Using surveys of 421 men and women in Beijing and testing their skills in economic games, researchers in Australia found those born after the 1979 policy were more pessimistic, nervous, less conscientious, less competitive and more risk averse. They also found them to be 23 percent less prone to choose an occupation that entails business risk, such as becoming a stockbroker, entrepreneur or private firm manager.

[…] Xin Meng, a co-author of the study who grew up in Beijing and left China in 1988, said she detects a different behavioral attitude among the only-child population compared with the previous generation. A 2011 incident where a two-year-old girl in southern China died after she was struck by two vans and ignored by 18 passersby caused a furor, with domestic media and Internet users criticizing Chinese society for a lack of morality.

“An incident like this is just unthinkable 20 years ago,” said Meng, a professor of economics at the Australian National University in Canberra. “If you’ve lived in the Chinese society for a long time, you can sense the difference as people become more individualistic.”

Lisa Cameron, another of the study’s authors, discussed the findings (PDF transcript) with Sarah Crespi on the Science magazine podcast.

Some have expressed reservations about the study, however. From Rebecca Morelle at the BBC:

Professor Stuart West, from the University of Oxford, said the study was “very interesting”.

However, he cautioned against some of the conclusions that had been drawn.

He explained: “They are making very strong claims about differences in behaviour for people born before or after 1979, and they are inferring it is all to do with the introduction of the one child policy in that year.

“The problem is that is a potential explanation for that data – but there are almost an infinite number of other explanations of anything else that could have varied with time: variation of socio-economic environment, prosperity, nutrition, political environment – anything.”

And from Louise Watt at the Associated Press:

Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas in Austin who studies these children, was puzzled that the study’s findings showed poor performance so consistently in virtually all measures. She said she would have expected a more mixed picture, and she hopes follow-up research is done.

[…] Careful studies done elsewhere that look for certain qualities in the only child find that “on average, they’re pretty much like everybody else,” she said.

A recent survey of 51,100 people by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences supports the idea that Chinese society lacks trust, according to Xinhua. Its authors, though, point to a wider range of contributing factors including migration.

The Chinese public was given a “trust score” of just 59.7 points out of a total of 100, according to the results of the CASS survey conducted among residents in seven cities, including Beijing, east China’s Shanghai, south China’s Guangzhou, central China’s Wuhan and southwest China’s Chongqing municipalities.

The survey showed that residents in China’s central and western regions tend to trust others more than their eastern counterparts.

[…] Yang Yiyin, one of the survey’s organizers, attributed the lack of trust to migration, China’s transformation from a planned economy to a market economy and declining “family culture.”

“People are more concerned about trust, especially in a transformative period when a new system of trust has not been established,” said Yang.

Migration would not account for differences between the Australian study’s native Beijingers, but its role in loosening the traditional social fabric finds anecdotal support in the Wang Yue incident cited above by Xin Meng. In October 2011, The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore visited the Foshan marketplace where the accident took place:

Although many other families live in the market above their stores, there is little sense of community. Just as in countless other hardscrabble suburbs across China, the residents are mostly migrants, drawn from all over the country.

They have little in common, beyond their shared desire to make money and improve their lot. And in the evenings, they close their shutters and retreat into their lonely stores.

“It is quite sad that we don’t really talk to each other because we all sell different things,” said a 50-year-old woman who would only name herself as Ms Hu, from a store selling abrasive pads a short stroll away from the Wang’s shop.

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Hu Jun was convicted of involuntary homicide by the Nanhai District People’s Court in the city of Foshan, Guangdong Province, where the girl, named Wang Yue, was hit and crushed by Hu’s minibus and another vehicle on Oct. 13.

[…] An earlier statement by the court said Hu was driving in dim lighting conditions amid torrential rain without turning on the headlights of his vehicle. He thought he had hit something but failed to stop and check.

The court said it also issued a lenient sentence because Hu gave himself up to police and paid part of the victim’s medical expenses.

