Chasing the Chinese Dream

Stories from Modern China

Nick Holdstock

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786722201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: History

China is undergoing the biggest and fastest societal and economic change in human history. Driving this dizzying transformation is the idea of the 'Chinese Dream', the promise that in the new China, anyone can make it. Journalist and writer Nick Holdstock has travelled the length of this huge country in order to find out the reality behind this rhetoric - from the factory-owner, to the noodle seller, from the karaoke maids to the hoteliers, and from the deserted, ageing countryside to the young and overcrowded cities.Chasing the Chinese Dream follows a cast of extraordinary characters: we meet the people getting rich; running factories and buying luxury cars and Louis Vuitton bags. But we also meet those left behind, trapped by a system which forces long hours and no prospects upon them. A spell-binding and magical narrative, this book looks to tell the story of modern China through the people who are living it.

Part I

‌1

Jumping the Dragon Gate

After I left Shaoyang I tried to stay in touch with many of my students. Over the next eight years I was only able to keep in direct contact with a small number of them, but through them I learned what had become of many of their classmates. Though most had entertained grand dreams of leaving both Shaoyang and Hunan province far behind, few had been successful. The majority were only able to find work in towns and cities within the province, and usually only as teachers. But for many of them this still constituted upward social mobility. These sons and daughters of farmers had become urban professionals.

In April 2010 I went back to China to visit two former students whose fortunes after graduation had differed greatly. Wenli was living in Shanghai, while Xiao Long was teaching in a school in the Hunan countryside. Both had been excellent students. Xiao Long’s spoken English had been excellent, while Wenli had been one of the brightest, most politically savvy students, who spent his free time preparing for a succession of gala performances that commemorated key moments in the history of Chinese Communism. I wanted to know how such gifted carp had ended up at opposite ends of the waterfall.

*

I met Wenli on the platform of Shanghai’s Dongchang underground station. He was wearing a grey T-shirt under a brown leather jacket with padded shoulders. On the T-shirt a woman’s face was drawn in a pop-art style, her mouth open in either a gasp or a scream. His trousers were cream-coloured and tight without being skinny, and ended in a pair of worn Converse trainers. In other words, Wenli looked cool.

‘You made it!’ he said, and smiled, and the sight of his teeth – their discoloration and uneven spacing, the gums that appeared recessed – immediately recalled the young man who ten years earlier had gasped in wonder at photos of Hyde Park, who sometimes came to class with mud on his clothes from helping his relatives in the fields. But there was no time to reminisce. Already we were moving quickly down tunnels lined with pictures of futuristic buildings. One looked like a dead rabbit; another was just an explosion of spikes.

‘These are Expo buildings,’ said Wenli. ‘It is a fair for world architecture. Many countries will have buildings there.’

‘Will you go?’

‘Yes; I am very interested in architecture. In China, we have too many ugly old buildings. We must make them modern.’

Outside it was a warm afternoon and the buildings seemed modern enough. For two or three blocks they were high and impersonal, their windows reflecting the clouds. We were in the Pudong district, on the east bank of Shanghai’s Huangpu River, a district that in the late 1980s had still mostly been farmland and warehouses. After the fast growth of the Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, there were fears that Shanghai might be left behind. To remedy this a new central business district was planned for the area, one that would be China’s equivalent of Manhattan. A torrent of official propaganda followed; in 1990 Deng Xiaoping, then Chinese premier, boasted that ‘Shanghai is our trump card.’1 But despite this enthusiasm, few wanted to relocate from the historic centre on the other bank of the Huangpu. By the start of the 2000s, this new area was only 30 per cent occupied. Outside China there was talk of the ‘Shanghai Bubble’, and doubts about China’s economic health. The economist Milton Friedman articulated the general scepticism about Pudong in 2001 when he dubbed it ‘a statist monument for a dead pharaoh on the level of the pyramids’.2 The mayor of Shanghai defended the empty offices and apartment blocks by saying that the construction was ‘like buying a suit a few sizes too big for a growing boy’.3

Since China ‘opened up’, it’s been the target of gloomy predictions about its economic and political future – the imminent demise of its ruling Communist Party is regularly foretold. Often these messages of doom issue from pundits and commentators who fail to take into account the ways in which China’s economic and political system differs from other countries. In the case of Pudong, one difference was that China’s major banks are state-owned, so they could be forced to relocate. Fifteen years after Friedman’s verdict, Pudong’s occupancy rate is now comparable to Manhattan’s. In many ways, Pudong has been a model of development for many municipalities, even those without its many advantages, which included a good location, a firm industrial base and existing prosperity in the region.

