Made in China: Your Job, Your Future, Your Fortune

[PsiKik]

Interresting news article about China.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1142148&page=1

[Helios]

Ha I was gonna say this myself, but hey did it for me

"Slowly, the American Dream is becoming the Chinese Dream"

I could see that while I was in Beijing this summer, but it doesn't take an NT to figure out there isn't enough goodies on this planet for everyone to live like us. What happens to the "Faded Red" when it can no longer deliever on the promise of a better tomr? The same thing that happened to all the prior dynasties that lost their credibility. China has not undergone a transformation like Meiji Japan. You can't have your cake and eat it too. In the mean time all these cheap consumer goods are nice! And don't fret, India will gladly replace them when the civil war breaks out (again).

[PsiKik]

I could see that while I was in Beijing this summer, but it doesn't take an NT to figure out there isn't enough goodies on this planet for everyone to live like us. What happens to the "Faded Red" when it can no longer deliever on the promise of a better tomr?
Seeing as you were there I would like your perspective.

Are the people being subjected to consumerist advertising? i.e.Are they are being coerced to aspire to consumerist values and buy luxury items?

My impression is that large numbers of people are being rapidly urbanised and at the same time are being pressured to aspire to luxury items, such as tv's, DVDs, computers, washing machines etc, etc, while many are still not earning enough to afford them. Could this not lead to some kind of revival of
marxism?

The working conditions of many people are terrible, could this not lead to very powerful labor unions?

[Helios]

It is all so uneven, even inside the big cities the wealth and development is very uneven. Gleaming steel and glass, next to aging wreckage. Just a few miles outside the capital it still looks like rural central America, I can only imagine what the interior is like! But none of that is what struck me. It was the people, the hope and anticipation they all hold for themselves and their nation. It was very innocent almost childlike. They spoke respectfully of the West and mostly the U.S., but eagerly of China and the future. Yet, as I looked around I saw thousands doing pointless manuel labor,clearly meant to do nothing more than keep the flood of people from the provinces busy. They all belive that they are building a better tomr, for themselves and their childern. I had to repress my fledgling Fi as I listened, knowing there was never enough for all. Moreover their leadership would just as soon kill 10 million of them in another 5 year plan if such worked.


So in the end I 'detached', put on the old callous mind set and laughed about them being "duped again" and compared it all to the Qing's failed attempt to contain the West in coastal "hongs". Then too, in the end the forces of the global market overwehlmed the central states ability to control it. The states failure to manage these outside issue undermined it's legitimacy. China's serene style of goverment does best when insular. They haven't had a successful cosmopolatain culture since the T'ang dynasy. The current ruler don't strike me as their heirs.

[PsiKik]

Interresting, so their growth is ultimately not substainable?

I find it interesting that there is manual labor for the masses to keep them busy.

Also that there is a positive attitude for the future amongst the people - is this government induced or
genuine?

[Helios]

Well I'd say genuine, but then again I was speaking to those who had gonna to univi and could speak english too. But I got the vibe that on some level everyone felt such, but again my level of contact was clearly limited by both scope and language.

[Helios]

I just read this story, it sorta confirms the impression I got while in China this summer

China's wealth gap reaching critical level By John Ruwitch
Tue Oct 11, 8:21 AM ET



Eight years ago, Chen Hua thought she'd put poverty behind her when she left her remote, mountain village in Sichuan province for a factory job in China's booming Pearl River Delta.

But even in one of the wealthiest and most dynamic parts of a country on the rise, she's finding the dividends of China's economic revolution do not always pay out.

Earlier this year, the garment workshop where she snipped dangling threads from clothes suddenly stopped paying wages. For several months, she and her colleagues kept working, hoping they would eventually be paid.

Then one day, the boss vanished and the factory closed.

Today, Chen, 53, hawks maps on a bridge near the Guangzhou train station in the capital of the southern province of Guangdong, where on a good day she earns 30 yuan. For a time after the factory closed, she recycled trash for money.

"At least now I can stand in one place and don't have to walk around all day," she says with a stoic smile. When a policeman strolls down the ramp, though, she and the other vendors bolt the opposite way.

Fancy imported cars, five-star hotels and slick malls dot Guangzhou, the hub of a region that has blossomed into one of China's -- and the world's -- main economic engines.

But Chen stands by the train station as a reminder of one of the most dangerous features to develop on China's socio-political landscape: the growing chasm between rich and poor in the world's seventh-biggest economy.

Persistent poverty in China's countryside, against the backdrop of fast-growing cities, has sparked social unrest in some spots and elicited sympathy from the wider populace.

