The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World (8 page)

Fifteen years ago, obtaining a passport was difficult. Now you would be hard pressed to visit any major tourist destination or shopping district in the world without running into scores of middle-class Chinese tourists snapping photos or buying Louis Vuitton bags. Over 50 million Chinese traveled abroad in 2010, and Chinese tourists are now the largest per capita spenders when traveling in France. Contrast this with the situation just several decades ago, when work units dictated marriage, moving within the country was illegal, and divorce was unheard of. For the Chinese people, these freedoms are now all possibilities.

Tangible improvements have created tremendous optimism. People enjoy newfound prosperity and stability, but the Cultural Revolution and its pain are not forgotten, even if it they are not openly talked about. Why dwell on negatives when there are so many positives? They are not blind to the problems plaguing the country today, like corruption, pollution, or income disparities. They do not forgive them either, and constantly pressure the government to address issues more effectively, such as when the food and high-speed train scandals became public. At some point, a deeper analysis of what went wrong during the Cultural Revolution will be needed to ensure that history is not repeated, but for now the wounds and scars are still too raw.

Seeing improvements on a day-to-day basis leads Chinese to strive to improve their own lives alongside their country and to focus on making money. The drive for wealth is a major reason why fewer are willing to toil in factories or sell their bodies. They aspire to reach higher social classes, make money, buy quality premium brands, and make a better life for their families. They want the Chinese version of the American dream.

As Chinese people prosper, and a stable China grows more important on the world stage, understanding how China’s recent history and experiences like Lili Li’s continue to shape society today and in the future will help us understand what kind of China is emerging and how it will disrupt the world, and will allow foreign businesses and governments to react in time to be on the right side of this development.

I wanted to better understand just how widespread optimism was in China, and how that optimism manifests itself, both in consumption patterns as well as in as family dynamics. So I decided to look deeper into the role of the segment of society that is least understood by Westerners, but that is also the most optimistic part of the population: Chinese women.

Chapter 4

THE MODERN CHINESE WOMAN

I first met Amy back in 1997 when I was living in Tianjin, a port city of 10 million two hours east of Beijing. There were probably only about a hundred foreigners living there then, many of them working at the big Motorola plant that had just opened. Crowds of dirt- and sweat-stained, rural migrant workers who had come to the city to find jobs would follow me around, as one of the few foreigners, and shout, “Hello!” They would be grouped together on roadsides, holding up “job wanted” signs with their skills scrawled on cardboard, when they would see me and come running.

One middle-aged man, whose clothes were so blackened by grime I wondered if they were his only set, approached me and said excitedly I was the first foreigner he had ever spoken to. He must have been dirt poor—I could see his ribs sticking out from underneath his shirt, and he stank—but he was so excited to meet me, he insisted on treating me to a meal of crispy duck followed by unfiltered cigarettes so strong they burned my throat.

I used to love biking through Tianjin’s leafy boulevards, lined with the old mansions that Europeans had erected over a century before during the waning days of the Qing Dynasty. The buildings were a welcome contrast to the drab, crumbling, Soviet-style block housing that made up the rest of the city. I would often eat my meals on one of those streets at Broadway Café, one of the few restaurants in the city that served Western food.

Amy was a waitress at Broadway Café. She was petite, with short-cropped black hair and a bashful, mousy demeanor—she looked like she might scamper away just for being talked to. She was clearly someone who had been taught to keep her head down and blend into the background for most of her life. Over the next several years that I saw her at Broadway’s, I only exchanged a few words with her beyond asking for more water or French toast. I don’t think she ever looked me in the eye. She seemed to change very little from year to year. When I finally left Tianjin for good in 2001, I said good-bye to her, got a quick curt smile in response, and never thought about her again.

Nearly a decade later, I was back in Tianjin on a business trip. I was walking around my old neighborhood, marveling at how completely the place had been transformed. The old block housing was gone, replaced by fancy modern restaurants, shops, and towering skyscrapers. As I wandered around, I heard someone call out my name. I turned around and found myself suddenly being grabbed in a tight embrace.

At first, I didn’t recognize the woman in her late twenties hugging me. I looked closer and realized it was Amy. In place of that plain, bashful young girl I remembered stood a beaming, confident young woman, decked out in expensive makeup, toting a designer bag, and sporting a salon-styled hairdo.

