On January 20, a knife incident occurred at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, injuring doctors and a patient. Relevant departments are currently dealing with the situation. If reporting, follow information from authoritative departments, play the story down, do not make links [to relevant stories], do not aggregate, and do not hype. (January 20, 2020) [Chinese]

An opthalmologist and three others were attacked by a patient’s relative wielding a vegetable chopper in the latest of a long-running series of attacks on medical staff. South China Morning Post’s report on the incident noted that according to a survey published in 2018, "more than 30 per cent of health professionals had experienced violence at work." The Supreme People’s Court stated in May, 2020 that "189 defendants in 159 concluded cases were penalized for injuring or killing medical workers or seriously disturbing the medical environment from January 2019 to April this year."

A series of directives at the start of the year guided coverage of a previous incident at Beijing’s Civil Aviation Hospital, the funeral of slain doctor Yang Wen, and the subsequent trial of her assailant, who was later executed.

•••

Regarding the closing of the WeChat public accounts "Gelonghui" (格隆汇) and "Gelonghui College" (格隆汇学堂), and the Weibo account "@GelonghuiAPP" (格隆汇APP), related reports should follow information from relevant departments. Do not write thorough reports and interpretations. Do not link to or promote the essay "Ants in a Prosperous Era" or similar content. (January 20, 2020) [Chinese]

Gelonghui is a Shenzhen-based financial media and research firm. The immediate trigger for the account suspensions is unclear—the targeted essay "Ants in a Prosperous Era" was published in September 2016. It discussed the case of Yang Gailan, a poverty-stricken woman from Gansu who had killed her four children with pesticides and an axe the previous month, before taking her own life. Her family had been denied government financial support, and according to the AFP, "multiple media reports alleged corruption was a factor, saying their benefits had been cancelled because they had not bribed local officials." A directive issued on September 13, 2016 ordered that “websites must not issue public comments. Find and delete any unauthorized or independent reports, and eliminate any politically harmful content or commentary.” The "Ants" essay, which is archived at CDT Chinese, argued that "the problem was not Yang Gailan’s, it was actually society’s," and concluded:

A country’s true greatness or otherwise has nothing to do with how many brilliant leaders it has produced, or how many nuclear weapons, or the size of its foreign exchange reserves, or how many Olympic golds it has won, or its GDP growth … none of these meant a hair to Yang Gailan.

It’s about how you treat the disadvantaged! [Chinese]

The organization’s irreverence continued. In November, 2019, for example, a report from The Economist on the use of fake state-owned enterprise status to secure loans noted that Gelonghui had "published a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to become a fake SOE. Find a long-forgotten government institution; target an official with no hope of promotion; then ‘be a shameless toady’ to get the institution’s seal to register your company. Finally, build a maze of subsidiaries."

•••

Regarding the Mercedes-Benz that entered the Forbidden City, brief reports based on information released by the Palace Museum are permitted. Do not comment, aggregate, or write extensive reports. (January 20, 2020) [Chinese]

Regarding the Mercedes-Benz that entered the Forbidden City, the Palace Museum has issued a public apology and decision on the incident. Brief reports based on the museum’s statement are approved, do not push pop-ups, do not conduct independent reports, do not aggregate, do not conduct extended reports, and properly manage comments. Strictly control the temperature on WeChat, Weibo, forums, etc., and guard against hype. (January 20, 2020) [Chinese]

On January 17, a Weibo user posted photos of herself and a friend posing next to a Mercedes SUV in one of the Forbidden City’s expansive courtyards, bragging that "the museum is closed today, so I’m taking advantage of this opportunity to avoid tourists and run wild." Another user cited by SupChina summed up the ensuing backlash, lamenting that "the Palace Museum, which is supposed to be a public asset owned by all citizens, has become a platform for a certain group of people to flaunt their wealth and privilege." The museum issued an apology, claiming that some vehicles had been allowed into the complex for overflow parking for a private event, and suspended its deputy director and head of security pending an investigation.

•••

Concerning the novel coronavirus epidemic situation, promptly report information and prevention decisions issued by authoritative departments. Important information can be verified with the health department to prevent confusion, respond to social concerns, promote scientific prevention knowledge, and guide the public in strengthening their prevention awareness and ability. (January 20, 2020) [Chinese]

This was the latest in a series of directives on coverage of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic as it spread from its epicenter in Wuhan. January 20 saw the first reports of cases in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong, as well as South Korea, and state TV reports on renowned virologist Zhong Nanshan’s confirmation that the disease was transmissible from person to person, and Xi Jinping’s call for the disease to be taken seriously and contained. The total number of known cases stood at 282, with six deaths, according to the World Health Organization’s first situation report on the outbreak.

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. See CDT’s collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truth since 2011.

In accordance with unified arrangements, all regions shall centrally publish a fourth quarter national economic survey announcement between January 10-16, and shall centrally release revised regional 2018 GDP numbers: Tianjin, Hebei, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Shandong, etc. regions may have significant revisions. You must be sure of the correct direction for reports, use data from the official website and WeChat of the Statistics Bureau for interpretation, and do not hype sensitive topics. (January 10, 2020) [Chinese]

Caixin reported on January 22 that 14 provincial-level governments, nearly half the total, "revised down their 2018 gross domestic product (GDP), as a result of the latest economic census amid a central crackdown on statistics fraud." 22 predicted lower growth for 2020. China announced national growth of 6% in Q4 2019, and 6.1% for the year as a whole. Xinhua greeted this as "a milestone for China and world economy," and "a solid step toward the target of doubling [China’s] 2010 GDP by 2020, an important part of the nation’s goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects for its 1.4 billion population." China’s GDP shrank by 6.8% in the first quarter of 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic inflicting the country’s first economic contraction since the end of the Cultural Revolution.

•••

The official Weibo and Wechat public accounts of the All China Women’s Federation and Women’s Voice, and the official Weibo account of All China Women’s News, will publish relevant information and a brief comment on the All China Women’s Federation’s announcement of refunds through Alipay to some donors to the “Spring Buds Student Assistance” project. Starting from 6 p.m., if reporting on this, please strictly repost in accordance with the standard set by content published by these authoritative sources. Do not alter headlines without authorization; do not send pop-up alerts; keep tabs on posts and comments; do not independently newsgather or edit; do not extrapolate, interpret, or comment without authorization; do not draw sensationalist connections with past events; strengthen content inspection of interactive sections; do not hype; do not set up special topic pages. Please strictly manage opportunistic questioning or attacks on our philanthropic and poverty alleviation efforts, attacks on the All-China Women’s Federation or “Spring Buds Student Assistance” program, and other harmful messages. (January 10, 2020) [Chinese]

If reporting on the rectification and reform of the All-China Women’s Federation “Spring Buds Student Assistance” program and the conclusion of the investigation into the same, follow authoritative information from the Federation as standard, and downplay the story; do not alter headlines without authorization; and do not comment on or hype the issue. Reinforce management of posts and comment threads. Do not draw connections or put together special features; do not opportunistically question or attack our philanthropic and poverty alleviation efforts; promptly clean up extreme and negative messages and harmful speech. (January 10, 2020) [Chinese]

The Spring Bud Project, a joint effort by the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) and the China Children and Teenagers’ Fund (CCTF) to promote girls’ education, celebrated its 30th anniversary last year. According to a CCTF report marking the occasion, "the project has raised a total of 2.118 billion yuan (US $298.3 million) from 27.84 million social donations, funded more than 3.69 million impoverished girls to return to school, built 1,811 Spring Bud schools and compiled 2.17 million safety manuals for school girls."

In late December, public anger erupted over news that the program had also been supporting boys in impoverished areas. The CCTF explained that the decision had been based on local teachers’ recommendations, and promised greater transparency in the future. The response failed to satisfy some critics, who argued that donors who had prioritized a rare female-focused education charity should have this priority respected. Subsequent censorship stoked the backlash: SupChina’s Jiayun Feng highlighted a disgruntled Weibo user’s sardonic query, "does it cost money to remove trending topics and censor comments? Is the money coming from donations?"

•••

Regarding the “Phase One Agreement” on the China-U.S. trade struggle, with no exceptions: do not independently organize reporting without direction, do not allow push notifications without direction, do not republish foreign reports. Social media platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, Tieba, and other forums are not allowed to launch [relevant] special topics or recommendations, etc., without authorization. You must strictly manage influential online accounts. Consult the above requests, do not hype [this topic]. (January 10, 2020) [Chinese]

This directive governs coverage ahead of the trade deal signed on January 15, which included agreements on technology and IP protection, trade imbalance, and currency manipulation. Writing at The Washington Post the following week, the University of Kansas’ Jiakun Jack Zhang observed that "Chinese state-run media have been in damage control mode to spin these as ‘deepening reforms’ — not concessions." Donald Trump hailed the agreement as a victory, inaccurately describing it as "the biggest deal anyone has ever seen," but it was described elsewhere as "incomplete" and misguided.

•••

Regarding the release of the Fourth National Economic Census Communiqué, do not hype or draw connections to the widening gap between north and south, friction between China and the U.S. on trade, or similar issues. (January 10, 2020) [Chinese]

The Communiqué, published on November 20 last year, outlined the state of China’s economy in 2018, offering "an essential survey of China’s national conditions and strength after socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered into a new era. It is a complete ‘physical inspection’ of China’s national economy during the course that China is securing a decisive victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and embarking on a journey to fully build a modernized socialist China." A regional breakdown is included in the final part of the Communiqué, grouping province-level areas into Eastern, Central, and Western, rather than north versus south.

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. See CDT’s collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truth since 2011.

Both were the subject of withering commentary from social media users, particularly on Weibo. CDT editors have compiled and translated some comments from Weibo users, many of them profoundly skeptical about the government figures on average per-capita disposable income:

洛晓洛跑得快呀: Today’s daily dose of humor has arrived.

寶公子Young: My salary has not increased by one cent, and prices haven’t gotten cheaper. I have no idea where they got this data, or how it supposedly increased.

墨卡不是摩卡: Why haven’t I been informed about when I can expect to receive my portion of this increase?

hikaru岚: I’ll never catch up to the average.

王海东15: As long as they [the people in power] are happy, that’s all that matters.

karlsnake: Does anyone believe this?

化做一粒尘: I just did a quick calculation, and my disposable income is about one hundred yuan (less than $14 U.S. dollars). Not bad. I’m very satisfied. After all, compared to the many workers whose wages are in arrears, I’m considered rich—seriously!

李小姓9863: As everyone knows, statistics is sorcery.

爱着帅哥的兔子君TVXQ: Data with Chinese characteristics.

谦哥理查德:  Read the comments, look at the data, and compare. Is this some new form of “exaggerated crop yields?” [Chinese]

Despite the strong first-quarter GDP growth, which appears to have been driven largely by manufacturing and external demand, the Chinese economy faces numerous challenges, including sluggish consumption, high youth unemployment, and a troubled property sector. A recent WeChat post from audacious entrepreneur and philanthropist Chen Guangbiao urging the Chinese government to bolster consumption by focusing on providing stable jobs, higher incomes, and a stronger social safety net earned many supportive comments from social media users. 

At Reuters, Chan Ka Sing reported on the conflicting economic indicators that make China’s economic recovery “a tale of at least two economies”:

An optimist will look at China’s latest GDP figures released on Wednesday and argue they signal that the best of times is returning. The country’s economy grew 5.3% in the first quarter year-on-year, comfortably beating analysts’ expectations of a 4.6% increase and putting Beijing on track to hit its 5% target for 2024. Yet beneath the headline number lies evidence that the People’s Republic has yet to put worse times behind it, not least near-zero inflation and sluggish lending and an enduring property market crisis. It’s a tale of at least two economies.

[…] Recent economic indicators have pointed to a rockier time ahead. Consumer inflation cooled more than expected in March and hovers around negative territory. An increase in monetary supply has also failed to translate into more bank lending. Fitch last week followed Moody’s by downgrading its outlook on China’s sovereign credit rating.

When meeting a group of U.S. business leaders last month, Xi said his administration is planning “a series of major steps” to propel China’s economy forward and that the Peak China theory will not be proved right. The remark has instilled expectations that the People’s Republic is serious about a new round of economic reforms. Such a diverse and often conflicting set of data, though, is complicating Beijing’s search for effective stimulus. [Source]

Chen’s post, “Rational Consumption Is the Bedrock of a Strong Nation,” contained six suggestions for Chinese bureaucrats and policymakers:

1. Keep an eye on the wallets of the wealthy and find ways to make them contribute more to the “common prosperity.”
2. Stop obsessing about ordinary people’s ‘pocket change.’ That’s the hard-earned savings they’ve scraped together to support their elderly parents, keep their kids in school, and use as a bulwark against potential unemployment or serious illness. They know better than you where that money ought to be spent, and they don’t need you lecturing them about it.
3. Consumption requires a stable source of income, so you should think about how to provide people with stable jobs and higher incomes.
4. Consumption requires a strong social safety net, so you should think about how to resolve the problems of affordable housing, elder care, and the high cost of medical treatment.
5. Hard work and thrift are admirable Chinese traditions and should not be abandoned just like that.
6. Getting rid of used cars and home appliances is not only an enormous waste of resources, but also pollutes the environment. Don’t lose sight of this fact just for the sake of “trading in the old for the new.” [Chinese]
   

Chen, who grew up deeply impoverished but is now conspicuously wealthy, ended his post by inviting government bureaucrats and policymakers to “step out of your climate-controlled offices” and “come with me to better understand the real lives of ordinary grassroots people.” Written under the folksy moniker “Brother Biao,” Chen’s six-item list drew many admiring responses from WeChat users, some of whom praised him for speaking truth to power: 

袁同学123456: The fact that [government workers] earning five-digit monthly salaries, enjoying free medical insurance, and eating cheap subsidized meals at the office (for only three or four yuan a pop) are eyeing the pockets of laborers who subsist on just three or four thousand yuan a month is ridiculous, utterly ridiculous …

忧桑的牢府: Brother Biao has risen in my estimation!

哇锅锅: Damn, people who speak the truth are an endangered species.

迪克牛仔男孩: They’ve rounded up everyone who spoke the truth.

脸上有肉666: There aren’t many people left who know how to speak the truth.

屁孩还年轻: [The government’s logic] in a nutshell: “Let them eat cake.”

王安-王安: Well said. Officials and bureaucrats just feign ignorance. [Chinese]

Chen’s post and the supportive responses from netizens are a reflection of the structural problems that continue to plague China’s post-pandemic economic recovery. This week brought news of better-than-expected first-quarter 2024 GDP growth, but it appears to have been driven largely by manufacturing and external demand, and questions remain about whether this will translate into broader prosperity for everyday citizens. As mentioned by some of the social media users who responded to Chen’s WeChat post, the Chinese government seems intent on pursuing policies designed to get Chinese consumers to “loosen their purse strings,” rather than enacting deeper structural reforms to the market-economy or bolstering the social safety net—actions that could stimulate consumption by giving Chinese households a greater sense of stability and confidence.

As CDT has documented, online Chinese-language content touching on meaningful political-economic reforms or offering prescriptions for rescuing the ailing economy continues to be vigorously censored. Recently deleted content includes a Weibo essay blaming China’s stagnating economic growth on “a failure of political reform” and likening the Party-state to gangsters; a WeChat post by Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping suggesting “Three Simple Points” to revive the economy; another WeChat post about a Guangzhou public opinion poll showing record dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, job prospects, and anticipated income; and “Ten Questions About the Private Economy,” a discussion between four prominent Chinese economists that was posted to the well-respected WeChat finance account “Caijing 11.” There was an example of retroactive censorship—the disappearance of a 2016 People’s Daily Online article confidently predicting that China would enter the club of “high-income” nations by 2024—and the Weibo censorship of a Singaporean paper’s blistering opinion piece arguing that China’s current economic malaise is a product of overly centralized leadership with Xi at its core. 

Chen Guangbiao’s WeChat post about consumption, while not targeted by censors as of this post’s publication, does mark something of a departure for the audacious, generally pro-government, pro-CCP entrepreneur. As previously noted, the plain-spoken Chen is no stranger to controversy. After founding the recycling company that made him his fortune, Chen came to public attention for personally rescuing 13 people after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and carrying 200 bodies from the rubble. His contributions to rescue efforts after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami earned him the ire of some anti-Japanese nationalists in China. His past endeavors have ranged from the audacious (a mooted billion-dollar purchase of The New York Times and a bid to demolish the quake-damaged San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge) to the misleading (a reneged-on promise to pay $300 each to a group of unhoused people in New York) to the headline-grabbing (selling cans of “fresh air” to bring attention to the problem of air pollution in China). Chen is also known for philanthropic projects with decidedly pro-CCP themes: he once offered two million dollars to fund reconstructive plastic surgery in the U.S. for an (alleged) former Falun Gong adherent and her daughter, who he claimed had self-immolated and later recanted their religious beliefs. That story was the subject of a leaked censorship directive, translated by CDT in 2014, from China’s State Council Information Office: “All websites must find and delete the Tencent article ‘At U.S. Press Conference, Chen Guangbiao Offers 2 Million USD to Self-Immolators for Plastic Surgery.’”

