Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Then, of course, there are China's mammoth
income disparities
. Peasants, attracted by the
big city's prospects, now flood to Beijing en masse - you'll see plenty outside Beijing sta-
tion, many of them finding the capital as novel as any foreigner does. The lucky ones end up
working on building sites, though even they, far from home and non-unionized, are often ex-
ploited. Though the majority are family men who send the little money that they earn home,
they are treated with suspicion by most city-dwellers - indicative of China's current class di-
visions. Steps are being taken to combat this, including a minimum wage of 40 percent of
urban salaries.
A reform of Beijing's restrictive
hukou
policies has also been on the agenda for some time.
These residence permits were introduced as a means of keeping the population in check and
in place during the Great Leap Forward, and while restrictions on work and movement were
gradually lifted from the 1980s on, those heading to work in big cities remain unable to be-
nefit fully from healthcare or other important urban services. Of course, those who own a
Beijing
hukou
don't necessarily want these reforms to take place, since the city's funds will
have to be spread across more people.
Corruption and the environment
There's also the issue of
guanxi
- a well-used term describing personal connections, whether
derived from family, business, friendships or out-and-out power. As success is largely de-
pendent on
guanxi
, the potential for
corruption
is enormous; even before being installed as
president, Xi Jinping was vowing to crack down on it from the “tigers” at the top to the “flies”
at the bottom (though some found this a little funny since Xi himself is the son of one of the
Communist Party's founding fathers).
Another descendant of the “Eight Elders” of the Deng era,
Bo Xilai
, found himself implic-
ated in a major scandal in 2012; following the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood,
the local chief of police fled to an American consulate to implicate Bo's wife in the killing.
Bo is now serving a life sentence, while his wife was given a suspended death sentence -
evidence that things are changing, however slowly.
One final issue on the lips of all locals - sometimes in a depressingly literal sense - is
pollu-
tion
. Despite the fact that factories were moved far from the city before the Olympics rolled
into town, things only seem to be getting worse, even according to the generally untrusted
official statistics. In 2009, the US embassy in Beijing began tweeting their own hourly pol-
lution reports; the rest of the world looked on with quizzical amusement on a particularly
particle-filled day in 2010, when the hitherto sober reading sailed past “bad” and “hazardous”
to a whole new level - “crazy bad”. And it really was: the level had passed beyond 500, a full
twenty times higher than WHO guidelines, and up until then supposedly the top of the scale.
In January 2013, the meter maxed out at 755 - not pleasant at all.
