Sink or swim in modern China
Chris Hogg heads to the small Chinese village of Zhushanxia, 200km from Shanghai, to see how lives have been shaped by the economy under communist rule, the recession and the country’s economic recovery.
Huang Jiao Ling lives at the end of a long dusty road.
Mobile phone numbers are daubed all over the walls of her home and those of her neighbours.
It is like a strange kind of mathematical graffiti, but the numbers are, in fact, advertisements for people offering goods and services.
In modern China, it seems everyone has something to sell.
Huang Jiao Ling, too, is an entrepreneur. She is in her 50s, but she looks younger.
In her front garden, where others might have planted vegetables, she has built a small workshop.
Inside, the walls are unfinished and the floor uneven, but there is just about enough room for a work-bench and a handful of basic machine tools.
Churning out widgets
On the floor are cardboard boxes filled with piles of tiny metal widgets.
They are simple to make – her husband sits at the bench turning them out rapidly by hand.
Many Chinese run their own small businesses in order to get ahead
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A few feet away, his bicycle-taxi is parked just inside the front door of the house.
The machine work is a lot less tiring than pedalling passengers around, but he still keeps the bike.
It is useful, he says, to supplement their income in leaner times.
The Huangs sell the boxes of widgets to the factory where Huang Jiao Ling has a full-time job.
For a while this year they had to shut the workshop as demand dropped, but now the machines are humming again.
They have two children, because if you live in the country and your first child is a girl, you are allowed to have another one.
The girls go to very good schools, the best Huang Jiao Ling can afford.
She spends more than half her income on school fees.
“We have to think of their future,” she tells me.
“It’s a Chinese tradition. Parents always think of their children, and when the parents get old, their children will look after them. It’s the same for every generation.”
Yu Feng Guo is Huang Jiao Ling’s brother-in-law.
She is doing well for herself in China’s new modern market economy, but he has been left behind.
He used to work in a state-owned brick factory.
Different lifestyles
When the economic reforms began 30 years ago he watched as some of his co-workers left their jobs to start up their own small businesses, many of them selling prawns or fish by the side of the road.
He decided to do what he thought was the right thing, what the communist party would expect of a loyal worker in a state-owned enterprise – he stayed.
Eventually, the brick factory went bust and he was out of a job.
Agriculture provides an income for many rural Chinese
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Now, dressed in a shabby khaki jacket, he works as a security guard in an open-air food market.
Those early entrepreneurs who had left his factory to try their luck in the fledgling market economy are now much richer than him and to his family this seems unfair.
“Thirty years ago everyone in the village was poor,” his son tells me.
“Now the difference in lifestyle between the rich and the poor in our village is huge.”
There is an implicit bargain in modern Chinese society between the leaders and the led.
Beijing tells its people “we will give you opportunities” – to earn more, to enjoy a better standard of living than your parents did.
But you, in return, will behave yourself.
Back on track
In Zhushanxia village quite a few cars can be seen bumping along past the fields, something you would not have seen 30 years ago.
If you have got used to having more, whether it’s a car, or a bigger house, or a more expensive school for your child, you have more to lose when times get tough.
That is why it is so important for the government to get the economy back on track.
When it first faltered, when factories started laying off workers, there was a risk that they would start to feel the government was no longer keeping to its side of the deal, so why should they?
So in Beijing, of course, there will be relief that a recovery appears to be under way.
But the next challenge for the government will be to do more to try to ensure that everyone shares the benefits.
Huang Jiao Ling is happy her workshop is busy again, but still nervous about the future.
So she, like most other Chinese, is saving as much of her income as she can.
Her brother-in-law Yu Feng Guo, has no idea how he will be able to save enough to secure a state pension on his meagre wages from his unstable job.
He and others like him will be looking to their leaders for reassurance that they will be cared for as they approach old age.
But that will costly and complicated. Fixing the economy may prove to have been the easy part.
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