The case earned particular notoriety not because of the accident itself but because of the eighteen passers-by who did nothing to help the injured child. Their inaction revived discussion of China’s supposed moral decline, and of the problem of “Good Samaritans” being sued by the very people they were trying to help. The most prominent case was that of Peng Yu, a young Nanjinger who, after coming to the aid of a fallen elderly woman in 2006, was successfully sued for knocking her over in the first place. The judge’s reasoning, that Peng could have had no reason for helping her except a guilty conscience, sparked an outcry, but his conclusion and the woman’s claims later turned out to be correct.

See more on Wang Yue’s case at Shanghaiist.

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Interference is not limited to high-profile cases, however, and is not always so aggressive. At Caixin, criminal defence lawyer Zhang Yansheng recalls advising a client through a frosted plastic partition, which blocked effective communication for much of their meeting.

As a professional criminal defense lawyer, I have been to detention centers everywhere. They are of course all different, but at a recent visit with an inmate, we were separated by pane of frosted glass.

[…] It has been more than a month since I came back from Foshan City, but I just can’t wipe that blurred face and muddy voice from my memory. A colleague laughed at me by saying, “You were not there on a date. What does it matter that you didn’t see the person’s face?”

But yes, we are often forced reluctantly to work under such conditions and people much too often accept it as normal. But has anyone thought about how many wrong verdicts have come about because of such tough conditions? How many have lost their lives unjustly because of these restrictions?

In the detention center, ripping away those plastic boards and replacing them with steel bars would have transformed the way the lawyers meet their clients and would have made the meeting much more productive. Effective communication would be beneficial to the criminal proceedings themselves, but would also show criminal suspects that they are fairly treated. Would the detention center ever think to allow that?

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Bo Xilai, Chen Guangcheng, criminal rights, detention, Foshan, gu kailai, Guangdong, Jerome cohen, lawyers, legal defense, legal system, Liu Xiaoyuan, pu zhiqiang
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On June 26 before dawn, hundreds of riot police clashed with the villagers in Zuotan, part of the city of Foshan in Guangdong Province. Police cars were smashed and flipped over. Many villagers were hospitalized for injuries, including an 81-year-old veteran of the Korean War who was beaten unconscious. Demanding to speak with the village secretary in person about the cheap sale of land [the villagers currently live on and cultivate], thousands of residents surrounded the village Party headquarters, gathering in the afternoon and staying through the early hours of the next morning. At 2 a.m., several hundred riot police arrived and began beating unarmed villagers in an attempt to escort the village secretary away. Residents defended themselves with bricks. The riot police eventually pulled out.

Factors in the conflict:

• Corruption among village officials in Zuotan and the futility of citizens’ appeals to the government lead the villagers to spontaneously organize the protest.
• Zuotan officials secretly arranged for the sale of land in three neighborhoods to developers. The officials thought they could claim every inch of land, never once considering that anyone could read the announcement of these arrangements on government websites. The news enraged the villagers, spurring them to protest.

Some netizens speculate that the village secretary is a “naked official” whose family lives in Australia. Sina Weibo has already blocked “Zuotan” (左滩) from search results and deleted posts showing photos from the conflict.

Photos from the scene via Weibo:

Overturned police car labelled a “thief’s car” by protesters.

The visible part of the banner directly above says “Give me back my land.” The banner fifth from the bottom reads “Collusion between the government and business is inhumane and destroys families.”

“Unite to kick out corrupt officials and profiteers; fight to the death for your homes.”

Via CDT Chinese.

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In the south, Guo Huojia, 59, and Li Youzhou, 37, won seats in the city of Foshan. Both men have fought the government for the rights of villagers who have had their land grabbed for property developments, a key source of complaint in the Chinese countryside.

Mr Guo, who has taken his local government to court in the past, and who may still be under monitoring by security officials, said he was “very excited” by his success, which saw him beat his Communist party-backed rival by over 2,000 votes.

“I did not think my chances of winning were very high. The villagers put me forward for the seat, so I will do my best to solve their problems,” he added.

