“It’s really annoying,” said Wang Man, 31, an employee of a poverty relief N.G.O. in Beijing. “By now though, I don’t care, as I think there’s a plot behind it. It’s an admonishment to women, it’s telling us what to do, where and when. Everyone is trying to get us to sacrifice ourselves, to look after children, husbands, old people.”

[...A]s a result, partly, of the increasingly defiant attitudes of women like Ms. Liu and Ms. Wang toward a term that many still find terribly hurtful, a riposte to “leftover women” has been born — and it’s a clever one. Yes, they’re saying, we’re “shengnu.” But that’s “sheng” as in “victorious,” not “leftover.”

[...] “We should have the right to choose what we want to do. So do we really need such a power-filled word as ‘victorious’ to describe something so normal?”

Ms. Wang agreed. “I’ve heard of it and I think it’s O.K., but I don’t think it’s a question of victory or defeat,” she said. “It’s just a way of life. If I had to choose, though, I’d tend toward ‘victorious’ for sure. Still, it all feels a bit tiring.”

Meanwhile, some people argue that even though the surplus of men has pushed up the cost of marriage, the gender imbalance might not necessarily empower women. From Louisa Lim at National Public Radio:

Nowadays, 70 percent of Chinese women believe a man should provide an apartment, along with a marriage offer, according to a 2011 survey. In economic terms, the relative scarcity of women is giving them bargaining power. These women’s demands are making China’s economy grow even faster.

[...] But some argue that women aren’t necessarily benefiting. Leta Hong Fincher is writing a book on gender and home ownership in China. She believes women are being excluded from what may be the biggest accumulation of real estate wealth in history.

“There are three main ways in which I argue that women have been shut out of the accumulation of real estate wealth: the first is that parents tend to buy homes for sons, not daughters; the second is that homes tend to be registered in men’s names only; the third is that women often transfer their life savings over to the man to finance the purchase of a marital home, which is then often registered solely in the man’s name,” she says.

See more on women’s rights, “leftover women,” and gender imbalance, via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: abortion, gender imbalance, leftover women, marriage, sex-selective abortion, urban life, weddings, women's rights
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

We Live in a Country of Strict Hierarchy

This morning, I was utterly irate over a notice my kid brought home from school. Yesterday, my child came home from school with a notice from the Shanghai Education Bureau about registering for Shanghai Residents Health Insurance at our own expense. It dictated that only three categories of people could register their kids. The first category was for kids with Shanghai hukou [residence permits]. The second was for children whose parents hold a Residential Permit A for nonnative talented individuals. The third was for kids whose parents hold a Residential Permit B for nonnative talented individuals–in other words, those with foreign citizenship. I threw the notice away immediately because we didn’t belong to any of those three categories.

As a consequence, my kid was held by his teacher after school, and we had to go pick him up. The reason was because my child did not return the health care program notice back to the teacher. This morning, I wrote several sentences on the notice and gave it to my child to turn in to the teacher.

(image text, printed:)

I) For those who will take part in the residential health insurance program, please check the box that corresponds to your circumstances:

1. Student is registered with a local residential permit.

2. Child’s parents are “Nonnative Talents” (beginning with CW9)

3. Child’s parents are “Nonnative Talents Type B” (beginning with CR, FR, etc)

II) If not participating in the 2013 residential health insurance program, please specify the reasons below:

 

(handwritten text from image:)

Ridiculous policy! This purposefully categorizes people into different classes. We are low-class people, none of the above.

We are Chinese, but we aren’t even qualified to have our kids registered for residential health insurance–not even at our own expense! How can this school still go about educating our kids to love the party and love our mother country?

Via CDT Chinese. Translation by Mengyu Dong.

© Little Bluegill for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: health insurance, household registration, hukou, urban life
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Yeoh warns that any sort of direct play requires research, but he has some handy tips. He says investors should look at what the Chinese will want to buy during the next decade. He also prefers established Western companies with a healthy exposure to China’s growth, notably luxury-goods companies.

”Generally, you would think that the corporate governance would be better for Western companies,” he says. ”There’s going to be more disclosure, and it’s a lot easier to understand a luxury-goods company generally than some sort of Chinese internet company.

[...] The downside is that the appeal of luxury brands can be fickle, and the saturation of brands could render them unpopular. ”[Shanghai women] always pride themselves as the most sophisticated and elegant and most open to the West,” Yeoh says. ”When they see the mistresses of the Shanxi coalminers wearing Louis Vuitton … they need to be wearing something else.”

See more on luxury demand in China via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: conspicuous consumption, foreign businesses, foreign investments, luxury, luxury brands, middle class, mistresses, urban life
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Charlie Custer, a filmmaker and blogger, is back in the United States. Left China. Couldn’t take it any more. Bad air. Unsafe food. And there was a nasty-scary spat with a government journalist.

