National Day Holiday in Guangzhou

Several years ago, the national leadership here embarked on a campaign to promote a “harmonious” society. This effort, recalling Confucian ideals that still pervade everyday life here, has been used to both suppress dissent from the policies that have devastated rural life as well as take steps to ameliorate those ravages by addressing the growing inequality here. With instances of social disturbance nearing 100,000 annually (according to official figures) there is fear that China’s national unity, re-established only 60 years ago (and still waiting on the eventual re-integration of Taiwan) could be threatened.

The promotion of harmony and the desire to attract the world to China has led to campaigns for “civilized” behavior. The monitors in the metro, mostly running ads for skin care products (“My skin cannot be too white”) and medications, have cartoons urging a “Civilized Guangzhou”. Behaviors that are encouraged include helping elderly people onto buses, apologizing when you step on the foot of someone queuing near you, or comforting a distraught young girl with a balloon. Earlier efforts have also included admonitions to not expectorate on the ground and briefly, and at the time of the SARS scare, not using your own chopsticks to remove food from the communal plate (the latter effort has gone nowhere, although I do recall better adherence in Hong Kong, which was very hard hit by SARS.)

I am on a small campaign myself to encourage “civilized” behavior. There are two aspects of this effort, me as demonstrator of the sought after behavior and me as the requestor. Each has had its interesting and salutary affects. For example, it is rare for people here to hold doors open for on another; there may be a line of people trying to get through the entrance door to our building and every person will try to slip through without any regard for those that follow (this is not ironclad in this building, with all faculty here we have a more traveled subset). Holding the door open always gets a smile, eye contact and a “thank you’ as if to acknowledge that only foreigners would deign to extend the courtesy.

Yesterday I was on a crowded bus and I offered my seat to an older woman; she followed the ritual of refusing me three times and when I insisted, she took the seat and smiled broadly. (According to what I have been told, a fourth refusal would have indicated that she really meant no). Although making a seat available to an older person is not uncommon, it is usually young women doing the offering. Perhaps the fact that it was a Graybeard making the gesture gave it greater resonance, but in any case, there were lots of heads turning in the wake of the seat exchange.

My demands for civilized behavior generally involve automobiles; even here on campus, an area expressly NOT designed for cars, drivers will act in the most aggressive manner towards pedestrians. Within limits, I will enforce pedestrian priority and when I do so, the drivers always look at me somewhat sheepishly as if to say, “Yes, I know that my behavior was uncivilized but I am playing by the rules of the game and I apologize for not recognizing that you were a foreigner, for whom I must be civilized”.

Another venue for encouraging civilized behavior is at the supermarket where you need to bring your produce to the young women at the scales so that they can weigh them and affix a bar code for scanning at the checkout. The usual scene is a scrum around the scale and these tiny grandmas elbowing themselves to the front to get their things scaled. A simple stare of scolding disappointment is enough to have the back off with a smile.

October 1st was National Day, the celebration of the 59th anniversary of the Communist march into Beijing. This merits a week long holiday, schools and government offices are closed but commerce goes on as usual. We were invited out for lunch by a former student, who is now working for the government doing training of community workers. Accompanying us was a colleague from her office and her 5 year old son, who wanted to listen to the foreigners speak, and another professional colleague from social work. We went to a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant, one we had not visited in the past. It was tastefully elegant in a Chinese Buddhist manner, the food was expertly prepared and the dinner conversation wide-ranging. One topic was the economic meltdown in the US and any adjustments we would need to make in response to the implosion.

The story is not getting all that much play here, despite the fact that the Shanghai stock market is down something like 70% in the past year and real-estate prices here in Guangzhou have softened significantly. More prominently discussed is the milk contamination issue and the culpability of private and public officials in the fostering of the original problem and the subsequent cover-up once the problem became known. A story seen in the US press but not reported here is the efforts of some parents to sue the companies involved, seeking to recover the costs of treatment for their babies. As the NY Times has it, the courts, not independent of the government, have not yet decided to accept the suits and pressure is being brought to bear against lawyers, encouraging them to not file such suits. This is part of the “harmonious society” question that seems repressive to foreigners.

Among academics, the US economic distress is seen as one more sign that the era of the US dominated world order is coming to an end; left open is a question (at least for me) whether China can act responsibly enough in matters of basic health and safety issues to participate in the moral leadership that its economic prowess entitles it to. At our “breakfast tea” this morning, with officials from the local trade un1on, our host repeatedly made the point that the just passed financial bailout in the US was a good thing as it insured stability. We retorted with the Senator Sanders line and encouraged them to see beyond the PR surrounding the legislation and see how this was another example of “heads I win, tails you lose”. Our host was focused on questions of stability and, as always, this can be best understood as a reflexive fear of instability, a state that China has experienced too much in the past 160 years or so.

In the meantime, China holds over $1.3 trillion in foreign reserves, most of it US dollars. One interesting future dynamic counter poses the US effort to inflate its currency to deal with its current problems, while China will seek to buy US-based resources and companies with their huge cash cache. The leading idea that is circulating, and one that bodes well for China if it comes to past, is that there will need to be more spending on domestic needs as the high tide of consumer generated prosperity recedes. There are many projects that could make good use of an infusion of state resources here, including health care and social security. With the demise of the former state owned enterprise system, formerly the fount of needed social services, housing and health care, individuals have been left largely without essential social support At the same time, the mass migration of people from the countryside to the urban areas has left entire regions of the country emptied of young people, the generation that in the past would have helped support the elderly. The economic practices of the government has been to encourage private accumulation of wealth (“To be rich is glorious”- Deng Xiao Ping) while neglecting social supports that are ever more important given the social disruption that the repaid development of an accumulationist society was wrought.

There have been some beginning efforts here and most rural residents have some health care coverage now; with the strong Party organization the new policy was announced 16 months ago and has met all of its (limited) goals by this time. The ability of the central government to address growing inequalities remains an open question and one that, if not solved, portends badly for China and the world.

I am going to end this here as it seems that I do have a decent web connection and I have 9 photos or so to attach; so I need to grab the opportunity. Please let us hear from all of you (I think there are 130 addresses that get a notification of this blog) and how things are going in your part of the world.

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