Looking at the stylish girl standing in front of me, a decade of change crystallized right in front of my eyes. Instead of the meek waitress with whom I made awkward, limited conversation in that Tianjin restaurant just 10 years before, I was now looking at a polished and self-assured businesswoman.

Later that night, Amy and I went to restaurant after restaurant while catching up. In many ways I was getting to know her for the first time. “Life is so good,” Amy said, grinning. Since I had last seen her, she had left her waitressing job and had taken a series of jobs at several of the multinational firms that were flooding into the city, and was now thinking about starting her own firm. “The time is now or never to be an entrepreneur,” she said. “I don’t know what I’ll do yet, but I will do something.” Amy smiled, fueled by self-confidence and her parents’ full-hearted support of her newfound business acumen.

After the Cultural Revolution and the arrest of the Gang of Four, the government concentrated at first on creating wealth and improving gender equality in order to promote stability. This approach was smart for two reasons. First, wealth creation makes it a lot easier for people to stop dwelling on the suffering they faced in earlier years, and less likely to push for violent change. Second, countries that push for gender equality generally develop more quickly and foster more vibrant economies and cultures.

During the Cultural Revolution, being labeled a capitalist was a heinous crime, as Deng Xiaoping and his paralyzed son knew all too well. Now that notion has been turned upside down. People who are not making money are too often looked down on because they lack ambition, potential, and social status. In many cases, the drive to make money has resulted in excesses, including many unscrupulous businessmen who lie, cheat, and cut corners as they try to get rich. Many Shanghainese girls told me they would not even consider marrying someone who has not already bought a house (without a mortgage) and car.

An electric business climate is pulling and pushing everyone to pursue money. Everyone knows someone, or maybe even has a relative, who was formerly a peasant raising pigs or tilling rice paddies covered in night soil, but who now drives a Mercedes and owns multiple villa-style townhouses. Fifteen years ago you only needed $6 million in total assets to make the top 100 on the
Forbes
China Rich List; last year the mark was $120 million. There are now several hundred billionaires in U.S. dollar terms in China—all self-made—and over one million millionaires.
The Hurun Report
estimates there are more billionaires in China than in the United States. I personally know about eight people who were barely scraping by to survive two decades ago, but who are now billionaires. With all the dizzying wealth creation around them, everyone feels like they, too, can make it big and achieve their dreams.

Rapid growth has driven Chinese women to break out of their formerly subservient roles and reach parity with men in society’s eyes. In Amy’s case, she went from meek waitress to savvy businesswoman to fledgling entrepreneur. As we left a restaurant that evening, where we had chatted easily, Amy told me to keep in touch and suggested that we “do some business deals together soon.”

Prior to my first trip to China, my image of Chinese women had been limited to portrayals in movies like
The Last Emperor
or
The Joy Luck Club
, and by stories of the travails of women recounted to me by relatives on my mother’s side of the family, whose ancestors had left southern China in the 1840s to work on the railroads in California. My family had never actually been to the mainland, but they told me all the horror stories that had been passed down from generation to generation about the plight of women.

When I first arrived in Beijing, I half-expected women to be concubines with bound feet who were treated like chattel—or at least downtrodden, like the women I had heard my relatives talk about. I had read lots of newspaper articles about the male–female gender imbalance to prepare for my trip, but there’s not much objective literature or general knowledge in the West about China’s current culture, or what the role of women there is really like. Reading current depictions in Western media of women in China, it is difficult to envision a forward-looking society led by powerful women. For instance, Japan-based Bloomberg columnist William Pesek argues that Chinese society “neglects” women and that there is rampant gender discrimination. As proof, he points to the fact that only two women have been appointed governors in China, while Americans have elected 32 during the same time period.

When you see firsthand how the role of Chinese women has changed since the mid-1990s, however, it is clear that the idea of the modern Chinese woman is the opposite of images like those in
The Last Emperor
, and that analysts like Pesek are holding onto and perpetuating outdated notions of women’s role in Chinese society.

Female empowerment has somewhat paradoxically been accelerated by the implementation of the one-child policy, introduced in the late 1970s to curb runaway population growth. It is true that the one-child policy has caused sex-selective abortions and outright female infanticide in rural areas, where the importance of strong bodies and hands for farm labor has created a powerful preference for boys. This policy has also helped result in a male–female imbalance of 118 to 100, often much higher in rural areas. Some estimate that there are 30 million more men of marrying age than women.

