Volume No.

93 February 2021
SOCIETY
Dumpster Derby:
On the frontlines
of the war on waste
ECONOMY
De-platforming:
Tech giants face
issues of anti-trust

WILD
FRONTIERS
Conserving culture, traditions
and biodiverisity in China's
borderlands

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ISSN 2053-0463
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
EDITORIAL
Demand-side reform is crucial to unleash
consumption potential
S
upply-side structural reform has been a top Central Committee of the Communist Party of Chi-
policy objective for China since it was intro- na, which took place in October and mapped out the
duced by President Xi Jinping in late 2015, goals for the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025). The
but a new buzzword has now entered the country’s meeting proposed improving income distribution
economic lexicon – “demand-side through taxation, social security
reform.” and transfer payments. It called to
The phrase made its public The key to strengthen the role of taxation in
debut at a meeting of China’s promoting income redistribution and gradu-
Politburo, the ruling Commu- consumption and ally increasing direct taxation, ad-
nist Party’s top decision-making boosting demand is justing the distribution relationship
body chaired by the president, between urban and rural areas, re-
to improve income
where leaders discussed economic gions and groups, and developing
policy priorities ahead of the an- distribution and put charity and other public welfare
nual Central Economic Work more money in the programmes.
Conference at the end of 2020. hands of low- and The key to promoting consump-
“[We] should stick to supply- middle-income tion and boosting demand is to
side structural reform while at groups, analysts improve income distribution and
the same time paying attention to put more money in the hands of
said
demand-side reform to eliminate low- and middle-income groups,
blockages, address shortcomings analysts said.
and link production, distribution, High-end consumption and
circulation and consumption to create a higher-level sales of luxury goods, cars and homes have increased
dynamic equilibrium in which demand drives supply significantly and domestic consumption of luxury
and supply creates demand, improving the overall ef- goods is expected to top 40 percent of world con-
fectiveness of the national economic system,” the Po- sumption in 2020, according to Li Xunlei, chief econ-
litburo agreed, according to the official readout of the omist at Zhongtai Securities. But the problem lies with
meeting issued by the Xinhua News Agency. consumption among low-income households and the
Vice Premier Liu He alluded to the new focus in middle class, who make up the vast population.
an article published in late November in the People’s The core of demand-side reform is to improve
Daily, the flagship Party newspaper. people’s ability to consume, which is related to income
Liu said the major pain-point in China’s economy expectations, demographics and the social security
still lies on the supply side, as supply-side factors have system, Qu Qing, chief economist at Jianghai Secu-
not been able to adapt to changes in demand. But rities, wrote in a note. He cautioned that unleashing
while he called for a more “innovation-driven, high- demand to promote consumption cannot happen
quality supply” that could drive demand, Liu said the overnight.
country should also attach great importance to “de- But other economists say that the role of invest-
mand side management” and stick to the basic strat- ment, a key driver of demand in China, cannot be
egy of expanding domestic demand. ignored. Rather, the focus needs to shift to spending
The greater focus on demand-side reform comes on the “new economy” rather than traditional infra-
amid concern that the recovery of domestic consump- structure investment and sunset industries.
tion has lagged behind the rebound in exports and Demand-side reform will drive the authorities to
investment – the other forces that drive GDP. pour more money into new economy sectors, econo-
The Xinhua report did not mention specific initia- mists at Guotai Junan Securities wrote in a note.
tives or strategies that leaders are considering to push Continuing to pour money recklessly into ineffi-
demand-side reform. But the government is already cient infrastructure and other projects with lower re-
pursuing demand-side economic policies because turns will do little to boost economic growth, further
they stimulate demand, such as tax cuts, government burden local governments with heavy debts and lead
spending and boosting investment. to bigger financial risks, said Li Qilin, chief economist
Some clues came from the Fifth Plenum of the 19th of Hongta Securities.
1
 CONTENTS

An ethnic group in northwest Yunnan

CULTURAL ROOTS struggles to preserve their traditions
and connections to the land

Photo by CFP
P14

EDITORIAL
01 Demand-side reform is crucial to unleash consumption potential

INTERNATIONAL
10 Ezra Vogel:
End of an Era?

POLITICS
12 Wei Jianguo:
Breaking Barriers
P32

COVER STORY
14 Conservation:
Tribal Unraveling/Rooted in Nature/Organic Thinking

SOCIETY
26 Rural Governance:
Running of the Bullies P42
29 Profile:
Gimme Shelter

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

2
 CONTENTS

P52

P56 P60

32 Rubbish Collectors: OUTSIDE IN

The Rubbish Army 60 Wuhan:
36 Real Estate: City at the Crossroads
All Quiet on the Oceanfront
04 MEDIA FOCUS
FEATURE 05 WHAT THEY SAY
38 Rural Youth Culture: 06 NEWS BRIEF
Family of Outcasts 08 NETIZEN WATCH
51 CHINA BY NUMBERS
ECONOMY 62 ESSAY
42 Anti-Trust Probes: 64 FLAVOUR OF THE MONTH/REAL CHINESE
Big Tech Crunch
45 E-commerce: P10
Basket Wars
48 Credit Rating:
Loose Bonds

CULTURE
52 Comedy:
Northeastern Exposure

VISUAL REPORT
56 Going in Style

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

3
ChinaReport, Chinese Edition
January 11, 2021
Debt-ridden Youth Consume More
A consumption revolution led by youngsters is underway in China.
According to the China Consumer Young People Debt Status Report
released by Nielsen in November 2019, the total credit product pen-
etration rate of China’s young adults between 18 and 29 reached
86.6 percent. The average debt-to-income ratio was 41.75 percent,
and the monthly real debt repayment-income ratio stood at 12.52
percent. The Nielsen report added that Chinese people born in the
1990s and 2000s are expected to drive the country’s, even global
consumption in the next five to 10 years. Customer credit services
are flourishing in China among young adults due to the progress in
fintech, e-commerce, the mobile payment revolution as well as easy
access to internet loans. However, irrational consumption has become
an increasingly irksome problem for young adults. It is urgent to crack
down on online loan sharks that are facilitated by consumer finance
platforms.
Anti-Corruption Outlook
December 31, 2020
Smokescreen over
Tobacco Corruption
Total profits a nd t axes f rom
the Chinese tobacco industry
amounted to over 1.2 trillion yuan (US$185b) in
2019 against the backdrop of China’s long-standing
State monopoly system. Due to the monopoly on re-
sources and its relatively independent management,
the tobacco industry has become a hotbed for cor-
ruption, particularly in recent years. In October 2020,
Lu Ping, former general manager of China Tobacco
Hunan Industrial Corporation which has an annual
output of over 100 billion yuan (US$15.4b), was in-
vestigated for serious violations of regulations and the
law. She had been working in the tobacco industry for
more than 40 years. In China, the tobacco industry
is both an enterprise and its own administrator, and
there is a lack of transparency and effective external
supervision. It is time to improve the supervisory sys-
tem, regulate personnel appointments and establish a
modern corporate system in the tobacco industry.
4
Caixin Weekly
December 28, 2020
Electricity Shortages Shock Provinces
Because of cold temperatures and increased industrial pro-
duction since December 2020, many provinces across the
country faced electricity shortages and blackouts. Accord-
ing to the National Energy Administration, power consumption in the provinces
of Hunan and Jiangxi rose by 17.2 percent and 19.07 percent year-on-year in
December. Hunan reached the electricity grid’s maximum load of 30.93 million
kilowatts, a record for the province. The energy agency has been working with
power companies to ensure generation capacity, increase coal supplies and is trying
to balance supply and demand. Most provinces were not fully prepared for the
electricity shortages, nor did they formulate emergency plans for the cold spell.
Experts argued that generally speaking, China has an oversupply of electricity and
the sudden shortfall reflects weak management of the electricity distribution grid.
Fangyuan Magazine
December 9, 2020
Yellow River Protection Not Watertight
Over the years, illegal occupation, sand excavation and
illegal construction have plagued the environment and
navigation safety of the Yellow River. On December 12,
2018, China launched a campaign to protect the river and the ecological pro-
tection and high-quality development of the Yellow River has since become a
national strategy. Along the Yellow River, which stretches 5,460 kilometres,
five protection plans were released to tackle water loss and soil erosion to im-
prove the environment and protect endangered wildlife in the region. Water
shortages are still a major challenge in the river basin despite continuous water
quality improvements. Per capita water resources in the area are only a fifth of
the national level. To make matters worse, safe disposal of wastewater is still an
enormous problem and only about half of the wastewater is properly treated.
China Report
December 16, 2020
New Era for Development
The 14th Five-Year Plan, which steers China’s economy
from 2021 to 2025, aims to strengthen the market’s role
in allocating resources, boost domestic consumption and
bolster innovation and green growth. It is a period for China to accelerate the
pace of high-quality development. Increased domestic demand will be crucial to
resist external shocks at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic is still impacting the
already flagging international trade. China will stick to the “dual circulation” de-
velopment pattern centered on the domestic economy while continuing to inte-
grate with the outside world. This high-level opening-up is expected to inject new
impetus for China to build a more transparent and law-abiding domestic market
with an improved business environment. Analysts argued that dual circulation
development is based on the high level of opening-up which when combined,
will contribute to global economic recovery.
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
“Amid the pandemic, we must be well-
prepared to prevent what should be a one-
time temporary shift in unemployment
from becoming normalised, structural
unemployment.”
Institute of Population and Labour Economics,
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in its 2020 Green Book
of Population and Labour issued on January 7, 2021
“While Joe Biden intends to replace the unilateralism of
Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policy with multilateralism,
that doesn’t mean the Sino-US relationship will improve.
Actually, Biden has the same China goals as Trump:
prevent China from gaining on the US. Also, Biden may use
more sophisticated measures than Trump, which could
pose even greater challenges for China.”
Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of International Relations,
Tsinghua University, in an interview with financial portal Caixin
“I used to worry that Chinese universities wouldn’t be
confident enough and instead simply follow their US
counterparts. But now I worry that Chinese universities are
too confident and see themselves as the best in the world
while refusing to learn from others.”
Chen Pingyuan, a professor of Chinese language and literature
at Peking University, on the future of Chinese universities amid
worsening Sino-US relations, at the seventh annual China
Education 30 Forum held in Beijing from December 12-13, 2020
“The predicament Western civilisation is in should never
be a reason for some short-sighted [Chinese] compatriots
to be arrogant. Similarly, the US’s predicament does
not mean those compatriots should regard China as an
invincible, war-worshipping country like the ancient Qin
Empire [221-207BC].”
Xiao Gongqin, a history professor at Shanghai Normal
University, on his public WeChat account
“The current economic recovery basically relies on
investment, especially in infrastructure and real estate.
This means perennial problems such as unprofitable
zombie enterprises and mounting credit risks at banks are
not going away with the economic recovery.”
Financial commentator Xu Jin on financial portal Caixin’s blog,
where she suggested that China is likely to see a decline in
investment returns and in middle-class incomes due to the
economic slowdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
Illustration by Xiao Zhenduo
“In the next 10 to 20 years, AI applications will go deeper
in areas close to humans, such as medical care, justice and
fintech. However, being unaccountable, unstable, unfair
and untraceable, today’s AI can make mistakes that could
put human lives and property at risk, causing people to
lose confidence in AI.”
Cui Peng, an associate professor of computer science at Tsinghua
University, at a recent online forum about future technologies
“The international community should take a win-win
attitude and abandon zero-sum thinking when it comes
to vaccine cooperation. We should oppose profiteering,
cornering or monopolizing the market and especially
nationalism in vaccine distribution.”
Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at a
press conference on December 28, 2020 pledging that China will make
Covid-19 vaccines available to the world at a fair price
“Just as banks get ‘too big to fail,’ so can giant digital
platforms. How we go about supervising these platforms
will pose a tremendous challenge to the world.”
Zhu Guangyao, former deputy minister of China’s Ministry of
Finance, urging targeted government research into taxation of digital
platforms, especially large ones that own technologies and big data
and have high consumption volume, at the 2020 Internet Finance
Forum held in Beijing on December 15, 2020
“In 2020, there was a pandemic more widespread than
the coronavirus: the ‘truth virus’, or taking your own
viewpoints as the truth. We may not be able to dismantle
the ‘wall of leftism,’ but we have to cure this ‘truth virus,’
otherwise we’ll all get infected sooner or later.”
Independent commentator Xisailuo on
his public WeChat account
5
 Top Story China and EU Reach Deal on Investment
Leaders of China and the European Union announced on
December 30, 2020 that negotiations on the China-EU Com-
prehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) were completed on
schedule.
Talks started on a China-EU bilateral investment treaty in
2013. The CAI focuses on increasing access to each other’s mar-
kets by introducing Pre-establishment National Treatment and
a negative list system. According to the EU, when the CAI of-
ficially takes effect after nations ratify it, China will expand EU
firms’ access to manufacturing, telecommunication, finance,
private medical care, transportation and cloud services, and the
EU in return will loosen restrictions for Chinese firms to enter
strategic fields such as renewable energy.
It means the two sides will benefit from each other in more fields.
According to the EU data, China surpassed the US to become the
EU's biggest trade partner in the first ten months of 2020.
Given China is less open than the EU, analysts said the CAI
will encourage more openness and help the country gain more
foreign experience in less-advantaged areas. The EU will gain ac-
cess to a bigger Chinese market, such as in luxury cars where the
EU is advantaged, which will help economic recovery following
the Covid-19 pandemic.
Although China and the EU have not yet defined the specific
clauses of the CAI, Chinese officials revealed that the agreement
is bound by high standards.
An official from China’s Ministry of Commerce told media
that the CAI will cover market access commitment, fair com-
petition, sustainable development and dispute resolution, all the
rules of which are equal for both sides. The official said that both
sides value a rule-of-law business environment and had reached
consensus during the negotiations on issues of technology trans-
fer, norm defining, information transparency and financial su-
pervision.
“Compared to the WTO entry [agreement], the CAI empha-
sizes the institutions more. This means that China’s investment
mode is advancing to a higher-level of openness,” Tu Xinquan,
director of China Institute for WTO studies, University of Inter-
national Business and Economics, told Nanfang Weekly.
The China Youth Daily cited Wang Huiyao, chairman of the
Centre for China and Globalisation, as saying that the CAI is an-
other milestone for China to promote international investment
and trade following the Regional Comprehensive Economic
Partnership (RCEP), the Asia-Pacific free trade deal which was
signed in November 2020. The CAI will greatly increase the
whole world’s confidence in economic recovery following the
pandemic.
According to EU rules, the CAI will not take effect until every
member country of the EU ratifies it.

International

World Bank Expects Chinese GDP to Grow 7.9% in 2021

China announced on January 18 that its
GDP growth was 2.3 percent in 2020. In 2019,
the figure was 6.1 percent. Ahead of these fig-
ures, the World Bank Global Economic Pros-
pect report published on January 5 predicted
that Chinese GDP would grow by 7.9 percent
in 2021, and global GDP by 4 percent.
The prediction was based on ongoing “proper
pandemic management, effective vaccina-
tion and continued monetary policy accom-
modation accompanied by diminishing fiscal
support.” But due to lasting damage from the
Covid-19 pandemic, global GDP is forecast at
5.3 percent below pre-pandemic projections –
or about US$4.7 trillion, the World Bank said.
Led by higher consumption and a quick-
er-than-expected recovery in exports, the
World Bank raised its growth prediction for
China, with the country helping to boost debt levels to reach historic highs which make
the outlook for the East Asia-Pacific, with the global economy vulnerable. “Limiting the
regional GDP expected to grow by 7.4 percent. spread of the virus, providing relief for vulnera-
The report warned the pandemic may “steep- ble populations and overcoming vaccine-related
en the long-expected slowdown in potential challenges are key immediate priorities... Global
growth over the next decades,” as it has caused cooperation is critical,” the report concluded.

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

6
Space Trade

Chang’e-5 Moon Probe Brings Back 1,731 Grams of Lunar Samples Tariffs Lowered on
China’s Chang’e-5 probe returned to Targeted Imports
Earth on December 17, 2020, bringing
with it 1,731 grams of lunar soil. China set lower tempo-
It was about 270 grams less than the rary tariffs on 883 imports
objective, which according to Chinese sci- from January 1, 2021, Chi-
entists was mainly due to the much lower na’s Custom Tariff Commis-
density of the lunar soil than according to sion said at the end of 2020.
data from the US and the former Soviet The policy aims to en-
Union, who collected lunar samples in the courage consumption and
1960s and 1970s. Scientists said it does reduce people’s economic
not mean that the previous data is wrong, burden, setting zero tariffs
since the Chinese probe collected samples on drugs for cancer and rare
at a different site. diseases, as well as medical
The difference in soil density may provide evidence for the theory that the moon consists of debris from nutrition products children
different celestial bodies after a planetoid hit the Earth. with certain diseases need.
According to the China National Space Administration, China will divide the lunar samples into three, Liang Ming, director of
for scientific research, public exhibition and sharing with other countries based on international rules. the Foreign Trade Institute
under the Ministry of Com-
merce, told media that Chi-
na has three types of tariffs
Diplomacy – temporary, conventional
and most-favored-nation.
Dames in Beijing as Envoys Nab Honours The first category is the most
There are echoes of empire days in Britain’s Honours system. Titles such as OBE (Officer of the Order of flexible and can be easily ad-
the British Empire) are much coveted. justed based on actual con-
It is therefore fitting that the UK’s new Ambassador to China, Caroline Wilson was named a Dame ditions. China has adjusted
Commander in the order of St Michael and St George (DCMG) in the last round of citations at the end temporary tariffs at the end
of 2020. The new envoy to Beijing received the honour for previous work including her recent position as of the year for the last three
Director Europe at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, held while the UK prepared to leave the Eu- years.
ropean Union. Wilson, already cutting a dash in Chinese social media, posted modest thanks on her own Besides medications,
Twitter account. medical instruments and
The same tweet thread also referenced Wilson’s predecessor Barbara Woodward, herself titled DCMG medical nutrition products,
OBE – the first “our woman in Beijing” who has now taken up a significant new post as the UK’s Ambas- other imports subject to
sador to the United Nations in New York. lower tariffs include materi-
als and parts for new infra-
structure construction and
aviation equipment.
Education

School Campuses Fit for a Princess

The Covid-19 pandemic is unsurprisingly keeping many international students away from the UK. An in-
novative response has come from £13,100 per term Benenden school who once taught the Queen’s daughter
Princess Anne. The private establishment, based in Kent in Southeast England, now plans to open a campus
for 1,500 students in Guangzhou’s Panyu District in late 2023. The parent school in the UK teaches only
girls but the new facility will be mixed. Benenden has found a partner in CTF Education Group, part of the
Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook Group, who are also thinking big. “The group will invest over US$390
million in the next few years in upcoming education projects in Hong Kong and Greater China,” said CTF
Education vice-chairman and group CEO Adrian Cheng Chi-kong.
Photos by CNS, VCG

There are already over 860 international schools in China, including some of the better-known top UK
independent schools like Westminster, Wycombe Abbey, Harrow, Dulwich and Wellington. With Covid
impacting hard, it is now more likely that more upscale educational facilities will follow Benenden’s recent
example and set up shop within the Asian giant.

