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I remember a Starbucks cup from several years..."
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The most irmpotant reason why China may not invest in the..."
Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA (
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I am going to have a baby in china , are there USA..."
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I understand that, but look what Erica wrote: “paying too..."
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Happy Lantern Festival 2011 from Tianjin, China! (
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Pronounced: guó bǎo
Literally: National Security/National Treasure
Means: The two terms are homophones, and "national treasure" often means "panda". A writer at Seeing Red in China explains the rest: "how panda becomes the symbol for Chinese security thugs: Chinese national security (more like secret police) is called 国保 (guó bǎo) for short, and it’s pronounced exactly the same as 国宝, national treasure. Netizens sometimes refer 国保 as 国宝, jokingly, hence Panda, China’s national treasure. Kungfu Panda movies provided the basis for Panda to be a martial character."
With the recent confrontation between Batman actor Christian Bale and some infamous Chinese security thugs, online Chinese are been passing around "Pandaman vs. Batman" jokes, and photoshopping "Pandaman" into all kinds of scenarios, including movie posters and images from other security embarrassments and scandals. See here, here and here for more.
- 2011/12/19
InterWǎng Debris
Recent China internet debris.
Affordable gadgets vs. Chinese workers' rights
Three recent news articles (and one response) return the spotlight to the mammoth electronics factories in China that make most of our favourite electronics, pointing out what everybody knows and no one wants to think about:
Happy Chinese workers spell the end of affordable tech (ZDNet)
"Human and worker rights reforms in China would have serious negative consequences for the efficiency and cost of the gadget supply chain.
[...]
"Foxconn’s client list reads like a celebrity tech roster that includes Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Intel, Lenovo, IBM, Cisco/Linksys, Netgear, Microsoft, Sharp, Sony, Motorola, Asus, Acer and Vizio... tablet runners and e-reader champions Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Yes, your Kindles and Nooks are also made by the very same companies with the same awful working conditions that make products for Apple."
The dark side of shiny Apple products (CBS News)
"...our most popular electronic devices are largely made by hand ... MANY hands, as it turns out ... hands that often are very over-worked, or so industry's critics contend."
[...]
""I met workers who were 12. Do you really think Apple doesn't know?"
"But what was news were the suicides..."
In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad (NYT)
and
BSR: New York Times’ Apple-Foxconn article contains untruths, inaccuracies, and misleading info (Mac Daily News)
- 2012/02/06
Those aren't Chinese New Year's fireworks; they're "recreational munitions"
From Nankai Rob's Chinese New Year 2012 post "Spring Festival Time. . .Lock and Load":
"...parties are held on a scale so massive that Caligula would have nodded in approval, and enough recreational munitions are set off to make the Battle of Waterloo feel like a suburban bar mitzvah. You’ll notice my careful word choice here: “recreational munitions” rather than “fireworks.” “Fireworks” as a term carries with it more celebratory, even innocent connotations, but you can’t define Chinese celebratory fireworks by the intent behind them. Certainly they’re set off with great excitement and joy, but you can, after all, also lob a grenade into a dumpster with great excitement and joy, and most of what is being set off these days qualifies for inclusion in the dumpster-grenade category. So: recreational munitions."
For more about the genuinely stunning Chinese New Year fireworks phenomenon with photos and video, see:
Happy Chinese New Year!
- 2012/01/22
Tension rising with Mainland students in American universities
Interesting observations at China Law Blog about how Mainland Chinese students studying in the USA -- in contrast to Chinese from other countries -- are apparently generating a lot of anger among the American students: Chinese Students In America. It's Bad Out There.
It seems that Mainland Chinese attitudes toward education don't play well among their American classmates. For example:
"They cheat all the time. It is pretty unbelievable how often I have seen them cheating. I am always complaining to my professors about this, but they usually just act like they are too important to deign to deal with something like this. Just come watch a test being adminstered and it will be obvious. They are allowed to get away with it because they pay the foreign tuition rate."
"One student told me of how all the students not from China agreed not to speak one day to see what would happen. There was no class discussion and the teacher asked them not to do it again."
- 2012/01/11
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I saw a CCTV news some days ago, saying the most important reason why they don’t want a second child is that the cost of raising a child is too high and most people can’t afford a second child. In China most people in the city want to give their children as best as possible.
