To me the logic that growth will slow once the initial gains of catching up have been used up make sense (even though there’s still a huge pool of low-cost labour to draw from), and encouraging consumption would seem difficult until there’s a strong guaranteed healthcare system and pension system. It’s also not clear to me whether all of the infrastructure investment that’s happening at the moment is actually invested wisely and efficiently. Word on the street in Wuhan would suggest that the road building boom there was motivated just as much by kick-backs as where the roads were needed, and in a book about railway building in China, the chief engineer tells the author that the quality isn’t great and they haven’t solved all of the technical problems related to building on permafrost, but that’s fine because in 10 years they’ll have new technology and money to rebuild the whole line. If that’s the logic behind most of the infrastructure being built in China, then that’s not a good sign for long-term growth.

As a student of Chinese in Wuhan, I spent quite a bit of time conversing with taxi drivers about what their wages were like and how 辛苦 their life is — which, relative to mine, it undoubtedly is. But according to the article, taxi drivers can earn around 5,000 RMB per month, construction workers earn 3,000, while those who work in small restaurants earn only 1,000 RMB per month. As a comparison, a standard salary for foreign English teachers tended to be somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 RMB (depending on the school, work hours and whether or not housing was included), and I would estimate that my relatively spartan lifestyle cost around 2,000-3,000 RMB per month. For someone to get by on just 1,000 RMB per month, they would need to live in extremely cramped living conditions, and not have very much money over for anything other than basic necessities.

Low wages are partly a supply and demand issue, and as long as there are people finding it even more difficult to make a living in the countryside around Wuhan than in the city, there will be people willing to take these jobs. But to me it seems like it’s also the outcome of a political system where workers don’t have the rights and protections they need (the right to organise, the right to collective action, freedom of speech) in order to demand higher wages and better working conditions. I don’t have much hope that the example of the restaurant union in Wuhan — which is probably still tightly controlled by the government — represents a fundamental change on these issues. But if it does set a precedent for more power and independence to unions, that would be a step in the right direction.

They can sometimes be scary, but they can also be a force for good. In this interview with Evan Osnos, who writes for the New Yorker from Beijing, Osnos talks about how his New Yorker pieces about China get translated more or less spontaneously as soon as they hit the press, by volunteers who coordinate themselves and post the translated work online. New Yorker pieces tend to be long — often up to 10,000 words — and according to Osnos, the translations are faithful to the original, an impressive feat. He also says in the interview that the entire weekly issue of the Economist magazine gets translated within a few days of publication and is posted online.

A few days ago, I discovered that a Reuters article about “ant people”, in which I was cited, had gone through the same process. Google my name, and you’ll find that a translated version of the article is everywhere, both on and off the mainland (in both traditional and simplified characters). I was interviewed for the article because I had written about the topic on my blog. I’m hardly an expert on the topic, but I had followed some of the news stories in Chinese media, and so I talked to the reporter about what I had read. I was actually misquoted in the article — the reporter asked me about living conditions, and I told him that reports from Beijing talked about 8-10 people sharing a room far outside of the city center, while the reports in Wuhan only talked about 2-3 people per room in several areas in Wuhan, including the area I lived in. In the article, I was instead cited as saying that Wuhan having 8-10 people sharing a room. By the time I had seen the article, it had already been republished across the world. And with that simple misunderstanding, this new “fact” went onto the internet, and quickly spread, attributed as first-hand evidence coming from me, on dozens of web pages. There was also a typo in the spelling of my name the second time it was written out, which some translations fixed and others decided to keep, staying as faithful to the original article as possible.

Mobs are powerful, but also notoriously difficult to control, and so it’s hard to say what the implications for all of this are for the people who want to use “netizens” for their own gain. Political commentators obviously hope that these “netizens” will push for increased openness and democratization, but the mob is just as likely to turn ugly in an outpouring of nationalism. Either way, there are a lot of people in China spending a lot of time online, and they’re a group to keep an eye on.

