This Generation (3 page)

Perhaps it's not surprising that different people fetch different prices—after all, there's lots of inequality in the world. Many people would like to create equality, given how superior some members of
society feel toward their fellow citizens, and the death of a lowlife and the death of a celebrity (assuming there's a distinction to be made between the two) will naturally have different impacts, but if the price of killing an urbanite is automatically much higher than the price of killing a rural dweller, this just shows that our system really is unsustainable. The registration system, at best, is a feature of a society in transition, and I hope it can be eliminated at the earliest opportunity, so that we have a system that looks good and sounds fair. If, on the basis of a piece of paper, people are classified into three, or six, or nine categories, how are we ever going to create a harmonious society? In a harmonious society, surely everyone costs the same.

May 13, 2007

New China News Agency, Hefei
(Wang Yan reporting): Anhui Family Planning Commission recently announced that Anhui Province is currently developing concrete steps to curb the phenomenon of the rich and famous having more children than they are permitted.

The authorities in Anhui, we are told, will, within the framework of current laws, regulate excess births by wealthy and prominent people. A hotline will be set up that will facilitate the exposure of such individuals, and in serious cases the names of the offenders will be made public and sanctions will be imposed. A system of levying society-upbringing fees will be strictly implemented: Where a couple has given birth to a second child without authorization, these fees will be levied at a rate of three to four times the couple's combined annual salary; for every additional child born, upbringing fees will be levied at double the previous rate. In accordance with the new management
procedures, Anhui has collected six hundred thousand yuan in society-upbringing fees from the owner of a private enterprise who violated the current planned-birth policy.

I have some questions:

1. Planned birth may be national policy, but doesn't national policy need to have a foundation in law?

2. If Yao Ming has more children than he's allowed, will he be fined more than a billion yuan? Is there a legal basis for fines of this kind? What if one of these days some local government has the bright idea of announcing that parking violators will be slapped with a one-hundred-thousand-yuan fine?

3. How are the proceeds from this huge levy going to be divvied up? I sure hope the departments involved are not going to resort to fisticuffs to settle this.

4. Why is this fee called a “society-upbringing fee”? Are they really proposing that the child be raised by society? Do I take it that the parents need no longer concern themselves with this—that they can leave the kid on the doorstep of the governor of Anhui?

5. How exactly is society supposed to have nurtured us, in the first place?

6. If it's so important to alleviate population pressures in China, then the best thing is if rich people emigrate, for that way not only will they not have to pay fines, they will also be reducing the population by more than three units—the greatest possible contribution they can make to this country.

7. This new ruling does nothing to resolve China's most real and most pressing problem—that of the poor having large families. If they have no income, or negative income, then logically shouldn't the authorities be imposing a negative fine on negative income, in which case wouldn't the government, in effect, be paying the poor for having extra children?

I'll just have to wait and see whether some bright sparks can answer these questions. I have actually raised some of these issues before, never anticipating that local governments would handle these matters even more foolishly. When it comes right down to it, this is a policy rooted in an egalitarian ethos. Actually, although people may be put out when they see that the rich have bigger families than others, this does not generate any social problems or demographic pressure. For a big nation to try to shape its policies to pander to its less well-off shows that it is dominated by a petty, micro-management attitude. What really matters is enabling the poor to improve their lives, or at least providing them with some social guarantees and basic welfare. If you spend your whole day jealous of Mr. X and cursing Mrs. Y, and celebrate with your several daughters and one son when you see some rich guy get fined six hundred thousand yuan, after you finish rejoicing aren't you still just the same poor man you were before? None of the money that the government managed to extort is going to end up in your pocket. For all we know, the problems stemming from these exorbitant fines will be a lot more damaging than a few couples having an extra child.

You've got to wonder, too, what the Anhui boss-man was thinking. If the police had it in for him like this, he must have really dropped the ball on the bribery front. Bad job there, I'm afraid. The international community, not knowing any better, is going to think he's the only person in Anhui who has exceeded the birth limit.

China is now a very unfair society. It's normal, however, for social inequities to exist. A healthy society isn't necessarily fair, but it needs to be just.

May 14, 2007

In my previous post I
raised the question of just how society is supposed to have raised us, because I hadn't quite worked this out, but plenty of readers have now supplied me with answers. I'm going to quote from a few responses.

