A dentist you can trust

In Zhu Tuo, a town located in the district of Yong Chuan (another one million plus city in China I had never heard about before), a few hours from Chongqing, we met one of the two local dentists and asked him how business was going.

Like with any person anywhere in the world that own his business, we got the expected 'so-so' answer. But this time we could empathise as being a dentist in China has always been a tough job to make money.

Most people, especially away from big cities have never been to the dentist and would go only in case of extreme pain. Overall there is a big lack of trust with dentists.

But our dentist friend, which is still making about 2-3000 RMB a month, found the solution by keeping the dentist chair ostensibly visible from the street. When we ask if people don't have any issue with being treated almost in the middle of the street, he answers the opposite: 'that way, my patients feel more confident that I have nothing to hide and will do my best job'.

Change in attitudes towards dentists is slow in China, but dentists are willing to create more trust!

China falling in love with an american caucasian and a japanese

‘My Hero’ on oriental TV (the biggest Shanghainese network which is broadcasted all across China through Cable TV) is the biggest entertainment show at the moment in China. Like for the hugely successful Supergirl that launched TV reality shows in China in 2005, it consist in a singing contest, where singing ability doesn't seem to be big part of the selection criteria...

For the first time for this kind of show in China, some of the candidates where foreigner. And not foreigners from whatever countries: one was a typical US WASP, the other was Japanese (yet both could speak fluent mandarin).

The show was on air from early may to the 21st of June 2007. In the end Chi Lai and Xiao Song Ta Yi made it no further than to the top 16, yet they enjoyed quite a big popularity.

There was some pride among Chinese women in discovering that a Chinese program could attract foreign candidates: here was a sign to them, that the ‘Middle Kingdom’ (Zhong Guo, direct translation of China in Chinese) is back in the middle.

Because, to them China is not a developing country but a major civilization recovering from though times... A country getting back in the middle.

Bull or bear it doesn't matter, the Party is in control

The popular success of stock market investments in recent years is one of the most visible symbols of fast moving China.

While most young people invest online, the older generation prefers to go to public stock market rooms where they can check live on huge screens both Shenzhen and Shanghai markets and invest.

China Galaxy Securities Ltd owns two floors of a big modern building in Chongqing downtown, where investors can come and invest, providing both a cheap public investment room and private more expensive private rooms upstairs for those that have more to invest.
On top of bearing the name of a famous casino in Las Vegas, the place does look at first sight like a gambling place without the glamour. On one side a huge screen where rising and decreasing stocks appear respectively in red and green (today it’s rather green), on the other side about40 private boots that look like cheap slot machines, where investors can check more in depth the evolution of a particular stock.

The average age here is about 60 years old and the typical outfit is quite remote from the Armani suit and the golden watch. There are old women quietly knitting, while other are heating their lunch box in the microwave oven available to customers. Above the boots, a big line of tea glasses cooling down while their owners are checking complex graphics with various curves in flashy colors.

After spending a few hours here and having interviewed a couple of customers, what is striking is the faith people have in the fact that the stock market cannot crash. About a month and a half ago Shanghai stock market lost about 15% in one day, yet to everybody here, this was only a bump on the road, rather than a warning for a bigger crash to come.
‘It will always go up’ tells us confidently an old woman, and the coming Beijing Olympics brings to them one more reason why the Authorities just cannot let market collapse in the coming 12 months.

Because to all investors we met, the Chinese Authorities fundamentally have control on the Chinese stock market. We ask an old man, who tells us he has lost some money in the last few weeks on the stock market, if he is confident that he will recover soon. His answer is similar: ‘I don’t know, only the high rank officials know that’.

In a country where the saving wisdom has quickly and massively shifted to the thrill of stock investments, this kind of shared belief that the Party is still in control of everything happening at Society level could cause big social upreasal against the central authorities, if the stock market were to crash.

That may be why the government is doing so much to avoid that…making investors right to hold to their belief…

The biggest toilets in the world

The picture above is nothing but what Angela and Lee, two youngsters from Chongqing we spend the afternoon with, present to us with pride as the BIGGEST TOILETS IN THE WORLD. They are part of a brand new theme park in Chongqing called Foreigners Street.

