Yes, China has a population problem, but that may not mean what you think it means. Part of the problem is the same as Japan is now facing, that of top-heavy society filled with elderly retirees. Because in traditional Chinese society the children are the retirement pension, this places an enormous strain on the middle-aged middle class of modern China. Whereas in the past they would have had siblings and other family to help, now it’s all on them, not to mention the cost of their own child. This means that the middle-aged parents now are unable to put away anything for retirement either, because everything has to go into giving the child the best education possible. It’s a system that is so focused on the next generation that the last generation is forgotten. With the old neighborhoods of Beijing being demolished for high-rise apartments and the cost of a square foot rivaling a Central Park apartment, something has to give.
It will be interesting to see how China deals with this problem in the next twenty years, and it’s a problem that is worse here and in Japan than it ever will be at home. Americans are too unhealthy to ever have an epidemic of healthy old retirees puttering about taking up resources for an extra thirty years after they have last contributed to the economy. Retirees certainly still contribute to the society through cultural knowledge and by serving as baby-sitters and often surrogate parents as the biological parents work, but this is only a short-time gig. What happens when Grandma is 85 and her one child retires, and then her one grandchild is left to care for both parents and the grandparent? And if that child is a girl and she marries, she’s married into another family with similar problems, and traditionally the burden of taking care of aging parents would fall to her brothers, except now she has none. How are her and her husband to start a family and get ahead in life when they have six parents and grandparents to take care of?
In response to this problem, the rules of the one child policy have become more lax in recent years. For a long time minority groups and those in rural areas were often permitted to have two children, especially if the first child was a girl, but now it is becoming easier for city-dwelling Han to have two kids as well, provided that both the husband and wife are only childs. Yet here another problem arises. Because of the tremendous economic and social advancements of the last thirty years in China, these young newlyweds either don’t want a child, don’t want a child for a while so they can each focus on their careers, or only want one child.
All of this culminates in a problem that can’t be fixed just by legal changes. The traditional filial piety that governed traditional Chinese agrarian and mercantile society has been shredded by the hammer of capitalism that sends the lone child far away for work. Manners and many cultural norms that make up the fabric of Chinese society are dying. In another twenty years, the parks will be mostly empty in the mornings. The retirees doing Taichi into their eighties will be dead, and the next generation will have focused so busily on economic matters all their life that parts of Chinese culture will die with their parents.
It’s a bit like when the last of the old southerners died at the turn of the twentieth century, and with them went a way of dress and thought and mannerisms that the world would never see again. The occasion represents a mix of good and bad, but there’s an undeniable bad to it. There’ll never be another Yoknapatawpha for Faulkner to write about, just as there will never be the old hutong/bathhouse/tea house society in Beijing anymore. It’s gone, dumped by the wayside in the name of progress. It’s a loss that I lament, the passing of the morally conscious old guard into the mists of time.
Yes, in their place now stands a financial building from which smart men in suits rule mini empires, but the progress comes at a price. Though progress and such loss is inevitable, I can’t help but look at the cost and wonder what we are progressing towards. As the fabric of society and the customs and culture that bind people together is ripped apart, and the practices and ethics cast aside, progress suddenly becomes unbridled of a moral conscious, allowing it to move even faster. Yet now, for the first time in all of history, it lacks guidance as well.
Today I walked through a park and saw an old man playing Chinese chess with a friend over a cup of tea at a nearby teahouse. I felt the sudden urge to go inside and try to soak up as much as I could from the pair, fearful that if I wait until tomorrow they’ll be gone. Many in China feel the same, but there is nothing they can do.
Quite suddenly, I have the sensation I’m standing on a runaway train headed for a cliff while everyone else parties around me, oblivious to the danger.
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Kunming, China |
