Trouble brewing: Part two

Taikang is an unlikely candidate for "gaige kaifang"-fuelled economic development.

It's a tiny city (about 300,000 urban residents, plus about 1 million rural residents in surrounding Taikang county) in interior Henan province. Most of its residents are farmers, and even in Taikang city most are first-generation city-dwellers, or they still have plots of land just outside of town.

By Chinese standards, it's pretty underdeveloped: The average income is lower, there's little to no local industry, the ginormous-factory count is way down and fewer people make it through high school, let alone to university.

Taikang's brain drain has been its economic saviour: In the past couple of decades, a growing stream of migrants have left the region to work in China's east-coast industrial heartland. The money they send or bring home has powered growth here that has created new businesses, construction, schools and higher wages. In the past decade, the Wu family here has moved from a one-room apartment in the school where both parents worked, to a small flat downtown, to a roomy house in a new part of the city. They have a car.

But things have started to go sour in the past few months. The nong min gong (migrant worker) migration has been reversed as thousands of east-coast factories shut their doors or simply laid off workers. Plummeting demand for Chinese exports has made operating costs untenable.

Almost four million people returned to Henan province in the final months of 2008. Although most of these people would have been home for the New Year anyway and hope to find work in February, many don't know where their next paycheque will come from. If these "peasants," as they're still officially classified, are forced to rely on tiny plots of land as their sole source of income, that's going to take a massive bite out of Taikang's economy.

One man I spoke with has been working in Shanghai's Baoshan district for the past three years. He made 1,000 yuan a month, much of which he sent back to his wife, parents and now-teenaged kids in a tiny village outside Taikang. He was fired in December when the small company cut back in the face of ballooning inventories and evaporating orders. Most single-family wheat farms like his make about 500 yuan a year per mu of land.

He's heading back to Shanghai later in February, hoping to find work. And if he doesn't...

"So, we'll earn less. We'll live on less."

Uh oh.

Taint China's reputation and die

The verdicts are in: Two men have been sentenced to death for producing melamine, that pesky, poisonous plastic that sickened 300,000 kids, killed six infants and humiliated China shortly after, uh, you know, that big sports thing in August.

40-year-old Zhang Yujun was sentenced to death for running what was allegedly China's largest melamine-producing factory, and Geng Jinping will die for producing and selling toxic food. A third man got a "suspended" death sentence and will likely end up in jail for life.

Tian Wenhua, the Sanlu executive who admitted knowing about the melamine in her company's milk powder at least four months before Sanlu and the government went public, got a life sentence.

Parents of the hundreds of thousands of children who got sick after ingesting the tainted milk aren't satisfied, however. Some are questioning why CCP officials, many of whom would have known about the melamine long before Sanlu's product recall in September, got off so easily.

The important thing, though, is that China can now hold its head high, free of any food-quality scares.

A pedagogical farce

Okay, so it was a bad idea to begin with.











But I needed money and at the time didn't have plans for January. And maybe I was feeling a little masochistic, or just overestimated my own virtue.


So I agreed to teach English to children in Taizhou, locking myself into eight hours a day of instruction with eight less-than-eager youngsters.








The students were prodigy of Zhejiang's monied--the ambitious and competitive parents in whose minds a fluency in English was essential in getting their children into good high schools, good universities and good careers; in short, they viewed learning English (as well as playing the erhu, excelling at sports and acing math, science, Chinese and calligraphy classes) as essential to success.

The kids, however, weren't quite that keen. They fidgeted. They brought sugar-rich snacks to class, consumed them messily and then tossed the wrappers on the floor. They threw cherries at each other. Once they realized my Mandarin was, uh, pretty basic, they talked amongst themselves constantly (in my--feeble--defence, I could understand most of what they said; it just took me a while).

I also discovered that eight hours a day, seven days a week is a long time to spend learning a language, especially when you're a hyperactive 11-year-old who should be on winter break. Each day felt like a marathon relay race as I bounced from grammar to dialogue to art-project based compositions to outdoor games that had a tenuous connection to English instruction but were necessary in order for us all to maintain our sanity after four hours inside a cold, concrete-walled classroom.

It takes a run-on sentence like that just to begin to convey how wiped and braindead (not to mention pedagogically useless) I felt at the end of every day.

I like to think they learned stuff. I definitely did.

One of the most surprising revelations was just how prudish these kids were. Yes, that's the age where kids tend to giggle over pretty much everything. But for some reason I don't remember throwing a tantrum every time I had to sit next to a boy in class. Honestly.

