A Profile in Reverse Migration

The following article is a lengthy profile on a young migrant worker and the current state of flux that she and China's migrants are in as the world economy crumbles. I recommend clicking on the link and reading the whole article.

From Der Spiegel:

The promise of prosperity lured Quan Xiaoju from her home in rural China to the assembly lines in the bustling city of Guangzhou. Now, like countless other migrant workers, she is heading back home as the jobs dry up and China's boom comes to an end.

As she bids farewell to Guangzhou, a city of nine million people, there is hardly enough time for a wistful look back -- at the teeming crowds of migrant workers with copious amounts of luggage in front of the city's train station, or at its bold downtown highway, built on stilts, and still packed with cars despite the economic crisis.

The crowd pushes forward relentlessly, literally forcing Quan Xiaoju to enter the station. Xiaoju, a petite migrant worker, quickly places her belongings -- a black-and-white plaid suitcase and a small plastic bag -- on the conveyor belt at the security checkpoint before being pushed onward, then up an escalator and into one of the enormous waiting rooms.

China's global factory is shedding its slave-like workers, cost-effectively and efficiently, almost as if they too were products on an assembly line. They sit in long rows, shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting for the trains that will take them back to their home provinces, to the places they once left for China's industrial east, lured by the promise of prosperity. Xiaoju (her name means "Little Chrysanthemum") finally has time to catch her breath and look around. She has a few more minutes left before her northbound train to Hengyang, in Hunan Province, is scheduled to depart.

The station is busy as it would normally be before the Chinese New Year, when companies in Guangdong Province -- the enormous export factory that borders Hong Kong and includes the burgeoning large cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan -- collectively send armies of migrant workers home on vacation. But this time the exodus is involuntary and unforeseen, and likely to last for an extended period of time -- and the mood is understandably gloomy.

Read On

Xiao Ju's story breaks my heart. The circumstances of her existence is so bleak:

A daughter of poor farmers born into China's dying countryside. Goes to the big city to work in a factory where she's given the opportunity to slave away for miniscule sums of money. Then one day she's told to go home. Not because of any problem of her creation. But because nobody wants the shoddy jewelry she makes anymore. She then has nothing left to do but return back to the bleak rural poverty of her home village.

It's even more gut-wrenching when you think about the millions of people like Xiao Ju who are in her exact same predicament.

At the end of the article, Xiao Ju laments that the life she dreamed of one day having in Guangzhou is gone. But she seems confident that one day she'll have the chance, again, to find work in a southern Chinese factory.

Ironically, in Xiao Ju's life, slavery in a factory is freedom. Working seven days a week with toxic chemicals making low-quality goods for pennies an hour is the beacon of hope in her, otherwise, doomed existence.

Such is the tragedy of China's rural migrant population.

What's Next for The Bird's Nest?

In the Bird's Nest Beijing has a very nice tourist attraction and an incredibly ornate building. Yet there is nothing really going on inside the place.

From The Associated Press:

BEIJING (AP) — Just five months after the Beijing Olympics, the Bird's Nest is a cavernous museum searching for a new purpose.

The iconic National Stadium drew acclaim for its daring design, an engineering marvel that borders on sculpture. Now it draws about 10,000 tourists a day — mostly Chinese — who pay 50 yuan (about $7) to walk on the stadium floor, then climb through the expensive seats to a souvenir shop hawking pricey mementos recalling Zhang Yimou's dazzling opening ceremony or the three world records set by Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt.

A symbol of China's rising power and confidence, the stadium may never recoup the $450 million the government spent to build it, particularly as China's economic slump worsens.

It has yet to draw big-ticket events, has no permanent tenant, and only one date has been announced for this year. Puccini's opera "Turandot," directed by Zhang, is set for Aug. 8 — the one-year anniversary of the Olympics' opening ceremony.

Read On

My friend, Taylor, who is visiting from America has been surprised at how much Olympic-related stuff (propoganda?) is still floating around China.

The TV on the bus we were riding the other day had a cartoon of the five Olympic mascots in a fantasy cartoon program with flying dragons and lizards. Their likeness can be seen on billboards and in street artwork everywhere too.



Based on the amount of merchandise and images you see of the characters, you'd never believe that the games ended almost half a year ago.

It is a shame that nothing can be done with the Bird's Nest. Despite having a population of over 10 million people, Beijing, sadly, doesn't have anything to put in the stadium permanently.

Coming from Kansas City, a city in middle-America of about 2 million people that over the past fifteen years has managed to put 75,000 people into its football stadium several times a year, I think that Beijing's inability to find anything to put into the stadium reflects poorly on the state of the city's, and probably the country's, civil society.



But of course I may just be reading too much into the Nest's perma-emptiness. It does seem to be flourishing as a tourist trap.

Flat Red Bull

I've never been a big fan of Red Bull. But the Chinese versions of the drink is particularly foul. For whatever reason the drink is uncarbonated and completely flat. It is like drinking cough syrup.

The drink seems to have caught on over here though. I see the drinks in every convenient store and super market as well as in night clubs as a mixer.

