I travel a reasonable amount in China for business, and I speak Mandarin. Some of my most enjoyable recent conversations have been with local taxi drivers ferrying me to/from airports in Beijing or Shanghai. But last week I had a conversation that reminded me just how incredibly vast is the chasm between the haves and the have nots in the second largest economy in the world.
The gap between rich and poor in China, particularly the widening urban-rural wealth gap, has been on the minds of the Chinese government for awhile. Last year, a study by the country's National Population and Family Commission found that the wealth gap was threatening to undermine the government's 'one child' population policy. And the ethnic wealth gap was cited as a partial cause of the riots in Tibet.
...Tibetans feel marginalized by a Beijing-led development drive that Tibet scholar Andrew Fischer calls "ethnically exclusionary". "They're pouring in an enormous amount of subsidies so it's no surprise that they're creating growth," said Fischer, a development economist at the London School of Economics.
"It's just that this massive amount of economic growth and wealth is creating a huge gap and a very strong ethnic bias in the development in the sense that it privileges those with Chinese fluency or Chinese connections," he said.
It's that last part -- the notion of 'connections' -- that I want to highlight here. Communist China always had a system of guanxi, or relationships, by which one could navigate the bureaucracy. The better your guanxi, the faster you could get a building permit, or a marriage license, or your bike fixed. With the influx of an open market, guanxi now leads to opportunities for vast creation of wealth, primarily amongst the same population that peddled influence in the past -- government officials, their families and their friends. None of this is new, of course, but what is new is the scale on which this is happening all over China.
So back to the taxi -- my driver, whose name I didn't get (and wouldn't dream of publishing) began our conversation with the usual chitchat about the weather and the ubiquitous "what country are you from?" When I told him I was American, he responded by telling me how much he admired President Bush for being a "man's man" and standing up to Saddam Hussein. Needless to say I found his judgement flawed and we had a good 15 minute chat about Iraq, agreeing to disagree. He insisted, however, that the US's system of government was far and away superior to China's. When I asked him why he felt that way (he had never been to the US), he offered an example -- "why do you think China's soccer team is so bad, given that we have six times the number of people in China vs. the US?" When I professed ignorance, he said it was because China's current system didn't allow for the most talented to improve their lives -- only the most connected.
This of course was an interesting point of view, particularly coming from an urban cab driver. Certainly his life was better under the current economy than before? Comparatively, he said, in some ways it was. He held his hands up in front of his face, making a square -- "that's how big my TV used to be." Then he spread his hands out wide (slowing down thankfully) -- "and this is how big my TV is now." When I asked if he would credit the Chinese government with that, he told me to shut up and listen. "Before, he said, "I used to work an eight hour day, and now I work a fourteen hour day." He doesn't own his cab, so he's paying to rent it, plus gas, and it takes him nine hours of work to make up the cost of rental and gas in fares, leaving him five hours to make his living.
This alone wasn't the issue, however. My taxi driver was fine with working hard to get along. His beef was that while his TV has gotten marginally bigger over the last few years, the average cadre makes enough income to buy a factory of TVs. I mildly protested that the income gap was widening in the United States as well, and that global inflation affecting food and energy prices were making it worse on the poor.
He laughed at me like I had no idea of what I was talking about. His next example was startling -- he brought up Elliot Spitzer. In the US, he pointed out, the governor of New York loses his job because he visited a prostitute(my driver was obviously well read in terms of US news). In China, though, not only does the Chinese government routinely look the other way at local officials' mistresses (unless things get too embarrassing -- for an example, read about this provincial official who kept 11 mistresses), they also pay little attention as public money is used to actively subsidize them and their families with government contracts, etc. to the tune of billions of RMB every year.
I asked him about what he thought about the next generation (he has a son), he smirked and said "How do they get ahead? School is too expensive and they can't get in without connections. They can't get a job in the public sector without an education. The difference between a manual labor job and a government job is 10x." He was convinced that the lao bai xing (the 'old one hundred surnames' meaning the average Chinese person) of the next generation would have it even tougher.
As we arrived at the airport, I found my Mandarin failing me. What to say? He sensed my discomfort and decided to reassure me (perhaps more for my benefit than his), that despite everything, there was still hope for the future. I asked him why. "Well", he said with a resigned grimace, "after all, my TV is a little bigger now."