The public was outraged in 2003 when a driver in northeastern China ran over and killed a peasant with her BMW, but was given a light sentence.

The leadership in Beijing is deeply concerned there could be a wider backlash, threatening a decade of strong economic growth and the Communist Party's grip on power, says Wenran Jiang, a China expert at the University of Alberta.

"They have come to the conclusion that ... the regime will not survive if they don't address the growing wealth gap, and more importantly, the perception that the government only cares about economic growth and the urban rich," he said.

YELLOW LIGHT, RED LIGHT

When China's late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping ignited the country's market reforms in the late 1970s, he espoused a trickle-down approach, saying: "Let some people get rich first."

Some have become gloriously rich. Next week, the Hurun Report, which tracks China's wealthy, will issue its 7th annual China Rich List on which the average wealth for the richest top 400 is about $200 million. Seven are billionaires.

To be sure, tens of millions of people have been lifted out of abject poverty since the party came to power 56 years ago.

But the wealthiest 10 percent of China's urban households now own 45 percent of the urban wealth while the poorest 10 percent have less than 1.4 percent, Chinese statistics show.

That has left Deng's successors, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, grappling with a wealth differential that economists say is wider than when the Communist Party came to power in a 1949 revolution.

Average urban incomes last year were 9,400 yuan while rural income was 3,000 yuan.

The newspaper of the Communist Party's premier cadre training ground, the Central Party School, reported recently that the wealth disparity had reached the "yellow" warning level and could become a "red" danger within five years.

"Social contradictions" are on the rise, it warned.

Beijing has taken steps to try to buoy rural incomes, allowing grain prices to rise and starting direct farm subsidies. It has also scrapped the agriculture tax, a centuries-old Chinese institution, and tried to abolish an array of crippling local fees.

But some of the measures, while lightening the burden on farmers, have bankrupted local governments, which are forced to raise cash elsewhere. The once robust communist social safety net has vanished, and rural dwellers now pay for things like education and health care.

"In poor areas, there are a lot of conflicts between the government and the farmers," said Li Fan, director of the World and China Institute, a private thinktank in Beijing.

China's "Gini coefficient," a measure of inequality used by economists that runs on a scale from zero to one, is believed to be above 0.45, among the highest in the world. The closer to one, the greater the inequality, and the prospect for unrest.

"That means it's already a critical time," said Li.

To escape poverty, country dwellers keep pouring off trains in cities like Guangzhou and the nearby border boomtown of Shenzhen, where Liu Zhengde begs for change outside a candy store in a lively shopping district.

Originally from the Henan province in China's heartland, Liu has drifted for much of his life. He has never married, and his last job was selling fruit in the central city of Wuhan.

That venture failed a few months ago, leaving the equivalent of less than 6 U.S. cents in the pocket of the weathered man with a wiry beard and wide eyes who, asked his age, says: "over 80."

"I couldn't even afford a steamed bun. Those cost five mao. All I had was four," he said. "Everybody said go to Guangdong."

The economic boom has made Guangdong one of the wealthiest places in China. But opportunity has been elusive for Liu who sleeps under bridges.

"All I want is enough money to buy a train ticket back home."

[C.J.Woolf]

Interesting stuff, Helios. I didn't know China was so much into Reaganomics. More evidence that trickle-down economics is bullshit.

[joft]

i'm supposed to do an economic report on china, but it's not due till december so of course I'm just going to procrastinate till then

[kuranes]

Lots of opportunities there. i've been tempted by these things where you go there ( or to other countries ) to "teach English" but do not have to know any language but English, since the students will be on a high level already, and are just looking to get better at conversational skills. While there you could talk to businessmen about helping to market their product in English speaking countries. And it would be a perfect opportunity to get started learning their language.

I looked at Thailand especially, because supposedly there and Korea is where the highest demand is. I know a guy ( friend of a friend ) teaching in Vietnam. He loves it there, but couldn't afford to come back here to the USA because of the disparities in economies.

[SensEye]

Seems my fellow Canucks are having some problems in Korea in this regard:


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051010/KOREA10/TPInternational/Asia

[PenguinHunter]

Seems my fellow Canucks are having some problems in Korea in this regard:


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051010/KOREA10/TPInternational/Asia

hehe, a friend of mine is there now, doing that. I may see him again sooner than I expected.

[ptGatsby]

I was in Korea in June. Though not in a major city, I can tell you the following; Woman felt safe enough to walk home drunk through alleys (well, most streets are american versions of alleys :) ) despite being more than 10min away. There has not been a single report of an assault on them - or any foreigner - since those I was with have been there (read: most well over 5 years, some ~15 years). Every disturbance in the area was caused by drunk foreigners, or within family.

