(Via Flickr/randomix)

Several days ago, the state-run People’s Daily ran a piece entitled “The Post-80′s Generation is Dispirited: Early Decline Cause for Alarm,” arguing that while China’s youth born after 1980 have far and away better material conditions than their forbearers, they face “spiritual confusion and a loss of identity.” The piece concludes by noting that a country’s youth are its future, and that it is the duty of the younger generation to address this problem. In response, social media celebrity and social critic Zuoyeben (@作业本) penned an essay on the real cause of this issue. The essay quickly became the top trending post on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, drawing more than 100,000 retweets and 29,000 comments in just a few hours. Tea Leaf Nation has translated the essay below in full.

In response to the People’s Daily: Why Is the Post-80’s Generation Dispirited?

Several days ago, the People’s Daily ran a story about how the post-80’s generation was dispirited, and how their premature decline in spirit was a source of concern. In this article, I will discuss this issue, using myself as an example.

When I was in elementary school, I was moved to tears by [such Communist heroes as] Qiu Shaoyun, Lai Ning and Lei Feng. At all times, I was prepared to sacrifice myself and become a martyr for the establishment of the motherland, spilling every last drop of blood. I thought my red neckerchief [symbol of the Young Pioneers, a Communist organization for children] was more important than my own life, because you told me: it was dyed red with the blood of martyrs. Back then, I wondered, how did martyrs keep their blood so fresh and red before they died?

It wasn’t until later that I learned, that stupid neckerchief was five cents worth of dye and ten cents worth of cloth that you sold to me for three dollars.

In the history books, you outlined the crimes of the Japanese, and made me want nothing more than to swim over to Japan and blow it up. You talked of how countless martyrs, Party members, and soldiers sacrificed themselves to win the War of Resistance against Japan. Back then, I was so deeply moved, I was angry I hadn’t been born several decades earlier, so that I could ride boldly into battle with just my knife and my horse. It’s a good thing I wasn’t born back then, after all, or who knows where I would have died.

In your anti-Japan dramas, seven or eight-year old kids could kill a lot of [Japanese] devils, and guerrilla units could charge at them with machetes to kill soldiers holding machine guns. Each died after being stabbed once – and sometimes you could kill two with one thrust. Were these devils stupid? You could kill more devils with a machete than a machine gun.

In secondary school, the education system was in the process of requiring teachers from schools not affiliated with the government to obtain licenses. Most of those teachers who had taught for decades were laid off. Those who remained, besides the few who understood a little bit about education, were usually the sons or daughters of powerful or rich people, and obtained licenses through their connections.

Those idiots beat students just as often as they ate. In my third year of high school, the PE teacher beat me within an inch of my life because my morning exercises were not up to par. My homeroom teacher slapped me across the face because I fell asleep in class. My art teacher knocked down my painting and easel because I cut class. The principal kicked me to the ground and wouldn’t allow me to stand up because I was late to school. What I’m trying to say is, back then, almost all teachers beat students, as long as they had some kind of physical advantage.

Of course, these days you’ve made some progress. You don’t beat secondary school students, you just get a hotel room with primary school students. [Editors: the reference is to the recent news that a primary school principal took six girls to a hotel room. Sexual attack is suspected.]

The physical scars of this are not even the worst part. You didn’t let us read novels, you didn’t let us date. What’s most despicable is that you took our private letters. Even taking them was not a big deal, but you would read them and then throw them away. This is an invasion of privacy. Do you understand that opening other people’s letters is illegal?

You approach education as if you had to force-feed us, always making us “recite the whole text,” learn from [Maoist model student] Jiao Yulu and to be wary of Western brainwashing. What use is it to recite the whole text? What are we supposed to get out of studying your examples and models? Do we deceive ourselves? Is there any meaning in “political thought education” for middle school students? Where is the value in making college students study Marxism, Leninism, Maoist Thought and Deng Xiaoping’s theories?

How is college different from vocational school? As long as you have money or connections, you can go to any college in the country you like.

How many of your professors do real academic research? Or have done real academic research? The world has already developed to this point, but you still require students to attend classes, or fail.

After I graduated, I entered the job market, and nearly drowned in a sea of other job-hunters. If your employment assistance office just for show? After I found a job, I saw most companies didn’t pay requisite insurances. During the period in which I was unemployed, you forced me to sign a fake employment agreement, then you shamelessly declared to the outside that your employment rate was over 98%….

After entering society, your regulations beat people about the head until they bled. You collected so much in taxes that companies figured out ways to steal and evade them.  What about the employees, then? There wasn’t a single law that could fully ensure that citizen’s rights in the workplace were not infringed upon.

Why must we continually pay taxes for five years before we are allowed to buy a house? Why must someone who makes 3,000 RMB a month in this city, where property costs more than 10,000 RMB per square meter on average, pay individual income tax?

When going to your various departments to fill out paperwork, you hold up endless hoops for us to jump through. When I went to obtain a certificate of unemployment, I had to go back and forth more than ten times between three different offices, traveling over 200 kilometers in total.

When I went to obtain my driver’s licenses, the instructor gave me all kinds of hints that I should give him a bribe. When it was time for me to be tested in reverse maneuvering, he told me three minutes into my allotted ten minutes that time was up.

When I went to get a replacement ID card, it took you over a month to deliver it to me. When I go to the bank, the unresponsive tellers act as if I’m stealing their money.

There are all kinds of ridiculous overcharges for my cellphone.

When I surf the net or mess around on Weibo, you freely delete my posts, which in and of itself isn’t a big deal, but you also invite people to “drink tea,” monitor them, or send them to re-education through labor camps for nothing more than a tweet.

If I want to buy a house, I can’t afford to eat or drink for thirty years.

When I buy stuff, fake goods, low-quality goods, toxic goods and unsafe items are everywhere.

If I want to buy a foreign-made car, I have to pay two times its original price.

“Primary school food meets sanitation standards, lamb meat is lamb meat, the rivers are clean, and there aren’t 10,000 pigs in the river. The air we breathe isn’t poisonous; you don’t have to wear a face mask.”

Now that I’ve grown up, you even dare to put poison in infant milk powder. The stench of the rivers is awful; the air is filled with the smell of the End Days. Housing prices are rising faster than anything, agents are evil, landlords are cunning, and renting an apartment has become like a battle.

I don’t care that your organizations are bloated beyond recognition, but why must I obtain a ‘temporary residence permit’ in my own country?

So you tell me. I belong to the post-80’s generation. How is it possible for me not to be dispirited? It’s enough of a f**king accomplishment that I’m somehow still alive!

(Via Flickr/°Florian)

Almost half of all Chinese report feeling “more anxiety,” now than they did five years ago. What, exactly, is driving these concerns, or increasing reports of these concerns? Avid followers of China-related news might immediately think of censorship and other restrictions on freedoms, yet reports show that the main sources of anxiety in China lie elsewhere. Furthermore, recent coverage of these concerns has revealed changes in the expectations, dreams, and demands of many Chinese.

Several days ago, a 24-year-old employee of Ogilvy in Beijing died from sudden cardiac arrest, which initial reports say occurred after the employee worked overtime for one straight month. His last post on Sina Weibo, a popular microblogging platform, went viral, drawing countless comments from other overworked netizens, many of whom noted that China had become the number one country in the world for death by overwork.

Studies show that many Chinese are unhappy with their jobs – or lack thereof. This year, millions of Chinese students are graduating and face what is reportedly the worst job market in history. Even if they are able to find a job, their worries will not end. A recent Regus study showed China ranked first among 80 countries in workplace stress.

A video produced by Tencent News depicted sources of anxiety felt by Chinese in the workplace: financial troubles, interpersonal relationships, and endless overtime. While the short video included facts and figures about stress in China’s workforce, it focused on individual stories – a 26-year-old who believes he will never be rich enough to buy a house, and a low-level office worker who dreams of emigrating. Chinese increasingly see their anxieties and dreams as individual matters, rather than collective issues.

As China’s growth slows, the idea of a national revival – the Chinese Dream, as it is known in official parlance – stands at odds with the hopes and fears of the average Chinese, creating further cognitive dissonance. While state-run media and government bodies continue to focus on positive news about officials’ achievements and economic development, most Chinese have become far more concerned about food safety, the quality of manufactured goods, and the safety of medicine.

Given the number social media-driven exposés that have drawn public attention over the past few years – on corrupt officials, rat meat scandals, and fake condoms, among other issues – it may be that increasing transparency is making it impossible to ignore issues that once simply flew under the radar. China’s rapidly growing middle class is already making its voice heard on these issues, and it is expected to swell to 40% of the population by 2020.

Despite the fact that anxiety has increased, Chinese overwhelmingly feel they are better off than they were five years ago. Cases like those of Mr. Li, the Ogilvy employee who reportedly died from overwork, may draw more attention because society increasingly values individuals’ lives and dreams.

Lin Zhao’s grave (Via Flickr/auess)

On April 29, 1968, a young Chinese dissident named Lin Zhao was secretly executed by firing squad. In 2013, on the 45th anniversary of her execution, her name resurfaced in the public sphere, as news broke that police had prevented people paying tribute to her at her grave.

Lin Zhao was an ardent Communist in her early years, but she was labeled a “rightist” while studying at the Peking University during Mao’s 1956 “Anti-Rightist Movement.” This movement followed the “Hundred Flowers Campaign,” during which the intelligentsia were invited to criticize the Communist Party and then persecuted for doing so. As Lin became more and more outspoken in her criticism of the regime, she was expelled from school and founded an underground publication, which earned her a prison sentence of 20 years. She served only eight years of that sentence before being secretly executed in 1968 at the age of 35.

Lin’s story is moving, not least of all because of the fine prose through which Lin spread her ideas. Her inability to stay silent was such that when deprived of a pen and paper in prison, she used her own blood to write on walls, clothes and white sheets, compiling a total of 200,000 words.

In an official paper advising authorities to prolong her imprisonment, it was reported [Chinese] that “during her imprisonment, [Lin Zhao] used hair clips and bamboo sticks to pierce her skin, using the dirty blood to write extremely anti-revolutionary, extremely vicious letters, notes and diary entries …openly smearing the socialist system as a bloody totalitarian system that plunders all it takes to be a human being…[while] she talked about herself as ‘a freedom warrior fighting against tyranny and a young resistant.’”

A picture of Lin Zhao circulated widely on Weibo, with the caption, “If one day we are allowed to speak again, don’t forget to tell everyone, there was once a person named Lin Zhao who was killed for loving them too much.”

Lin was shot during the height of the Cultural Revolution. The epilogue of her story added a touch of farce to her tragedy. Two days after the execution, two policemen appeared at the door step of Lin’s mother, demanding that she pays the five cents that she “owed” the government for the bullet used to execute Lin.

A martyr in the making

Despite the theatrical nature of Lin’s story, she remained in obscurity for twenty years following her death. The Shanghai High People’s Court officially cleared her name in the early 1980’s, and her letters written in blood were put on display for a brief period of time before they were permanently archived.

It was not until 1995 that a cameraman at the state-run Xinhua news agency named Hu Jie heard about Lin’s story and was captivated by it. He secretly worked on a documentary of Lin until he was fired, perhaps because of the project.

The making of the film was a race against time, as the prospect of arrest by the Ministry of Security was more than a remote possibility. Hu interviewed Lin’s schoolmates, her uncle, and her lover, who kept a collection of Lin’s prison writings, which were written first in blood and then transcribed by Lin into paper after she obtained it from the prison authorities. Others contacted by Hu declined to appear in front of the camera, including two of Lin’s guards at the prison. The film was finished in 2003 and circulated underground.

In 2004, Hu Jie’s film was covered by Freezing Point, a progressive Chinese journal shut down in 2008 for its liberal positions. Since then, several mainstream media organizations – none of them state-run – have covered Lin’s life in one way or another. However, Lin Zhao remained far from a household name.

Later in 2004, a grave site containing a piece of Lin’s clothes and a bit of her hair – Lin’s body was never recovered – was constructed in her hometown. The site gradually became a small shrine, and an increasing number of people began to go there to pay homage to Lin. Authorities became aware of this, and installed a surveillance camera near the grave. On April 29 of this year, around 120 mourners gathered at the grave, and were met by 200 security officials.

Changing public sentiment

Several years ago, many wanted to look forward and put aside the ugly parts of China’s history, as can be seen from a comment on Hu’s documentary on YouTube: “Mr. Hu is still living in the past. Let us move on. China is changing, changing fast, and changing for good…Mr. Hu, pay a visit to Shanghai. You will be surprised how advanced and modern Shanghai is now.”

The comment was posted in 2008, when most prevalent narrative in society was one of growth. Economic development brought about improvement in living conditions for most people, or at least most city-dwellers, fueling optimism about the future and reluctance to face the past. But over just a few years, this narrative was shattered by skyrocketing real estate prices, shocking corruption scandals, and startling food security crises.

The tricky part of silencing activism in China today is that whenever the authorities try to obstruct it, the obstruction itself makes the news. The news of police obstruction spread online via microblogging platforms that afternoon, and generated waves of eulogies, postings of Lin’s poems, and personal reflections on online forums. On the anniversary of her death, posts about Lin Zhao were retweeted tens of thousands of times, and trended on Sina Weibo, a widely used social media platform.

That Lin’s criticism of the regime has resurfaced is due in part to the nature of her writing. Her poems and prose often promoted universal values such as freedom, democracy and justice, which remain relevant to this day. When the silencing of Lin in prison was reenacted in the suppression of the memorial at her grave, the resemblance to history became too obvious to ignore.

In a certain sense, people living in today’s China may be more drawn to stories like Lin’s now than in years past. It is hard to say whether public sentiment led to massive sympathy for Lin, or whether Lin herself fueled the ever-increasing outcry for freedom – both may be true. Written in blood, Lin’s story has had an impact that she herself could never have foreseen.

Ai Weiwei and associates in front of the Chengdu Bureau for Letters and Visits. Via Flickr/wu fake

A news article published in early May suggests that reform may be in the works for China’s long-standing petitioning system, also known as the Letters and Visits system, which is often associated with scandals involving cruelty and inhumanity. On May 9, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported that in March, the State Bureau for Letters and Visits had ceased issuing rankings of provinces by the numbers of petitioners from each province. Subsequently, some provincial and township authorities also dismantled similar lower-level ranking and evaluation systems.  Though seemingly trivial, the change has serious implications.

 A glimpse into China’s petitioning system

The history of China’s petitioning system is as long as that of Communist China. The system is designed to allow the state to listen to and resolve citizens’ complaints and grievances. The State Bureau for Letters and Visits, as well as associated bureaus at every level of local government, are charged with receiving letters, calls and visits from citizens, directing citizens’ issues to the government bodies that could assist them, and supervising the settlement process. In theory, citizens are not allowed to petition higher-level bureaus unless their issues cannot be resolved by lower-level authorities. In practice, visiting the petitioning bureaus in an ascending order of authority, from the local to the central government level, is often viewed by petitioners as a last resort, to be considered when all other means (including the legal system) fail to bear fruit.

According to a research paper published in the China Quarterly, the second half of 2003 and early 2004 saw a surge in petitioners coming to Beijing, largely because they observed that the new Hu-Wen administration seemed to have a much more accommodating and populist attitude. Probably in response to this increase in petitioners, the central government amended the Regulations of Letters and Visits in late 2004, mandating that the evaluation of public servants take into account their performance in dealing with letters and visits. Around the same time, the State Bureau started ranking provinces by how many petitioners from each province came to Beijing, and provincial governments began to do the same with lower-level authorities.

A vicious cycle

The rankings were originally intended to encourage provincial- and township-level officials to solve petitioners’ problems at the local level. How well civil servants perform in this department has become an increasingly important factor in their evaluation and promotion. According to the Southern Metropolis Daily, in Yongzhou City, Hunan Province, the rankings have been considered as important as GDP performance. In some regions, it has become all-important for officials to prevent petitioners from reaching Beijing: even one case of a local reaching the central-government level bureau could diminish a local official’s career prospects. Thus, local officials are under pressure to stop people from petitioning higher authorities in any way they can.

For years, provincial and local authorities have been accused of abducting petitioners from Beijing by force. Many informal prisons, known as “black jails,” have been set up in Beijing by or for the government to detain petitioners. Hard labor camps and mental asylums are used for these purposes as well. In September 2010, Caijing Magazine reported that a private security company called An Yuan Ding was hired by many local authorities to intercept petitioners, imprison them in secret camps, and send them back to their hometowns. Additionally, in 2009, Xinhua News Agency reported that local authorities devoted considerable amounts of money to bribing the Central Bureau of Letters and Visits to delete petition registrations. Expenditures related to petition interception, including transportation, hiring fees, and bribery – tend to add up tremendously. For example, provincial and township governments in Hunan Province reportedly spent more than one million RMB dealing with Tang Hui. In this regard, the petitioning system has become not only a hotbed of human rights violations, but also a drain on public finances.

Given their bleak prospects, why do waves of petitioners still making their way up through the letters and visits system? For many, the reason is neither that they could manage to elude local officials hunting them, nor that upper-level letters and visits bureaus were willing to address their demands. As rational players in the game, they can sense how fearful the local officials are of their actions, and they use petitioning as a way to intimidate and threaten the officials. The more local officials are panicked by petitioners sneaking off to Beijing, the more determined petitioners are to do so, and the more likely petitioners feel it is that their requests will be answered, not by the ones to whom they petition, but by the local bureaucrats who are following them. To protect themselves, the local governments will do whatever they can to restrain petitioners, yet petitioners try to make their way to Beijing precisely in order to alarm the local officials. This results in a cycle in which the conflict between the petitioner and the official can easily escalate.

Finding a way out

In recent months, there have been several signals that reform is underway to address the inhumanity associated with the petitioning system. In December 2012, several weeks into the Xi-Li administration, tens of thousands of petitioners were rumored to have been released from Jiujing village, one of the largest petitioner concentration camps in Beijing. In January and May of this year, top-level officials from the State Bureau of Letters and Visits and the Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Central Committee of the CPC made public speeches against intercepting citizens who “petitioned legally.” As for the news reported on May 9, though it remains to be seen whether the termination of rankings is temporary or permanent, the public and media are willing to believe the situation is improving. As of May 14, both state-run mouthpieces like the People’s Daily and the Xinhua News Agency and liberal media like the Oriental Morning Post, Beijing News and Caijing Magazine had published positive editorial pieces.

Still, the termination of rankings could be a double-edged sword. Many petitioners use the system as a bargaining chip in their struggles with local authorities, since bureaucrats fear they will petition higher-level authorities. Now that petitions are no longer a vital concern for local authorities, officials may ignore the demands of petitioners entirely. A truly functioning petitioning system should not only prohibit the inhumane treatment of petitioners, but should also effectively empower citizens. Currently, the bureaus of letters and visits are neither able to force other government organs to respond to petitioners’ requests, nor monitor the settlement processes.

Ongoing reforms should include the enhancement of the institutional powers of bureaus of letters and visits. On the other hand, the citizens flooding the petitioning offices, which are considered a last resort, reveal the ineffectiveness of other channels for hearing complaints and grievances. Enhancement and clarification of the roles of the People’s Congress, NGOs, the arbitration system and the judiciary branch could lessen the burden on the petitioning system. Such work would be difficult and involved, but it is also necessary if China aspires to set up a safety valve to address citizens’ concerns effectively.

Former “comfort women” in Korea rally in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, August 2011. (Claire Solery/Wikimedia Commons)

On May 8, the Japanese government announced it would honor the 1995 war apology, a decision widely interpreted as a diplomatic gesture aimed at smoothing ties with China.  Tensions between the two countries have recently escalated due to events such as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s suggesting a possible revision of the 1995 apology, key cabinet members visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, and Abe questioning the validity of describing Imperial Japan’s wartime acts as “aggression.”

Despite such efforts, war-related issues have once again returned to haunt the Japanese foreign ministry.

“In the circumstances in which bullets are flying like rain and wind, the soldiers are running around at the risk of losing their lives…if you want them to have a rest in such a situation, a comfort women system is necessary. Anyone can understand that,” Toru Hashimoto, mayor of Osaka and co-founder of the rightwing Japan Restoration Party, stated on Monday, according to the BBC.

The term “comfort women” is a euphemism for women who were forced into prostitution to serve Japanese soldiers during WWII. Most of them were from China, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines, but some were also from Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Taiwan.

Beijing and Seoul outraged

The Chinese and South Korean foreign ministries immediately issued statements rebuking Japan over Hashimoto’s remarks, which seemingly contradict Japan’s formal apology toward comfort women issued in 1993.

“There is worldwide recognition…that the issue of comfort women amounts to a wartime rape committed by Japan during its past imperial period in a serious breach of human rights,” said a South Korean foreign ministry spokesman. “Our government again urges Japan’s prominent officials to show regret for atrocities committed during Japan’s imperial period and to correct their anachronistic way of thinking and comments.”

“The conscription of sex slaves was a grave crime committed by the Japanese military…We are shocked and indignant at the Japanese politician’s remarks, as they flagrantly challenge historical justice,” stated Hong Lei, spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry.

Hashimoto’s comment triggered outrage among Chinese citizens as well.

“To turn an act of sexual perversion into a political tool and to use it as a way of flaunting Japan’s greatness—this is a disgrace for the Japanese people,” commented user @ 阿SU_不加V on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter. “We should make [Hashimoto’s] wife be a comfort woman,” wrote user @gbinhe.

Reopening old war wounds

Some see Hashimoto’s statement not as an isolated incident but as yet another proof of Japan’s return to militarization and imperialism. Liu Yang, a social critic and writer widely followed on Weibo, warned:

Little Japanese Osaka Mayor argues in favor of ‘comfort women.’ Little Japanese Prime Minister Abe, dressed in army camouflage, poses in a jet numbered ‘731’ and shouts ‘Long Live Japan!’ All these incidents show that the Japanese people have practically gone mad—the world must be on the alert and look out for little Japan coming out to bite us again.

Mixed responses at home

Various Japanese ministers quickly stated that Hashimoto’s views do not reflect those of the government, attempting to minimize the diplomatic damage. “Abe cabinet has the same sentiments as past cabinets,” announced chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga,reiterating the government’s commitment to the 1993 apology toward comfort women.

Japanese online reactions to Hashimoto’s remarks, however, range from supportive to denunciatory. Their comments often contradict each other—some assert that the comfort women were coerced into prostitution, while others maintain that they volunteered—thus demonstrating the lack of consensus over the issue.

Some users on Ni Channeru, a Japanese online discussion forum with over 11 million users, nodded in agreement with Hashimoto’s assertion. “Of course comfort women were ‘necessary’—that’s why they existed in the first place. Plus, it’s not like the Japanese army forcefully dragged them into Japan,” wrote one user.

Others took a defensive stance, arguing that one cannot pass judgement on past incidents based on current standards. “At that time, prostitution was not illegal. Therefore, we cannot call it an illegal act now,” one user contended. “That would be ex post facto law (retroactive law; judging an act based on a law that was adopted ‘after the fact’),” another chimed in agreement.

“Besides, the same thing happened during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, too. That shows that comfort women were probably truly necessary,” wrote another.

Many Japanese users, however, Many Japanese users, however, sharply criticized Hashimoto. “Shut your mouth—how dare you say such things and pretend to know what it was like [to be a comfort woman],” wrote one user. “It doesn’t matter what the laws said then. Prostitution is prostitution—it should be denounced. An army involved in it of course deserves to be shunned,” insisted another.

One Japanese citizen questioned Hashimoto’s moral integrity in a Yahoo! Japan blog post:

No matter how you defend [the comfort women system], evil is evil. Mr. Hashimoto cannot hide his lack of respect for human rights. He is a lawyer as well as politician…His comment that ‘comfort women were necessary’ is an affront to women and it is unbelievable that someone who has studied law should utter such words. Does the thought, ‘what if my daughter were to be used as a comfort woman,’ not occur to him at all?

Although rightwing extremists tend to attract more attention in international media, their views do not necessarily represent those of the government or the country at large. The issue of comfort women—and war atrocities in general—is one that has yet to be resolved, both in and outside of Japan.

Via Flickr/BriYYZ

[Note: The following is a Tea Leaf Nation op-ed, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of the editors.]

On November 29, 2012, at the end of his visit to “The Road to Revival” exhibition, which showcased China’s achievements in modern and contemporary history despite foreign invasions and exploitation, the newly appointed General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee Xi Jinping stated: “Everyone has his own ideals, aspirations and dreams. Nowadays, the ‘Chinese Dream’ is a hot topic; in my opinion, realizing the revival of the Chinese nation is the greatest ‘Chinese Dream.’” Four months later, in Xi’s presidential inauguration speech, he mentioned the term “Chinese Dream” nine times and indicated that his mission was to make that dream come true during his term.

Soon thereafter, the “Chinese Dream” became a buzzword in China. In the blogosphere, the Chinese people are busily making their wish lists of Chinese dreams. There are petitions for affordable housing, cleaner air and non-toxic foods; there are appeals for more political participation, freedom of speech, and transparent government; there are international wishes for a China that never has to take its cues from the U.S. and never has to hesitate to use force to assert its territorial claims.

Xi’s “Chinese Dream” rhetoric seemingly inspired the whole country to explore the outlook of a rising China. Some people have wondered whether the “Chinese Dream” will compete with the dream of the world’s top superpower: the American Dream. However, even a quick examination of the two dreams will show that the two are different concepts based on different philosophies.

The American Dream represents the individual ambitions of early settlers and later immigrants to survive and thrive through their own hard work in a virgin land, where social stratification had not yet taken form. It captures the spirit of the constitutionally enshrined truth that all men are created equal, and draws a roadmap for personal success: hard work.

The “Chinese Dream” of national revival as defined by President Xi is based on the historical grudges and unfulfilled ambitions of a once downtrodden nation. It is a patriotic sermon on collectivism. The formula prescribed by President Xi to make the “Chinese Dream” come true is the upholding of socialism with Chinese characteristics, patriotism and the unity of the nation.

The universal appeal of the American Dream is based on the fact that the U.S. is a country of immigrants. Anyone from anywhere in the world has a shot at becoming an American. The “Chinese Dream,” on the other hand, is derived from the unique historical experience of the Chinese nation and is based on the assumption that the nation is led by the Chinese Communist Party.

To a certain extent, this awkward comparison can be attributed to the misleading translation of “中国梦” (Zhong Guo Meng) into “Chinese Dream.” The word “Chinese” is somewhat ambiguous: it implies “China’s” or “the Chinese people’s.” To posit that the revival of the Chinese nation is the “greatest common factor” in the dreams of the Chinese is the result of a top-down political summation by the CCP. This so-called “Chinese Dream” has nothing to do with what the average Chinese person wants on daily basis. A more accurate translation of the buzzword might be “China Dream” or the “National Dream of China.”

In fact, China’s state-run English media initially waffled back and forth between “China Dream” and “Chinese Dream.” Later on, after President Xi Jinping stated that “the ‘Zhong Guo Meng’ is the dream of the Chinese people,” the translation “Chinese Dream,” took the lead and became the official term for the concept in the government’s international communications.

State media and CCP pundits have rushed to elaborate on the philosophical implications of the “Chinese Dream,” a catchphrase associated with no concrete matters of policy planning or legislative proposals. The Chinese people have been mobilized to carry out dream-talks, in which they are encouraged to align their private aspirations with the grand strategy of national revival. This push is similar to President Hu Jintao’s “Harmonious Society” campaign and President Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” campaign, propaganda movements intended to unite society and consolidate political capital for the then-leaders.

When President Xi Jinping came to power, China’s political and ideological landscape looked rugged. The fall of Bo Xilai revealed a cruel power struggle at the top of China’s political hierarchy. Vested interest groups, such as state-owned enterprises and the CCP princeling faction, were alleged to have hampered institutional reforms, and reformists inside and outside the CCP had become more verbal about their frustrations with the lack of system-wide reform for a political system that seemed increasingly incompatible with the further economic and social development of modern China. A social media-led exposé of abysmal government corruption severely impacted the Chinese people’s trust in the CCP.

To start with a clean slate, President Xi needed a campaign that could unite a politically and ideologically divided country. The “Chinese Dream” promotes nationalism, and nationalism promotes unity. Through the “Chinese Dream” campaign, the CCP explicitly summons the Chinese people to dream the same dream as the Party and shelve their differences, so that the nation can forge ahead as a united whole. But, for many, the real “Chinese Dream” may be to have a dream that is separate from the Party’s mandates, and, further, to have the resources to realize it.

Gongjian Hutong (Photo Credit: William Ford)

At the entrance of Gongjian Hutong in Beijing sat a short thin man who walked with a limp and wore a blue, one-piece jump suit. He lived in a one-room metal shack with a clear sliding door and fixed bikes for a living, with a large shelf of tools next to his bed. He gossiped with the convenient store owners next door and sometimes nodded to me when I walked past him. He may have resided illegally in the shack, but I never asked. He probably just showed up at the mouth of the alley one day, built his house, and no one objected.

From 2006 to 2007 I lived in a Beijing hutong for nine months. “Hutong” in Chinese is rooted in a Mongolian word that means “water well” and is now loosely defined as “lane,” “alley,” or even “neighborhood.” The hutong neighborhoods in Beijing, some built in much the same style almost 750 years ago, are a maze of gray brick alleyways. Red doors appear at intervals that open into siheyuan, or small, four-sided courtyards.

During the Communist period, revolutionaries and Red Guards threw out residents who were court officials, labeling them bourgeoisie, and moved into their former homes. These revolutionaries transformed certain hutongs into what more closely resembled dorms of Communist youth and Red Guards. Many never left, raising families there. Some people fashioned shoddy brick sheds and additions onto the houses. As a result, the residual hutong alleyways today are crowded and can look like a mix of slums as well as former high estates.

Mr. Pan was the oldest resident on the street. On a spring day, he led me through a low red door into a small courtyard and then into his 60 square-foot house on the left. He had also moved in during the Cultural Revolution. His family had lived in the area as well, but they were “no longer here” anymore, and he didn’t go into the details of their passing.

He pointed to the refrigerator behind him next to his bed.

“You see this? In the 70s, no one had this. The TV? No one had that either.”

I nodded.

“Your America is developing. The world is developing, and China is the same. We’ve made capitalism work now for us! But we’re different too – we still have to be a glorious socialist nation. Like these hutongs. If they need to build a subway here and take down my house, that would be a shame, but of course I would do it. One person can’t object in the face of the good of so many people.”

“Is there going to be a subway here soon?”

“Not here, but one block down.

“So you’re not going to be moved.”

“Of course not! But other people down the street are complaining and that’s what I tell them. Sometimes you have to sacrifice for the country and not be a stubborn nail.”

“Stubborn nail” is the term used in China for families that refuse to abandon their houses in the face of development projects. Sometimes entire areas of old housing were demolished and a highway was built right through a house whose residents refused to leave, guarding it day and night. Families would protect their houses, leaving them, in extreme cases, standing in protest in the middle of a highway or in an excavated site for a skyscraper, alone like an island.

A few doors up from Mr. Pan was the local barbershop owned by a migrant family with the surname Ye. Two years later, they moved farther down the street into a renovated larger space with shinier mirrors and floors. They went from having two barber seats to four, but the scene was always the same – two siblings, brother and sister in their late twenties cutting hair, and their grandfather sitting in one of the waiting chairs watching Chinese soap operas on a tiny television in the top left corner of the room. They were legally registered in the countryside when they bore children, allowing them to have more than one child. Our conversations were always different at the beginning, but usually ended by debating who was the best basketball player in the NBA. Weizhu said Kobe Bryant. In 2006, Lebron James hadn’t quite caught on yet in China.

She often asked about my family.

“I would miss them. We’re from Zhejiang, and now our whole family lives here.” Zhejiang was a wealthy coastal province just south of Shanghai. No one in the Ye family said the sh sound in Chinese words, an immediate giveaway of their roots. They urged me to go to Wenzhou, one of the most famous factory towns in China, to see how successful their home province had become.

“There aren’t hutongs in America?” she asked me.

“No not really. Not like this, not this style at least. Hutongs in China are maybe three times as old as my country.”

“And hutongs aren’t even that old!” she said laughing.

The grandfather smiled and put up five fingers. “Wu qian”. Five thousand. He meant five thousand years of China existing.

“That’s true,” I said.

When I left, Weizhu said “man zou.” It was a common wish of fortune which translated to “walk slow.” If you walked slow, life was calm and good. It sometimes reminded me of the urban American slang term “drive slow.” I hid a smile whenever it was said.

They sometimes asked about my host family, the Suns. On our street people admired them. The Suns’ son, Wenhao, had scored in the top percentile on the Gao Kao, the Chinese university entrance exam and was, in the traditional sense, as successful as a Chinese child could be. A neighbor came to my host mother Guangfeng one day, complaining about her own son. She asked for advice, frantically, but barely listened to anything Guangfeng said.

“She can’t even focus on her own problems,” Guangfeng said, “how can she fix her son’s? He plays computer games all day. He can’t function outside. So many kids today in China are the same way. You see? That’s I why didn’t like to let Wenhao play with other kids very much when he was young. I was so worried they would influence him.” She laughed to herself more than to me. “So I made sure to be the only one who played with him – mothers can do that just fine.

She relayed hutong gossip over dinner. Her husband, Zhenguang, explained to me that, in the past, Mr. Pan had certainly not always believed that capitalism worked for China. Zhenguang described watching Mr. Pan lead a mob down the street in the 1970s to stone a neighbor labeled a bourgeoisie capitalist roader. After the deed was done, they carved flowers into the wall of the man’s house as a tribute to Mao Zedong’s “Hundred Flowers Movement” of the 1950s, when the Chairman encouraged “a hundred flowers of criticism” of the regime to “blossom” from the masses. When the citizenry expressed more criticism than Mao expected, he unleashed a campaign against them, labeling them anti-revolutionary capitalists.

Zhenguang laughed at my incredulous expression. He assumed that, by now, Mr. Pan had gone through so many slogans and movements in his life that they all seemed the same. It was communism back then, then socialism, then “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” Who knew what the government was doing? He supported it in whatever language their policies were published and cited himself as a Chinese patriot for it.

“Everyone was different back then anyway,” Zhenguang said, his expression growing more serious, “even nice old folks like Mr. Pan. In the Cultural Revolution, we were out in the countryside, sleeping on newspapers one night in a farmer’s house, and it was very hot. In the morning we woke up and found that one of the people we were with had sweat on Mao’s picture on the front page of the newspaper. He was almost beaten to death.” He paused. “It was a very different time.”

Mr. Pan died a few years ago, but, like the hutongs themselves, some things changed and others didn’t. It was all mixed in together. My host family’s hutong is still very much the same, save a new TV and computer. The barbershop is still there and the grandfather still sits watching soap operas in the corner. The bike repairman has not changed a bit. Often, for those things that did change, many didn’t seem to care or took a long time to notice.

Six years after I lived there, Guangfeng told me there was a temple behind our house. She had never gone back there. I was only in town for a week when she told me, and so the three of us – Zhenguang, Guangfeng, and I – took a look one night. The last time Zhenguang had gone back there was as a child. Back then, there was a large open courtyard and a one-room temple in the middle. We ventured behind the house to discover that the courtyard had been completely overrun by shanties, and the temple’s roof was now barely visible. As we left, Zhenguang cursed, laughed, and shook his head, amused and disgusted at the same time.

“They built so many!” he said to the neighbors as we left. In the last forty years he had visited America before he had revisited the area ten yards behind his house. It looked nothing like it used to, and, unlike state-led urban renewal, the government had nothing to do with it.

Via Flickr/MaxChu

The island of Lanyu lies not far off the southeast coast of Taiwan — a small, bucolic island with a population barely exceeding 4,000. Aboriginal Tao people make up nearly 60% of the population, with the rest being mainly Han Chinese. Residents also share the island with a more unwelcome neighbor – the Lanyu Nuclear Waste Disposal Facility, which contains over 100,000 barrels of radioactive waste from Taiwan’s three active nuclear power plants. Amidst a bitter, protracted dispute over the construction of the “Number Four” nuclear power plant in Taiwan, Lanyu in many ways symbolizes the complex and seemingly intractable debate over Taiwan’s nuclear future.

The status quo

Taiwan has three operational nuclear power plants, while a fourth, the Longmen Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao, east of the capital Taipei, is currently under construction. The three plants are all owned and operated by Taiwan’s largest electrical utility, Taiwan Power Company (Taipower), and together constitute 12.6% of the company’s total power generation portfolio. Fearing the potential for blackouts and power shortages across the island, the government approved the construction of the Longmen plant, which began in 1999 and was originally scheduled for a 2004 commissioning.

But political opposition and construction problems have caused repeated delays. In the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that ruptured the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan, construction was once again halted on the Longmen plant, which cost nearly NT$9 billion to build and was close to completion.

Lessons from Fukushima

The Fukushima nuclear disaster has had profound effects on Taiwanese perceptions of the safety of nuclear power. Taiwan, like Japan, sits near fault lines and experiences frequent earthquakes, and many fear a Fukushima-like scenario should a similarly disastrous earthquake or tsunami strike the island. Comparisons with Fukushima are often at the center of protests and opposition to the Longmen plant. Opposition groups have put forth a wide range of objections to the construction of the plant, including the potential for environmental disaster, Taipower’s safety record, and the failure to adequately store and manage the nuclear waste facility on Lanyu.

National Taiwan University professor of atmospheric science Gloria Hsu, a prominent academic opponent of the Longmen plant and a critic of Taipower, maintained in a recent forum that “Nuclear power generation is unsafe, uneconomical and unsustainable” and pointed out the risk of continued heat release from the fission of unstable uranium byproducts in the reactor in the event of a meltdown. Anti-nuclear groups have taken to organizing on Facebook, with a multitude of groups attracting tens of thousands of followers, including one named after a phrase common amongst protesters which has attracted over 24,000 followers: “I’m human, I’m anti-nuclear!” Protests in March across Taiwan attracted tens of thousands of protesters against nuclear power and the Longmen plant, and in response, the government decided to hold a referendum on whether to continue or permanently cease construction on the plant. A recent in-depth analysis of the nuclear issue published in Commonwealth magazine describes the conditions for the passing of the referendum:

• Article 30 of the current referendum law states that in the event of a citizen referendum, if the percentage of total referendum voters exceeds 50% of total national eligible voters, and the “agree” voting percentage exceeds 50%, the referendum has passed.
• If the vote total does not satisfy the above total, or if the effective voting number does not exceed 50% in agreement, the referendum is rejected.
• No date has been set for holding the referendum on the nuclear plant, but most observers expect a vote to come sometime this summer.

The story of Lanyu — fishing cannery or nuclear power plant?

Meanwhile, protesters have pointed to Lanyu both as an example of Taipower’s inability to properly manage nuclear waste and the government’s failure to execute proper oversight. The facility, which opened in 1982, currently stores 100,277 barrels of low-level radioactive waste under the management of Taipower and has been fraught with controversy ever since it opened. Billboards informed residents that the site was a pier and breakwater construction site, curiously being built by the Atomic Energy Commission of the Republic of China; residents of Lanyu were under the impression that a fishing cannery was being built. The signs were also posted in Mandarin Chinese, a language not widely spoken on the island at that time.

Despite official insistence that the government and Taipower did not intend to mislead Lanyu residents, the fact that a nuclear waste disposal facility was instead being constructed has led to a sense that the facility was built without the consent of island residents. Many residents feel the government deceived the islanders and took advantage of their isolation and political marginalization as indigenous peoples to build the facility on the island.

Located on the southeast corner of the island, and built five kilometers away from the nearest island residences, the facility itself has not accepted any waste since 1996. But this has not ended the controversy. Owing to the high temperatures and humidity of the island, which have caused corrosion of the waste drums at the site, many residents feared radiation leaks from improper management of the site. Taipower has replaced and repaired tens of thousands of waste drums in a process completed in 2011 and maintains that any radiation leakage from the low-level waste was within safe limits. About 70,000 drums in total have been replaced. Some residents of Lanyu have even come to accept the facility as a necessary evil owing to the benefits it has brought the island, including free electricity, jobs and the occasional payout from Taipower. But amidst intensifying opposition to the construction of the Longmen nuclear plant, a growing number of Tao leaders and anti-nuclear activists have joined the growing protest movement in the hopes that the Lanyu site will eventually be closed and the waste removed from the island.

An “unsolvable” dilemma?

One expert has called Taiwan’s nuclear waste dilemma “unsolvable.” He Liwei, a former assistant researcher on the Research Institute for the Executive Yuan Atomic Energy Committee, noted that a permanent solution to waste disposal has eluded many chairmen of the Atomic Energy Committee and Taipower, and believes that, “Each one will just pass [responsibility for solving the problem] on to the next.” The three nuclear power plants generate some 15,000 barrels of waste per year, with no permanent storage facility.

In the aftermath of major and persistent protests from islanders that prohibited Taipower from delivering waste to the Lanyu site, Taipower and the government have tried in vain to find an alternative permanent solution to the problem of nuclear waste disposal, including an abortive effort in 1997 to deliver nuclear waste to North Korea that was shelved over loud objections by Japan and South Korea. One article from the Central News Agency stated that the “government’s failure to identify a permanent storage site is clearly the largest stumbling block to the development of nuclear power” in Taiwan. Much of the high-level radioactive waste from the power plants is currently stored in cooling pools within the plants themselves.

In a recent television debate on the nuclear issue, Taipower chairman Huang Zhongqiu responded to the “unsolvable” claim by saying that long-term geologic and hydrologic studies are required before finalizing a permanent site for high-level nuclear waste, and operations could not begin until at least 2055. Government officials have already indicated that the Lanyu site will not become the long-term storage facility for nuclear waste.

Taiwanese law limits the operating period of nuclear plants to 40 years. The Taiwanese government, Taipower and business groups have pushed for the construction of the Longmen plant to prevent power shortages or price increases for electricity. In a recent televised forum held by the WANT China Times group, supporters of the Longmen facility emphasized the necessity of the plant and of nuclear power in general not only to Taiwan’s economic stability and the uncertain effects of substitute energy sources on industry, but also to ensure that Taiwan can meet its internationally obligatory carbon-reduction targets in the fight against global warming.

The Executive Yuan, Taiwan’s executive branch, has stated that should construction stop on the Longmen plant, Taiwan could face electricity shortages within two years. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’ website on nuclear power, which was recently launched to address public questions prior to the referendum on nuclear power, states:

Because nuclear power generation has stable, low-carbon, low-cost and high efficiency characteristics, it can act as a bridge power source option in the transition to a non-nuclear homeland. Further, ‘No nuclear safety means no nuclear power’ has been the chief premise of the government’s continued use of nuclear power.

A shift away from nuclear power and a resultant increase in imports to cover the cost of coal and natural gas as power substitutes have led business and industry groups to oppose efforts to stop construction on the Longmen plant and efforts by anti-nuclear groups to shutter the existing three plants. The government has estimated that if the Longmen facility is not completed, the price of electricity could rise by 15-18% by 2018, and increase by up to 42% by 2026 if the generating capacity of the three existing plants is reached.

The Lanyu site continues to be a sore point for residents and will remain a wellspring for protesters against the continued use of nuclear power in Taiwan. The summer referendum may determine the final future of the Longmen plant even as the question of nuclear waste will remain unsolved. In the meantime, Taipower has placed an advertisement in newspapers on Kinmen, a small island north of Taiwan, saying “Kinmen can’t lose” by cooperating with the Taiwan government’s policy of finding a place to store nuclear waste. The advertisements have attracted significant controversy in recent days as Democratic Progressive Party politicians and the media have called them attempts at “brainwashing” residents to accept a disposal site. Even as the nuclear referendum draws closer, a permanent solution for the existing waste issue seems as distant as ever.

(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Last week, a speech by U.S. President Barack Obama on the value of engaged citizenship made waves in Chinese social media. “The core of Obama’s speech yesterday at the Ohio State University Commencement is ‘a sense of citizenship,’” posted influential Sina Weibo user @假装在纽约, or “pretending to be in New York,” a widely followed provocateur who frequently tweets about the U.S. and whose account has more than 470,000 followers. “I roughly translated his speech, because I feel that Chinese youth may perhaps be even more in need of this kind of education, which they do not receive in Chinese classrooms.”

In his commencement speech on May 5, President Obama said, ”We are not a collection of strangers…we are bound to one another by a set of ideals and laws and commitments.” ”Pretending to be in New York’s” post, together with his translation of the speech, attracted over 30,000 retweets and nearly 6,000 comments in about two days.

Though this is not the first time that Chinese netizens have compared the circumstances of China and the U.S., the concept of “citizenship” has stirred yet another round of discussion about the rights and responsibilities of the Chinese people, as well as criticism of the government. Yin Hong, executive dean of the Tsinghua School of Journalism and Communication, commented: “Though this is not the best speech, ‘citizenship awareness’ has been described very clearly: everyone has natural rights, so everyone also has natural responsibilities. This is citizenship. Without human rights, there should be no responsibilities. Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand.”