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

7
Female Passenger Forces Kiss on Taxi Driver Poll the People
A video showing a woman in Mianyang, Sichuan
Province forcing a kiss on her taxi driver as she left Education authorities in Shanghai announced that a
local university will offer a household management
the car went viral. The posted video shows the star- course in 2021 to train domestic workers, a first for
tled driver trying to dodge the kiss while the woman the city after a local college opened a household
management department in 2014. Netizens are
leans into his seat, grabs his head and kisses him. split on the decision, with opponents arguing that
Afterward, she gave the driver an extra 15 yuan such work does not require academic degrees and
that university graduates working as housekeepers
(US$2.3) for what she called compensation for would be a waste of talent.
“pain and suffering.” The story stirred debate on-
line, with some pointing out China’s absence of sexual harassment laws protecting men. “If What do you think of a university graduate working
the passenger were a man and the driver a woman, the internet would have been filled with as a housekeeper?
criticism, but now most people just take it as a joke,” one user commented. Zhao Peifeng, a It’s a waste of talent. Housekeeping
local lawyer, told a Sichuan news website that the woman could be charged with obscenity, a does not require a university degree.
crime that can apply to all genders. 17.6%

It’s not a waste: there will be a growing

demand for educated domestic staff.
53.4%
Couples Rush to Divorce Before New Cooling-off Law
Local civil affairs bureaus in many Chinese cities were crowded with people filing for divorce It depends on how much they stand to
earn. 25.2%
in December 2020 before a new clause to China’s Civil Law that requires a three-month
cooling-off period went into effect. Since January 1, 2021, couples have been required to Hard to say. 3.8%
separate for three months before finalizing their divorce. The clause triggered widespread
Source: www.sina.com.cn
debate, with opponents arguing it infringes on people’s freedoms, and much worse, may dis-
advantage victims of domestic violence or other abusive situations. Many younger netizens
said the clause has scared them off tying the knot and that marriages, not divorces, should
have an official warming-up period as people also get married on impulse.
Most Circulated Post
Circulated 33,226 times by January 4
‘New Style’ Marriages Divorce from Traditional Views
Views on dowries and other marriage traditions are changing in China’s wealthier eastern
provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, where spouses and their families are coming together on “People between 12 and 14 years
old shall face criminal responsibility
more equal terms, Chinese media reported. Traditionally, a woman is expected to prioritise for the following crimes: intentional
her husband’s family while cutting filial ties to her own. However, these “new-style” mar- homicide, intentional injury that ends
riages seek to give both families equal importance, as well as forego dowries or betrothal gifts in death or severe disability through
from grooms, which have become increasingly expensive due to China’s imbalanced gender aggravated assault, and other serious
ratio. Such couples generally plan for two children: one takes the mother’s surname who crimes approved for prosecution by the
Supreme People’s Procuratorate.”
she supports financially, and the other the father’s surname who he supports. Some netizens
believe the arrangement could help diffuse family conflicts by maintaining strong ties to
both families, while others said it may prevent the couple from getting closer and negatively Chinese lawmak-
influence their children. ers have lowered the
minimum age of
criminal responsibil-
Headteacher Accused of Abusing Student over Sexual Allegation ity from 14 to 12
A middle school headteacher in Shanxi Province has outraged Chinese netizens after he years old. The move
allegedly assaulted a female student and forced her to admit to having sex with a classmate. comes in response to
According to media reports, the headteacher surnamed Ren suspected the 13-year-old vic- rising public concern
tim of being in a relationship with a boy and called her to his office at night. After the girl over the country’s growing number of criminal
denied the accusations, Ren allegedly choked the girl, pulled her hair, slapped her and beat cases involving children, which include serious
her with a rod. He also allegedly forced the girl to write a self-criticism letter based on his crimes such as rape and homicide, yet bring little
dictation that contained details about her alleged sexual encounter. Ren accused the girl of to no penalties. Authorities also passed a law in
sneaking the boy into her dormitory at night. The girl’s family made her undergo a gyneco- December 2020 that includes systemic improve-
logical exam to prove she was still a virgin. The case is now under investigation. Lawyers said ments to the education and reform of juvenile
that the headteacher could be charged with abuse. delinquents.

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

8
TOP FIVE SEARCH QUERIES WHAT’S
On for the week ending January 10
1. China Promises Free Covid-19 Vaccines to the Public 664,467
China’s National Health Administration announced on December 31,
HOT?WHAT’S
NOT?
2020 that they would provide the public with Covid-19 vaccines free
of charge.

2. Xi Jinping Delivers New Year’s Speech 441,083

Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a New Year’s speech to the
public on December 31, 2020, in which he encouraged people to
keep working hard to revitalise the Chinese nation.

3. UK Considers Returning Pandas to China 378,684

Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland is considering sending the only two
pandas in the UK back to China over financial pressures from the Portrait of Kindness
Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, the Guardian reported. A man with cerebral palsy
in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province
has won hearts online after
4. Covid-19 Found on Auto Parts Packaging in Chinese Cities 356,651 media reported he opened a
The Covid-19 virus was detected on the packaging of auto parts in photo album plant to employ
some Chinese cities after a distributor in another city was found to people with disabilities. Lu Lipo Malpractice
have contracted the coronavirus. Hong said that he had been
made fun of and bullied since Wang Liangfa, a cosmetic surgeon
childhood, but he found solace in in Beijing, faces charges after one
of his patients died 10 years after
photography. Lu’s photo album a liposuction procedure. Media
factory employs 42 people, 30 of reports said that Wang operated
5. Thailand Makes Chinese New Year a Public Holiday 232,564 whom have disabilities. Lu said on the victim, Zhang Jinhua, in
Thailand’s cabinet recently said Chinese New Year will be an official he hopes his factory will help 2010, who court medical experts
support his disabled employees said had fallen into a coma from
holiday. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the move would excessive anesthetic. Zhang, a
further strengthen China-Thailand relations. and thanks them for their trust. businesswoman, died in 2018 in
Hungary where she lived. Wang
Some of the images used in this section are from the internet

was arrested in 2020 thanks to

the tireless efforts of Zhang’s
husband. Media reports said
that while Zhang was 1.7 metres
tall and weighed 61.6 kilograms
before the operation, staff at the
cosmetic hospital where Wang
TOP BLOGGER PROFILE worked had convinced Zhang she
was overweight and required
immediate liposuction.

Ren Hailong
Followers: 14,204 by January 7
While he may not have many followers on Sina Weibo, Ren Hailong,
a migrant worker from Henan Province, made headlines in Party paper
the People’s Daily in December 2020 as a young model worker. An ex- Therapy Wall
serviceman, Ren, now 26, found online fame in October 2019 when he For years, Hu Dingguo, a man
posted a short video from his job at a shipyard in Dalian, northeastern in his 70s, has been building a
100-metre scale model of the
China’s Liaoning Province. Face covered in soot, Ren had just knocked off Great Wall as a way to cope with
the loss of his wife. Hu said that
after a long day, but he looked very excited. “I earned 300 yuan (US$46) his wife had always wanted to
visit the Great Wall but passed
today... It would be awesome if I could earn 300 yuan every day, then away 10 years ago before she
I could take my uncle [who raised me] travelling...” had the chance. Hu has spent Organic Furniture
four years working on the replica
he said in the video. He soon gained attention and 20,000 yuan (US$3,085) on Zhang Yongpeng of Shandong
materials. He plans to exhibit it Province has reportedly spent
nationwide for his winning smile and work ethic. eight years literally growing his
to the public free of charge once furniture business from the ground
Ren eventually left the shipyard, which he said he it is complete. up. He plants, prunes and shapes
trees as they grow into chairs
didn’t like, to livestream full-time in Hangzhou, that can be harvested. Zhang
told media that learning how to
Zhejiang Province. There he encourages young make branches twist and turn
took a lot of trial and error. He
people like himself to never give up on their tried over a dozen varieties and
over 40 techniques in the first year
dreams. Ren has more than one million followers alone. Although each chair is one
of a kind, some netizens criticised
on short-video platform Douyin, and told media Zhang, saying his efforts went
against the laws of nature.
that he had to work harder than ever to learn his
new occupation from scratch. “Keep peace in
your heart and never be frivolous,”
reads his profile on Weibo.

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

9
INTERNATIONAL
Ezra Vogel
END OF AN ERA?
The death of Ezra Vogel, a renowned American scholar on China, prompted tributes
from Chinese officials and scholars, as well as concerns over a generational change
in American scholars’ attitudes towards China
By Yu Xiaodong
E
zra Vogel, professor emeritus at Harvard University and a re-
nowned American scholar on Asian affairs, passed away at the
age of 90 on December 21, 2020 due to complications from
surgery, his family said. His death prompted waves of tributes in the
US, China and other Asian countries.
For decades, Vogel served as a bridge between the East and the West.
He was best known for his work studying the rise of two Asian pow-
ers – Japan and China. On Japan, his 1979 book Japan as Number
One: Lessons for America, an instant bestseller, was not only acclaimed
in both the US and Japan, but it inspired other Asian countries such as
Singapore to chart their own development course.
China Expert
On China, he was one of the first American scholars to focus on
the reform and opening-up policy that led to China’s rapid develop-
ment. Visiting China for the first time in 1973 during the era of late
Chairman Mao Zedong, Vogel travelled frequently to China in the
following decades. He lived in South China’s Guangdong Province for
a year, which led to his 1989 book One Step Ahead in China, Guang-
dong Under Reform.
But Vogel’s crowning achievement is his 2011 book Deng Xiaoping
and the Transformation of China. Based on 10 years of extensive travels
and research, including interviews with ordinary people, entrepreneurs
and top officials, the award-winning book provided in-depth insights
into one of the most important periods in China’s contemporary his-
tory. It is widely considered the most important political biography of
the late architect of China’s reform and opening-up.
“As an expert on China, Vogel represents those who understand,
respect and are willing to communicate with China,” said Professor
Wu Xinbo, director of the Centre for American Studies at Fudan
University in an article paying tribute to Vogel.
“He never displayed a condescending attitude. Quite the contrary,
he kept an open mind towards opinions from Chinese scholars. His
research on China was not based on American experience or the
10
American model, but from China's own environment and conditions,
and he focused on how China designed its own system and develop-
ment strategies according to its own needs,” Wu said.
In recent years, Vogel visited China at least once a year. In a 2015
interview with ChinaReport, Vogel said that as an American scholar on
China, he felt he had a responsibility to understand the true China and
present it in a broader historical background. Vogel also said he was
working on a book on Hu Yaobang, another iconic reform-minded
Chinese leader who held the top office of the Communist Party of
China from 1981 to 1987.
According to Ren Yi, an influential commentator who studied at
the Harvard Kennedy School and assisted Vogel on his book on Deng
Xiaoping in the 2000s, Vogel opted to first complete his 2019 book
China and Japan: Facing History, which reviews the history of political
and cultural ties between the two nations over 1,500 years.
“Fluent in both Chinese and Japanese and having spent a lifetime
studying the two countries, Vogel was always concerned about the re-
lationship between China and Japan, so he decided to finish this book
and postpone his project on Hu Yaobang,” said Ren in a blog post
on December 22 to commemorate Vogel. “It is a real shame [that he
couldn’t finish the book].”
‘An Old Friend’
Over the past couple of years, as US-China relations rapidly deterio-
rated under the Trump administration, Vogel was among the loudest
voices opposing the new direction in China policies.
In July 2019, he co-authored an open letter titled “China is not
an enemy.” Refuting former US President Donald Trump’s claim of a
consensus that US engagement with China had failed, the letter was
signed by more than 100 American academics, foreign policy experts
and military and business leaders who called on the US President and
Congress to re-examine their approach to China.
In April 2020, Vogel joined dozens of experts and former senior of-
ficials in a joint statement that urged the US to cooperate with China
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. In July 2020, he wrote an opinion
piece for the Washington Post, warning that US policies are “pushing
our friends in China towards anti-American nationalism.”
At a webinar of the Beijing Xiangshan Forum on December 1,
2020, Vogel said the election of Joe Biden to the US presidency will
bring new opportunities for the two sides to promote ties on three
levels – high-level meetings, exchanges between professionals, and at
the working level. Vogel said that the US and China should find a way
where they can compete with each other like sportsmen, but not fight
with each other like enemies.
At a regular press conference on December 21, China’s Foreign
Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin called him “an old friend of the
Chinese people.”
Praising Vogel for his “tireless efforts to promote communication
and exchanges between China and the US and to enhance the two
peoples’ mutual understanding,” Wang said that his contributions to
China-US relations “will not be forgotten.”
The same day, Chinese Ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai also
tweeted his condolences. “I have known Professor Vogel for a long

time and learned a great deal from him. I believe his ideas and com-
mitment will always have an impact on us,” Cui said. “His wisdom and
insight on China have been of immeasurable value not only to people
in the field of study, but also to the world.”
Many Chinese scholars shared their feelings and experiences related
to Vogel in both traditional and on social media. On Sina Weibo, a
major Chinese social media platform, the hashtag “Ezra Vogel” got
more than 400 million views.
‘A Huge Loss’
For many, Vogel’s passing adds to the perception that the influence
of the old generation of China experts is declining, as anti-China rhet-
oric seems to have become the new political correctness on the US
relationship with China.
“Even heavyweight figures like former US Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger have also lost influence,” reads a commentary titled “The
world needs more scholars who have deep understanding about Chi-
na” in Ming Pao, a Hong Kong-based paper.
Considered one of the most famous diplomats and a renowned
strategist on China who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, Kissinger,
who will turn 98 in 2021, was removed from the Defence Policy Board
on December 14 in a sudden purge of veteran experts by the Trump
administration.
“As politicians like [former] Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and
self-claimed China experts like Peter Navarro tried to revive McCar-
thyism, objective and rational voices of scholars who genuinely know
China have been drowned out by the fanfares of radical and extremist
China hawks,” it added.
Michael Swaine, director of the East Asia Programmeme at the
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a US think tank, tweeted
that the passing of Vogel is “a huge blow to the field, especially at this
Photo by VCG
Ezra Vogel holds a Chinese version of his book, Deng Xiaoping and the
Transformation of China
critical time, because Ezra was a major supporter of the effort to inject
greater sanity and balance into US thinking about China.”
In an article run by the State-owned Global Times on January 5, the
paper quoted Douglas Paal, vice president of studies at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and a former special assistant to
President George HW Bush, as saying that younger generations of
scholars on China studies in the US did not experience the dark peri-
ods of World War II or the Cold War, and lack first-hand experience of
the potential catastrophic consequences of great power struggles.
“The majority of the new generation of China researchers can nei-
ther speak fluent Chinese, nor have extensive experience of living in
China, and they lack the in-depth knowledge of China’s history and
reality,” reads the article, “The result is they primarily perceive the US-
China relationship from the perspective of a zero-sum game and safe-
guarding US supremacy.”
According to Ren Yi, unlike Vogel who is open-minded and genu-
inely respected his research subjects, many younger American scholars
and journalists, including those who speak Chinese and live in China,
tend to have a condescending attitude and an ideological bias against
China.
“I really think Vogel’s aspiration transcended that of most Western
and Chinese scholars,” Ren said, “What he did was something truly
great, that was promoting the mutual understanding and respect of
different civilisations for the sake of a better future for all humanity.”

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

11
POLITICS

Wei Jianguo

BREAKING BARRIERS
Former vice commerce minister argues that repetitive construction projects and homogeneous
competition stand as major obstacles to China constructing a single mass market
By He Bin

T
he annual Central Economic Work
Conference held in Beijing from
December 16-18, 2020 identified
expanding China’s domestic demand as the
main task for 2021.
The meeting stated that forming a strong
domestic market is an important bolster in
building a new development pattern. Con-
sumption, savings and investment need to
grow rationally.
Wei Jianguo, vice chairman of the Chi-
na Centre for International Economic
Exchanges and former vice minister of com-
merce, said in an exclusive interview with
ChinaReport that it is time to address copy-
Photo by CNS

cat construction projects and homogeneous

competition across the country to unleash
the potential of China’s mass market. Wei Jianguo

ChinaReport: What is the role of a single

mass market for China’s new development
pattern?
Wei Jianguo: The role of China’s mass
market is reflected in two areas: huge mar-
ket capacity and the large economy. Over
1.4 billion people aspire to live better lives.
The many second- and third-tier cities and
those in central and western China have
huge demand for development. There is also
enormous demand for both individual and
productive consumption.
The domestic market will be the main
body of China’s mass market. It’s expected
to form open, sound and secure supply and
industrial chains. Meanwhile, China’s mass
market should be attractive to the outside
world. In other words, market demand will
boost domestic economic growth and drive
economic recovery in other countries.
CR: What are the main obstacles China
faces in forming a mass market?
WJ: Over the past years, we see time and
again that many places benefit themselves
at the expense of their neighbours. There
are administrative barriers between different

