Author: Rich Will

The first time I met someone from mainland China was in 1994 at a party. We were both catastrophically drunk and partly because of this, and partly because at the time I mixed in a dark red circle, I naively assumed that he was some sort of dissident who’d fled the country. I don’t think he was, and he may even have been a gatecrasher, but I bombarded him with all sorts of stupid questions, the subtext of which was ‘Bu..b..but what is your life like?!?’ The exoticism of the life I imagined for him in China was boundless. I don’t remember a single word he said to me.

Five years later when I started teaching I had Chinese students in all my classes. The boys would turn up halfway through the morning, evidently still fast asleep, and in the meantime we, the Europeans, would bombard the girls with questions. ‘So you’ve really never heard of the Beatles/Elvis/techno music?’ was a common theme. They in turn would timidly ask if it was true that there were really late night discos in Dublin. In the break they would crowd round the tape player and turn up their cassettes of what sounded to me like Fisher Price Disney pop ballads.

They were (I think) rich kids who had failed to get into University and had therefore been sent away until they had learnt English. To me ordinary life in China was full of mystery, and even their most mundane comments fed this impression. One insisted throughout his entire stay that back home he was a taxi driver. Lost for the answer to a question he would grin and burst out ‘I drive taxi – where you wanna go?’ to great hilarity. Discussing the issue of acceptable questions to ask on a first date they came up with ‘Who is your local party chief?’, which they seemed to find just as deliriously incongruous as we did.

Hungover and mischeavous one early summer day, I decided we would talk about special occasions and festive holidays in our different countries. I mentioned that June 4th was a significant day for many people in China. The idealstic young Russian and German students saw the opportunity I’d sensed they were waiting for and launched into a furious attack. The Chinese were nonplussed. When things had calmed down a bit one of the students, a patient and drowsy whisp of a boy from Qingdao, explained exactly what had happened that day.

The student protestors, he said, had tied duck feathers (duck feathers? we asked, understandably confused. Duck feathers, he assured us) to the soles of their feet and had tickled (yes, he knew what tickled meant) the soldiers, and a lot of soldiers had died because of the tickling.

The students I had that summer and the next seemed to be constantly coming up with similarly bizarre, usually hilarious and often disturbing explanations for things. And I think it was that more than any other single thing that gave me the impulse to want to come to China and to find out what it was like to live amongst people who had such an outlandish view of the world.

Now, I’m aware of how quickly what seems exotic from a distance quickly becomes mundane upon closer contact. I still believe there is more to the attraction of the exotic than this, and there are some places which retain their mystery and allure when you live there. But China today would present quite a challenge to anyone’s sense of wonder and mischief. What was the Cultural Revolution if not a war of the mundane against the exotic? Young people in China today revere the most mundane and least interesting aspects of our culture – the NBA, the UEFA Champions’ League, KFC – and dream of becoming secretaries, accountants and CEOs. Anonymous, money-making dreams.

So was I naive? My only defence is that I didn’t come here expecting to find Shangri-La, or even Thailand. I came here in search of that sense of the bizarre I found in Dublin, for more duck feather stories.

It’s something that happens very rarely. The other day in class I was overjoyed when one of my students kept a completely straight face while she told the class that she used to have a patch of grass on the top of her head which could predict the future. People like that really stand out here. They apparently have a word in Chinese, Linglei, which describes young people with a different view of the world and who aspire to a different lifestyle, but here nobody recognises the word, let alone identifies themselves with it. For most their worldview compels them to repeat what they’ve never had cause to question. One of my students primly informed me that ‘the aim of University in England is to cultivate the perfect gentleman’. Another plucked up the courage to ask if I’d had another girlfriend before my present one. I’m 32 years old, by the way.

In just over two months I’ll be another year older and I’ll be gone. While I’ve been here and over the last few years mainland Chinese have been spreading out across the globe, possibly outnumbering the wealthier and worldlier Cantonese speakers. Dublin and Lisbon both have more and more shops, supermarkets and restaurants owned and run by newly arrived Mandarin speakers. Wherever I go in the world in the future I’ll be meeting more and more people from mainland China.

