by Han Han
Sometimes the truth does not correspond to the people’s needs, but the truth matters more than sentiment, and sentiment matters more than standpoint. I don’t think we should just take it for granted that things are a certain way and then criticize people on that assumption—after all, that’s the all-too-familiar package the government has been trying to ram down our throats for years.
On begging
February 10, 2011
My car sometimes makes an incredible rattle, and friends ask me if the exhaust pipe is loose. “No,” I say, “it’s money shaking around.” I usually put a bunch of one-yuan coins in the car, so that I have something to give beggars who accost me at traffic lights or in a parking lot.
I have mixed feelings about beggars. On the one hand, I know a lot of them are just pretending to be penniless, because the streets are empty when I tend to go out at night and more than once I have seen beggars being picked up in cars. On the other hand, whether genuine or fake, some of them seem really pathetic, so I tend to dole out a few coins if I run into one. But over time I have become rather numb to it all, and these days my charity is more a habit than a true act of compassion. Chinese beggars are always looking for a handout when you’re out and about, and most of them are children. Sometimes they will stick to you like a limpet, especially if you’re with a girl. If you don’t cough up, you come across as self-important and hard-hearted. If you do give money, you find yourself with a whole cluster of kids around you and no amount of coins will be enough to go round. If you give out a large sum, it looks as though you’re putting on a show, and most of the time you know you’re simply abetting evil. Once I gave a twenty-yuan note to one of several children surrounding me and said, “Here, share this with your pals—I don’t have any change.” He looked at me and dashed off like a puff of smoke. In a second the other children were all over me, and I found myself with a boy and a girl clutching each of my legs and really understood the idea of “children at the knee.” That being said, beggars do help me appreciate the rate of inflation, for if you offer a panhandler one yuan today, this elicits a very different reaction from that of a few years ago.
After that, I asked someone why so many children are begging, and was told that it’s a form of business. I’m happy, at least, that most of the beggars I have encountered have no physical deformities. Recently I learned from online commentators that some kidnapped children are deliberately maimed so that they can beg for money more effectively, which made me think of the crippled children I used to see sprawled on wooden carts and it made me wonder if they, too, had been victimized like that. It is illegal to force children to beg, and Public Security has asked people to call the police immediately if they see children being made to beg. The problem is: Although I have had plenty of experience with panhandlers, I have never once witnessed an adult forcing a child to beg. So I think that any form of begging by children should be prohibited, whether it is their parents or others who put them up to it. And such a ban should not be hard to enforce, because begging tends to take place at busy intersections, where there should be an adequate number of police on duty. Once we have such a law in place, I’m sure people will have enough sense and determination to see that we in this country put a stop to children begging.
Parents who do take their children out begging may think, however, that so long as a child is not abducted or coerced, one should have the right—or the freedom—to have one’s child beg. And it’s true that while we might not have the freedom to publish or form associations or demonstrate, we definitely have the freedom to beg—but that’s only true of adults. And even in their case, freedom is never absolute: If it’s time for a large-scale national celebration or if it’s within view of some government vanity project, you are not going to be able to beg as you please. In fact, this is all decided by the beggar’s parents after weighing up the benefits: They feel that the one or two thousand yuan the two of them make in a regular job is bound to be less than what their child would make from begging. Personally, I think we can ignore the argument that parents are entitled to have their children beg. To be sure, the state doesn’t do enough to protect the disadvantaged, but if parents who have disabilities take their children out to beg, it only gives the government an excuse not to ban children from begging and ultimately leads to the abduction of other parents’ children.
It’s true that in our country it sometimes doesn’t matter very much whether or not something is written into law. Many people feel our laws are incomplete, but that’s not really true: We pretty much have all the laws we need—the key thing is what parties are involved: when people in power want to do something, laws are not going to stop them, whereas if you infringe on the privileges of the people in power you’ll find that the laws are very stringent. But, however you look at it, having a law on the books is better than having none at all.
