asset purchases. Americans, in other words, began spending money they did not really have on quantities of goods the world had never seen before. China was at the right place at the right time to take advantage of American and European excesses. China, however, did not destroy manufacturing sectors in America the Americans had already decided were not worth supporting. The American economy in the 1970s was already shifting toward a services economy, and is now 70% based in services – not manufacturing. China entrance onto the trade stage merely facilitated a shift that was already happening – first to Mexico and Japan. Now, China is seeing a similar flight of manufacturing to India, Vietnam and Bangladesh. China is gradually becoming uncompetitive in some manufacturing industries through the same processes.

10. How do you think the United States has responded to the Chinese growing? What have the Americans done right and what have they done wrong? America effectively misspent the funds that became available through China’s suppressing the interest rates on American T-bills through its extensive purchase program of the American bonds. Americans over-leveraged their homes, bought a lot of stuff they didn’t really need because it was cheap, and created a debt load future generations will still be responsible for decades to come. Blaming China for American economic woes merely obscures the fact that the international economy is undergoing a dramatic rebalancing and that America needs to restructure its own economy to meet upcoming challenges.

11. Many see Beijing as a potential threat to Washington’s once unrivaled dominance of the Pacific. But is China influence limited only to the Pacific? Because it seems to me that the reach of the People’s Republic is far and wide, extending from the Far East to Africa to Latin America. The question mixes trade and national security. China’s trade reach certainly extends to Africa and Latin America; its national security sphere does not. It defense posture has developed to the extent that America is no longer the big fish in the Pacific Ocean. And with the development of a naval base on the coast of Burma, Chinese vessels will be able to ply the same seas as the Indians. This has made the Indians and the Americans insecure.

12. Besides its economic grow, China has also adopted a more assertive military stance, expanding its naval reach with new ships and submarines in what Beijing says is a purely defensive move. Can this growing military buildup hide aggressive intentions? China is not shy about displaying aggressive intent in its own neighborhood: the recent spat with Japan over the Senkaku islands is one example, as well as the continued build-up of forces along the border of the disputed territory of Arunachal Pradesh, which the Indians hold dear. China is no longer holding to the philosophy/slogan it promoted the past ten years of a “peaceful rise”. Further abroad, China has no interest in conquering foreign lands; only of preserving its national sovereignty and preserving its energy independence.

13. Many say U.S.-China relationship shifts toward deep mistrust in the last year. Chinese leaders became infuriated when president Barack Obama met with the Dalai Lama and when Washington announced plans to sell sophisticated weapons to Taiwan.U.S. officials tried in vain to get China’s leaders in May to condemn its ally North Korea for the sinking of a South Korean warship and then became alarmed at Beijing’s bellicose response to a September incident involving a Chinese fishing boat and a Japanese patrol ship. How do you see US-China relations now? The Chinese leadership sees the American leadership as uncertain, splintered and at cross-interests with itself: on the one hand encouraging tariffs while United States governors host trade missions to China for their local companies; discussing closer military ties while selling billions of dollars of armaments to neighbors Taiwan, Japan and South Korea; of preaching fiscal responsibility to China while America continues to spiral into greater debt without additional job creation. China is very much like the teenager who is feeling more certain about himself while laughing at the middle-aged “adults” whose power is waning.

14. The new generation of Chinese military, much more than the country’s military elders, view the United States as the enemy. Chinese military’s hostility toward the U.S. is not new, just more open. But is China capable of flexing its military muscle towards the US? Do they have the military capabilities to confront US? China does not have the capability to confront the US in a sustained, full-frontal confrontation. No one does [without the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction – MAD]. The only way for China to win is as it always has through history: through the sheer weight of numbers of its people; guerrilla tactics and attrition – that is, simply wearing the opponent down. China’s approach to the world in trade and defense is one of asymmetry; they always see themselves as having the disadvantage – and so do not meet engagements square-on, where they always believe they cannot win in a fair fight.

15.  President Hu Jintao will visit Washington in January. Could this trip help reset the relationship with China? Because China seems disappointed by the Obama administration and Beijing thinks he has no essential difference from other previous US presidents. The trip will have no substantive results. Hu Jintao has already set his stamp on his Presidency; he is now setting the stage for the handover of power in 2012, which pretty much means more of the same discussions on the currency come Jaunary. China – and much of the world – see President Obama as a lame duck, likely to change come 2013, after the November elections of 2012.

16. The foreign ministers of China, India and Russia pledged recently to step up cooperation in trade, energy and geopolitical affairs including climate change, international and regional issues. Should US and UE be afraid of the cooperation of these developing giants? No. Cooperation is good; and the more there is between these three strong personalities, the better. The US and EU embrace this sort of exchange.

17. China’s rapid rise is taking place at the exact same time that the U.S. is losing its global economic dominance. It is possible to substitute soon “The American Dream” with “The Chinese Dream? Should we all start learning Chinese? If you are going to do business in China, it’s nice to learn a bit of the language; however, Romanians have nothing to fear that their language will be replaced with Chinese. Frankly, it is the Chinese who have in place national policies to increase the number of its citizens who speak English language, and with greater fluency. China has no intent to rule the world; however, it is intent on maintaining its regional hegemony and energy security. The world is simply a source of raw materials and cash for China. It prefers to eat at home.

image credit: the-romanian-women.blogspot.com

A couple weeks ago in Shanghai over a lunch of Sichuan spicy chicken and Yangzhou-style fried rice (with obligatory stir-fried spinach with diced garlic) Rob Schmitz and I discussed his trip at the beginning of the month to Inner Mongolia. Rob is China Bureau Chief for the Marketplace Business Report, which airs daily on National Public Radio (NPR), in the U.S.