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

12
cities. For example, some cities have require-
ments on the height, width and emissions
standards of vehicles. Even if vehicles com-
ply with national standards and are legal to
drive on highways, they are not allowed to
enter some cities. Against the backdrop of
the Covid-19 pandemic, some cities rejected
deliveries from hard-hit areas. In addition,
cities commonly set barriers for tax revenues,
logistics and human resources.
In the past, we were on alert for low-level
copycat construction projects. Some local
governments, however, argued that high-level
ones like scientific projects are not superflu-
ous. As a result, many of these white elephant
projects were undertaken. They were a stu-
pendous waste of land, capital and human
resources.
Some projects churned out products but
the price war drove up production costs and
slashed earnings, resulting in a vicious cycle.
They actually worked against ongoing sup-
ply-side reforms.
Cities in China’s urban clusters including
the Yangtze River Delta and the Beijing-
Tianjin-Hebei region are more competitive
than complementary, which decreases the
competitiveness of city clusters overall.
Some cities do not make the most of local
characteristics and development advantages.
They rushed to develop modern technology
and the digital economy. This homogeneous
competition has impeded the formation of a
dynamic mass market.
CR: What are the motivations behind
copycat projects and homogeneous competi-
tion?
WJ: There are four main reasons. First,
some local government officials and entre-
preneurs are out for quick success and instant
profits. Second, many localities see copycat
construction projects as a way to address
employment and social problems across the
board. Third, some local governments did
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
not grasp the central government’s overall
economic strategy and development layout.
They were overwhelmed by regional pro-
tectionism. Fourth, some local governments
lacked a rational, big-picture approach to
development. For example, when officials
visited other cities, they did not take full
consideration of their own conditions to find
long-term, stable, secure and open industrial
and supply chains.
CR: How can we solve these problems?
WJ: We need to stop superfluous construc-
tion projects and homogeneous competition
as soon as possible. Benefiting oneself at the
expense of your neighbours and encouraging
a closed market should be avoided. In addi-
tion, the central government has to adopt
more regulatory policies and eradicate copy-
cat infrastructure projects and homogeneous
competition from the start. Key projects that
are beneficial to society should be identified
and given the go-ahead.
Nowadays, cities across the country are
striving to promote urban planning and de-
velopment. An overall rational plan should
be considered when examining and ap-
proving urban construction projects, which
should become the yardstick to measure the
progress of China’s mass market.
CR: What is your advice for regulatory
policies?
WJ: To begin with, the National Develop-
ment and Reform Commission and its local
bureaus should scrutinise new projects more
prudently and kill those that fail to meet
standards. Local governments should not
pursue redundant projects under the pretext
of developing the local economy. Second,
administrative examination and supervisory
authorities should be more active in creat-
ing legal and institutional constraints on
copycat projects and homogeneous compe-
tition. Third, more precise and concentrated
top-level design should be given priority. As
a result, localities will know what to do next.
CR: Nowadays, data can be a barrier. For
example, it is required to register local health
code apps when travelling between cities. Will
it impede the formation of a mass market?
WJ: I think a city’s data should be recog-
nised by other cities in the absence of uni-
form national data. For example, data regard-
ing health code apps.
In addition, it is necessary to maximise the
role of data and make it available to more
institutions and enterprises such as customs
data and import and export data. Data is still
not being shared between government de-
partments. Alongside China’s drive to build
a mass market nationwide, it is urgent that
data is made available to more agencies.
The Central Economic Work Conference
proposed relaxing restrictions on market
access, promoting fair competition, protect-
ing intellectual property and constructing a
uniform mass market. It is crucial to build an
international business environment based on
the market and rule of law. Big data is key to
realise this. Data access and transparency are
crucial to constructing the modern market
economy system. I think the central govern-
ment will come up with more detailed guide-
lines on its implementation.
CR: Unified planning and control by the
central government seem to be contradictory
to the market-oriented allocation of resourc-
es. How do you see that?
WJ: The central government proposed
integrating top-level design and local devel-
opment with its own characteristics. Local
development should not run counter to the
mass market proposed by the central govern-
ment. There is a lot of work to do, and it is
crucial to combine economic development
with macro perspectives to build a perfect
institution with Chinese characteristics.
13
COVER STORY

NATURAL
CAUSES
Conservationists are realizing that
culture needs protecting as much as
biodiversity. ChinaReport investigates
how traditional views are reshaping
nature preservation

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

14
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
15
COVER STORY
Conservation
TRIBAL UNRAVELING
Well-intentioned efforts to conserve pristine forests and eradicate poverty have had a huge
impact on the lives of the Dulong people of southwestern China
By Wang Yan
“
My husband has left for a tough journey
hunting in the mountains / I am here at
home praying for his safety / I hope our
mountain god will protect him / I hope he
will come back as soon as possible.”
Sitting by her fire pit, 76-year-old Li
Wenshi sang a melodious folk song in the
Dulong language for the reporter and fel-
low villagers, on the night of October 18,
2020. One of these, Chen Yonghua, listened
thoughtfully to the lyrics. Later, Chen said
the song remindsed him of the lost tradition-
al lifestyle of the Dulong people.
“We Dulong often sing as we work or
when we celebrate festivals,” said 41-year-old
16
Chen, head of Dizhengdang Village affiliated
to Dulongjiang Township. “We love to sing,
and we also sing for our environment, in-
cluding the Dulong River, the snowy moun-
tains around us and all the wild animals in
our forests.”
Dulongjiang is known in China for its
well-preserved natural forests and environ-
ment and most importantly, its successful
poverty alleviation campaign. The township’s
Dulong ethnic group, once the least devel-
oped indigenous people in the mountainous
region of northwest Yunnan Province, close
to the border with Myanmar, has been suc-
cessful in eradicating extreme poverty, hitting
Photo by Xinhua
Dulong people started relocating
from their villages in the
mountain forests to riverside
settlements in the early 2000s
its target in 2018, two years ahead of the na-
tional anti-poverty goal. Annual income per
capita is 6,122 yuan (US$936), according
to official data. The national poverty line is
3,200 yuan (US$489).
Isolated Lives
One of the smallest ethnic groups in
China with a population of around 6,930
(2010 census), the Dulong have lived in
the Dulong River Valley, which is in the
northwest of Yunnan, for hundreds of years.
Rising in the high plateau of the Tibet
Autonomous Region, the Dulong River flows
through northwest Yunnan into Myanmar,
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
where it is called the N’Mai and forms one of
the headstreams of the Irrawaddy River. The
river flows about 80 kilometres into Yunnan,
sandwiched between Mount Dandanglika
on the west bordering Myanmar and Mount
Gaoligongshan to the east in Yunnan.
For thousands of years, the valley was se-
cluded and dangerous due to its harsh natural
environment and remote location. To out-
side explorers, the untouched natural beauty,
diverse culture and exotic tattooed faces of
the Dulong were enchanting.
Historically a vulnerable ethnic group op-
pressed and looted by much more powerful
clans from other ethnic groups including the
Tibetans, Naxi and Lisu, the Dulong kept to
themselves. By the 1950s, the Dulong were
still adhering to a patriarchal clan society,
with fishing, hunting and slash-and-burn ag-
riculture as their main sources of livelihood.
With favorable policies and State finan-
cial support, the Dulong developed quickly,
hailed as having “progressed 1,000 years in
one step” and as “an ethnic group that di-
rectly entered socialism from a state of being
primitive.” It has become a success story of
poverty eradication and nature preservation.
In 2019, Dulongjiang became the first place
to set up a 5G base station in Yunnan.
Criminal Bears
Dulongjiang Township is inside Gaoli-
gongshan National Nature Reserve and the
World Natural Heritage site of the Three
Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas.
A hotspot for biodiversity, the region boasts
2,278 species in 199 families of plants, 19
species of nationally protected wild animals
and 20 protected bird species.
At the end of the 1990s, the Chinese gov-
ernment started to enforce ecological protec-
tion. Apart from a ban on hunting, major
projects to enhance forest protection and the
Grain to Green project were launched in the
Dulong River Valley. Grain to Green started
in 1999, a conservation programme which
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
The wildlife of Gaoligongshan Nature Reserve, northwest Yunnan Province. Clockwise from top left:
Myanmar snub-nosed monkey, silver pheasant, red serow, a goat-antelope, and Sclater’s monal, a
type of pheasant
pays farmers to convert cropland into forests
to restore degraded land.
According to an article published in the
journal Social Sciences in Yunnan in 2008 by
ethnic Dulong researcher Li Jinming from
the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences,
at the beginning of 2003, before Grain to
Green started, the area of cultivated land in
Dulongjiang Township totalled 14,804.2
mu (9.87 km2), including 4,980.2 mu (3.32
km2) of fixed farming area and 9,824 mu
(6.94 km2) of land under crop rotation. After
the Grain to Green project started, 14,000
mu (9.33 km2) of farmland was reclaimed, al-
most 95 percent of the original farming area.
Due to the steep mountain topography,
flat land to farm on by the river is scarce,
so most people practised slash-and-burn ag-
riculture on the forested mountain slopes.
“However, the rules say that mountain slopes
with an angle greater than 25 degrees can’t be
farmed, which means villagers had to com-
pletely abandon their traditional ways of
planting,” Professor Guo Jianbin from the
School of Ethnology and Sociology at Yun-
nan University told ChinaReport. “This had
Photo by Xinhua
a dramatic impact on the Dulong people’s
livelihood, and as soon as they had to give up
traditional farming, they became idle.” This
was because they had no farmland to work,
while they were provided with subsidies and
staple foods like rice, Guo said.
“Previously each household had their own
patch of farmland in the forest which was ro-
tated. We haven’t been allowed to farm the
traditional way since 2000,” Li Wenshi said.
Li Yihua, 30, Li Wenshi’s daughter, said her
family owns only 2 mu (1,333 m2) of farm-
land near the family home to plant corn and
potatoes. Her family, like most locals, de-
pends on government subsidies to buy food
and daily necessities, she said.
Traditionally, the Dulong hunted with
crossbows and arrows dipped in poisonous
wolf’s bane [aconite, a toxic herb]. When
wildlife conservation stepped up after 2000,
hunting became illegal. Human-wildlife
conflicts have since increased, and property
damage is common. In Dizhengdang Village,
most families have had confrontations with
bears. In 2020, bears ate one of the Li family’s
sheep and ravaged their beehives.
17
COVER STORY
Tibet Autonomous
Region
Mt.Dandanglika
Dulongjiang Township
Dizhengdang
River
Gongshan County
ng
Dulo
Bapo
ng River
Lanca
Mt.Gaoligongshan
er
ng Riv
Nujia
Myanmar
Ma Cuiying, 30, Li Wenshi’s neighbour,
told the reporter that a bear had ruined her
cornfield in 2020. “A bear grabbed one of
our pigs from the pigpen behind our house
one day in May. Luckily my father heard the
pig squeal, and he shouted at the bear. After a
while, the bear gave up and ran away, and the
pig survived,” Ma said.
“I remember there weren’t so many bears
in the forests when I was young. These days,
bears eat livestock like chickens, ducks and
pigs, and they steal eggs. They ruin our crops
too,” said Li Wenshi. “But we’re forbidden
from taking action.” Compensation often
does not cover losses. According to Xue
Jinling, a researcher at the Yunnan Acad-
emy of Social Sciences, every household in
Dulongjiang suffered bear-related damage
to beehives in 2019. “Wildlife protection is
prominently at odds with livelihoods in Du-
longjiang,” Xue told ChinaReport.
Declining Culture
“Our people have benefited from favorable
policies and support from the government,
resulting in significant improvements to our
18
Yunnan
living standards,” said Zeng Xueguang, a
Dulong man who works at the Yunnan
Nationalities Museum in Kunming, the pro-
vincial capital of Yunnan. “However, there
are problems we really can’t ignore anymore,”
he told ChinaReport. Traditional culture is
declining at an alarming rate.
The Dulong used to believe in animism,
with rituals for different occasions. Influ-
enced by the Bon religion from the neigh-
bouring Tibetan culture, Dulong people
used to worship a regional mountain god,
or lha. “In our hunting culture, before we set
off, we’d make images of the animals we were
hunting out of buckwheat flour as offerings
to our lha,” said Meng Jisong, a Dulong from
Bapo Village in southern Dulongjiang. Meng
said that each village has their own mountain
god to protect them and bestow a good har-
vest and food upon them. Now, more Du-
long are turning to Christianity or atheism.
“In the past, we had rich cultural ceremonies.
We chanted prayers when we planted crops,
hunted or built houses. We have a strong
sense of conservation which forbids us from
felling trees at random,” said Chen Yonghua.
“Now I feel we don’t commune with our lha.”
According to Chen, the annual Dulong
Kaquewa Festival is held around January.
The precise time is decided by a village elder
or shaman. An ox is sacrificed to their lha
for bountiful hunts and harvests. Now, the
festival is not held regularly, and when it is,
authorities promote it as a tourist attraction.
As new roads connect Dulongjiang to the
outside world, the influx of mainstream cul-
ture in the internet era has severely impacted
the once isolated group. “Dulong culture is
not as resilient as other comparatively strong
ethnic groups like Tibetans or Naxi,” Xue
Jinling said.
Guo said that the abrupt change in diet
from wild game and traditional crops like
corn, millet and potatoes to processed foods
and other non-local staples like rice and milk
has had a huge effect. “The Dulong used to
get everything from food to clothing from
their natural surroundings. The impact of the
Grain to Green project has been huge. To an
extent, it completely severed the Dulong’s ties
to their environment,” he said.
Another major problem is the dwindling
population. “The sixth nationwide popula-
tion census [in 2010] already indicated nega-
tive population growth of Dulong from the
fifth nationwide population census [in 2000]
from 7,400 down to 6,930,” Professor Guo
said. “Data from the recently completed sev-
enth nationwide population census won’t be
released until mid-2021, but we can predict
with confidence that the figure will continue
to drop, which is in line with my personal
observations and research for over a decade.”
Although the Dulong were not subject to
China’s previous strict family planning policy
and are allowed to have three children per
family, Guo said young people are unwilling
to have large families.
Uncertain Future
Due to its unique significance as both a
borderland town and an impoverished ethnic
minority area, Dulongjiang received special
attention from provincial and national au-
CHINAREPORT I February 2021

Lorries selling staple food and daily necessities regularly visit Dizhengdang Village, Yunnan
Province, October 2020
thorities. Projects and investments aimed at
improving livelihoods poured into the valley.
According to Zhang Guohua, a village
official from Dizhengdang, training pro-
grammes for villagers in mushroom growing,
herb planting, animal husbandry and cook-
ing are yet to yield any fast or effective ways
for locals to earn sustainable sources of in-
come. The only successful cash crop is caoguo
(Fructus tsaoko, also known as tsaoko fruit), a
spice related to the ginger family often used
for hotpot seasoning.
“Without sufficient research [beforehand],
many poverty alleviation projects were un-
successful,” Guo said. “For example, one local
government tried yak farming, but the high-
altitude animal of course couldn’t survive in
the local climate.” Even for the relatively suc-
cessful caoguo planting industry, Guo said he
had reservations.
“The market fluctuates a lot so it can’t en-
sure long-term incomes. Besides, widespread
forest floor planting of caoguo may cause
plant diversity to decline, threatening biodi-
versity conservation.” Excessive caoguo plant-
ing as a monoculture in the forest means
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
Photo by Wang Yan
other species struggle to survive.
Guo’s concerns are echoed by Dulong who
live in Bapo Village. The climate is suitable
for caoguo and almost all households grow it,
making it the main source of income.
According to Meng Jisong from Bapo, the
price of caoguo peaked in 2017 at 20 yuan
(US$3) per kilogram, but it dropped by half
in 2019.
“If the price continues to drop, there’s no
room for profit because planting it is time-
and labour-intensive,” Meng said.
Apart from caoguo planting, authorities
tried to develop tourism, which poses its own
threats to conservation. But in 2020, hit by
the Covid-19 pandemic and unprecedented
heavy rains from June to October that result-
ed in road-blocking landslides, tourism was
not as lucrative as they hoped.
“In the past, we knew exactly how much
we could grow and harvest, and we took
pride in forest farming, but now we depend
mostly on government subsidies,” Zeng Xue-
guang said. “We might seem happy, but we
don’t know how long the subsidies will last,
so it leaves us feeling uncertain.”
Photo by Wang Yan
Li Wenshi sits by her fire as she sings a traditional
Dulong song, Dizhengdang Village, Yunnan
Province, October 2020
“In my opinion, the Dulong’s traditional
slash-and-burn agriculture is ecologically
friendly, not primitive or damaging to the
forest,” Guo said.
“It’s much better to allow them to gradu-
ally transition their way of life rather than
abruptly changing it under a nationwide
across-the-board policy,” he said.
Li Heng, a 93-year-old researcher at the
Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Acad-
emy of Sciences, told ChinaReport that the
shuidonggua (Alnus cremastogyne), a native
fast-growing deciduous tree used by Dulong
people in slash-and-burn agriculture, pro-
vides firewood, lumber and fertilizer, and is
not destructive to the environment.
Nowadays, despite being a violation of
Grain to Green project regulations, some
villagers in Dizhengdang have gone back
to farming in the northern mountains of
Dulongjiang. Ma Cuiying told the reporter:
“During the growing season, our family
walks four hours back to our old plots in the
mountains. We’ve started growing potato,
taro and corn again, and we are looking for-
ward to a good harvest this year.”
19
 COVER STORY
Conservation
ROOTED IN NATURE
In Naren, a village hidden in virgin forests in northwestern Yunnan, locals try to maintain
their connection with the environment despite encroachment from the outside world
By Wang Yan
S
ome 200 kilometres to the east of
Dulongjiang, in the domain of the
World Natural Heritage Landscape
of the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Pro-
tected Areas, there lies China’s most intact
virgin forest landscape. The small village of
Naren nestles in the mountains between the
headwaters of the Langcang and Jinsha riv-
ers, which downstream become the Mekong
and the Yangtze.
In late October our correspondent walked
in the virgin forest surrounding the village
with Lu Rong, 56, a Naren villager and for-
est ranger employed by Baima Snow Moun-
tain National Nature Reserve. They observed
20
hares, pheasants and wild birds with bright
plumages — yellow, blue or red. They
smelled the fresh moist air mixed with the
scent of fungi, pine needles and towering fir
trees, and felt the soft soil covered with fallen
leaves, fern and mosses.
Lu looked up at the verdant mountain for-
est with an average altitude of over 3,500 me-
tres. He pointed and said that every August, a
group of over 450 Yunnan snub-nosed mon-
keys migrated from the nearby reserve and
stayed in the forest for a couple of months.
The Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, a species
famous for its red lips and pink face, is indig-
enous. It has been classified as Endangered
Photo by Wang Yan
An overview of Naren Village, Yunnan
Province, October 2020. The village has a
monastery on its central hill and it is also
building a nature education centre
on the International Union for Conservation
of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened
Species with a total population of less than
3,500. Its habitat is the mountains border-
ing Yunnan Province and Tibet Autonomous
Region at 3,000 metres above sea level.
Endangered Monkeys
Baima Reserve in Diqing Tibetan Autono-
mous Prefecture of Yunnan Province was
set up in the late 1980s specifically to study
and conserve this unique monkey species.
According to Sina Cili, one of the reserve’s
managers, there are three groups of monkeys
in the conservation area. One group stays
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
inside the reserve, the other two mainly live in
the forests around Naren and the neighbour-
ing village of Bamei. “In Naren, the group
increased from over 100 in the late 1990s
to 450 or so because of all the efforts by the
reserve and its neighbouring communities,”
Sina told the reporter in late October 2020.
Due to large-scale commercial logging over
the past few decades in northwestern Yun-
nan, which continued until the late 1990s,
the natural habitat of the Yunnan snub-nosed
monkey has significantly diminished. “They
used to live inside the reserve, however the
forests were partly destroyed due to road
construction, so they migrated to our village
where the forests remain intact,” Lu said.
“I began working as a forest ranger in the
late 1990s, and I normally patrol the moun-
tains twice a month,” he said. Lu said he is so
enchanted with the monkeys, even obsessed,
that he follows them wherever they go.
During the last two decades, in contrast
to the previous over-exploitation of natural
resources from the 1960s to the 1980s, the
need for environmental protection and bio-
diversity preservation started to gain ground
in most parts of China, including Deqin,
the county which administers Naren Village.
Now, there are 40 volunteer forest rangers,
one from each village household. They take
part in twice-monthly patrols to monitor il-
legal hunting and logging.
The conservation measures mean that the
population of Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys
has increased from 1,500 in the 1990s to
3,500 today.
Prayers and Mountain Gods
Every morning, as the sun rises and the
village awakens, households in Naren, a re-
mote ethnic Tibetan village, burn incense
and juniper on the flat roofs of their homes.
As the white smoke curls up and away, Lu
Rong throws grains into the air as offerings
and chants Tibetan prayers to the mountain
gods. “We pray to the three mountain gods
of our village and Kawakarpo, our regional
lha (god), to protect us wherever we go, en-
sure our harvests are good, for good weather
throughout the year with enough rainfall,
and for the prosperity and peace of our vil-
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
Lu Rong (centre) and other Naren villagers pray and burn incense to their local mountain
god, or lha, every morning
lage and of all sentient beings across the
world,” Lu said. “Every day begins with this
ceremony and occasionally the villagers go to
the monastery in our village to conduct the
ceremony together. It’s a routine passed down
for generations.”
“Apart from its religious connotations in
connecting humans with the natural world,
burning incense, juniper, pine and rhodo-
dendron branches during the prayer ceremo-
nies is a way to purify the air and stop the
spread of diseases, a way to harmonise rela-
tionships among people. It originated from
ancient Tibetan culture thousands of years
ago,” said Luo Ga, a Tibetan doctor and
herbal medicine producer in Diqing.
“In the ecological system of Tibetans, any
living beings including animals, plants and
human beings equally coexist and no species
is prioritised, even though some are vocal and
some are not,” Luo told ChinaReport in late
November 2020.
This traditional belief system was abruptly
interrupted in the 1960s through to the
1980s due to the Cultural Revolution (1966-
76) and other social turmoil in China’s mod-
ern history. In Naren, like other places across
the country, hunting wildlife was legal and
widespread. It resulted in the near extinction
of many wild species. In the late 1990s, as the
country started to enforce wildlife protection
Photo by Wang Yan
laws, regional reserves like Baima began to
have an effect. In Naren, the revival of Bud-
dhist beliefs as well as teachings from monks
and Lamas, who called on villagers to stop
hunting, reversed the crisis.
“Our Lama came to give teachings in the
late 1990s, and all the villagers were asked to
vow in front of the Lama never to hunt again
and prevent outsiders from entering our for-
ests to poach,” 30-year-old Nima, a Naren
resident, told the reporter.
“We started regular forest patrols and
cleared away wire traps. Gradually we began
to see a recovery in wildlife numbers,” Nima
said. Images of many species including the
Chinese goral, a type of antelope, and leop-
ards that had not been seen for years were
captured again by infrared cameras.
Since Baima Reserve was established, au-
thorities realised the importance of involving
local people, so they encouraged villagers in
and near the reserve to help protect endan-
gered species like the Yunnan snub-nosed
monkey. Environmental NGOs including
the WWF, the Nature Conservancy and
Conservation International started com-
munity-based conservation programmes in
Yunnan’s northwest.
Involving local communities in conser-
vation has proved effective in China. For
Tibetan communities in particular, the com-
21
COVER STORY
Dust rises after a mountain slope is blasted for a dam construction project on the Jinsha River near
Sarong Village, northwest Yunnan Province, October 2020. Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys migrate to
this area every autumn
A Yunnan snub-nosed monkey photographed by a camera trap in the
forest near Naren Village, Yunnan Province
bination of their traditional religion, cultural
customs and modern scientific conservation
measures has resulted in success stories. Con-
servation organisations realised that religious
and cultural beliefs provide entry points to
spread the conservation message.
22
Baima Reserve, is to cooperate with religious
leaders in disseminating conservation con-
cepts and environmental protection among
festival goers.
Traditional Governance
“In the past, we didn’t have widespread
commercial logging in our village. It allowed
our forests to survive, so today we expect to
continue our lifestyle while at the same time
continuing to protect our mountain for-
Photo by Wang Yan
ests,” Lu Rong said. Rules devised by village
households mean the utilisation of all natu-
ral resources from water distribution for ir-
rigation purposes to firewood collection are
all strictly and fairly managed, Lu said. This
type of intact village governance system is
rare now, even in China’s most remote rural
areas. Residents share responsibility for build-
ing and paying for public facilities, and joint
decisions on public affairs are made through
full negotiation and the participation of all
households.
“The traditional self-governance system for
rural villages is a proven and effective way to
manage natural resources and conserve ecol-
Photo Courtesy of Shanshui Conservation Centre
ogy. It can’t be substituted by government
and natural reserve regulations,” Guo Jing, a
researcher from Yunnan Academy of Social
Sciences told ChinaReport in early January
2021.
“For my generation and my son’s genera-
tion, we followed the traditional lifestyle by
farming and grazing livestock in the moun-
tains, but our grandchildren’s generation has
mostly gone to the city for higher education.
Their future livelihood is uncertain, and
that’s what concerns us most at the moment,”
Lu Rong and other villagers said.
“The core issue is to find substitute liveli-
hoods to ensure sustainable development for
local people,” Sina said. Ecotourism has been
One way is participating in local tradi- promoted by Deqin County and hailed as
tions. In late autumn, the reporter joined a potential promising industry. “However,
staff from Baima Reserve to participate in there hasn’t been any substantial progress so
Gedong, a Buddhist festival at Dongzhulin far. Lack of infrastructure and supporting
Buddhist Monastery in Deqin County. The facilities has hampered the development of
main purpose, according to Sina Cili from ecotourism.”
CHINAREPORT I February 2021

