Strangers in the City - pt. 2

As promised, part 2:

Shen, 35, Construction Worker

“I don’t really have much contact with the people around here. I’m here for the work.” Having worked in the construction industry for seven years and in six different cities, Shen’s relationship with the city he now happens to inhabit is definitely a marriage of convenience. That being said, there’s not much love lost regarding his home village, either. “Work’s work. It isn’t really on to be asking for holidays all the time. If there’s a spare weekend here and there, I might go home, since the transport’s so easy from here.” As a family man and roving beneficiary of China’s booming construction industry, his main concern is working his way up the ladder to the coveted rank of foreman. Moving with the work, Shen is a fully paid-up member of China’s substantial “floating” population.

He also has an unswerving faith in the power of China’s continued development to keep workers like him insulated and afloat in the wake of the current global economic turmoil. “I’m not worried about my job. Ever since this country was founded it’s needed new buildings. There’s no way that’s going to just tail off.” As far as he’s concerned, his industry’s ability to weather any storm is assured. “I don’t know what I’d do if things did take a turn for the worse. It’s just not something I’ve devoted any thought to.”

A pragmatist he may be, but perhaps unlike many others Shen also derives a strong sense of satisfaction from his work. “It’s a great feeling to complete a project. Everyone from the boss down to the laborers get’s pretty worked up about it. Still, it’s a shame we don’t get to enjoy the fruits of our labor.”

Cao Junqiao, 20, Waitress

“I never thought I’d miss my family this much.” As she speaks fondly of her parents back in Anhui, or protectively of her younger brother (like her, a recent migrant), it becomes apparent that after the initial excitement of arriving the big city, the reality of living a life uprooted from family and friends is starting to hit home for Cao. “My mum called over autumn festival; she was all worked up, worrying that I wasn’t going to get my moon-cakes this year.”

Cao is still relatively new in town. After graduating from high school in June, she decided to head for Nanjing with a group of her classmates. Arriving with no jobs awaiting them, no knowledge of the city, and no money, the first few days were tough going. “When we first got here, we had nowhere booked to stay, so we dumped our bags at the Nanjing Library. We had scarcely any money on us, so pretty much every hotel was outside our price range. We ended up spending the night in an internet café! When the next morning came around, we had no idea what time the library opened. It was some way away, but we’d spent all our money so we just had to make do with walking. We got there at 5.30 and hung around for four hours until the place opened. While we were waiting, we bumped into an old guy playing erhu and doing his morning stretches in the park next door. Turned out he was a university professor, over 80 years old, spoke great English. He asked us where we were from. We told him we were from Anhui, and that our parents were peasants. He said “ah! Peasants are the kind of people I admire most!’ Can you imagine?”

Now established as a waitress in a Hunanese restaurant, Cao is slowly starting to settle into her new surroundings. “At first, I didn’t have a clue, but the others helped me out, and I got the hang of it after a few shifts. Now it’s great – I’m good at what I do, and I love working with all the girls here.” However, though she remains sanguine about the challenges that face her, the current job is definitely no more than a means to an end. “I need to get together a bit more money first, but I’m hoping to start night school next year. I really like the idea of studying to become a tour guide, but you’ve got to learn so much, even reading classical Chinese. It’s tough. Whatever, though, I’m not going to be a waitress all my life!”

Strangers in the City - pt. 1

Apologies for recycling material - I'm snowed under and abroad for the next ten days, so in the interests of continuity, here is the first of two parts of an interview piece on migrant workers produced for a local magazine last November. The introduction, on re-reading, is over-wrought and over-written. Far better to let the interviewees speak for themselves:

Li Chao, 40, Street-Sweeper

Despite the sickly bittersweet smell of generic fermentation that suffuses the place, the waste-processing post near the intersection of Danfeng Jie and Zhujiang Lu is unexpectedly spotless, its white-tiled surfaces gleaming in the early morning sunlight. Inside, we meet Li, an unassuming yet affable man sitting resplendent in his brand new glowing orange safety jacket. It’s the job of Li and his team to make sure that their designated section of road is kept spotless throughout the day. The hours are long: “Normally I’m up and working by four in the morning,” Li says. “We work through until a bit before seven, then set down to breakfast. We don’t clock off until ten at night, so I only get about four hours’ sleep a night.” It’s not always enough. “If there’s a break in the work, I might catch forty winks now and then, though strictly speaking it’s against the rules,” he says with a smile.