This was launched by Meixin a local successful entrepreneur who started business in safety doors and then grew into a huge conglomerate including real estate, car and motorcycle manufacturing and entertainment.

The park now includes a replica of the great wall, a typical Anglican church with a massive Hummer in front for wedding ceremonies, dutch traditional houses, a Venetian bridge and a replica of a revolutionary theater from the deadly times of the 70ies (which is apparently only disgraceful to me)…

Everywhere messages in English and Chinese posted on massive boards like ‘we shall learn to tolerate, love and grace’, ‘impulsion is devil’, ‘respect others property’, or ‘the way to solve all problems in develop procedure is to speed up the pace of development’ (sic).

But back to the toilets, that we religiously visit, despite the smell that makes the performance even more real. To Lee and Angela, they are clearly the master piece of the theme park.

This is of course an extreme example, nevertheless, it reflects an interesting way of fuelling change in China. There is a clear sense of pride in modern China for competing at world level, whatever the field. Breaking a record is a way to show capability and to gain further self confidence in the process to strive for more.

And the Beijing Olympics are still to come...

I am not the next president of China

Wang Yang is 28, she has been married for two years and has no plan to have kids. She is now HR manager at the Chongqing Marriott Hotel, after having graduated from a Hotel Management school in Switzerland.

At first sight, she fits with the ambitious working girl profile, yet, she quickly adds, smiling, ‘I always tell my parents that I am just a small potato’ and start talking about how she wants to escape pressure for success that Society and her parents put on her. ‘In China every parents think that their child will be the next president’.

She would like to open a fashion store and move to Chengdu because the pace is much more relaxed there. Yet she feels that she has to keep working for Marriott until she becomes HR director within 3-5 years. ‘To succeed in life, you have to choose a direction and stick to it, even when it’s a bit boring’. Then what about keeping rising further in the hierarchy? ‘No because that would mean forgetting about my own life and devote everything to my work’.

Much in her life is about this attempt to combine her ambition and her willingness for a pressure free life. Her opinion on Europe, where she stayed for two years (she speaks fluent French and English), is interesting: ‘Europe is too boring, there are no opportunities there, you just have to follow the rules or be left out. There is no room for creativity there.

When asked to describe how she feels about the next generation attitude to today’s China, she actually gives an insightful portrait of herself: ‘young people don’t make choice, so they don't move on or sometimes they even move back (to university)’. Then concluding that it’s better to have only one Party in China, as it makes one choice less to make!

Clearly choice is at the core of her personal dilemma. Chinese Society is stressful because it now offers so much choice, yet she feels anything outside of China would just not offer her the reassuring feeling of having many opportunities available to her.

And the fact parents are over protecting their child makes that worse. What Yang describes is a leathal cocktail of choice, pressure and overprotection that suddenly paralyses the young generation, making them feel there are too many choices to know how to make one.

One leg down but still moving on

He used to have his own construction material business. When he had a car accident as he was driving drunk, he lost both his left leg and most of his money as his insurance refused to cover anything.
With the money he had left, he bought a three wheel motorbike for disabled people. In Chongqing they are allowed to work as short distance taxis without having to pay tax or patent. On average he is making a turnover of 70-80RMB a day . For now he has no plan for the future, he is just making a living.Does he regret anything, no it was his fate. Full stop.