Naren has been trying to find its own way.
Apart from collecting and selling mushrooms
from the forests as a basic source of income,
since 2013, villagers have experimented with
cash crops, including maca (Lepidium mey-
eni or Peruvian ginseng), peonies and Paris
polyphylla, a medicinal plant.
“Some were successful for a while, and
some failed. We started planting quinoa in
2016, and so far the market is good,” said
village leader Ah Song. Young villagers are
also contributing. Pin Chu, a villager in his
late 20s, returned to Naren after graduating
college. He set up a company to create the
village’s own brand to sell forest products
directly to consumers, which will earn more
money for the community.
One of the most promising initiatives is a
nature education centre with state-of-the-art
facilities targeting nature lovers. The Yunnan
snub-nosed monkey has attracted attention
from academics and conservationists, so
Naren was helped by environmental organ-
isations including Wild China Film and the
Shanshui Conservation Centre. “Based on the
support we have, we plan to train the young
generation in plant and wildlife biodiversity, so
they will become guides for ecotourism activi-
ties in our forests,” Ah Song said.
Different Choices
As Naren tries to maintain its close ties with
the environment, other villages made different
decisions. In Sarong, a village clinging to the
mountains in the next valley, over 33 house-
holds decided to relocate to a new village on
the banks of the Jinsha River in 2017. After
each household was offered 155,000 yuan
(US$24,010) in compensation for their land,
villagers agreed to allow a dam project in the
valley which started in April 2020. The dam
project has been through an environmental
impact assessment and was approved by envi-
ronment authorities.
However, problems emerged as soon as the
project got underway. Deforestation is causing
the Sarong villagers to worry about the pollu-
tion and environmental damage on the fragile
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
Tibet Autonomous
Region
Deqin County
Baima Snow Mountain
River
ng
Dulo
Gongshan Shangri-La city
Naren
Jin
ha
s
Ri
ng River
ve
r
Lanca
iver
Nujiang R
Yunnan
Myanmar
forest ecosystem. “The scale of destruction of complicated and it is already beyond my imagi-
the forests is larger than we thought, but more nation and control.” Changes are taking place
importantly, the dust caused by the construc- everywhere, just like the city of Shangri-La it-
tion is likely to impact the harvesting of the self, initially an imagined fairyland in English
Tricholoma matsutake (a high-priced mush- writer James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon,
room), a major income source for local villag- which has now changed into an unremarkable
ers,” said Cili Kezhu, 29, a villager from Sarong. tourist destination with clusters of concrete
“Besides, this dust, if it drifts away and falls buildings, paved roads and crowds of people.
on a larger area, may pollute the lichen in the Villagers in Sarong still hope the environ-
virgin forests, a major source of nutrition for mental remediation promised by the dam
snub-nosed monkeys, which will threaten the contractors will restore the lost forest when the
monkeys’ survival. project is finished in 2024, yet no one is sure
As the reporter visited Sarong in late Novem- whether they will fulfil their pledges. Anwu
ber, she witnessed the destruction of a whole Nongbu, a villager from Sarong showed the
forested slope, with plumes of dust blown far reporter a couple of wire snares he found and
and wide. No one knows if the project will cleared from the forest in July and August. It
negatively impact the endangered snub-nosed is proof that as the villagers moved away from
monkeys. their forests, poachers from outside snuck back
Ci Cheng, a Tibetan novelist from Sarong in.
Village, said that every family had a sacred tree “Almost all the villagers around here decided
near their home. The tree was protected, and to relocate to lower altitudes on the riverbank
it in turn protected the home and the family. for convenient transportation and a warmer
Ci strongly opposed relocating the village, but climate. We could get annual government sti-
now accepts the changes in his hometown are pends and free houses built by the State, but
unavoidable. Referring to the future develop- we choose to stay in Naren where our ances-
ment of Sarong Village, he admitted to the tors have lived for generations,” Lu Rong said.
reporter during an interview in Shangri-La “This is a blessed site with the best forests in
City, the seat of Diqing government: “I now Deqin, the real remaining Shangri-La in our
feel I can’t predict the potential direction of the minds, and we want to continue living here
village, as the situation is so fast-changing and and protecting these forests.” 
23

COVER STORY
Conservation
ORGANIC THINKING
Guo Jing, a Yunnan Province-based researcher, talks with ChinaReport
about the importance of biocultural diversity preservation and his
expectations for the upcoming UN Biodiversity Conference in China
By Wang Yan
T
he 15th Meeting of the Conference
of the Parties of the United Nation’s
Convention on Biological Diver-
sity (CBD COP15) is scheduled for later
this year in Kunming, capital of Southwest
China’s Yunnan Province under the frame-
work “Ecological Civilisation: Building a
Shared Future for All Life on Earth.”
The progress and problems of biodiversity
preservation in Yunnan’s northwest, where
ChinaReport recently visited, are a micro-
cosm of others found across the country.
Northwest Yunnan is among the world’s 36
biodiversity hotspots, or areas rich in endem-
ic species whose habitat is under threat.
Rather than barring locals from living on
nature reserves, China has seen more com-
munity-based conservation activities since
early 2000. In Sangjiangyuan National Park
on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the govern-
ment has recruited over 17,000 Tibetan
nomads to work as forest rangers.
In China, the central government en-
dorsed the role of local communities in its
national park system. Internationally, con-
servationists and scientists have reached the
consensus that conservation practices require
multidisciplinary approaches, and that the
ultimate goal of biodiversity conservation is
harmony between humans and nature.
In an article titled “Embracing diverse
worldviews to share planet Earth” published
in the journal Conservation Biology in 2019,
the authors wrote that the cosmologies and
spiritualities of many indigenous peoples and
24
other groups are anchored in specific territo-
rial contexts that offer alternative relation-
ships between humans and nature. “Indeed,
even the term ‘human-nature relationship’
is itself problematic to the extent that it re-
inforces a dichotomy between humans and
other species. It is perhaps better to talk of a
biosocial complex that encompasses all living
species and the relationships among them,”
continued the article.
Guo Jing, an anthropologist and research
fellow at the Yunnan Academy of Social Sci-
ences, has studied cultural and environmen-
tal issues in northwest Yunnan since the mid-
1990s. In an interview with ChinaReport
in January, Guo talks of the importance of
incorporating biocultural diversity in nature
conservation.
ChinaReport: How did biodiversity con-
servation in northwest Yunnan begin?
Guo Jing: In the 1990s, there were two
important events in northwest Yunnan in-
volving two snow-capped mountains across
the Lancang (Mekong) River watershed: Bai-
ma Snow Mountain and Kawakarpo, both
sacred mountains for ethnic Tibetans. In the
early 1990s, local Tibetan communities pro-
tested attempts to summit Kawakarpo by for-
eign climbers due to the mountain’s cultural
and religious significance. One expedition
team from Japan and China was engulfed
by an avalanche, resulting in the deaths of
17 people. Every expedition in the years that
followed was unsuccessful. In 2001, the local
The images from the book Nyanpo
Yutse Chorography illustrate the Tibetan
understanding of biodiversity: “If you put
your hand on the pastureland, there are
seven herbs under your palm that can
cure diseases; if your whole body is lying
on the grass, the herbs underneath your
body can treat all the diseases of your
body.”
Nyanpo Yutse Conserva-
Photo Courtesy of
tion Association
government passed laws banning all sum-
mit attempts on cultural and religious sites.
On Baima Snow Mountain, the discovery
of Yunnan snub-nosed monkey populations
led to the creation of a nature reserve in the
1980s. Poaching was rampant across the re-
gion at that time, while commercial logging
threatened to wipe out the mountain forests
of Yunnan’s Diqing Tibetan Autonomous
Prefecture. When the Natural Forest Protec-
tion Project was implemented nationwide
and authorities endorsed the protection of
endangered Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys,
logging activities on Baima Snow Mountain
ceased. The local government was forced to
transition its economy from logging to tour-
ism. Suddenly, modern ideas of environmen-
tal protection, mountain climbing and tour-
ism, which locals had never heard of before,
were everywhere.
[The Tibetan] traditional system of belief
does not include environmental awareness.
They feel that the environment does not
need to be protected. It’s the environment
that protects us. This is the source of con-
flict and intolerance between imported envi-
ronmental protection ideas and local beliefs.
These culture shocks were a turning point for
northwest Yunnan.
Previously, local communities maintained
their cultural relationship with the land
through reverence of sacred natural sites. But
in the context of globalization, these rela-
tionships could no longer exist in isolation as
they did in the past, and they had to face the
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
 challenges of modern materialism.
Then the concept of nature con-
servation was introduced. Adapt-
ing and merging with cultural
understandings of sacred natural
sites, this was a catalyst for envi-
ronmental awareness in local
communities.
When Diqing prefecture
seat was renamed Shangri-La
[in 2001], a utopian image
that appeals to Western tastes
and environmental protection
was developed in step with tourism.
CR: Can biodiversity conservation
be separated from cultural diversity?
GJ: I’ll continue using northwestern
Yunnan as an example. In the late 1990s
and early 2000s, the Nature Conservancy
(TNC) came to Yunnan to conduct con-
servation programmes. However, TNC
couldn’t carry out its routine methods of
conservation through enclosure in north-
western Yunnan, a place with millions of peo-
ple from different ethnic groups. To solve this
problem, TNC invited over 80 local experts in
ecology, botany and ethnology to participate
in field research. This led to a fundamental
change for local researchers as well as for TNC,
who developed a new set of strategies by com-
bining biodiversity, cultural diversity and sus-
tainable livelihoods. I also participated in the
research, and in one of my papers I highlighted
the idea that a mountain is also a sacred place,
indicating that indigenous people imbue their
environment with cultural significance, which
defines their relationship with nature. When
TNC brought these ideas back to the US, they
caused heated debate among conservationists.
Their work in northwestern Yunnan to in-
corporate cultural diversity into biodiversity
preservation contributed to changes in envi-
ronmental protection movements worldwide.
In recent years, researchers have promoted
biocultural diversity, a combination of bio-
logical and cultural research to bridge the gap
between nature and social sciences, establish a
biocultural perspective and advocate a biocul-
tural approach to environmental protection.
However, in China and in some other parts
of the world, neither academia nor govern-
ments have sufficiently acknowledged the
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
interconnection between indigenous cultures
and environmental preservation. However,
I have personally witnessed many successful
attempts at integrating the two through local
environmental NGOs. During my field re-
search, I observed that systems with local reli-
gious and secular organisations are helpful for
the management of natural resources. What
I’m most concerned about is whether these
management systems will continue to exist.
If they do, change is possible. But in many
places in China, apart from the government,
the original management systems have been
shattered or even destroyed. I think it’s a very
important issue.
CR: While China’s achievements in bio-
diversity conservation are significant and we
have seen the recovery of many endangered
species, what do you think still needs to be
strengthened?
GJ: I have learned that in some places with
rich biodiversity in northwest Yunnan, cultur-
al diversity is depleting faster than the biodi-
versity of its surrounding forests. In China and
around the globe, cultural diversity loss will
come earlier than biodiversity loss because the
international community has already come to
a political consensus on preserving biodiver-
sity. But cultural diversity remains very contro-
versial across the world. Cultural conflicts pose
challenges for all countries.
The destruction of cultural diversity in-
volves two main aspects: religious beliefs and
traditional community management sys-
tems, particularly those in rural regions. In
rural China, for example, the traditional self-
governance system for rural villages has been
effective in managing natural resources and
conserving the ecology through the years. It
can’t be substituted by government and natu-
ral reserve regulations. So I feel the most chal-
lenging problem now is maintaining cultural
diversity rather than biodiversity.
It is widely acknowledged that China has
made many achievements in biodiversity pres-
ervation, but the public and the authority do
not give enough attention to cultural diversity
issues. In particular, policies including ecologi-
cal migration or relocation programmes have
resulted in loss of cultural diversity, which in
turn affects biodiversity. This is a key problem
that we should address going forward.
CR: What’s the difference between views on
conservation among indigenous groups and
mainstream nature conservation in the West?
GJ: In fact, conservation in the West has
changed a lot in recent decades, from the ear-
liest form of fortress-like environmental pro-
tection that excluded indigenous peoples, like
Yellowstone National Park, to community-
based conservation models that integrate the
wisdom of local cultures and their traditional
mechanisms for resource management. But as
you mentioned, the worldviews of local peo-
ples should be cherished and respected. For
example, every species of wildlife and plant
shares a relationship to humans in traditional
Tibetan culture. The vulture serves as a con-
nection to heaven, as the bird plays a crucial
role in sky burial (which involves exposing
the corpse to vultures). While reading Nyanpo
Yutse Chorography, a book on the biodiversity
of a sacred mountain in southern Qinghai
Province based on field research by local Ti-
betans from 2010- 2019, I was astonished at
how biodiversity conservation is represented
in a worldview completely different from the
mainstream.
The Tibetan authors introduce the human-
nature relationship through the Tibetan sys-
tem of classification rather than the Linnaean
taxonomy, or rank-based classification, which
presents existing environmental perceptions
through a different lens, a mind-blowing ex-
perience when you read it. If the book can be
translated into English and presented at CBD
COP 15, it would surely cause a sensation.
CR: How do you understand the CBD
COP15 theme “Ecological Civilisation: Build-
ing a Shared Future for All Life on Earth”?
GJ: Overall trends in biodiversity conser-
vation are to integrate humanity into life on
Earth, while changing the contradictory stance
of humans versus nature to one of integration
and inseparable unity. In my view, all life on
Earth should be exemplified through two
communities: one of individuals and the envi-
ronment, or all lives on Earth, and all cultures.
A serious problem humans now face is cultural
conflict, especially in the past two years, which
seems to have resulted in the disintegration
of some groups. The two communities are
interdependent, and our biodiversity goals
won’t be reached without them.
25
SOCIETY
Rural Governance
Running of the Bullies
Lack of supervision and support systems in rural China are a major reason why some
village officials turn into local tyrants, experts say
By Zhou Qunfeng and Xie Ying
B
y November 2020, 41,700 village officials had been fired over
involvement in gang-related activity or bullying. Of these,
3,727 were punished or penalised, according to the WeChat
account of the Central Politics and Law Commission (CPLC).
Among the charges were monopolizing village resources, embez-
zling village lands for private use and engaging in criminal activity.
Despite the grievances of villagers, many officials held their posts for
years through intimidation, coercion and other nefarious means.
Analysts attribute the phenomenon to China’s system of rural gov-
ernance, which leaves much room for illegal behaviour. An amend-
ment to China’s Constitution in 1982 ensured “self-governance” at
the village level, allowing for an elected village committee to manage
local affairs. According to regulations, village self-governance includes
four democratic pillars: elections, decision-making, management
and supervision. Due to lack of support systems, the latter three are
mostly ignored.
“China’s open political environment in villages and vast grey zones
for illegal economic activities provided fertile soil for village hood-
lums,” Lü Dewen, a researcher at the Rural Governance Institute,
Wuhan University, told ChinaReport.
Long Were Their Reigns
On November 28, 2020, a court in Zouping, Shandong Province
heard the case of Zhang Shixue, former Party secretary and commit-
tee director of nearby Weiqiao Village. Charged with a laundry list of
crimes including organizing gang activity, embezzling public resourc-
es, disturbing the peace, disrupting village production, loan fraud and
illegal firearm possession, Zhang, 63, was sentenced to 19 years and
eight months in prison.
26
A son of the former village Party secretary, Zhang became a mem-
ber of the village committee in 1997 despite only having a primary
school education. From 2003 to 2017, Zhang served as village Party
secretary, the highest local post. During that time, he also served as vil-
lage committee director for seven years. Before every election, Zhang
bribed voters with valuables such as mobile phones and threatened
those who intended to vote otherwise.
According to Liu Qingbin, a resident of Weiqiao Village, more than
500 villagers did not vote for Zhang in 2011. In retaliation, Zhang
withheld their annual bonuses of foods and other items for Chinese
New Year. “Zhang told them that he paid for the New Year goods
distributed to villagers from his own pocket, but they were actually
paid for by the village committee,” he told ChinaReport.
Another villager who refused to reveal his name told ChinaReport
that Zhang prevented those who did not vote for him from register-
ing their children for residence permits.
Zhang squeezed out his political rivals. “Zhang pushed me out be-
cause I often objected to his opinions,” Cheng Chuanbing, a former
village committee director of Weiqiao Village, told ChinaReport. In
2014, Zhang split the village committee into two groups. He and his
followers used the new office building, while the rest met in an old,
run-down house, Cheng claimed. For three years until Zhang finally
lost reelection in 2017, the two groups worked separately, creating a
major obstacle to village administration.
In November 2020, the Central Commission for Disciplinary
Inspection (CCDI), China’s top disciplinary watchdog, posted on
its website about the corruption case of Shi Fenggang, former Party
secretary and committee director of Xinzhuang Village in Beijing’s
Fengtai District, who was charged with forging documents and
CHINAREPORT I February 2021