The independent candidate movement, which has been broadly suppressed by authorities, has been joined by a young celebrity model in Beijing, whose campaign has been getting a lot of attention online.

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Natsuno Asanuma, a Honda spokeswoman based in Tokyo, said workers went on strike Monday morning at the parts factory in Foshan, Guangdong Province, a joint venture between Honda subsidiary Yutaka Giken and Taiwan Fui. She refused to give details on any demands made by the employees.

The factory supplies exhaust parts for Guangqi Honda, a joint car assembly venture between Honda and Guangzhou Automobile of China, Ms. Asanuma said. Production for Guangqi Honda hasn’t been affected so far, she said.

“The employees at the Foshan plant are continuing to strike,” Ms. Asanuma said. “There has been no effect on production at Guangqi Honda, but if the strike continues, that could change. We are keeping a close eye on the situation.”

See also reports from the Wall Street Journal and Business Week.

Read more about the previous strike at the Honda parts factory and about dissatisfaction among the new generation of workers in China, via CDT.

Update: See “Labour strife rolls across China” from the Toronto Star:

Last week much of the country’s attention focused on a strike at a Japanese-owned Honda factory in southern China — for which Chinese authorities allowed rare and open reporting. Workers there won a 24 per cent pay hike.

Authorities also allowed reporting on the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn electronic assembly plant, where a scourge of suicides by workers corralled in regimented factories rocked the nation.

Foxconn responded with a 30 per cent wage increase – and announced a further 70 per cent Monday.

But few in China heard about the clash in Pingdingshan — or more than 15 other strikes that spilled into the streets of China in May.

While it was fine for Chinese media to report on strikes at large, foreign-owned factories — the government suppressed news about worker actions at other, Chinese-owned and operated plants. It didn’t want the contagion to spread to other pools of cheap labour across China.

And few are as cheap as those in Pingdingshan.

And from the New York Times “With Strikes, China’s Workers Seem to Gain Power,” while the Huffington Post has published a slideshow titled, “Why The END Of Cheap Chinese Labor Is Near.”

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The women were injured on Sunday around a crowded marketplace in Foshan, a city in far southern China’s Guangdong province, according to a report in the Guangzhou Daily, the official newspaper of the capital province.

None of the victims died.

The report cited one witness who said the man, aged in his 20s, singled out women, especially young ones, striking them with a kitchen cleaver around the neck, shoulders and chest before he fled up a flight of stairs.

“Before the eyes of the terrified crowd, he threw himself from a three-storey building and died on the spot,” said the report, which was widely circulated on Chinese news websites.

Unlike other recent knife and cleaver attacks in China, Sunday’s attack did not appear to be directed at children.

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The floods killed 57 people, collapsed tens of thousands of homes, damaged crops across more than 2.12 million acres and causing more than an estimated $1.5 billion in economic losses.

Banana trees were almost swallowed up by the muddy chocolate brown waters of the Xijiang River that overflowed its banks in Foshan, a city in prosperous Guangdong province. Farmers ditched their plows and waded into the neck-high waters with nets to catch fish.

The Beijiang River, which converges with the Xijiang in Foshan, swallowed a neighborhood that had been home to about 100 people. “The water came in fast. It started rising yesterday morning, and by noon our homes were swamped,” said a man who gave his name as Mr. Huang, standing on a dike staring at his inundated home across the Beijiang river.

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Local environment officials said that the water was now safe to drink after the oil pollution scare forced restaurants and businesses to close and sparked a surge in bottled water sales…

“Tests show the water is safe to drink, but we will keep on monitoring the water quality of the river,” said an official surnamed Li with the city’s publicity department, according to Xinhua.

No information was given as to how the oil slick emerged on the river, with Xinhua saying that environmental authorities had launched an investigation…

Nanfang Daily, a local newspaper in Guangdong, said on Sunday that Heshan city, to the south of Foshan, may now be at risk from the slick.