Despite the recent Lunar New Year celebration in which hundreds of millions of residents went traveling and returned to their hometowns, there are signs that the wave of infections has peaked. The Chinese CDC’s chief epidemiologist estimated that 80 percent of the population may have been infected with Omicron, conferring some short-term immunity, and making an imminent second or third wave less likely. 

As many citizens seek to put the pandemic behind them and local governments turn their attention to restoring economic growth, there have been a number of thoughtful essays exploring how three years of “zero-COVID” controls and the recent Omicron surge have affected China’s rural residents. 

In this CDT translation of a WeChat essay by Caixin columnist Zhang Feng, the author writes about a recent Omicron outbreak in his hometown, a small village in Henan province. He describes how residents of his hometown dealt with the illness, notes a shift in how the villagers conceptualize the virus, and reminds readers of the ways in which lack of access to medical treatment and healthcare resources (particularly for elderly people) continues to exacerbate the urban-rural divide.

So it appears that my hometown, a small village in Henan province, has survived the “pandemic.” 

My dad told me that every family in the village, and nearly every person, had caught a cold. Many have already recovered from their colds, and the younger folks felt better in just a day or two.

There are over 20 elderly people in the village, none of whom died from this particular wave of colds. No one called an ambulance, but if anyone had, there is no guarantee they would have shown up anyway. The real problem is that no one wants to call an ambulance, at such considerable expense.

People queued up to see the only doctor in the village. My mom also went to see him. She’d had a fever, but after it subsided, she couldn’t sleep. I suspected that the problem was her blood pressure. After she was given I.V. fluids, her symptoms abated and her sleep improved.

My dad also went to see the doctor. Once, when I called him, he happened to be waiting in line there. He complained that he’d come down with a cough, but the medication he’d taken hadn’t helped much, so he’d gone back to the doctor to get new meds. He said there were quite a few people in line, forty or so. 

That doctor is an amazing guy. Long ago, when he first started practicing medicine, he treated my great-grandmother. Later, when my grandfather was in the final stages of esophageal cancer, I went to the clinic and asked him to come round and treat grandpa. (At the time, I remember thinking it was a bit ridiculous—it’s not as if his cancer was curable.) He’s the main doctor my parents rely on, and once, after I’d graduated from junior high and stepped on a glass bottle, he was the one who came and bandaged up my foot. 

It should be said that everyone who was infected had the opportunity to receive treatment from him. That said, there are no effective treatments for COVID-19 here (there are overseas, but they have to be imported), and no cure for it. The fact that everyone in the country is taking Ibuprofen illustrates that there really is no suitable medicine available. But the doctor surely has ample experience treating colds.

I think the most important thing was that he provided treatment and reassurance, a role much like that of a general practitioner. 

For the past ten or so days, I’ve been keeping a close eye on my parents. In my view, the most significant thing has been a subtle shift in discourse: people in my hometown no longer think of COVID-19 as a “pandemic,” but rather as a cold. “Every household has caught a cold,” they say, so there’s nothing to be scared of.

No one here has ever seen an antigen test before. People got sick, came down with fevers, and then recovered. No one here tested positive for COVID-19, because no one took antigen tests—they don’t even know what an antigen is. Over the last three years, however, there have been many rounds of mass nucleic-acid testing. Sometimes, to cut costs, members of the same family were made to share the same nucleic-acid test tube.

My mom thinks the weather is a factor. “It hasn’t rained in ages,” she says. “It’s minus four degrees, but it hasn’t snowed. If it had rained, there wouldn’t be this many people catching colds.”

Of course, this shift in discourse is a form of self-consolation—because apart from this, what else can they do? They don’t have the means to compete for scarce medical resources and treatments. And it’s impossible to buy fever-reducing medication in town; my dad had to go all the way to Anhui province to get hold of some. When I was little, the adults would always go to Anhui whenever they needed something they couldn’t get locally.

You’d be hard-pressed to say that my hometown has gained any kind of experience at all fighting the pandemic. If I had to sum it up, I’d say that fundamentally, people have just resigned themselves to their fate. They’re more concerned when their kids get fevers, because children represent the entire family’s future. But adults just tough it out and wait for the illness to pass, figuring a little cold never killed anyone.

As for the elderly, they’ve already come up with another form of coping mechanism, the idea that “If God really wants you to go, there’s not much you can do.” Luckily, God didn’t lose his temper this time around. Perhaps it’s because this disaster-prone place has already suffered enough.

My hometown probably illustrates one facet of this country’s “most down-and-out places.” In rural Henan, the pandemic was markedly different than it was in Beijing. Those observing Beijing’s overwhelmed medical system must have thought, on that basis, that the situation in Henan would be many times worse. In fact, the scenario was quite different. In big cities, elderly people over the age of 80 were the focus of pandemic prevention campaigns, but in the village where I was raised, there are very few residents over the age of 80—people simply don’t live that long. 

The “elderly” folks my dad refers to are actually people like him, in their sixties or seventies. The basic diseases that elderly big-city residents have to be on guard against—cancer, cerebrovascular diseases, and so on—have long been playing their role in the village, carrying away those whose time has come. While this is a great tragedy, it certainly isn’t something new.

This, then, is the even greater misfortune: when confronted with a virus like Omicron, it seems that everyone ought to be equal, but in fact, we see the urban-rural divide playing out even with this virus. Not only is there an inequality of resources and access to health care, there is also a vast urban-rural gulf in how health is perceived. 

The countryside is, as ever, silent in this. Perhaps that is its fate. [Chinese]

Translation by Liddy L.

First video, posted on March 29. Residents of a community in Minhang District, Shanghai, gather and shout slogans such as “We want the residents’ committee to step up and resolve these problems!” and “We want to eat, we want to go to work, we want freedom!” [Video courtesy of Radio Free Asia. Also confirmed by Bloomberg News.]

Third video, posted on March 31. Residents of a community in Shanghai protest the high price of food by shouting “We want cheap food” and “The police do nothing, the police don’t care.” A man with a megaphone shouts, “And you police, you’re not even here to sort things out…” At the end of the video, a bystander comments, “They’re coming to arrest people.” Some online sleuths identified the community as Haitangyuan [Haitang Garden], located in Hui County, Gaohang Township, in Shanghai’s Pudong district.

Fourth video, posted on April 1. In the Weifang Wucun housing complex [as identified by the signage on the community recreation room in the background] located on Laoshan Road in Shanghai’s Pudong district, residents unhappy with the lockdown of their community clash with pandemic prevention volunteers. [China’s online humorists have dubbed such overzealous volunteers “pandemic prevention enthusiasts.”] According to netizens, this is not the first time this sort of conflict has occurred.

Fifth video, posted on April 2. After Shanghai transformed the New International Expo Center venue into a centralized quarantine facility, videos showing the conditions in quarantine appeared online. Some of the videos featured people in quarantine complaining about poor living conditions, inadequate sanitation or disinfection protocols, and excessive crowding. [Chinese]

Earlier this week, online videos revealed chaotic scenes at a designated field hospital in Nanhui, Shanghai, as quarantined residents fought over food and supplies, with audible voices in the background complaining that everyone was “stealing.” A WeChat article by author LYZ / 恰帕斯东风电钻, republished by CDT Chinese, describes a number of incidents in which workers and residents found themselves locked in without adequate food or supplies. A portion is translated below:

On April 1, screenshots of chat records shared online showed that over 1,000 people were locked down in the Jiuting No. 8 Bridge Wholesale Market in Shanghai’s Minhang district for more than ten days. The market’s merchants were forced to sleep on the ground and there was a risk of cross-infection. Their entreaties for help were censored on Weibo and Douyin, and phone calls for outside help did not go through. Two weeks previously, a similar incident occurred at the Songjiang Building Supplies Market, when people were confined inside without food or drink, triggering a mass protest.

[…] On April 2, a Weibo blogger stated that many construction workers had been locked into their lodgings in Shanghai’s Pudong district. Because the toilets and bathrooms were communal, the workers could not avoid the risk of cross-infection. Workers in unit one were served only two meals per day, while those in unit two had to subsist on instant noodles.

Online rumors suggest similarly poor conditions at quarantine facilities in Jiading district, Pudong district, and other areas. Some quarantine facilities have experienced temporary food and water shortages, or incidents of residents pilfering supplies. [Chinese]

A comment recently posted to Li Wenliang’s Weibo Wailing Wall bemoans the state of things in Shanghai in 2022, over two years since the initial outbreak and lockdown in Wuhan:

@达喀尔的旗帜：Brother Liang, I am astounded that now, two years later, Shanghai is the same as Wuhan was back then. Oh, that Shanghai has come to this … most people never imagined they’d be fighting over vegetables in 2022. With proper management, the price of vegetables wouldn’t have skyrocketed, and nobody would be fighting over vegetables. [Chinese]

Of the 25 to 26 million people in Shanghai, several million are running extremely low on food and necessities at this time. Many are surviving on one meal a day only, let alone getting a balanced diet. Urgent action to restore delivery operations is needed.

— Dali L. Yang (@Dali_Yang) April 8, 2022

A plea by a stormzhang is making the rounds (before disapearing) and it says: "the basic livelihood of the people of Shanghai is now in great trouble, and the vast majority of the people of Shanghai spend their entire lives every day looking for channels to grab food."

— Dali L. Yang (@Dali_Yang) April 8, 2022

I should note that the elderly who live alone and aren't app users may well be the most vulnerable. And they need not only food but also access to medication and other services. They need attention and help!

— Dali L. Yang (@Dali_Yang) April 8, 2022

Weibo has blocked the hashtag “Shanghai buy food.”https://t.co/5FQ1g5GWZY pic.twitter.com/33Zv8wnlv3

— David Kirton (@DavidKirton_) April 8, 2022

The sentence “buying cake in Shanghai” is still allowed on Weibo. Unlike “buying vegetables in Shanghai”, which is blocked. ✅🍰 🚫🥗 pic.twitter.com/ern9Rc6360

— Martin Aldrovandi (@martinaldro) April 8, 2022

Shanghai’s lockdown has also highlighted economic inequalities in what is perhaps China’s most cosmopolitan city. Starker than ever is the socio-economic divide between Shanghai’s urban population and the legions of truckers, delivery drivers, migrant construction workers, and small shopkeepers who serve them. During this lockdown—as in previous lockdowns in Shenzhen, Wuhan, and other cities—many migrant and gig workers have been stranded away from home, forced to sleep outdoors or quarantine in workspaces, or been unfairly discriminated against as “virus carriers.” Both state media and popular media have featured positive stories on the heroic efforts of such workers and volunteers, although there is a dearth of critical, in-depth reporting on the extreme hardships they face. A recent story in The Bund, reprinted by CDT, offers a snapshot of one such “human link” in Shanghai’s supply chain. Li Na, a Lawson’s convenience store manager, slept in the store and lived apart from her family for over three weeks in order to keep her customers supplied with food:

Before the epidemic, our store was open 24 hours a day. During this period, the boss has assigned me a few boys to work the night shift. Now and then, if we’re really short-handed, I work the store alone. I would rather get a bit less sleep and be able to ensure we’re open at least 20 hours per day. 

Actually, we don’t get many customers at night, but we insist on staying open all night, because the customers who do show up then are definitely in urgent need of something. Like those white-suited pandemic workers finishing their shifts, delivery drivers, and volunteers … they work so hard during the day, it’s only at night that they have time to come in and buy something to eat. 

[…] Bathing is the most challenging obstacle. The store doesn’t have any shower facilities, so I haven’t taken a shower in over 20 days. I have to wait until the middle of the night when I’m finished working to go into the bathroom and wipe off my body. [Chinese]

The lockdown has taken a particularly harsh toll on households with children, elderly parents or grandparents, or family members with special needs. For some, it has also inspired a renewed sense of community and concern for the less fortunate in society. A touching recent post by blogger Wei Zhou describes making group food purchases with his neighbors and attempting to use the lockdown to teach his children about economic inequality:

Community groups have sprung up to make communal purchases of eggs and pork, and the residents’ committee makes bulk purchases of vegetables, which can be delivered to your door by volunteers. This morning, we bought a sort of “set meal” that cost 30 yuan and included two cabbages, two potatoes, and two tomatoes (each fairly small.) Generally speaking, those who know how to get online, and have a mind to, can usually manage to buy vegetables. It’s probably hardest for the small number of elderly people who live alone and don’t know how to order online.

[…] The kids don’t understand this yet. As long as our family isn’t going hungry, they have trouble grasping the great disparities that exist in the outside world. Although I’ve talked about this a bit with them at the dinner table, it’s hard to say how much they really understand. [Chinese]

Around midday, more than 60 uniformed security personnel formed a wall in front of the main entrances to the glistening tower in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen, where protesters shouted at company representatives.

“A company as big as yours, how much money has been swindled from ordinary people?” a woman said to Du Liang, identified by staff as general manager and legal representative of Evergrande’s wealth management division.

[…] Several protesters said Du had remained in the lobby overnight. He was seen sitting on the ground and slumped against a wall on Monday, visibly exhausted.

[…] The mood was tense, with protesters attempting unsuccessfully to push through a security line blocking access to lifts. [Source]

another of three company reps facing the crowd pic.twitter.com/eBldazkYGZ

— David Kirton (@DavidKirton_) September 13, 2021

“Evergrande return our money!” pic.twitter.com/F6zbJu21jF

— David Kirton (@DavidKirton_) September 13, 2021

Over 80 investors and suppliers gathered outside Evergrande’s Shenzhen HQ today chanting “Evergrande, return our money!” and demanding higher-ups to give an explanation.

Even more police and guards today. Crowd started singing the national anthem at one point but were stopped. pic.twitter.com/Jy5iIHd51X

— Beiyi Seow (@beiyis) September 15, 2021

Lots of “police gathering evidence” on-site… pic.twitter.com/PB3jS3HYbv

— Beiyi Seow (@beiyis) September 15, 2021

Heavy security presence at #Evergrande HQ today as dozens of desperate contractors seek pay that’s months overdue. They’ve come from Henan, Hebei, Anhui, Shandong, Heilongjiang, Ningxia, nationwide – and many have hundreds more unpaid workers & subcontractors waiting back home pic.twitter.com/LrJGvhvfdK

— Alice Su 蘇奕安 (@aliceysu) September 15, 2021

Everyone here has a story like this: they have taken loans, borrowed from friends, scraped to survive & are now facing collapse if they don’t get paid back by #Evergrande. It’s a matter of survival not just for them but also many ordinary workers & their families beneath them pic.twitter.com/UByB55TFjY

— Alice Su 蘇奕安 (@aliceysu) September 15, 2021

Over 60 security personnel eventually formed a wall outside the main entrance of the company’s Shenzhen headquarters to block more protestors from entering. The state has long pegged disgruntled investors as potential security threats. A common theme of investor protests is the belief that the government induced them to invest without warning of the risks, and then disappeared when businesses went south. In a leaked 2018 public security database, unlucky (or gullible) investors were tagged as “those involved in instability,” alongside “evil cult members,” separatists, and spies, as well as seemingly mundane professions like film projectionists. In Forbes, Anne Stevenson-Yang wrote: “Hell has no fury like that of Chinese investors who have lost money in Evergrande loan derivatives or apartments that have declined in value.” Xie Yu and Frances Yoon of The Wall Street Journal report that similar protests broke out elsewhere in China:

Trouble has also erupted in recent days at the offices of Evergrande managers in the central Chinese city of Nanchang in Jiangxi province, and in Zhengzhou, in northern Henan province, photographs and videos showed.

On Monday, dozens of protesters marched in the commercial center of the western city of Chengdu, holding banners demanding Evergrande return their money “earned with blood and sweat,” according to video snapshots shared on Weibo, a Twitter-like social-media platform. [Source]

Evergrande is having trouble. This massively indebted property group might well trigger a market-wide panic. In the meantime, people are already on the street… pic.twitter.com/eFtopcXQHE

— Jingzhou Tao 陶景洲 (@JingzhouTao) September 13, 2021

On Monday, Evergrande issued a statement denying that it faces bankruptcy. One of the many causes of the crisis is a merry-go-round home construction financing system, common in China, whereby developers sell apartments before they are built and subsequently use that cash to cover construction costs and other debts. It is estimated that 1.2 million people are waiting to move into one of Evergrande’s 800 unfinished projects. The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development informed banks that the company will not be able to make interest payments and some principal payments due on September 20, a short-term relief measure that highlights how close the company may be to insolvency. The company is reportedly transferring ownership of some of its unfinished projects in lieu of paying its debts. If unable to finish the promised units, Evergrande will undoubtedly struggle to pre-sell future apartments, further endangering the company’s liquidity.