Now I don’t know what happens to Chinese people when they go to live abroad. I suppose that their different experiences may well broaden their outlook and cause them to question what they’ve been brought up to believe in in China. Now I’m not in much of a position to say. What I do think, however, is that the circumstances in which foreigners are allowed to come and live here in China are too inhibiting to permit any more than a superficial understanding of and engagement with what’s really going on around them. It feels like the unspoken question in the inquiring eyes of a Chinese person as they follow me down the street or round the supermarket is ‘why the hell did you choose to come here?’. The answer is that I feel ashamed that I made that choice, and I’ll feel much freer to talk openly to Chinese people – about the duck feathers and the fortune-telling head grass – when I’m no longer an ‘invited guest’of their government, a government which they have a lot more right and reason to hate then I do.

Does anyone remember Gary North? In 1999 I was a regular visitor to his site, which hosted thousands of links to articles presenting entirely plausible scenarios of global financial catastrophe at the end of the year. Embarrassing to admit now, of course, but I was actually quite frightened.

All the more chastening, in fact, to find out soon after that Gary North was a bit of a nutter. Actually, he was a fully-fledged hysterical fundamentalist lunatic who had already, in the early eighties, but without the benefit of the internet, happily predicted that AIDS would lead to a decimation of the decadent human species. He was a full-time doom-mongerer, with his own silly agenda.

These days I’m much more careful about believing predictions when I don’t know who’s making them and why, particularly when I come across them on the internet.

Now, Gordon C. Chang is a writer on Chinese affairs, and from what I know of him he’s been in a good position to make predictions about the future of the Chinese economy. His book, which I don’t think is on general sale in the People’s Republic, but which you can read an extract from here, is a very detailed account of what exactly is rotten about China’s economic miracle, and he provides a number of possible scenarios, all entirely plausible, for how things could go horribly wrong for the Chinese government in the not too distant future.

It’s obviously something he feels very deeply about. In fact, it is this which puts me of the book, which often reads like a rant. The individual stories he tells tend to get lost in the general sweep of his argument, making it compelling to read in short bursts, but over 200 pages he often comes across like somebody with a vendetta.

Could he be another Gary North? His name is not one that crops up much in the increasing amount of articles equally sceptical about the sustainability of the economic miracle, unlike that of Jasper Becker, whose book The Chinese I unfortunately won’t have the chance to read more of until I leave the country for good – hooray! – in the summer, but who turns up in this excellent BBC radio documentary.

Now I think I agree with a lot of what Chang says. My feelings cloud the issue, however – I’d love to see the C C P humiliated and overthrown, although I know that whatever challenges may emerge may not necessarily be to my liking. The general feeling, for example, that the Government is insufficiently anti-Japanese
(there is an eye-witness account of yesterday’s Beijing demonstration here) could be the spark for a firestorm of grievances against corruption, unemployment and economic inequality

But ultimately I’m not best placed or qualified to say. I only read what I choose to read and believe what I choose to believe. However, I do live in China and I do reflect on what I see around me. From this local point of view, then, and given that I don’t speak much Chinese and I miss most of what goes on around me, does all this apparent growth and prosperity look sustainable? Can the momentum be maintained, or is it heading like Chang says for an inevitable collapse?

Since in our college of 16,000 students there is nowhere to go and socialise, I spend a certain amount of time in the gym. I’ve been going for about three or four months now. I had to change gyms because the better equipped gym at the neighbouring University ceased to be better equipped when some of the machines stopped working. A week or so went by and when they weren’t fixed I had to switch to the gym on our campus.

At first this was much better. After 6 months in China I’m getting used to the same song being repeated at great volume for hours on end, and over time I persuaded the staff that it was better to close the doors on very cold days. The staff seemed quite friendly, given that they have what is in China considered a dream job, namely sitting around slurping noodles and sending text messages. The most important thing was that the machines worked.

All good things end eventually. When I asked when the machine would be fixed, the answer was ‘bu yi ding’. I asked someone what that meant. It means ‘not necessarily’.

I switched to another machine, which seemed at least to be hurting adjacent bits of my arms and shoulders. Truth be told I’m not much more of an expert on body-building than on the Chinese economy, but it was fine for two days. Then it broke. I asked again about the chances of it being fixed any time soon, and this time I was pleased that I understood the answer. Bu yi ding.

Armed with this new bit of vocabulary things are becoming clearer. Now when the state-of-the-art DVD PC facilities stop working, I know there’s no point asking if they’ll be fixed and if we’ll be able to use the classroom again. And the smell that comes out of the bathrooms and fills the corridors of the school’s brand new buildings, will anything be done about that? Bu yi ding.

