Facts and Details

POOR PEOPLE IN CHINA

Beggar in the 1930s There are three degrees of poverty: 1) extreme, or absolute, poverty defined by the World Bank as a household that gets by on less than $1 a day, not enough to support the basic needs of survival; 2) moderate poverty, defined as living on $1 or $2 a day, where basic needs are met but just barely; and 3) relative poverty, as defined by income below a certain level of the national average.

About 13 percent of China’s population—about 203 million people— live on less than $1 a day. About 42 percent of China’s population—about 593 million people— live on less than $2 a day. Most are in the countryside.

Children in textile and garment factories often work 14 hours a day, seven days a week, and sleep by their machines. Boys in Green Mountain City gets paid about 18 cents a load for carrying 55 pound bags of coal up a mountain. Even in the cities, a school teacher with a salary of $50 a month—good by Chinese standards—might have to save for two years to be able to afford a bicycle. Married couples often live apart, sometimes in opposite corners of the country, working at different places. They only time the get to see each other is during holidays, three weeks a year.

The “poverty penalty” is a phenomena in which the poor can pay up to 25 times more certain services such as clean water as the rich.

Good Websites and Sources: Poor in China Earthtrends earthtrends.wri.org ; Wikipedia article Wikipedia ; United Nations Development Program undp.org ; Social Issues in China peopledaily.com ; Wikipedia article on Social Issues in China Wikipedia ; Rural Poverty Portal ruralpovertyportal.org : Suicide in China Guardian story guardian.co.uk ; China Daily article chinadaily.com ; Center for Disease Control cdc.gov

Links in this Website: Rural Poor, See Rural Life, Urban Poor, See Urban Life RURAL LIFE IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; VILLAGES IN CHINAFactsanddetails.com/China ; URBAN LIFE IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; MIGRANT WORKERS IN CHINAFactsanddetails.com/China

China Raise Rural Poverty Line

In November 2011, Associated Press reported: “China has redefined the level at which people in rural areas are considered poor by raising the official poverty line, despite a booming economy. A sharp upward revision in the official poverty line, announced by the government on means that 128 million Chinese in rural areas now qualify as poor, 100 million more than under the previous standard. [Source: Associated Press, November 30, 2011]

The new threshold of about $1 a day is nearly double the previous amount. While the revised poverty line is still below the World Bank threshold of $1.25 a day, the change brings China closer to international norms and better reflects the country's overall higher standards of living after three decades of buoyant growth.

The old limit, first set in the 1990s and increased periodically thereafter, focused on the bedrock poor at a time China was still largely rural and impoverished. As the country has climbed toward middle income status, experts from the World Bank and Chinese think tanks have urged the government to raise the threshold to capture more poor Chinese.

"The previous poverty line underestimated the number of poor people in rural China," the official newspaper China Daily quoted Wang Sangui, a rural development expert at Renmin University, as saying. "Only 2.8 percent of the rural population was officially considered poor, which was lower than in many developed countries such as the United States, which has a poverty rate of about 15 percent." With the higher threshold, more people qualify for government assistance. Funding for poverty relief is also being raised more than 20 percent this year to 27 billion yuan ($4.2 billion), the China Daily reported.

Homes of the Poor in China

House of the poor in the 1930s Poor rural families often live in bamboo frame houses or mud-and-straw bricks homes with packed earth floors. Thatch-roof mud-wall houses found in some parts of Sichuan, Hunan and Yunnan provinces look like African huts. Houses with more than two story are rare. Progress and wealth means a family can move out of their mud and stone hut into a concrete house.

A typical rural family of nine in Yunnan Province with a per annual capita income of $364 lives in 600-square-foot house with a living room, 3 bedrooms, kitchen and 5 storage rooms. Peasant houses often have dirt floors, and little furniture other than a table, chairs and makeshift beds. A blackened shed serves as a kitchen. Many have color or black and white televisions.