Bang bang, here come the Sichuan boys

In Chongqing street you often see men holding a thick bamboo stick and a rope, chatting together or carrying huge bulks that must weight at least twice as them. They are called the bang bang (bang in Chinese stands for stick). So up we were to meet them.
Out of the group one is most willing to engage the conversation while others listen to us with curiosity. He is about 60 years old, and comes from the Sichuanese countryside.
Every year for the last 25 years he has been staying in Chongqing looking for house renovation work, waiting in the street to be hired by somebody for the day. He only goes back to his countryside for Spring Festival and October for the crop and the harvest to help his wife who stayed there. When he is hired, he makes about 70-80RMB per day, 10 years ago he made only 30-40RMB. When we ask him how much money he makes from his farm, he laughs; ‘farm is to bring the food, but who would expect to make money out of it’!
He has two sons, who both now live in Shanghai. The elder went to university and now works for a Taiwanese factory supervising a team of 1000 workers; he makes about 5000RMB a month. The younger which is 18, works as well for the factory.
When our old man talks about his sons, you can tell how proud he is. So why keeping working, when he has two sons to take care of him now? He would not get used not to work and feel like he should keep his independence… and on top of that, working as a bang bang in Chongqing is much less tiring than taking care of the farm!

The Saatchi confusion

We end up the night in one of the studios of the 501 art gallery after two students grabbed Yi Fan to show him one of the latest exhibited work by a local artist. As I look at it, I can hear Yi Fan presenting us as coming from Saatchi, while the eyes of the students starting to sparkle!
Charles Saatchi is famous in the UK for being the man who discovered most of the young British talents that now stand amongst the biggest names of the world’s contemporary art scene (or should I say market).
A couple of months ago, Charles Saatchi launched his virtual Saatchi Gallery in Chinese, in order to start attracting local talents, as the prices of Chinese contemporary art is sky rocketing on the global art market.
That’s how fast the Chinese art scene, even in Chongqing, understood the rules of the contemporary art game.
Unfortunately to them there is no more connection between the advertising agency we work for and the man, since him and his brothers sold all their shares in the nineties…

Chinese voluntarism applied to art

Yi fan told us the night before that he would bring us into a place that represents the kind of art that Chongqing government wants to promote. He brought us to a street nicknamed Tu Ya Street (‘draw what you want’ in Chinese), where on both sides for at least one kilometer every single building, other wise very common in their architecture and mostly old, is covered by graffitis in a kind of hip hop meets Japanese cartoon style.
The local government made it happen over the last year as part of its efforts to promote Chongqing around its fourth pillar, culture (the first three being the food, the beautiful girls and the docks).
We went back the following afternoon to get a closer look at the graffitis (with the secret hope for me of finding anything controversial or at least with a double entendre). But close scrutiny did not bring any result and the huge sculpted stone at the top of the street finished ruining my hope as I discovered a propaganda style scenery of industrial plants and phallic electricity pylons with the official name of the street written in pingyin… with the Walt Disney font!
As far as the neighborhood is concerned, nobody seems very excited about the change it brought to the landscape. As we ask a mobile phone store manager, her first reaction is to complain that it did not increased her turnover (as if she was expecting the few tourists attracted here to suddenly want to buy a new cell phone).

A man who seldom uses adjectives

Here is how Melody, the Chinese half of our xploring team in Chongqing described Li Yi Fan after a long evening of beers, cigarettes and endless conversations about the two sides of fast changing China.
Li Yi Fan is a photograph and documentary director that tries to capture through his work the two sides of changes affecting China and above all in Chongqing his home region. Two years ago, he made a documentary film called ‘Before the flood’, where he shows the total destruction of a millenary city called Fengjie by its own inhabitants. Reason for this being the construction of the biggest dam in the world, the Three Gorges Dam which made the water level of the Yang Tse Kiang rise enough to force the transfer of more than a million people in the region (this politically sensitive initiative being the reason for the creation of the special Chongqing administrative region, which like Shanghai and Shenzhen directly depends from the central government).
Yi Fan spent 11 months in the city of Fengjie, filming its inhabitants being given no option by the local government but to destroy themselves their own house before being relocated in a new city created from scratch, where they had to pay to compensate for the fact that their new house was more modern than the previous one!
His film was shown in a couple of film festivals abroad, including Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam film festivals. This foreign success, he modestly adds, finance his production and makes him one of the only two Chinese documentary films directors that can earn money today in China. In China his films are rarely shown and not available on DVD and in Chongqing they are even banned except in universities.
Melody tells him that we would like to go to Fengjie to interview people and observe how they feel now about this extreme metaphor of change in China. He tells us that there is no need to go there; everybody would tell us that they are happy now, and they would mean it!
According to him, these people like any people from Sichuan (Chongqing used to be part of Sichuan administratively, but still is very much, culturally speaking) consider themselves as the happiest in the world.
But would the reaction had been much different if we had been anywhere else in China?
Things change so fast in China, that what was revolting to most is often quickly forgotten. That is what makes the value of Li Yi Fan’s work even greater. A man who seldom uses adjectives, a man who doesn’t try to move people through artificial or overstated emotions, but just by showing reality as it is.

