I have been having a hard time thinking of what to write as life in Beijing has become rather normal. What's normal? Well of late, business thinkers have encouraged me to copy western business models, I watched Ziggy Marley exhort a crowd to peaceful disobedience, and the state utilities company turned off the heat on 15 March (even though the temperature is down to 41º). 
Since Wei and I have started dating, my life is becoming increasingly middle aged. Like many Chinese, I've even been eschewing the nocturnal haunts of Beijing. In fact what a lot of people do in Beijing is to stay in and watch counterfeit audio and video products (some 120 million sold each year) or read an unauthorized book (500 million each year). What the Chinese appear not to be doing is enjoying one another at home. According to a survey released this week, 30% of couples under 30 years of age are abandoning sex. The reason? They're too stressed. Forty-five percent of couples in the survey, conducted by American-pharmaceutical maker Eli Lilly, say the husband has sexual dysfunction. Yet this hasn't stopped the Chinese from adding a further 6.92 million future stress victims to their roster this year. (And worryingly, for every 100 baby girls, there are 119 baby boys.) What is stressing young Chinese out so much seems to be the pace of growth and a fear or losing out, and with this appears to be a rampant self interest that is leading to people having a singlular focus on wealth. As one person told me, ‘China has no spiritual anchor. Instead money has become the god.’ I overheard a young man, his cufflinks chinking on the table, talking today about how he had to buy property now because his wife wants to live next to her parents; the parents' apartment had doubled in price in the last 12 months. According to a recent report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, mortgage repayments are eating into nearly 50% of middle class family incomes. (Average earnings, by the way, are between 60,000 - 500,000 yuan, or US$$7,765-64,716, per year.) Meanwhile at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (founded by Asia’s richest Man, Li Ka Shing), I attended a seminar packed with young Chinese looking for the answer on how to become wealthy. Professor Teng Bin-sheng, an erudite and structured presenter, ventures that it is entirely OK for entrepreneurs to copy business models from America and Europe. Innovation, he argues, is not applicable in all situations. On the streets of Beijing, we have counterfeit police and in the theatres of knowledge, I mused, we have apostles of duplication. With the Olympic horizon having passed the psychological 500th day mark, it is as though making money has become a sport in itself, competitive to the point of distraction. Six casualties of this dash for progress were workers on the new Olympic infrastructure. I heard a rumour from a friend who passed by the north of the city that there had been a subway tunnel collapse, and 24 hours later it was news in the media. The contractors, the China Railway 12th Bureau Group Co., confiscated all hand phones from the workers, confined them to site, and threw soil in to the 20m² cavern in Haidian in an attempt to cover it up. 6 men were buried in the hole. International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge said in Belgium the day before the collapse that “the Games will contribute to the evolution of China," but I am not sure if we are experiencing evolution or revolution in the adoption of capitalism. On a red cloth banner strung on a grey municipal building in Gaobeidian, a suburb, white lettering proclaimed, ‘through the Olympics enhance the quality of civilizations.’ It was unclear which civilizations it was referring to. The Ziggy Marley gig was both an indication of the changes taking place in China, and at the same time created an interesting juxtaposition between those who desperately want things and a man for whom “love is my religion.” The crowd at the Star Live House was predominantly, but not exclusively, expatriates with smoking and drinking allowed, and guards randomly checking tickets to the VIP area. His song “Shalom Salaam” was less well received than his father’s song “no, woman, no, cry,’ which according to the statistics seems to be about right for a large number of men in China these days. Ziggy, with fist aloft, intoned the audience to ‘stand up for your rights’ and I wondered if he realised that in Beijing, Olympics glasnost notwithstanding, standing up to authority wasn’t really a smart way to get ahead. The performance was great, and for a moment it was easy to forget that I was in Beijing, until navigating the locker room where the attendant would not give us instructions, only pieces of paper that we were supposed to understand held the combination to unlock the red boxes that held our jackets and bags. As the Company settles into its weekly routine, and I settle into a life pattern with my girlfriend, the idiosyncrasies of life in China seem to be no more than those of living anywhere in the world. I have some interesting stories to tell of visiting hospitals, of doctors who prescribe sunshine and fresh vegetables and lab assistants more interested in pasting pink receipts onto white paper than talking to patients, but that is for next week I think. For now, Beijing is becoming a place where I can relax and enjoy the coming spring, and hopefully have a more exciting home life in my 40’s than a third of the population is having in their 30’s. (Note: The Ziggy Marley photo montage above was created with a copy of Ziggy's album cover and photos from here and here.)