It’s a simple question of maintenance. Because nobody knows what to do when these new fangled machines and these shiny new buildings get broken, damaged or worn, the authorities do all they can to prevent this happening. In the brand new language labs the students have to put little blue cloth slippers from a cardboard box by the door over their shoes so the floor doesn’t get damaged. In the 12-storey main building, it’s not possible to take the lift to or from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th floors in case it breaks down. As for the toilets, the solution is to leave all the doors and windows wide open at all times, which has the added advantage of affording the curious students even more access to the habits of Westerners than they get at the average English Corner.

As I said, I’m no ‘China hand’ or expert. I know what I see and I try not to generalise too much or let my opinions shade my judgments. But if the different parts of the economy are managed in a similar way to our college, the Government will have, in fact probably is having huge problems maintaining the appearance of economic momentum.

Do I think they’ll be able to continue making the economy grow without risking surplus production, over-investment and economic collapse, and without provoking massive social unrest in the not too distant future?

不一定.

There are rumours of a large demonstration in Beijing this Sunday against all things Nipponese. I think that having marched everybody up and down the hill so many times over invading Taiwan, the authorities are now in a difficult position with regards to anti-Japanese feeling. They have to be seen internationally to calm things down, but this leads to anger in China as people perceive that they aren’t doing enough. And the internet and text messaging, which seems to be where this movement is being organised, are something that’s very difficult for them to monitor, try as they might.

For people who aren’t living here it’s probably difficult to get a sense of how strongly people feel about Japan. Or at least how they say they feel. Time and time again even the seemingly more clued-up students will volunteer that they ‘hate Japanese people’. It’s amazing how quickly a short statement of opinion can ruin your opinion of someone. ‘Congratulations!’ I think, ‘now I hate you!’

It also opens up an interesting dilemma. Now I’m aware that in the class I can’t make any reference to the three Ts. I think that even if I did, it would be greeted with silence. Actually the students are always keen to talk about Taiwan, but nevertheless I never respond when it’s referred to in class because I can’t honestly tell them how I or most of the rest of the world see it. A fellow teacher was just yesterday upbraided by the Communist Party stooge in the Foreign Affairs Office for pointing out at an English Corner (this is one reason I steer clear of the things) that Taiwan has in effect been independent for a very long time – something that is, for most of the world, a geographical question. Also yesterday when we were practising correcting false statements I mischievously wrote on the board ‘Taipei is the capital of Thailand’, which seemed to upset some of them – the idea of Taipei being a capital disturbs them, and as they’re taught never to say Taiwan, but Taiwan Province, whenever I make any mention of the place they make a big point of it.

However, Japan is a different matter. They don’t seem to consider it to be a controversial topic as far as talking to foreigners is concerned. So am I right in thinking that I can openly tell them that they are wrong and that their government is lying to them about it?

It will be interesting to see, now that the Government is clamping down on all references to the protests in the press, if foreign teachers are somehow made to feel they shouldn’t talk about it. In the meantime, I have no compunction about making someone who claims to ‘hate Japan’ lose face in class!

As you probably already know, the Chinese Government is currently engaged in a crackdown on blogging websites, via new regulations obliging bloggers to register with the authorities. There is more on this podcast, from Global Voices. It has a frightening moment at about 15 minutes in, when the interviewee explains what happened when an independent blogger called the Ministry for information on how to register. And if you are outside China and have a web server, you may well be able to help.

How many Chinese people does it take to change a lightbulb? Well, if their Government has anything to do with it, it could be quite a few. The other day in the small supermarket in Dalian’s state-run Friendship Store, I counted 50 uniformed staff. If I look out of my window I can see two elderly men sweeping the dust up and down the same bit of the same road. And it’s also not unusual to find three people staffing a small public bathroom in a public park.

It’s not just public places, though. An average large-sized restaurant typically has up to four women stationed permanently at the door to squawk welcomes and goodbyes at the diners. Big hotels have, in addition to a couple of porters and bell-boys, someone whose job seems to be to ‘help’ people use the revolving doors, which creates obvious difficulties for anyone wanting to get in or out.

Neither is it just Chinese-run businesses. The German-owned wholesaler Metro has literally dozens and dozens of floor staff standing around looking very very bored, while the lucky ones get to whizz around in forklift trucks. They also employ one poor guy to stamp your recept immediately after the checkout staff have given it to you.

I don’t know how the system works. Maybe businesses of a certain size are obliged to employ a certain ratio of people. But the smell from the average Chinese public toilet is enough to tell you that employing all these staff does not result in higher efficiency and a better service – quite the opposite, in fact.