Photo by Zhou Qunfeng
Villager Liu Qingbin points to a plot of land that former village head Zhang
Shixue illegally repossessed by voiding the lease contract
bribery to attain his post. Once elected, he filled all the major posi-
tions with close relatives or followers. He made decisions unilaterally,
which eventually drove other officials to resign.
To maintain his autocratic rule, Shi arranged for his son to take
over his post and be elected as a delegate to Fengtai District People’s
Congress. A former village official told ChinaReport on condition
of anonymity that Shi kept tabs on villagers using dozens of hidden
voice recorders.
“After the Organic Law of Villager Committees issued in 1998,
many villages held open elections, but bribery, intimidation and lack
of supervision were rampant,” Lü said.
According to the CPLC report, the punished village officials were
charged with meddling in 826 village elections to acquire their posts,
with the longest tenure lasting 37 years. Among the officials, 762 had
extended family clans supporting them.
Local Tyrants
According to Lü, profiting from public resources is a major reason
why village toughs seek and hold official posts.
“Reform and opening-up has transformed village economies, but
due to poor supervision and lack of supportive laws and regulations,
many areas are still beyond legal jurisdiction, such as the use and de-
velopment of public lands,” Lü said.
“That’s why village hoodlums are rare in western and moderately
poor areas in China, but are rife in wealthier and more economically
active areas, especially those with abundant natural resources such as
minerals,” he added.
Zhang Shixue illegally repossessed a plot of land whose lease had
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
not expired. “The land contract was won in an open bid, but Zhang
said it was null. He cut off electricity and water to the land,” Cheng
said. During interviews, ChinaReport learned that Zhang’s family and
clan had started numerous businesses on the land he repossessed, in-
cluding a paper mill, coal mine and restaurants.
Similarly, Shi Fenggang, according to the CCDI report, used more
than 10,000 square metres of public forest in the west of the village
for a private garden with a pavilion, pond and greenhouse. He report-
edly forced villagers to transfer their land to him at very low prices by
cutting off power, digging huge ditches in front of their houses and
charging exorbitant sanitation fees. Sometimes the encounters were
tragic. Shi’s cronies threatened and surrounded an elderly villager over
transferring land to Shi. The villager collapsed due to a stroke.
According to the report, Shi pocketed 580 million yuan
(US$85.3m) from illegal land acquisitions and demolitions. The vil-
lagers called him a “local tyrant.” Shi lived in an enormous villa, where
he hoarded 7 million yuan (US$1m) in cash, more than 30 kilograms
of gold and countless luxury items, including expensive cigarettes,
alcohol, jewellry, calligraphy and artwork.
Unrestrained Power
That is why the public deplores “flies,” a term to describe low-level
corrupt officials more than State-level corrupt “tigers,” as they deal
directly with ordinary citizens and are harder to supervise.
“There aren’t really any checks and balances on village self-gover-
nance and the transparency, fairness and supervision the central gov-
ernment requires for rural governance exists only on paper,” Zheng
Fengtian, a professor at the School of Agricultural Economics and
Rural Development, Renmin University of China, told ChinaReport.
His view echoes a People’s Daily article from 2015 following the
CCDI’s report on corrupt village heads which pointed out that “vil-
lage bullies” operate due to a lack of supervision.
“Some towns oversee more than 10 villages... higher departments
don’t usually have enough personnel to supervise them properly.
Besides, some villages are in the mountains, far from the town, mak-
ing supervision even more difficult,” Chen Yupeng, a county-level
Party secretary in Yunnan Province, told the Party paper.
Local supervision is near non-existent as villagers are unaware of
their legal rights. This is sometimes by design. Some village officials,
according to the People’s Daily report, forged government releases to
misinform both villagers and more senior watchdogs.
A big reason is the flow of young rural dwellers to cities, Zheng
said. “The ones that stay are mostly senior citizens who are neither
physically strong nor educated enough to fight back against these ruf-
fians,” he said. “So, public empowerment in those villages is next to
nothing,” he added.
Zheng said that although every village has a mediation committee
27
SOCIETY
Shi Fenggang is sentenced to life imprisonment at Beijing Second
Intermediate People’s Court, September 14, 2020
to resolve disputes, they are usually ineffective as few villagers dare stir
up trouble, especially when their issues involve village officials.
Local law enforcement is also susceptible to village toughs.
Villager Wei Lijun recalled that Zhang Shixue once publicly
claimed the local police station belonged to his son.
Many villagers alleged that a decade earlier, Zhang burned the vil-
lage’s account books and beat other officials to prevent them from
going public with the village’s annual expenditures.
“They [Zhang and his followers] stormed into the office with
blades and clubs and beat anybody they saw... When I found that
two account books and the official stamps were missing, I called the
police. The local police chief came with another eight officers, but
they didn’t stop the violence,” Cheng said. In the presence of the po-
lice, Zhang and his followers hit Cheng on the head and injured two
other officials, Cheng added.
In 2017, law information portal jcrb.com exposed how a village
Party secretary surnamed Liang in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Auton-
omous Region enacted vigilante justice against a villager surnamed
Zhou who struck Liang’s wife in a car accident, killing her. According
to the report, Liang and his posse seized Zhou and dug a pit in front
of her grave, intending to bury him alive. Police were called to the
scene, but Liang and his clan refused to comply. Given the size of his
gang, the first batch of police officers protected Zhou by jumping
into the pit with him until backup of 130 police officers arrived.
In 2016, Meng Lingfen, dubbed “China’s most powerful village
committee director,” was sentenced to 20 years for seven crimes.
Media reports described how Meng was tyrannical in wielding
her power. She retaliated against any villager who opposed her,
including destroying their orchards, harassing them over the vil-
lage’s loudspeaker all day and illegally issuing fines. She had Hebei
28
Television reporters seeking an interview beaten in the town’s govern-
ment office.
The case showed that the town government could not deter Meng,
let alone supervise her. After the case went public, netizens asked
whether Meng had backing from higher-level officers.
A 2017 Xinhua News Agency report furthered these suspicions by
condemning some higher officials for “colluding with and protecting
village bullies.”
According to the CCDI report, Shi Fenggang was backed by sev-
eral town officials from the local government, natural resources plan-
ning department and police.
“Some town governments are turning a blind eye to incapable or
hostile village officials. Their connivance helped increase their power
and even evolve into [criminal activity],” Li Zhengbin, secretary of
Fengtai’s disciplinary inspection commission, told media after Shi’s
misdeeds were exposed.
Swatting Flies
China is trying hard to crack down on the "flies". In January 2017,
the Supreme People’s Procuratorate published a guidance document
on punishing village hoodlums and cracking down on their criminal
activity and the officials that supported them. In 2018, the central
government ordered authorities to include officials at the lowest lev-
els. This year, the central government’s rule of law working commis-
sion passed a resolution on strengthening the rule of law in villages,
pledging to root out all village rogues according to the laws.
Support systems are also being improved. Lawmakers revised the
Organic Law of Villager Committees in 2010, lowering the condi-
tions for villagers to remove incompetent officials. It required every
village to set up a supervision station consisting of villagers not al-
ready serving in local office to help maintain the transparency of vil-
lage affairs and spending. Meanwhile, those found to have committed
bribery during elections, harassed villagers or of involvement in illegal
activities would receive a lifetime ban from village office.
At the 19th National Party Congress in October 2017, the govern-
ment proposed combining the “rule of law” in village self-governance
with “rule of morality.”
“One-sided emphasis on self-governance will cause problems [any-
where] as village officials are free from restraint. So we should work
out more regulations and laws to strengthen restraints,” Zheng said.
“Rule of morality refers to encouraging virtuous senior villagers to
play a larger role in dealing with local affairs and disputes, since they
are usually held in high esteem.”
Shi’s criminality finally caught up with him. He was sentenced to
life in prison by Beijing Second Intermediate People’s Court on Sep-
tember 14, 2020.
“From the cases my team has studied, punished village ruffians
are generally older and consolidated their power 10 or 20 years
ago. Village hoodlums are not as rife as they once were,” Lü told
ChinaReport.
CHINAREPORT I February 2021

Gimme Shelter
Deep in downtown Jilin, the Five Yuan Women’s Dormitory was a home for the city’s poor,
destitute and homeless for over two decades – before suddenly shutting its doors
W
hen the reporter visited Five
Yuan Women’s Dormitory on
November 10, 2020, it was
alive with conversation and laughter over the
steady drone of Buddhist chants played on
a loop.
No longer. The dorm abruptly closed in
late December after operating for nearly a
quarter of a century. The reasons behind the
closure are still unclear. However, the dorm
was unlicenced and operated in a grey area of
municipal policy.
Sun Shiqing, 68, ran the dorm from two
50-square-metre flats she owns on the sec-
ond floor of an old seven-storey walk-up in
Jilin, the capital of Northeast China’s Jilin
Province.
One flat served as a dorm for women that
cost 5 yuan (US$0.76) per night. A bed in
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
Profile
By Kui Yanzhang
the neighbouring flat for men cost 6 yuan
(US$0.91).
The dorm was home to nine women and
four men who worked odd jobs during the
day. When they returned at night, the place
came to life.
At first, the dorm only charged 2 yuan
(US$0.30) per night. Qi Xiaoguang, a re-
porter for Jilin Television, first visited the
dorm in 2005. She spent five years filming
the documentary The 2 Yuan Women’s Dor-
mitory (2010) about the place and its resi-
dents at the time, three of whom lived in the
dorm until late 2020. The documentary’s
success generated more media attention. Per-
haps too much.
Sun only increased the rent by 3 yuan
(US$0.46) in a decade. These prices were re-
alistic in Jilin: a single room at the cheap ho-
Photo by Kui Yanzhang
Day workers wait
outside Hubei
Labour Market in Jilin
city, Jilin Province,
November 10, 2020
tels that surround Jilin Railway Station costs
20 yuan (US$3). There are at least five unli-
cenced dorms that charge similar rent within
a 500 metre radius of Sun’s place. They are
mostly near the city’s eastern business district
– a prosperous commercial centre since the
1930s, now lined with skyscrapers and shop-
ping malls.
The dorm has seen many come and go:
battered wives seeking a safe haven from their
abusive husbands, migrant workers who left
their home villages to find work in the city
and many homeless. Most stayed for one
night, some for years. A few thought they
would spend the rest of their lives there.
Men Across the Hall
It was -7 C before dawn on December 9.
More than 200 migrant workers stood by
29
SOCIETY
Sun Shiqing's flowers sit on the windowsill in the dormitory, Jilin city,
Jilin Province, November 10, 2020
the road in front of Hubei Labour Market
waiting for work. Wrapped in face masks and
thick cotton coats, they quietly rubbed their
hands and stamped their feet to keep warm.
Occasionally they exchanged a few words
with each other.
One of the men walked towards the re-
porter with a smile: Xu Haifeng, a 58-year-
old lodger at Sun’s dormitory.
Xu’s story is heart-breaking. He married
at 35, considered very late in the villages of
Northeast China. But Xu’s wife left him,
then his only son drowned in a reservoir. He
was 10.
Grief stricken, Xu left his village and wan-
dered from city to city.
“I went wherever I felt light-hearted and
relieved. I had to do something to make
this dead heart feel alive again,” Xu told
ChinaReport.
Xu’s parents passed away last year. Among
his remaining relatives, he is closest to his
older sister. In the past, Xu would return
home to visit. He rarely goes back now.
“If you don’t make much money, people
back home look down on you and think
you’re a failure. Home is a place that is easy
to escape but hard to return to,” Xu said.
The dormitory was where Xu could find
30
Photo by Kui Yanzhang
a little solace. “In the day, I went out to find
work, then at night I went back to the dorm
and chatted with my roommates. You don’t
feel so lonely there,” Xu told the reporter.
Sun Hongtao, who lived in the men’s
dorm for 13 years, was also homeless once.
After he got divorced and lost custody of his
son in 2004, Sun left his village for Jilin. He
found work at a construction site but was
later diagnosed with tuberculosis, leaving
him unable to do any heavy work. He now
works odd jobs.
A resident for over a decade, Sun saw the
dorm as his home. He never reconnected
with his ex-wife or son, and does not ex-
pect his son to support him in his old age.
“I didn’t raise him. How can I expect him to
care for me in the future?” Sun said.
Suffering Endured
On a wooden door in the women’s
dormitory hang four yellowing posters with
encouraging aphorisms of enduring life’s
suffering with patience and acceptance.
A devout Buddhist, Sun Shiqing feels this
philosophy speaks to many of the female ten-
ants’ outlooks on life.
“There are two kinds of women in the
world: those who live for their children and
those who live for themselves. The women
who lived here are the former. You can’t find
a woman here whose life is completely her
own. If you’re looking for people who live
for themselves, you’re in the wrong place.
Try a mahjong parlor instead,” Sun told
ChinaReport.
On the evening of November 10, the
women in the dorm chatted as they swiped
through short videos on popular app Kwai.
Zhang Aiwa was drawn to a video of a little
girl singing the song “Mama, Don’t Leave
Me Alone” in a shabby room.
“Mama, why did you leave me alone at
home? You said you’d suffer for my sake…”
the girl’s sorrowful song tore at Zhang’s heart.
“The kid sings so well. What a poor girl.
She must be a left-behind child of a migrant
worker family,” Zhang told the reporter in a
solemn tone.
It was Zhang’s ninth day at the dormi-
tory. Two weeks before, she left her village in
Huadian County for the city, expecting to
find a job as a nanny. Every morning she
went downstairs to Sister Tiao Homemak-
ing, a domestic staff agency, and waited for
work. The middle-aged woman hopes to
earn enough to cover her son’s mortgage.
Most of the family’s financial burdens rest
on her shoulders as her husband has a heart
condition.
Li Guilan, 78, has lived in the dorm for
more than 20 years. The round-faced and
amiable woman comes from a village in
Shulan County, Jilin Province. Li has four
children – three work in other provinces. Un-
willing to burden her children but not used
to living alone in the city, Li settled on Sun’s
dorm. She had been there ever since.
Like Li, most tenants are migrant work-
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
ers from surrounding counties. Along with
the wave of urbanisation that followed the
reform and opening-up policy, many villag-
ers left for Jilin, the province’s capital and
second-largest city, for work at the bottom
rungs of society.
Wang Lin, 68, is another 20-year tenant.
In her silver necklace, silver earrings and
leather pants, Wang was the most fashionably
dressed woman at the dorm.
Wang told ChinaReport that when she first
arrived, she had just divorced her abusive ex-
husband after he had been sentenced to eight
years for assault and robbery. Her ex’s fam-
ily was granted custody of their son, which
made visitation difficult.
After settling in the dorm, Wang mainly
worked as a babysitter. Living at the dorm
was a way to ease her feelings of loneliness.
The only relative she keeps in touch with is
her niece. She has called her son many times,
but he never answers.
Farewell, Old Home
When Sun Shiqing said she never saw
the documentary nor read articles about her
dorm, the reporter pulled one up online. Sun
put on her glasses, turned on a small light,
and slowly read it, word by word:
“More than 20 women packed the dorm
like sardines in a can. Their bed sheets were
so worn out they were almost rags,” Sun read,
then laughed.
“But indeed, the people here all had hard
times,” Sun told ChinaReport.
Sun first had the idea of opening a dormi-
tory in 1997, a time of economic reforms
when layoffs at State-owned enterprises were
common and migrant workers flooded the
cities.
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
She bought a flat near the Hubei Labour
Market and charged 2 yuan (US$0.30) per
night for a dorm bed. A month later, the
room was full.
Initially she was earning tens of yuan a day,
which “was quite enough to live very com-
fortably at the time.” Several years later, she
bought another flat on the same floor and
opened a dormitory for men.
She developed deep bonds with her ten-
ants. Sun’s son, 43, married a former tenant.
The couple has a 15-year-old son. The fam-
ily now lives in a 158-square-metre flat and
keeps a spare room for her.
But Sun did not intend to move. “These
[tenants] are really good people. I don’t want
to leave them,” she said.
Compared to hotels, nursing homes and
shared flats, Sun’s dormitory was not just
Photo by Kui Yanzhang
about business. It gave residents a sense of
warmth, companionship and belonging. It
was more like a space that allowed groups of
rural migrant workers to live and socialise in
a traditional way commonly found in rural
society.
Sometimes Sun took in homeless women Bunk beds in the women’s dormitory. Most of the
free of charge. Every day at noon, one of tenants are elderly
Sun’s friends, also a Buddhist, came to the
dorm to share steamed buns.
Every Spring Festival Eve, instead of hav-
ing dinner at her son’s place, Sun spent it with closed her dormitory.
her lodgers. Sun is vegetarian after becoming “I closed it just because of health prob-
a Buddhist in her 60s, and would prepare lems,” Sun told ChinaReport. “I was too tired
vegetable dumplings – a traditional holiday and needed some rest,” she said, refusing to
food – with her tenants to celebrate the com- elaborate.
ing year. The dormitory was once a place where
In the second half of 2020, media reports lonely souls could gather and find compan-
about the dormitory and the work Sun was ionship. By the end of the year, its tenants,
doing became more frequent. In December, old and new, were again scattered and faded
less than one month after our interview, Sun into the crowds of the city.
31
SOCIETY
Rubbish Collectors
THE GARBAGE ARMY
As China attempts to impose a system of urban rubbish recycling, are the informal waste collectors
that have kept the cities clean for decades about to be thrown on the rubbish heap?
By Hu Kefei and Xie Ying
T
here is a hidden army in every Chinese city. They have a
keen eye for an empty bottle, and if they spy someone about
to finish a drink, they stand patiently by until they acquire
it. They crush it to save space, and then squeeze all the bottles into
enormous sacks tied precariously one on top of the other to a much
smaller three-wheeled tricycle. People marvel at the sight of the trikes,
now more likely to have electric motors attached, wondering how
the piles of Styrofoam boxes, strings of cooking oil containers and
mountains of flattened cardboard boxes stay upright, as their owners,
rubbish collectors and rubbish recyclers, head every evening to a waste
processing centre to turn their rubbish into cash.
Wang Weiping, an adviser for Beijing municipal government and
an urban engineer, has studied rubbish recyclers for 20 years. By his
reckoning, there are at least 2.3 million in China earning a living from
informal rubbish collection and recycling. While the work is dirty
and arduous, stories of unexpected people engaged in the trade are
common in the media, from university students to people raising
money for medical care or funds to start a business. Rumours abound
that there are riches to be found in other people’s rubbish.
Given China’s population and the large amount of rubbish
32
Photo by IC
Crushed bottles are stacked
at a recycling centre
produced daily, informal rubbish collectors filled the gap when cit-
ies did not have proper disposal systems, reducing government costs.
They did the most labour-intensive work – collecting and sorting
rubbish. Now that China is putting government-led rubbish collec-
tion and sorting systems in place – to a greater or lesser effect – some
say the informal rubbish sector will prevent the new system from
working as it should. Others say there is still a place for this unsung
army of waste workers, as they are the best placed to help the new
systems operate.
Trash into Treasure
Most people associate rubbish pickers with vagrants or those strug-
gling to make ends meet. But some are successful at turning rubbish
into treasure.
“It’s easy money. I’d be silly not to do it,” said an elderly rubbish
collector surnamed Qi. Although she is retired and earns a pension,
she sorts and collects rubbish from the dumpsters outside her Beijing
apartment block, as well as the others belonging to the 10 buildings
in her residential community. She sells rubbish that can be recycled to
supplement her pension.
CHINAREPORT I February 2021

