Children of China's Future – Part II
Aging population and poverty require stronger investment in China’s rural youth.
DINGXI PREFECTURE: Wang Hongli, 8 years old, lives in a remote rural village on the Loess Plateau in one of China’s poorest and most agricultural provinces, Gansu. His prospects for living the good life are as bleak as the landscape. He is not on track to become part of China’s emerging middle class, the free-spending, computer-savvy, person-of-the-world often featured in the western media.
Hongli is a pseudonym. His parents work in a faraway industrial zone, coming home for only three weeks at Chinese New Year. His grandmother takes care of him and his siblings on the weekends, and during the week he lives in a dorm, three to a bed with 36 other students in an unheated room 4 by 4 meters.
Hongli suffers from iron-deficient anemia, but neither his family nor his teacher knows he is sick. Even if his anemia is discovered and treated by the researchers who have documented 30 percent anemia among children in poor rural areas, it likely will recur after he finishes the study, with furnished dietary supplements. Despite educational pamphlets, he’ll likely revert to a diet of staple grains and bits of pickled vegetables.
Unsurprisingly, Hongli’s grades are not good. In China’s competitive school system, he has only a slight chance of attending high school, much less college. In China’s future high-wage economy, all Hongli can hope for is a menial job in the provincial capital, Lanzhou, or as a temporary migrant elsewhere. Without urban permanent residency, hukou, he will have limited access to urban social services. He may suffer chronic unemployment, or resort to the gray economy or crime. He also may never marry – one of the millions of “forced bachelors” created by China’s large gender imbalance.
Hongli is not alone. In fact, he’s one of 50 million school-age youth in China’s vast poor rural hinterlands. Recent studies by Stanford and Chinese collaborators show that 39 percent of fourth-grade students in Shaanxi Province are anemic, with similarly high rates elsewhere in the northwest; up to 40 percent of rural children in the poor southwest regions, e.g., Guizhou, are infected with intestinal worms. Millions of poor rural students throughout China are nearsighted, but do not wear glasses.
Because China’s urbanites have fewer children, poor rural kids like Hongli represent almost a third of China’s school-aged children, a large share of the future labor force. These young people must be healthy, educated and productive if China is to have any chance of increasing labor productivity to offset the shrinking size of its aging workforce.
Many observers presume that China’s growth will continue unabated, drawing upon a vast reservoir of rural labor to staff manufacturing plants for the world. In fact, to a considerable extent, China’s rural areas have already been emptied out, leaving many villages with only the old and the very young. The growth of wages for unskilled workers exceeds GDP growth.
Better pay should be good news for poverty alleviation. However, rising wages push up the opportunity cost of staying in school – especially since high school fees, even at rural public schools, are among the highest in the world.
It’s myopic to allow rural students to drop out of junior high and high school – mitigating the current labor shortage, but mortgaging their futures. Recent studies demonstrate that eliminating high school tuition – or reducing the financial burden on poor households – improves junior high achievement and significantly increases continuation on to high school. Yet unlike many other developing countries, China does not use incentives to keep children in school, such as conditional cash transfers. The public health and educational bureaucracies also do not proactively cooperate to remedy nutritional and medical problems – including mental health – that school-based interventions could address cost effectively.
The educational system, based on rote memory and drill, doesn’t teach children how to learn. The vocational education system is ineffective. Instead, China’s schools tend to focus resources on elite students. Tracking starts early, and test scores are often the sole criterion for success. A recent comparative study documents that China’s digital divide, with lower access to computers in poor rural areas, is among the widest in the world.
China’s government is increasing expenditures for school facilities and raising teacher salaries. However, these steps are far from adequate. During South Korea’s high growth, almost all Korean students finished high school. Today, less than half of youth in China’s poor rural areas go to academic high school, and the percent going to college remains in the single digits.
Greater investment in public health and education for the young people in China’s poor rural areas is urgent. If the government waits 10 years, it may be too late to avert risks for China’s stability and sustained economic growth.
Surely China could easily address this problem? A third of Chinese were illiterate in the early 1960s; now, fewer than 5 percent are. By 2010, about 120 million Chinese had completed a college degree. Chinese also enjoy a relatively long life expectancy compared to India and many other developing countries, and basic health insurance coverage is almost universal.
But the pace of change and citizens’ expectations are higher as well. Most Chinese assume that basic nutritional problems and intestinal worms were eradicated in the Mao era. China’s mortality halved in the 1950s; fertility halved in the 1970s. As a result, China will get old before it gets rich. Population aging, rapid urbanization and a large gender imbalance represent intertwined demographic challenges to social and economic governance. The policy options are complicated, the constraints significant, the risks of missteps real and ever-present.
