The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World by Shaun Rein Page A
Authors: Shaun Rein
Tags: General, Business & Economics
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professional lives will continue to get better and better and better.
Most horror stories about China’s gender inequality now occur in rural areas. Some villages have 150 boys for every 100 girls, and in these backward places women are still destined to live lives of servitude. Thankfully, as with rising gender equality in urban areas, the inferior status of rural women is starting to change, as salaries for the positions migrant women typically take in the service sector outpace those of men, and as better educational opportunities are introduced.
Julie came from a totally different world than Melanie. I met her one day in Shanghai at a massage parlor. My feet were aching after a long run, and I needed a foot massage to ease the kinks out. Julie was the masseuse assigned to me. As I dipped my feet into a bucket of warm water laced with traditional Chinese medicinal herbs—the first part of a foot massage—Julie started to tell me her life story.
Julie was born in the late 1980s on a rice farm in Jiangxi in south central China, one of the most underdeveloped provinces in the country. Life there was a struggle for everyone when Julie was a child. Access to food often depended on conquering nature. Frequent floods and droughts scourged the area.
Where Julie grew up, 40-year-olds looked like 90-year-olds, as the hard farm work turned skin into leather. Feet were calloused from walking the mountainous terrain without adequate footwear, and fingernails were yellow and thick. Luckily for Julie, she was not destined for a life on the farm. She married young, and she and her husband left the countryside alongside tens of millions of other migrants looking for work in urban areas. Through hometown connections, they ultimately both found work in Zhejiang, an industrialized province, at a fashion-accessory factory. There she glued buttons onto accessories destined for America and Europe. Julie soon found a job at a foot massage parlor, and dropped her tiresome job in the factory for the higher-paying position as a masseuse.
Julie later moved to Shanghai, where she now gives massages to between five and seven wealthy Chinese clients a day. Foreigners sometimes come, she said, but Chinese are the bigger spenders. The pay and working conditions in massage parlors are better in Shanghai than in Zhejiang. The work is hard and tiring, and she has huge, yellowed calluses on her knuckles from pressing against her clients’ feet, but she makes nearly $700 a month—a fortune in her hometown, where it often takes half a year to make that much.
Unfortunately, Julie’s husband couldn’t find work in Shanghai, so he returned to Zhejiang, where he makes $200 a month as a worker in the fashion-accessory factory. Julie said it was tough being away from her husband, whom she married for love, but her family needed to make money.
Julie said she recently bought a $90,000 apartment back in her hometown of Jiangxi, using mostly her own earnings as a deposit. She had saved most of her earnings for eight years to put a 20 percent down payment on her home. For the vast majority of Chinese, owning a home—something that was not allowed in the first four decades of Communist rule—has a profound significance. People do whatever they can to buy a home, and they view it as the ultimate goal in life. They often pool money from parents and grandparents and live together under one roof. The average age of a home buyer in China is 27, five years younger than the average home buyer in America.
Julie’s two-year-old daughter still lives back in her hometown and is being raised by her husband’s parents, so she saves as much of her earnings as possible to send back to them. It is hard being away from her child, she said, but as she started to push acupressure points on my feet, she justified it to me. “I can make more money than my husband,” she said. “We have no culture, no education, so I have to do the work because he cannot make much. My
Most horror stories about China’s gender inequality now occur in rural areas. Some villages have 150 boys for every 100 girls, and in these backward places women are still destined to live lives of servitude. Thankfully, as with rising gender equality in urban areas, the inferior status of rural women is starting to change, as salaries for the positions migrant women typically take in the service sector outpace those of men, and as better educational opportunities are introduced.
Julie came from a totally different world than Melanie. I met her one day in Shanghai at a massage parlor. My feet were aching after a long run, and I needed a foot massage to ease the kinks out. Julie was the masseuse assigned to me. As I dipped my feet into a bucket of warm water laced with traditional Chinese medicinal herbs—the first part of a foot massage—Julie started to tell me her life story.
Julie was born in the late 1980s on a rice farm in Jiangxi in south central China, one of the most underdeveloped provinces in the country. Life there was a struggle for everyone when Julie was a child. Access to food often depended on conquering nature. Frequent floods and droughts scourged the area.
Where Julie grew up, 40-year-olds looked like 90-year-olds, as the hard farm work turned skin into leather. Feet were calloused from walking the mountainous terrain without adequate footwear, and fingernails were yellow and thick. Luckily for Julie, she was not destined for a life on the farm. She married young, and she and her husband left the countryside alongside tens of millions of other migrants looking for work in urban areas. Through hometown connections, they ultimately both found work in Zhejiang, an industrialized province, at a fashion-accessory factory. There she glued buttons onto accessories destined for America and Europe. Julie soon found a job at a foot massage parlor, and dropped her tiresome job in the factory for the higher-paying position as a masseuse.
Julie later moved to Shanghai, where she now gives massages to between five and seven wealthy Chinese clients a day. Foreigners sometimes come, she said, but Chinese are the bigger spenders. The pay and working conditions in massage parlors are better in Shanghai than in Zhejiang. The work is hard and tiring, and she has huge, yellowed calluses on her knuckles from pressing against her clients’ feet, but she makes nearly $700 a month—a fortune in her hometown, where it often takes half a year to make that much.
Unfortunately, Julie’s husband couldn’t find work in Shanghai, so he returned to Zhejiang, where he makes $200 a month as a worker in the fashion-accessory factory. Julie said it was tough being away from her husband, whom she married for love, but her family needed to make money.
Julie said she recently bought a $90,000 apartment back in her hometown of Jiangxi, using mostly her own earnings as a deposit. She had saved most of her earnings for eight years to put a 20 percent down payment on her home. For the vast majority of Chinese, owning a home—something that was not allowed in the first four decades of Communist rule—has a profound significance. People do whatever they can to buy a home, and they view it as the ultimate goal in life. They often pool money from parents and grandparents and live together under one roof. The average age of a home buyer in China is 27, five years younger than the average home buyer in America.
Julie’s two-year-old daughter still lives back in her hometown and is being raised by her husband’s parents, so she saves as much of her earnings as possible to send back to them. It is hard being away from her child, she said, but as she started to push acupressure points on my feet, she justified it to me. “I can make more money than my husband,” she said. “We have no culture, no education, so I have to do the work because he cannot make much. My
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