The best (or worst) was when I and my fellow teacher, who had a class of her own, showed the kids English-language movies with Chinese subtitles to get them used to hearing the language. Their response to both Back to the Future and The Little Mermaid was "Eeewww!" "Too yellow" (yellow--huangse--actually is Chinese slang for "sexually explicit," so you can imagine how much fun they had with "Yellow Submarine") and "Not fit for children!"

Wait, what?

I tried to explain these movies, all rated G, are actually geared towards kids in North America. But they would have none of it.

Their objections were numerous: Michael J. Fox and his girlfriend kiss. So do Ariel and the prince. Scandalous, I know. It's worth noting, however, that they were far more put off by the Sea King's long hair than they were by Ariel's skimpy seashells.

What gives? When I was their age I remember thinking Tom Robbins was dirty, but that was just another reason to read his stuff.

I'm not sure how indicative these privileged youngsters are of the rest of their generation, but if so there are millions of kids growing up with a very old-school perception of gender and sexuality.
I fear for their tender sensibilities when they discover the Internet.

Trouble brewing: Part One

Taizhou is one of the ugliest cities I have ever had the privilege of encountering.

It hugs China's east coast, a rich, industrial city in rich, industrial Zhejiang province just a few hundred kilometres south of Shanghai.

It's a shining example of what a few decades of madcap economic development can do: Thirty years ago, Taizhou had no natural resources and therefore no industry; it was the second-poorest city in the province.

Now, it's the third-richest--riding on a wave of manufacturing wealth that has populated the city's streets with swanky new Mercedes Benzes and Lamborghinis.

Unfortunately that wealth hasn't convinced the city's monied denizens or its (justifiably) smug government of the need for urban design of any sort.

So the streets go in all directions. Most buildings look new-ish but grimy and relentlessly out of place. The pavement is filthy despite veritable armies of street cleaners.


There are dozens of stores selling safes, fancy bedding and ugly plastic children's toys and few restaurants or grocery stores (okay, that's more a personal beef than an urban flaw, and there are plenty of fruit-and-vegetable vendors in the old part of town. There's also a butcher shop/mini abattoir doing a wicked trade selling pigs' heads for New Year's).

Crappy urban design is the least of Taizhou's worries, however: This city is one of those hit hardest by the jinrong weiji--the economic crisis--that has dealt exporters a death blow. Few retailers in the U.S. are clamouring for the Chinese plastic this city was shipping out, and that has Taizhou's elites freaked right out.

Both local and national governments are hoping they can convince China's growing middle class to pick up the purchasing slack. A year or so ago, this may not have seemed entirely outside the realm of possibility: Chinese consumers were buying cars, phones and pricey appliances in swelling numbers.

But even the most loaded new xiao zi's spending was nowhere near his or her American counterpart's credit-hungry habits at the best of times. Now that the weiji's effects are spreading and people are settling in for a long-term global recession, what was already a culture that encouraged saving has become one that promotes thriftiness more than ever.

One Taizhou resident I spoke with, even as she extolled the economic virtues of her hometown, laughed when I asked if she planned to up spending as per Hu Jintao's exhortations.

"I was supposed to buy a house this year. Now, there's no question."

Uh oh.

SimChina: The game every young autocrat is dying for this Niu Year

If you're the central government, China is really one big computer game.

It took me a while to come to this conclusion, which is surprising because it's so obvious.

Remember back when SimCity, that choose-your-own-adventure meets urban planning computer game, was popular?

You could spend hours on end building your ideal city, then flip the switch and see what happened when your hapless citizens went along with their daily lives. You could change things and react to crises as they came along. It was the one of the greatest digital power trips a 10-year-old could want.

Click. Eighteen new (and alarmingly empty) skyscrapers in your downtown core!

Click. Bulldoze those houses to make way for a massive stadium shaped like a bird's nest!

Click. A Magnetic Levitation transit line from an airport all the way to the capital of the next province over!

Uh oh, the locals are protesting--do you bring in the riot police or bow to their demands (or, the increasingly popular Option C: Both)?

Starting to sound familiar?

It's widely accepted that a significant part of the credit for China's surreal development over the past 30 years is due to its government's ability to do, um, pretty much whatever it wants. Without pesky elections or political parties to worry about (or at least none of any genuine significance), the government can ensure everything will go according to plan as it blitzes this billion-person country to a global powerhouse and third-largest economy in the world (sucks to be you, Germany).

The catch, of course, is that issuing no-nonsense legislative demands is a lot easier than enacting said edicts when your domain is friggin' enormous and your bureaucracy nowhere near as centralized as you pretend it is. Sure, you can declare that Shaoxing will be the tie capital of the world and Pudong New Area will be divided into four industry-specific economic zones. But it's damn hard to enforce little things like, I dunno, food-safety laws and labour regulations in Dalian, Baoshan and Kashgar--and everywhere in between.