I’ve heard that, too; economics is often one of the first reasons given. Interesting that it’s the relatively rich 白领 who are quickest to say they can’t afford it.
My own experience is that children are very cheap to raise here in China.
For one thing, baby formula milk is a big unnecessary expense. Mama milk is cheap, plentiful and the perfect food. It is even proven to increase intelligence!
For another, kindergartens are a huge unnecessary expense. Children learn more with a parent.
I think (a) the advertisements have worked, and have tricked parents into buying in the hopes of improving their child, and (b) many parents enjoy their (paid) work more than child-raising, and are secretly happy to be told that they have to work hard to earn more to spend more on their child.
I am quite skeptical of this article. The overwhelming majority of my Chinese friends who have a child say they are envious of me having two kids, and say they would love to do the same.
To me, this sounds like a government written piece to reinforce the one child policy.
Much of what we’ve seen heard goes along with some of what you guys are saying. It’s not an accident that parents who would want more than one child feel like they could never afford them anyway. And much of the child rearing expense in China is unnecessary. Parents allow themselves to be taken advantage of. And though my conspiracy-theories don’t stretch quite as far as Capn’s, it’s no secret that the gov explicitly uses the specter of poverty in it’s One-Child propaganda.
My wife routinely has the same child-raising conversations whenever she takes Lilia out somewhere (foreign baby = ultimate conversation piece). Recently a taxi driver was saying how they were envious of us (planning for more) but just couldn’t imagine having more than one because raising one child in Tianjin saps all their family’s resources. Her example was buying 200 kuai shoes for her own baby. My wife replied that our baby’s shoes were 20 kuai and why does a baby need 200 kuai shoes anyway? And that’s when the taxi driver talked about giving their kid the best, and when my wife pressed her she admitted that it had to do with ‘face’ and peer pressure from/competition with other parents.
It sounds to me like the desperation to give the kid the ‘best’ of everything, which is partially fueled by ‘face’ concerns and worry over training up their little competitor for the great Chinese education/employment race, is reflected in the market. Stuff is priced to gouge families who will pay as much as they can afford (and more) for their one and only child. Baby formula in Tianjin is more than in Vancouver! We’re getting name-brand Dutch formula (that we can trust) imported over the internet for the same price we’d pay in the store for made-in-China brands.
We also repeatedly hear from parents (most of my students are adults) about how a baby/child is TOO much work and they can’t imagine doing it again. I don’t get this. Of COURSE they’re a lot of work! Life as you knew it is over! What were you expecting?
It’s interesting to compare with what we saw in Taibei. Rich families with many kids were not uncommon — our students usually had siblings — but a double-career couple with no kids and a pampered puppy wasn’t an uncommon sight. People joked about the over-pampered dogs as child-replacements. It’s no secret that many rich, urban Chinese in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taibei who have the choice are choosing one or none. Hong Kong downsized its maternity services because their birthrate was so low, and now apparently the majority of women giving birth in HK are actually from the Mainland. At the same time, some of my exceptionally rich/well-connected students in TJ have more than one kid: “we just have to pay the fine, that’s all.”
I suspect it all depends on what ‘kind’ of Chinese you ask. When it comes to segments of society living vastly different experiences, there are many chinas, 对吧?
Also, I hereby apologize on behalf of WordPress and the internets for that Aussie flag. I thought the internets was supposed to know everything!
对!
Thank you for your long and considered answer, which I found very interesting.
Don’t take away my Aussie flag, as it’s my country :-)
Glenn has some bad history with this blog and Australian flags.
I guess as a New Zealander living in China, Australia is the middle ground. So the interweb really is omniscient :-)
Joel, your experiences you write of are similar to mine. A couple of further thoughts.
We have almost never had to buy clothes for our daughter, Mulan. We have about 3 or 4 family/friends who each regularly pass their child’s too-small clothes on to us. (This is one of the benefits of the one-child-policy — children’s clothes still have a lot of wear left in them!) We are not too proud to accept hand-me-downs!
My wife tells me that only one out of 12 of her young (early-20s) colleagues is an only child. This one is a Guangzhou native. The other 11 are originally from smaller cities or villages.