Secondly, there are really a lot of people with physical handicaps, and it may be that children with handicaps have really no alternative but to beg. This relates to the question of social protections and welfare. If these things are not provided, how do you expect people to survive? Basic benefits are not nearly enough to keep one alive, and if you have a rural residential permit your entitlements are even less—the state’s certainly not going to help you raise your child. The state is bound to think instead: I have already been so good to you in not slapping you with a begging tax and a management tax, so how could I ever dream of giving you money to support your child?
If I can just go off on a tangent for a moment, we all know that our government is very rich. Many people are having a good laugh at the financial crisis in the United States and find it hilarious that some American states have enormous budget deficits and are even on the verge of bankruptcy. But if those states were free to impose a new category of tax—if they could throw a barrier across the highway and levy tolls at will, level a housing tract whenever they feel like it and sell off the land they have cleared, then those state governments wouldn’t be in such a mess. Actually, the state governments don’t even need to do those things—so long as they collect their normal revenue but dispense only the welfare benefits that Chinese people get, I can guarantee that none of them will go bankrupt. So it is that in countries where governments are prone to going bankrupt, the people themselves can avoid bankruptcy. Unfortunately, some of our people are thrilled to see other governments go bankrupt. They get so excited that they shake awake their wives, who have gotten sick from overwork but dare not go to the hospital for treatment, and tell them, “Our government is really kicking ass . . . ass! . . . ass! . . . ass!” Not much you can do about that echo—when you’re living under the arch of a bridge, it comes with the territory.
Finally, we hope that a ban on children begging can finally be written into law and strictly enforced. Many children who have been kidnapped, of course, are simply sold to other people and do not beg in the streets at all, but it still makes sense to start with the problems which are easier to solve before moving on to the more troublesome ones. In an effort to comply with “national policy” and ease the state’s burden, so many couples in China have only one child, and now if the government proves incapable of protecting that one child of theirs, then even though you guys never run the slightest risk of bankruptcy you’ll still be too embarrassed to face those docile, tongue-tied citizens of yours.
Prices are going to take a dive
February 22, 2011
Recently I keep finding I don’t have much money in my wallet—maybe just a few ten-yuan notes are all I find at the end of the day. That easily covers a bowl of noodles, of course. What happened to all the money I left the house with, I wonder. Then I realized it’s because it costs six hundred yuan to refuel my car, and it costs two or three hundred yuan to treat a few friends to dinner, and it costs fifty yuan to go and come back on the freeway. So long as I don’t buy anything extra for myself, one thousand yuan pretty much covers a day’s expenses.
I can’t help but wonder how th
ose people who just make two or three thousand yuan a month manage to get by in this city. They don’t need to buy gas, you may point out, but they’ve got to get through thirty days a month, after all, and pay for their housing. They have no claim on most of the facilities in this city, so all they can do is look. It’s just as well that our government has been compassionate enough to refrain from charging an eye maintenance tax for the privilege of looking at the city.
It was back in 2000, when I’d just published my first book, that I bought a Volkswagen Passat, because in those days that was one of the few models available (along with the Santana and Jetta), and the Passat seemed the most fashionable. Gas was then three yuan a liter and you could fill the tank for a hundred-odd yuan. That was when I developed the habit of leaving home with a thousand yuan, which in those days would have been enough to take me practically all the way to Europe. My parents wanted me to buy an apartment, not so as to improve my living arrangements or invest in real estate but because Shanghai’s housing market was in the doldrums, so the government had hatched a scheme whereby you would get a tax refund if you bought property. Housing prices in the outskirts of Shanghai cost between several hundred and a thousand yuan a square meter, and in the city center they were asking three thousand yuan a square meter. “Those prices are outrageous,” I said. “To buy a one hundred-square-meter apartment will cost three hundred thousand yuan. At this rate people will have to work for well over ten years to afford an apartment. You shouldn’t have to work more than five years to buy a small apartment. These prices are twice what they should be, so now’s not the time to buy. The price is going to drop any day now, to below a thousand yuan per square meter.”