To make things even worse, residents' reactions to your well-meaning clicks are becoming increasingly unpredictable and harder to manage. It's no longer as easy to delete people, or to cut-and-paste them to some more convenient location. And people keep looking over your shoulder, pointing out minor things you really weren't going to bother about or the way you deal with your denizens.

What's a gamer to do?

Hmmmm...

Somehow I get the feeling this isn't going to go over well among some of these "freed serfs."

It also goes a long way towards explaining why Beijing's talks with the Dalai Lama are such a colossal failure.

Yes, this is a touchy subject for all involved and I have yet to meet a single Chinese person who doesn't whole-heartedly believe Xizang/Tibet is an inalienable part of Zhongguo (I also talked with a Xizangren in the rain outside Shanghai's railway station who thinks Tibet is Chinese--he also thinks Beijing is leaving Tibetans in the lurch, development-wise).

But...really?

Street meat

One of the first things people say to you when you tell them you're going to China, right after "Don't organize any 'Free Tibet' rallies," is, "Don't eat the street food."

I tend to break that rule a lot.

Yes, selling things streetside without a licence is technically illegal here. Then again, so are copyright infringements, scalped bus tickets and bribery. Not that any of those exist in China, at all.

Yes, none of this stuff is refrigerated and that can't be good for the ol' lower intestine. Then again, I know for a fact the hygeine in most restaurants' kitchens isn't much better and in a way it's comforting to watch things being cooked right in front of me.

Mostly, though, street food is delicious and cheap; it's also a testament to the culinary creativity of people who are pretty shafted in terms of their lifestyles here.

My favourite couple sells malatang outside the Fudan Daxue Bei Men. He's from Xi'an; she's from rural Sichuan. Their eight-year-old daughter, whom they've somehow wrangled a spot at the local public school, skips rope outside with them after school. They make the best numbingly spicy soup on this side of Chengdu. With a steady stream of students flocking to their stall, this is one pair of migrant workers with no plans to return home for lack of work.

OMG, sry we poisoned ur kid. C U L8r!

I almost wish I had been poisoned with melamine, just so I could have gotten this.

You know a failing company really cares when it sends you a text message, right?

New 'hood

So I moved a little while ago--from a dorm room in the fishbowl foreign students' residence of a way-off-in-the-boonies campus to a shared apartment in a neighbourhood of Pudong.

Pudong's a weird place. It's the home of Shanghai's signature skyline--think towering phallic skyscrapers and that ugly, bulbous space station, the Dongfang Mingzhu--on the eastern banks of the Huangpu River. It's also home to the Special Economic Zones the city began in the early '90s to launch Shanghai into the market-driven (but still centrally orchestrated) global economy. On its eastern outskirts are communities of migrant workers and other groups relocated when their old downtown houses were bulldozed and modernized.

Like I said--weird.

The neighbourhood I've landed in offers a fascinating glimpse of the bridge between traditional Shanghairen and their emerging upper-middle class.

My apartment complex is home to a mix of young families and old people, with the odd thrifty businessman thrown in. Like traditional Danwei-style "model communities" it's fenced off, has blase security guards at the entrance and--as I learned to my chagrin early one Sunday morning--the main gate locks up between midnight and 6 a.m.

Across the street from my apartment is a big indoor market boasting a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, hunks of tofu, still-flopping fish and enormous slabs of raw meat. The street outside is dominated by tiny stores selling household goods and steamed rolls; a woman sits on the sidewalk every day at her portable sewing machine and seems to be making a killing.

A block in the other direction is a strip of bars, beauty salons and the first veterinary hospital I've seen in this country. The latter, especially, is a sure sign of a population bourgeois and wealthy enough to worry as much about their animal companions' health as they do about their own.

So there's now demand for a snazzy-looking place where the children of the Cultural Revolution can take Fluffy in for her shots.

Mao Zedong would not approve.

A few blocks north, there's a ramshackle grouping of houses under a bridge, with outdoor water taps and low-hanging laundry lines reminiscent of Puxi's shikumen. Except, of course, these dwellings (and in all likelihood their inhabitants, as well) are a little more illegal.

Over that same bridge is the enormous--and, quite frankly, not a little frightening--Lotus department store. It's your typical disorienting, overly huge Wal-Mart type store, designed to house everything you could possibly want arranged in such a way that you won't find it without plowing through several kilometres of shit you'll never need but will likely end up buying anyway just because it's there.

My housemate loves it.