I have never felt so relaxed during my stay there. I had no problem with my GF going to the store, even on the other side of town, at midnight. Here, I won't let her walk alone to the store in the middle of the day - nor does she want to.

All I can say is that the trip broke every stereotype I had of Korea in two weeks. Government was unpleasant, but that's about the only negative thing I can say. Well, that and the dried fish. Ugh.

[Xylix]

Woman felt safe enough to walk home drunk through alleys (well, most streets are american versions of alleys ) despite being more than 10min away. There has not been a single report of an assault on them - or any foreigner - since those I was with have been there (read: most well over 5 years, some ~15 years).


I hate to say it, but in my experience of overviewing the statistics of various countries/places/whatnot how safe something appears has far far far far more to do with what gets reported, than how safe it actually is.

Sadly, so too does what the individuals in the city/country/whatnot 'think' is safe in the city.

[ptGatsby]

I hate to say it, but in my experience of overviewing the statistics of various countries/places/whatnot how safe something appears has far far far far more to do with what gets reported, than how safe it actually is.

Sadly, so too does what the individuals in the city/country/whatnot 'think' is safe in the city.


I never quoted a statistic. This is the expierence of people moving from every part of the world to this particular town to work. They brought their families - those are the women going out, just like their kids. The foreigners have their own social network and had something happened to one of them, they would of known. They let them walk around because it just doesn't happen. Not even cleaners with keys to the house were unusual, even if you never met them (things were arranged through agents).

Statistically, Korea seems to have a moderate crime rate. What defines crime seems a bit different, however.

[Xylix]

I never quoted a statistic.

Irrelevant.

That has nothing to do with the nature of my prior post.


They let them walk around because it just doesn't happen.

And in New York during the whole silly sniper fiasco parents were jerking their kids out of school in fear they would be shot. The whole 'city' was terrified. Yet, the chances of being killed by that sniper was astronomically small compared to the chances of being killed by anything else. So why the fear?

Equally there was the little anthrax incident.

And many many more.

Certainly none of these are particularly statistically remarkable. Not given the size of the areas affected, and the number of individuals involved. Yet many quivered in fear of the events.

Why?

Because the reporting of crime has far more to do with the preception of safety than actual, real saftey does. Why is this important? Quite simple. The perception of safety you and the locals feel in Korea is far far more likely to be a result of how incidents are reported (or indeed not reported) than how likely such an event is to happen, or even happen to you.

Not that you couldn't be safer than say in the United States, you might be, but rather, the feeling of saftey, or the lack there of, likely does not correspond very well to reality.

[ptGatsby]

I will agree on the fear culture issue.



Because the reporting of crime has far more to do with the preception of safety than actual, real saftey does.



Quite simple. The perception of safety you and the locals feel in Korea is far far more likely to be a result of how incidents are reported (or indeed not reported) than how likely such an event is to happen, or even happen to you.



Ah, that I can understand, and appreciate.

Yet, I live in Vancouver, and just down the road, up an alley, a kid walked his GF to the bus and was randomly killed there. No reason, really, he just was... I don't need to see the report when police sirens are a city block away. Two doors down was a grow-op? Hell, where my parents live, a major street was shut down for two days because someone had ordered (?) 18 barrels of chemicals for a meth lab located there. I travel by the derelict downtown area here fairly frequently, and I wouldn't walk that street. My GF was working a job and saw someone ran off with another woman's purse. The guy next door got held up by a gang by a local 7-eleven... at elevenish in the morning.

Are my expierences unique then? Not for hanging out with my friends living all over the area. Personal expierence, not 'reports' on the news.

I don't need the fear culture to tell me stuff is happening when it clearly is. Its easy to blame the fear culture, and you may be statistically unlikely to be attacked personally... but it is happening.

My perception of safety comes from the expierences of those that now live there, not the news. Maybe I feel safer because they let school kids walk around alone way past dark. It didn't hit me until I talked to the guys there though.



Not that you couldn't be safer than say in the United States, you might be, but rather, the feeling of saftey, or the lack there of, likely does not correspond very well to reality.


Is it possible this stuff happens there too? Maybe. But when you work with two dozen people who don't have a single story like the ones above... well I have a hard time agreeing. These people are friends, even if you take a significantly small sample of the ones I worked with personally. They are foreigners there - no political ties. They come from Europe (east and west), from n. america, from australia, and the rare one from asia. The bias is largely mitigated.