His most recent post, from January 29th, seems particularly relevant (this was originally four consecutive posts, which I’ve ordered to make the statement easier to read):

It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers. It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes. But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.

This observation seems important and true for public discussion on the internet in general — we tend to visit websites and read blogs that fit in with our interests and confirm our views, rather than exposing ourselves to opinions that push our thinking and challenge us to find common ground. A particularly poignant example of this is political blogging, where people tend to read and link to blogs that share their own political leanings, creating online bubbles that never really have to touch. Even when certain platforms (like facebook) are widely used, they allow us to stay confined to our own circle of friends. So far, the internet has not proven to be the democratizing force or arena for public discourse that many hoped it would be.

From what I’ve seen, this seems to hold true in China as well. Sometimes topics gain wide exposure online, but more often than not, those topics fall into the category of new, exciting but basically unimportant gossip, and quickly prove to be fads. Any real and potentially threatening discussion is undermined by the 50 cent party and by censorship. The censors can’t be everywhere all the time, but maybe they don’t need to be — small bubbles are not threatening, and when something does expand beyond a small bubble, then they swoop in and block that content.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is. Having real-name registration seems like it would at least encourage people to be more civil online (a first step towards constructive discussion), but also probably risks stifling debate. Either way, it’s helpful for observers of the online world (like me) to keep in mind that very few online fora represent a “cross-section” of the population, and online comments, debates and surveys should almost always be taken with a grain of salt. The more we try to push ourselves to not just read content that doesn’t fit in with our bias, but also to comment thoughtfully and maybe allow our own positions to be moved, the better it has to be for building a strong society.

I hate getting pillaged

I assumed that everyone in the class would be in favor of the 丁克 phenomenon — in a country with policies in place to keep down fertility rates, it seems like it would be ideal if some families choose not to have children, and other families could then have the option of having more children. But almost all of my classmates are Asian (most of them are from South Korea and Vietnam, plus two from Japan, one student from Turkey, and me), and apart from me, all of the other students said that they do not approve of the rise of 丁克 households. In cultures where children essentially serve as their parents’ pension plan, and on a more spiritual level, are necessary for passing on the family line and taking care of the souls of deceased ancestors, not having children at all becomes problematic. Some of my classmates also looked at the issue from the perspective of the individual family, claiming that children are essential for a happy marriage, and others said that they considered having children to be a couple’s responsibility to society.

The way demographic trends are looking, my classmates are probably right that China is going to need more babies. This summer, there was quite a bit of media attention over Shanghai’s recent campaigns to encourage couples in which both husband and wife are only children to take advantage of the fact that the one-child policy allows these couples to have two children, instead of just one. Given the cost of raising a child in Shanghai, few families take advantage of this aspect of the policy, and some media reports claimed that Shanghai’s efforts to convince more only-child couples to have two children was a sign that the one-child policy as a whole might be up for revision in the near future. There haven’t been any other signs that the government plans to revise the one-child policy, so the Shanghai campaign is probably not representative of a broader trend, but either way it does seem like Shanghai is particularly worried about its upcoming demographic problem. So why isn’t there more talk about abolishing the one child policy? Maybe there’s a bit of social engineering going on — rather than get rid of the one child policy, which would probably lead to people in the countryside having more children, city governments would prefer that highly educated city residents instead have their assigned share of babies.

Either way, fertility rates have fallen drastically, and China will soon be facing the same demographic challenge that most of the developed world is already beginning to grapple with. For a cool graphical representation of how China’s fertility rate and life expectancy has changed over the past century, gapminder.org has this ready-made graph, and lots of other indicators to play around with.

A recent report revealed that the going rate for such a campaign averages 50,000 yuan ($7,315). One firm boasted it has the most “experienced team”, with access to 100,000 freelancers, that can post thousands of articles on up to five popular forums and blog hosting sites, creating 200,000-400,000 visits. And they guarantee a quick sensation.

