This Generation (20 page)

Many people think that the subtext of the Fujian initiative is that recently some history teachers and university professors have been a bit too vocal, and of course I've seen in today's news that the history teacher Yuan Tengfei has been investigated—along with the Heaven on Earth Night Club—but I doubt that the two things are linked. When the Sensitive Council has not yet shown its hand, the government is not going to respond so rapidly nor are the various departments going to coordinate so seamlessly. It's just a coincidence, a routine decree from an educational department. Some kind of decree like this governs all professions in China—it's simply that the precise language may take different forms. In the same way, all raffles share a common principle: The authority to interpret the rules rests with the sponsoring body. And I don't propose to discuss the question of who has the power to decide whether someone else's thought is correct or incorrect, for that topic is meaningless, since the answer is obvious. Who has the power? It's the people in power, of course, who have that power. Everything that bolsters their interests and their power is, of course, correct, and everything not conducive to promoting their interests and enhancing their power is naturally incorrect. As soon as you have grasped that principle, you'll never have to tie yourself into knots wondering what is right and what is wrong.

As for you history teachers, literature teachers, and politics teachers, what kind of role do you think you will play and what kind of
verdict do you think will be passed on you in the textbooks of the future? Perhaps you are simply a vegetable that is not in charge of its own affairs, but your students are your seedlings. Try to be real teachers, imparting to your students common sense and reflection, independence and a sense of justice, so that in your old age, when you tell your grandchildren you once served in this profession, you will feel a surge of pride rather than be stricken with shame.

May 28, 2010

A high school friend of
mine had no great aspirations, but was healthy and eager to work. After a long search, he landed a job in an assembly plant, for a salary of one thousand five hundred yuan a month. Often he would work overtime, which sometimes was paid and sometimes was not, for a total of two thousand yuan a month. He lived six or seven miles away from his workplace, so he bought a scooter, leaving home early and coming home late. Recently married, he couldn't afford to buy a house. Fortunately, his parents did have some rental income: Like other families in his home village, they built a three-story house and rented out the first and second floor to migrant laborers—six rooms at two hundred fifty yuan rent each, bringing in an extra monthly income of one thousand five hundred yuan. Those out-of-towners typically lived as a family, three to a room, each of them earning a bit over eight hundred yuan a month, walking or cycling to local factories. These factories, set up by investors from elsewhere, manufactured chemical products and polluted more heavily than the assembly plants. Most of them have now closed down. The few that remain are able to turn a slight
profit, but if they were to clean up their act and reduce emissions, that would put them in the red, and if that happened they wouldn't be able to pay taxes and make a contribution to GDP, so the local government can't afford to enforce regulations.

My friend feels he's not done so badly—he's found a wife, anyway—but pretty much all his income is spent just on basic subsistence and any major purchase is out of the question. He doesn't dare change his job or head off to some other region to try his luck, in part because there is no social safety net, and if by chance something happened and he missed out on a month's wages, there would just be no way to carry on. Looking ahead to the birth of a child, he and his wife would like to buy a house in the town and acquire an urban residence permit, but an apartment in one of the satellite towns near Shanghai costs at least half a million yuan. For that, he would need to work without eating and drinking for twenty-five years, and what he'll get for that is just the basic shell of an apartment—he'd need to go hungry for another five years to get it properly fixed up.

His next-door neighbor, another friend of mine, has just graduated from university and gets paid a bit more. But his girlfriend has higher expectations: She won't marry him until he has a house in the city. An older city apartment costs at least two million yuan, so my friend needs to work for sixty years—or his family needs to rent out their house to eight migrant-worker families for a hundred years—before he can afford to buy it. So all they can hope for is forced relocation. Even if the government purchases their house for half a million and then sells off the land for five million, they're not going to protest, for the half million can cover the down payment on an apartment in the city. How they manage in the future remains to be seen, but at least this way he would be able to marry. As for where his parents will live after the house is demolished, that's certainly an issue, but maybe they'd be able to rent a reasonably sized room in another local's house for three hundred yuan or so, as an interim arrangement.

My first friend's previous job involved rotating shifts and the factory was far from his home; he developed health problems and resigned the job to take his current position, hoping for less overtime and higher pay; his employer indicated he would get a raise of one hundred yuan this year and another one hundred yuan next year. Last week he told me that his father is probably going to get a job abroad as a bricklayer: If he works abroad for three years, he should make two hundred thousand yuan. I asked him what his plan was, and he said he'd just carry on as he was doing—what other choice is there? His mother is screwing in light bulbs for eight hundred yuan a month. This young man in his twenties is looking at his own future thirty years from now: a father in his fifties who has to go abroad to work for two years. This family in the outskirts of Shanghai dislikes the migrant laborers, for they compete for jobs in the local factories and have driven down salaries to just a few hundred yuan a month, and the ratio of outsiders to locals in the areas is now over ten to one. At the same time, they have no choice but to depend on them, because they pay over ten thousand yuan in rent each year.