Chinese Savings and American Debt

In an effort to avoid further economic woes, Beijing is encouraging its nation of savers to spend their money.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Beijing - Li Wen, the manager of a Citroen auto dealership in south Beijing, is pretty proud of himself. As car sales across China dive, torpedoed by the international crisis, his figures are holding up.

He is the sort of model entrepreneur whose example the Chinese government badly wants others to follow, as the authorities pin their hopes of staving off an economic slump on a boost to local consumption.

"Stimulating domestic demand is the most important factor to cope with the global financial crisis," the governor of China's central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, said recently. "We need to adopt more comprehensive policies to support ... consumers' spending patterns."

One of Mr. Li's own policies – to offer more financing to car buyers – illustrates just how hard it could be to persuade a nation of savers to spend their country's way out of trouble.

Almost all of Li's customers – traditionally wary of falling into debt – pay cash on the nail, in full, for their autos. This year, he hopes to persuade 20 percent of them to take out loans that he has arranged with local banks. "We have to encourage consumers to buy," he says. "We dealers have to provide services to boost consumer confidence."

Read On

Later on down the article, this is an interesting clip:

The average Chinese family saves some 30 percent of its income, partly because China's social security net is weak; people have to rely on their own resources to pay for a hospital stay, for example, or for a child's education.

This savings rate, fueled by a more responsible credit culture than the West, seems to be a good thing to me. Now I understand that demand and spending stimuate economies, but the Chinese, who actually buy what they can afford, seem to be way ahead of the game compared to Americans.

Why am I ragging on the spending-crazy Americans and praising the frugal Chinese? Check out the beginning of this article from The Christian Science Monitor in 2005:

Americans have stopped saving for a rainy day.

Instead, they are living paycheck to paycheck, depending on credit cards to get them through emergencies, and hoping that the rising value of their homes will give them a retirement nest egg.

This personal economic chasm is showing up in the national savings rate, which has been declining for years. Tuesday, the Commerce Department reported that the personal savings rate fell to zero in June, the lowest since a one-month buying binge in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The United States is on track to record a savings rate for the year below 1%, which would be the lowest since the depths of the Great Depression, when the rate turned negative.

There is just a different attitude towards debt and spending in China compared to the US. Although there are signs that Americans realize how unsustainable their lives have been for the past several decades. From CNN on December 11:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- It's a sign of the times: Americans are pulling back on the debt they use to spend and fuel the economy, while their net worth is declining.

The government reported Thursday that household debt in the third quarter fell for the first time ever. Meanwhile, net worth dropped by the largest amount on record based on data going back to 1951.

In China, I pre-pay my electricity, gas, cell phone, and internet. In this kind of society, if I don't watch how much electricity I have on my meter, the lights go out.

This seems simple enough to me now that I've been in China for a while. But when I first came to China three years ago, this lack of credit truly annoyed me. I kept thinking, "Why can't they just bill me for what I spend later?"

Now I can identify that my thinking at the time was unmistakenly one of an American who'd grown up in the most consumptive culture in the history of the world.

When I tell Chinese people about the culture of credit that I come from in the US, they cannot wrap their minds around it. Essentially, they don't understand how we, initially, get something for nothing and are then trusted to pay things back later. That seems so counter-intuitive to them.

The longer I stay in China and outside of America, the harder it is getting for me to understand America's utter dependency on credit and the encouraging of its people to live either beyond their means or to the absolute limit of them.

Cui Hua Shan - Part 1

A snow-covered bridge near the top of Cui Hua Shan

My friend from America who's visiting me, Taylor, and I went to Cui Hua Shan yesterday. Cui Hua Shan is a mountain about an hour south of Xi'an in the Qingling mountain range. The mountain is famous for its rockslides and massive boulders.

Here is a small excerpt of a (Chinglish) write up about the mountain from Xi'an Expat:

Located 20 kilometers away from Xi'an, Cuihua Mountains landside scenery national Geopark is one of the first 11 Geoparks authorized by National Land Resources Department in March, 2001 and, one of the first unveiled national parks in China as well. In the park, the highest peak Zhongnan mountain elevates above sea level by 2604m with total area 32km2 and is one of the developed fullest from landslide. With its most complete diversity of landslide appearance, most typical structure, most intact, largest scale and highest tourism value, the park is the most unusual in China and abroad, as demonstrated with search by Shaanxi Sci-tech Information Research Institute, well-known as Chinese landslide miracle scenery and geological museum.

It was recorded in records on kingdoms in the early stage of West Zhou Dynasty that at the second year (B.C.780) during the You King period of West Zhou Dynasty there had been a great earthquake in the three valleys in the middle part of Shaanxi. And in the year the earthquake resulted in rivers dried and Qishan plateau collapsed. The same record can also be found in 'On historical events' by Si Maqian, an ancient scholar of the Dynasty. It is by inference from literature records on kingdoms in the early stage of West Zhou Dynasty that the Cuihua landslide scenery was caused to from be the earthquakes following.

Read On

Here are a few of pictures I took from the mountain:


Some nice water fall action here


Cui Hua Shan's narrow path winds through thousands of boulders


A path with the peak above covered in clouds


A frozen lake amidst clouds


I love this photo. A man video taping a rooster at the bottom of the mountain.