Later, when I went to Hong Kong, I was shocked by the prices there: How could it cost forty or fifty Hong Kong dollars for a simple lunch combo? I found it amazing that a taxi ride in Hong Kong cost the equivalent of well over a hundred yuan. Housing in Hong Kong, I found, cost tens of thousands of yuan per square meter, and a night in a hotel easily cost over a thousand yuan. It was an enormous relief to get back to Shanghai.
In 2001 I went to Beijing and rented an apartment in Wangjing for a thousand yuan a month. I spent all my royalties on practicing driving and upgrading my car, and I almost couldn’t afford to rent an apartment. Later, I managed to save fifty thousand yuan and bought an apartment in Guanzhuang, in a development called Berlin Romance. Although it was actually a good distance from there to downtown Beijing, the freeway terminated in the eastern extension of Chang’an Avenue. To keep things simple, I told my parents that I lived at the east end of Chang’an Avenue. They spread the word, and when I went home neighbors would ask me enviously, “I hear you live right next to Tiananmen—do you get to see the top leaders?”
“I don’t see them very often,” I said, “but I can smell them. Every time the expressway is closed to ordinary motorists, I know that our leaders are going out, and when we’re finally given the all-clear I can smell the exhaust fumes their cars left when they passed ten minutes before.”
At that time gas was still over three yuan a liter. “It costs too much,” I told my friends. “We shouldn’t have to pay more than one yuan. Otherwise people will have to spend a whole month’s wages just to keep a car in operation.” In those days the Xinyuanli suburb of Beijing was crawling with women who’d gone to the bad: If you wanted to go to the bad with one of them it would cost you only a hundred and fifty yuan, and if you wanted to go to the bad for a whole night it would cost you two hundred.
Later, because I felt lost in Beijing and was in danger of going to the bad myself, I returned to Shanghai, renting a two-bedroom apartment in Songjiang for three thousand yuan a month. Gas cost over four yuan a liter then. “If it goes up to five yuan,” I told my friends, “that’s a complete joke.”
At that time there were no five-star hotels in Songjiang. My apartment was in Kaiyuan Xindu, a new development opposite the university. There houses cost five thousand yuan a square meter. “Why don’t you buy an apartment?” a friend asked.
But at that time I couldn’t afford one. I would pass the densely packed new developments in Songjiang, where every unit had been sold and only one in a hundred was occupied, and would say to my friend, “There’s bound to be a housing collapse, with all this overbuilding. Five thousand yuan per square meter—they’ve got to be kidding! Most people would have to work twenty years before they could afford a two-bedroom apartment. Just wait, sooner or later housing prices will slump here in Songjiang, and you’ll be able to buy at five hundred yuan a square meter. That’s when I’m going to make my move.”
“What you say makes a lot of sense,” my friend said. “I’d be ruined if I bought a place now. I need to wait it out. Thanks for showing me the light!”
Later, I did buy a house for my parents, spending all my savings on a three-bedroom apartment in Zhujingzhen in Jinshan District. I’m still fond of that apartment, for though it’s not very big, it’s a nice design. There was a salon down on the first floor—ten yuan for a hair wash, five yuan for a carwash, and thirty yuan for a hand job. I had taken a break from writing at that point and only just started car racing. After a difficult trial period I joined the best race team in the country, drawing a salary of eighty thousand yuan, but because of a series of unlucky accidents I ended up in fourth place and missed out on a bonus, but still managed to clear a hundred thousand over the course of a year with the help of book royalties. I was content with my life then. I had some regrets about buying property when the market was at its peak, but felt it was worth it to see that my parents got a nice place sooner rather than later. I pretty much forgot about the little apartment in Beijing, thinking that lousy place would soon be down below the one thousand mark, so best simply not to think about it.
That year we experienced a shocking event: Gas prices soared above five yuan a liter. They’ll be taking to the streets in protest, I thought. But of course I was wrong. We have such great citizens—you’re really a lucky devil if China is the country you get to rule.