Cardboard boxes are usually sold to paper mills, where they are recycled for raw materials
“I mainly collect plastic bottles, Styrofoam, paper, clothes,
furniture, home appliances and daily use items. I earn 5,000-6,000
yuan (US$735-882) a month. That’s twice my monthly pension,” she
told ChinaReport.
According to Ma Ning, a former recycler in Beijing, people in
major Chinese cities discard about eight billion plastic bottles every
year, or 200,000 tons in total. However, due to the informal nature of
the recycling business, there are no accurate figures for the amounts
and types of waste individual rubbish collectors process. Plastic bot-
tles are made from polyethylene terephthalate, commonly known as
PET, which can be recycled, turned into polyester, and used in the
manufacture of vehicles, electrical parts, home appliances, textiles and
construction materials. A rubbish recycling centre buys waste plastic
at 2,000 yuan (US$294) a ton, and if the plastic is presorted and
preprocessed, the price may double or triple.
Wu Xin, another rubbish picker in Beijing, told ChinaReport that
he collects waste Styrofoam for 1.5 yuan (US$0.2) per kilogram and
sells it to recycling plants for double that. Although there are mid-
dlemen who eat into his earnings, profits are still good. Wu said the
price for waste magnets had risen from 60 yuan (US$9) to 400 yuan
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
Photo by IC
(US$60) per kilogram due to the rapid price rises for rare earths.
Wu told ChinaReport that he and his wife bought a lorry to collect
and transport recyclables. Despite only being allowed to drive their
lorry at night due to Beijing traffic controls, they still earn 25,000
yuan (US$3,676) a month, nearly twice the average Beijing monthly
wage in 2019.
The owners of recycling yards may earn much more, as they also
own processing machines. But they need to pay for rent, maintenance
and set money aside to grease the right palms. Wu said, money is not
the most important factor in running a recycling yard.
Spoils of Battle
If rubbish is the spoils for rubbish pickers, then rubbish bins are
the frontlines of the war. The priority is establishing a good relation-
ship with those in charge of the rubbish bins and dumpsters. Qi told
ChinaReport that she had been able to “contract” so many rubbish
bins in her community because she bribed property management
staff.
“I treated them to two meals and sent them several cartons of posh
cigarettes, and I also paid three years’ management fees in advance,”
33
SOCIETY

she told ChinaReport. “It cost me an arm and a leg,” she added.
For her efforts, she was also finally allowed to use part of the
community bike shed where she can store and sort her rubbish.
Qi claimed that her privileges stoked envy from other rubbish
collectors, who took revenge by stealing her bicycle and destroying
her already-sorted rubbish.
But these conflicts pale into comparison when it comes to the rub-
bish bins along urban roads. Wu Xin told ChinaReport they pay 20,000
yuan (US$3,077) every year to the people in charge of the road where
he collects rubbish. “It’s all under the table and we never get a receipt.
But just because you pay doesn’t guarantee you’ll definitely get the cans
– you have to find someone to help strike up a relationship with them,
or you won’t even have a chance to pay them off,” he said.
Wu said that one time he parked his lorry in front of a residen-
tial building, only to be shooed away four times in five minutes by
security guards, community management staff, urban management
officers and other rubbish collectors.
“They smashed the lights of my lorry with metal bars and threat-
A man sorts rubbish at an unlicensed recycling centre
ened me. They said if I came back, they’d beat me,” Wu said, adding
that he was told that the rubbish on that particular road “belongs to”
a relative of an official.
Individual rubbish collectors like Wu also have to pay the owners
of shops or restaurants where they collect rubbish. “Otherwise, they’ll
sell it to other people,” Wu said. To make more money, many rubbish pickers connect with illegal
Ma Ning had to fight for his patch. “I didn’t want to ask my family factories which produce fake cosmetics, high-end alcohol, cigarettes
for money when I went to university, so I targeted the rubbish around and healthcare products, and even “imported” infant formula. The
our school, which was in a suburban area. To get sole access to the factories buy real packaging and reuse it for their fakes. It is difficult
rubbish, I had to beat all the others to make them go away,” he told for buyers to tell the difference.
ChinaReport. In May 2017, a report published in Nature exposed a black market
Ma later returned to the rubbish recycling industry, becoming fa- for fake research testing reagents in China where counterfeiters alleg-
mous for his informative livestreams about rubbish sorting. edly bought the empty boxes of high-quality, sometimes imported
reagents from rubbish collectors and laboratory cleaners, who were
Tricks of the Trade often unaware of their intentions. The packaging was used to disguise
Rubbish pickers have tricks to increase their earnings, such as hid- cheap domestic products or fake reagents.
ing a bottle of water in a pile of empty bottles to increase the weight, Due to the large numbers and mobility of rubbish pickers, it is hard
or injecting water into a pile of cardboard. Wu said some try to hide for local police to investigate these cases.
a wooden door in a pile of cardboard. Or they mix low-value but “China’s household rubbish disposal and recycling are managed by
heavy rubbish with higher-value but lighter recycling. It is a fine line different departments and they have failed to effectively integrate data
to tread. about recycled rubbish from different sources... So there are a lot of
The best places to get rubbish are on vacant land in suburban areas uncertainties in measuring the recycling rate of household rubbish,”
or remote areas on the outskirts. There are always piles of rubbish Zhou Chuanbin, a deputy researcher at the Research Centre for
lying around, and at night as people sleep, these illegal rubbish dumps Eco-environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, wrote in
become hives of activity. Chinese Journal of Environmental Management in 2018.
A rubbish lorry driver surnamed Wang told ChinaReport that the
dump he works with does not have any of the required equipment for Necessary but Stigmatised
pollution control, and its lorries are unregistered and use substandard Rubbish collectors have been the mainstay of the rubbish recycling
diesel. But it has been there a long time and nobody seems to care industry in China since the 1980s when the country began to em-
how it is run. brace the market economy. But the large population, according to
“I earn 15,000 yuan (US$2,206) a month,” Wang said. Zhang Jieying, a deputy researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

34

Photo by IC
Sciences, is emblematic of “dual stigmatisation.” She wrote in her
2016 book The Life of Waste that rubbish pickers are mostly migrants
already on the fringes of urban society, and as they usually deal with
rubbish on the edges of cities, they are further stigmatised as “being
dirty, mysterious and dangerous.”
For a long time, rubbish pickers were marginalised and remain out-
side any formal management system. They are a source of trouble for
city officials. In a 2009 interview with the China Youth Daily, Wang
Weiping, the Beijing government adviser, claimed that rubbish pick-
ers in Beijing were involved in 72 percent of criminal cases and 72
percent of them have had infectious diseases.
“They fight for territory, and the bosses of some rubbish picker
gangs have even hired thugs. It causes public safety issues,” he said.
“They are a population outside the public’s and government’s sight,”
he added.
Zhang said that many rubbish pickers and illegal dumps dispose of
rubbish without any pollution controls, harming the environment.
In 2011, the State Council issued a document on establishing
advanced waste processing and recycling systems, encouraging small-
and medium-sized enterprises to engage in rubbish disposal, and de-
manding standardised management for individual rubbish collectors.
In 2016, the State Council issued another document on upgrades
for waste recycling, which called to make full use of smaller recycling
enterprises and individual rubbish collectors.
These documents, however, were mostly ignored. In a 2020 report
on rubbish pickers before and after the country rolled out compul-
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
sory rubbish classification and sorting measures, Chinese data analyst
Dataway pointed out that current measures in cities generally target
residents, communities and sanitation workers but overlook individ-
ual rubbish collectors and the illegal recycling industry.
Many local governments simply banned or restricted individual
collectors. Beijing issued a regulation on the management of house-
hold rubbish this year that requires communities to stop rubbish
pickers from sorting and mixing already classified rubbish.
Both Qi and Wu told ChinaReport that the people in charge of their
community or street have warned they might not be able to collect
rubbish in the future.
In March 2020, Yang Xuefeng, a professor at Zhejiang Univer-
sity of Finance and Economics, claimed in an article for Economic
Information Daily that rubbish picking is not the same as rubbish
classification. “Rubbish classification refers to dropping, collecting,
transporting and disposing of rubbish according to different classifi-
cations, while rubbish picking is merely a means of making money,
and rubbish pickers make no contribution to raising public awareness
[of rubbish sorting and recycling],” he wrote.
Wang Weiping disagrees. “We can sort rubbish by weight using
density blowers or magnets to sort out metallic waste, but no current
technology can do the work more carefully and effectively than people
doing it by hand,” he said. “Even developed countries like the US still
have manual sorting.”
Zhang Jieying wrote in her book The Life of Waste that rubbish
pickers play a major role in rubbish disposal, especially when it is
hard to get households to sort and recycle their own rubbish. Rubbish
picking offers a means to earn a living, especially during the recent
economic slowdown.
Wang Weiping said that in Beijing, rubbish collectors processed as
much rubbish as government rubbish disposal plants, around 7.6 mil-
lion tons based on 2016 data. If it costs 500 yuan (US$74) to process
a ton of rubbish, rubbish pickers reduce government expenditure for
disposal by 3.8 billion yuan (US$558.8m) every year.
Furthermore, rubbish pickers are good at what they do. A commu-
nity in Shanghai, for example, reportedly employed an experienced
rubbish picker to help residents sort household waste when the city
rolled out compulsory household waste sorting in 2019.
Wang Weiping and Zhang Jieying suggest that local governments
should not ban rubbish collectors. In 2018 during the Two Sessions,
China’s annual top legislative meetings, Song Lianghua, a member
of the Sichuan Provincial People’s Political Consultative Conference,
proposed including China’s army of rubbish pickers into the official
urban rubbish sorting and recycling system.
“I’ve done a lot of research into how other countries deal with rub-
bish pickers... I think we can learn from Brazil, for example, where
pickers take responsibility for rubbish sorting and the government sets
up cooperatives [to aid them]. This costs less and has much higher
social and economic returns,” Song told the Sichuan Daily.
35
SOCIETY
Real Estate
All Quiet on the Oceanfront
The housing glut in cities along China’s coasts has swelled local coffers at a heavy cost to the
environment. Experts caution that increased government scrutiny of new coastal real estate
projects is urgently needed
By Yang Zhijie
O
ne weekend in late November
2020, a grandiose apartment sales
ceremony was held in the coastal
city of Rushan, East China’s Shandong Prov-
ince.
“All employees stand up please and let’s
extend our warmest congratulations to this
gentleman from Zhengzhou, Henan Prov-
ince, who has successfully purchased a flat
in Jinding Residential Community,” a host
at the event announced in a booming voice.
“Let’s give him a big hand. Welcome aboard.”
A middle-aged man walked on stage to a
standing ovation. He was handed a bouquet
of flowers amid thumbs up from the crowd.
Fireworks cued to music rang outside the sales
hall.
Back in the sales office, agents sealed more
deals by the minute, huddled at dozens of
small tables as middle-aged clients handed
over hefty deposits for flats.
But despite the development’s sales blitz,
Rushan is facing a real crisis. Fewer seasonal
tourists are visiting the seaside city, which by
late autumn appears deserted from the out-
side, with most flats along its famed Silver
Beach left empty.
Tourist Trap
In April 2019, Li Meng’s 60-year-old
mother joined a flat purchasing group organ-
ised by Xianghai Real Estate, a company in
Rushan.
Like most real estate developers and
36
agencies in China, Xianghai wrangles pur-
chasing groups, luring retirees and those soon
to be with all-expenses paid trips to their
seaside communities, promising early-bird
discounts.
What often begins for many as plans to sit
through a sales pitch for a free holiday at the
beach ends with signed contracts.
Increasingly, these companies have been at
the centre of disputes over illegal advance sales
and false advertising, particularly in Rushan.
On April 26, Li Meng’s mother took a free
shuttle bus to Rushan to a new Xianghai-de-
veloped community.
“Salespeople told my mother that the ame-
nities are perfect, and a new [top-tier] Peking
Union Hospital would open near the com-
munity,” Li told ChinaReport. Their claims
included pending construction of undersea
tunnels from Rushan to Dalian, in North
China’s Liaoning Province, and even to South
Korea, Li said.
Li’s mother put down a 70,000 yuan
(US$10,700) deposit for a 50-square-metre
flat. Li’s father learned of his wife’s decision
with a text from their bank alerting him of
the withdrawal.
Li scoured the contract and found more
misleading information. The developer said
Rushan Railway Station is a 30-minute trip
from the community. However, the commu-
nity is 35 kilometres away from the station – a
two-hour trip by public bus.
In addition, the developer was unable to
provide any documented proof about the un-
dersea tunnels. A spokesperson from Rushan
government told the reporter that no hospital
would open near the community and the un-
dersea tunnel project was proposed 12 years
ago by South Korean officials, but it was “only
an idea.”
Developers have separate sales teams for lo-
cal buyers and purchase groups – and separate
pricing schemes. “All the [trip] expenses are
eventually tacked on to the closing price,” a
salesperson from a local-buyer team told the
reporter on condition of anonymity.
A Rushan official told ChinaReport that the
local government has been combatting prac-
tices such as misleading advertisements and
released regulations to tighten management.
However, the problems persist.
Sun Yingning, a senior official at Rushan
Housing and Urban-Rural Development
Bureau, told ChinaReport that many real
estate sales agencies are not registered in
Rushan, making it difficult for local authori-
ties to supervise them. The local government
has rolled out measures to cool the market,
such as the buyer’s right to withdraw from a
purchase contract within a set period.
Retirement Dreams
Located on the northeast corner of the
Shandong Peninsula, Rushan is known for
Silver Beach, its 21.3-kilometre strip of scenic
coastline. More than 200 residential commu-
nities dot the area, most of them consisting
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
of small flats no larger than 80 square metres.
Yan Yuejin, a director with E-house Chi-
na R&D Institute, told ChinaReport that
seaview flats are the main selling point for
developers.
“People from across the country are moti-
vated to buy flats in Rushan for investment,
retirement or holidays,” he said.
The Rushan official told our reporter that
since 2010, the market has been flooded
with pre-owned flats, and housing prices
fluctuated between 2,000 and 4,000 yuan
(US$306-612) per square metre. Rushan has
only one train station which is not linked to
China’s high-speed rail network. In addition,
there are no major hospitals near Silver Beach.
A taxi driver who has lived in the city for six
years told the reporter that the hospital is not
equipped for CT scans and the closest major
hospital is a 30-minute drive from the city
centre.
Only several residential communities in
Silver Beach have central heating, and tem-
peratures average 0 C in winter.
The annual influx of tourists to Silver
Beach starts in May, peaking in August. By
November, most business are closed and few
residents remain. When ChinaReport report-
ers visited in early December, subletting signs
hung in the windows of most of the seaside
restaurants.
According to Rushan government, around
100,000 seasonal residents live in Silver
Beach, but only 10,000 stay year-round. Sil-
ver Beach was advertised as a resort in 2008,
but by 2014, the local government had not
approved any real estate developments and
instead focused on developing it into a new
urban area.
In recent years, Rushan has invested over
3 billion yuan (US$460m) in infrastructure
including roads, forestry, water utilities, pub-
lic transportation, education and medical
care. Rushan will be connected to the high-
speed rail network, but not until 2023, when
Beijing and Shanghai will be a four-hour trip.
Rushan is home to 560,000 people,
150,000 of whom live in the city centre. Over
the past 20 years, an ageing population and
negative population growth have affected
the local economy whose fiscal revenues
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
Photo by IC
Listings for seaview flats line a street in Rushan,
Shandong Province, July 5, 2019
registered only 4.6 billion yuan (US$704m)
in 2019.
The Rushan government official told our
reporter that only in 2019 did the city have
the finances to build three public kinder-
gartens in the city centre, costing 150 mil-
lion yuan (US$23m). “Each infrastructure
improvement requires a large investment. It’s
a gradual process that is unlikely to be com-
pleted in the short term,” he said.
Waves of Exploitation
The situation in Rushan is an epitome of
the smaller cities along China’s coast.
“Nowadays when night falls, these large
residential projects turn into dark buildings,”
said Gu Jun, a sociology professor at Shanghai
University. “They have become nothing but
ghost cities.” He added that excessive coastal
development is damaging precious natural
resources.
Insiders say that it is still too early to
develop China’s coastline resources as there is
neither an overarching plan nor the industry
or healthy economic chains necessary to sus-
tain sound development.
The government official told our report-
er that real estate development in Rushan
began en masse in 2004. Within a few years,
the coastline was crammed with construction
projects. In 2007 and 2008, 60 percent of city
revenue came from real estate development.
“We started real estate projects relatively
early, and nearby cities developed after us.
We have given other cities a salutary lesson in
terms of urban planning,” he said.
Guo Songhai, director of the Real Estate
Institute at Shandong University of Finance
and Economics, delivered several proposals
to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative
Conference of Shandong Province over the
years, appealing for more oversight of coastal
real estate development. Surveying coastal
cities in the province, his team found com-
mercial projects at nearly every sea-adjacent
site. Many sprawl over more than 10 square
kilometres.
To make matters worse, since 2010 some
cities started reclaiming land from the sea in
the name of developing the maritime econ-
omy, a national strategy first proposed by the
central government in 2010. According to
Xinhua News Agency, many coastal cities in
the provinces of Hainan, Guangdong, Shan-
dong and Liaoning built residential proj-
ects on reclaimed land. Guo Songhai added
that land reclamation in Dalian, Liaoning
Province, has destroyed parts of the area’s
Qianshan Mountains and coastal wetlands.
Li Wenjun, former director of the mari-
time management office at the State Oceanic
Administration, said the construction frenzy
was driven by the promise of huge profits. He
added that reclaimed land is zoned as “newly
added land,” whose legal status is unclear. Lo-
cal governments made fortunes from issuing
land use transfers to real estate developers.
Central and local governments have pub-
lished regulations to rein in excessive land
reclamation and real estate projects on coast-
lines. On November 1, 2016, China released
the Measures on the Protection and Use of
Coastline, a guideline which promised closer
scrutiny of real estate projects and that they
would be held to stringent environmental
protection standards.
Dong Yue, deputy director of the
Law School of the Ocean University of
China in Qingdao, Shandong Province, told
ChinaReport that after the release of the
document, some coastal cities launched
rectification campaigns targeting seaside
residential projects.
Sun Yingning told our reporter that while
seaside flats are popular with middle-aged
and elderly buyers, they appeal less to younger
ones due to the lack of industry in the area.
“Rushan government must urgently improve
infrastructure and win more policy support
to make residents settle there and boost con-
sumption,” he said.
37
FEATURE
Rural Youth Culture
FAMILY OF OUTCASTS
Lonely young migrant workers in the 2000s adopted flamboyant styles to find friendship and a
community. Ridiculed by mainstream society, a new documentary offers a reappraisal of their
aesthetics and motivations
By Qiu Guangyu
I
t was in 2012 that documentary maker Li Yifan first encoun-
tered young factory workers with outlandish hair, heavy make-
up and eccentric outfits. He was excited, thinking that China
had developed its own punk culture. Then he discovered it was not
punk at all – it was a unique subculture called “shamate.”
A Chinese transliteration of the word “smart,” it refers to a trend
that sprang up around 1998 among Chinese teenagers and young
adults, particularly those from rural areas.
Influenced by Japanese and Western pop culture – especially Japa-
nese visual kei fashion, similar to the glam rock and punk styles of the
1970s – rural youths in China adopted alternative hairstyles, eccen-
tric costumes and flamboyant clothes. Pictures of shamate teens went
viral in the noughts, but they attracted as much derision as applause.
Mainstream Chinese netizens derided and attacked the rural teens
for being tacky and vulgar. The short-lived grassroots aesthetic move-
ment did not last long before disappearing from cyber space in the
early 2010s.
In 2016, Li approached the key figure of the movement, Luo
Fuxing, a 25-year-old referred to as the “godfather of shamate.” Luo
put the documentary maker in touch with the community that had
long been misunderstood.
Starting in 2017, Li visited 15 villages and cities seeking out sha-
mate youths. He conducted in-depth interviews with 67 of them
and online interviews with another 11. Over the course of filming,
Li amassed extensive footage of shamate and other migrant workers
labouring in factories, workshops and going about their daily lives.
Issued in December 2019 and released on video-sharing platforms
in November 2020, Li’s documentary We Were Smart has rediscovered
38
the group once disdained as “foolish buffoons, cheesy weirdos and
bad kids.”
Mostly born after 1990, shamate were young migrant workers
working in factories in cities as children and as teenage labourers in
the 2000s. With no protection, insurance or care, these lonely and
vulnerable teenage workers used hairstyles and fashion as a weapon
to arm themselves, and a way to communicate with their peers and
reinforce the sense of belonging to a lost rural family and community
severed by the torrent of urbanisation and industrialisation.
Not Bad Kids
When he began his exploration of shamate culture, Li Yifan first
thought they were college students from underprivileged rural fami-
lies. He thought they would be educated and aesthetically conscious,
using a self-mocking fashion to rebel against the commercial main-
stream.
But as his exploration deepened, the director realised he was wrong.
He found instead youths who shared an almost identical experience:
born in impoverished families in the countryside in the 1990s, chil-
dren left behind when their parents went to work in cities in the
heyday of China’s manufacturing boom. These youths dropped out
early and followed their parents, finding work in factories as child
labourers in manufacturing hubs in southern and eastern China, like
Dongguan, Shenzhen, Huizhou and Wenzhou.
After China joined the WTO in 2001, the process of the country
becoming “the world’s factory” accelerated. A great number of millen-
nial migrant workers flocked to find factory jobs. At the same time,
more exposure to culture from overseas during the 2000s, particularly
CHINAREPORT I February 2021