Timely policy response is complicated by competition for resources – pensions, long-term care, medical care for the elderly and more – as well as significant governance challenges arising from a countryside drained of young people. The well-intentioned programs for what government regards a “harmonious society” create large unfunded mandates for local authorities. Attempts to relocate rural residents to new, denser communities provoke anger at being uprooted and skepticism that local authorities simply want to expropriate land for development.
Millions of migrant workers – like Wang Hongli’s parents – return to their rural homes during economic downturns. Urbanization weakens this capacity to absorb future economic fluctuations. Government efforts at “social management” – strengthening regulatory control of informal social groups and strategies for diffusing social tensions – expand the bureaucratic state, a central target of popular discontent.
Premier Wen Jiabao’s announcement of a 7.5 percent growth target – the lowest in two decades – has been expected. Future economic growth will moderate partly because of demographics, but mostly because productivity gains slow as an economy runs out of surplus rural labor and converges on the technological frontier. Costly upgrading of industrial structure will squeeze the government’s ability to deliver on its promise of a better future for all, stoking social tensions.
China’s stability and prosperity, and that of the region and the globe, depends on how well today’s youth master the knowledge and skills that enable them to thrive in the technology-driven globalized world of the mid-21st century. Resilient public and private sector leaders of the future must be able to think creatively. Therefore, China’s government should respond to population aging by acting now to invest more in the health and education of youth, especially the rural poor.
Karen Eggleston, Jean Oi, Scott Rozelle, Ang Sun, Xueguang Zhou
YaleGlobal, 14 March 2012
2012 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Read more at http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/children-chinas-future-part-ii
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Children of China's Future Part I
Children of China's Future – Part I
On tour in Europe, China’s privileged children reflect inequality and self-confidence.
BRUSSELS: On a blustery February evening in the Tyrolean town of Kufstein, pandemonium reigned inside the usually lugubrious Thaler Hotel. Gaggles of Chinese children swarmed the corridors. “Hi!” one called out. My Chinese was rusty, but adequate. “Ni hao,” I replied. “Have you had a fun day?” Nonplussed, the boy fell momentarily silent.
“Are you Chinese?” asked another bespectacled child with braces flashing silver across his teeth. “Do I look Chinese?” I countered.
“You speak Chinese,” he parried. A girl with bobbed hair and grownup expression sighed. “Don’t you know?” she said with a frown. “These days it’s normal for foreigners to speak Chinese. It’s no big deal.”
And it’s also increasingly normal to see hoards of Chinese children hitting Europe’s ski slopes, shopping malls and chocolate shops. If it’s school-vacation holiday in China, then it’s study-tour time in Europe.
I joined one of six groups of children visiting Europe for the Chinese New Year break in late January, a trip arranged by a German company, ECS Tours. Run by a young couple – German lawyer Rudolf Reiet and Xing Li – ECS is a new player in the lucrative market for Chinese study groups in Europe.
In a country where many workers earn an annual income of around $1,500, parents paid up to RMB 60,000, or US$9,500, to send their children on whirlwind tours of the continent’s sights. In addition to holiday photos, the children were expected to bring home skills like eating with a fork and knife and learning the appropriate time to clap at a classical music concert.
Chinese tourists, some 3 million of whom visited Western Europe in 2010, have already remade the traditional European Grand Tour according to their own tastes and consumer culture. Typical stops include Paris for romance and Louis Vuitton; Switzerland for mountains and chocolates; German towns like Trier, the birthplace of Karl Marx; and Metzingen, home to several factory outlets and the headquarters of Hugo Boss.
Chinese travelers have also emerged as the travel industry’s knights in shining armor, riding to the rescue of Europe’s industries suffering the effects of stagnant economic growth. In 2011, Chinese travelers accounted for 62 percent of Europe’s luxury goods sales according to one estimate.
The 35 children in my group were from a primary School in Chongqing and receive a truncated version of the new Chinese Grand Tour with a few days each in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Talking with them offered a glimpse into the attitudes and aspirations of the country’s future workforce. These children were born in 2000 amid anticipation of China’s imminent rise to superpowerdom, an idea that would have seemed improbable even a decade earlier.
Collectively, the children provide a snapshot of China’s new elite. Many are sons and daughters of officials of China’s ruling Communist Party. “They talk just like little lingdao [leaders], ready to launch into a politically correct speech at the asking,” Reiet said. Others are children of entrepreneurs. Reiet smiled, recalling a child who had brought along packets of instant noodles to sell to classmates bored with European fare at the inflated price of €5 each.
Over dinner, the conversation at our table was about money. One jolly, plump 11-year-old grinned and pointed to her friend: “Do you know how much cash her father gave her for this trip?”
“Stop it, stop it!” gasped Xue, trying to put a hand over her friend’s mouth.