Why did I feel safe? Because everyone felt safe. Why does everyone feel safe? Lack of fear culture, or lack of crime? When there are no reports of crime by your own friend network, I tend to follow that more.

Its not like I haven't traveled to other places. All over the states, I live in Canada, Been to Scandinavia, Europe. This is my first stop in Asia. Its also the only place I felt safe... and the only place that those I was with, also expats, didn't report crime as a constant thing. By personal expierence.

--

Actually, this is interesting to me now. I wonder if I did react to the overall culture. I'll need to think about it now...

Anyway, the reason I originally posted is because we tend to comment on places like China based on a certain feel, rather than expierence. On the other hand, I'll have to think on whether or not it was the same for me now :)

[PenguinHunter]

I had no problem with my GF going to the store, even on the other side of town, at midnight. Here, I won't let her walk alone to the store in the middle of the day - nor does she want to.

Crazy, I want to ask where in Vancouver you live but, since this is a public forum afterall, I guess I'll just comment. Obviosuly I've been to Vancouver a bunch of times, living so close and all, but I've never felt unsafe there. I've wandered around with friends, and by myself, relatively late in a few parts of the city and surrounding areas and I've never had, or heard of, any problems. I guess I wasn't wandering around East Hastings late at night but when I'm there in the day, there are lots of shopping carts but not threats. I'm not trying to argue with you or anything, I just never thought of Vancouver as a very dangerous place.

[ptGatsby]

Crazy, I want to ask where in Vancouver you live but, since this is a public forum afterall, I guess I'll just comment. Obviosuly I've been to Vancouver a bunch of times, living so close and all, but I've never felt unsafe there. I've wandered around with friends, and by myself, relatively late in a few parts of the city and surrounding areas and I've never had, or heard of, any problems. I guess I wasn't wandering around East Hastings late at night but when I'm there in the day, there are lots of shopping carts but not threats. I'm not trying to argue with you or anything, I just never thought of Vancouver as a very dangerous place.


Vancouver is moderately safe, so long as you aren't in East van - the northern part (basicly along E. Hastings). Unfortunately, unless you can afford a 400k place, you are living there, or further out.

This is different than say, Richmond where in the past few years, club-like equivalents have been hit with automatic weapons, or say Surrey, Langely... ect. Most crime is largely centered around certain areas - Joyce station, Central City, Downtown... There are good places, like Port moody, where the worst you'll get is the occasional random thing. We have a few organised crime things around here, mostly just due to the docks here. Nothing outside normal, really. If you visit the clubs downtown, some of them have organised crime connections (Actually.. most), a few have had killings, both hits and random... but generically speaking, its probably only a few a year.

Certainly your *chance* of having something happen is fairly low, overall. BC is right in the middle of Canadian crime rates. And very low if you live in the right area.

To be more percise, the crime rate for BC is about 1200 violent crimes reported, and about 7000 property crimes, and about 12,000 other crimes. Oh, that's per 100k people, of course.

Vancouver specifically has about 11,500/100k in what we would consider 'crime' to be (ie: not fraud, counterfeiting) for this discussion. I mean, its not likely that you will get killed with only 2.1 homicides, or have something stolen with 153 robberies, or 1350 break-ins, or 1261 motor thefts. And of course, only about 40% are thefts with weapons (not motor theft), and only a few percentage end up with injuries.

Actually, you have about a ~~2.8 chance, according to 2003 police data of having that happen to you, apparently. I'd like to point out this is definately better than most of the big cities in the states by a fair margin, so... yah. Its not that bad. Still, you get your weekly alert of a kid being kidnapped or whatever.

All available from stats can. (www.statcan.ca).

[PenguinHunter]

Interesting stats. To continue derailing this, I should have added that I feel less safe wandering downtown Saskatoon or Winnipeg at night. Part of this is likely because I know beforehand that that the crime rates are worse. Part of it is that I'm naive as well. I generally assume that people won't make the effort to get anything from me because I generally don't look like I have much. So sometimes I may potentially be in more danger than I think I am. Living in the Middle East and Victoria has made me like this too. I never feel like walking around a city at 3am is something to be done with caution. But yeah, the stats you posted validate my general assumption that BC has lots of weird people but not many dangerous ones.

[ptGatsby]

Well, Winnepeg is only slightly worse (eyeballing, I would guess no more than +0.x %) whereas I would say Saskatoon is somewhere around +2%.

I think it also depends on where you are in these areas, and what is defined as 'crime'. Removing drug crimes or other 'victimless' crimes changes the numbers drastically, making places like Houston far far worse when compared to a place like Vancouver.