Li first moved to Nanjing eight years ago. Like so many new arrivals, he found his job through personal connections: “My aunt was in Nanjing. She helped sort me out. It’s hard to just roll in and find a job.” As street sweepers, he and his wife are able to earn enough to put their two children through university, so long as they all live frugally. “Things are alright here, it’s a pretty cheap place to live, we can get by on about five hundred yuan a month. That leaves us a thousand or so to put the kids through school. That said, they’re on a tight budget, even the school canteen’s expensive, so it’s no gourmet dinners for them!”

With his old village some two hundred and fifty kilometres away, Nanjing is beginning to feel more and more like home for Li. “If someone were to tell me I had to up sticks and work elsewhere, I think I’d find it pretty hard to leave,” he says. “You could say Nanjing is my second home town now.” Yet so long as he is unable to register as an urban resident, the future remains uncertain. “We’ve got no pensions. I certainly hope our kids will end up taking care of us, but that’s just a hope. Whether they choose to or not is up to them, really.” And if the worst comes to the worst? “Well, I’ll just have to move back to my first home town and grow old, won’t I?”

Chen Changyou, 47, Taxi Driver

Originally from a peasant household, Chen was awarded the much-sought after status of full urban resident after a stint in the army. With access to healthcare, a pension, and the right to own property, he has been blessed with the opportunity to integrate into his adopted city in a fashion most migrants can only dream of. As he puts it, “Nanjing’s my mother-in-law.” Working in the relatively lucrative taxi business (on average, he can expect to take home 4,000 yuan a month), he has been better placed than most to view the city’s evolution in the 28 years since he first arrived. For people in his line of work, development’ translates directly: a new road to be traveled, an new landmark to be committed to memory. “When I first arrived in town, the tallest building around was six floors,” Chen says. “And that was a hotel. Back then, the roads were narrow, torturous. There were still plots of cultivated land strewn about the place. There were no expressways, airports or anything like that. The reality of life today goes way beyond what I could ever imagine as a child. Back then, even driving cars was the preserve of party secretaries and cadres. Now, I’ve got two homes, and I can buy my own car if I want to. Life’s better everywhere, sure, but it’s 28 years of hard graft that got me where I am today.”

Chen’s work ethic is simple. “You’ve got to get your hands dirty. If you want to get rich, you’ve got to be prepared sweat blood, just like a peasant.” Every inch the self-made man, he is nonetheless fiercely proud of his adopted home and the opportunities it has afforded him. “Ever since I retired from the army, I’ve been doing everything I can to make a contribution to this city, my new hometown. Whenever I pick up foreigners in my cab, I feel like I’m acting as a representative for Nanjing itself.” But despite being able to consider himself a proper Nanjingren now, he remains aware of the gulf he has traversed to make it this far, one that so many others still face. “Every month I put a bit of money aside to give to the migrant school here. Happily, I’m lucky enough to be in a position to do this.”

The Pleasure of Plenums

a handy guide to that thing you probably haven't heard about.

Somewhere on the distant edge of your current-affairs radar, the faint notion that events of a vaguely political nature are currently underway in China may have begun to emerge as a fuzzy, indistinct blip.

Perhaps you’ve been dimly aware of state premier ‘grandpa’ Wen Jiabao’s delivery of the State Council’s annual report (in a speech lasting well over two hours, Papa Wen spent a good deal of time hurling about the word faith as if he’d just invented it, as he has already done at Davos and elsewhere this year. If this behaviour persists much longer, he’s liable to end up sounding like either Gordon Brown or George Michael, neither of which is particularly seemly for a man with this much social capital).

More likely, you might have picked up on People’s Congress chairman Wu Bangguo’s assertion that China has no plans to adopt western-style parliamentary democracy in the near future (Absolutely No Democracy for China Ever Ever Ever! – BBC; more on this later).

Either way, the news that China’s NPC and NPPCC are busy holding their annual double-plenum is unlikely to inspire much excitement. The bodies occupy a confusing position within China’s dizzyingly complicated government structure (which, in many respects, still serves as little more than a front for a highly centralised authoritarian core). According to the epithet-flinging sages at the Guardian, all this amounts to is yet another meeting of the country’s ‘rubber-stamp parliament’, not worthy of the attention of us parliamentary democratic types.

Though there is an element of truth in this, the horse-trading, jockeying for position, political haggling, and genuine all-out policy debate taking place in the corridors and meeting-rooms of Beijing’s Great Hall of the People is becoming more significant with each passing year, and forms a rare and fascinating window onto the realm of modern Chinese politics in motion.

Here, then, is a pocked guide to the Third Plenum of the 10^th National People’s congress. Let’s start with the warm-up act.

The what? The NPPCC, or National People’s Political Consultative Conference.