It seems the current pay for one posting is 50 cents. A typical job posting for this type of work says you can make 40 yuan a day by working two hours, which they say translates to 80 posts.

The Jia Junpeng phenomonon seems to have been an example of this type of PR campaign, and the rumor has it that the buzz over the Chinese Obama Girl was also created by on online PR campaign.

There are also allegations that PR companies pay people who have existing accounts on popular book and move review websites (like douban.com) to post positive reviews of upcoming movies, and compensate these reviewers based on how long they’ve had their accounts (since users can easily spot reviews inserted by PR companies if they all come from newly opened accounts which are only used to post positive reviews for one or a handful of movies). According to ESWN, there’s a very clear pricing scheme for reviews from different types of accounts:

Public relations companies are seeking to purchase used ID’s with the following requirements:
(1) registered prior to 2007
(2) written at least three movie reviews
(3) has no less than 50 friends
(4) able to maintain secrecy and have business ethics
(5) including but not restricted to Douban, Shiguang Net and other webites

The price card is as follows:
(1) Base price of 500 yuan.  One yuan extra for every day registered earlier than December 31, 2007
(2) Until December 3, 2009, each additional movie review from the fourth one will earn an extra 5 yuan
(3) Until December 3, 2009, each additional friend from the 51st one will earn an extra 2 yuan
(4) 100 yuan extra whenever the movie review appeared on the front page
(5) 50 yuan extra whenever the movie review appeared at the top spot of the movie review section
(6) 50 yuan for a positive review of the movie represented by the PR company
(7) 50 cents for a comment against a negative review of a movie represented by the PR company
(8) 25 cents for a personal attack comment against the poster of a negative review of a movie represented by the PR company.

I see these kinds of posts sometimes when I’m looking at reviews for hostels and hotels in China on websites like hostels.com — on English-language websites, their obvious Chinglish and over-the-top praise for the hostel in question (often places that have otherwise gotten overwhelmingly negative reviews) usually make them easy to spot, but it’s annoying nonetheless.

I don’t know if this apparent phenomenon of explicitly manipulating discussion forums and online reviews in order to promote a product is common in other countries as well, but to me, it seems like this is something that happens much more here in China than in other places I’ve been. And if that’s the case, it’s hard to say why. One guess would be that Western internet users seem to spend more of their online procrastination time in closed communities, where all of the people they interact with are people they have already met in real life, while Chinese users seem to spend more time (relatively speaking) on open discussion forums, and are more likely to accept friend requests from people they don’t know personally on social networking sites like renren.com. This wouldn’t apply to movie or hotel review websites, but could help to explain why creating an online trend by registering lots of fake usernames, or hiring people to post comments, might be more successful in China than in other places. Another possible explanation would be some sort of difference in codes of ethics among PR companies — maybe Chinese PR companies think that “fake” reviews are ok, while English-language PR companies are more worried about the backlash against their company or the product they’re promoting if/when people find out about the tactics.

And then there’s the “50 cent Party” (五毛党), people who are allegedly paid 5 mao by the government for each pro-government comment they post, which seems like a uniquely Chinese adaptation to an internet society. In my experience, it seems like people dismiss these comments as soon as they suspect that they come from a 五毛党-ist, but maybe these people influence public opinion more than I realize.

Being a savvy internet consumer is tough. When we’ve lost all of our old ways of evaluating those with whom we come into contact (things like personal ties, social standing, even body language and facial expressions), how do we decide who to trust? To me, all of this strengthens the case for why media institutions, which have the training and resources to investigate and follow up on important stories, continue to be important in a world where the internet allows information to flow more and more freely.

I have now dutifully eaten my dumplings, and I can report that my ears are not frozen, so maybe there’s some truth to the saying. Or maybe it’s our heater doing its job. Either way, dumplings are delicious, so I approve of this tradition. Happy winter solstice!

Dumplings being made (picture from Xinhua, via CCTV)