Myth busting

The dispersal of three myths:

1) All Chinese are hard working.

When I was studying at Auckland University in New Zealand in 2004, I used to make my way into the library some time around ten in the morning. I was lucky to find a seat, such was the keenness of my Asian friends to get in and practise for their IELTS test. If I went to my host university in the UK at ten in the morning, I could have had a whole row of tables, maybe even a whole floor, to myself.

It is, however, all a myth. Maybe it’s the lazy ones who stay behind and the hard-working ones who get the opportunity to go abroad (not actually true, either). And certainly people in Shaanxi and north China generally are regarded as less hard working than southerners.

It's laziness coupled with protestations of business that make it particularly interesting. One of the things I hear most often is wo hen mang (I'm really busy) and variations on it - mang de hen (so busy), mang si le (busy to death), mang feng le (so busy ive gone crazy), etc. I hear this mostly while I'm chatting on QQ, the instant messaging service.

Being busy means just doing your normal, everyday job. When they get asked to do something over and above their normal routine, then they just "beng kui" - collapse under the enormity of the onerous task placed upon them. They need a good xiuxi (rest) after that. I'm trying to work with a university on foreign student recruitment, and the people in charge of the website deserve a prize for stonewalling and intractability. They'll go home after eight hours of playing computer games and chatting on QQ and say how busy they've been.

The people in my office who have the least work to do like to make out they have the most. When one of the drivers comes back from picking someone up - a tough 45 minutes of sitting down and rotating his arms slightly - he'll emit lots of 'ooooh's and ‘ai yahhhh’ sounds, just to let people know how busy he is. When someone asks if he is free in the afternoon, he looks slightly pained and mentions how 'mang' (busy) he is. As soon as the person goes away, he sits at the computer playing on his QQ farm game until lunchtime.

There's another guy here who is employed purely because he is a relative of the boss' wife and can be trusted not to leak secrets and to keep an eye on people. He is probably the laziest and most stupid person I have ever met, but he's good at walking quickly and smoking and talking loudly on his phone in local dialect, which perhaps gives the appearance of being busy. He sits in on our meetings, and at the end repeats everything that was said like he's just thought of it, then recaps again (just in case we missed it the first two times), then concludes the meeting.

When our company moved office, I've never seen them so excited. Here was an opportunity to loudly move tables and chairs up and down stairs and show everybody how busy they were. If no one was watching or within earshot, they would probably just sit around smoking.

Another point worth mentioning is that, generally, Chinese people are willing to work long hours. The opportunity to earn money is rarely passed up by a Chinese, and they think anyone who does is either very rich or very stupid. But when they're not working, they do hardly anything. They seem to struggle to enjoy themselves, and ‘playing hard’ is not on the agenda. A group of Indonesian power station operators received training from our company in Xian, and for the closing ceremony they had prepared songs and skits and all sorts. The boss of our company lamented the inability of our staff to have a good time like the Indonesians. I think this trait is actually generally fairly well recognised by Chinese themselves, particularly those who have foreign friends.

Also, I rarely see anyone running.



2) All Chinese people are poor.

I should make some distinctions here. The older generation in China had it tough. My friend’s grandmother had to give some of her children to her sister to raise. My ex-girlfriend's father is now bald because he never had enough to eat in his teens when he went to work in the countryside. Anyone who lived through that period is very able to live and get by and be satisfied with their lot, especially now.

All change, please! Now it couldn't be any more different. Urban kids born after 1980, and even more so those born after 1990, couldn't be better off. One reason is the family unit. The parents pay for everything. Almost none of the post-1980s generation will pay their own university fees. Almost none of them will buy their own house - the parents will buy it for them. They'll find them a job, buy them a car, maybe even find them a husband or wife if they're still single at 25. A new group of people has been formed - 月光族, ‘the monthly spenders’ - post-1980s generation people who spend all their salary on shopping, drinking and more shopping because they know their parents will buy them a house. I think it's fair to say that, compared to their western contemporaries, most urban Chinese are better off.