Who’s involved? Bizarrely for a one-party state, NPPCC delegates are drawn mainly from the eight parties that make up the body of its ‘united front.’ Though they all toe the party line pretty closely today, the names of one or two belie the ossified remnants of a desperate and often tragic struggle for political compromise that took place in certain quarters following the end of World War II, as the nation slid back towards bloody civil war (the ‘China Democratic League’ spent its early days trying to drum up support for a ‘third way’ between the communists and the nationalists before being hijacked from the left, leaving many of its founding members to bear the full brunt of the political upheavals of the 50s and 60s).

The 2,000 odd delegates are chosen through a non-representative system of proposal and nomination, and include leading academics, professionals, intellectuals, and the occasional popular figure like Olympic hurdling champion Liu Xiang (who managed to stumble off the plane from the states just in time to attend the plenum’s closing ceremony). Broadly speaking, delegates are roughly analogous to the kind of people one might find stocking the majority of the shelves over at the House of Lords.

What is it meant to do? “Political consultation, democratic supervision, and political participation.” Essentially, a mechanism for ordinary citizens to play a direct role in overseeing the legislative activities of their government.

What does it actually do? Not much. NPPCC ‘proposals’ have no way of becoming legislation. Next to the NPC’s sleek ship of state, the NPPCC is a bit like a crazed gondolier, sputtering a host of largely unworkable, often ridiculous, yet occasionally intriguing proposals as he punts alongside. Many of the hundreds of proposals put forward are genuine reflections on current political talking points, allowing delegates to serve as a kind of foil for their colleagues next door at the NPC itself. Some, however, remain wonderfully ludicrous (the pick of this year’s crop include suggestions for everyone to start buying a kind of national costume in a bid to boost ‘patriotic’ consumerism, and a proposal to allow 17-year-olds to take their university entrance exams in classical Chinese).

All of which brings us to the main act…

The what? National People’s Congress.

Who’s involved? Technically speaking, this is the elected representative body of the people of China. NPC delegates are elected by and from a pool of local-level NPC’s, which in turn are elected directly by ordinary citizens. However, this is all slightly academic at the moment since most candidates are party-vetted, the number of competing candidates per seat is tightly controlled (usually about 120 candidates for every 100 seats), and electioneering is illegal.

What is it meant to do? Technically speaking, the NPC is the nation’s highest legislative body, representing the apex of the Chinese ‘state’ power structure (as opposed to the ‘party’ structure, with which it is intertwined). At its annual meetings, it discusses major policy initiatives and ratifies them into law, while its smaller, year-round Standing Committee is responsible for more day-to-day legislation.

What does it actually do? Though there still remains a certain whiff of the ‘rubber-stamp’ about it (China’s 4bn yuan stimulus package flitted by this year with barely a mention), the NPC has become an increasingly politicised body in recent years.

The fact that bills forged by the State Council (headed by Papa Wen, China’s equivalent of a cabinet) usually breeze through the NPC with little opposition at the voting stage often masks the torturous business of hammering out the details that can now take place over the course of events like the annual plenums, (a re-emergent by-product of a deep cultural tendency to try and reach consensus wherever possible).

While everyone involved still professes a fundamental loyalty to the party line, different delegates may hold wildly different opinions about the direction in which the country is headed and how best to get it there. Increasingly, NPC legislation represents not just the original intentions of the country’s leadership clique, but the compromise reached after these differing voices have had their say.

This brings us back to the issue of democratisation (yes, that old chesnut). While Wu Bangguo may have dismissed multi-party democracy out of hand, an increasingly vocal NPC presents intriguing possibilities. There is little doubt on this last point – this morning’s papers contain stories of one NPC delegate suggesting acidly that the body would be more effective if less time were spent on collective self-congratulation and more on discussing legislation, while others have called for greater and earlier transparency of central government proceedings, or full immunity of speech [should appear here later today] to allow for wider-ranging debate – comments that would have been unthinkable a few years back.

The question is where next? An empowered NPC and an overhauled, more competitive electoral system could, if properly handled, end up being every bit as ‘representative’ as many of the world’s supposed democracies. Is a one-party democratic model possible, or will the steering hand of the CCP only become more subtle in its stifling of genuine debate? Check back here in 20 years or so to find out!

在这，读不懂中国, or He Who Shouts Loudest....

Events in the row over the return (or not) of artefacts looted from Beijing’s old Summer Palace took a farcical turn this week as winning bidder Cai Mingzhong proclaimed that, Chinese patriot that he was, he had no intention of actually shelling out the absurd €31m needed to seal the deal, thus promising to drag out this ill-tempered affair for a good few weeks yet. Dealing as it does with Chinese humiliation at the hands of foreign foes, this is a story that plucks on the raw nerves of popular sentiment like strumming away at a very loud, very angry harp.

