Posted on 09/12/2018 11:32:56 AM PDT by Zhang Fei
In the 1980s, free-marketeers, wielding pagers and zipping around the streets of China’s biggest cities in minibuses, boldly navigated the emergent gray zones of a novel economic frontier of “reform and opening.” In the 1990s and into the new millennium, a flood of migrant workers, braving semi-legal status and the contempt of city dwellers, left their provincial homes and poured into urban factories, becoming the human engine driving China’s continued growth.
Now, in 2018, it is the millions of truck drivers, food delivery couriers, livestreamers, and freelancers—many still migrants—piecing together their livelihoods in China’s booming gig economy who are on the cutting edge of the country’s economic growth. Like their predecessors, these new economic pioneers highlight the tensions between engineering and sustaining growth in the world’s second-largest economy and maintaining ideological and political control over 1.4 billion people. Those tensions are manifesting in strikes and protests across the country, led by workers fed up with being at the bottom of the pile.
The rapid expansion of short-term contracts and freelance work over permanent jobs is due in part to top-down policies intended to reboot China’s slowing economic growth and propel the transition from a manufacturing to a service-based economy. In 2015, Premier Li Keqiang unveiled the Internet Plus strategy to encourage “hundreds of thousands of people’s passion for innovation to build the new engine for economic development.”
Over 110 million freelance writers, cab drivers, petsitters, livestreamers, house cleaners, couriers, and others have become part of China’s gig economy, accounting for about 15 percent of the entire labor force—compared to about 10 percent in the United States. According to Zhaopin.com, China’s largest online recruiting firm, demand for part-time or freelance jobs nearly doubled from 2015 to 2016, outpacing growth for full-time work.
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
One of the attorneys I work with just told me a similar story. He is quite overweight. When he goes to Jack In
The Box in the morning to get his breakfast, there was a group of old Chinese ladies that regularly sat eating their fast food outside the restaurant and they would make various comments to him in Chinese.
He didn’t speak Chinese, but talked with one of his clients who did, and asked what were they talking about. The client told him to listen carefully to what they said and then tell her and she would translate.
So my fellow attorney listened carefully and then called up the client and repeated it to her. She started laughing hysterically. When he asked what was so funny, she said that they were calling him “Fat White Devil.”
When I worked in China in the mid-70s, they called our calculators “devil boxes.” Seems to be a popular insult.
Like my ol’ pappy used to tell me: If you’re not driving close to the edge, you’re just wasting good concrete
Interesting, thank you.
Well, just a suggestion , in the interest of lowering the unemployment levels, why don’t you try holding down say... a couple of thousand jobs, ya know? After all, isn’t that what Miss Bug Eyes from the Bronx said is the reason why unemployment is so low because ‘’everyone is holding two jobs’’.
China is trying to manage a mix of capitalism and Communism. It won’t work for long.
To keep the allegiance of the Party, Xi has to give “insiders” plenty of opportunity for graft. But doing so pits them against the market.
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