It must be a little scary to live in China. There are over 1 billion people making a living, a population so big that people are discouraged to have kids. Everyone can quietly bonk around with contraceptives on or in.
Having many people around makes for an interesting dynamic. Remember that movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy? A shiny thing, a bottle emptied of its effervescent sugary contents and worthless to one consumer, was thrown off an aeroplane into the arid vicinity of a rural tribesman. Consumer number two, the tribesman, now took possession of this thing the Gods sent him and passed it around his village. Kids used it to play games, adults used it to pound grain. Then as human nature would have it, two people wanted the precious bottle at the same time. Person B snatches the bottle from person A, and the two-way tussle continued for a while before the anger boiled over and tempers flared. I think Person A then hit Person B on the head with the hard bottle. Someone got hurt.
So my application of this on-screen scenario to real life in China is this - this is a country that in less than two generations ago was singing the prices of Marxism, sharing and collective profit and burden. They openly denounced western values and probably swore never to be slaves to democratic enterprise. Since then, things have so dramatically gone the other extreme that I feel not everyone has managed to understand that having precious things suddenly in hand can alter the way society functions and behaves. In their communist past, religion was suppressed. For many of us, precepts of morals, ethics and the human condition are learned through our parents and often religious beliefs that aim to make us better people. There is an appreciation of what greed means and also what it's consequences are. I am not sure if everyone in China got that lesson.
The whole world's factory model has seen money flow through the Great Wall in immense quantities. If one own's some sort of production facility in China exporting some good or another, you've probably rolling in the dough. Production plants in China have so significantly affected the world economy that most of world resources now go into China and most of our stuff is made there. Factories in Western markets have had to close because it's cheaper to make things in the Orient.
Anyway, the point is there some very rich people in China. With money, one obviously can wait to flaunt it (remember shiny bottle story. These persons have bought big houses, bigger boats, fast cars, 80% of the world's Louis Vuitton collection, and any other fancy thing that's for sale. But money in China makes people bizarre. There was a lady who bought a dog from Tibet for like a million bucks and got 15 limos to go to the airport to see it home. So it's a dog, the dog doesn't care how it ends up in its gilded cage. The lady cared about what other people thought and saw, a lady with the money to make this spectacle happen. It seems it is no longer about appreciating what is bought but the ability to simply just buy.
The problem with showing off is that other people want the same things too. They mimic each other. Someone has a new shiny thing, everyone wants that same shiny thing. It's human nature. But it's worse among people who have had little for a long time, who have been asked to scrimp and save for the nation. The mindset in the Chinese has changed along with the economic boom. Individual wealth not collectivism is foremost now, and comparing one's bank balance with your neighbour is now de rigeur. I have friends who have been to China and were asked what their salary was within the first minute of conversation with a local. Maybe that's why we hear of oil in drains being recycled and melamine put in milk powder, all to make a buck.
The trouble is also that no everyone is equally wealthy. No society really is. But in China's case, there are polar opposites. That can only spell trouble. The poor and by extension, the least happy, will make noise with their pots and pans, and may resort to knives and spades if they get desperate. Ironically, that's what started the whole communist movement way back two centuries ago, the unequal distribution of wealth. Someone's bound to get hurt sooner or later, with or without the shiny bottle.
It may seem strange that i'm writing about this. It's been on my mind for a while, how society can ruin itself. Maybe it's with age one also thinks about contentment and detachment. People who have money should spend more time thinking about these things. Maybe they'd be happier.
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