A journalist with over seven years experience in China is taking a six-month journey through rural China to document the lives of China’s “other billion” — the Chinese who aren’t born, raised and educated in relatively developed coastal cities: “I have embarked on what I hope will be a six month journey through the Chinese countryside — listening, watching and telling stories from farmers’ lives. … China, it is often said, has more than 400 million Internet users and hundreds of millions of new urban residents who are changing the face of the country. It is less often noted that China also has another billion people who have not yet been fully included in these new economic and social changes. The following, if you will, are some fragments from the story of the other billion.”
We’re playing a Taboo-style English exercise where I give a student a word and she has to make her classmates guess it, but she can’t say the word or certain specified related words. I give one mid-20′s female student Japanese, along with China and island.
“Who do we all hate?”
“Japanese!”
It was the fastest correct guess all class.
For more about common Mainlander feelings toward the Japanese, see:
NPR has an on-going series on the apparent rise of religious belief in China.
A reflective review of Peter Hessler’s latest book Country Driving:
“For many Chinese, their biggest concern has always been poverty. They believe that all their problems would float away if only they had money. When success does strike — and for the first time in their life they don’t need to worry about money — many Chinese are still anxious and lost and don’t know why. They are just unhappy. In Hessler’s account of Wei Ziqi, I see my family, my relatives and my friends all facing a similar predicament … Hessler does a good job capturing both the anxiety and opportunity of this transitional period…
“There is a myth, one believed by many Chinese, that foreigners do not and cannot understand China. This book shows that this myth is simply nonsense.”
A piece translated from the Chinese internet argues that grass-roots level government officials are more victims than perpetrators when it comes to China’s drinking/banquet culture:
“Official reception is currently an “important task” for grass-roots level cadres. Some unit chiefs spoke candidly [on this topic]: “If we didn’t have to wine and dine people, work wouldn’t be so hard.” In other words, grass-roots level cadres are fed up with the excesses of official reception.”
“Establishing a civilized community is everybody’s dream;
creating a beautiful and happy life has your and my contributions.”
建文明社区是大家心愿，创美好生活有你我奉献
jiàn wénmíng shèqū shì dàjiā xīnyuàn, chuàng měihǎo shēnghuó yǒu nǐ wǒ fèngxiàn
This is the new banner that went up in our neighbourhood this week. What it actually means is, “Sidewalk vegetable sellers are officially no longer welcome here.” When this went up, the chéngguǎn (城管), which are the low-level bylaw enforcers who deal with things like illegal street vendors, came and kicked out our neighbourhood’s vegetable sellers — a migrant couple from Húnán (湖南) who daily pedal in their vegetables on a three-wheel cart — and the noodle vendors with their push carts. All of them have been daily fixtures inside the front gate of our apartment complex since the day we moved in. Jessica’s buying noodles after a walk in the park in the photo below (vegetables in the background on the left):
The Pros & Cons
We like having these people in our neighbourhood. In a big, dirty, noisy, anonymous, soul-quenching concrete wasteland where you don’t even know the people in your own stairwell, having an informal community center inside the front entrance where people play, gossip, buy breakfast and lunch, etc. really changes the feel of the place. We get to smile and make small talk every time we come and go (and show off Lilia), and the old guys sitting around doing nothing all day get just as big a kick out of it as we do, I think.
But it’s not simply a matter of vain city officials disregarding the poor in a selfish rush to create a sterile urban facade that will advance their careers and prestige (though no doubt that’s a big part of it); there are real downsides to having these vendors around. The chǎobǐng (炒饼) lady, whom we call “auntie” (大娘), leaves a pile of eggs shells, cabbage, and other rotting food waste right by the entrance every night. More than once when biking home from work at night I’ve seen and heard big rats scrounging around in it. These vendors are unregulated, and in China that often means things like dìgōuyóu (地沟油), cooking oil that was skimmed off the sewage scooped out of manholes outside of restaurants and resold in used-but-new-looking containers, usually to street vendors but often to restaurants as well. Street vendors also create traffic nightmares in a city where the traffic is already beyond brutal. Tianjin used to be known for its bustling street markets, which was a nice way of saying ridiculously crowded streets that you could barely push your bike through. These days such markets are harder to find, but I videoed a bike ride through one a couple blocks away.
Getting Kicked Out
Here’s the best shot we have of the vegetable selling scene, pre-eviction. It’s hard to see, but there are shelves of vegetables along the wall on the left, behind the chair and cabinet:
And here’s afterward, with their shelves and things torn down:
It doesn’t happen as sinisterly as I could make it sound in the telling; it’s not like there’s a squadron of stone-faced riot police that show up and bully people around. In our neighbourhood it means an unenthusiastic middle-aged guy, who looks just like the other middle-aged guys in our neighborhood aside from his rumpled, ill-fitting, cheap-looking uniform, standing off to the side smoking, almost apologetically telling the vendors they have to go. He’s just the messenger; he has no real power, but the people that sent him do and there’s nothing anyone can do about it except comply. He’s the opposite of intimidating.
That’s how it is here and elsewhere in our area: the vendors don’t get mad at the messengers — they even stand around and chat, taking their time. But that’s not how it is elsewhere, where chéngguǎn are often violent and beat the street vendors, in some instances provoking violence in return — not to mention the controversy surrounding the alleged leak of a chéngguǎn manual explaining how to use violence to enforce bylaws. In Kunming people are even getting creative in their resistance. No such drama for us, though.