However, the return part of the deal is that the kids are expected -and have a legal responsibility – to look after their parents in old age, ie, live with them. It strikes me that this has significantly financial advantages for all concerned compared to nursing homes, separate houses, etc.

My colleagues - mostly post-1980s generationers - like to point out my relatively high salary. And in turn, I like to point out that I pay my own rent, buy my own food, pay for my own plane tickets, and don't get red envelopes stuffed full of money from various aunts and uncles. A good half of these colleagues do not have to pay for anything. Particularly the women. The one child policy (see below) has indeed created 120 men for every 100 women, but this is highly advantageous for women. Girls who are relatively cool and open about going out for a good time never pay for anything. They're not expected to pitch in for the house. While many want to and will be independent, if they choose not to, they could easily get through life without lifting a finger (particular the pretty ones).

There are no slums in China. Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia, most of Africa – places which have had the advantages of decades of free world residence and support – have plenty. The closest thing resembling a slum in China are former villages that have been absorbed into the urban area. They might not be des-res, but they are hardly seas of poverty. The buildings in them get higher and higher as people expand upwards.

There are plenty of poor people in China, and being a city dweller I admittedly don't get to see a lot of them. But it doesn't seem too desperate to me. I was walking through a village the other day, and there were brand spanking new washing machines and big new red doors in battered old courtyards. Salaries are rising for almost everyone while inflation (property excluded) is manageable. The Chinese government is considering raising the rate at which tax is paid from 2,000 yuan per month to 5,000 yuan. This has regional implications, but it is the roughly the equivalent of anyone earning £30,000-40,000 a year not paying any tax.

There are 300 new cars a day on the roads in Xian alone - one million a month in the whole country. One million new cars a month? Think about that. More and more people are going on holiday overseas, eating western food, drinking whisky and enjoying the good life. The wealth is far from evenly spread, and this old route to economic growth is obviously unsustainable and will have only one ending, but for now, the rising tide has indeed lifted most boats, if only to varying degrees.



3) The one child policy is a horrible abuse of human rights, blah blah blah

Simple fact for everyone - the planet is chronically and totally unsustainably overpopulated. In particular, China. In the 1930s, due to hundreds of years of highly advanced agriculture and medicine, the population of China was already over 400 million. Chairman Mao, in charge from 1949 until 1976, advocated "more is stronger", encouraging people to have as many children as they could. Of all his decisions, this one undoubtedly was the most pig-headed and has the deepest legacy. In 1954, the projected population of China for the year 2000 was 2 billion. In 1978, sanity returned to China, and they implemented a policy which people, particularly non-Chinese, should be very appreciative of.

I've never met one single person who has said anything other than "there's too many people" in this country. It's so blindingly obvious. Try getting on a bus in any city in rush hour (or any hour for that matter). I've taken over a thousand journeys on urban buses. Quite often I was unable to actually get on it, let alone sit somewhere. There are people everywhere all the time. To find peace and solitude like that depicted in ancient paintings is a challenge in itself. Hard seats on the train are also a must-see for those human rights flag wavers. What about the right to some food and a place to live, something which would be impossible without the policy?

It's illegal to have a kid outside of marriage, giving birth is expensive, and you need permission before having a kid. It sounds pretty awful ('draconian' seems to be the adjective of choice in certain circles). No one particularly likes it. But Chinese are too practical and the situation too obvious for them to do anything other than accept it. With the massive increase in wealth that has now come about, a significant number of urban women only want one child now anyway, and almost none of them want more than two.

I like the phrase "responsible member of the international community". It usually has connotations of terrorism. But overpopulation is much more serious. And when it comes to population, China has been very responsible - due to its own reasoning rather than any desire to be a responsible member of the international community.

The policy is not as strict as it is made out. People from the countryside can, under certain circumstances, have two or even three kids. Ethnic minorities can have two or three. Obviously the rich and corrupt can get around it, and it has created a generation of ‘little emperors' - selfish, bad tempered and dependent children. The gender gap is also a real and undesirable side effect. But aside from the above points, do you really want a huge and increasingly wealthy foreign population spilling onto your doorstep? I didn't think so.