Describing a mud brick home on the edge of the Gobi desert in poor Gansu province, Sheryl Wudunn wrote in the New York Times Magazine: "The shack had two rooms, each dominated by a kang...The dirt floor was swept clean and the furniture consisted of three rickety wooden chairs set around a crude wooden table, the mud walls were papered with newspapers, with pictures from old calendars providing a bit of color."

See Minorities.

Very Poor in China

Poverty in China The 21 million poorest people in China live on less than $88 a year (2007). About 9 percent of the population lives in absolute poverty, compared to 15 percent in the Philippines and 50 percent in Vietnam. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University described the extreme poor as people who “are chronically hungry, unable to get health care, lack safe drinking water and sanitation, cannot afford education for their children and perhaps lack rudimentary shelter—a roof to keep rain out of the hut—and basic articles of clothing, like shoes.”

Among the legions of poor are shirtless rickshaw drivers, pensioners, unemployed workers in old industrial cities, barefoot construction workers, and skinny laborers who carry 40 bricks at a time that weigh 120 pounds. Most are farmers who don’t earn much from selling their crops. Newsweek described a girl who sold her blood to Beijing clinic so her family could buy fertilizer. In Guizhou, one of China's poorest provinces, peasant families sleep in open-air huts, collect water in the mountains with shoulder poles, sleep under thin quilts in the winter and subsist off cornmeal gruel. The New York Times described one man who spent two years of income for electricity—two 60-watts bulbs that lit up his house for a few hours a night. The man said, "we don't have money to buy fertilizer, I don’t have a cow or ox to cultivate the land and the soil is barren."

Tania Branigan wrote in The Guardian, “To understand just how poor rural Guizhou is, you can look at the statistics. Or you can look at the children in Qixin village. Zhao Ai is nine, but is so short he appears three years younger. He eats nothing between leaving home at 6.30am — for a two-hour trek down the mountain to Ruiyuan primary school — and returning at 5pm. [Source: Tania Branigan, The Guardian, October 2, 2011]

In 2010, Shanghai took the top spot in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)'s international rankings for reading, maths and science in state schools. Meanwhile, at Zhao's primary, the big educational challenge is "no food", says headteacher Xu Zuhua. Malnutrition stunts her pupils' growth and hampers their concentration. "Even though we are developing, it feels like urban areas are running while we are strolling," says Zhou Liude, who oversees Ruiyuan and nearby schools.

The government has sought to invest in rural areas, and the benefits of growth are spreading. In the towns around Qixin you see stores with gleaming yellow motorbikes and adverts for 3G and coffee. But these remain unimaginable luxuries for families like Zhao's, who survive on basic farming and wages sent home by relatives working in cities. Their poverty is disguised by development: the further away from the road people live, the poorer they are — and the worse their children's grades — says Ruiyuan's headteacher.

Decline of Poverty in China

It has been said that “China helped more people out of poverty than any other country in history.” Since the Deng reforms the number of people living in absolute poverty (unable to adequately feed themselves) has declined from one in four in 1978 to one in twelve today (less than 100 million people). The number of extreme poor has been reduced by 300 million.

Between 1990 and 2009, China slashed its numbers of rural poor from 85 million to 35.97 million, thanks in large part to the wages sent home by migrant workers. The government hopes further urbanization will lift more rural people out of poverty. According to the United Nations, the number of people living on less than $1 a day was reduced from 33 percent worldwide in 1990 to 16 percent in 2000 mainly because of economic growth in China and India.

Much of China’s dramatic decline in absolute poverty occurred in 1980s when the rural poverty rate fell from 76 percent in 1980 to 23 percent in 1985. The poverty rate has changed relatively little since then. The fact that much of the economic growth occurred after that raises the question: how much has market economics really helped the poor?

Development in China in China

Development is spotty and uneven. While Beijing and Shanghai have been ranked by the United Nations as equivalent to Greece and Singapore in terms of income levels the provinces of Gansu and Guizhou have been ranked with Haiti and Sudan.

Government assistance for the poor includes welfare payments for destitute city dwellers, rural anti-poverty projects and incentives for investments in poor provinces. As a whole the rural poor have been affected very little by the massive amounts of foreign investment that has poured into China.