Apologies if I made it seem that Vancouver is that dangerous - I believe it to be better than the average N. American city. I was only speaking of my expierences :)

[Helios]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051210/ap_on_re_as/china_protest_shootings


BEIJING - Armed with guns and shields, hundreds of riot police sealed off a southern Chinese village after fatally shooting as many as 20 demonstrators and were searching for the protest organizers, according to villagers and a newspaper report Saturday.

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If that death toll is confirmed it would be the deadliest known use of force by security forces against Chinese civilians since the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989, and marked an escalation in the social protests that have convulsed the Chinese countryside.

During the demonstration Tuesday in Dongzhou, a village in southern Guangdong province, thousands of people gathered to protest the amount of money offered by the government as compensation for land to be used to construct a wind power plant.

Police fired into the crowd and killed a handful of people, mostly men, villagers reached by telephone said Friday. Villagers' accounts of the death toll ranged from two and 10, with many missing.

On Saturday, Hong Kong's Apple Daily newspaper raised the death toll to nearly 20, citing villagers. There was no explanation for the discrepancy.

Although security forces often use tear gas and truncheons to disperse demonstrators, it is extremely rare for them to fire into a crowd — as the military did in putting down pro-democracy demonstrations around Tiananmen Square, when hundreds, if not thousands, were killed.

State media have made no mention of the incident and both provincial and local governments have repeatedly refused to comment. This is typical in China, where the ruling Communist Party controls the media and lower-level authorities are leery of releasing information without permission from the central government.

All the villagers said they were nervous and scared and most did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. One man said the situation was still "tumultuous."

A 14-year-old girl said a local official visited the village on Friday and called the shootings "a misunderstanding."

"He said (he) hoped it wouldn't become a big issue," the girl said over the telephone. "This is not a misunderstanding. I am afraid. I haven't been to school in days."

She added, "Come save us."

Another villager said there were at least 10 deaths.

"The riot police are gathered outside our village. We've been surrounded," she said, sobbing. "Most of the police are armed. We dare not to go out of our home."

"We are not allowed to buy food outside the village. They asked the nearby villagers not to sell us goods," the woman said. "The government did not give us proper compensation for using our land to build the development zone and plants. Now they come and shoot us. I don't know what to say."

One woman said an additional 20 people were wounded.

"They gathered because their land was taken away and they were not given compensation," she said. "The police thought they wanted to make trouble and started shooting."

She said there were "several hundred police with guns in the roads outside the village on Friday. "I'm afraid of dying. People have already died."

Hong Kong's English language South China Morning Post newspaper on Saturday quoted villagers who said authorities were trying to conceal the deaths by offering families money to give up bodies of the dead.

"They offered us a sum but said we would have to give up the body," an unidentified relative of one slain villager, 31-year-old Wei Jin, was quoted as saying. "We are not going to agree."

Police were carrying photos of villagers and trying to find people linked to the protest, the newspaper said, citing villagers.

Hong Kong reverted to Chinese control in 1997, but within its context as a "Special Administrative Region," the former British colony maintains a high degree of press freedom. Its proximity to Dongzhou gives local reporters an advantage in covering the story.

The number of protests in China's vast, poverty-stricken countryside has risen in recent months as anger comes to a head over corruption, land seizures and a yawning wealth gap that experts say now threatens social stability. The government says about 70,000 such conflicts occurred last year, although many more are believed to go unreported.

"These reports of protesters being shot dead are chilling," Catherine Baber, deputy Asia director at Amnesty International, said in a statement. "The increasing number of such disputes over land use across rural China, and the use of force to resolve them, suggest an urgent need for the Chinese authorities to focus on developing effective channels for dispute resolution."

Amnesty spokeswoman Saria Rees-Roberts said Friday in London that although she did not want to compare Tuesday's clashes with Tiananmen Square, "police shooting people dead is unusual in China and it does demand an independent investigation."

Like many cities in China, Shanwei, the city where Dongzhou is located, has cleared suburban land once used for farming to build industrial zones. State media have said the Shanwei Red Bay industrial zone is slated to have three electricity-generating plants — a coal-fired plant, a wave power plant and a wind farm.

Shanwei already has a large wind farm on an offshore island, with 25 turbines. Another 24 are set for construction.

Earlier reports said the building of the $743 million coal-fired power plant, a major government-invested project for the province, also was disrupted by a dispute over land compensation.

Authorities in Dongzhou were trying to find the leaders of Tuesday's demonstration, a villager said.

The man said the bodies of some of the shooting victims "are just lying there."

"Why did they shoot our villagers?" he asked. "They are crazy!"