Mark Kitto, a Welshman and a resident of China for 16 years, he’s going, too. “I won’t be rushing back either,” he says. “I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream.”

The artist Ai Weiwei cannot leave. The authorities won’t let him. After his studio was demolished in Shanghai, he relocated to Beijing, which he calls “a city of violence.”

“You will see migrants’ schools closed,” he said of Beijing in a Newsweek essay last year. “You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches — and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.

McDonald’s piece references a new interview with Ai Wei Wei, from Foreign Policy’s Cities Issue, in which the dissident artist tells Jonathan Landreth that he still views Beijing as a “constant nightmare”:

No. Beijing’s greatest problem is that it never belongs to its people. Though it’s a city of more than 10 million, people living here are like people living in a hotel.

There are some small changes in recent years, but not many. First of all, Beijing is a city of immigration. When it was liberated in 1949, the area of the city was equal to the area of construction built for the Beijing Olympics. Every year, the area of Beijing in 1949 has been added to the city again. In the past 10 to 20 years, Beijing has expanded 10 times on its size in 1949. They come from everywhere seeking opportunity because it’s the capital and it controls all the resources. Every day 1,000 cars are sold in Beijing, a line of cars eight kilometers from front to back.

It’s growing at this rate, but why? Does Beijing have beautiful scenery? Does it have lakes and mountains? No. Every document, every order, comes from this city, and it presents enormous opportunities in land, roads, energy. You see good roads and good parks, and there are some changes. But what sustains them? The tax revenues of the authoritarian state. Its bureaucracy and capital make it like a monster, consuming everybody.

Custer, meanwhile, fired back to clarify why he left China and dispel any suggestion that his tiff with CCTV host Yang Rui influenced his decision:

So let’s talk about that: was our decision to leave motivated at all by the Yang Rui incident? No. Since my wife was unable to get a tourist visa, we had to apply for a US immigration visa. Anyone familiar with that process can tell you that it would be utterly impossible to get one in the two months between when the Yang Rui crap started and when we left China.

The folks at China Daily Show wrote their own “Why I’m Leaving China” post:

Look… we need to talk. About us.

When we first met, it was great. You were a developing nation, on the cusp of greatness, full of opportunity, innocence and frankly batshit behavior. I was a 24-year-old college graduate who couldn’t get a job/ recently redundant 36-year-old staring bleakly into the future/ newly divorced sex-tourist only 52 years young.

And now? Now, you’re a bellicose superpower with a victimhood complex and a whole bunch of incipient, growing social problems. And me? I’m a 29-year-old college graduate who still can’t get a job/ China expert/ old guy with arthritis and no pension plan.

Hey, hey – don’t cry… come on. Let’s not make a scene

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Wei Wei, Beijing, Charlie Custer, food safety, pollution, urban life, yang rui
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Many Chinese women will spend far more of their income than their Western counterparts on these magazines and the products featured inside them. According to a 2011 study conducted by Bain & Company, mainland China ranked sixth in the world for spending on luxury goods ranked by country. In 2010, it was a $17.7 billion market. Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Gucci remain the most desired luxury brands.

[…] Lena Yang, general manager of Hearst Magazines China, who oversees nine publications including Elle and Marie Claire, says that the typical reader of Hearst Magazines in China is a 29.5-year-old woman who is more likely to be single than married. She has an average income of about $1,431 a month and spends $938 a season on luxury watches, $982 on handbags and shoes and $1,066 on clothes.

Meanwhile, movie producers in Hong Kong also found themselves contending with Louis Vuitton handbags. From Bloomberg:

In real life, the Hong Kong film producer is losing the fight against a more insidious adversary: the luxury handbag.

Gone are the days when landlords in Hong Kong used movie theaters as a way to draw visitors to malls, says Kong, executive director of Edko Films Ltd. “Now they say ’Get out, we want LV.’”

No wonder, when a Louis Vuitton Monogram Empreinte Artsy MM bag sells for more than HK$20,000 ($2,578) in the city and mall owners get a share of the sale on top of rent.

Read more about luxury consumption in China via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: conspicuous consumption, fashion, luxury, urban life
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Luxury labels have thrived in China and now their cheaper High Street counterparts are betting that young, fashion-conscious shoppers like Ms Yu, 20, will help them weather weak economies in their home markets in the US and Europe.

“They target a very different consumer segment compared to their luxury counterparts, but being Western brands they will always have a certain cachet with the Chinese consumer,” says Ashma Kunde, a London-based global retail analyst at research group Euromonitor.

However, they will encounter stiffer competition from established local chains than their luxury forerunners, and with many brands expanding aggressively in China, they will also be vying with each other for customers.

Many brands have ambitious plans for China and others are entering the market for the first time this year.