While China undeniably has the moral high ground on the issue, it is worth remembering that, in terms of time elapsed, kicking up this much fuss about something that happened in 1860 would be equivalent to the city of Naples demanding the return of its sovereign (nay, inalienable) territory stolen by that upstart Garibaldi.

However, this is by the by. Decades of official narratives about “a century of national humiliation” (1850-1950) coupled with China’s uncertain position in the international pantheon mean that this kind of thing still has a potent resonance.

There are, however, various ways in which to approach an issue. Here is how the story was treated in an editorial from The China Daily, the state run English-language paper:

A French judge's refusal to halt the sale of bronze heads of a rabbit and rat at an auction today does not mean an end to the Chinese people's efforts to retrieve such relics (…).

What is even more ridiculous is the connection Pierre Berge, the former partner of Yves Saint Laurent and now owner of the art collection to be auctioned, has tried to make between the return of the animal heads and human rights (…).

That only means he follows what we Chinese call gangster logic - to blackmail someone with something robbed from that person (…).

Those who took part in the plundering and the very act of setting fire to the "garden of all gardens" owe Chinese people a heavy debt not only in the real value of properties they destroyed or plundered but also in terms of morality and justice.

A word about how this particular institution is run. English-language stories are almost always written by Chinese authors and then made serviceable by foreign sub-editors (serviceable being, in many cases, a relative term. Please remember, while you read this link, that this is a story run by the state news agency. Even the BBC, that doyenne of embarrassing cock-ups, manages to run a reasonably professional Chinese language section without making a complete tit out of itself).

The paper’s editorial line, needless to say is handed down straight from the propaganda department, and thus corresponds fairly closely to the impression of itself the Chinese government wishes to broadcast to the outside world.

By contrast, here is a translated extract of an article entitled The Moral History of the Old Summer Palace carried last Thursday by a privately-owned Chinese-language newspaper, the Southern Weekly:

…as pointed out recently by an eminent historian, the reason why contemporary Chinese remain obsessed with the fate of this former imperial retreat is that they are bewildered as to “how Westerners could break the international laws which they themselves had established, laws which expressly prohibited looting of private property in times of war, regardless of whether it belonged to the common people, or the head of state…” However, the story of the Summer Palace has a wider significance. We ourselves must accept at least some of the responsibility for the palace’s current decrepit state. Hot on the heels of the Anglo-French forces came local residents, who stripped the place bare for timber. During the chaos following the fall of the Qing, everyone from high officials to common thieves had a hand in sequestering away what little remained its former glory. Even under the current administration, this process of destruction and neglect continued unabated; the artificial hills and lakes were filled in, and what had once been a garden became a patch of farmland, crisscrossed with roads. Then came the Cultural Revolution…

The story is thus a complicated one, but the main point is simple enough; history deserves respect, and we should cherish all of the material treasures we are fortunate to have in our position.

Don't expect the Chinese domestic press to come out in support the West over such issues. Don't expect it to be particularly moderate, or particularly outspoken. Do, however, expect to find, here and there, a well-constructed argument, a reasoned opinion, or the sound of an individual voice.

This is already a point that has been made much more artfully and at greater length by James Fallows in the Atlantic last year. Though the kind of swill served up by the China Daily on a daily basis may suggest otherwise, there is, in fact, much to be found in China's domestic media that is worthy of admiration and respect. While severe restrictions on press freedom still exist, the dance-like negotiation between censors keen to keep everyone on-message, and editors doing their best to sell papers is slowly pushing the boundary forward. Restricted, alas, to speakers of Chinese, there is a wealth of considered, well-argued and occasionally beautifully written journalism to be found beyond the realms of the state media engine.

In this context, the adolescent tantrums of China’s various state-monopolized English-language outlets are thus made to seem particularly offensive. Not only are they offensive to the intelligence of pretty much everyone on the planet, but worse, their shrill and persistent screams are a misleading and perverse mockery of the actual state of the contemporary Chinese media.

(Note: should you be interested, the following sources offer at least a glimpse of the kind of stuff emerging from non-state media sources. Tim Hathaway, an American journalist associated with the Southern Weekly translates the paper’s weekly editorial on his blog; Danwei.org is a site devoted to following stories in, and about, the Chinese media, and while not strictly media-related, ChinaSmack is an English-language round up of hot topics on China’s BBS discussion forums)