The spill marks the second major water pollution report this year from Guangdong Province, where 50,000 residents of Kaiping City had their water supply cut off in January.

Only days after the spill, a national survey released Monday by the Ministry of Health and the National Committee for the Patriotic Public Health Campaign reported that 44.36 percent of drinking water in rural China falls below government standards.

According to Xinhua:

“Most people living in rural areas do not have their drinking water sterilized. Often they just drink the well water, which may have been polluted,” the spokesman said.

Sanitation was somewhat better in more densely populated areas, with 85.23 percent of people living in villages or counties often having their water boiled before drinking.

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Xiantang’s angry villagers took control of the village council’s opulent five-story offices on July 1, after officials had refused to open their accounting books. They have been there ever since, mounting a 24-hour guard over a pile of cardboard cartons they believe contain the accounts that will prove their allegations.

They threaten to stay there until regional authorities send auditors to check the books, and their demands have also taken on a political tone. “We want to elect a good village leader” to replace the current head of the council and Communist Party Secretary Lai Zhenchang, who was appointed by the government, says one of the protesters, Lai Jiawen. [Full text]

The story is accompanied by an audio report by Peter Ford about why the government has allowed the protests to continue for so long. Read also a Toronto Star report on Xiantang from last week, “It takes an angry village to revolt in rural China“.

[Image: Lai Niu points to the village leader he and fellow peasants accuse of fraud, via CSM]

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Earlier this month, the village party secretary who had been the target of criticisms resigned. The town government sent in three cadres to take over government work in the village. As a result, the villagers calmed down somewhat and the demonstrations eased up. But on the night before last, villagers found some village officials moving stuff out of the village committee office building. They stopped the men and asked to inspect the stuff. At first, the village officials claimed that the boxes contained moon cakes. When the villagers opened the boxes by force, they found out that these were the operating account books for the village committee over the last dozen years. The books showed that there had been almost 100 million yuan in revenue that the villagers had never heard of. Therefore, the villagers took possession of these account books.

In order to stop the village officials from destroying the evidence, more than one thousand villagers surrounded the village committee office building. Some of the villagers even blocked the highway in order to draw the attention of senior Guangdong and central government officials to investigate the case. [Full text]

[Image: Hundreds of villagers have signed a petition to demand

access to the village accounts, via ESWN]

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Yesterday, Foshan bus companies publicly reported on increasing cases of counterfeit money and false bus passes used on buses. Since 2004, Foshan bus companies have seized over 2,000 false bus passes and received about RMB 1.92 million yuan ($250,000 dollars) in counterfeit money, which included RMB 1.88 million yuan ($247,000) in coins. These coins were hard to be recycled and piled as high as hills.

Bus companies are almost helpless to deal with the proliferation of fake coins. Some have installed fake coin detection machines. But it does not work because many passengers do not throw the coins into the machine, instead put them into the boxes for paper money. Thus bus drivers are unable to rectify the problem. [Original Chinese Report]

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In recent years, many Chinese towns have become specialist production lines for dirt-cheap Western consumer goods. In Foshan, for example, the factories churn out electrical products and toys, while Wenzhou has a virtual monopoly on the production of cigarette lighters. But while the exports vary, all of these places near mainland China’s border with Hong Kong have also been exporting something less tangible to the world’s consumer markets: deflation…

True, Chinese exports are still rising, fuelling its massive trade surplus. Many multinationals are continuing to outsource incremental production demand to China. Last month, a survey by Deloitte found that more than two-thirds of manufacturers planned to establish or increase production in China. [Full Text]

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Over the years, this village-turned-urban sprawl in south China has conjured up images of low-cost, low-tech factories churning out the stuff that fuelled China’s economic take off.

Shenzhen was the testing ground for the first tentative steps that China took over two decades ago to reform and open up its economy to the outside world.

It was from Shenzhen — the original “special economic zone” — that the workshops of China’s export-oriented juggernaut spread like weeds up the banks of the Pearl River to places like Dongguan, Guangzhou and Foshan.
[Full Text]

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