Walking the Path

This afternoon on the way back from lunch, Winnie and I stopped at the DVD store. There we came across a copy of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cina: Chung Kuo (China: the Middle Kingdom). The film is a documentary that Antonioni shot in Beijing, Henan, Suzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai during a five-week trip and later aired on Italian TV as an almost four-hour documentary. Antonioni didn’t sneak into the country, he was invited by the Chinese government. No one really knew what was going on inside the country at that time so this film can very much bee seen as the film equivalent of Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China.

The fact that Snow and Antonioni were both invited by the Communists to see life inside China is were the similarities end however. Antonioni, while he praises the simplicity and collectivism of Chinese life at that time, does indicate through voiceovers that there is some repression in the country. He also mentions two or three times through out the film that the Chinese government minders asked him not to film something, but since Antonioni’s team already had their camera on they filmed it anyway.

What comes out in the end is this great picture of China that most foreigners — including expats like myself who live here — have hardly ever seen. Beijing and Shanghai without the skyscrapers and the traffic. In fact when they show Pudong all you see is a shipyard and an oil refinery the rest is all fields.

It is amazing what is still the same as well. Many of  the activities that the children play in school and the songs they sing haven’t changed in 30 years. Neither have the lives of the rural people in many of the villages in Henan and the rest of central China. That is probably the saddest thing about the documentary. You could change the calendar to 2008 and the scenes in Henan would still look the same. China’s opening up has made a lot of improvements, but for rural people a lot of these improvements have come because they are able to leave their villages and work in the cities — even though the government has tried to make structural improvements there, corruption has arguably prevented those reforms from having their full effect.

But that is an argument that is an argument that can be fleshed out during another post. If you’ve got four-hours to kill and are a fan of China’s history, go out and purchase Antonioni’s Cina, you won’t be disappointed. It is an eye-opener.

J.

Today, India’s giant Tata conglamorate unleashed it’s US$2,500 People’s Car. It’s supposed to be an affordable car for the developing world. Since China has such a growing car market, it made me wonder if the People’s Car would sell well here. I don’t think it will for the following reasons:

•  A car called the People’s Car that isn’t made in China is an ideological embaressment to China’s Communist government that is supposed to be serving the people and creating a harmonious society. That same government is also trying to create a growing car industry within China and they probably don’t want any more foreign competitors in the country other than the others that are already here.
• The Chinese car industry is mad that they didn’t come up with the idea themselves first.
• The environmental situation in China is so bad that the central government is trying to discourage citizens from all trying to buy cars (I know that this contradicts the first point, but it’s true). Local governments such as the Shanghai Municipal Government are adding extra barriers such as auctioning off license plats so that sometimes the plate costs more than the car. People who buy plates from neighbouring provinces face restrictions on using expressways at peak hours and parking in certain areas. Tata’s People’s Car would destroy that all the efforts the governments have put into keeping cars off the road.

What do you think about the People’s Car?

J.

I hate writing Top ten lists, but I love finding and reading them — and I discovered two beauties today:

• Global Voices translated Kuan Feng’s Top 10 Chinese Internet stories of 2007
• CNNMoney and Fortune Magazine have put out 2007′s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business Unfortunately China and the product recalls from this summer are a number 1.

Anyone else find any other interesting top ten lists?

J.

I read a really interesting post today by James Fallows, the Atlantic’s China correspondent. Entitled, “Workshop of the World, Fine Arts Division”, it details Fallows’ visit to a fine arts “village” outside Shenzhen. But instead of being an artists’ colony like you would see in Europe, the US — or even Beijing, it’s a series of factories were they mass produce almost every type of art — from European Old Masters to the latest in hip Chinese art — you can imagine by hand!

It just makes me go WOW! It’s like Andy Warhol’s Factory team that used to mass produce his silk-screen series of paintings, but on a much larger scale. And I pretty much guarantee that most of this art is being bought by new middle class Chinese who are looking for something to decorate their living rooms (Fallows’ post didn’t say). Part of the reason, I say this is because I’ve tried to mail Chinese art to my parents in the past and ran into a lot of problems getting it cleared through customs — so much so that I didn’t send the piece and will try to bring it with us when Winnie and I come home in June.

The other reason is that as the Chinese middle class grows and gets wealthier, they are willing to spend money on very non-essential items. That doesn’t just mean buying a second TV or a flashy car (and it’s debatable if those items can be considered essential or not). It means doing things like taking vacations aboard and buying art. Just like most Chinese are going aboard for the first time in large chartered tour groups, matching baseball caps, flags and all, their first experience buying art is buying prints like those Fallows’ describes in his post.