Micro-credit lending schemes are being used and supported. Nobel-prize winner and Gameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus is working with the Chinese government to introduce his micro credit system to rural China.

The concept of NGOs in China is almost a contradiction of terms. The equivalent of NGOs need to be sponsored by a Communist-controlled umbrella group and registered with the Chinese government, sometimes as companies.

Go West, See Minorities

China’s Income Gap

Inequality has risen sharply in recent years despite government pledges to tackle it. Alarmed by the widening wealth gap in China after he saw a luxury car with a price tag of more than 100 million yuan ($15.7 million) at an auto show in Shanghai, former prime minister Zhu Rongji said: "Quite a few entrepreneurs even own private aircraft. But in the countryside, people in some places still do not have enough to eat. So many years after the Liberation [the founding of the People's Republic in 1949], rural residents still remain so poor.” [Source: Clifford Coonan Irish Times, January 22, 2011]

The gap between rich and poor reached its widest margin in 2009 since economic reforms were launched in the late 1970s with the urban capita income of about $2,500 being nearly three times the figure in countryside according to data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics. In the large cities the gap is even more extreme. In 2008, Beijing’s per capita GDP was $9,085 while Shanghai’s was $10,529 in 2009. The Xinhua News Agency reported that the top 10 percent of the richest people earned 23 times more than the poorest 10 percent of people in 2007 - up from 7.3 times in 1988.

Cong Yaping and Li Changjiu, economic analysts with Xinhua's Center of World Studies, warned that China's Gini Coefficient - an indicator of income inequality - has exceeded 0.5, threatening poor economic security, a weaker development outlook and social instability, the Xinhua-owned Economic Information Daily newspaper reported. The warning threshold, as commonly recognized by the international community, of the Gini Coefficient is 0.4. A World Bank report said the index for China surged to 0.47 last year.[Source: Global Times, Guo Qiang, May 27, 2010]

China’s income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is now on a par with some Latin American and African countries, according to the World Bank, with 0.5 deemed by some to be conducive to social disturbances. In 2010 Justin Yifu Lin, the bank’s chief economist, identified the growing disparity as one of China’s biggest economic problems. [Source: Sharon Lafraniere, New York Times, April 22, 2011]

Yang Yiyong, director of the Social Development Research Department at the NDRC, warned that China can't afford any further rises in the Gini Index, as growing disparity could result in social unrest and ‘could even cause distrust in the country's public-ownership economic system.’ ‘Social problems, including migrant workers consecutively taking their lives and serial attacks on schoolchildren, are related to conflicts stemming from the income gap,’ Yang said. Yang's words referred to seven unrelated attacks on primary school and kindergarten students in less than two months in 2010, in which more than a dozen children were killed. “ [Ibid]

Income Gap Between Urban and Rural China

The rural-urban income gap constituted a major part in the overall gap. The People's Daily reported that the existing hukou system has helped push up the gap between the rich and poor. Citizens with rural hukou cannot generally enjoy the same social benefits as urban residents, even though they live and work in cities. “ [Source: Sharon Lafraniere, New York Times, April 22, 2011]

For every one yuan of a rural resident's income, a city-dweller enjoys 3.23 yuan in disposable income — and that may significantly understate the gap. Include the extra services and benefits enjoyed by urbanites, such as subsidised housing, and "many observers believe that the ratio would easily be in the range of four to five and is arguably among the highest in the world," says professor Kam Wing Chan, an expert on migrants at the University of Washington. "China's incomes are increasingly polarised. This large income gap is definitely a contributor in the background to the more frequent and violent protests and unrest." [Source: Tania Branigan, The Guardian, October 2, 2011]

Even farmers who reach the cities as migrant workers are in effect second-class citizens, because China's hukou — household registration — system classifies people as urban or rural and allocates rights to services accordingly. One Chinese academic has described the result as "counterfeit urbanisation": cities full of people who cannot enjoy much of city life.

In recent years, Chinese leaders have sought to give rural areas more help. Official statistics suggest the income gap may have closed slightly within the last year, though experts suspect this reflects sampling changes.