I leave for work on my bike around 8:20am, and on the morning all this happened I passed the chǎobǐng lady on my way to the subway. She was pushing her cart down the road after being kicked out that morning. She’s funny because she’s tiny, can’t be more than 5 feet tall or more than 80 or 90 pounds, but she’s a real firecracker. I asked what happened and she animatedly told me that the chéngguǎn made her leave. I asked when she could return and she said, “After 9:00.” I double-checked, “You mean you can go back after 9:00? You just have to wait until after 9?” Yep, that was the deal apparently, at least for her and the other push-cart vendors. Maybe there was an inspection coming through. Since then they’ve all been back every morning like normal, except for the vegetable sellers.
Other stuff about street vendors, street markets, and city clean-up:
China is sometimes described as a “kiss-up/kick-down society”. Relationships are hierarchical whether you’re at work or not. People often shamelessly kiss-up to those above them (like bosses) while treating the people below them like their dirt. The disregard and lack of even basic consideration for those underneath is often shocking. There’s an idiom about being the “grandpa” and the “grandson” in a Chinese company, expressing how higher-ups have almost absolute power over their underlings. I’ve heard it said that the average Chinese office has more drama than Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
This month’s edition of Tianjin’s expat magazine has a great little anecdote that reflects this aspect of Chinese society. It’s from an article on how “to be a happy evergreen tree in working world” (obviously not written by a foreigner), where a senior manager gives advice to junior employees who complain that their bosses are “exploiting people and destroying work-life balance”:
Tip #3: Love your boss unconditionally
It doesn’t matter how you feel about your boss’s work ability or personality… In front of someone who has longer career life than you, all you need to do is to worship him and try to love him. Therefore you can feel what he feels; see what he sees from a higher level. Finally, you might be as successfully as he is. So why not?
One day I’m going to blog about our company’s annual banquet (年会), because it’s creepily like a church service for worshiping the boss. But I need this job, so that post will have to wait! :)
From China’s Female Suicide Mystery: “Pesticide ingestion is involved in 60 percent of Chinese suicides … Rural Chinese women—with their easy access to toxic pesticides, social isolation, and unique burden of feudal obligations and modern stresses—have been particularly susceptible.
“…from 1995 to 1999, suicide was the No. 1 cause of death for Chinese young adults aged 15 to 34. Rural suicide rates were three times higher than urban rates, and women had a 25 percent higher suicide rate than men—making China one of the few nations with that distinction.”
For some Chinese people, that stuff we hear about in the news or read about in history textbooks is real life.
I’m sitting in the office with a student. Students often come in to chat during office hours — this one’s in her early 20′s. She asked about us planning to eventually have another child, and then started casually telling me how she “was supposed to have a little brother” but the government wouldn’t allow them to “so they just killed it” in the second or third month of pregnancy. She says she doesn’t know the details, but “at that time it was very strict” and they couldn’t just choose to pay the fine for breaking the One Child Policy and have their second child (like some of my other, richer and better-connected students have). Then she went on wondering what it would have been like to have a brother.
It makes sense that she’s talking about it so casually. I’ve read enough about China (and heard enough of those horrible radio ads for “3-minute” “painless” abortions: “Oh no! I’m pregnant! But I just started a new job — what about my career?” “Don’t worry about it! You can just…”) to understand how these kinds of situations are so common that regular people like my student naturally talk about it like it’s no big deal. Of course, the fact that a person could discuss this kind of situation so nonchalantly only demonstrates just how extra horrible it is; the brutality is not just barbaric, it’s also commonplace.
It’s always interesting when the things you read about in the news and in history books suddenly appear before you in the life of someone you know. Like a sudden reminder that no matter how well we get along, the world my students come from is very, very different from my own.
A similar reminder happened in class two days ago — that’s two days before June sixth, a major but unmarked anniversary (I promise you know what happened in China on that day, even if you don’t recognize the date). I was facilitating a free talk session with about fifteen students. One of them was 32 years old and living in Tianjin in nineteen eighty-nine, another was 19 and living in Shanghai. Others were only children at the time, while some weren’t born yet. All they wanted to do was talk about the event, about what they remembered, what happened in their cities and what they saw — none of them were sympathetic to the gov. I wanted so bad to ask so many questions, but if it came out that I instigated or encouraged discussion of that particular topic I’d be risking trouble with my employer. I tried to steer the discussion elsewhere several times, and the students kept bringing it back. Anyway, it was interesting to see history come alive in memories and stories of my students. It’s easy to talk with them everyday and forget that they’ve experienced some crazy stuff and have all kinds of stories to tell.
Related stuff:
- Chinese Academy of Social Sciences publishes the latest and most negative data on sex-selective abortion in China
- Famous Chinese novelist writes on the enforcement of China’s family planning policy
- What can happen to a 6-month illegally pregnant women in China
- ‘Painless abortion’ and ‘female surgery’ ad campaign hits Chinese university campus
- October’s propaganda: anti-”gendercide”
- Free Baby Accessories, compliments of Tianjin & the One Child Policy
If you’ve ever wondered why grandparents follow their newborn grandchild through the hospital immediately after birth, and why most Chinese kids get picked up by parents or grandparents rather than walking home themselves, here’s one reason: rampant child trafficking. See China’s Child-Trafficking Epidemic
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