“€4000!” the girl exclaimed, undeterred. “Can you believe it?” Fan then happily explained that her father had given her €2,000. The children were comfortable talking about money, but ask a question about politics, even something as basic as whether their parents were party members, and they immediately went quiet.
Another girl at our table had looked on, disapproving of the conversation, and when others demanded to know how much spending money she carried, she refused to tell. I asked what her father did. Reluctant to answer, she finally confided that he was a bank executive. One girl let out a whoop. “You must be really rolling in it!” she laughed.
China’s per capita GDP might still be about a sixth that of the United States, but these are China’s children of privilege. The West would not automatically associate the professions of some parents– including policemen, municipal government officials, army officers and investment bureau bureaucrats – with wealth.
Despite decades of economic reform, China’s state-led capitalism has created a murky, often corrupt world, where the line between government officials and entrepreneurs is blurred. Local officials still have power to dispense patronage and lubricate business deals.
The result is scenes as when the scrawny 11-year-old daughter of a police officer waved a platinum credit card a Swarovski Crystal shop. She had picked out a crystal-encrusted watch that cost €2,800 and explained she was buying it for an auntie. Over the course of the next hour she spent a total of €4,200 on gifts for her family.
Another son of a policeman joined children snapping up crystals like candy and held up his crystal dog. “You know what I like about this?” he said. “It’s not ‘made in China!’”
Half the staff at the Swarovski shop were Chinese, and some of the local Austrian clerks had even learned basic Mandarin. Most of the children took this in stride. And for children of an emerging superpower, first impressions of Europe only confirmed their childlike sense of cultural superiority. There was a distinct touch of condescension when I asked the children how they had enjoyed Europe thus far.
“The hotel rooms are rather small here,” said the bank executive’s daughter. Another 11-year-old girl was critical of the traffic. “So many rules to follow on the road. I’m not sure who gets right of way. It must be scary to drive here!”
Another girl, whose father is an engineer and mother a housewife, dissed the breakfasts. “All that ham,” she muttered darkly, missing the typical morning fare for Chinese, hot buns stuffed with pork or a rich bowl of congee, rice porridge. “But,” she continued, “it’s a lot more peaceful out here than in China. Quiet.”
I thought about the children’s hometown, Chongqing, a municipality in China’s southwest and one of the largest urban centers in the world – home to 32 million people, four times that of Austria’s population.
What I remembered most from my own visit to Chongqing in 2008, was the ceaseless aural assault: churning cement mixers, sizzling spicy noodles at roadside stands, spluttering exhaust pipes and heavy thudding of wrecking balls. Everywhere were sounds of trade and movement, the old giving way to the new.
“You mean it’s a lot more boring out here,” giggled another girl. Both grinned in agreement.
For a vast, emerging country like China, defined by continuous change and a headlong rush towards trade and infrastructure development, Old World Europe could understandably appear a tad dull. And while the children did accomplish their mission of learning proper use of fork and knife and filling cameras with pretty pictures, they took away more – a conviction that China is more developed and urban than Europe, though Europe is cleaner, quieter, with plenty of expensive crystals and watches to buy. And yes, foreigners speaking Chinese is normal.
Pallavi Aiyar
YaleGlobal, 12 March 2012
2012 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Read more at http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/children-chinas-future-part-i
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
On tour in Europe, China’s privileged children reflect inequality and self-confidence.
BRUSSELS: On a blustery February evening in the Tyrolean town of Kufstein, pandemonium reigned inside the usually lugubrious Thaler Hotel. Gaggles of Chinese children swarmed the corridors. “Hi!” one called out. My Chinese was rusty, but adequate. “Ni hao,” I replied. “Have you had a fun day?” Nonplussed, the boy fell momentarily silent.
“Are you Chinese?” asked another bespectacled child with braces flashing silver across his teeth. “Do I look Chinese?” I countered.
“You speak Chinese,” he parried. A girl with bobbed hair and grownup expression sighed. “Don’t you know?” she said with a frown. “These days it’s normal for foreigners to speak Chinese. It’s no big deal.”
And it’s also increasingly normal to see hoards of Chinese children hitting Europe’s ski slopes, shopping malls and chocolate shops. If it’s school-vacation holiday in China, then it’s study-tour time in Europe.
I joined one of six groups of children visiting Europe for the Chinese New Year break in late January, a trip arranged by a German company, ECS Tours. Run by a young couple – German lawyer Rudolf Reiet and Xing Li – ECS is a new player in the lucrative market for Chinese study groups in Europe.
In a country where many workers earn an annual income of around $1,500, parents paid up to RMB 60,000, or US$9,500, to send their children on whirlwind tours of the continent’s sights. In addition to holiday photos, the children were expected to bring home skills like eating with a fork and knife and learning the appropriate time to clap at a classical music concert.