It's funny that this video is going round just at the same time as Chinese property panic is back in the news. It's a relic of the previous problem (too much building of things people didn't want) rather than the existing one (not enough building of stuff already paid for) https://t.co/BamssYVwFi

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) September 14, 2021

2/2
Unless a credible savior were to step in, there's no reason to think October and November sales won't be worse. Who wants to buy an unfinished (or even finished) apartment — except at a heavily discounted price — in a project whose manager may soon go out of business?

— Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis) September 14, 2021

Investors are not the only ones left in limbo by Evergrande’s financial hardships. The head of the Guangzhou Football Club allegedly wrote a letter to Guangzhou’s municipal government encouraging it to take over the club. The costs of operating the club, formerly known as Guangzhou Evergrande, are largely underwritten by Evergrande. Just last year, reigning Chinese Super League champion Jiangsu FC shut down after its parent company Suning Group ran into financial troubles. Bloomberg News provided further detail on the potential state takeover of Guangzhou Football Club in an attempt to save it from closing:

The uncertainty swirling around China Evergrande has bled into the operations of Guangzhou F.C., disrupting training for top-level and junior teams. Last week, as the company’s debt crisis worsened, the club appealed to the local government for aid. Under one possible scenario, the government of Guangdong province would assume around 10% to 15% of Evergrande’s stake in the team and a local state-owned enterprise would acquire the rest, according to one of the people. The team could also be disbanded, the person said.

[…] Evergrande loses about 1 billion to 2 billion yuan ($155 million to $310 million) on its soccer-related businesses annually, according to a report by Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Dan Wang and Daniel Fan. “We assess the current value of that business activity at zero,” the analysts wrote Sept. 9.

[…] The Chinese Super League’s “club expenditure is about ten times higher than South Korea’s K-League and three times higher than Japan’s J-league, but our national team is lagging far behind,” Chinese Football Association President Chen Xuyuan told the Xinhua news agency in February after Suning disbanded its team. “The bubbles not only affect the present of Chinese football, but also hurts its future.” [Source]

The Curse of the Security Check

Wei Sanhe

1

An officer blocked the young man in front of me at the train station security check. “You have a lot of scissors in your bag,” the officer said. It was “a lot of scissors” that got my attention. I watched as the officer opened his backpack and took out a case. “For cutting hair,” the passenger said.

I stopped to watch the story unfold.

“A lot of scissors.” Actually, there were only two pairs of scissors, one the kind with teeth, you’ve seen them, I couldn’t tell you what they’re called. And there were some other small implements that seemed to have sharp, metal points.

Have you seen the latest hairdressing tools? They’ve really gotten an upgrade, and they fit into those little cases that are bestsellers on Taobao and JD.com.

The frontline security officer brought the tools to another officer who was seated, and together they began their inspection. I was about five meters away. There was an electronic display screen for a rear view, where I watched the officers turning over the hairdressing tools and examining their fine, pointed ends.

I got nervous waiting for the security girl to say something. Would the tools stay or go?

Finally, she pronounced her judgment. “You can’t bring the scissors on the train.”

She turned and escorted the young man and his tools to a counter. She told him he could bring everything else besides the scissors, but he decided to leave the whole kit behind.

Then I witnessed a “humanizing” procedure. The young lady at the counter took out a sealable paper bag, and the young man scanned its QR code. Then the security girl put the tools in the bag and sealed it.

Don’t think too hard about it. This wasn’t for fast delivery of your property to your destination. The QR scan was for leaving stuff behind and arranging when to come back and fetch it.

“When can he pick it up? Or rather, how long will they hold on to your dangerous items?” I asked this out loud.

“Speak Mandarin,” said the security girl. “I don’t understand.”

That threw me off. I thought this work would be the province of a local girl with a few day’s training, at most.

It was actually difficult work. She had to scan every single passenger from head to toe, which meant that for each person she had to raise her head, lower her head, and stoop over. Sitting duty was possibly better. I reckoned they took turns.

It would be hard work for anyone not in their prime. Even so, it couldn’t be easy for any of these women (according to my observations of subways and airports, women comprise more than half of security officers).

And here was a slight young girl who had traveled so far for the sanctuary of this work.

I switched to Sichuanese and asked again, but she didn’t answer. She was too busy. The flow of the security checkpoint depended on her.

2

My onlooking complete, I hurried to catch my train, thinking back on the many checkpoint encounters I had stockpiled in my brain.

At this very same train station, the year before last, an old friend came to visit. There had been an issue with her luggage. She’d been here before, with the same piece of luggage. It had come with her from Europe to China, and in China from Suzhou to Xi’an by high-speed rail, and again from Xi’an to Chengdu through another airport check.

The problem was hair gel.

No matter how good her Chinese, she couldn’t get around the regulations. She had looked at me, hoping I would say something useful. I knew what she was thinking. It’s not surprising that most reactionary Western countries have a weak sense of the enemy—they basically have no security checks on their subways and trains. All I could do was look back at her, at a loss.

Whatever they confiscate they hold onto for just one day, and you have to come back to get it yourself.

I asked if they could hold the hair gel for a few days longer. I remembered that at the Capital Airport I once had a tube of toothpaste over 100 milliliters: When they took it, they said they’d hold onto it for a month.

But the officers at Chengdu East Railway Station thought I was talking nonsense, and they ignored me.

At that point you just have to give up. To console my visitor from far away, I explained that security is a core Chinese value, and the security checkpoint is the strictest place in China. The courtroom can be accommodating, but not here. You must understand.

3

Two years ago, I took my father to Chongqing for medical treatment. I wanted him to ride the subway, something he’d never done before. I also brought him home by high-speed rail. All this amounted to him experiencing the modern security check.

On both the subway and the high-speed rail, the security girls asked my father to take off his hat for inspection.

Both times I said, “This man is in his eighties. Even I wouldn’t take off his hat. How can we get past this?”

As you might expect, they wouldn’t make an exception. My humor didn’t even get me a grudging smile. The security girls were overworked, and they weren’t in the mood to listen to me.

When I took off my father’s hat and handed it to the inspector, I said to myself, This is just strange, and wrong.

At the same time, I understood. In my opinion, those women are the most dedicated workers in China.

4

I am quite the artful dodger at my hometown train station.

I have often wondered, Is it worth it? But I haven’t changed my ways.

Just a few weeks ago, I got into an argument with the security girls there. Objectively, I did lose my temper at them.

I had heard two villagers talking in the waiting lounge. One said his wrench had been confiscated. The other said he’d been lucky, his wrench had slipped through.

It was around the time of the spring equinox, and farm work was picking up, but these two were only now heading out to work. They were bringing along simple tools, most likely for odd jobs. One was a bit younger, while the other seemed to be in his fifties. I imagined what their lives were like, and it got to me.

It sounded like they were heading far north, where it was still cold. Their big backpacks were stuffed with things to keep warm. They looked stupefied, as if they were discussing someone else’s problems. The one whose wrench had been taken was expressionless. The lucky one looked neither happy nor worried.

I knew how they felt. They had one foot at home and the other in an indeterminable future. But they weren’t in the present, and inside they were empty.

I told them, “Wait and see. I’ll have a word with them!” They were a bit surprised. “I’m not going to get it back for you,” I said, “I can’t do that, but I am going to give them a what-for!”

I went up to security. There weren’t many passengers in this train station in the county seat, so they weren’t busy. “You took his wrench,” I said.

“According to regulations,” was her firm, indifferent reply.

“You think it’s easy for him?” I said. “Traveling so far from home at such an advanced age? You could just let it go. So what if it’s a wrench? It’s a work tool, and you took it. Now he’ll have to buy another. Not a good look for you!”

The officers were local recruits, the sons and daughters of farmers, so I tried to appeal to their hometown pride.

I may have been a tad emotional.

The girl holding the scanner was surprised, and annoyed, by my meddling. The girl at the computer said, “If we let him take it on the train, and if a fight broke out…”

“Young lady,” I said, “they’re out to make money, not trouble. Their families are waiting for their safe return. They want everything to go smoothly, more than you do…”

The girl holding the scanner joined in. “But what if…”

I knew we weren’t using the same logic, they and I. They wouldn’t buy my argument. So I just spoke for myself, lobbing it back to them. “What if you…”

To my surprise, they seemed to find my “what if” supremely offensive, and fired back, “What if you…”

Ha ha, it was pretty funny.

But I didn’t have time to talk nonsense with them. I had to check my ticket one last time and get to the platform. I had to change their minds right then and there.

“Police…” the girl half-shouted, half-cursed.

“Yeah, where are they?” I yelled back. “Get them over here and let’s settle this.” Meanwhile, I was thinking how less-than-ideal it would be if the police didn’t let me on the train.

The police came, and I blurted, “This young lady needs to be disciplined. She has no manners.”

That wasn’t the truth. I was the one who had escalated things. I’d been ruder than them. I had made a fuss for one reason: to make sure they remembered this incident, and hopefully, at some point, realized that they had gone too far.

The young policeman heard the story. Then he gritted his teeth and said with a blank face, “So you’re fighting injustice!”

I understood the weight of this statement: It meant I was provoking them. I said, “No, I just tried to reason with them. I mean, they could let a fellow villager keep his wrench. They’re just going to work, after all.”

I hoped that had cooled things down. “I’ve said my piece.”

The two policemen didn’t say anything. They turned off their cameras.

In the end, I escaped the trouble I’d brought upon myself, and possibly some grave consequences.

5

I come from an agricultural community. Train security checks are China’s postmodern art. When villagers from an agricultural community are asked to do “postmodern art,” it’s a train wreck, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Two years ago, on the morning of March 8, 2019, I bought a train ticket to Beijing. After passing the last hurdle—that is, when I got to the platform—the ticket inspector suddenly shouted to the vast, empty hall, “He’s one bound for Beijing!”

Two uniformed officers ran over and told me to follow them. I asked what the matter was. They said I had to go through security. I said I’d already gone through security. They said I had to do it again.

On the right side of the hall was a small door that also led to the railway platform.

A whole bunch of uniforms were standing around. There was a table. My backpack was placed on the table. One uniform deftly got to work. I still didn’t understand what was going on, but I do remember it was a woman, and that she ripped open the zipper.

I was so bewildered that I just said, “What is it? What is it?” What I meant was, Why not just ask me to open my bag?

They were also confused: This was just how it was done. It never occurred to them that they shouldn’t just randomly open someone’s bag. Hadn’t they been granted the authority?

I quickly realized that there was a second security check if you were going to Beijing at the beginning of March [around the usual time of the Two Sessions political meetings in the capital]. It was like this every year. It wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular. You simply couldn’t go without a second security check. I accepted this, of course.

I said, “I could have opened it for you, but you didn’t ask.”

That was when the trouble started. It was probably the first time they’d encountered someone like me. In the ensuing negotiations, they never got the difference between me opening my own bag, and them doing it.

“I’ll open it, you inspect it,” I said. They played along. But I had deprived them of their sacred rite to go through other people’s belongings. I’d taken the sport out of it. I took my things out one by one and placed them on the table, stealing anxious glances at the platform on the other side of the door, where the train, for now, was waiting…

What did they think, seeing me so nervous? They were in no hurry, and they weren’t even looking at the objects I had scattered before them.

The performance complete, I hurriedly packed up my things. “OK?”

They ordered me to take everything out again. They had to make another pass, because apparently when I’d been checked the first time they’d been testing their equipment.

I was running out of time. I started to sweat.

It was useless for me to worry, though, and impossible for me to get out of it.

“I’ll take it and go back through, OK? I’ll run.” No. Once a passenger has laid a hand on their bag, they have to go through another body scan. And that wasn’t the end of it. I had no choice but to let a uniform carry my bag to the door and put it through the scanner again.

That forty-ish officer, in full uniform, with a baton at his waist and jackboots on his feet, took my bag and walked slowly, leisurely, rocking to the left, swaying to the right, over to the scanner in front of the waiting room.

I watched him, my heart galloping, but I told myself there was nothing for it. I had to calm down.

He put my bag into the machine, and the conveyor belt spat it out. Then he took my bag in one hand, and once more started swaggering back towards me.

I pictured myself snatching my bag and bursting through the door. The train still hadn’t moved.

But he pressed my bag onto the table and said, “There’s metal inside.”

“Didn’t you see it just now?” I cried. “It’s a key!”

Out the “metal” came. Then it was returned to my bag, which was checked again.

The train started to move.

6

I hold no grudge against that jackbooted, baton-wielding uniform. He, on the other hand, holds a grudge against me. He has been given the authority to check people, so of course he resents the people he’s checking. How else to explain his stalling?

I couldn’t keep banging my head against the wall, and I couldn’t grab him and bang both our heads against the wall, either. Not that I didn’t want to, but because he wasn’t him. He was them, and I couldn’t handle them on my own. None of his accomplices objected to him dawdling with my bag. Every one of them was indifferent to my anxious pleas. I don’t know if they’re simply numb in their hearts, or sharing in some vicious pleasure.

I remember there were bystanders trying to get me to calm down. These are the rules, nothing to get upset over, they said. I was on a lonely island. The onlookers, security guards, everyone else who wasn’t getting on that train, they were a community.

Whatever. Back in the waiting room I gave them all a talking-to about “big principles.”

All the inspectors and janitors were folks from the county, mainly farmers who owned nearby land. Here they were in costume. Their real uniforms were waiting for them outside.

Before there was the train station, most of them worked in Guangdong. (80% of the population of our little county gave their best years to Guangdong.) I had also had a taste of Guangzhou railway stations a few decades back. They were hell on earth. Perhaps we had trampled on each other at one of those stations.

Infrastructure is being built up too quickly. Suddenly there’s a high-speed rail in my hometown. Migrant workers who had been tortured by the old trains are now inspectors at these new stations.

I ranted. They said nothing.

I mistakenly thought the security check was controlled by the county public security bureau. I worked my connections (sorry people) and found the chief of public security, wanting to vent my anger and get them to change their ways. When the real uniforms appeared, it turned out they were not under public security. They say that except for foreign affairs, the railway has all the components of state machinery.

The two guys in regular uniforms were both outsiders.

The station master was alarmed. He wasn’t a local, either, but had been assigned here by the railway. A wise sixty-something, he was in no hurry. He asked to see the surveillance video, and then, with great magnanimity, brought me justice. “Our staff made a mistake. When you entered the station, they didn’t tell you you would need to get a second security check to go to Beijing, which cost you another check’s-worth of time.”

But in the end, no one conceded they should have gotten my consent to open my bag. This was our final disagreement.

Two years have passed, but as of last month (as mentioned above), I still “take the initiative to start trouble with security” at my hometown railway station, which just goes to show that I haven’t let this go. But I have decided that after I write this post, I will let go of my prejudice against them.

7

I can’t help but wonder what sort of person makes the ideal security officer. My conclusion is that the grassroots level masses, who have never known respect or power—the poor—are the ideal candidates.

Only poor people can do this work, can bear this hardship. This is understandable. Also, the grassroots masses, who have known neither power nor respect, will run away with any power they can get, automatically wielding it to inconvenience and mistreat others, and they will take pleasure from this, some modicum of psychological compensation for their respect-deficient lives.

The only power available to the downtrodden is the power of a servant.

But it is just this kind of power, the power to serve others, that can also be used to hurt others, to reward those who are as low as they are, or even lower. On top of that, they also take full advantage of “discretionary measures,” amplifying their power until it’s more than they can handle.

This profession came into being at an opportune time. There is a huge job market right now, and this is just the type of work for them. I am sure not one son or daughter of a government official is among their ranks. [Chinese]

Translation by Alicia.

Nine Years after Anti-Japanese Protests, Two Families Forever Shattered by One Act of Violence

Li Jianli and Wang Juling in Thailand in 2019.

The doctor holds Li Jianli’s right hand. Supporting Li’s elbow, the doctor lifts his right arm over the top of his head in a circle, once, then again.

After finishing with his right arm, they switch to the right leg, then the left arm, then the left leg. Muscle tissue that can’t move on its own needs help to maintain basic resilience and strength.

This is the Xi’an City Center Hospital Rehabilitation Center, where Li comes for physical therapy (PT) once a day, every day. He has been living this life for nine years.

On September 15, 2012, during the immense anti-Japanese demonstrations in Xi’an, Li was attacked while driving his white Toyota. Cai Yang, a young laborer, struck Li in the head with a bicycle U-lock, cracking open his skull. About two weeks later, Cai was arrested in his hometown of Nanyang. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

During the subsequent nine years, the two families have been shattered, each suffering in different ways. Li’s movement and language abilities have deteriorated. He and his wife stay in the hospital most of the time, only going home on weekends. Meanwhile, Cai’s parents have left their hometown to make their living as forest wardens, going months at a time without eating meat.