“Han Han, how ignorant you are! How could you possibly imagine that society hasn't raised you? Do you think that the street outside your house was put there for free?”

I have to say that this comrade has extremely low expectations. He's the type of citizen our government most appreciates—one who's happy just so long as he doesn't have to pay to walk down the street. But better not dream of ever driving a car, for though there aren't many highways in China, the majority of the world's toll roads are here and even basic national roads will charge you, even though when you buy a car you pay a purchase tax, a value-added tax, a customs tax, a consumer tax, plus an annual road maintenance tax and car/boat usage tax, not to mention the local license fee. I just hope that the street outside your house doesn't get picked out by some boss or other for conversion to a motorway, or you'll
end up having to cough up some dough as soon as you leave your house.

“Han Han, your ignorance amazes me. The education that you received, the house where you live, the store where you shop, the hotel where you stay, the hospital where you see a doctor—all these are things that the government has provided for you.”

This comrade, I feel, has clearly confused welfare and commerce. So many of the things he mentioned are money-making enterprises. Free public education is still not genuinely free, and the other institutions deserve no further comment. I'm grateful, of course, to our government for building hospitals—it really set an international precedent there, didn't it?

“Han Han, you SB,
³
if you were in war-torn Africa, or in Iraq, you'd realize how much the government has done for you.”

This friend's point is an interesting one. I like the way he used an English abbreviation when calling me “soldier-boy” and also that he reminded me about conditions on the battlefield. But, like our first respondent, he sets his sights too low. For him to compare a peaceful country like ours to one that's fighting a war—now, that's not very patriotic.

Just how society has nurtured us remains a topic to which I need to give some serious thought. I'm sure it must have given me some support, for when there was a fire in our house some years ago it was 119 that we called to bring in the fire brigade (calling 120 and fetching the paramedics would not have counted, since you pay through the nose for that). We need to be clear about the distinction between profit-making enterprises and social nurturing. Social welfare is making some progress, but since the country is far from wealthy, the government seems always intent on treating benefits as though they're a money-making opportunity. I have now paid over three million yuan in taxes to the government (in my profession,
we do pay our taxes, and my real income is all post-tax), but I'm well aware that if someone in my situation becomes ill or old or handicapped, or if my income dries up through pirating or copyright infringements, or if one day for any reason I can't afford to pay for my next meal, the government and the welfare system as they currently exist are not going to help me, and all I can hope is that I don't get hauled off by city management officers.

Naturally I'm hoping that national welfare will constantly improve and the government will allocate more funds to it—that little pot of hot money from abroad, after all, is not going to have an impact on our economic marketplace. But no matter how rich our rich people get, a nation that views wealth with hostility, a nation where the population at large favors hanging the rich to rescue the poor, is bound to be backward and deprived.

Finally, I notice that it seems to have become the fashion recently to assume the air of some underprivileged individual from the grassroots. I'm wondering if I need to employ a translator for my blog—given that there are so many soldier-boys.

May 17, 2007

A few days ago I
wrote a column for Xu Jinglei's online magazine. It was my idea, because I've been busy writing a novel lately and find it difficult to set aside time and energy to write a full-blown essay, so I thought it would be simpler just to answer some readers' questions. Sex-advice columns, in any case, are always entertaining, and they give you a chance to poke fun. Unfortunately, because no translation was provided for my remarks, many defenders of morality had great trouble understanding them. That just goes to show how much damage was done by the language-and-literature education they got in school.

In today's paper they are saying that I'm leading young people in the wrong direction, and they express the hope that the General Administration of Press and Publication will monitor or penalize me. This is all because of my answer to this question I was asked: “What's your view on early sexual activity among today's adolescents—how some students are premature in sampling forbidden fruit?”

What I said was: “I understand and give them my full support, but they need to take precautions.”

They say my answer is not only radical but also ridiculous. But this happens to be my view, and it gets you nowhere to say I'm radical—that just shows how out of it you are. I doubt very much that people these days are so easily misled as to justify the claim that I'm leading them in the wrong direction. In the column I also said that, to my knowledge, there's nothing strange about an erect penis measuring eight inches—how come I haven't seen these experts tug on their own organ to make it that length? This shows they aren't completely out of their minds. But maybe some people just like to throw a veil of propriety over their own shabby behavior. In addition, the chief editor of
Education Today
claims that an overwhelming majority of educationalists disagree with me.