However, for years the government has been taking several steps to combat infanticide through such measures as banning doctors from reporting a child’s sex to expectant parents, and allowing parents to have two children in some parts of the country if the first child is female. They have also allowed women to initiate divorce; likewise, arranged marriages are a rarity now.

In urban China, where physical strength is no longer needed to support the family, girls are as welcome as boys. All the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of parents and grandparents, whose lives were disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, are placed on girls, who are raised as little princesses. Women are now viewed as just as capable—if not more so—as their male counterparts of performing highly on achievement tests and ultimately becoming the breadwinners of the family in the workforce. This shifting mentality has caused male–female ratios in urban areas to draw closer to the worldwide norm, which is 107 males for every 100 females, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Many couples still bribe doctors to disclose information about the child’s sex, especially in rural areas, but the preference for boys is even beginning to decline there as well. China’s urbanization rate rose above 50 percent for the first time in 2010, up from 30 percent just a decade earlier. As a result, strong hands for farming are no longer as prized as they once were. Additionally, the government has made establishing better social security and medical care access for rural communities a priority, which further lessens elderly people’s notion that they need sons to help care for them as they become infirm.

In the past three years, when interviewing migrant families in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, I discovered an even more surprising trend: Female migrants often outearn their male counterparts. More women are starting to work in service industries, taking jobs like waitressing and house cleaning, where salaries tend to be higher than in physical-work-based jobs like construction and recycling.

In the 1950s, the first decade after the Communists came to power, Chinese women accounted for only 20 percent of household income. In the nineties, when I first met Amy, they accounted for 30 percent. Now women account for more than half of income, and there are now more women in university than men. Women account for 55 percent of the $15.6 billion of luxury items bought by mainlanders in 2011, and
Forbes
reports that 7 of the world’s 14 self-made billionaires are Chinese women.

Research suggests Chinese women enjoy working and are not willing to stay at home. In many cities like Shanghai, couples who are themselves both only children are allowed to have two children rather than just one. A survey conducted by the Guangzhou-based magazine
New Weekly
, however, found that 81 percent of eligible couples countrywide wanted just one child; only 14.5 percent said they wanted two. The main reasons were that they were worried about the high costs of raising two children, and how having two children would influence the couple’s career development. The Shanghai Academy of Arts and Sciences found that 45 percent of Shanghainese couples did not want a second child.

Positive trends toward gender quality, accompanied by the hard facts on the ground, all add up to one thing: Chinese women are becoming empowered in the workplace, and their changing role in family dynamics, especially rural families, has had more impact on Chinese society than is understood by most Westerners.

Amy is typical of the generation of Chinese women born in the late 1970s and early 1980s that shifted from being meek girls to confident, aggressive consumers and entrepreneurs. By contrast, Melanie, a young woman born and raised in China, is a good example of an urban woman born in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Melanie and I were sitting next to each other on one of the newly opened high-speed trains connecting Nanjing and Shanghai that cut travel time in half and increase business productivity. She was tall, and had an athletic build, long, sculpted legs, and a bouncy smile. The train was so crowded that her leg pressed against mine, while an old man on my other side practically had his arm in my lap.

I had planned to spend the train ride reading, when Melanie struck up a conversation. She began telling me about her family and her career goals. Her body language showed she was at ease opening up to a foreigner—she had none of the shy nervousness that Amy had when she was a waitress at Broadway in Tianjin.

Melanie told me her mother was denied the chance to go to college because the university system closed during the Cultural Revolution. By the time universities reopened in the 1980s, her mother was already too committed in her career working at a state-owned enterprise to go back to school. She also missed out on profiting from the great economic reforms that were going on, because she was too unsophisticated to open her own business. She remained mired in a low-level position in her company until she lost her job in the late 1990s, as tens of millions of other people did when the government cut state-owned enterprise jobs to move to a more market-oriented economy.

Melanie’s mother had married not out of love, but because her husband was labeled as an appropriate, marriageable candidate by the Chinese government due to his family background. Permission from the government was needed in those days to marry. Over the years, Melanie’s mother had come to accept her husband, but like so many Chinese families in her generation, marriage was more a pact for shelter and support than a match made out of love.

As Melanie described the pressures her parents put on her, I saw in many ways her mother was living vicariously through Melanie. She pushed Melanie to get a master’s degree so her daughter could have the education she had missed, and to gain Communist Party membership to benefit from opportunities. Finally, she pushed Melanie to marry for love rather than security. Melanie’s father virtually ignored her mother; he showered Melanie with boundless love and support.