How long that will last though is anyone’s guess. Those Chinese with more money are already buying a lot of contemporary Chinese art at high prices at Hong Kong auctions and even though foreigners are getting in on the trend right now, I think it’s Chinese people that are going to keep the industry growing long-term.
I am sure this will spread to other industries as well as Chinese people have more money to spend and as quality demands go up. Evidence for this comes from another blog post I read this morning. It’s by Andrea Learned of the Marketing Profs website and she was talking about Western men’s buying habits becoming more like women’s, but I think this quote can apply to the Chinese consumer as well:

“it seems society may have reached a point where men are considered no less masculine if they pay good money for a nice sweater, a facial or a safer car. We live in a world of abundance, and EVERYONE now expects/demands much more relevance and higher standards of service from brands. And, brands have to listen, because they are now scrambling to keep, let alone grow, their markets.The way I see it, men are discovering what women have long known and acted upon as consumers. Any brand that saw this coming, and spent time to learn more and become relevant to women, now has a serious advantage. Kudos to those that did.”

Replace the men in the above paragraph with “Chinese” and I think you get the point. Brands that offer quality and added value to the growing Chinese middle class — and effectively demonstrate that to consumers through their marketing campaigns — are going to be rewarded later once that market grows to become an even significant force than it is today.

J.

It’s exactly one week before Christmas. And like every other year that I’ve been in China you wouldn’t know it — as long as you stayed away from a shopping mall. There, the shops are full of Christmas spirit or at least the hope that foreigners and Chinese people who are related to or work with foreigners are going to go and spend lots of money on Christmas gifts. Apologizes for the cynical commentary, I just don’t feel very much in the Christmas mood at the moment. I generally don’t mind staying in China for Christmas as I get to escape all the commercialism at home — as you can tell from my words above that’s fast disappearing. The other reason is I get to spend time with Winnie and my friends and have what for me is the true meaning of Christmas — good friendship and that will still be happening this year. I’m also taking Christmas Day and Boxing Day (the day after Christmas for non-British Commonwealth readers) off this year to ensure I get a good rest.

The bad side is that the Chinese Government has gone and dropped a lump of coal in my stocking — and it’s not even Christmas Eve yet. They’ve gone and canceled shortened the May Day holidays down to one day. Now, they’ve done the noble thing and added an extra day onto the Chinese New Year/Spring Festival as well as gave us Tomb Sweeping Day (April), The Dragon Boat Festival (June) and Mid-Autumn Day (September) as new public holidays, which adds one extra holiday to the public holidays for the year, but I am still going to miss having a guaranteed week of in May.

Joking aside, the reason the government is doing this because the country’s infrastructure can’t take the majority of Chinese all traveling at once three times a year during the Golden Weeks (the other two are Chinese New Year and the October 1st National Holidays). And I think this plus the annual leave that the government is promising to mandate will bring a lot of relief. But like a lot of others, I wonder if in the short term canceling the May Golden Week will just shift the burden to the October one.

J.

Update: We’ve been asked to work Saturday December 29th in order to receive Monday December 31st off. That will provide us with a three-day long weekend for New Years.

I read an interesting piece on Lost Laowai this morning. LLW owner, Ryan wrote about a recent study that showed that the “yellow fever” phenomenom is a myth. A study by economists in the US found that there is no evidence of a preference of white males for Chinese women, but they also didn’t find discrimination by Chinese women of white males. Ryan offers the important white-guy-dating/married-to-a-Chinese-girl view point, and since I’m one of these the topic and his words (with a good amount of sarcasm) have a lot of meaning to me:

“This “yellow fever”, as it’s often called, is nothing China-specific. The idea of an “Asian fetish” is so common that it gets its own category of porn (I’ve been told). For some reason that “fetish” idea is dumped onto all men (or women) in relationships with an Asian. I’m married to a Chinese, so I must have a fetish for Asian women. Does anyone else see the massive gap in this logic? Asians aren’t a quirky sub-sect of sexual acts. How can they be brought under the same “Fetish” umbrella as things like sadomasochism, bondage, and feet licking? So, if it’s not a fetish, and not because Asian girls are submissive housewives just begging to take care of their “man”, why is it there is such a high ratio of white guys with Asian women?”