Such is the life of ordinary folk in the outskirts of Shanghai, and this family might actually be doing pretty well. It's situations like this that have led so many employees at Foxconn to throw themselves off buildings: repetitive work, very low wages, a hopeless future.
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But if they go somewhere else, wages will be even lower. The cost of living is high: Though they won't go hungry or suffer cold, there's nothing else they can do. And giving them enough to eat is presented by the government as a huge achievement, a notable contribution to the world and to humanity. How the authorities wish they could get their hands on the archives of prehistory or photographs of the Ice Age, for that would really show what a big debt the people owe to
the government! Since just having enough to eat is such an accomplishment, how could people possibly have higher goals than that? Although my friend is under a lot of pressure, at least his friends and family are close by. But for the vast majority of young migrant workers, their families are a thousand miles away or more, and their families may well not treat them with much affection, for how much you earn is commonly the sole criterion Chinese families have for determining the value of a child.

These young workers represent a sector of society unfamiliar to most Internet users. It's rare to find chat rooms where current employees of Foxconn tell stories about the suicides of their coworkers or talk about their own lives, for they don't have time to do those things and may not even know how. The garish, self-indulgent life outside has nothing to do with them, and they have no hopes of love, either, given the reality of their existence. Maybe only when they throw themselves off the roof does the value of their lives find some expression, when their having once existed is briefly mentioned and remembered, although now they have become only a statistic.

Psychological counseling is useless. When they see our women cuddling the rich, and the rich cuddling the officials, and the officials cuddling the bosses, and the bosses cuddling Lin Chi-ling,
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how are you going to give them psychological counseling? If I make inquiries, I find that my former classmates are all struggling. If there are men who are doing okay, it's because they depend on their parents, and if there are women who are doing okay, it's because they have married well. Everyone envies your benefits at Foxconn: wages issued on time, accommodation provided, and overtime with pay. You tell people you're a robot, but those people say they're just a pile of shit. In an area of several hundred square kilometers, there's not a single realistic rags-to-riches story to tell: Such is the life of so many Chinese youth.

If the Foxconn workers were paid ten times what they are now, would the suicides stop? So long as inflation isn't ten times what it is now, then yes—the suicides would cease. Of course, their employer would never raise their pay that much—and if they did, the government would issue an edict forbidding it. Why have our politicians been able to pump up their chests on the world political stage and make some political moves and play some political tricks? It's because of you, China's cheap labor: you are China's gambling chips, hostages to GDP. Whether it is socialism with Chinese characteristics or capitalism with feudal characteristics, in the next ten years there is no way out for these young people. This is so sad: warm blood that should be coursing through veins—spilled on the ground, instead.

June 24, 2010

Orphan of Asia was originally
the title of a 1945 novel by the Taiwanese author Wu Zhuoliu, written during the Japanese occupation; the book describes the tragic predicament of a Taiwanese intellectual who is mistreated by the Japanese but also discriminated against in China. Later, the name was applied to a detachment of the Chinese Nationalist Army stranded in the border area of southwest China; their story formed the basis for a Hong Kong feature film. Luo Dayou wrote a song for that movie, which was set in the region of Yunnan, Burma, and Laos, although he was no doubt also thinking of Taiwan's isolation at the time. One of those places is now one of Asia's problem children, but the others are among Asia's promising youngsters; the true orphan of Asia is North Korea.

Last week I watched Brazil play North Korea in the World Cup, a match I had been looking forward to for a long time, in part because I like South American soccer, in part because North Korea is just so mysterious. “Do you think the Korean players will be shot when they get home,” I joked with my friends, “because they have had a chance to see the world?” After watching the
first half, another thought occurred to me. “North Korea actually has always been good enough to reach the finals,” I said, “it's just that the past few World Cup finals have been held in developed countries, so it wasn't convenient for them to progress beyond the qualifying round. This time the finals are in South Africa, where there's a huge gap between rich and poor, so the North Korean government took their team and dumped them in a South African shanty town and said, ‘See, this is how you live when you don't have socialism.' Generalissimo Kim Jung-il had decided it was all right for them to take part.”

In this first match the North Korean team played stylish soccer and were very sportsmanlike as well: No playacting or pushing and shoving, and if they fell down they were back on their feet right away. Whether out of sympathy for the underdog or out of solidarity with other Asians, I was touched by their performance. And when they finally scored a goal, I was delighted—although I did remind my friends that just because they like the Korean players and the Korean people they shouldn't take things any further and start liking Kim Jung-il and the dominant ideology there. When it came to the second match, many people quite fancied North Korea's chances, thinking they might well upset Portugal. But experience tells us that with this kind of country, whatever the setting, once things start to go wrong the whole place is likely to fall apart. When North Korea was thrashed 7–0, my friends began to worry once more about the fate of the team when they got back home.