Don't trust grand parents for education

Fa Guo Shu Shu, that’s how the 3 years old boy and his 5 years old sister sharing our coach call me. That means French Uncle.They are loud, they jump everywhere, they never stop… I love them and so does their mum although she is describing them as not controllable…because of the grand parents!Ms Luo was working in Dongguan with her husband while, as in most Chinese migrants families, grand parents back in Chongqing raised the children for the first two years, before she quit her job and brought them back last year to Dongguan.‘Grand parents don’t really care about educating the children, but would rather enjoy a relaxed life with them. Feeding well and dressing well the kids is the only responsibility they consider, so they don’t make children work hard because anyway they won’t be there anymore to see the result, instead they just think about enjoying them today’.Now she wants to re take control on her children’s education and ensure they grow up hard working enough to survive in a Society that every Chinese I have met, agrees to describe as increasingly competitive.Then she adds: ‘In western countries, parents don’t put that much pressure on their child to succeed because they don’t rely on them for their old days’ and China may be changing fast, here is one thing that won’t change in the future, according to her.

So Be It

In our coach, Ms Luo, 31, with her two children (a 5 years old girl and a 3 years old boy), saying goodbye to the husband/ father. They live in Dongguan, one of the main export factories centre around Guangzhou. They are going back to Chongqing (22 hours of train away) where the husband’s family lives in a countryside town. There, the children will enjoy free education (the chinese government has just been introducing in the last 2 years free education until the end primary school; but this is only possible in the school of the district where you belong, hence most migrants within China have to send back their kids to their place of origin for education). Husband will keep working in Dongguan, but she needs to watch out kids education so she will go (see next post) and they won’t see each other before next year.
But none of them seem to mind the situation.

When I raise my surprise, the answer is ‘that is the way it has to be’, implying ‘why complaining or even thinking about it’? Husband has a good position in Dongguan, education is free in Chongqing, so the current separation makes sense and that is enough to simply accept it.
We will get the same quiet reaction with no trace of revolt or indignation when she will tell us about her second pregnancy. In one child policy China, if local authorities find out you are pregnant for the second time before the birth they will systematically force abortion, whatever the number of months of pregnancy.
That’s how she quietly tells us the story of this woman from her town: she was more than 8 months pregnant when local authorities found out and gave her an injection which was aimed at damaging the baby brain to give her the choice between a mentally disabled child and abortion. The point here is not if the story was true or not, but the way she told it to us with no trace of revolt or indignation. In a country that has been virtually always considering itself as too populated ‘it has to be’ (whatever the way).
Fortunately she was luckier and she successfully hide her pregnancy until the end: she therefore had to pay a 12,000RMB (about two months and a half of their current household income) fine and the boy can now enjoy the same rights as his elder sister.
So be it as well with change and this woman way to cope with it. Salaries have not increased in the last two years in Dongguan, and when asked to describe the consequences of Society change, she is first describing a widening gap between richer and poorer.
Change is just another fact of chinese Society, so why questioning it?

Go West, July 07/ Xploring the implications of fast changes in China

China is changing, fast. We want to understand how people cope with change, what opportunities as well as threats it creates, how they adapt, what’s next…so we went xploring Chongqing, the region which the Chinese government wants to rapidly turn into the symbol of Central and West China catching up with the coastal area development. A place in today’s China, where change is fast –even on local standards- as well as sometimes brutal.

CHONGQING

What it was before and what its now . . .

In our wagon to CHONGQING

Leaving guangzhou