Students and Teachers, part 2

So here's where the students and teachers part comes in. The segment of Chinese society devoted to higher education is a particularly paradoxical one, at least to the eyes of this Western observer. The incredible boom in higher education since the Deng reforms, as well as the increasing prevelance of cell phones and the internet, has created a class of college students and recent graduates who are more connected to each other than ever before. They send messages back and forth on their phones, chat on web discussion boards and take advantage of friends in other cities to visit parts of the country that they have never been to before. What they are not doing, at least not yet, is forming much in the way of a movement with any goals beyond visiting each other and improving their individual and by extension, but only by extension, their collective prosperity.

Here is where two cutting observations made me think a little differently about the potetial problems in the Chinese future. The first was told to me by my Chinese teacher, who's real job is as a "tutor" (perhaps "guidance councilor" would be a more appropriate term) here at the college. I had posed my students the question of what they would do with their money and time were they to suddenly find themselves millionaires (in American dollars no less) and was astounded by the fact that the majority of them considered this an insufficient sum despite their inability to decide how to spend it. They had no conception of how much things cost (for example that a few million dollars could buy quite a few cars but probably not an island or a college). More importantly to my perspective, they had no idea what they would do with their time if they no longer had to work out of financial concerns. And so I was complaining to Guan Laoshi about this and she said that this is a pretty universal phenomenon among Chinese college students.

She told me that they have grown up in an atomosphere where enormous emphasis is placed on earning money to "make their life (and their parents' lives) better," but they are actively discouraged from developing interests. Most of them come to college to study what they perceive as a means to this end, but they genenrally have no conception of what this work actually entails. They all want to go to Shanghai or Shenzhen to get a job in international business because it is "related to their major" but they have no idea why this is their major. They are convinced that they will get ahead by doing the same thing as everyone else. The fact that they are competing with millions of others with exactly the same qualifications does not strike them as problematic. This seems to run counter to common sense and certainly to game theory which clearly reveals this to be a loosing strategy unless you are already in a position of advantage or their is enough of everything to go around. I suppose perhaps the assumption is that in the context of an expand economy, there will be enough of everything to go around.

I am going call this class of students and young workers China's new cell-phone proletariat (to echo, in part, my earlier gadget theory). Perhaps this label is going out on a bit of a rhetorical limb, but I think that it captures the character of the group. On the whole, the cell-phone proletariat, while possesing a basic skill set that should slot them into white-collar work, are almost entirely lacking in specific skills or interests to differentiate them from the horde. They generally assume that by meeting certain minimal qualifications they can walk into a coastal city and be handed a job. Many of them even have dreams that through hard work and careful saving they could one day open a firm of their own to employ future generations' versions of themselves. With the exception of their minimally-workable college education, they are carbon (or perhaps digital) copies of the blue-collar class of unskilled laboreres: they are almost completely interchangable off-the-farm to-the-city children of technological progress, gazing with innocent eyes at the utopian vision of a perfectly boring existance.

Then my student Tom told me something that made this all the more menacing; he crystalized and idea that had been bumping around in the back of my head. Specifically, Tom told me that he and some of his more sophisticated classmates are worried about the possibility of China's annual growth rate dipping below 8% because it is already difficult for them to find good jobs. Yes, you read correcty, that is not a typo or a blurry 3, they are worried about the impact on the job market of growth rates lower than eight percent while anywhere outside of Asia a growth rate exceeding three percent is considered respectable or even high. What's more, an informal esitimate by my Chinese teacher revealed that close to half of graduates of second- and third-tier schools end up returning to the farm or taking a job at a store front. Even with an astounding rate of growth over the course of more than a decade, even with an aging population reaching retirement and even-increasing talk about China's rising fortunes, college graduates are faced with relatively high levels of unemployment and especially underemployment. Imagine what might happen if China's economy grows at something less than superhuman speed.

And, to throw one more wrench into the works, consider why China's astounding advance is not occuring evenly. The fact is that the economy here is astoundingly dependant upon cheap exports, especially to the developed world. Yes, China has a domestic market and yes, it is growing, but this is not the major reason for China's increadible ascent during the past two decades. It is no accident that nearly all of my students want to go to the coast to find a job; they may talk about the pleasant climate on the East Coast, but the main reason is because that has been the major growth area. The fact that most of the growth has been occuring on the coast only serves to accentuate the point that much of China's production doesn't stay in China. And this in turn means that China's success has largely been predicated on its ability to find international markets for those products. So what will happen to that 8% growth rate if, for example, American consumers stop consuming?

In the event of a change in the fortunes of any of China's major markets overseas, there seems to me the distinct possibility or a downturn, or a least less of an upturn in China's economic fortunes. This in turn has the potential to create a huge class of unemployed cell-phone proletarians, unemployed workers who in many cases represented the hope of their families to rise out of rural poverty and a massive expenditure of poor communities' resources (one of the former teachers here refers to these students as "their parents' retirement accounts"). What happens when a class with proletarian elements but whith markedly higher levels of education and expectations is faced with unemployment despite numbers saying their economy is growing? And what happens if this class just happens to buy a lot of electronic gadgets? Keep in mind that these are the same gadgets that are both highly correlated with freedoms that these students don't currently experiance and which give them a radically increased ability to orgainze.

The Nationalists cut down their main worry, the urban Communist movement, but Mao managed a revolution with peasants. Perhaps the Party is now paying too much attention to the peasants and neglecting the new proletariat the markets have created. Is it possible that the near future will see a showdown between the CCP and the CPP, between the Chinese Communist Party and the Cell-Phone Proletariat? I'm not saying it will happen, but it should be on the radar.