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Tuesday, 9 December 2008
Young Chinese Face the Unknown - Economic Hardship
While his father grew up wondering where his next meal would come from, Beijing resident Ran Zhao wonders whether he should buy a car, study in the United States or try to build up his fledgling snake medicine business.
Young Chinese Face the Unknown - Economic Hardship
By Ian Ransom 9 December 2008
BEIJING (Reuters) - While his father grew up wondering where his next meal would come from, Beijing resident Ran Zhao wonders whether he should buy a car, study in the United States or try to build up his fledgling snake medicine business.
The 25-year-old office worker is one of about 360 million Chinese born after 1978, when the Communist government officially launched economic reforms kicking off 30 years of spectacular growth and lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Ran, like many of his city-dwelling friends, has vague childhood memories of family austerity, but for the most part has enjoyed privileges and freedoms his parents never dreamed of.
“My father said that when he was my age, he thought China could never be anything but poor,” Ran said at a classy dim sum restaurant in Beijing. “Now he’s amazed that there are millions of people who actually own cars.”
The 30th anniversary of economic reforms is a landmark state media have used to praise the Communist Party’s sound economic stewardship, and some academics have used to call for wider political reform in the one-party state.
For many young Chinese, however, the date remains an abstract notion for a generation raised in a relative era of plenty.
“For me, the anniversary is not a big deal because 10 years later there will be a 40th anniversary, and 20 years later there will be a 50th anniversary,” said Sarah Lai, a business graduate studying for a Masters at a British university.
Decades of growth and the unwinding of China’s monolithic nanny state has brought young Chinese new entertainments and, increasingly often, the spending power to consume them.
It has also created a dangerous expectation that the good times will roll on, even as growth slows and the job market tightens amid the fall-out from the global financial crisis, said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a political analyst from the University of California, Irvine.
“The real challenge will come not from people being left behind in the short run, but if the sense disappears that there are still years of growth ahead from which those people may be able to benefit,” said Wasserstrom.
“Young people frustrated by a sense that they won’t have the opportunity to be part of a period of growth, that they missed out somehow on the good times, could become a volatile force.”
UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE
China has warned that unemployment will rise next year as the global slowdown forces companies to shed staff and cut salaries, and has made finding jobs for the record 6.1 million university graduates a priority of social stability.
“The decrease of the youth share in the total population and the increase of the idle youth in the labour force are the two biggest contradictory factors of China youth employment,” the Center for China Study, at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, said in a recent report.
University graduates have been told to lower their work and salary expectations, but have proved to have little tolerance when they have felt they have been duped.
A string of student riots has been recorded on Chinese campuses in recent years, sparked by disputes over qualifications and the classification of their diplomas.
Student-led protests, initially targeting foreign countries, have also turned against the government for being soft on perceived slights against China, as witnessed by anti-Japan demonstrations in 2005.
While the 30-year reform anniversary means little to most of the generation born after it, far more sensitive anniversaries lie in wait for the Communist Party, which has staked its legitimacy upon building and maintaining a “harmonious society.”
In April, China passes the 20th anniversary of the start of student-led pro-democracy protests on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, that were ultimately crushed by army troops in June 1989.
Next year will also see the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, student-led demonstrations against foreign powers’ transfer of colonial interests in China from Germany to Japan after the former’s defeat in World War One.
The dates may provoke discussion on campuses and even some symbolic action, but the likelihood of frustrated, idle youth throwing down an open challenge to Party rule is unlikely, even amid rapidly worsening economic conditions, analysts have said.
“The level of helplessness that young people in China feel today compared with what they felt in the late 80s is of a very different kind of magnitude,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, from the Journalism and Media Studies Center of Hong Kong University.
“The frustrations are more akin to frustrations that people in any number of countries would feel during an economic downturn.”
With rising numbers hooked up to the Internet, and increasingly aware of China’s social ills – ranging from rife official corruption to a cavernous gap between rich and poor – the young would sooner blog about their gripes than try to march on city streets, said office worker Ran.