“Everyone thinks Ordos is empty because of speculation,” Rob told me. Ordos is a prefecture bordering the better-known Hohhot. “Actually, it’s because of all the money that’s suddenly entered the local economy from the huge deposits of coal they recently discovered in the surrounding lands that they had money to build the city. It’s not speculation, like the rest of China – it’s because they actually have the cash.” Rob told me pretty much the only residents of the fully functional city are local administrators.

Knock on effects of the new coal business, Rob told me, have included the forced removal of nomads from their now-valuable land, a fair amount of which had already become unusable because of over-grazing by the sheep that have been providing the cheap merino wool sweaters consumers love.

Rob produced several other radio reports on the boom in the economy of Inner Mongolia, because of coal mining. Just a couple days ago, he offered a report on China’s real estate bubble.

Check out the podcasts here:

Urban Desert: Empty homes in Ordos

Boomtime on China’s grasslands

Is there a housing bubble in China?

Related posts:

Space is Curved in China

Property Value Woes

China Property Woes: An un-American Response

Few writers/journalists/business analysts based in China can deliver an entertaining and insightful lunch talk on the French intellectual classic about pre-WWII Shanghai, Man’s Fate, by Andre Malraux, and then give an incisive interview on the impact obesity is having on Chinese society and economy. However, the ubiquitous Paul French can.

This past Friday at Shanghai’s M on the Bund, in its Glamour Bar, Paul delivered a humorous literary criticism of Malraux’s novel of Shanghai in 1927, a time of political intrigue, underworld skulduggery, and, well, existentialism. Really, it was funny – you had to be there. He did crack on the French (the country and its people; not his own family) quite a bit, and thankfully left us Americans alone for the hour he talked. Still, I did learn more about Malraux the man (apparently, he was a big fat liar about a lot of things – though with flair, admittedly), and wrote graphically and rather accurately about the Shanghai of the time, though he had never visited the city before writing the novel in 1933. I intend to read the book again with the insights I gained from the luncheon.

Afterward, Paul was good enough to give me a bit of his time so I could record an interview about his new book with Mattew Crabbe – his partner at Access Asia – Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation. In particular, I found what Paul called “the privatization of space” and its relationship to the evolution of an unfit society insightful.

Listen to the podcast here to learn more about what inspired Paul and Matthew to write the book in the first place; what Paul found to be the most interesting and exciting finding in the book; and how fat and China just may look come the year 2025.

image credit: moonbattery.com

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

Yesterday a couple colleagues and I made our way up to Nantong, at the mouth of the Yangtze River. Nantong is about an hour and a half drive from Shanghai. We had gone to visit a ship building company that has moved into the manufacture of cement foundations for offshore wind turbines. The central government is looking at having nearly seventy percent of all China’s offshore wind farms off the coast of Jiangsu Province.

Whether from Suzhou or from Shanghai the road northward to Nantong is wide and well-paved. It’s when one hits the township of Qidong, which is part of the Nantong municipality, that things get interesting. Motorcycles and electric bikes abound in Qidong, the economy of which is overwhelmingly based on agriculture and aquaculture. Either side of the road into and out of the one-horse town is patched with crops of grain or shallow ponds in which any variety manner of fish or crab or shrimp is cultivated.

The tallest building in Qidong seems perhaps eight stories high, a great, pink-stone, Romanesque structure that was quite out of place amidst the garage stall storefronts and five-story residential apartments. Cars congested the narrow downtown road, over the main thoroughfare of which was suspended a series of great blue-frame ribbons studded with lights. I imagined at night the street was quite a spectacle in which the town’s fathers took a great deal of  pride.

The single greatest claim to fame I recognized about Qidong, though – the very thing that puts the small town on my mind-map – is that upwards of one out of every four motorcycle or electric cycle ride wore a proper helmet, many of which were visored. Some were the sort one associates with Hell’s Angels – simple upside down bowls with a thin strap gripping the chin; others encased the entire cranium like a goldfish bowl turned upside down,visors down. One woman wore a designer pink helmet with black stretch-fabric that fit down into her designer brown plaid coat.

I wondered what tipping point had prompted so many local town’s folk to such precaution as wearing safety helmets: a vice mayor crippled on his electric scooter? a super-sale on motorcycle helmets? the coolest guy or the sexiest girl seen wearing one, snug and smug that he or she was safe against the insanities of the local traffic.

Whatever the reason, it was a refreshing sight to behold,since most cyclists in China wear no head protection whatsoever – even the families of four (mother, father and two children) on electric motor bikes.

I wonder if the phenomenon will ever tip into the rest of the country.

image credit: blog.scad.edu

The New York Times today published an insightful (and depressing) article on the state of mental health treatment in China:

The Lancet study estimated that roughly 173 million Chinese suffer from a mental disorder. Despite government efforts to expand insurance coverage, a senior Health Ministry official said last June that in recent years, only 45,000 people had been covered for free outpatient treatment and only 7,000 for free inpatient care because they were either dangerous to society or too impoverished to pay.

Doctors have found a direct correlation between the rapidity and extent of change in Chinese society with stress-related afflictions:

Although research is scanty, a recent Health Ministry survey suggests that the need for more specialists is growing fast. The study found that the incidence of mental disorders had climbed more than 50 percent from 2003 to 2008. Although some of the increase was because of greater awareness and reporting, Dr. Ma argues that the incidence of stress-related disorders like depression and anxiety has shot up.

“Chinese society is just changing too fast for people to adjust to it,” she said.

The article goes on to discuss how much social inertia there is to accepting the reality of mental illness, to the ability to treat it, and to the lack of respect accorded mental health professionals. Mental illness does not stop at city limits, either; China’s countryside is seeing a dramatic rise in cases as well.

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