Although western brands are thriving in China, local designers are emerging in the urban scene. Aside from street fashion designers, China’s luxury designers are also on the rise, according to Asiaone Plush:

For many years designer Guo Pei drew inspiration for her luxury clothes collections from travelling abroad, but recently she decided to focus solely on China’s culture.

China has in recent decades become known as the workshop of the world, with tens of thousands of factories pumping out cheap products for shops globally sporting a ‘Made in China’ label that often evokes poor quality.

But Chinese firms such as Guo’s are now using the label as a marketing tool to create a new generation of home-grown luxury brands and convince the country’s legions of rich to ditch their Chanel clothes and Bordeaux wines.

Today, China boasts roughly 15 to 20 brands – ranging from watches, jewellery, fashion or cosmetics – that are riding this wave, hoping to compete with foreign firms in what has become the biggest luxury market in the world.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: designers, fashion, luxury brands, luxury goods, urban life, youth culture
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Kate Ba is in her late 20s and works at a public relations firm in Beijing. While men might still wield a lot of the power, says Ms Ba, more women are rising through the ranks and they are not afraid of pursuing their own career goals. “My generation are just now starting to become managers, and in the future I think we’ll see more women as presidents and CEOs, far more than in my mother’s generation.”

Yet, according to the article, women with successful careers have their worries as well:

Those women who do want to start a family can find it difficult to break out of the newfound career track. Many women complain that the more successful and financially independent a woman becomes, the harder it can be to settle down. This prompts the fear of becoming a shengnü or “left-behind woman”.

 [...]

Other, older problems are even more serious. Many women working in China experience sexual harassment and discrimination based on gender or marital status.  Retrograde attitudes clash with the desire of young women to be able to express themselves without being harassed.

See also:
- Amy Chua profiles Four Female Tycoons from China, via The Daily Beast
- For China’s Women, More Opportunities, More Pitfalls, via CDT.

---

© Wendy Qian for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, Shanghai, unmarried women, urban life, women, women's rights
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/06/young-women-china/feed/ 1 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/04/eating-bitterness-chinas-great-urban-migration/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/04/eating-bitterness-chinas-great-urban-migration/#comments Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:14:29 +0000 Samuel Wade http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=134932 Read more]]> April Rabkin reviews Michelle Dammon Loyalka’s new book, ‘Eating Bitterness‘, for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Being a migrant in China is a bit like being an illegal immigrant in California. Essentially, when Chinese people move from the countryside to the city, they leave the benefits of citizenship behind ….

In “Eating Bitterness: Stories From the Front Lines of China’s Great Urban Migration,” Michelle Dammon Loyalka chronicles their inner lives. She chooses eight migrants living in one neighborhood of Xi’an, the city in northwestern China famous for terra-cotta warriors.

What she finds is fascinating: The nanny loves the spoiled toddler she works for more than her own children, who are stuck back in the countryside until they finish school; the knife-sharpening peddler can’t get used to city prices, and impossibly saves three-quarters of his meager income; the innkeeper, returning to her hometown, is preoccupied with keeping her black leather pants clean, next to neighbors washing clothes in the river. She looks down on them and no longer fits in there, but has yet to assimilate to the city. Loyalka writes about people in limbo.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom discussed the book with Loyalka at The China Beat last month:

JW: Novelists are often asked if they have a favorite fictional character, so I wonder if you have a favorite among the people you profile … as someone to write about? I guess that’s really a way of asking if you have a favorite chapter in the book?

MDL: That’s a tough one. Everyone I talked to had such a different story to tell, and I find each one so compelling in its own way. But if I had to choose a favorite I’d probably pick Chapter 8, “The Big Boss.” It’s about a 32-year old second-grade dropout who’s amassed a small fortune, only to find himself more lonely and dissatisfied than he ever was as a poor man. He longs to turn his focus toward philanthropy, but those around him find this desire completely incomprehensible.

To me his story really does represent the direction China is heading. In recent decades Chinese have focused on material progress to such an extent that anything else is seen as a distraction. But as conditions around the country continue to improve, people are gradually reassessing that mindset. There’s a real restlessness that’s starting to set in, and “distractions” like religion, volunteerism and social activism are all on the rise. As China’s economy continues to rocket ahead, that search for a purpose beyond sheer material prosperity is only going to grow.

Michelle Dammon Loyalka will discuss the book at a series of events around the US in the coming weeks. April Rabkin was awarded the Asia Society Osborn Elliott Journalism Prize this month for her writing on recycling tycoon Chen Guangbiao, the role of social networking in China, and a group of elite Beijing high school students.