Income Gap in Shanghai

Will Clem wrote in the South China Morning Post,“Shanghai - and the Yangtze River Delta that surrounds it - is awash with cash. It's visible in the shiny new BMWs, Jaguars and Lamborghinis that cruise along the city's elevated highways. It's seen in the spectacularly overpriced designer handbags chic young mistresses use to batter their way through crowded pedestrian areas. And it blares out from the stylishly exclusive nightclubs flowing with rivers of champagne and Johnnie Walker Blue mixed with green tea. [Source: Will Clem, South China Morning Post June 25, 2011]

But it goes without saying that not everyone is on the sweet end of the deal. Those trendy nightspots are nightly laid siege by platoons of penniless beggars. Supercars come to a rest at red lights alongside rusting tricycles piled with recyclables rescued from the litter bin. The reality is that most of Shanghai's 23 million residents scrape by on a minimal amount of money, and none more so than newly arrived migrants.

According to the municipal statistics bureau, the average annual wage in 2009 - the most recent figure available - was 42,789 yuan. That's well above the national average but it doesn't go very far in a Gucci store. It is the in-your-face brashness of the nouveaux riches in the mainland's most glamorous city that is a constant reminder to the rest of the population just how meagre their own lot is.

Efforts to Close China’s Income Gap

“China’s long-term solutions to the divide include more market reforms, stronger social security programs, lower taxes on low-income families and tighter controls on illicit income,” Sharon Lafraniere wrote in the New York Times. “ But while waiting for Beijing for all that, some local officials are looking for ways to gloss over the gap. A regulation posted in March 2011 on the Web site of the Beijing Administration for Industry and Commerce banned outdoor advertisements promoting “unhealthy” tendencies, including “hedonism, feudalism and royalty, worshiping of and groveling before foreign things, supreme aristocracy and vulgar tastes.”

At the National People's Congress in March 2011, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to place the country's have-nots at the heart of its development goals for the next five years. In his address at the opening of the congress Wen promised to ensure social stability by curbing inflation and raise the incomes of those left behind by China’s spectacular growth. "We must make improving the people's lives a pivot linking reform, development and stability," said Jiabao, in his annual work report. "And make sure people are content with their lives and jobs, society is tranquil and orderly and the country enjoys long-term peace and stability." [Source: Tania Branigan, The Guardian, March 5, 2011]

In March 2010, Wen promised increased spending on welfare and rural areas, aiming to halt the growth of the gap between rich and poor, maintain stability and spur domestic demand. In the speech before the National People's Congress (NPC), China's rubber-stamp parliament, Wen warned: ‘We must not interpret the economic turnaround as a fundamental improvement in the economic situation...There are insufficient internal drivers of economic growth." Wen Jiabao promised to ease rules denying public welfare services to millions of migrant workers and do more to met the social security need of China’s poor. He pledged to reform the increasing unpopular household registration , or hukou , system under which a citizen’s residency is strictly tied to one’s hometown. [Sources: AFP, Tania Braniganm The Guardian, March 5, 2010]

Making the case for increased social spending, as he has done in recent years, he added: ‘We can ensure that there is sustained impetus for economic development, a solid foundation for social progress, and lasting stability for the country only by working hard to ensure and improve people's well-being...We will not only make the pie of social wealth bigger by developing the economy, but also distribute it well.’ In an online chat he said that a society was ‘doomed to instability’ if wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few. “ [Ibid]

Wen also pledged reform of the hukou (household registration) system, which means that tens of millions of migrant workers do not enjoy the same rights to basic services as urban dwellers. But critics say the pace and scale of government changes are inadequate to ensure that China's rural and urban citizens are treated equally. “ [Ibid]

Around the same time the Global Times reported: ‘Stepped-up efforts to reform the way China spreads out its wealth are being reviewed amid warnings and fears that a widening income gap is jeopardizing social stability across the country. A plan to curb the yawning wealth distribution will be drafted, according to officials with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC)... Such a plan could be written into the country's next Five- Year Plan for 2011-15.’ [Source: Global Times, Guo Qiang, May 27, 2010] State media outlets have featured intensive coverage on the issue, with one report appearing in the overseas edition of People's Daily commenting that China is faced with a growing income gap and an accompanying sense of social inequality despite a steady growth since the 1980s in the national average salary. [Source: Global Times, Guo Qiang, May 27, 2010]

