Some glimpses of China

January 8, 2005

Your humble correspondent always feels shabby speaking ill of other countries—a sinking dread of being misunderstood. Many of my posts on China tend to express the pain of life there, as will this one. And the misunderstanding will be that the Chinese nation is somehow a failure, its industrial might an assault on the piece of ground allotted to the Chinese, its political judgments a colossal error. If only the Chinese had done something different, they could be living in comfort... That is the misunderstanding I need to clear up: for as time passes, it seems harder and harder to imagine how the world could have been different, and China is no exception.

When the Chinese authorities decided to introduce market reforms to their sequestered country, they did so one prefecture at a time. Markets being what they are, it would never do to allow that one prefecture to have free interaction with the rest of the country—workers would migrate in search of higher pay, goods in search of higher prices, and creative destruction would come to the country like the blossoming of fireballs over every hamlet in the country. The power of the party to manage the "experiment" would be lost. And yet, when special economic zones "took off," the incentive was to throw more fuel on fires already burning. And so it was that China became like a series of concentric rings, with the outermost rings being the desperately poor, hungry and chaotic regions of Qinghai, Xixang (Tibet), Sha'anxi, Henan, and Guizhou; then, most of Anhui, Guangxi and Sichuan—places ravaged worst by the Great Leap Forward; then the old rust belts of Liaoning (in Manchuria), Shandong, Zhexiang; then the booming metropoli of Shanghai, Shenzen, Guangzhou, Wuhan; and at the very top, Beijing—for Beijing controlled it all.

The old dynamic of super-rich Northern country, guzzling gas and wolfing down costly food from the lands to the south, applies in China as well. The American worker, with absurd transportation bills, housing bills, medical bills, and other elements of entitlement sustainability, or her European colleague with the lofty standard of living, is ever at the mercy of market insularity. When recessions hit, the worker is reminded from all sides that a thousand Chinese are available to do the job for a twentieth the wage. In the meantime, the Chinese working in a sweatshop in Shanghai or Guangzhou is under the same misgiving—that there are eager hordes of Henanese, or even Hakka from poor prefectures of Guangdong, clamoring for access to those jobs in the city.

By way of illustration, EastSouthWestNorth features two fascinating posts (hat tip to Asian Labour News). The first one features a set of photographs from life in China. The pictures are not about cruelty and barbarism; they are about coping with difficult conditions that my readers can scarcely imagine:

And here are links to the entire series.

And more recently, Roland posts about the huge pressure of wage differentials (alough he seems to think he's posting about indentured servitude):

During the summer of 2004, three investigators from the Municipal Government of Chongqing traveled through eight provinces in China to study the problem of "pensions for peasant laborers." The deepest impression that these investigators got was about the "indentured" terms that the peasant workers endured.

At a wood factory in eastern China, the investigators found out that when workers wanted to use the bathroom during work hours, they must wear the special yellow jacket provided by the factory. Anyone found in the bathroom without the yellow jacket was penalized heavily. Of course, there was one and only one yellow jacket in the whole factory.

"They did the dirtiest work, the most tiring work and the toughest work. The temperature at the factory was high as 60 degrees centigrade. A family of three lived in a shed of six square meters. Their meal was usually one dish (vegetables only) and one soup." This was how investigator Hu summarized the typical home of peasant laborers.

Investigator Luo said that at a shoe factory in Zhejiang province, the production room was only 3 meters tall; there was a wall outside the window, which meant that the could not circulate; even if you just stand outside the door, you will be assaulted by the malodorous smell of plastic. Inside the air was so foul that you cannot even see the workers. A worker told them that the temperature was normally over 50 degrees centigrade inside, and as high as 60 or 70 during the summer.

The investigators went to visit a worker's home near a plastic factory in Zhejiang province. When they got there, a boy brought over some stools for them to sit while the mother was busy washing clothes. They saw that the 'home' of this family looked just like a temporary shed at a construction site, with stacked concrete blocks for walls and abestos tiles for the roof.

In future posts, I'd like to address this similarity and differences.