Down and out in Beijing

It is said politics is the art of managing expectations and managing the aspirations and expectations of this brood of individually self-conscious youngsters maybe the biggest challenge the Chinese government will face in the coming decades.

Week 1 in China, the land with 5000 years of civilisation where:

• The police supposed to deal with my residency permit take their lunch at 11:30am and don’t resume their posts till 5pm.
• Bank staff complain to customers.
• I have to use filter evading proxy software to get the cricket score.
• Polo mints are sold individually.

This is my second stint in Beijing and it doesn’t feel as if I’ve been gone very long at all. Even the cold is scarcely as brutal as I remember it, I find myself comfortably going outside with less than half the bulky clothing I would have worn last time.

What hasn’t changed is my bafflement at how this place has changed from the communist society it was. Sitting here writing this on a laptop via a wireless internet connection in a friend’s upmarket foreign contemporary restaurant does little to dampen the unease.

This week amongst the overwhelming mass of the Beijing populace I have encountered waiguoren (foreigners) ranging from Austrian documentary film makers to Filipina waitresses in distress.

The latter case is Sally, a waitress at said restaurant. Sally has been having some problems with her Chinese colleagues, specifically with the state of the staff dorm – it is not only big industrial companies in China that are expected to put a roof over their employees’ heads – and more specifically the gap between Chinese and Filipino concepts of domestic orderliness.

So distressed is Sally that she calls the restaurant’s manager, who tactfully suggests that if she takes the lead in keeping the dorm tidy, then maybe the others will get the idea and join in. On the other end of the line comes a fragile voice on the edge of tears: ‘But they don’t even have a broom!‘

The manager has now resolved to call a staff meeting on the situation – and to take money from the staff’s tip pool to pay for some cleaning gear.

It is a story I have heard before from others who have bunked with Chinese 20-something Generation Ys; a noticeable dearth of domestic skills.

This is more than an anecdote. It is a field observation of something that could have significant implications for Chinese society, economy and even politics. The product of three decades of state imposed only-childdom: the "little emperors".

It is said politics is the art of managing expectations and managing the aspirations and expectations of this brood of individually self-conscious youngsters maybe the biggest challenge the Chinese government will face in the coming decades. Their self-interested motivation is both an opportunity and a threat for the party-state. The recent surge in young Chinese joining the party suggests there is already an effort to pre-emptively co-opt this new generation before they have a chance to form ideas that might be undesirable.

The old Marxist materialism has given way to a new more superficial kind of materialism. The Red Guards have now become the old guard and like their Summer of ’68 colleagues in the west they’ve all moved on into a relatively comfortable middle-classdom, no longer willing to step on the pie of which they now have a satisfactory slice.

The Little Red Book has been replaced by the iPod, but as they say: the more things change, the more they stay the same…both bear that now inescapable mark: Made in China.

Ross White-Chinnery was born in Wales and spent his childhood in Singapore and Hong Kong before emigrating with his family to Australia in 1995 where he has lived worked and studied since. Ross recently begun travelling back to Asia trying to map out a career path and consider the implications of the shift in the balance of influence from West to East. With an academic background is in Politics and History his interests encompass the social and cultural aspects of these.