Yang Yiyong, director of the Social Development Research Department at the NDRC, says one solution to the problem is allowing the free mobilization of labor and the implementation of equal pay for equal work, both of which are hindered by the current household registration system, or hukou. [Ibid}

Li Keqiang, who is expected to become premier next year, has suggested urbanisation could "pull up" the countryside as a smaller number of farmers consolidate land, leading to increased productivity — though much farmland is being lost to development. Yet the best prospect for most farmers remains a move to the cities. There are promising pilot projects that attempt to tackle the urban-rural gulf: improving education for poorer children; increasing integration.Cities such as Chongqing and Guangdong have been experimenting with limited hukou reform. [Source: Tania Branigan, The Guardian, October 2, 2011]

Economic Reforms and the Poor in China

Rural people benefited from the Deng reforms the most in the early 1980s when prices for crops were allowed to rise. This one move lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and is regarded as the biggest anti-poverty measure in history. Under the Deng reforms many peasants moved from mud huts to brick homes and acquired better jobs, health care, food and opportunities than they had in the Mao era.

Even though 800 million peasants were the first to benefits from Deng's economic reforms, they have been left behind by the explosive growth in the coastal regions, cities and special economic zones. Incomes for farmers leveled off in 1985 while incomes for urban workers have risen sharply since then.

According the World Bank "the quick reductions of poverty through agricultural growth" in China "were largely exhausted by the end of 1984. According to Chinese government statistics 170 million moved out poverty between 1978 and 1985 but only 36 million moved out of poverty between 1985 and 1997.

Sentiment of the Have Nots in China

Most Chinese are better off than they were 20 years but many remain unsatisfied, envious and worried about their future. One rickshaw driver from Anhui Province, who had no home in Beijing at the time of the Olympics in 2008 and either slept in his rickshaw or on a bench at the Forbidden City, told the New York Times, “The only happy thing is to have money. You don’t have bitterness. You don’t have to feel tired.”

The people in the countryside who have failed to profit from the economic reforms are perhaps the one who look back on the Mao years with the most nostalgia. Dissident Liu Binyan wrote in Newsweek, "they feel that though life was hard in those years, it was more or less egalitarian, and people had the right to, moreover, to stop the wrongdoing of bureaucrats. But now the gap between rich and poor is growing wider and wider. Millions of workers in state owned factories have lost their jobs or are only partially paid. Retirement pensions are constantly in arrears. The peasants have been suffering under increasing financial burdens, sometimes including extortion at the hands of local officials. Corruption and abuse of power have run wild."

Many poor Chinese abhor the new millionaires who exploit tax breaks, child labor and financial privileges to get rich quick. "Red-eye disease" describes jealousy brought about being left out but seeing others gett rich quick. One orange farmer in Hunan told Time, "Rich entrepreneurs spend the equivalent of my annual income in one night at a karaoke bar."

One poor peasant in the Guizhou told the New York Times, " My biggest wish is that government will change its policies and help us to get rich, because living in this kind of poverty makes us too embarrassed to go out of doors."

Contempt (Envy) for People with Expensive Cars in China

Mark McDonald wrote in the New York Times, “There is special contempt — and some envy, of course — for black Audi A6's, Ferarris and Bentleys. Expensive cars serve as symbols of the so-called Great Divide, the widening wealth gap between China’s 1 percenters and everybody else. A recent poll by Renmin University showed that only 5.3 percent of respondents believe the rich come by their wealth legally. The survey was cited in a story in the People’s Daily newspaper about a 24-year-old unemployed man who smashed the windows of two Mercedes-Benzes. “Why can some people drive such good cars,” the man said in court, “and I have to wander on the streets?” [Source:Mark McDonald, New York Times, March 20, 2012]