For others, time flows like water, but for these families, time is a turbid current thick with gravel and silt. Every step forward is slow and painful.

Today, the echoes of that break are faint, but they cannot be muted.

Li Jianli lies on the PT bed, white discs attached to electrodes covering his right arm. This is electromagnetic therapy, the first item of the day.

The rehabilitation center is on the fifth floor of the outpatient department. When his wife, Wang Juling, walks in with Li, the doctors, nurses, and cleaning staff all greet them. “We’ve been here a long time,” Wang says. “They all know us.”

The couple moved in here after Li’s injury. Every day, they come from the inpatient department in the rear court to the rehab center for treatment. They’ve been doing this for almost nine years. Ten days ago, the hospital informed them that the ward is going to be renovated, and will not be able to accommodate them for the time being. Now Wang must take Li home at night and come back every morning.

Li is 60 years old. His gray hair is sparse, and he always wears a hat when he goes out to cover the six-inch scar on his head. Hair does not grow on the scar, nor can it be touched when bathing. There is a subtle trace of incongruity in his face, probably because of his left-brain injury. When he’s not speaking or laughing, his expression looks a bit dull.

When he walks, Li is used to taking his first stride with his right leg. After the injury, the right side of his body became hemiplegic, and he could barely walk. It would be safer for him to start with his left leg, but his wife says that “he always feels scared and uses that (right leg) first.” He is OK on flat ground, but when he comes upon a slight slope in the road, he is prone to trip and fall.

Except from his wife, Li declines all offers of physical support, striving to maintain his dignity. He used to love to talk and laugh, and he still retains a trace of good humor despite years of illness. Now he smiles and looks at the doctor massaging him. The young man, embarrassed, smiles and says, “Don’t look at me like that.” Li turns his head to the female doctor, who has been treating him for a long time. “She’s closer with me than my daughter!”

Wang can’t help but smile. “You have a daughter now, do you?” The couple has two sons, but no daughters.

Li’s speech is still fairly clear, but he is limited to short, simple sentences. Wang says that the blow from that fateful year injured the language center of his brain. Li could not speak at all when he first came out of surgery. The doctors made him read newspapers, speak, and make conversation, getting through it all word by word. “Now he can speak like this, but he’ll still trip up in the middle”; “Sometimes when he’s talking to you, he’ll go um um um um. The more rushed he gets, the less he is able to speak.”

After the right half of his body is massaged, Li turns himself over to the other side of the bed for the massage on his left side. “You can see he moves well (on the bed), he moves very freely,” Wang says, “but at home it’s very difficult for him to get out of bed.”

Maintaining his current physical condition is the result of years of persistent treatment. Wang remembers that shortly after the accident, she took her husband to West China Hospital in Chengdu, where the doctor said, “It’s already a win if you can maintain your current condition. As you get older, you will develop convulsions, epilepsy, and urinary and fecal incontinence.”

Thanks to systematic treatment, PT, and exercise, Li’s physical condition has been fairly good over the past few years. There is no serious deformation or atrophy on the right side of his body, nor severe imbalance in his gait.

But the doctor’s prognosis is gradually starting to come true. “He’s already had a few seizures,” says Wang. A few days ago [during the Qingming festival], their son drove Li and his wife to the city outskirts for tomb sweeping, a stroll on the green, and a family meal. Li was happy. He had two bottles of a [non-alcoholic] drink. Then he became incontinent and defecated on himself. Wang is worried that such incidents will become more frequent. Now, if her husband doesn’t have a bowel movement before they leave for the day, she carries toilet paper and plastic bags to rehab.

The atmosphere of long-term hospital residence is not always as welcoming as the rehabilitation center. Wang says that in the beginning they stayed in a single room, and she could rest on the other bed. Later, the hospital said there were too many patients, and another person was placed in the room. She had to buy a simple folding bed. Later, more patients were added to the ward, and their room became a triple. There was often no room for her folding bed, so Wang had to squeeze into bed with her husband.

Whenever the weather changes, the right side of Li’s body becomes sore. Because he moves so little, his right armpit often gets inflamed and infected. Recently, the hospital stopped his medicated ointment. Wang went to the hospital. “They all said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll contact you.’ I still haven’t heard back from them.”

She thinks “(the hospital) just wants us to leave.”

“We owe the hospital 1,580,000,” says Li from his bed.

Wang says that some time ago, the Central Hospital took them to court for being in arrears. After getting the mediation call, she went to the Political and Legal Affairs Commission about it. The matter was left unresolved.

Wang hopes that, in addition to shouldering the medical expenses, the guilty party will compensate “enough for him (Li) to live on”; “In a few years I’ll have to hire someone to nurse him. I can’t do it anymore. I just don’t have the strength”; “For someone in his condition, people won’t come for a daily (nursing fee) less than 150 to 170. And between our daily expenses and daily medical treatments, we need more. You do the math.” The 520,000 yuan he was compensated the year of the attack is stretched ever thinner as Li lives on.

When Li finishes PT, he sits up from the bed. Everyone in the room watches as he slowly extends his feet and puts on his shoes. “I wear Nike, Nike brand, made in China.” After a pause, he adds: “Rational patriotism!”

It’s eight or nine bus stops from the Central Hospital back to Li’s house, and they have to transfer.

Getting on the bus is difficult for Li. The door is narrow, and his wife can’t help him. He can only grab the railing with his left hand and struggle upward. Wang usually gets on first. After watching her husband board the bus, she grabs a seat and waits for her husband to sit down before she goes to swipe her card.

Getting over curbs is also a challenge. Accidents can happen if they’re not careful. A few days ago, the couple got off the bus near their home. Because there were guests coming that day, Wang rushed to buy vegetables and told Li to walk home. She’d just bought the vegetables when she received a call from her husband. He had fallen. “I was so scared that I tossed the food aside and rushed over to him. There were three people standing around him, two women and a man. I asked him, Why didn’t you ask these people for help? He said they wouldn’t.” Li remembers that he asked for help from the two women. The younger one wanted to help, but the older one stopped her. “She said we can’t help him, call 120 [the emergency number for ambulances].”

Wang couldn’t support her husband alone, so she asked the man to help, and together they lifted Li back up. Before, when Li fell at home, Wang had to drag him over to the dresser and lean him against it, then wrap her arms around him and finally lift him up.

After he fell outside, Wang never let him walk alone again. When it rains, they have to stay home, missing the day’s therapy session.

Passing a beautiful blue car on the road, Wang asks her husband, “How much do you think?”

Li takes a look. “200,000 yuan.”

Wang clicks her tongue. “So expensive. I’m thinking closer to 100,000 yuan. Then we could buy one.”

Both Li and his wife drove taxis when they were young. Wang still has a photo from when she was a driver in the 1990s: Sitting in the driver’s seat of a “Starlight Fleet” taxi, she is young, with a neat, short haircut, a beautiful face, and shining eyes. “I had a very high occupancy back then,” she recalls, her tired face brightening.

Later, the couple started a second-hand car business, and bought a car and a home. Their son was preparing to get married. On the day of the attack, they were driving their son and daughter-in-law to look at decor for their new house.

Later, Li gave the white Toyota to his son. The two people who had been driving the car for half a lifetime didn’t even want to touch it.

Their home is on the sixth floor. When he reaches the door, Li extends his left hand to verify his fingerprint. The home fingerprint lock was installed for his convenience. The fingers of his right hand are curled tightly together, unable to extend.

An old crimson sofa and wall clock furnish the dimly-lit living room. Boxes of PT equipment are stacked in a corner. A little tent stands by the window, waiting for their grandson and granddaughter to play in.

In an interview a few years ago, Wang said, “The only thing that makes me happy is being able to see my grandchildren every week.” Li feels the same way. But recently his grandchildren have come of age for extracurricular tutoring on the weekends, and so he rarely sees them.

Back at home, Li seldom speaks. Even if his wife reminds him to chat with visitors, he is reticent, focusing on his phone. “He watches PT videos on Douyin” and does whatever he can do, Wang says. He also likes to earn points online and exchange them for gifts. “It’s small things, shampoo, laundry detergent, toilet paper, boxes and boxes for you to buy.” It is the only housework he can take off his wife’s shoulders.

After years of hard work, Wang has heart disease and high blood pressure, and she is beginning to show signs of depression. Local journalist Jiang Xue is always in touch with the old couple. Some time ago, she called Wang to chat and found she “sounded more impatient than before.” Wang went to see the doctor. “The doctor asked if I was feeling irritable. I said yes, I’m so wound up I want to kill someone. I can’t help it. If something goes wrong, it just sets me off.”

When Wang gets home, her mood gradually improves, and she takes out old photos and shows them to her visitors. Before the accident, the couple liked to travel. They had been to Hong Kong, Macau, Guilin, Chengdu, and Hainan. They had planned to go abroad, but after the injury, the only place they went to was the hospital. “This is gone today, that doesn’t work tomorrow. How can I be in a good mood?”

In 2019, the couple joined Wang’s colleagues on a trip to Thailand, fulfilling Li’s dream of going abroad and giving Wang an opportunity to relax.

To this day, Wang’s spirit soars when she recalls the trip. She says that the two tour guides were especially good and took care of Li every step of the way. “We were about to board a cruise ship, but the crew stopped us, saying he (Li) couldn’t get on this way. The tour guides explained that I was responsible if something went wrong. They asked the four crew members to carry him (onboard). ”

One day as they were walking on the beach, Li Jianli was unsteady and turned his right foot out badly. “I asked if he wanted to rest a while. He said it was OK, and he gritted his teeth and walked on. He was so happy when we got back.”

Wang posted the travel photos and videos to her WeChat Moments. “A lot of people ‘liked’ it and encouraged me to keep up the fight.” She “felt very moved,” but also “found it difficult to bear.”

This rare luxury should be a part of their daily life.

Yang Shuilan doesn’t know exactly where she is, just that she is in Xi County, Xinyang City in Henan Province, almost 300 kilometers from her hometown.

A few years after her son, Cai Yang, was taken away by the police, Yang and her husband Cai Zuolin left their hometown of Zhang Village, Nanyang City, and went to Xichuan, 120 kilometers away, to make a living as forest wardens. Later, they moved to where they are now, still doing the same work.

Yang is 66 years old, and Cai is 71. “His health gets worse every day,” Yang says. Cai once injured his legs, and the hyperplasia in his right knee has gotten worse as he’s aged. Now he’s often in pain and limps when he walks. He has the new rural cooperative medical insurance, but it is troublesome to use in a new place, and he is “afraid of spending money,” so he goes to a small pharmacy to buy over-the-counter medicine.

But he must go on. In addition to looking after the trees, they also have to grow corn and vegetables on the edge of the woods for the better part of their grain ration. If it is not enough, they must walk half an hour to the nearest store. As for meat, they only get what their children bring them when they visit.

Yang has had heart problems over the past few years. She simply takes medicine when she feels unwell. Her daughter buys most of the medicine online, because “it’s cheaper online.” Her doctor tells her to avoid getting upset, but she can’t help it. “There are so many things that make me angry, family matters. I’m just angry, and I can’t say (why).”

They live in a tile-roofed house left by the previous forest wardens. It leaks when it rains, and they live “in fear of one big storm.” Cai and Yang have nailed a tarp under the ceiling to hold the water, but they’re still worried. “We’re afraid the house will collapse.” They told their boss they wanted some repairs done, “but it was all in vain.” If a heavy rain comes, they have arranged to stay with a family nearby for two days. “We’ve been here a long time,” Yang say. “We all know each other, and there are good people.”

The couple agreed to a salary of about 1,000 yuan per month, paid annually as a lump sum. This is their only source of income. So far, though, they have only been paid for their first year of work. “If we don’t sell any trees, we don’t get (paid).” But the two of them choose to stay here. “We’re old, we can’t do any other work.” “When the time comes, they will pay us. I don’t think they will deny what is ours.”

Cai Yang is still in prison. Nine years have passed since the disaster.

Its shadow still looms over the two families, and may never disperse. [Chinese]

Translation by Alicia.

Sceptics understandably ask whether China fiddled its numbers in order to win what it calls the “battle against poverty”. There are of course still isolated cases of abject deprivation. China, however, set itself a fairly high bar. It has regularly raised the official poverty line, which, accounting for living costs, is about $2.30 a day at prices prevailing in 2011. (By comparison, the World Bank defines as extremely poor those who make less than $1.90 a day, as roughly a tenth of human beings do. Poverty lines in rich countries are much higher: the equivalent line in America is about $72 a day for a four-member household at 2020 prices.) In 1978, shortly after Mao’s death, nearly 98% of those in the countryside lived in extreme poverty, by China’s current standards. By 2016 that was down to less than 5% (see chart).

[…] The government’s approach changed in 2015 when Xi Jinping, its leader, vowed to eradicate the last vestiges of extreme poverty by the end of 2020. Officials jumped to it. They tried to encourage personal initiative by rewarding poor people who found ways of bettering their lot (see picture). They spent public money widely. In 2015 central-government funding earmarked for poverty alleviation was an average of 500 yuan ($77) per extremely poor person. In 2020 the allocation per head was more than 26,000 yuan (see chart).

[…] A bigger challenge is relative deprivation, a problem abundantly evident to anyone who has travelled between the glitzy coastal cities and the drabber towns of the hinterland. People may have incomes well above the official poverty line, but they can still feel poor. A recent study by Chinese economists concluded that the “subjective poverty line” in rural areas was about 23 yuan per day, nearly twice the amount below which a person would be officially classified as poor. That conforms with a standard used by many economists, namely setting the relative poverty line at half the median income level. It suggests that about a third of rural Chinese still see themselves as poor. [Source]

Declarations that China has ended extreme poverty understandably arouse scepticism.

So it's worth noting that:
–China actually set itself a fairly high poverty line (20% above the World Bank's);
–and the end of extreme poverty doesn't mean the end of poverty!

(3/5)

— Simon Rabinovitch (@S_Rabinovitch) December 31, 2020

It also accords with experiences at bottom of the income ladder. One villager in a county newly "lifted from poverty" described his struggles paying for his kids' schools & his dad's cancer care. In no mood to celebrate the end of poverty. "Speaking frankly, it's a lie." (5/5)

— Simon Rabinovitch (@S_Rabinovitch) December 31, 2020

The campaign is a major point of pride for China’s ruling party. ”Poverty alleviation dramas,” TV shows that glorify similar campaigns past and present, are quite popular. In his Sinocism newsletter, Bill Bishop noted that “Minning Town,” a dramatized small screen depiction of a 1990s poverty alleviation campaign in Ningxia, was purportedly based on a program led by Xi Jinping during his time in provincial government.

Yet stark inequalities remain. Earlier this month, the sudden death of a Sichuan-based livestreamer, brought about by the twin ills of poverty and disease, shocked Chinese netizens. Reporting by Sixth Tone indicates that the “left-behind” children of China’s first economic boom, a reference to their rural childhoods spent apart from their parents who labored along China’s coast, are today confronted with the same impossible choices of their parents.

Indermit Gill, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, believes that China’s poverty line is nearly $20 lower than where it should be, meaning up to 90% of the population could be considered impoverished. The Economist reviewed Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell’s “Invisible China,” a book that exposed the shockingly unequal conditions that lie in rural China:

After decades of research, Mr Rozelle and Ms Hell present some startling data. Their team gave an iq-like test to thousands of rural Chinese toddlers. They found that more than 50% were cognitively delayed and unlikely to reach an iq of 90 (in a typical population, only 16% score so poorly). There were several reasons for this.

Half of rural babies are undernourished. Caregivers (often illiterate grandmothers) cram them with rice, noodles and steamed buns, not realising that they also need micronutrients. Studies in 2016 and 2017 found that a quarter of rural children in central and western China suffer from anaemia (lack of iron), which makes it hard for them to concentrate in school. Two-fifths of rural children in parts of southern China have intestinal worms, which sap their energy. A third of rural 11- and 12-year-olds have poor vision but no glasses, so struggle to read their schoolbooks.

[…] Among the entire labour force in 2010, 44% of urban and 11% of rural Chinese had graduated from high school. Among the current crop of students, the figures are much better: 97% of urban students graduated from high school in 2015, and 80% of rural children went to a high school of some sort. But the rural “high schools” were often dreadful, opened rapidly to meet official targets and staffed by teachers with little interest in teaching. The authors tested thousands of children at “vocational” rural high schools, and found that 91% had learned practically nothing: they scored the same or worse on tests at the end of a year of schooling as at the beginning. [Source]

30% of China's labor force have finished high schoolhttps://t.co/WKhKWP7Hfq pic.twitter.com/Bq6NpOtMyx

— Jordan Schneider (@jordanschnyc) January 14, 2021

https://twitter.com/ruima/status/1353066993298022400

https://twitter.com/ruima/status/1353540414913925120

At The Financial Times, Kristen Looney wrote on the challenges created for newly urbanized farmers by China’s campaign-style approach to poverty alleviation:

But Mr Xi’s milestone is not about economic growth lifting all boats or an authoritarian government simply declaring poverty gone. It reflects China’s status as a campaign state, or a mobilisational regime, whose leaders have long relied on the extraordinary deployment of resources and people to accomplish key goals.

[…]But for tens of millions of families, poverty alleviation has meant abandoning their homes, farmland and village communities, and moving into mass housing complexes on the outskirts of unfamiliar cities. Many have assumed debt to purchase the subsidised housing. It is unlikely, given China’s slowing economy, that the proliferation of “peasant apartments” on the urban fringe has been accompanied by sufficient non-farm jobs. The result may be concentrated poverty, as previous inequalities are reproduced.

[…] By barrelling on with the anti-poverty campaign, China remains on course to become a “moderately prosperous society” by the middle of this year. But integrating this fabricated middle class into the rest of the economy will be a feat of a different scale.  [Source]

Xi Jinping’s address to the recent Central Rural Work Conference gave little indication that future rural reforms might include significant changes to the hukou—or household registration—system, a long-cherished goal of activists, rural residents, and academics alike. At The South China Morning Post, Zhou Xin reported on Xi’s speech, which heralded the end of the poverty alleviation campaign while introducing its successor “comprehensive rural revitalization”:

It is a remarkable improvement from 2000 when Li Changping, a rural cadre, wrote in a famous letter to then-premier Zhu Rongji that “our peasants are really suffering, our countryside is really poor, and our farming is in great danger”.

But despite this, the countryside remains a weak link. Per capita income in rural China is around a third of that in urban areas, and retail sales – a rough measure of consumer spending – was just a sixth of that in urban areas last year, even though 40 per cent of the population lives in the countryside.

[…] The meeting, however, did not offer any substantial changes to the existing institutional framework in rural China. Land will continue to be owned collectively and contracted to rural households for a very long period of time, while grass-roots governance will be firmly in the hands of Communist Party cells.

[…] As such, China’s rural revitalisation will be about the commercialisation of agriculture, the improvement of public services, and fixing problems such as pollution. [Source]

A second stagnant era of rural reform is village democracy. The Economist published an analysis of the “carrying across one shoulder” system that spells the end of rural democracy in all but name:

In 2018 the party began calling for all-out efforts to implement a system it describes as yijiantiao, or “carrying across one shoulder”. This refers to the way that farmers suspend two loads on either end of a pole across their backs. In this case the loads are the two parallel structures that run China’s villages: the elected village committees and the party committees. The party wants memberships of both committees to be the same, and to be led by a single person: the village party secretary.

[…] This requires some sleight of hand. The election law says that “no organisation or individual may designate, appoint or replace any member” of elected committees. But localities have introduced rules that all but ensure the village party secretary gets the concurrent job of village chief. Commonly, the village’s party members (usually just a small fraction of the population) choose a party secretary and other members of the party committee—ie, endorse the choice made by higher-ups. Next, a member of this committee organises the election for the post of village chief. Finally an election is held in which every adult villager may vote. The party secretary wins.

[…] A tighter vetting system typically ensures that no one stands against him (village leaders are rarely female). It involves consulting official organs in the local township, including the police. These can block the candidacy of a wide range of people. The south-western city of Kunming, for example, has a list of ineligible types called the “seven forbiddens and 15 unsuitables”. Among the forbiddens are “politically two-faced” people. A propaganda video explains this with an illustration of a man dreaming of a protest for freedom and democracy. The unsuitables include those with “strong religious feelings”: a cartoon shows people bowing to a Jesus-like figure. [Source]

The tighter controls on village elections mirror general trends at the local government level. At The Center for Strategic & International Studies, Jude Blanchette published a translation of an internal document that laid out officials’ governing priorities, namely fighting against “hostile forces”:

In order to better understand local-level governance, the CSIS Freeman Chair is releasing the following translation of an official notice by the town’s CCP committee on the eve of the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 2019. The lengthy document comprehensively catalogues various economic, political, and security risks, many of them understandable, while others seem more fanciful or remote. Interestingly, a large portion of the document is focused on protecting Niangziguan from so-called “hostile forces,” including overseas elements of the Catholic church and pro-democracy activists. While it is possible that Niangziguan officials truly believe that the town must actively guard against “color revolutions” (as the document declares), it is more likely that Xi Jinping’s relentless campaign to snuff out any and all threats to the CCP has infused small-town governance. Regardless, the document is a revealing window into the concerns of the CCP in the first half of the twenty-first century.

Here is an excerpt of two of the directives included in Blanchette’s CSIS report:

1. Prevent and crack down on “color revolutions” [颜色革命]. Keep a close eye on major activities, sensitive points, and hotspots, closely monitor new developments in disruption and destruction by hostile forces [敌对势力], and establish and improve control mechanisms for key political figures, organizations, and groups. Strictly prevent infiltration by hostile forces into ethnic, religious, and other fields; interference by hostile forces using sensitive cases, mass incidents, and the “rights-defense” activities of interest groups; and hostile forces from engaging in activities that undermine political security and social stability, never allowing the formation of flag bearers [扛旗人物], nor the emergence of illegal parties and activities, nor the formation of political opposition.[…] 8. Eliminate blind spots in the supervision of social groups. Emphasize and improve the level of social-organization management, accelerate construction of information platforms, and guide social organizations to participate in public services and provide public products so we can make full use of their positive role in social-governance innovation. Strictly prevent overseas NGOs, as well as certain domestic social organizations that receive Western support, from going around under the banners of “democracy,” “human rights,” “religion,” “charity,” “environmental protection,” and “poverty alleviation.” Strengthen oversight of overseas organizations’ activities in our town, quickly grasp the fundamentals and figure out the situation, and actively guide them in operating in accordance with laws and regulations. [Source]

Different places have sent out differing notices in the past. Is this a national, centralized policy?

I’m alone in the city and don’t have a stove to cook on. I’m worried I won’t have a place to eat on New Years, what should I do?

Can those living on municipal borders go home on New Years? Even though it’s technically two separate cities, it’s actually just the village over. Does this count as returning home? Do I need a nucleic acid test?

Does my first trip to my boyfriend’s hometown to meet his parents count as “returning home”?

So, who do I show this certificate to? Will it be checked when I get on the train? Or after I step off? Or should I log it with the neighborhood committee once I’m back home?

Realistically speaking, won’t all of these people congregating for nucleic acid tests create a risk of coronavirus clusters? Couldn’t it lead to cross-infections?

Isn’t this saying that the centralized national health QR codes are practically worthless? Does a “low risk area” designation carry any meaning?

There will be an estimated 1.7 billion trips taken during the 2021 Spring Festival, with an average of 40 million people traveling per day. A large portion of those people could be classified as returning home.. Aren’t the testing infrastructure needs too great, the costs too steep, and the pressure on medical departments too high?

I’m a medical practitioner, will I get a vacation this year?

Can you take the issues raised here as a sort of suggestion or proposal? Can you synthesize the people’s real difficulties and needs to create a more scientific and reasonable policy? [Chinese]

Chinese officials said that returnees must pay for nucleic acid tests out of their own pockets. Experts estimated that China will have to conduct 170 million tests to satisfy Spring Festival-related demand, news of which caused testing company stock prices to rise by 10% on Thursday, the maximum allowed on China’s domestic stock market. The windfall comes at the expense of migrant workers, many of whom can only afford to return home once per year, and who may now be priced out of the trip. Jane Cai at The South China Morning Post:

“I have three questions,” one user said in a popular post. “First, everyone has a health QR code as a proof of our health status. Why do we need a Covid-19 test result? Second, China categorises the country into three transmission risk zones: high, medium and low. Why should people from low-risk zones have a test? Last but not least, why does the policy only target people going to rural areas? Is it discrimination against migrant workers?”

Most of China’s 280 million rural migrant workers usually travel home to their villages at this time of year.

Zhou Wei, a migrant worker in Beijing, said he was dismayed learning about the measures and planned to cancel his trip home to Henan province.

“I had a tough year finding odd jobs in Beijing last year. A nucleic acid test costs around 100 yuan (US$15.50), which is not a small amount of money,” Zhou said. “Even if I return to my hometown, the 14-day health monitoring period will deprive me of all the joys of the festival. Our village party secretary is always strict. I bet he would not allow me to move as I please.” [Source]

National officials also mandated that rural localities institute “grid management,” a method with its roots in surveillance that breaks neighborhoods into cells, each under the watchful eye of grid managers who control all entry and exit into their cells. The system was instrumental in ending Wuhan’s outbreak in spring of 2020. At The Wall Street Journal Sha Hua reported on the difficulties Chinese authorities have had in adapting Wuhan’s pandemic control model to the countryside:

More of the current surge of cases have appeared in China’s countryside than in previous outbreaks, posing a challenge to the country’s big-city playbook. Public awareness of the disease is weaker in rural areas, and some farmers are reluctant to get tested, Feng Zijian, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told state broadcaster Chinese Central Television this week.

Last week, more than 20,000 villagers from a high-risk district on the edge of Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital of Hebei, were moved into quarantine accommodations—repurposed hotels and dormitories—to prevent transmission within households, Chinese officials said.

North of the city, meanwhile, authorities rushed to build last Wednesday a quarantine center with more than 3,000 rooms for isolating close contacts of coronavirus patients—a scene reminiscent of efforts during the early months of 2020, when two large field hospitals were built in a matter of days in Wuhan.

Temporary makeshift hospitals and quarantine centers , sometimes converted from hotels and dormitories, were instrumental in bringing the infection rate down in China by separating suspected and mild cases from the healthy population, thereby preventing further transmission. [Source]

https://twitter.com/hancocktom/status/1350776411649310724

An elderly man was pinned to the ground by officers after refusing to take a coronavirus test in northern China’s Hebei province. pic.twitter.com/nIMWNSTCez

— South China Morning Post (@SCMPNews) January 18, 2021

"When I was little
Nostalgia was a tiny stamp
When I grew up
Nostalgia was a Covid-19
test report"https://t.co/tmUqNh15dM

— @chenchenzh.bsky.social (@chenchenzh) January 21, 2021

Officials also mandated that weddings and funerals, often held during Spring Festival as it is the one time per year that widely dispersed families congregate, be cancelled. The outbreak is not entirely confined to rural areas. Reported cases in Beijing and Shanghai triggered school closings and limits on public transportation. The new outbreak comes during a vaccination campaign that aims to see 50 million people vaccinated before the Spring Festival.

#AFP #China #COVID19
Shanghai neighbourhood evacuated after three virus cases.https://t.co/Wg9miOLTHt pic.twitter.com/B656kgF9a3

— AFP Photo (@AFPphoto) January 21, 2021

They found one case at a hospital in Shanghai last night… pic.twitter.com/kTkz9trK59

— Eliza Gkritsi (@egreechee) January 21, 2021

More than 250 new cases of coronavirus across China today. A drop in the ocean relative to population, but haven't seen numbers like this reported since March last year.

— Bill Birtles (@billbirtles) January 21, 2021

Pinduoduo said an employee — it gave only a last name, Tan — jumped to his death in his hometown of Changsha in central China on Saturday. The company said Tan, in his 20s, had asked for leave from the Shanghai-based platform on Friday without giving a reason and traveled home that same day.

[…] On Sunday, Pinduoduo’s public relations crisis deepened when an employee with the last name Wang posted a video in which he described the relentless pace of work at the company, alleging that staff members were required to work 300 hours a month. According to Wang, the department in which Fei worked, which specialized in groceries, required 380 hours.

[…] Anger on social media, already at a high after the death of the young woman, reached a new level in response to Tan’s death and Wang’s video, which was viewed more than 50 million times as of Monday.

[…] Hundreds of comments called for boycotting the Groupon-like platform, which gained market dominance by catering to the low-end ­e-commerce segment. Some vowed to block anyone who shared links to Pinduoduo deals, one of the key ways the company promotes itself. [Source]

After the tragic death of one Pinduoduo's employee on the New Year's Eve, and the suicide of another employee on Jan 9, one brave former employee came out on internet after posting anonymously about a colleague being taken in by an ambulance and got fired soon after. pic.twitter.com/ybKr0YDtsr

— Caiwei Chen (@CaiweiC) January 10, 2021

Soon after that he was approached by his supervisors and the HR team with threats about his future career. He was offered a deal to leave the company "voluntarily" if he promised to never mention this again, but he refused and was immediately fired and escorted out.

— Caiwei Chen (@CaiweiC) January 10, 2021

Maimai and Kanzhun, both Glassdoor-like Chinese platforms, have all been alleged to take down negative reviews of companies and leak personal informations before per companies' request.

— Caiwei Chen (@CaiweiC) January 10, 2021

At The South China Morning Post, Yujie Xue and Che Pan provided further details about Wang’s viral video condemning the company:

In a 15-minute video posted late on Sunday to his Weibo account, the former employee – who identifies himself by his screen name Wang Taixu – said he was abruptly fired from PDD on Friday. He said he was terminated because of a post he made on anonymous professional social network Maimai about a co-worker being hospitalised.

[…]“[They] have discovered that there is at least one company in China that can force some of its most brilliant minds to work like slaves,” Wang said in the video. “I think I can use one sentence to describe this company: it lacks the care for its employees that’s probably lacking in all major internet companies. All of these are real and weigh on every employee at Pinduoduo.”

[…] Two former PDD employees, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals, told the Post that they agreed with Wang’s broad accusations about long working hours and poor working conditions at PDD. [Source]

On Weibo, many began comparing events at Pinduoduo to the Foxconn suicide crisis that shook China at the turn of the last decade. At Whats On Weibo, Manya Koetse shared netizen commentary on Pinduoduo’s work culture:

Since Pinduoduo is making headlines again for another employee death, people on Weibo are now mentioning the electronics manufacturer Foxconn (富士康). Foxconn attracted major media attention after a series of employee suicides in 2010 and 2012 linked to low pay and poor working conditions.

On Weibo, many commenters wonder if Pinduoduo is becoming a second Foxconn.

Meanwhile, more staff members are speaking out about Pinduoduo’s working culture. The stories of former employees of the company’s community group buying unit Duoduo Maicai (多多买菜) were shared by Sohu News. They talk about 12-hour workdays and “supersize” work weeks (超级大小周) where staff would work 13 days in a row, then get one day off, or not getting days off at all. They also speak of requirements to minimally work 300 hours per month. [Source]

Despite public backlash, some CEOs have publicly embraced marathon work hours. In a recent Weibo post, the CEO of popular restaurant chain Xibei Canyin proposed 715 work culture—seven days a week, 15 hours a day. One tech company has even created a “smart office chair” that tracks how many minutes workers spend at their stations. In response to corporate demands, some workers are embracing “touching fish,” a poetic euphemism for slacking off. At Quartz, Jane Li reported on the young workers who have taken to “touching fish”:

Buy a large thermos bottle, and fill it with either Chinese herbal tea or whiskey, as a desk-side companion. Set a reminder on your phone to drink eight glasses of water every day, and leave your workstation every 50 minutes to get that water. Start doing 15 minutes of stretches, or planking, in the office pantry. Set the goal of becoming the person who uses the most toilet paper in the company.

These are some of the tips (link in Chinese) for how to slack off at work provided by Massage Bear, a Chinese blogger whose musings on China’s Twitter-like Weibo have attracted more than half a million followers. Her philosophy of “touching fish” (mō yú), a Chinese phrase synonymous with lazing around at work, has resonated in recent months with many Chinese millennials, increasingly exhausted by society’s ever more intense rat race.

[…] “‘Touching fish’ is a passive way of rebelling for the young proletariat like me,” says Massage Bear, who declined to identify her actual name. The blogger says she isn’t trying to get people to shirk work. But she does think people should question why they work excessive hours to impress their boss or compete with colleagues. [Source]

At Bloomberg News, Shuli Ren argued that the “touching fish” phenomenon is not simply a rebellion against workaholic culture, but also, in part, a symptom of stagnant wages for young workers:

It’s a reflection of Gen Z’s disappointment with pay. Last year, China churned out 8.7 million university graduates, a record high. More than 80% surveyed were hoping to earn at least 5,000 yuan ($770) a month in their first job, according to a recent study conducted by HRTechChina, a recruiting site. Fewer than 30% ended up getting that much. What’s the point of working hard for so little money? State-owned enterprises, which pay less but offer cozy, easy gigs, became graduates’ second-most-desired destination, after internet companies.[Source]

China’s couriers are likewise subject to immense pressure from tech-giant owned delivery companies. Last month, an Ele.me driver collapsed on the job. The company denied that it had any fiduciary responsibilities towards the man’s family, as he was technically an employee of a subcontractor. After online outrage, Ele.me agreed to pay the courier’s family 600,000 yuan. Meng Huixin, an e-commerce analyst, told the South China Morning Post that the episode was illustrative of the ways that delivery companies attempt to skirt Chinese labor laws: “The employment arrangement is the biggest loophole in the on-demand food delivery industry [….] Most on-demand food delivery platforms are not tied to riders in labour contracts. Instead they seek to reduce costs and avoid legal risk by outsourcing their demand for labour.”

Ele.me was back in the news yesterday after a video of a Jiangsu delivery man setting himself on fire over a contract dispute with an Ele.me subcontractor went viral on Weibo. At The Financial Times, Yuan Yang and Ryan McMorrow wrote about the delivery driver’s plight:

Social media posts on Monday showed Liu Jin, a 45-year-old driver, setting himself on fire next to a Meituan delivery scooter in the eastern city of Taizhou. Videos shared on social media showed people rushing towards the man to put out the fire with extinguishers. “I want my blood and sweat money back,” Mr Liu said, covered in ash.

Mr Liu had been working for Ele.me, Alibaba’s food delivery platform, but recently signed up to Meituan, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation. Mr Liu experienced a pay dispute with Ele.me’s local partner in charge of drivers when he tried to resign, said one of the people. He then decided to set himself alight in protest.

[…] “Sometimes, food delivery couriers are compelled to do multi-apping to deliver for both Ele.me and Meituan to see if they’d get more than sticking with one platform,” said Jenny Chan, an assistant professor of sociology at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, who studies labour and automation. [Source]

The Countryside Through a (PhD Educated) Rural Daughter-in-law’s Eyes

Although I’ve always been wary of writing about those on the lowest rungs of society, I’m worried their voices are now being silenced like never before. When a family’s children and grandchildren can no longer have their voices heard, just like their older brothers, their narratives will never come to light. There will be no one to bear witness to their grief. And because of this, their experiences will be lost to history forever.

I write all this today as a firsthand witness, as a daughter-in-law in a farming family. It’s an account of the fate I share with the people who happen to be my relatives.

1. A Family Touched by All of the Tentacles of Reality

I struggled with whether or not to write these words down for a long time. I first became aware of my older brother- and sister-in-law’s daily struggle for survival after I married into the family. All these years, life was a harsh, rugged reality for them, as if that was their unavoidable destiny. As someone on the outside, I always felt like writing their story down would be something of a violation. But now a member of the family, my intervention was inevitable. It became impossible for me to remain a completely objective bystander removed from the situation.

Our family has confronted and dealt with many trials over the years. Issues like rural elderly care, left-behind children, rural education, medical care—all of the issues affecting the prospects of the rural population that are commonly discussed by intellectuals and academics. My aim is to recount our situation from the point of view of a firsthand witness as much as possible, both to sort through my own personal feelings, and to provide a case study, in hopes of giving back to the village in some way.

My husband’s family is from a village in Xiaochang County, Hubei. In 2005, the first time I went back with him to their village for Spring Festival, the person who left the biggest impression on me was my sister-in-law. Sister-in-law was short. She had dark skin and an overall rough appearance. I even privately asked my boyfriend (at the time, now my husband), “I know Elder Brother isn’t exactly a heartthrob, but why marry such an ugly woman?” I later realized how horribly rude a question that was. To a poor village family (especially since Elder Brother had a hereditary disease that, I later found out, was the reason their father and second-eldest sister passed away early), finding a girl of appropriate age with which to start a family meant he was already extremely fortunate.

In reality, when it comes to village marriages, beauty and looks are incomparably less important than economics and family status. Sister-in-law didn’t come from a good family, either, but I don’t know the details. In the 10-plus years I’ve known her, she rarely went back to visit her side of the family, nor does she talk about them much. She’s a very outgoing person, simple, an open book. She was just a few years older than me, and we hit it off instantly. That first time I went to the village, we quickly felt close enough to hold hands.

My mother-in-law was about 75 at the time, still in good health. There was also my nephew, then 14, and niece, 12. Those years, Elder Brother and Sister-in-law were construction workers in Beijing. Fourth-sister and her husband worked with them, as well. Fourth-sister’s husband was a recruiter. He recruited many young and middle-aged laborers from back home. The setup worked well for him, people naturally trusted those from the same home town. And it worked out for those he recruited too, as they could earn a wage through the work he introduced.

I later learned Fourth-sister’s husband made a lot of money back then. In the late 90s, he even had the vision to buy land in Xiaogan City and build a four-story building there. Thinking back to that time, those were the family’s quietest, most peaceful days. My husband was still in school then, so he wasn’t able to give more economic support to the family. Since my mother-in-law was still in good health, she took up the big responsibility of looking after my niece and nephew. Approaching 80 years old, she was still feeding the chickens and cooking, doing all the household chores she could.

To maintain their livelihoods (children’s studies, maintaining relationships with those in the village, healthcare and other necessary family expenses), Elder Brother and Sister-in-law remained in Beijing at their work site throughout most of the year, only returning home a month or a couple weeks before Spring Festival every year, to help with preparations. That made niece and nephew “left-behind children,” raised by their grandma. But compared to a lot of the lonely children in similar situations, they weren’t too negatively affected psychologically, because they had their grandma’s love.

Things changed in 2008. Elder Brother and Sister-in-law had been working away from home for years, but they grew tired of constantly just scraping by year in and year out. At the same time, grandma and grandpa were already quite old, they could no longer handle the kids, who had entered their rebellious period. Sister-in-law decided to return home, both to take care of the elders, but also, more importantly, to keep the children under control. She also tended to the fields, fed the chickens, fed the pigs. We sent support money back on a regular basis. Everyone was healthy, and there were no big crises. At the end of the day, the family was still getting by.

And just like that, Elder Brother was left now the only one away from home. Physically, he never was a very healthy person, it certainly wasn’t appropriate for him to be doing physically taxing jobs like construction. But there was no way for him to earn an income back in the village. The kids were growing up, the elders getting very old. Pressure to make money was growing by the day, both for his children’s marriage prospects and to provide a good quality of life for the older generation.

The house the family lived in was built in 1998 with the financial help of my husband. There was a second floor, but it was basically an empty shelf. It wasn’t finished at all. People couldn’t even sleep up there when there were a lot of relatives home for holidays. But at least everyone was living well enough. As the kids grew older, it always seemed like things were looking up.

Every time Elder Brother heard we were planning to bring the kids back for winter or summer vacation, he’d always return to the village early, slaughter chickens and ducks, take his son with him on his motorbike to markets in the county seat and buy all sorts of cheap, silly toys for my son. Grandpa and Grandma were always elated, too. The whole family was together—the daughters that had married out of the family, and even the husband of Second-sister, who died young. Everyone got to experience the love and warmth of family. Fourth-sister and her family, who had been living in Beijing for so many years, were the only ones who seemed to rarely come home. But this stability didn’t last for long. Some unexpected issues came up that directly affected the direction of the whole family.

One issue was with Fourth-sister’s construction site. The government was behind on loan payments that Fourth-sister’s husband was responsible for. He was behind by a huge amount of money, and had no way to make payments. Their savings were completely devastated. Not long after, so were Elder Brother and Sister-in-law’s, earned through all those years of blood, sweat and tears away from home. (This money was virtually their entire life savings, nearly 100,000 yuan. They planned to use the money for their son to marry.) On top of that, Fourth-sister’s husband also owed a large amount of backpay to the workers on their project, and this debt couldn’t be avoided. When the situation was at its most dire, they even asked to borrow money from us.

I think it was the day before Spring Festival 2009. My husband received an urgent phone call from Fourth-sister’s husband. He told us someone was holding a knife to his neck, and that he had to pay a debt back that very day. He pleaded with us for help. He always gave me the the impression of being a pretty well-off guy—he wore clean, crisp, fashionable clothes, he had a manner about him of countryside success.

This was the first time he had reached out to us in years. Honestly, I didn’t want to lend him the money. For one, we didn’t have the extra funds on hand to help. We were preparing to make the first payment on our mortgage at the end of the year. Our financial situation was basically at its most strained point, as well. Secondly, they already owed Elder Brother and Sister-in-law nearly 100,000 yuan of their hard-earned money. I had my doubts over their ability to protect the basic interests of their relatives.

I explained my position to my husband. He didn’t say a word. Fourth-sister had no choice. She called us again begging for help. It was an emergency, there was nothing else she could do. We clearly didn’t have a choice, either. We swallowed our pride and asked to borrow money from a financially stable friend.

Even though she promised to pay us back in a few months, I knew it wasn’t up to her. We knew better than to ever expect that money back, and this proved to be correct. Years later, Fourth-sister’s family’s financial situation never improved. She didn’t dare come home for years, afraid she’d run into people who used to work with her husband wanting old wages paid. (It was only much later that I became aware of the true extent of the direct impact Fourth-sister’s family fate would have on our finances. Because they had no way to repay the money they owed to Elder Brother and Sister-in-law, Elder Brother was never able to save money again. With their son and daughter growing up, the burden of paying for things like marriages and starting a family all fell on our shoulders.)

My husband and I went to visit Fourth-sister and her husband in 2015, when I was studying in Beijing. They lived in a chaotic slum in Beijing, full of sewage, with garbage strewn about everywhere. They lived in two cramped rooms at the end of a winding alleyway. To avoid debtors, they had cut off all contact with the outside world for several years at that point. Fourth-sister’s husband didn’t dare return to his hometown, either. He was an only child, unable to even look after his own mother. Neither did he dare openly look for a job. They survived on money Fourth-sister earned washing dishes at a cafe. Their two daughters also made some money as tour guides. Their family was so well off back in the glory days of the 90s. I never would have imagined they’d one day be living like this, hiding in a dark corner, all because the government defaulted on the project payments.

The second issue was an even bigger blow. My husband’s youngest sister [Little Sister] left the family to become a Buddhist nun. Out of everyone in the family, Little Sister’s life was the most comfortable and happy. She was naturally pretty, and she had that classic Hubei girl can-do attitude. After completing junior high school, she went to work in Wuhan as a temporary worker in a factory. She met a formal employee there and they married. The two did very well financially because they got married early and bought a large house before prices reached 1,000 per square meter. Their daughter was smart and cute. Her husband eventually became a deputy director of the factory.

However, the truth is, other than my husband, Little Sister was shouldering a lot of the responsibility of supporting the family. All of the clothes and everyday items my nephew, niece, mother-in-law and father-in-law had, virtually all came from Little Sister, who brought the items to them from Wuhan. When Elder Brother and Sister-in-law were working for a few years in Wuhan, she took care of their housing. But these past few years, Little Sister started following Buddhism. She became a vegetarian. When she brought her children on vacation to Guangzhou where I was in the summer of 2012, she kept telling me about the benefits of vegetarianism.

Just a year later, in September 2013, my husband got an unexpected call from Elder Brother. He told us Little Sister had left the family to become a Buddhist nun. She even got a divorce, essentially ensuring herself no way to back out of her decision. From then on, she would be living the religious life. While I can understand her choice from a religious point of view, to be honest, I found her decision to let this burden fall on her family to be unacceptable.

Little Sister and I were born the same year. Her choice to leave the family for the religious life came precisely at the stage of life when one’s responsibilities to family are at their greatest: her husband was very busy with work; her daughter just began high school; her mother-in-law was very old, and her own parents were over 80. Her decision sent a shockwave through the whole family. In an attempt to convince her to return to secular life, my husband asked for leave from work and rushed overnight from Guangzhou to Wuhan, then from Wuhan to Anli, but was unsuccessful in the end. I could never look at her again, even at my mother-in-law’s funeral.

It continues to baffle the rest of the family to this day: why would someone who loved normal, secular life so much suddenly give it all up? (I only occasionally heard her speak about the complicated situation with her husband’s family, about the emotional abuse of her father-in-law, about her timid mother-in-law’s dependence on her, holding her and crying.) But she made her decision, and there was nothing the family could do.

The person most directly affected by Little Sister’s decision was her own daughter. An introvert to begin with, she became even more withdrawn. She only made it through the first year of high school, dropping out under social pressure. I have fond memories of that little girl at Spring Festival 2006, when the whole family was together. She was out picking vegetables, then joined her cousins running wildly through the fields, red bow swaying behind her head—a lovely sight. Out of all of those kids, she was the only one born in a big city—a beloved princess. I never would have thought that seven years later, she’d be the most pitiable out of all of them, all because her mother decided to leave and become a nun.

After her daughter, her mother was the next hardest hit. Her mother was never able to understand why she left for religious life. She mentioned it to anyone who came by the house. Mother-in-law’s once sturdy body gave way, rather suddenly, leaving her bedridden after a stroke and a fall. She wasn’t able to see her youngest daughter again before her passing. Father-in-law (stepfather) became slow of speech. Little Sister was his only biological child, her departure meant the loss of his biggest emotional investment. He spent his last days wandering aimlessly through the village, his ugly expression devoid of the joy of his past.

Fourth-sister’s bankruptcy and Little Sister’s entrance into religious life directly crushed two whole families, the effects of which then cascaded out to all the other siblings and their families—especially Elder Brother’s family, whose financial situation was tenuous to begin with. After five or six years his savings were completely exhausted, there was nothing left. Never again would everyone gather together like at that happy 2006 Spring Festival reunion. Little Sister used to help support the family financially, once she left, my family had to take on even more.

Though we tried to keep it hidden away in a dark corner, our family’s sadness was evident at every turn. Each time I’d go back to my mother-in-law’s house, I’d always hear about more depressing things talking to Elder Brother and his wife. In late 2013, their son eloped with a girl from the same county he met online. Elder Brother and Sister-in-law were elated. But soon after the girl joined the family, there was a lot of tension between her and Sister-in-law. She had an extremely eccentric personality. Later, we found out about her extremely rough upbringing.

We heard that after her mother gave birth to her, the county government forced her mother to undergo sterilization surgery. When she got home after the procedure, she became mentally ill. She was basically unable to care for her children. She would viciously beat people, tear up the clothes she was wearing, there was nothing anyone could do. The family locked her in a room. Everyone knew the tragedy was related to her surgery, but no one had the power to bring the truth to light. Instead, fate was allowed to take its toll on this ordinary farming family in the cruelest of ways.

I once asked my nephew’s wife, “Did you ever report the situation to the township government?” A blank expression showed on her face. She still hadn’t realized how much harm had been done to her life by that botched tubal ligation, she just explained that no one ever held her when she was small. I always talked about getting more information from her, to see if there was anything I could do to help protect her rights. But I later learned her mom had already passed, having never gotten over that mental illness. She was only in her forties.

Truthfully speaking, there’s nothing extraordinary about Elder Brother and Sister-in-law’s family. They’re ordinary farmers. They are some of the most honest, decent people. They have no extravagant expectations for their lives, never thought about how to acquire more capital through other means. Honest work is all they can do, and they do it in hopes of living a quiet, peaceful life.

But their situation is extremely common throughout the countryside. Stay in the village, and there’s no way to make money; go work elsewhere, and you might not even get your wage. But all those basic family expenses—children’s schooling and money for starting a family, housing construction and renovation, health care and end-of-life care for elderly—still remain. Although rural areas are exempt from agricultural taxes, compared with the rising costs of everything else, it’s really just a drop in the bucket.

One could say, there aren’t many ways through which China’s boundless hope and wealth can trickle down to them. But all of society’s ills seem to readily extend into these ordinary farmer’s homes: the government defaulting on loans; the spirituality crisis and the confusion it causes; the brutality and negligence of rural family planning practices and implementation. Any and all kinds of silent tragedies, from all directions, permeate the daily existence of these ordinary farmers. Their only option to deal with the pain, to resign to their fates.

Mother-in-law with two sons and a grandson

2. A Family Without a Future

On July 13, 2015, my mother-in-law passed away after being bedridden for almost a year, ending her 86 years of misery.

Her funeral kept me busy, but it also left a hole in my heart. I felt that the tight knot that held our family together suddenly came undone. I didn’t spend much time living with my mother-in-law, but her kindness and generosity had often warmed my heart. There was no awkwardness or ill-feeling between us (she was more like a grandmother to me).

Every time we would come home, she would be beyond happy to see us—especially her little grandson. Shortly after he was born, she bought a lot of candy to share in celebration with the villagers. Whenever we mailed photos home she would share them with the old folks in the village. Her greatest wish was for her son to become a government official, an important one. In her mind, nothing improves a family’s fortune more than having children take up government positions. When it comes to resolving real issues for the family, her son and daughter-in-law, with their fancy PhD degrees, don’t even match a local official or construction manager.