There seems to be no limit to the confidence of Shanghai’s urban planners: at the time of writing the city is building another new area. Nanhui New City, located 60 kilometres south-east of the centre, is being built to provide accommodation, shops and services for a planned 800,000 residents. Construction is due to finish by 2020; the finished development will consist of concentric ring roads encircling a man-made lake, a design apparently inspired by ‘the image of a drop falling into the water’, according to the manager of the project.4

When I asked Wenli what he was doing in Shanghai, I expected him to say he worked as a translator or in the media.

‘What am I doing?’ he repeated, as if the question baffled him. ‘I am a teacher; no, not a teacher. A trainer. I train students for the IELTS [International English Language Testing System] exam.’

‘Do you like the job?’

‘To be frank, I do not. I am not a real teacher. Just help them pass some test.’

‘What about the students?’

‘Some are arseholes, some are lazy, some are stupid.’

‘So why do you do it?’

‘For the money,’ he said, and smiled in a way that was either rueful or proud.

We turned off onto a small street where two teenage girls in identical blue tracksuits were hitting a shuttlecock back and forth, watched by a third girl who was texting while eating sugar cane. We passed a hairdresser and a small supermarket, then Wenli asked me to wait. He disappeared into a small shop whose window was full of photos of afflicted skin. Boils, rashes, nodules, spots, blotches, welts and what appeared to be some sort of orange mollusc growing from a neck. As I stood there, wondering what else to ask Wenli, I remembered two things about him. The first was that his sister had killed herself after years of emotional problems. The second was that his final dissertation – a brilliant analysis of how corporations choose their names – had been almost entirely plagiarised.

Wenli came out holding a red plastic bag. He took me to a small restaurant below street level whose walls were covered with posters of waterfalls, flower-filled meadows and blonde women astride Harley-Davidsons, holding electric guitars. Our waitress was a short young woman with a fringe you could have used as a ruler. She asked us to pay in advance.

‘How come?’ I asked Wenli, because in Shaoyang (and most other cities in China) one usually pays after eating.

‘It is because this place is so busy. So many people come from outside.’

While Shanghai has 14 million residents with a local hukou, at least another 10 million migrants reside in the city. According to Wenli, ‘People don’t know each other, so they don’t take any risks.’

I asked him how he had gone from not wanting to be a teacher in Shaoyang to being a teacher in Shanghai.

‘First I went to Kunming, because our college has many links to that place. I thought I could get a job in a company. But it was very hard; for three months I tried, but the competition was too strong.’

Increasing competition among graduates has meant that even the best students are often forced to look for work outside their own province. Between 1998 and 2008 the number of undergraduates increased fivefold, which has led to a corresponding increase in graduate unemployment. A recent study found that only 68 per cent in 2009 found work, compared to 94 per cent in 1996.5 The poor living conditions that many have to endure – often in small rooms at the edge of the urban area – have led to them being referred to as an ‘ant tribe’.

Finding a job in China often depends on one’s contacts, which in some cases can be as simple as having a friend already working in a factory or company. But although Wenli’s participation in the gala performances meant he was held in high esteem by the college leaders, they hadn’t been much help to him after he left.

‘Maybe if I had stayed in Shaoyang, the leaders would know some people. But Kunming is too far. They do not have guanxi there.’

Guanxi can simply refer to a person’s contacts, but can also indicate the way they were obtained. When used in this second sense, guanxi often connotes corruption. In 2010, China was 78th out of 178 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which focuses on public-sector corruption. The Chinese government does not deny the existence of the problem, and regularly announces anti-corruption initiatives, which usually involve the indictment of high-profile figures. One of the most notable contemporary examples of these was the dismissal of Bo Xilai in 2012. The charismatic former Party secretary of Chongqing city was once thought a candidate for a top government position, but was sentenced to life imprisonment for corruption and abuse of power. Though few doubted the corruption charges, there was also public s...

Table of contents

• Author’s Note
• Introduction • Big City Dreams
• Part I
• 1 • Jumping the Dragon Gate
• 2 • Buttering the Tiger
• 3 • The Many Trials of Mr Horse
• Part II
• 4 • A Twisted Love
• 5 • Left Behind
• 6 • Cutting Grass and Wood
• 7 • The Bubble
• 8 • The Village in the City
• 9 • Every Carp Requires Good Fortune
• Epilogue • The Art of the Possible
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography