What Does a Chinese Want?

New Aspirations of the “Fifty-Something” Generation

For the past twenty years, the world has observed in awe as China enthusiastically embraced former leader Deng Xiao Ping’s exhortation: “To get rich is glorious”.

Today, “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”, the official description of the current system, would be better labeled as “Capitalism with Chinese characteristics”.

But the contradiction between the almost wild entrepreneurial economy and the still tightly-controlled political environment remains a historical experiment, without precedent and no sure outcome. Many (more often outside than inside China) are also concerned by growing disparities between rich and poor. Personally, I always viewed such disparities as an almost unavoidable side-effect of early development or fast economic growth, which can easily be overlooked as long as everyone shares in the increased prosperity (though in different proportions).

Even today, most observers agree that the nation’s stability is unlikely to be threatened as long as a large majority of Chinese perceives its lot to be improving. And indeed, thus far at least, one can observe a powerful trickle down effect from this capitalist revolution on almost all layers of the population.

Beyond the thousands of quasi-instant fortunes of early entrepreneurs, the wages of white collar workers and corporate executives have increased apace with the development of a competitive private economy and the installation in China of many foreign companies. In the process, salaries have steadily increased and a true middle class has been created in most of the big and medium-sized cities. One can observe this in big department stores, which once catered mostly to the wives and concubines of government officials but now offer fashions aimed overwhelmingly at the young professional woman.

Blue-collar workers have benefited as well, though less spectacularly, as the government-set minimum wage has been regularly and generously increased.

Farmers initially lagged but have more recently benefited from renewed attention from the central government, in the form of lower taxes and other initiatives.

Generally left behind have been the millions of migrant workers, who move from farms to cities to take precarious jobs. This trend is encouraged by the government, to reduce excess labor in agricultural areas, but these unskilled workers receive only very low wages that, occasionally, even go unpaid by unscrupulous employers. While this often causes local riots, that underclass is in a survival mode that is not conducive to either revolutions or nation-wide organization.

Except for the latter, however, almost everyone seems to feel that their lot has improved in recent years and, from what I can judge, the nation’s current leaders remain popular.

Altogether, rising incomes have resulted in a tidal wave of “conspicuous consumption”, especially among the 25-40 generation. Starting with the purchase of apartments, they followed with cars, appliances, electronics, fashion, cosmetics (for both men and women) and, more recently, with services such as sports clubs, golf, spas, and the like. The phenomenon, started in cities like Shanghai and Beijing, has spread to second-tier and even smaller cities. It shows no sign of abating, as countless glossy magazines, avidly read by young adults, extol the lifestyles of the newly rich and famous and busily create new desires and “necessities”. This consumption surge, though it has not yet overtaken exports as a growth engine, has given the Chinese economy the looks of an unstoppable machine.

What has been lost in this development process, however, is the safety net previously implied by a communist economy where everyone was employed by the government and felt “taken care of” equally, if not sufficiently. Characteristically, it is not so much the younger generation that worries about the lack of a safety net. But among the “fifty-something” you can feel a looming sentiment of insecurity.

Over the years, I have made a small number of good friends among Chinese of that age group. It is a schizophrenic generation, largely shaped by Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution.

A few years ago, I asked a 25-year old Shanghai woman, who was about to marry a European friend, what her parents thought of this marriage to a foreigner. She answered: “My grand-parents are delighted. But my parents were totally broken by the Cultural Revolution: they no longer have opinions.” And, indeed, many of her parents’ generation merely survive in the new environment, incapable of taking charge of their own destiny.

Others, in contrast, were steeled by the ups and downs endured by their families during that destabilizing period. Often moved to villages far away from home, many experienced the lives of poor farmers, very different from the comfortable ones they had been accustomed to in their middle-class families at home. Surviving in a constantly changing environment gave them an adaptive quality that often helped them seize the opportunities early when the economy was freed from its communist straight jacket.

During this trip, in conversations with entrepreneurs, executives, farmers and professionals, two areas of concern kept coming up: education and healthcare.

Education is not really free in China. Books, school supplies and transportation cost money. So does the tutoring that is often considered necessary if your child is to be accepted in one of the better schools or universities, which will more or less guarantee the best jobs on graduation. This is a huge burden if you are not one of the rich – even with only one child per family.

Among the better-off, the dream is to send their child to a western university, in the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. As a friend put it: “To even entertain that dream, you must already have put aside one million RMB”, which is real money in our countries ($120,000) but literally huge by Chinese standards. Yet, this is the dream of millions.

So far, the Chinese do not seem to marry very early and their child may come when they are in their very late twenties or early thirties. By their late thirties, they start thinking about their education budget very seriously and, understandingly, with some angst. My friends and their friends of the fifty-something generation have already gone through those tribulations and await with anticipation the day when their children will become independent. Yet, their worries won’t be over.

As many of us know, once you reach your fifties, little ailments become a daily reminder of our inexorable aging. If you have little or no health insurance coverage, as is the most common case in China, you start to worry about your really old age. Under communist rule, medicine was wholly inadequate but free. Furthermore, everyone participated in the same government-run system and there was little awareness that things could be better. Now, with better information and a large generation about to reach retirement age, and in a largely privatized economy, the fear looms large of finding oneself without any coverage at all when whatever corporate-sponsored health-care that existed runs out.

In the past, family solidarity and a strong Chinese sense of generational responsibility could generally spread and attenuate the burden, complementing whatever state-sponsored health care existed. But, in recent years, the one-child-per-family policy has created a more hedonistic and selfish generation of children. To me, and by western standards, these children still seem to still exhibit a wonderful sense of duty to their broad family. But Chinese parents worry that this ethical tradition has been eroding and point out that it will be harder for a single child to take care of parents (and sometimes grand-parents) than when the burden was shared among several working children.

As the fifty-something generation approaches retirement age, the creeping sense of insecurity that is becoming apparent among them is likely to spread, with an increased awareness of the system’s shortcomings.

There is another major source of concern, which seems shared by all generations: the deterioration of the environment. From the increasingly unusable (and shrinking) water supply, to the desertification and sand storms of the Beijing area and the increasingly dangerous air pollution in major cities, the environmental deterioration has become palpable to many in recent years. While it probably ranks a distant third behind education and healthcare, it has recently burst onto the worry stage.

The main reason is a massive information campaign by the central government. In a recent paper, “Chinese Muzzle” , I argued that the central government was using the widely perceived link between the corruption of local official and industrial pollution to rally public opinion behind a certain re-centralization of political power.

Conducting an education and propaganda campaign against polluters puts the central government on the side of public opinion and reinforces its ability to prosecute and replace corrupt (or merely disobedient) local officials. It is particularly telling that Pan Yue, deputy director and frequent spokesman of the State Environment Protection Administration (SEPA) has regularly and openly criticized the corruption of local officials as the main obstacle to fighting pollution in China. Not only has he not been censored, as might have been the case some years ago, but his agency has recently been granted added enforcement powers.

Putting all these observations together and using the fifty-something generation as an omen of things to come, it becomes clear that the aspirations of China’s population (I almost wrote “electorate”!) are likely to be changing soon. Demands for a greater quality of life and for a better societal safety net are likely to become increasingly important. Concurrently, enrichment at any cost may become less important. This evolution may markedly slow down the country’s rate of growth and radically change the pattern of that growth – toward domestic services and somewhat away from producing “things”. And it may get under way sooner than seems probable today.

François Sicart, in Paris
April 23, 2007