Stills from Li Yifan’s documentary We Were Smart
Japanese, South Korean and Western pop culture, permeated the lives
of young rural and urban Chinese.
Luo Fuxing, the “godfather of shamate,” was an early adopter.
Born in Meizhou, South China’s Guangdong Province in 1995, Luo
dropped out of school at 11 to work in factories near his village.
Around 2007, he started imitating Japanese rock star Takamasa
Ishihara (better known by his stage name Miyavi), who was in the
visual kei rock band Dué le Quartz. Luo permed and dyed his hair
bright colours, used gel to fashion a gravity-defying hairstyle and wore
flamboyant clothes and heavy makeup.
Luo posted selfies on Qzone, an early social networking website cre-
ated by internet giant Tencent in 2005. His style went viral overnight.
Many young netizens started imitating his eccentric fashion, a clumsy
mix of goth, punk, emo, anime and visual kei. Luo was the one who
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
Photo by Xinhua
decided to christen this new style “shamate.”
Far from being bad kids as people had stereotyped them, the young
people in the documentary use simple and honest language to narrate
how they left their villages to find factory jobs as underage workers,
how they toiled on assembly lines and how they were injured, cheated
and abused while living and working in cities. Having a shamate hair-
style felt like protection from harm and bullying.
“Sometimes I feel the hairstyle makes you brave. It arms you. Peo-
ple think you’re a badass. Looking like a badass will protect you from
bullying. That’s what I feel about this style. Sometimes I wanted to
look like a badass. I wanted to feel safe. That’s why I did it,” Luo said.
“The environment [where I worked] wasn’t safe at the time. Me and
my friends felt terrified. We were really young, and we were so afraid
of being bullied. So we changed our hair and got tattoos to make us
39
 FEATURE
Luo Fuxing, the “godfather of Shamate,” sits in the beauty salon he operates in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, December 2017
look more aggressive, like a little thuggish. Of course, we also did it to
be more attractive,” said shamate fan Yang Peng in the documentary.
Factory owners did not like what they saw as radical hairstyles, feel-
ing it must be associated with a spirit of defiance towards discipline.
Some shamate found jobs where their eccentric looks would be more
welcome, such as hair stylists.
An Xiaohui, a 27-year-old ethnic Yi woman from Daliangshan,
Sichuan Province, was a typical shamate kid. At 12, she was taken to
a factory in Huizhou, Guangdong Province by a foreman, who, she
later discovered, had secretly embezzled most of her income for two
years.
After her discovery, she fled the factory one winter day in 2007 and
wandered to a roller rink. She quickly noticed two girls with cartoon-
ish hairdos. Instantly entranced by this “super cool” style, An made
friends with them, hoping to learn how to dress like that.
In love with shamate style, An went to work in a private factory
that offered her more freedom to practise her aesthetics. The factory
processed car parts for German automaker BMW, and there were for-
eign visitors. After one gave her a thumbs up, her boss was impressed.
“After that my boss let me continue my hair experiments. For a
40
Photo by VCG
while, I was a fashion guru for many of the young workers at the fac-
tory,” An told ChinaReport.
Wanting to Belong
Li Renqing, secretary general of the Rural Social Issues Research
Centre at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, conducted field
research on shamate culture with Li Yifan. Li told ChinaReport that
the word “family/clan” was the key to understand shamate culture.
The scholar discovered that these youngsters, who were mostly
lonely children left by their parents in villages, grew up in a period
of great social transformation. Traditional rural communities were
on the brink of deconstruction as urbanisation and industrialisation
developed. As a result, these teenagers did not receive much support
from traditional institutions – society, school and family. They were
forced to struggle in cities on their own at an early age.
Shamate style, for these teenagers, was a way to cope with loneliness
and find companionship with their peers, forming a new family.
Yun Xiaoshuai went to work at 14. “After I left home to work, the
only time I felt a sense of relief was when I styled my hair and got
dressed up. All I wanted was to attract people to make friends with
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
me and think I was special. Even if someone didn’t like my hair and
cursed at me, it didn’t matter. As long as they talked with me, even
argued with me, I’d be very happy,” Yun said. He now works on a
construction site in Kunming, Yunnan Province.
In the documentary, a shamate whose screen name is Poisonous
Dragon stressed the relationship between shamate fashion with the
sense of belonging to a family.
“After you styled your hair, you felt safe. How can I explain this
feeling of safety... It’s like this family was huge. If you were bullied, all
of us from the family will help you. So it made you feel safe,” he said.
Poisonous Dragon left home to find work when he was 13. He now
works at a construction site in his hometown in Guizhou Province.
Shamate liked to gather on and offline. A decade ago, Luo Fuxing
created QQ chat groups, where tens of thousands of shamate would
communicate. Their favorite hangouts were roller skating rinks. On
holidays, they swaggered down the street in ostentatious displays to
attract attention. This, in their own lingo, was called “bombing the
street.”
Through sharing a similar style, these lonely migrant workers cre-
ated a common identity, which led to mutual understanding and sup-
port and even helped them weave a social network where they would
connect people with jobs.
“Our ways were simple and direct. If I wanted to find a job, I asked
[another shamate kid], ‘Are there any jobs at your place? Yes? I’m on
my way,’” Luo told ChinaReport.
Shamate Revisited
Media estimated that at the peak of the movement, there were tens
of millions of shamate youths in China.
But as the culture ran counter to mainstream aesthetics, particularly
urban bourgeois aesthetics, shamate youths were gradually reduced to
the subject of vicious parody or ridicule. By urban standards, shamate
style had nothing to do with the epithet smart or trendy. Instead, it
was associated with being cheap, low-class and having poor taste.
In 2011 and 2012, shamate culture suffered waves of criticism,
mockery and verbal abuse from netizens. They were described as
“brain-damaged youths.”
In 2013 and 2014, Chinese internet regulators carried out the
“Clean Net Action” campaign, which ended up eradicating the cul-
ture, the pictures of shamate youngsters deemed vulgar and unci-
vilised.
Li Yifan told ChinaReport that after being suppressed by main-
stream culture, many shamate youths have become reserved and
introverted, unwilling to communicate with the outside world. He
estimated that nowadays in China, the community has dwindled to
just a few hundred people.
The documentary was critically acclaimed after its release. It rated
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
8.7/10 on Douban, China’s leading media review website. For the
director the feedback was surprising – it was urban youths aged be-
tween 20 and 35 who related most to the film. Young urban netizens
claimed solidarity both as peers and the exploited.
“‘How I wish my hair could be like a peacock’s wings that can take
me over the high walls of the factory (lyrics of the film’s theme song).’
Their vertical hairstyles represent a searching and longing for subjec-
tivity, identity and the mutual help and connection within the com-
munity. Those 915 short videos of workers toiling in factories quietly
remind us of a cruel truth – perhaps we are participants in the pro-
duction chain that ceaselessly exploits them, but in the meantime, we
realise that they are actually us,” reads a comment from Douban user
Gongfancomment, a post that many others agreed with.
“People have got to know, understand and even adore this com-
munity, which they used to regard as heretics,” the director told Chi-
naReport.
After years of efforts, some former shamate such as Luo Fuxing and
An Xiaohui are living relatively comfortable lives in cities. Both oper-
ate beauty salons – the former in Dongguan, Guangdong Province
while An is in Chongqing.
Recalling her days as a shamate, An thinks of the experience as
“childish but nostalgic.” Now she and her husband, who was a sha-
mate youth too, are feeling the pressure of mortgage payments and
kindergarten fees for their 2-year-old son.
“When I was young, I never thought it was a big thing whether I
had money or not. But now it’s different. We must have money, as
much as possible, for the sake of the child,” An told our reporter. On
her social network page, there is no trace of the girl with bizarre, co-
lourful hair and clothes. Instead, there is a bright-eyed woman dressed
in traditional Yi costume.
But the majority of the shamate are still struggling. Li Renqing
points out that even though working conditions in factories are much
improved, the nature of exploitation and suppression that lies behind
the labour structure has not changed at all.
Li argues that individual development of young migrant workers
has been restricted by China’s urban-rural structure.
“Between the cities and the countryside there is a huge gap in hu-
man capital, education equality and social resources... these place
limits on the future development of young migrant workers,” Li told
ChinaReport.
Shamate culture, Li indicates, constitutes as an indispensable part
of the history of millennial migrant workers. Their emergence was a
testimony, an outcry of a population who have long been sacrificed,
silenced and neglected along with social development.
Luo Fuxing is pleased they once made a fuss to let people know of
their existence. “Those who can express themselves always gain more
than those who can’t,” Luo told ChinaReport
41
ECONOMY
Anti-Trust Probes
BIG TECH CRUNCH
China’s recent anti-trust probes into Alibaba and other tech giants mark a major shift in its
regulatory approach towards the internet sector as firms go from hero to villain
By Yu Xiaodong
F
or weeks, Alibaba Group, the world’s
largest e-commerce company and
China’s biggest internet company,
has been on a rollercoaster ride as China’s
regulators launched sweeping proposals to
tighten its regulation of internet-based tech
companies.
On November 3, in a move that stunned
everyone, China halted the initial public
offering (IPO) of Ant Group on the
Shanghai and Hong Kong exchange with less
than 48 hours to go. Alibaba’s fintech arm Ant
Group was expected to raise US$34.5 billion,
42
making it the world’s largest IPO which
would catapult the company to become the
world’s fourth-largest financial company.
The following week, on November 10 the
State Administration of Market Regulation
(SAMR), China’s top market watchdog, re-
leased a draft antitrust guideline on internet-
based monopolies, defining for the first time
what constitutes anti-competitive behaviour
including pricing, payment methods and the
use of data to differentiate shoppers.
On December 24, the SAMR announced
an official probe into Alibaba over its
Photo by IC
“choosing one or the other” policy, under
which merchants are forced to sell exclusively
on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms. The very
same day, four of China’s top financial regu-
lators including the central bank summoned
Ant Group to discuss compliance issues.
On December 30, the SAMR announced
that it had fined Alibaba-operated Tmall, Ali-
baba’s rival Jingdong (JD), and Vipshop each
500,000 yuan (US$76,400) over pricing ir-
regularities. Although the fines meted out so
far are insignificant, it is widely believed that
these regulatory actions mark a major shift in
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
China’s approach towards the country’s ever-
expanding internet giants.
Liberal Regulation
For the past two decades, the internet in-
dustry has been a driving force of China’s
economic rapid growth. Touted as the future
of China’s economy, these upstart firms are
now a major source of innovation, injecting
vitality into the economy and facilitating the
much-desired economic upgrade.
Often perceived to be challengers to the
once dominant, mostly State-owned tra-
ditional companies, internet companies
enjoyed a rather favorable reputation in the
early years. Bringing convenience such as
mobile payments and share bikes, many take
pride in China’s leading position in certain
high-tech fields, as the internet sector is a ma-
jor industry where China can compete head-
on with developed countries.
To promote development in the internet
industry, China took a relatively liberal regu-
latory approach. Take the controversial policy
of “choosing one or the other” e-commerce
platforms, for example. For years, Alibaba
Group, which operates the dominant e-
commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall, has
been accused of enforcing this policy to co-
erce merchants and brands not to sell on rival
platforms. Brands defying this rule would
be either excluded from high-traffic promo-
tions or Alibaba services, or have their listings
pushed way down in search results.
In July 2017, China’s second-largest e-
commerce firm JD released a statement ac-
cusing Alibaba of forcing merchants off JD’s
sites and signing exclusive deals with Alibaba.
Calling the practice an infringement on mer-
chants’ business autonomy and consumers’
rights, JD called for the regulators to step in.
In April 2018, the Associated Press re-
ported that five unspecified major consumer
brands complained that traffic to their Tmall
stores fell after they refused to sign exclusive
contracts with Tmall. A US clothing com-
pany saw its sales plummet 10 to 20 percent.
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
But given Alibaba’s dominant position in
the e-commerce sector, few brands can risk
openly challenging Alibaba over its practices.
In a rare case, Galanz, a Chinese home ap-
pliance brand, decided to stand up to Tmall.
In two statements released in June 2019,
Galanz said that after some of its executives
visited Pinduoduo, an emerging e-commerce
platform, the search results for its products
on Tmall started to become “abnormal,”
leading to plummeting sales. Galanz later
sued Tmall in a court in Guangzhou, South
China’s Guangdong Province, though the
two reached a settlement in June 2020.
Many argue that Alibaba’s “choosing one
or the other” policy is against China’s existing
anti-monopoly law, which prohibits monop-
olistic agreements among business operators,
and the concentration of business operators
that eliminates or restricts competition. But
in all these cases, China’s regulators appear to
have taken a hands-off approach.
But as the once-small underdogs have
developed into titans who dominate across
industries, the perception and sentiments
towards internet companies have rapidly
deteriorated.
Changing Sentiments
Many observers believe that Alibaba and
other firms operating e-commerce platforms
have leveraged their dominance, turning
from a source of innovation to an obstacle to
innovation and competition. As the Chinese
leadership in 2020 started promoting the
strategy of “dual circulation,” which focuses
on domestic consumption and employment,
the tech giants’ alleged monopolistic practices
have become increasingly intolerable.
“When merchants are forced to sign exclu-
sive deals and withdraw from other platforms,
there will be real damage to employment and
the real economy,” said a commentary in
Beijing Youth Daily in September.
“While China’s ‘dual circulation’ strategy
aims to promote openness and competition,
the e-commerce companies’ practices directly
counter this,” the commentary said.
In explaining the rationale behind the
anti-trust measures, Huang Qunhui, a
senior research fellow and director general of
the Institute of Industrial Economics at the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told
media in a briefing by the State Council
Information Office on November 17
that platform companies may have strong
incentives and capabilities to innovate in the
early stages of their development, but once
they have established a monopoly, they can
become a force that discourages innovation
in order to protect their business interests.
Moreover, the public attitude towards tech
firms has turned hostile over time. In the
past, the use of algorithms and big data was
associated with more convenience and af-
fordable products and services. But now, they
are often associated with predatory practices
targeting both its own workforce and con-
sumers.
Earlier in September, Renwu magazine
published a report detailing how China’s 4.6
million-plus food delivery riders, most of
whom work for internet companies includ-
ing the Alibaba-backed Ele.me and Tencent-
backed Meituan, who due to the algorithm’s
impossible delivery targets and shoddy route
maps, have to race against time to make a
living, leading to traffic violations, accidents
and even death. The report led to widespread
anger and heated debates about the social
and ethical costs of the use of big data and
artificial intelligence systems.
In the meantime, there are rising com-
plaints about e-commerce companies’ use of
a practice known as “big data backstabbing,”
where they target user profiles to market the
same product at different prices to different
users, often in the form of charging higher
prices to long-standing customers. This
further adds to the change in sentiments to
view tech giants as predatory villains rather
than as innovative heroes.
The internet companies’ recent move
to enter the business of community group
43
ECONOMY
buying, known as “online vegetable baskets,”
also led to widespread anxiety over their in-
fluence over people’s everyday lives. A preva-
lent perception is that as China’s tech giants
are struggling to expand overseas against the
backdrop of an intensified tech war with the
US, they have turned inward to competing
with the little guys to secure their profits.
“China’s internet companies have started
preying on the livelihoods of aunties selling
vegetables on the street, and we still call them
‘high-tech’ companies,” said an article run by
ikanchai.com, a popular online tech site.
The issue also caught the attention of
China’s Communist Party’s flagship paper
People’s Daily. In an opinion piece published
in November, the paper criticised internet
companies for “being obsessed with quick
results and short-term profits.”
“With the advantages in big data and al-
gorithms, internet giants should have higher
goals in terms of technological innovation,
rather than just eyeing profits from selling
cabbage and fruit,” reads the commentary.
Capital Expansion
The shift in the authorities’ regula-
tory approach is seen as a direct response
to the transformation of the internet
sector.
“Now the internet industry is strong
enough, and the government does not want
it to grow unchecked or to take control of
traditional industry,” said Fei Pei, an industry
analyst. “What the government wants them
to do is take on more economic and social
responsibilities.”
“The recent regulatory moves indicate that
the government’s focus has shifted from in-
creasing efficiency to promoting fairness, as
the authorities move to protect the interests
of groups that have less negotiating power,
including small- and medium-sized busi-
nesses and ordinary people,” said a report
released by Shanghai-based brokerage firm
Orient Securities in December.
The change in regulatory approach can
44
be traced to January 2020, when China for
the first time released a proposed revision to
its anti-monopoly law that included the in-
ternet industry. Based on the proposed law,
companies could be subject to a fine of up to
10 percent of their annual revenue for violat-
ing the law.
But the recent sweeping proposals appear
to be more expansive in scope. In a politburo
meeting chaired by Chinese President Xi
Jinping on December 11, the central leader-
ship raised a new key phrase, “the prevention
of disorderly expansion of capital,” which
quickly became a keynote concept in the
authorities’ anti-monopoly agenda.
In the Central Economic Work Confer-
ence (CEWC) held on December 18, 2020,
a keynote annual meeting to draft China’s
economic priorities for the coming year, the
importance of the prevention of disorderly
expansion of capital was highlighted again.
Combined with “curbing monopolistic
behaviour,” it is listed as one of eight major
policy priorities for 2021.
In past years, capital expansion was a ma-
jor strategy for China’s tech giants, especially
Alibaba and Tencent, China’s dominant
internet players. According to a report in
New Fortune magazine in November 2020,
Alibaba and Tencent have established what
they call “digital ecosystems” that are worth
10.8 trillion yuan (US$1.65t) and 11.8 tril-
lion yuan (US$1.81t), roughly a 10-fold in-
crease from five years ago.
Indeed, there are signs that internet com-
panies’ capital expansion and acquisitions
will be subject to more strict scrutiny. On
December 14, the SAMR fined Alibaba and
two other internet companies 500,000 yuan
(US$76,400) each for not properly making
declarations to authorities about past acquisi-
tions.
The market watchdog also said that it was
investigating the merger of Huya Inc and
DouYu International, two Tencent-backed
online game streaming platforms which
collectively control more than 80 percent of
China’s online game streaming market.
At the end of November, Alibaba and
Tencent reportedly suspended their plan to
acquire iQiyi, a Netflix-like video platform,
due to the prospect of stricter regulation.
In a statement regarding the regulator’s
recent summoning of Ant Group on com-
pliance issues, Pan Gongsheng, deputy gov-
ernor of China’s central bank, said the com-
pany must “return to its origins in online
payments” and prohibit irregular competi-
tion, a sign that cross-industry expansion will
not be welcome in the future.
According to Professor Zhao Yanjing from
Xiamen University in Fujian Province, plat-
form companies’ vertical expansion should
be strictly regulated. He warned that if plat-
form companies are allowed to build their
own digital cross-industry empires, they will
become government-like regulators of their
markets and will bend the rules to serve their
own interests.
Zhao argued that the global challenge
to regulate tech is to solve the paradox that
high-level valuations of platform companies
come from big data that does not belong to
them but to the people.
The Wall Street Journal reported on
January 5 that considering Ant Group’s data
collection as an unfair competitive advantage
over other players, the regulators are seeking
to require Ant Group to share its consumer
data with the People’s Bank of China, ei-
ther through a nationwide credit-reporting
system or a credit-rating company controlled
by the bank.
There was also speculation that Ant Group
will be split into two companies, with one
taking over its financial business which will
be subject to existing financial regulation,
and the other taking over its high-tech busi-
nesses such as cloud computing and big data.
So far, it remains unclear how far China
will go regarding the fate of Ant Group. But
the consensus is clear now that the era of the
runaway expansion of China internet firms
is over.
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
E-commerce