It was a tragic car accident in October 2010 that gave rise to a notorious addition to China’s sociopolitical vocabulary — the phrase, “My father is Li Gang!’‘ My colleague in the Beijing bureau, Michael Wines, reported about that accident, when a Volkswagen smashed into a college student, a poor farm girl, who later died. Michael wrote: “The 22-year-old driver, who was intoxicated, tried to speed away. Security guards intercepted him, but he was undeterred. He warned them, ‘My father is Li Gang!’ “

Li Qiming, the driver, was the son of Li Gang, a deputy police chief, and propaganda officials quickly threw a cloak of silence over the media, as Michael wrote, “to ensure that the story never gained traction.” Quite the opposite happened, however, and the phrase “My father is Li Gang” has become a notorious and bitter catchphrase for shirking responsibility. The author and journalist James Fallows, in his blog “In short,” Mr. Fallows writes, “every exposed raw nerve created by the gaping economic and power inequalities of today’s China was touched by this episode.” [Ibid]

“In April 2012, Mei Fong wrote in the Los Angeles Times, After USC graduate students Ming Qu and Ying Wu were shot and killed earlier this month, the Chinese student community in America was saddened, shocked and frightened. The reaction back home was very different. The killings, which happened while Qu and Wu were sitting and talking in a BMW, unleashed a torrent of Internet vitriol in China, and it wasn't directed at the pair's attacker. A comment on the popular site 163.com was typical: "Studying in America, driving BMW, a male and a female, let them die." Another commenter on 163.com posted this: "We should think about why a lot of families, even the poor ones, spend a lot to send their children abroad. This is meaningless. Studying abroad only contributes to American GDP…. Stop cheating us." [Source: Mei Fong, Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2012]

“Never mind that the BMW was a secondhand model and not the $60,000 luxury model the Associated Press erroneously reported initially. Or that Qu and Wu were not especially rich or well connected: Qu's father is a manager at an insurance company, his mother a teacher. Wu's father is a police investigator and her mother a retired textile worker. The malevolence this tragedy generated grows out of deep divisions within China. The chasm between haves and have-nots is growing ever wider, and with it has come resentment that extends to the approximately 160,000 students a year — enough to populate three schools the size of UCLA — who elect to study in the United States. [Ibid]

Contempt for BMW-Driving Chinese Students Murdered in Los Angeles

In April 2012, Mei Fong wrote in the Los Angeles Times, After USC graduate students Ming Qu and Ying Wu were shot and killed earlier this month, the Chinese student community in America was saddened, shocked and frightened. The reaction back home was very different. The killings, which happened while Qu and Wu were sitting and talking in a BMW, unleashed a torrent of Internet vitriol in China, and it wasn't directed at the pair's attacker. A comment on the popular site 163.com was typical: "Studying in America, driving BMW, a male and a female, let them die." Another commenter on 163.com posted this: "We should think about why a lot of families, even the poor ones, spend a lot to send their children abroad. This is meaningless. Studying abroad only contributes to American GDP…. Stop cheating us." [Source: Mei Fong, Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2012]

“Never mind that the BMW was a secondhand model and not the $60,000 luxury model the Associated Press erroneously reported initially. Or that Qu and Wu were not especially rich or well connected: Qu's father is a manager at an insurance company, his mother a teacher. Wu's father is a police investigator and her mother a retired textile worker. The malevolence this tragedy generated grows out of deep divisions within China. The chasm between haves and have-nots is growing ever wider, and with it has come resentment that extends to the approximately 160,000 students a year — enough to populate three schools the size of UCLA — who elect to study in the United States. [Ibid]

“Disdain for American-educated students has come only recently. During China's economic expansion in the 1980s, students educated abroad were feted and valued for the skills and knowledge they acquired, which were then scarce in China. The students were dubbed hai gui, or "sea turtles," as opposed to "land tortoises," the term for those who stayed home to get their education. [Ibid]