Wrote another Weibo user, “Why do the Chinese lack a sense of citizenship? Because they don’t feel that this government has anything to do with them, and truthfully, the government is not an elected body.” Another netizen commented, “[Being in] a socialist country, we cannot think about such things; the more you think about them, the worse you will feel. As for rights, whatever the civil servants say goes.”

The sentiments apparent in the comments on Pres Obama’s speech went beyond envy, jealous and pity. They also included discussions about the struggles, difficulties, and bitterness that Chinese youth face today. Weibo user @ 大背头龙行虎步 wrote:

The youth all start out hoping for a sense of citizenship, but after hitting the wall over and over again in society, they turn towards nepotism. This is ‘soy-sauce vat’ China, where everything ends up black [corrupt] regardless of how it started out. One generation after another, this is our traditional culture: dictatorship, authoritarianism, and intolerance of opposition. The burdens of tradition are way too heavy; democracy might be another century away.

User @呼啦啦啦宝宝_佩 mused:

While Chinese college graduates succumb to reality and lose their dreams in the face of high prices and unaffordable housing right after college, American youth can make the future of their country their personal mission; they’ve been endowed with a strong sense of citizenship, they hold fast to their dreams, and they take the responsibility for the nation’s development. I am wondering, where is China’s future? Where is the future of the next generation?

Such concerns might just be timely, with graduation right around the corner for many in China. Perhaps for most recent college graduates, the most pressing issue facing them is not how to change the nation, but how to survive in a gloomy economy. In fact, 2013 is believed to be the most difficult job hunting season modern China has ever faced. While almost seven million college graduates are entering the job market, only nine million new jobs have been created, and college graduates must compete with returning students from abroad, as well as high school graduates and trade school graduates. The ratio of college graduates to jobs is believed to be the lowest in Chinese history.

A sense of citizenship may mean more than thinking independently and forming opinions that differ from the propaganda of the Chinese government. More importantly, it represents an ability to be balanced and independent when facing authority, an ability that flows from the feeling of being an influential part of the country, however small the individual may be. As Ren Zhiqiang, a real estate tycoon with more than 14 million followers on Weibo, opined, “The president’s speeches have never been edicts that all are required to study, but simply common sense.”

(via Bigstockphoto)

In Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich, John Osburg, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester, takes his readers into a shady underworld, where entrepreneurs and state bureaucrats mingle and forge the networks underpinning China’s socialist market economy.  Osburg’s informants include a cast of memorable characters, many of whom could just as easily be found in a Hong Kong gangster flick.

Anxious Wealth examines relationship cultivation and gender roles among contemporary Chinese elites.  The book draws upon several years of ethnographic data culled from countless evenings accompanying businessmen entertaining clients, partners, and state officials.  While the book locates itself in the context of anthropological literature on consumption and social class, there are insights here useful for businesspeople, policymakers, as well as cultural observers.

Bonding, Chinese Reform Era style

The narrative offers a worm’s eye view of the co-dependencies among entrepreneurs, underworld bosses, and government officials in Reform Era China.  Osburg explains how networks form around shared experiences of leisure—banqueting, drinking, gambling, and cavorting with hostesses.  Among this population, a purely monetary bribe is insufficient.  The goal of business entertaining—not always achieved—is to transform interested, calculated relationships into relationships rooted in what Osburg calls “irrational sentiment.”

Osburg depicts a China in which entrepreneurs and underworld leaders cultivate connections with government officials to get protection, insider access, and preferential treatment for their businesses.  In turn, officials rely upon the underground forms of force those connections can supply in order to achieve the economic goals that help that same officials get promoted. Bureaucrats often depend upon unofficial income derived from that growth to afford the lifestyle and “face” commensurate with their position. How might this work in practice? Here’s one example: A developer supplies a local official with the thugs that forcibly dispossess local residents to pave the way for an infrastructure project. The developer gets to build his project, and the official takes a cut from the land sale.

One remarkable aspect of the book is the (non-Chinese) author’s infiltration into elite entrepreneur and even underworld circles.  How does he pull this off?  In the context of Chengdu, a western city with comparatively few foreign expats at the time, the presence of a foreigner was in some ways a bonus, as the presence of a Chinese-speaking, foreign guest vaguely suggested the international reach of an entrepreneur’s circle.

Fascination with things foreign

The status afforded to things foreign is a theme that resurfaces throughout the book.  On more than one occasion, the author conducts workshops for Chinese audiences on Western tastes and manners.  (A slightly more outrageous European etiquette seminar charging participants RMB 80,000 (about US$13,000) recently caught some attention on the Chinese social Web.)  In a similar vein, advertisements for Chinese brands regularly claim that their products meet foreign standards of quality.  For example, in the words of this milk ad a voice-over by movie star Ge You says, “San Yuan milk: European and American standards, Beijing quality.”  The author suggests that knowledge and mastery of international standards—from milk to Maseratis—is crucial to Chinese elites’ desire to project global recognition.

Osburg notes in passing how elites’ obsession with being perceived by their peers as “world class” finds reverberations in the objectives and conduct of the Chinese state itself.  But the state’s deep-seated desire for recognition by both domestic and foreign audiences can lead to an emphasis of form over substance. The desire for the appearance of progress and prestige has sometimes combined with corruption in dangerous ways, leading to the cases of shoddy construction and food safety scandals that seem sadly unavoidable in the China Anxious Wealth depicts.

How to move beyond the “old boy” networks

Ultimately, Anxious Wealth prompts readers to ask difficult questions about the direction of China’s development. The political and social conditions under which entrepreneurs in China operate complicate attempts to place them within Western social science categories, such as “bourgeoisie” or “middle class,” that historically agitate for legal rights and political representation to protect their accumulated wealth.  Osburg’s study shows how Chinese entrepreneurs forge close—and often profitable—ties with state officials, giving those entrepreneurs a vested interest in opposing any political shakeup.

Minxin Pei and other scholars have argued that owing to the inefficiencies of corruption among elites, China has become stuck in a “trapped transition.” If China is to power through this rut toward a more equitable system of governance, the impetus for change will more likely come from the groups excluded or marginalized by these established “old boy” networks.  Among Osburg’s informants, woman entrepreneurs and recent college graduates advocated for a more meritocratic system.  Rural or urban residents who have their property appropriated by collusive practices of developers and local governments insisted upon the rule of law.

It’s not surprising that the common folk on the periphery of Osburg’s story are incensed by the excess and waste of elite banqueting and karaoke culture. For those Chinese partying on the public dime, there’s worse news: given the prevalence of mobile phones, rapidly growing Internet penetration, and the vibrancy of China’s social Web, what happens in the nightclub rarely stays there.