Urban poor panhandling |
By Gerald Lemos, The New York Times, September 9, 2012
AS China prepares for a leadership transition next month, problems are
mounting: slowing economic growth, the political fallout from the Bo Xilai
affair and destabilizing social problems. Chinese leaders find it hard to know
what ordinary people really think.
For four years, I tried to answer this question, as I traveled to and
from the foggy, industrial megacity of Chongqing as a visiting professor. I
spent months teaching and studying in communities without foreigners around,
where state-run factories had closed and where landless ex-farmers now live in
barren blocks of apartments.
I wanted to find out what was on the minds of ordinary people. What
did they talk to one another about? So in 2007, with permission of the
authorities, I put up billboards featuring images of trees, like the “wish
trees” in Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian temples, where people tie notes about
their private desires to the branches, hoping that the wind will blow their
prayers to heaven. Chongqing residents stuck hundreds of their leaf-shaped
notes onto the branches of my “trees.”
Their wishes and worries were candid, heartfelt and startling: people
had lost their optimism and were yearning for security and freedom from
anxiety. Income is a primary worry for those who have lost their jobs or land.
Pensions and social welfare payments are almost nonexistent. People struggle to
pay for education. They can’t afford medical treatment; clinics and hospitals
require patients to pay cash in advance. A serious illness can spell financial ruin
for an entire family.
China’s one-child policy has turned family life from a source of
solace to a font of anxiety. Parents now get just one chance for a
child to succeed and to support them in their old age. Single
children carry an unbearable burden of parental and grandparental expectations.
In sum, a spiritual hunger has taken hold even as physical hunger has
receded. Anxiety and resentment are turning people inward; the Chinese are
being consumed by anomie, a listless sense that life has little meaning.
In the late 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms raised living standards and
ended the frightening chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Things were looking up
for almost everyone. But a further wave of reform in the 1990s closed factories
and devoured farms, heralding a storm of new anxieties for many ordinary
people.
Chongqing, which for a time during World War II was China’s capital,
had engulfed surrounding agricultural land. As compensation for lost land,
farmers received a cramped flat and a small cash payment. “I’m a citizen at the
bottom of society,” one wrote for my wish tree. “We would like to punish those
who have taken away our land.”
In another community, built around a huge but now closed tire
factory, one man hung this message: “When the factory went bankrupt, my length
of service was one year short and my age was one year short of retirement. I
worked for 29 years. What can I do with my life when they closed the factory
and my daughter is studying in university?”
Rubbing her stomach, an old woman from the same community told me: “My
daughter is far away in Guangdong. I am sick. I’ve had this lump for a long
time. I think it’s cancer. I can’t afford to go to a doctor, and I haven’t told
my daughter. I don’t want to ruin her life.”
The one-child policy has meant a proliferation of “bare branches” —
men cast aside as a result of China’s skewed gender ratio (six men for every
five women). In a culture with a strong preference for boys, parents often use
ultrasound and terminate pregnancies for sex selection. Fearful about their
chances, even schoolboys worry about marriage.
One undeniably ambitious 11-year-old said he wanted to lead a flying
squad, China’s equivalent of a SWAT team; another boy, age 12, wanted to be a
“trillionaire.” But both feared that they would never get a wife.
Young women, by contrast, can be picky and state openly that only a rich
husband will be acceptable.
I told the
officials who gave me permission to put up the wish trees about these
anxieties. But in their authoritarian, bureaucratic mind-set the reports were
taken as early warnings of social tension rather than grievances to be
redressed.
Many people are turning to Taoist and Buddhist traditions,
Christianity or newfangled religions and cults. Virulent anti-Japanese
nationalism is also on the rise, especially in cities like Chongqing that were
major bombing targets during World War II. So are prostitution, gambling and
suicide.
In their quest for old certainties, ordinary people are
enthusiastically talking once more about Confucius. Prosperous
families send their children to classes to learn about the philosopher’s
“great harmony,” and China is creating hundreds of Confucius Institutes around
the world. In January 2011, a large statue of Confucius appeared unannounced
near Tiananmen Square. It remained for three months but suddenly disappeared
without explanation; placing a statue of the sage in central
Beijing was evidently a step too far.
The incident is a fine symbol for the true battle for China’s future.
It is not an argument between Communism and Western models for society. It is a
search for the Chinese soul and for an alternative to a tortured contemporary
psyche.
When the now disgraced leader Bo Xilai became Chongqing’s mayor he
immediately spearheaded a popular campaign against organized crime and
corruption. Mr. Bo tried to ease the shortage of low-cost housing and to
improve the lot of impoverished migrants to the city. He also began a Maoist
campaign, encouraging the singing of “red songs” and sending SMS messages of
Mao’s sayings to millions. This propaganda was designed to attract the support
of hard-line factions in Beijing, but ordinary people reacted more cynically.
Most people I knew just laughed and shrugged.
But Mr. Bo’s high-profile campaign fell apart when his police chief
sought sanctuary in the American consulate in Chengdu, complaining that Mr. Bo
was riding roughshod over the rule of law.
Although his wife, Gu Kailai, has been convicted of the murder of Neil
Heywood, a British businessman, Mr. Bo’s whereabouts and future remain a
mystery. The “Chongqing model” — Maoist propaganda, handouts for the fractious
poor and ubiquitous control of all public institutions, including the police
and courts — has been a threat to the Beijing leadership but seems to have
collapsed with Mr. Bo’s fall from power.
China’s export-led boom is fading. Potential economic stimuli might
backfire and overwhelm state-owned banks with bad loans. Crony capitalism and
corruption are endemic. Extremes of wealth and poverty, as well as multitudes
of public grievances against officialdom, are all continuously fueling social
discontent.
The anxieties highlighted on my wish trees — the one-child policy, urban
migration, health care, educational costs and unemployment — are intractable.
Beijing needs to become more comfortable with decentralizing power,
but local government is too often corrupt and incompetent. And at the top, the
Communist Party is divided. Its highest priority is the survival of the
one-party system, and for now, it seems to have decided that authoritarianism
is the best bet. The remaining options for ordinary people are despair or
dissent.
1 comment:
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