Since Wei and I have started dating, my life is becoming increasingly middle aged. Like many Chinese, I've even been eschewing the nocturnal haunts of Beijing. In fact what a lot of people do in Beijing is to stay in and watch counterfeit audio and video products (some 120 million sold each year) or read an unauthorized book (500 million each year). What the Chinese appear not to be doing is enjoying one another at home. According to a survey released this week, 30% of couples under 30 years of age are abandoning sex. The reason? They're too stressed. Forty-five percent of couples in the survey, conducted by American-pharmaceutical maker Eli Lilly, say the husband has sexual dysfunction. Yet this hasn't stopped the Chinese from adding a further 6.92 million future stress victims to their roster this year. (And worryingly, for every 100 baby girls, there are 119 baby boys.) What is stressing young Chinese out so much seems to be the pace of growth and a fear or losing out, and with this appears to be a rampant self interest that is leading to people having a singlular focus on wealth. As one person told me, ‘China has no spiritual anchor. Instead money has become the god.’ I overheard a young man, his cufflinks chinking on the table, talking today about how he had to buy property now because his wife wants to live next to her parents; the parents' apartment had doubled in price in the last 12 months. According to a recent report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, mortgage repayments are eating into nearly 50% of middle class family incomes. (Average earnings, by the way, are between 60,000 - 500,000 yuan, or US$$7,765-64,716, per year.) Meanwhile at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (founded by Asia’s richest Man, Li Ka Shing), I attended a seminar packed with young Chinese looking for the answer on how to become wealthy. Professor Teng Bin-sheng, an erudite and structured presenter, ventures that it is entirely OK for entrepreneurs to copy business models from America and Europe. Innovation, he argues, is not applicable in all situations. On the streets of Beijing, we have counterfeit police and in the theatres of knowledge, I mused, we have apostles of duplication. With the Olympic horizon having passed the psychological 500th day mark, it is as though making money has become a sport in itself, competitive to the point of distraction. Six casualties of this dash for progress were workers on the new Olympic infrastructure. I heard a rumour from a friend who passed by the north of the city that there had been a subway tunnel collapse, and 24 hours later it was news in the media. The contractors, the China Railway 12th Bureau Group Co., confiscated all hand phones from the workers, confined them to site, and threw soil in to the 20m² cavern in Haidian in an attempt to cover it up. 6 men were buried in the hole. International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge said in Belgium the day before the collapse that “the Games will contribute to the evolution of China," but I am not sure if we are experiencing evolution or revolution in the adoption of capitalism. On a red cloth banner strung on a grey municipal building in Gaobeidian, a suburb, white lettering proclaimed, ‘through the Olympics enhance the quality of civilizations.’ It was unclear which civilizations it was referring to. The Ziggy Marley gig was both an indication of the changes taking place in China, and at the same time created an interesting juxtaposition between those who desperately want things and a man for whom “love is my religion.” The crowd at the Star Live House was predominantly, but not exclusively, expatriates with smoking and drinking allowed, and guards randomly checking tickets to the VIP area. His song “Shalom Salaam” was less well received than his father’s song “no, woman, no, cry,’ which according to the statistics seems to be about right for a large number of men in China these days. Ziggy, with fist aloft, intoned the audience to ‘stand up for your rights’ and I wondered if he realised that in Beijing, Olympics glasnost notwithstanding, standing up to authority wasn’t really a smart way to get ahead. The performance was great, and for a moment it was easy to forget that I was in Beijing, until navigating the locker room where the attendant would not give us instructions, only pieces of paper that we were supposed to understand held the combination to unlock the red boxes that held our jackets and bags. As the Company settles into its weekly routine, and I settle into a life pattern with my girlfriend, the idiosyncrasies of life in China seem to be no more than those of living anywhere in the world. I have some interesting stories to tell of visiting hospitals, of doctors who prescribe sunshine and fresh vegetables and lab assistants more interested in pasting pink receipts onto white paper than talking to patients, but that is for next week I think. For now, Beijing is becoming a place where I can relax and enjoy the coming spring, and hopefully have a more exciting home life in my 40’s than a third of the population is having in their 30’s. (Note: The Ziggy Marley photo montage above was created with a copy of Ziggy's album cover and photos from here and here.)