Chinese tourists, some 3 million of whom visited Western Europe in 2010, have already remade the traditional European Grand Tour according to their own tastes and consumer culture. Typical stops include Paris for romance and Louis Vuitton; Switzerland for mountains and chocolates; German towns like Trier, the birthplace of Karl Marx; and Metzingen, home to several factory outlets and the headquarters of Hugo Boss.
Chinese travelers have also emerged as the travel industry’s knights in shining armor, riding to the rescue of Europe’s industries suffering the effects of stagnant economic growth. In 2011, Chinese travelers accounted for 62 percent of Europe’s luxury goods sales according to one estimate.
The 35 children in my group were from a primary School in Chongqing and receive a truncated version of the new Chinese Grand Tour with a few days each in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Talking with them offered a glimpse into the attitudes and aspirations of the country’s future workforce. These children were born in 2000 amid anticipation of China’s imminent rise to superpowerdom, an idea that would have seemed improbable even a decade earlier.
Collectively, the children provide a snapshot of China’s new elite. Many are sons and daughters of officials of China’s ruling Communist Party. “They talk just like little lingdao [leaders], ready to launch into a politically correct speech at the asking,” Reiet said. Others are children of entrepreneurs. Reiet smiled, recalling a child who had brought along packets of instant noodles to sell to classmates bored with European fare at the inflated price of €5 each.
Over dinner, the conversation at our table was about money. One jolly, plump 11-year-old grinned and pointed to her friend: “Do you know how much cash her father gave her for this trip?”
“Stop it, stop it!” gasped Xue, trying to put a hand over her friend’s mouth.
“€4000!” the girl exclaimed, undeterred. “Can you believe it?” Fan then happily explained that her father had given her €2,000. The children were comfortable talking about money, but ask a question about politics, even something as basic as whether their parents were party members, and they immediately went quiet.
Another girl at our table had looked on, disapproving of the conversation, and when others demanded to know how much spending money she carried, she refused to tell. I asked what her father did. Reluctant to answer, she finally confided that he was a bank executive. One girl let out a whoop. “You must be really rolling in it!” she laughed.
China’s per capita GDP might still be about a sixth that of the United States, but these are China’s children of privilege. The West would not automatically associate the professions of some parents– including policemen, municipal government officials, army officers and investment bureau bureaucrats – with wealth.
Despite decades of economic reform, China’s state-led capitalism has created a murky, often corrupt world, where the line between government officials and entrepreneurs is blurred. Local officials still have power to dispense patronage and lubricate business deals.
The result is scenes as when the scrawny 11-year-old daughter of a police officer waved a platinum credit card a Swarovski Crystal shop. She had picked out a crystal-encrusted watch that cost €2,800 and explained she was buying it for an auntie. Over the course of the next hour she spent a total of €4,200 on gifts for her family.
Another son of a policeman joined children snapping up crystals like candy and held up his crystal dog. “You know what I like about this?” he said. “It’s not ‘made in China!’”
Half the staff at the Swarovski shop were Chinese, and some of the local Austrian clerks had even learned basic Mandarin. Most of the children took this in stride. And for children of an emerging superpower, first impressions of Europe only confirmed their childlike sense of cultural superiority. There was a distinct touch of condescension when I asked the children how they had enjoyed Europe thus far.
“The hotel rooms are rather small here,” said the bank executive’s daughter. Another 11-year-old girl was critical of the traffic. “So many rules to follow on the road. I’m not sure who gets right of way. It must be scary to drive here!”
Another girl, whose father is an engineer and mother a housewife, dissed the breakfasts. “All that ham,” she muttered darkly, missing the typical morning fare for Chinese, hot buns stuffed with pork or a rich bowl of congee, rice porridge. “But,” she continued, “it’s a lot more peaceful out here than in China. Quiet.”
I thought about the children’s hometown, Chongqing, a municipality in China’s southwest and one of the largest urban centers in the world – home to 32 million people, four times that of Austria’s population.
What I remembered most from my own visit to Chongqing in 2008, was the ceaseless aural assault: churning cement mixers, sizzling spicy noodles at roadside stands, spluttering exhaust pipes and heavy thudding of wrecking balls. Everywhere were sounds of trade and movement, the old giving way to the new.
“You mean it’s a lot more boring out here,” giggled another girl. Both grinned in agreement.
For a vast, emerging country like China, defined by continuous change and a headlong rush towards trade and infrastructure development, Old World Europe could understandably appear a tad dull. And while the children did accomplish their mission of learning proper use of fork and knife and filling cameras with pretty pictures, they took away more – a conviction that China is more developed and urban than Europe, though Europe is cleaner, quieter, with plenty of expensive crystals and watches to buy. And yes, foreigners speaking Chinese is normal.
Pallavi Aiyar
YaleGlobal, 12 March 2012
2012 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Read more at http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/children-chinas-future-part-i
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
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