My mother-in-law’s humble wish, along with the endless wear and tear of mishaps in life, made all her suffering and humiliation all the more evident. I know, there are many people like my husband who, born to a modest background, changed their lives through education and settled in the city. Burdened by their families, they even share some common characteristics in terms of their spirit and temperament—so much so that they are labeled “phoenix men,” and are often demeaned as non-marriage material by women from different social circles or better families.

I don’t deny any individual’s right to choose. It’s true that one has to deal with more issues marrying such a man, but this one-sided public opinion assuming itself on the moral high ground shows discrimination, helplessness, and indifference. It also shows how the urban-rural structure has dealt irreversibly bad cards to the peasants, and how such a divide affects generations and leads to irreconcilable differences. You could say that even if someone in the countryside were able to change their own course through education, they would still feel belittled and humiliated as long as they stay connected with their families. And these are the lucky ones we are talking about. How can you expect someone who stayed in their rural hometowns to fare any better?

It is what it is. When I calm down and give it some thought, I know that Elder Brother’s family didn’t have much of a future to look forward to.

First of all, inter-generational poverty has begun its course. In their prime years, Elder Brother and Sister-in-law left their kids behind to work in the city. Now my nephew and niece have grown up, are facing economic pressure, and will inevitably repeat their parents’ life, becoming a new generation of migrant workers. Elder Brother and Sister-in-law assumed the responsibility of looking after their grandchildren, just as my parents-in-law did.

My nephew got married in late 2013. To pay off his debt, he had to leave his wife shortly after the Chinese New Year to join the other migrant workers from his village to work as a bricklayer. When he was lucky he’d save up over 10,000 yuan a year; when he’s not, maybe he’d have to switch construction sites, and he’d have barely enough for a train ticket home. Compared to his parents’ generation, he is not nearly as frugal. Just like any urban youngster in his 20s, obsessed with smartphones and fancy clothes. The money he’s spent on these things could have supported his family for six months.

He’s thought about getting a job in a nearby town or opening up his own shop, but he doesn’t have the money or the skills to get started. On an objective note, there are hardly any circles of production in the rural area. More often than not, one has to break up the family structure in order to make a basic living. Therefore, there is a de facto cycle of getting married, having kids, becoming migrant workers, and producing left-behind children. For Elder Brother, the new challenge he faces is the possibility of having nowhere to turn to when he gets old. After all, none of his children were able to break out through education, while despite his hard work, he himself is only able to maintain the most basic existence, unable to save for retirement. Inter-generational poverty has become the destiny for this family. 

Second, the effects of being left-behind children will start to manifest. My nephew and niece, the first generation of left-behind children, have grown up. My niece met someone online, got married at the age of 19 and became a mother at 20. Her husband is a local young man who is a year younger than her.

My niece was never mentally prepared for motherhood. Nor does she feel the responsibility of child-rearing. During her pregnancy, she maintained her old lifestyle, living off of instant noodles and sugary drinks, on her phone constantly. Noodle cups and empty bottles piled up near her bed. After giving birth, she didn’t even know where to buy cotton diapers.

One summer, I saw her with her less-than-one-year-old daughter. It was a hot day, and she left her daughter half-naked, covered in mud and dirt. I told her to get some cotton diapers, and she looked oblivious. Then she jovially told me how she started feeding her daughter popsicles when she was a few months old, and after a few days of diarrhea, the kid was now able to eat anything. But in fact, her daughter was constantly running an unexplained fever.

Compared to a new mom in the city, who is careful and meticulous, my niece surprised me with her ignorance and roughness. She is a kid, after all, a kid who became a mother at the age of 20. Her playful nature and the heavy burden of motherhood seem quite incongruous. I’ve asked her to buy some books or read about child-rearing online, and she looked at me with her young eyes and said, “I’m heading out next year. It’s the grandma’s job to look after the kid.”

My nephew isn’t faring any better. His wife, who lacked nurture and guidance from her own mother, doesn’t know how to be a mother herself. When the baby cries, she’d simply leave him in bed and completely ignore him or yell at him. She has hardly any patience, not to mention the calm that a reasonable mother should have. And because my nephew works in the city all year round, his wife spends most of her time with her mother-in-law. The two have their disagreements over trivial matters, which makes it even harder for her to care for the newborn.

You have to admit, unlike Elder Brother’s generation who were forced to become migrant workers, my nephew and niece are driven by very different mentalities. Although it’s true that they are still relatively poor, for many of these young mothers going out to work is their best excuse to avoid child-rearing responsibility. Because of how they grew up, they find child-rearing beyond cumbersome and miserable. How their own choices may hurt their children is simply not their concern. 

Because they were not well cared for as children, it’s hard for these left-behind children to learn how to love. When they grow up and become parents, this lack of love won’t simply change, no divine power can compensate for that. The inter-generational poverty of love is the real issue of concern.

Compare that to the care and quality education given to a normal city dweller and you can’t deny that such this invisible gap is deepening the urban-rural divide. But on the other hand, because my nephew and niece have spent so much time working in the city they are also deeply affected by contemporary consumerism. They don’t differ from their urban counterparts in terms of benchmarks in clothing, marriage, housing, and daily lives.

My nephew didn’t make much money before getting married, but that didn’t stop him from getting new phones. (He met his wife on the internet, which gave Elder Brother and Sister-in-law solace.) For his wedding, he even hired a band and a motorcade, not to mention getting the “Big Three” gold jewelry popular in rural areas (necklace, earrings, and bracelet). The wedding wasn’t much different from any wedding in an urban, high-end hotel, the only real difference was that his family wasn’t wealthy. They didn’t put up a fight against the grandiose wedding, the betrothal gifts, the outfits for the bride. This was their only opportunity to shine in their otherwise dim life. And, the heavy debt incurred thereof became the starting point for a new family.

Third, the traditional village structure has lost its resilience. A weak economy has fastened the decline of traditional values and practices. Take caring for the elderly as an example. Even though for thousands of years, it has been the firmest belief among peasants that one shall raise children to provide for old age, such a simple wish has been greatly challenged by reality. Researcher He Xuefeng and his team revealed that in the rural areas of Hubei Province, many older people are committing suicide: “Our research center has found that the Two Lakes Plain (Dongting Lake and Jianghan Lake) and the surrounding areas have high suicide rates. The suicide rate among senior citizens in those areas, in particular, have greatly exceeded the average rate.” (“On peasants’ suicides and their types and reasons,” Huazhong University of Science and Technology Journal (Social Sciences) Vol.116.)

In his paper “Change of Inter-generational Relations and Elderly Suicide: An empirical study in Jingshan county, Hubei Province,” Chen Bofeng restated: “The high rates and percentages of elderly suicide and the fast increases thereof are indisputable facts. The cruelty of such a fact is shocking.” (Sociological Studies, Vol.4 2009) If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I could hardly believe the prevalence of such cruelty.

When my mother-in-law was sick, villagers would come by to visit. They’d talk about how the elderly in rural areas rarely get timely treatment when they get sick. (Sister-in-law looked after my mother-in-law every day with great care. She helped her turn over and changed her dressings. The whole village saluted her as the model daughter-in-law.) If the illness is terminal, death is often just a matter of time. Some elderlies would take their own lives so as not to burden their children. And some children, unable to bear such prolonged torture of caring for a terminally ill patient, would gradually feed the patient less food and starve them to death.

In his novel Mother, author Chen Yingsong, known for his portrayal of the underclass, offered a sobering and harsh account of such a reality. When I read this novel, I had those old folks in my mind. I could feel their calmness when nearing the end of their lives.

In their eyes, life doesn’t have much special meaning. To live, is to live in a lowly way, a numb way. Their happiness comes from basic instincts and from the inertia of life, and they see death as natural. In a village that has become quieter and more irrelevant as time goes by, such voiceless tragedy doesn’t stir up much emotion in people’s hearts.

The tragic and voiceless life of the miserable peasantry can hardly see any fundamental, overall transformation. Apart from keeping their stomachs full, years of glorious development have not allowed them to enjoy a dignity comparable to the overall strength of the country. The splendor of the big cities, the extravagance enjoyed by the urban wealthy, the high living of the successful—this all bears little resemblance to the miserable lives of those in the countryside of the same nation.

Finally, the village is facing an erosion of capitalism. Through government-business collusion, hot money is eyeing the last resource of the rural area—the land. On paper, the privatization of rural land is still in the debate stage; in reality, rural land is already being consolidated through capital. My husband’s village is located on a small hilly area without much scenery. A small river runs through the village providing basic irrigation.

But in recent years, some people came and closed off a big part of the land, and diverted the river into private ponds. They built pavilions and terraces for urbanites, modeled after the holiday resorts in developed areas and completely incompatible with the surrounding village. In fact, because the area lacked attractions, there weren’t many tourists to boost the economy. However, the diversion of the river is directly affecting the water supply; the farmland is occupied, and nobody can predict what will happen in the end. And, the villagers don’t seem to care. For the younger generation, like my nephew and niece, farming isn’t an option. The land being converted into resorts gives them an illusory sense of comfort.

If I didn’t marry my husband and experience all the daily affairs as a family member, if I hadn’t witnessed these unspeakable truths with my own eyes, I can hardly imagine the disadvantage facing a normal peasant in their life and struggles, nor would I know how far removed their lives are from the general trend of society. These real pains prompt me to ask: What exactly caused this family’s predicament? Why exactly do we give back to the countryside? 

An abandoned rural residence 

3. Why We Give Back to the Countryside

To be fair, even if I get into rational analysis, the prospects for Elder Brother’s family are still choked with gloom and despair. Yet every time we go back, Elder Brother and Sister-in-law still inspire relief and comfort with their outlook. They’re always short on money and Elder Brother suffers from a congenital illness, and yet they are much happier than us. Elder Brother never loses sleep, and Sister-in-law never bemoans their situation. 

Even as her mother-in-law lay dying in bed, Sister-in-law did what had to be done without complaining. The stifled despair that usually accompanies the critically ill was nowhere to be found. The more they lived in peace and without desire, unaware of their plight, the more I felt their fate was a cruel one. I wondered why in this world must this be people’s fate. And for those in the family who’ve left and found success, giving back to the family has become nearly a natural, emotive choice. 

When I think about giving back to the village with a cool head, no matter our country’s current economic might, rural families still do as they have always done: rely on one another for mutual aid. My parents’ generation did this, and my generation does this, too. On this point, I feel deep gratitude, etched forever into my heart. 

I think of my parents. A half a lifetime ago, my father was a village teacher, a government position, and my mother was able, so our financial situation was just a bit better than everyone else’s. This obliged them to offer unlimited help to their relatives. In those decades, practically half of their energy was poured into dealing with their relatives. 

“I’ve helped no one and troubled everyone” is how my mother sums up her own life. This is how she honestly feels about what she has done for both sides of the family for all those years. My entire impression of my childhood is of dad’s older half-brother sitting at home doing nothing, never going out the door without some money; or of my widowed uncle who went to Dad, his older brother, for help as a matter of course; or else of my mother’s sickly brother asking, shyly but firmly, for support; or Dad’s half-sister going to her parents at regular intervals to vent her grievances. 

These relatives were kind, honest, and warm (when my dying aunt heard that Dad was coming to see her, she dragged herself to catch one of her hens for him to bring home for dinner). They never meant to bother their family or to freeload. It’s just that when they ran into trouble, their bitter village lives offered no exit. The help of their slightly-better-off siblings was their only way out. That was the fate of my father’s generation. Now, under the flag of Reform and Opening raised decades ago, the country has amassed great wealth, and no one in our family is without warmth or food. Yet, as new distresses arise, the situation facing my husband and me is nothing like what our parents dealt with. 

In his essay “I Am a Peasant’s Son,” Mo Luo once lamented, “Every peasant hopes to change the family’s fortunes by sending their son to the city. But all this effort merely replicates that ‘duck and cover’ trope so popular in movies. What’s left behind is a flimsy set that collapses at the first blow. Of course, one’s death is inevitable. Even more powerless to save his drowning family, the escapee can do nothing but look at the sky and howl his grief.”

As the daughter-in-law of a rural family who lives among them, I can feel the helplessness of this anguish. My husband is like any rural kid who improves their lot by getting an education: the premise of city life is not to have a good time. Even paying for regular expenses feels like a crime to him. Born with the shadow of his family hanging over him, it shades his daily life. He doesn’t smoke or drink, or even have much of a social life. Hobbies are out of the question. His one indulgence is reading books. He leads what to others must seem a dull, simple life. 

My husband is quiet by nature and doesn’t like to talk much. The quieter he is, the more I feel the painful, stifling weight his family exerts on him. He’s like a very lucky fish. Through his own hard work, he finally swam away from this hopeless family, but the good fortune of his escape can’t bring him inner happiness. The family he was born into casts its long shadow over him. As long as someone in the family is suffering, the one who got away can’t enjoy the ease and joy that ought to be his. 

This pain that clings to him like flesh and blood will never let him forget the misfortune of his brothers and sisters. He is saddled with a mortgage and raising his children, but it is repaying the family he came from to which he feels duty-bound, never mind that it’s mostly his siblings back in the village who take care of their elderly parents. As a consequence, he silently accepts any request for financial help from anyone in the family. He would never even think to refuse. 

After many years of marriage in the midst of this difficult economic situation, I often feel the heavy burden of my husband’s large family, at times a seemingly bottomless despair. But it’s the emotional anguish, not the financial ruin, that was hardest to take. There is a basic fact that I cannot avoid. If we didn’t care about them, if even the people closest to them turned a blind eye to their suffering, then who would reach their hand out to Elder Brother and Sister-in-law? Just the same, the ones who leave the village and gain a foothold in the city still face real, true hardship. 

In the essay “What’s the 80s Generation To Do?” author Yang Qingxiang offers a meticulous analysis of the plight of intellectuals born in the 1980s, who escaped the countryside only to live a life of desperation and hard work in the cities. As for the 70s generation, their situation wasn’t quite as dire, according to Yang. But the 70s generation was only better off because they were able to buy housing just as housing prices were beginning to get out of control. They were fortunate enough to become “mortgage slaves,” but as they hit middle age and all the expected challenges that come with it, life and career pressures loomed as large as they would have otherwise. All they had were meager sums from already limited incomes to help their families back home. How much can a family’s fate really be changed with such scant resources?

The questions posed by Mo Luo 11 years ago remain unanswered: “What could best change the destiny of the people of the countryside? Should we rely on emergency policies, or does it require systemic sociopolitical reform? If farmers can’t access better educational resources; if they are not treated as so-called ‘citizens’ in a political framework based on equality; if they are unable to defend their rights in an open social system with their own voices and strength, then who could possibly guarantee that things will change for them? Who has the ability, the conscience, to be their savior?” (“I am a Farmer’s Son,” published in “Tianya” Issue 6, 2004) The day when we will get an answer to these questions remains out of sight.

That made me think of a certain group of people—those who made it to the cities through their own hard work. They were able to change their personal destiny, and therefore possess the power that comes with that. But the world’s temptations got to them, and they began walking the path of corruption. I think that for them, going from very limited resources to extreme material wealth after gaining access to opportunity, their desire for more will inevitably expand over time, because they truly understand the cruel truth about the difference one’s social status can make on their life. One author wrote the following regarding how members of this group of people truly think: “They work hard to take advantage of any opportunity that comes up, because they know that once this period of social stratification ends and society becomes rigid again, social mobility will become much more difficult.”

This really is the reality. If those who escape rural life aren’t able to change their family fate through their personal power, then change is impossible. I often saw abandoned homes in the village. When I asked about them, the answer was usually that the family had moved to the city and never returned. Where I was born, in Hunan, a whole family’s destiny could change simply because one of its members joined the military and became an officer. He’d leveraged all kinds of connections to get his brothers and sisters from both sides of the family out of the countryside. Even one brother-in-law, a 27-year-old who had not graduated from middle school, was able to join the army. And through family connections, a job was eventually arranged for him at the Public Security Bureau.

Compared to them, my husband and I barely contribute anything to our family. There are virtually no opportunities or resources that could fundamentally change things for our family. We have a niece that graduated college, but we weren’t even able to help her find a good job. Because my mother-in-law understood the importance of power, her biggest regret was that her son didn’t become a government official. In her mind, she always thought her son would be able to leverage his PhD into a visible government post. She didn’t know what the reality was for people in his demographic. Because of the guilt of being unable to help my relatives, I feel the structural challenges rural families face to changing their fates. Mo Luo’s feelings on this really resonated with me: “Farmers have paid a heavy price in this so-called ‘modernization’ process. I wouldn’t dare hope for my brothers and sisters in the countryside to be able to change their own situations through continuing modernization. Their destiny tomorrow will be as harsh as it was yesterday. With the situation being as it is—big government, small civil society—the only destiny for these disadvantaged people is to be used as humble stepping stones for the advantaged.”