I needn’t go into all the details of how housing prices continued to skyrocket in the years that followed. I never saw that guy who was determined to hold off on a house purchase again. These days my friends often like to recall my confident prediction that house prices would drop below a thousand yuan a square meter. “Your hunch was actually dead right,” one of them said to me. “Prices really have fallen below a thousand—but not house prices, stock prices.” Poor guy—taking to heart my advice to wait until house prices dropped, he had invested in the stock market, instead.
Today gas prices are close to ten yuan a liter. But they should be higher still, so high that those troublemakers who are so irresponsible and so indifferent to the interests of our leaders as to set fire to themselves at the slightest provocation will not be able to afford to buy even a single liter of gasoline, and housing prices should be a lot higher, too, so high as to be completely out of reach, for that way those girls who are dead set on having a house of their own will marry only rich guys, thereby freeing up China’s bachelors to focus all their energies on their jobs, without any further distractions. The tax rate, too, should be higher: Personal income tax should be set at eighty percent, and you shouldn’t just have to pay property tax when you buy an apartment, you should pay delivery tax when you have a child and environmental protection tax to make up for the government not protecting the environment; those who make money should pay profit tax and those who lose money should pay experience tax and those who lose a parent should pay inheritance tax; drivers should pay carbon emissions tax and adolescents should pay nocturnal emissions tax and both sexes should pay sexual activity tax. As for why that is better, don’t ask me—all I know is that when I was little I saw it written on the wall in big red characters: PAYING TAXES IS GLORIOUS!35 And you don’t mess with people who have the power to write that kind of slogan.
As for myself, I’m still in the habit of leaving home with a thousand yuan in my pocket. But w
hen I went to Hong Kong a few days ago I was taken aback how cheap things were there. Today I asked for an ice cream cone at KFC and gave the girl two yuan. “That’s three yuan,” she said. Maybe because KFC and McDonald’s haven’t raised their prices much, I’m still accustomed to thinking that burgers cost just ten yuan. But there’s one happy piece of news. Today, as housing prices and gas prices and utility prices are all going up, there is one expenditure that the government has slashed by almost half. Typically it raises prices by ten or twenty percent, but now I find it can be very generous when it thinks it necessary. Yes, the marriage registration fee has been reduced from nine yuan to five. In other words, if you marry three times in the course of your life, the government will have saved you a full twelve yuan! Thanks a lot for that.
Huang Yibo is a fine cadre
May 4, 2011
Recently I was stunned to hear about Huang Yibo, who wears a badge with a full five stripes on it signifying his achievements as a member of the Young Pioneers.36 It gives me a real inferiority complex. When I was at school I only made it to two stripes, although I did almost once make it to three. In the class elections in my primary school, a classmate and I were both equally popular candidates, but I ended up with one more vote than she, and the teacher ascribed this to me being too competitive and voting for myself. The result was that she was elected instead of me, and I missed out on my third stripe. I was always under the impression that two bars put me up near the top third, but now I realize I never made it out of the bottom forty percent.
Everyone’s now making fun of Huang Yibo and his parents, but I can’t go along with this. My experience of holding a student leadership post at school has made me realize how fragile the mentality shaped by the nightly TV news broadcast on state television is. And that experience has never provided any confidence-boosting capital to us after we grow up or fostered any genuine class consciousness—years later when we have a student reunion, it’s the person who makes the most money who is everyone’s role model and no one commands respect for having once held a post in school. When I was in school, the TV in our classroom was used exclusively for watching the news broadcast, and the papers we subscribed to were Red Scarf, Shanghai High School, Global Times, and Reference News. So in those days we were all hoping that war would break out with the United States, and I was convinced that as soon as the People’s Liberation Army brought into action the secret weapon they had stashed away in the mountains, U.S. imperialism would suffer a crushing defeat. I continued to have that fantasy about China’s advanced technology for years after I graduated, until I became a race car driver and realized that China can’t even manufacture a durable ball bearing or hydraulic valve, let alone a decent internal-combustion engine. I realized then that we had no secret weapon at all, and began to worry: If there really is a war, how are we going to manage? In the end I realized that our national defense strategy is not geared toward guarding against foreign armed forces but toward maintaining readiness against the people of our own country.