I can say from firsthand experience that Asian women are definitely not submissive, they are strong willed and independent in their own way and they are not afraid to tell you either. Here in Shanghai, the stereotype is actually the men that are submissive not the women — in some cases this can be said of the foreign men as well. But to be realistic this has pretty much ended too. And again I’ll turn to Ryan because he really gets at the heart of the “yellow fever” matter:

“Falling in love is falling in love. If it’s with someone of your own nationality, culture or race; or someone of a different one – it matters little. I think we all need to be a little more tolerant and a little less judgmental towards why people are together, and instead celebrate that multicultural and multi-ethnic love will go a long way in helping the world understand one another and respect each other, two things this little planet is in ever increasing need of. Perhaps where we should be a little less tolerant and more judgmental, is towards people propagating stupid stereotypes that have no place in the globalized world in which we live.”

Nothing else needs to be said.

J.

According the China Game, the CBC canceled a documentary on the Falun Gong last night, because it received pressure from the Chinese embassy in Ottawa. I’m not a big fan of the Falun Gong myself (I worked on a couple of FG stories as a journalist and always found them to be a little out there), but I am surprised that the CBC gave into pressure on this. It strives to make sure that the documentaries that it airs are extremely fair.

When I heard about that the Chinese embassy had “tried to correct factual errors” my first question was did the filmmaker try to contact the Chinese embassy for their side of the story? The article makes no mention of this so I can’t say for sure if he did or not (and I don’t know if this was the cause for the pressure — the comment section of The China Game post says that it may be due to manipulation of the filmmaker by the Falun Gong. I just know that when I tried to contact the embassy in regards to a lawsuit launched by Falun Gong members in Montreal in 2001 (I was an intern journalist working for what is now CanWest News Services), all they would tell me is that the Falun Gong is a cult. If that’s all the embassy would say to the filmmaker, I’m not surprised they were left out of the film.

J.

It looked like we were going to see the end of the hukuo in Yunnan. For those readers living outside China, the hukou is a residence registration document that every Chinese person has. The document is linked to the person’s hometown or the hometown and it determines where the funding for their social security and schooling will go. Yunnan province was supposed to make it easier for people who had lived in another city for at least a year and had a stable income to change their hukuo to the city where they were currently living. But according to the China Law and Politics Blog that really isn’t the case:

“The announced Yunnan reforms will eliminate the distinction between “agricultural” and “non-agricultural” hukou status, according to an October 25 Xinhua article. Similar reforms have been announced by a number of other provinces and municipalities. But they do not affect the requirement that migrants obtain local hukou in urban areas to receive public services and benefits on an equal basis with other urban residents.

The proposed Yunnan reforms will require migrants to urban areas to have a “fixed place of living” and a “stable source of income” in order to shift their hukou registration to an urban area. According to the Xinhua article, the Yunnan reforms define “fixed place of living” as property ownership of a home in an urban area, or possession of one allocated by one’s work unit prior to 1995. How many rural migrants satisfy that condition?

The Yunnan reforms actually look almost identical in content to those announced by dozens of other provinces and municipalities. For more information, see these posts (1, 2), the topic paper of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), and this list of similar reforms.”

Accord to the Chinese Law and Politics blog “stable income” is holding “a professional position” or “owning your own business” And as the writer mentioned there aren’t many migrant workers that fit that position. I also find this bad for another reason: it goes against the government’s harmonious society claims.

The government says it wants to eliminate the gap between rich and poor and it wants to stop the large amount of surplus rural labour from moving from the countryside because it is getting harder to find jobs for all of these people (and that could create political unrest for the government). Why not let the people move and settle in new towns if they can get jobs there to support themselves? If a migrant worker can get adequate social security and medical benefits in an area, he’ll stop moving. He’ll have achieved his goal of getting a better life and will stop moving (and therefore being perceived as a threat liability by the government). By not changing the hukuo system the governments in Yunnan, Beijing and all the provinces are just making the situation worse.

J.

The 17th CPC Congress started today in Beijing and instead of writing about who is going to be the successor to Hu Jintao — lots of other people are already doing that. Instead I’d like to draw your attention to two interesting blog posts about the crackdown on foreigners who overstay their visas in the run-up to the Congress.

Jonathan Ansfield outlines the sometimes colorful stories of people who overstay their visas whereas Josh Gartner outlines his problems of harassment by his local PSB in Beijing — even though he’s here legally.

I don’t know if I agree with the methods the PSBs used. But I’ve — so far — never encountered a problem with my local PSB in Shanghai. I haven’t overstayed my visa and my office helps me to renew my visa since I am here with a work permit, so I’ve never missed renewing either.

I hope I stay problem free.

J.