“In any case, for myself and most Chinese people, it’s enough that our standard of living is becoming better,” said Ran. “So I don’t care about politics so much.”
1 comment:
Young Chinese Face the Unknown - Economic Hardship
By Ian Ransom
9 December 2008
BEIJING (Reuters) - While his father grew up wondering where his next meal would come from, Beijing resident Ran Zhao wonders whether he should buy a car, study in the United States or try to build up his fledgling snake medicine business.
The 25-year-old office worker is one of about 360 million Chinese born after 1978, when the Communist government officially launched economic reforms kicking off 30 years of spectacular growth and lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Ran, like many of his city-dwelling friends, has vague childhood memories of family austerity, but for the most part has enjoyed privileges and freedoms his parents never dreamed of.
“My father said that when he was my age, he thought China could never be anything but poor,” Ran said at a classy dim sum restaurant in Beijing. “Now he’s amazed that there are millions of people who actually own cars.”
The 30th anniversary of economic reforms is a landmark state media have used to praise the Communist Party’s sound economic stewardship, and some academics have used to call for wider political reform in the one-party state.
For many young Chinese, however, the date remains an abstract notion for a generation raised in a relative era of plenty.
“For me, the anniversary is not a big deal because 10 years later there will be a 40th anniversary, and 20 years later there will be a 50th anniversary,” said Sarah Lai, a business graduate studying for a Masters at a British university.
Decades of growth and the unwinding of China’s monolithic nanny state has brought young Chinese new entertainments and, increasingly often, the spending power to consume them.
It has also created a dangerous expectation that the good times will roll on, even as growth slows and the job market tightens amid the fall-out from the global financial crisis, said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a political analyst from the University of California, Irvine.
“The real challenge will come not from people being left behind in the short run, but if the sense disappears that there are still years of growth ahead from which those people may be able to benefit,” said Wasserstrom.
“Young people frustrated by a sense that they won’t have the opportunity to be part of a period of growth, that they missed out somehow on the good times, could become a volatile force.”
UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE
China has warned that unemployment will rise next year as the global slowdown forces companies to shed staff and cut salaries, and has made finding jobs for the record 6.1 million university graduates a priority of social stability.
“The decrease of the youth share in the total population and the increase of the idle youth in the labour force are the two biggest contradictory factors of China youth employment,” the Center for China Study, at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, said in a recent report.
University graduates have been told to lower their work and salary expectations, but have proved to have little tolerance when they have felt they have been duped.
A string of student riots has been recorded on Chinese campuses in recent years, sparked by disputes over qualifications and the classification of their diplomas.
Student-led protests, initially targeting foreign countries, have also turned against the government for being soft on perceived slights against China, as witnessed by anti-Japan demonstrations in 2005.
While the 30-year reform anniversary means little to most of the generation born after it, far more sensitive anniversaries lie in wait for the Communist Party, which has staked its legitimacy upon building and maintaining a “harmonious society.”
In April, China passes the 20th anniversary of the start of student-led pro-democracy protests on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, that were ultimately crushed by army troops in June 1989.
Next year will also see the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, student-led demonstrations against foreign powers’ transfer of colonial interests in China from Germany to Japan after the former’s defeat in World War One.
The dates may provoke discussion on campuses and even some symbolic action, but the likelihood of frustrated, idle youth throwing down an open challenge to Party rule is unlikely, even amid rapidly worsening economic conditions, analysts have said.
“The level of helplessness that young people in China feel today compared with what they felt in the late 80s is of a very different kind of magnitude,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, from the Journalism and Media Studies Center of Hong Kong University.
“The frustrations are more akin to frustrations that people in any number of countries would feel during an economic downturn.”
With rising numbers hooked up to the Internet, and increasingly aware of China’s social ills – ranging from rife official corruption to a cavernous gap between rich and poor – the young would sooner blog about their gripes than try to march on city streets, said office worker Ran.
“In any case, for myself and most Chinese people, it’s enough that our standard of living is becoming better,” said Ran. “So I don’t care about politics so much.”
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