In the supermarket, for example, there are often three or four people in the aisle pointing things out to you and encouraging you to buy them instead of whatever you’ve chosen. However, if you try to find out what the difference is, they can only claim that it is ‘better’. They don’t know why. It’s the same if you try and buy a DVD player, or anything related to your computer. I find that I know more about it than they do. And I’ve been convinced many times that I would do a better job of driving a taxi or a bus than the person employed to do so, despite the fact that I’ve only ever had one driving lesson in my life, and that was a disaster. Even more worrying is coming across articles like this. There is a strong sense that any given person doing any given job in China only has a limited understanding of what they’re supposed to be doing.

Why is this so? I don’t believe any racist nonsense about how the Chinese are any more or less inventive or incompetent than anyone else. My own pet theory is this: After Mao and his henchmen and women had driven anyone with any expertise to madness or suicide, or just plain beaten them to death, there wasn’t that much know-how and learning to go around amongst such a rapidly growing population – and the tradition of passing expertise and wisdom on to future generations had itself received quite a beating.

You can see this clearly in the realms of cultural ‘products’ – although China is the ‘factory of the world’, what cultural exports has it produced in the last few years, apart from those tourist-friendly films celebrating China’s glorious past?

Another enduring legacy of that time is that people don’t seem inclined to challenge anyone in a position of responsibility, even if it’s obvious that they don’t know what they’re doing. Maybe this is an ongoing reaction to a time when nobody’s position was secure, apart obviously from that of the Great Helmsman. The Government soon recovered its authority, and people nowadays tend to regard any form of authority with craven face-saving respect.

So, the Government is desperate to keep people busy, to give them a stake in China’s future and make them believe in the Chinese dream. At least, that’s the charitable point of view. However, in China today those who aren’t lucky enough to find jobs in foreign-owned factories producing inferior-quality goods for export, or unfortunate enough to labour day and night building the unaffordable apartment blocks and hotels that crowd out the skyline of China’s cities, are paid subsistence wages to perform utterly meaningless tasks.

Whatever about Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, I’m sure this wasn’t what Marx and Engels had in mind. And Margaret Thatcher would sleep even less at night at the thought of a public toilet staffed by three salaried employees!

As we all know, low wages are the reason for China’s economic ‘miracle’. And those low wages are the subject of a very interesting article by Andy Xie (it’s the second article on the page), in which he points out that in other fast-developing economies in the past (he talks mostly about South Korea) there was a point at which a labour shortage developed, and wages had to rise.

The crucial point about China, though, is its size. China is starting to run out of land and natural resources – hence the drive to send migrant labourers to Africa to work in Chinese-owned factories. But it will be a very long time before it runs out of peasants prepared to work for very low wages in unskilled jobs. This means that wages will not rise in a country where the supply of labour is basically unlimited and workers are prevented from making demands.

What this means for China, I think, is two things. One is that those new apartment blocks will not rise in price as expected, and there will be some sort of crisis when speculators realise this and stop investing. I think this will lead to big problems for Chinese banks. Andy Xie puts it better than I can:

The fact that Chinese workers benefit little from their productivity gains has profound implications for China’s property market and commodity prices. Property values tend to rise in line with labor income in the long term. Property speculators assume that China’s economic growth will deliver rapid wage growth, and, hence, that they are just front-running Chinese workers in pushing up the prices first, i.e., Chinese workers will buy from them at higher prices with their higher wages in the future. I believe this is an illusion.

The second thing is at some point there will be social unrest related to the failure of wages to keep up with commodity prices. Andy Xie again:

The prices that China can afford depend on wage levels more than the overall size of the economy. The Chinese economy has been expanding rapidly on employment rather than wage growth. In the end, the burden for bearing the costs of raw materials comes down to the income of each consumer. Chinese consumers are just not becoming rich fast enough to catch up with the rapid increase in commodity prices.

But I also believe that all of this has dramatic implications not just for China. China is the ‘factory of the world’ – as we can see right now with the worldwide crisis in the textile industry, companies from other countries will continue to face stiffer and stiffer competition from Chinese exports. And who is going to pay? I think Andy Xie may have just hit the nail on the head with his final point:

In summary, the global financial markets are speculating in China-related assets, in the belief that Chinese prices will rise to OECD levels. I believe that OECD prices are more likely to fall towards Chinese levels.

My own point is this: I don’t think that it’s just commodity prices that are going to fall across the world. Chinese wages are not going to rise to OECD levels. I believe that OECD wages are going to fall torwards Chinese levels.

You know, from a certain perspective, I think that might just be what Globalisation is all about.