---

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: book reviews, entrepreneurs, migrant workers, migrants, urban life, urban rural divide
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/04/eating-bitterness-chinas-great-urban-migration/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/are-you-or-your-chinese-friends-%e5%b0%8f%e8%b5%84-xiaozi-quiz/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/are-you-or-your-chinese-friends-%e5%b0%8f%e8%b5%84-xiaozi-quiz/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:44:46 +0000 Xiao Qiang http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=52217 Read more]]> Elliott Ng wrote on the cnreviews blog:

The slang term 小资（xiao3 zi1) came up over dinner with my friends Min and Kai. I was discussing a Website I liked, and Min responded, “I don’t like that site. It’s too 小资.” Well, I had never heard the term. What is it? Min responded: “I don’t know how to translate it. People who are xiao zi like Western things, like to drink coffee at cafes…Shanghai is a very 小资.”
…
Quiz: Here’s 20 questions to determine if you or your Chinese friend is Xiaozi
Are they jaded about Chinese national events, and resist being defined by “official” and mainstream culture?
Do they like to sit in cafes? Do they like to drink coffee?
Do they appreciate red wine (and really appreciate it, not mix it with Coke)?
Do they crave outbound travel? Do they want to visit Tibet?
Are they focused on self-expression through fashion? Do they look down on people who spend money on brands without true appreciation of fashion?
Do they sometimes have a sense of being somehow different from the rest of society? That they are seeking something that cannot be found?
Do they use their English name, even with other Chinese people?
Do they like to socialize with foreigners? Do they like to date foreigners?
Are they picky in their love life? Do they feel that most traditional members of the opposite sex don’t understand their love of life, and their need for creative self-definition? Attitude of “if I’m not in love, I’d rather die”
Do they like foreign hobbies like Yoga? or Salza dancing?

[Full text]

---

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bourgeoisie, urban life, xiaozi
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/are-you-or-your-chinese-friends-%e5%b0%8f%e8%b5%84-xiaozi-quiz/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/10/chinas-treet-fashion/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/10/chinas-treet-fashion/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:18:14 +0000 Paulina Hartono http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=46805 Read more]]> Malika Zouhali-Worrall profiles Eno, a prominent brand in China’s emerging urban street fashion scene, via CNNMoney.com:

The local art, music and fashion scenes owe much to the dramatic surge in Internet access in China over the past decade. Fewer than 1.2 million users were online in 1998, according to the government’s China Internet Network Information Center. By June 2009, that number had surpassed 330 million. Despite the government’s extensive efforts to censor potentially subversive online content, a lot of cultural information has filtered through, and the impact has been tremendous.

“Ten years ago everyone looked the same here,” says Alexis Yang, 26, Eno’s events organizer, who sports an oversize woolen hat in Rastafarian colors. “There was no punk or hip-hop in China except for really underground stuff, and no way to express your personality.”

Nowadays, new streetwear fashions pour into China from South Korea, Japan, Europe and the U.S. But Hartmann and Petersen have learned that Chinese fashion trends tend not to follow the global model.

“Everywhere else, fashion starts from the runway, and you pretty much know what the trend’s going to be a year or two later,” says Hartmann. “Here it’s not really clear what’s going to end up working at what time. That’s why we tried to open up the design process as much as possible.”

---

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Eno, fashion, urban life, youth culture
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/10/chinas-treet-fashion/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/05/over-working-models-in-vogue-in-big-cities-guan-xiaomeng/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/05/over-working-models-in-vogue-in-big-cities-guan-xiaomeng/#comments Fri, 11 May 2007 21:17:43 +0000 Sophia Cao http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/05/11/over-working-models-in-vogue-in-big-cities-guan-xiaomeng/ From China Daily:

Working 10 or more hours a day, almost no days off, no regular meals and lack of sleep – that’s the life for 70 percent of the white-collar workers in four of China’s big cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, according to a survey by Beijing Normal University.

These white-collar workers, usually with university degrees, good jobs and salaries, are quite used to overtime work and a new word was coined for them – “over-worked models” (Guo Laomo). [Full Text]

---

© Sophia Cao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: public health, urban life
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/05/over-working-models-in-vogue-in-big-cities-guan-xiaomeng/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/05/shenzhen-adults-have-mental-probs-xinhua/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/05/shenzhen-adults-have-mental-probs-xinhua/#comments Mon, 07 May 2007 15:09:14 +0000 Xiao Qiang http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/05/07/shenzhen-adults-have-mental-probs-xinhua/ From Xinhua, via China Daily:

One out of every five adults in Shenzhen, South China’s Guangdong Province, suffers from mental problems, according to a government-sponsored survey.

The survey covered more than 7,000 people aged 18 or above, of whom 21 percent said they had experienced psychological difficulties at some stage of their lives and 17 percent said they currently have mental problems, according to the municipal health department.

(...)
Read the rest of Shenzhen Adults Have ‘Mental Probs’ – Xinhua (69 words)

---

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: mental health, public health, Shenzhen, urban life
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/05/shenzhen-adults-have-mental-probs-xinhua/feed/ 0