“Even as many Americans make the mistake of viewing China as a monolithic superpower, the Chinese, too, tend toward one-sided views of America. America the imperialist oppressor; America the violent. It's a view that Qu's and Wu's tragedy unfortunately reinforces. But there is also another dimension to the Chinese view of America. It is a country many admire as a place of hope and possibilities and opportunity, the land that created Steve Jobs and Jeremy Lin. This is the America that draws ever-growing numbers of Chinese students, who then take home a view of the United States that refutes the stereotypes. Such an exercise of informal diplomacy on a grand scale cannot help but change U.S.-China relations. It may even change the world. [Ibid]

Riots in Left Out Regions in China

In the poor province where peasants have been left out of the economic miracle there have been riots and social unrest. In the Guizhou Province, workers who were not paid for working on a road rioted. The province's Communist newspaper reported "illegal elements openly smashed vehicles, illegally took hostages and robbed public security cadres and police of their firearms, thus causing serious consequences."

Historically rural poverty has been one of the main causes of political unrest. In the mid 1990s, tens of thousands of peasants rioted in the cities of Kaili and Tingren in Guizhou Province over punishing taxes, harsh birth control policies and the high cost of feeding and educating their family. The army had to be called to restore order.

See Demonstrations, Taxes, Government; Land Seizures, Agriculture, Economics.

American Becomes a Hero in China for Giving French Fries to a Homeless Woman

In May 2012, Jonathan Kaiman wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “An American student has shot to Internet fame in China after buying a packet of French fries for a homeless woman in Nanjing. Photos of her enjoying the food with the student — a Southern California native named Jason Loose, who is now endearingly known as “American French Fry Brother” by many Chinese Internet users — have been forwarded hundreds of thousands of times on Sina Weibo, China’s popular micro-blogging service. The images have set off a new round of soul-searching in China since they were posted. Many Chinese citizens believe that their country’s blind pursuit of wealth has created a moral vacuum, causing feelings of indifference toward the suffering of strangers. [Source: Jonathan Kaiman, Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2012]

“Loose, who has been studying at Nanjing University for nine months, was caught off-guard by his sudden popularity. “I just gave some food that isn’t really even healthy to an old woman and talked with her for a few minutes,” he said of the McDonald's fries when reached by phone today. “I don’t see much that’s newsworthy about that.” “There wasn’t much money in her collection bowl, and it was really hot out,” recalled Loose, whose hometown is Thousand Oaks. “I walked past her and thought that maybe she could use some food and some company.” The two talked about her poor health, her home in rural Anhui province, and the weather. She said she was thirsty, he recalls, so he poured her some spring water. He left after about 10 minutes “I asked what's her favorite food to eat?” he said. “Her answer was ‘not French fries.’ ”

Loose did not find out until the following day that an onlooker had photographed the encounter and posted the images online. He opened his own Weibo account soon afterward. Although he has written only 17 posts, he already has over 9,000 followers. Comments on Weibo reflect admiration for Loose’s charity, and question why the Chinese aren’t often seen performing similar acts of kindness. “Truly wish this was a fellow countryman,” wrote one user. “Chinese people, let’s all learn from this,” wrote another. Yet some users accused Loose of putting on a show, and others questioned his taste in food. One user responded with a tongue-in-cheek nationalistic swagger. “American Imperialism won’t even spare our old ladies,” he wrote. [Ibid]

“In an online question-and-answer session with Loose organized by Sina Weibo, Internet users sought further details about the encounter. “Being a foreigner in China itself attracts attention, but you also sat with a beggar. At the time did a lot of people gather around you?” asked one user. “This is something I didn’t notice,” replied Loose. While Loose is slightly baffled by the attention, he hopes to use his new-found fame to highlight the altruism of many Chinese people he knows. “I have had a great experience over here, and this has been a part of that experience,” he said. [Ibid]

Image Sources: Bucklin archiveshttp://www.bucklinchinaarchive.com/ ; Liu Bolin, China’s Invisible Man artist, Global Times Chinese: photo.huanqiu.com http://photo.huanqiu.com/creativity/unlimited/2010-11/1254288.html ; YouTube

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

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© 2008 Jeffrey Hays

Last updated August 2012