Even though we help one another as much as we can, it’s not enough to change things because of how disadvantaged we are. At the governmental level, the best way to change things for families like Elder Brother’s is naturally through education. But the truth is, resources for rural education have withered to virtually nothing. My niece and nephew weren’t even able to complete middle school because of the poor conditions at their school.

My husband once counted the scholars in his cohort who had gone to college in the countryside. There were no fewer than seven or eight. But for our niece and nephew’s generation, if their parents weren’t able to send them to middle school in the county seat or in Xiaogan, odds would be against them even to test into high school. Even if conditions at rural school were just as good as those in the cities, these left-behind kids are still at an inherent disadvantage due to a lack of quality parenting.

In this family, all of society’s structural gaps are on display. To Elder Brother, Sister-in-law, my niece and nephew and their children, education no longer provides a viable means through which to change their lot in life, like it was for my husband. To the next generation, visions of escaping the countryside and living a simple, modest life in the city is like a mirage. Without promoting more sustainable development on a fundamental level, our loved ones, those people with whom we share a fate, are doomed to social destruction, doomed to be left in the dust, to struggle to survive, with no way to fight it, without even a whisper.

In conclusion, I want to say that although I’ve always been wary of writing about those at the bottom of society,  I’m worried their voices are being silenced like never before. When the young people from families like Elder Brother’s can no longer have their voices heard, their narratives will never come to light. There will be no one to bear witness to their grief. And, because of this, their experiences will be lost to history forever. I write all this today as a first-hand witness, as a farming family’s daughter-in-law. It’s an account of the fate I share with these people, who just so happen to be my relatives.

[Chinese]

Translation by Yakexi, Little Bluegill, and Anne Henochowicz

The delivery workers described grueling routines: 12-hour days, six days a week, under the automated and watchful eye of mobile apps that track how and when they deliver hundreds of packages a day.

Delivery workers are a critical link in China’s on-demand courier services, which ship more than 60 billion packages a year and generate nearly 1% of the country’s annual economic activity.

[…] If Wang fails to garner at least one five-star review a month, he gets slapped with an $8 pay deduction. If someone complains by email, Wang is fined about $300, nearly a week’s wages. Lesser offenses can carry fines of about $30 to $80.

“On those days, it is as if I worked the entire day, delivering 400 packages, for nothing,” he says. [Source]

Couriers fine for complaints unrelated to delivery; for not enough good reviews; and for too many bad ones. Below, the mobile app one worker @NPR interviewed uses. Minus 3 pts for bad review. Minus 15 for complaints. Too few points, and he’s fined up to half his pay that day. pic.twitter.com/63eUmToEin

— Emily Feng 冯哲芸 (@EmilyZFeng) December 2, 2020

It’s quite something to see these two stories, one by @kimidefreytas re the US, one by @EmilyZFeng re China, paired together. Two societies that share more problems in common than we all might like to admit pic.twitter.com/u2OYlgsCAt

— Neysun Mahboubi (@NeysunM) December 2, 2020

Here’s one from last month “…place a new order and I’ll pay for it, add my WeChat… I’m truly sorry, let me take responsibility! I’ve been delivering goods to you for 3-4 years” pic.twitter.com/tEg9aBjcmR

— Cate Cadell (@catecadell) December 2, 2020

In September, “Delivery Riders, Trapped In The System,” a long-form investigation by People (Renwu 人物) into the algorithms and managers that govern the lives of China’s 4.6 million delivery workers, went viral. The report detailed a number of abuses. “Meituan navigation told me to drive against traffic once I crossed the road […] If there is a wall, it will tell you to go directly through the wall,” said one driver. Managers threatened workers with double penalties for absenteeism if they didn’t show up for work during a typhoon. “Gamified” performance rankings created Sisyphean tiers by which drivers were ranked and paid in competition with each other. Subsequent public outrage against Ele.me and Meituan, the two delivery giants implicated in the report, caused both companies to tweak their delivery requirements. They put the onus to lessen driver’s burden on consumers by allowing them the option to give drivers more time to make deliveries. “Comprising [sic] the rights of consumers is a solution but it’s not reasonable and cannot solve the fundamental problem,” an e-commerce analyst told The South China Morning Post.

Public sympathy for drivers was already high after their heroic service during China’s lockdown earlier this year. At great risk to their personal health, delivery drivers in Wuhan brought fresh food and vegetables to people confined to their homes throughout the peak of the city’s coronavirus outbreak. During February, couriers delivered over 1,337 tons of necessities in Hubei alone. A recently produced 20-part drama compared the work of Wuhan’s delivery drivers to that of its doctors.

.@Pepsi has joined hands with @PDChina, the official newspaper of the CCP to "celebrate some of the brave people fighting the pandemic on the frontline and to pay respect to their spirit of love."

Here's their “Salute our Heroes” limited edition gift box: pic.twitter.com/rKNMeLZgzT

— Fergus Ryan (@fryan) June 13, 2020

But as the pandemic subsided, and Chinese economic life returned to normal, some drivers felt left behind. In October at The South China Morning Post, Masha Borak wrote about the salary hardships faced by drivers in post-pandemic China:

According to a recent report by the China Post and Express News, more than 75 per cent of 65,000 package-delivery couriers recently surveyed were earning less than 5,000 yuan (US$747) a month, and most lacked access to social insurance. More than half of the respondents also said they work at least 10 hours a day, and around 60 per cent said they take two or fewer days off each month.

[…] Zhang Xuelin, a 38-year-old delivery driver working for Sherpa’s – a food-delivery service that targets foreigners and high-end dining in China – said he could earn up to 6,000 yuan a month in cash tips a decade ago, when mobile payment apps were in their infancy.

“Now that consumers use mobile apps to pay for the orders, the tips are much less,” he said. “Ten years ago, you could expect that tips would be higher than your salary.”[Source]

Delayed payments and deadly accidents have sparked protests and strikes by delivery drivers. China Labour Bulletin has tracked 19 delivery driver deaths since 2018, and documented 33 strikes among couriers and food delivery workers since the beginning of 2020. The strikes have come in the weeks and months before couriers’ busiest time of year, Alibaba’s November 11 “Singles Day” shopping holiday. This year, 3 billion packages were expected to be delivered in China between the 11th and the 16th. One driver told an interviewer, “Our physical strength is limited, and delivering items for a long time without rest is unbearable.”

Like with any honest look at modern China, it's both heartbreaking and heartwarming – a push-and-pull between the relentless dehumanization and standardization the Chinese state and work culture imposes on its people, and the tiny but powerless rebellions that provide solace.

— Krish Raghav (@krishraghav) November 10, 2018

At Singles Day peak, workers deliver on average 1,000 packages/day at 1 yuan each. The normal average is 200/day. Delayed delivery is penalised at 30 yuan/package, a customer complaint is 200 yuan, worse still, a package lost in the system is also blamed on the delivery worker. pic.twitter.com/19Du1SWGl1

— 中国劳工通讯 CLB (@chinalabour) November 22, 2018

At The New York Times, Vivian Wang wrote a portrait of one courier’s decision to strike, even as Xinhua called the strikes “fake”:

Then came the virus. As cities locked down, many couriers were unable to work, and franchises struggled to stay afloat. Some folded. Those that did reopen struggled to pay couriers even reduced wages.

That was what happened to Mr. Fang in Nanjing. His local outlet of Best Express, one of the major delivery companies, did not issue $30,000 in wages to eight workers as promised. Mr. Fang said he was owed about $3,000, the equivalent of four or five months’ pay.

In July, the outlet owner promised to pay by August. August came and went.

So the eight couriers, just under half of the station’s employees, went on strike. [Source]

At Rest of World, Meaghan Tobin documented the economics of worker strikes and Chinese society’s growing support for couriers:

Aidan Chau, a researcher at China Labour Bulletin, said the delivery drivers have little recourse when claiming back pay because they don’t have contracts with the local delivery centers. Chau said some workers have been waiting for their back pay for as long as five months. “When the pandemic started, they could possibly accept that their bosses were not paying them, because everyone knew it was a very difficult time, and they thought things would get better,” Chau told Rest of World. “But after the pandemic subsided, they’re still not getting paid.”

[…] The pandemic accelerated a fierce, long-brewing price war between express delivery companies, with drivers getting the squeeze. According to China Merchants Bank, average delivery prices dropped more than 30% just from February to July, as the country emerged from the depths of the pandemic. For years, e-commerce giants have slashed delivery prices to draw more clients, and this year’s delivery fees are half what they were in 2015. The average delivery price per package was nearly 8% lower during the first half of 2020 than during the same period last year. The delivery companies pass the cuts on to workers: local media reports some drivers make as little as $0.10 per package.

[…] The strikes — and the resulting delivery delays — have drawn attention from the Chinese public. More than 13,000 users discussed the strikes on Weibo, and the hashtag “deliveryman strike” had more than 13 million views. While many commenters complained of late orders (“I seem to be back in ancient times waiting for delivery on horseback,” one posted), they also called for support and livable working conditions for the drivers. [Source]

Nine Chinese counties, all in the mountainous province of Guizhou, have recently been certified as poverty-free, officials said. They were the last counties to make it over a threshold China has set based on a matrix of indicators including income, health, education, shelter and other human needs.

[…] Despite setbacks associated with the coronavirus pandemic, which in China like elsewhere disproportionately hit lower-income groups, Mr. Xi has repeated a determination that the poverty elimination goal would be achieved, making it a foregone conclusion that authorities would declare success before year-end. The People’s Daily earlier this year said poverty had plagued China for thousands of years so eliminating it can be considered “a Chinese miracle in human history.”

[…] A report this year from former World Bank officials said that if a uniform standard of $5.50 a day in income, or around $2,000 a year, were applied, some 373 million or about 27% of the population would be considered in poverty. “Under these rates, poverty in China is still sizable and merits renewed efforts as well as further refinement of the country’s poverty policies, strategies and programs,” the report said. [Source]

A leaked media directive issued on March 2 and later obtained by CDT illustrates official determination to keep the epidemic from derailing poverty relief goals:

2020 is the year of the final, decisive assault to eliminate poverty. Promptly block, find, and delete related negative content, take strict precautions against backflow of harmful information from abroad, and strictly manage “low level red,” “high level black,” and comments that deliberately stir up extreme public sentiment. Firmly grasp orientation guidance of hotspots, be strict in checks and audits, prevent specific issues from dominating the whole topic or local problems from overwhelming the overall picture. Prevent disorderly application of “poverty reduction tags” from interfering with the overall attack on poverty. In general, do not conduct public investigative reports on sensitive issues involving poverty or on problems for whose solution conditions are not currently in place. Strengthen content checks and management of posts and comments. (March 2, 2020) [Chinese]

Read more on this and other directives from the same day in CDT’s Minitrue Diary collection, an almost daily series of instructions covering the first ten weeks of 2020.

13/"…nor an unalloyed success. Two things became clear to me after two years spent living side by side with the campaign’s rural beneficiaries: China will indeed have eradicated poverty by its own metrics by the end of this year, and it still has a long way to go… pic.twitter.com/UyAuIJJRcP

— Matthew Chitwood (@mmchitwood) November 25, 2020

First proposed in 2014 and then enshrined in China’s 13th Five-Year Plan, “Precision Poverty Alleviation” was Xi Jinping’s signature campaign to end poverty in rural China by 2020. Terry Sicular’s latest report in China Leadership Monitor offered a comprehensive overview of the program, its methods, and its future. After building a national registry of poor households, China adopted campaign-style governance to achieve the goal of raising annual rural incomes above 4,000 yuan, approximately $600. Local governments were tasked with organizing employment drives, funding environmental projects, and even resettling rural residents, among other policies. The program, according to Sicular, was largely successful. But in her conclusion, Sicular noted that “[m]any households remain vulnerable to poverty, and, furthermore, the current low, unidimensional, rural poverty line no longer reflects what it means to be poor in China’s rapidly evolving society.”

The coronavirus pandemic and torrential flooding across China this summer saw families plunged back into poverty after ostensibly escaping it. The behavior of local officials is also sometimes suspect. John Donaldson, an expert on poverty in China, said “I was in poor villages at the end of 2019 and what I saw was … some things that were going great and other things that were utter disasters, that were worse than nothing,” according to CNN. At The Los Angeles Times, Alice Su visited a family left behind by a local resettlement drive while examining the gaps in China’s poverty alleviation campaign:

Yang’s family had considered such a move [to Xinjiang] 10 years ago, when the resettlement policies first began. They’d visited to see new land the government had promised for a subsidized price. They decided it was too much of a change, but upon return, they found that all but two of the family’s hukous, the household registrations that tie every Chinese citizen to a city or rural area, had been transferred to Xinjiang. That meant they were now classified as Xinjiang residents and would be able to access only government social programs there.

[…] “My mother is so sick, she can’t move. How can we move to Xinjiang now?” Yang said. He was unsuccessful in trying to get their hukou changed back to Lianghekou. Now the authorities wanted to demolish their house by the end of the year but would not provide another place for his parents to live.

[…] Complaints come from all sides of the anti-poverty project. Forced relocation is a common grievance. But so is unfair distribution of new homes and government funds. Sometimes that is a matter of perception: Villagers who are just above the poverty line but still struggling see their neighbors receiving new apartments and subsidies while they are left behind, and accuse officials of playing favorites. [Source]

“..of Shaanxi, officials are relocating 2.4 million poor from their homes in remote, often mountainous regions to newly created villages. Sometimes the relocations, too, are driven by the profit motive, where local officials are intent on converting the now-vacant land into..” pic.twitter.com/yYRSPLDYv1

— Dexter Roberts (@dtiffroberts) November 25, 2020

China’s stark income inequality further belies state-led narratives about the eradication of poverty. The income gap between Shanghai and Xinjiang grew from 13,506 yuan in 2013 to 24,376 yuan in 2020. Currently, less than one third of Chinese families count as “middle income” (earning between 100,000 yuan to 500,000 yuan). China’s Gini index, a measure that ranks inequality on a 0 to 1 scale, is 0.465, significantly higher than Japan and Korea’s and nearly as high as that of the United States. The issue is deeply sensitive to Chinese authorities. Thomas Piketty, whose book Capital In The Twenty-First Century was praised by Xi Jinping in a 2015 speech for exposing unprecedented inequality in the West, found his second book banned in China after he was unwilling to censor it. In an interview with Constant Méheut of The New York Times, Piketty shared the passages Chinese authorities attempted to delete:

“There is a constructive criticism in this book, and, frankly, it does not blame the Chinese model more than other models in the United States, Europe, India, Brazil,” Mr. Piketty said.

[…] The requested cuts include parts that point out the “extremely rapid rise of inequality” in China, to levels comparable to those seen in the United States. Others highlight issues like China’s lack of an inheritance tax, which Mr. Piketty says results in a significant concentration of wealth.

“It is truly paradoxical that a country led by a Communist Party, which proclaims its adherence to ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ could make such a choice,” Mr. Piketty wrote in a paragraph that he said Citic Press asked to be cut. [Source]

Questions about how to address China’s inequality abound. Recent op-eds have suggested everything from education reform to more holistic poverty metrics. In a blog post, Andrew Batson, the China research director for Gavekal Dragonomics, examined Chinese leaders’ unrealized promises of “common prosperity” and the avenues they might realistically use to achieve it:

When Deng Xiaoping famously endorsed inequality in the 1980s by saying “We should let some people and some regions get rich first,” he justified that in purely instrumental terms: it was “for the purpose of achieving common prosperity faster.” The ultimate goal, Deng consistently said, was to achieve common prosperity, not to entrench deep divisions. Inequality would rise initially to allow China to grow more rapidly, then decline later. Since Deng’s original comments, that commitment has been honored more in the breach than the observance. Xi’s rhetorical focus on common prosperity signals that he aims to complete the great task that Deng began, by achieving the final goal that Deng did not.

[…] Rather awkwardly, however, Xi’s campaign for eliminating extreme poverty coincided with a renewed rise in inequality, as shown by the official Gini index published by the National Bureau of Statistics. Inequality had steadily declined from around 2009 but then started rising again after 2015. For skeptics of Chinese official data, the trend of declining inequality after roughly 2010 is well supported by multiple other sources, so I believe the post-2015 rise or plateau in inequality is also a real phenomenon.

[…] It’s less clear what precise tools the government could use to achieve such reductions in inequality. The associated goal of “equalization of public services” suggests one channel: public expenditures could be raised in lower-income regions to help narrow the income gap. Other policy documents suggests officials are increasingly open to using the tax system to do some redistribution. This would be a big change: while China’s top marginal tax rate is fairly high, the system as a whole is not progressive. Most wage earners are exempt from income tax, and required social security contributions are regressive. [Source]