Basket Wars
The community group buying model has surged as internet giants pour in capital,
further squeezing wet market and traditional grocers amid controversy over
unfair competition and dumping. Now, regulators are stepping in
By Zhao Yue and Xu Ming

Photo by IC

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

45
 ECONOMY
L
i Ling, who runs a restaurant in Changsha, Hunan Province,
found herself particularly busy this year with her second job –
running a local grocery buying group on WeChat. Similar to
a buyers’ club or other group buy programmes, residents of the same
community get together to buy in bulk on different e-commerce plat-
forms to get discounts. Li is one of the millions of people across the
country trying her hand at the booming business. She is the group’s
coordinator, managing chat groups and orders that come via WeChat
mini-apps or standalone shopping apps. Buyers place orders one day
in advance and pick up deliveries the next day at a collection point. In
Li’s case, her restaurant.
First developed in China by Changsha-based e-commerce plat-
form Xingsheng Selected in 2016, community group buying (CGB)
found its true niche during the coronavirus lockdowns, especially in
smaller cities and rural areas where people are more sensitive to price
than same-day delivery. CGB took the spotlight in recent months
as China’s internet giants in retail, food delivery and ride-hailing all
threw their hats in the ring for a share of the market beyond first- and
second-tier cities.
In June 2020, ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing launched its grocery
e-commerce platform Chengxin Youxuan, saying it will not set an in-
vestment cap for the new project. A month later, food delivery platform
Meituan set up a CGB department with the ambitious “1,000 cities”
campaign to penetrate county-level markets nationwide by the end of
2020. In August, group buying app Pinduoduo launched its commu-
nity-based shopping arm Duoduo Maicai. In late October, Alibaba
launched its CGB project Hema Youxuan in Wuhan, Hubei Province.
Internet giants like Alibaba, JD and Tencent have invested in lead-
ing players to expand their presence. In November, Alibaba invested
US$196 million in Shihuituan. A month later, JD invested 700 mil-
lion yuan (US$106.9) in Xingsheng Selected.
The trend is reminiscent of 2018 when around 100 CGB platforms
emerged in a few months as capital flooded the market. E-commerce
giants like JD and Suning also jumped in. But the timing was not
right: Most startups went bankrupt and the giants retreated after short
tryouts. Xingsheng Selected and Shihuituan are the two biggest survi-
vors from that initial boom and managed to rekindle enthusiasm for
CGB after it found new purpose during the pandemic.
Community coordinators, who are usually local shop owners or
other residents, attract customers from their communities through
WeChat and recommend products on different platforms for about
a 10-percent commission. They play a crucial role in winning over
customers and are highly valued. Major platforms scrambled to woo
coordinators as they entered smaller markets.
In many places, Meituan, Pinduoduo and Didi Chuxing are
poaching coordinators from early players like Xingsheng Selected by
offering higher commissions. Coordinators often work with several
46
platforms at once. Li Ling, now working for Xingsheng Selected, is
also considering platforms with higher commissions. In November,
a platform recruited 2,000 coordinators in a day in a small city in
Shandong Province, news outlet The Paper reported.
Brick-and-mortar shops, parcel delivery lockers or even the coordi-
nator’s home can serve as collection points. In southern cities, where
CGB is most popular, a single residential community sometimes has
over 20 collection points.
The scale of community group buying is estimated to have reached
72 billion yuan (US$10.99b) in 2020, double its 34 billion yuan
(US$5.19b) in 2019. The market is expected to climb to 102 billion
yuan (US$15.57b) by 2022, according to a September report from
iiMedia Research, a market data provider.
Zhang Meng, a brokerage analyst, told ChinaReport that compared
to the previous costly battles over fresh food e-commerce, CGB pro-
vides internet giants with a cheaper channel to attract customers, par-
ticularly in smaller cities as bigger markets become saturated.
Fresh food e-commerce, which was a major retail battlefield in
2013, expanded rapidly as investment rushed in to tap into the
middle-class consumer market. Competition was fierce as platforms
launched price wars to win over consumers. Starting in 2019, bank-
ruptcies swept the industry. The high cost of storage, cold-chain trans-
portation and instant delivery are cited as major reasons.
According to Zhang, fresh food e-commerce platforms had ware-
houses with a short delivery radius of around three kilometres to en-
able instant delivery. Burdened with high marketing costs and per
customer transaction overheads, few platforms survived.
Community group buying is a different story, Zhang said. “The
threshold and costs of running community group buying are lower. It
involves presales, caters to the lifestyles of local consumers and mainly
relies on local suppliers, which saves a lot on storage, shipping and
spoilage. This makes it possible to attract consumers in lower tier mar-
kets,” Zhang noted.
Old Games, New Tricks
This new battle also involves the subsidy wars common during
the heyday of ride-hailing and bike-sharing, where platforms would
squeeze out less capable competitors by offering low prices or even
operating at a loss. For now, price is the biggest selling point for CGB
as its business model is neither innovative nor irreplaceable. Com-
pared with traditional wet markets, supermarkets and shops, group
buying prices are too enticing for customers to turn down, ChinaRe-
port found.
On Shihuituan, a kilogram of carrots is 1.38 yuan (US$0.21),
while they cost up to four times as much at an average wet market or
supermarket in Beijing. On Meituan’s platform, 1.5 kilograms of or-
anges costs 2.99 yuan (US$0.46). The lowest price for a similar variety
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
of orange on Dmall, Wumart’s shopping platform, is around 10 yuan
(US$1.53) per kilogram, three times higher.
Many of the fresh foods on CGB platforms come directly from lo-
cal suppliers, cutting distributor costs. The presale model also saves on
storage and logistics. This may partly explain the low prices on these
platforms, Zhang said.
But the main reason is that internet giants including Meituan, Pin-
duoduo and Didi Chuxing are selling items at a loss to grab market
share. On some platforms, many products are sold at a loss.
A frequent user of CGB platforms told ChinaReport that prices are
cheaper than at the wet market in his residential community. “Subsi-
dies for customers on Xingsheng Selected used to be limited. But now
there are more buying groups and as the subsidies flood in, prices are
incredibly low.”
This low-price strategy puts physical shops and wet markets on the
chopping block, particularly for local retail grocers that currently sup-
ply all CGB platforms. Under the traditional supply chain, retailers
buy from wholesalers who deal with farmers. Pricing is rather fixed,
leaving little to no profit margins at CGB prices.
CGB could steal business from supermarkets of over 500 square
metres within two years if it continues, Ye Guofu, founder and CEO
of lifestyle product retailer Miniso, said at the China Entrepreneur
Summit held in Beijing in early December 2020. The smaller and
closer to customers the better, he said.
Physical shops are adapting by doubling as delivery points. Li
Yangguang, who for years has run a small produce shop in a
Changsha community, recently became a CGB coordinator for
several platforms including Meituan, Shihuituan and Xingsheng
Selected. Li told ChinaReport that he did not like dealing with CGB at
first, but it developed too quickly for him to ignore. “If I refuse, other
people would do it anyway and take my customers,” Li said.
For wet market vendors, who already started to lose appeal when
fresh food e-commerce arrived, the blow could be more lethal. Li Ling
said she knows many vegetable vendors from running her restaurant,
and they are all at a loss for what to do. Two have decided to close
shop and go back to their hometowns, Li Ling said.
Chen Chen, a vegetable vendor in Southwest China’s Chongqing,
said business started to get tough a month after Meituan’s platform
arrived. His revenue shrank 20 percent, Shanghai-based IT Times re-
ported. He is now a coordinator and made room in his stall for a
CGB delivery point. But not everyone in the market is as flexible.
Li Yangguang said that vendors have a harder time adapting to the
sudden changes.
Long-term Questions
The low-price strategy sparked debate as the corporate-backed
CGB platforms took business from local vendors and those who rely
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
on wet markets. In an article from December, State-run People’s Daily
called for tech companies to put more efforts in long-term innovation
instead of focusing on short-term gains.
Platforms that burn through money to attract customers are ac-
cused of disrupting traditional circulation of commodities and pric-
ing systems, and have been criticised for unfair business practices
and dumping. Besides resistance from shop owners and vendors, the
changes have created turmoil in the supply chain. On December 12,
a grain and oil company from Cangzhou, Hebei Province issued a no-
tice prohibiting distributors from selling products to CGB platforms
without authorisation and set a minimum retail price. Other suppliers
followed suit and refused to sell to CGB platforms.
Regulators also stepped in. On December 9, market supervisors
in Nanjing, eastern Jiangsu Province issued a notice demanding
“orderly competition” among CGB platforms and restricting them
from dumping goods for lower than cost. Alibaba, Meituan and Didi
pledged to follow the notice.
A few days later, the State Administration for Market Regulation
and the Ministry of Commerce held a conference on CGB that was at-
tended by internet platforms including Alibaba, Tencent, JD, Meituan,
Pinduoduo and Didi Chuxing. Authorities announced restrictions,
prohibited dumping, unfair competition and any form of monopoly in
pricing or production and sales, and ordered local market supervisors to
keep an eye out for unhealthy developments in the sector.
While the subsidy war is expected to further squeeze vendors and
shops, experts said CGB will not replace wet markets and supermar-
kets, something that fresh food e-commerce tried in vain.
Besides, there are also doubts as to whether CGB will prove a
viable business model in the long run. As platforms mainly cater to
price-sensitive customers, the question remains whether they will still
choose to shop this way once the subsidy war ends. To keep prices low
enough to retain customers while remaining profitable, CGB faces
huge challenges such as controlling costs and building a strong supply
chain, experts said.
According to Xu Yong from China Communication and Transpor-
tation Association, it is impossible for CGB to substantially reduce
shipping and storage costs, despite its advantage of direct supply. “Be-
sides, running this model [from goods and maintenance to employing
community leaders] still costs money,” Xu said. “We won’t be able to
say it’s a viable model until it sees long-term and steady profitability.”
Product and service quality are crucial to retaining customers at
a time when options abound. Amid the rapid expansion of CGB,
however, problems surfaced: unstable supply, product quality, false
advertising, deceptive pricing, imparity clauses and poor customer
service. Many customers on CGB platforms complain of struggling
with exchanges or refunds as community coordinators do not handle
them. CGB’s future seems uncertain at best.
47
ECONOMY
LOOSE BONDS
China’s credit rating agencies are facing increased scrutiny after
defaults by high-rated State-owned enterprises. Authorities
promise to tighten supervision and transparency to shore up
G
olden Credit Rating, a top credit
rating agency in China, was sus-
pended in December for failing to
analyze important factors that affected some
issuers’ ability to service their debts or justify
some upgrades to ratings. The China Secu-
rities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) an-
nounced on December 14 that it had frozen
Golden Credit Rating’s licence temporarily
and forbade it from issuing new security rat-
ings for three months. The same day, China’s
top discipline watchdog, the Central Com-
mission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI),
announced it had charged two former senior
executives of the company with taking bribes
from issuing companies in exchange for rais-
ing ratings on their bonds.
The suspension, the second instance in
the country since 2018, comes as China’s
domestic credit rating industry is plagued
with credibility issues in the wake of a series
of defaults involving State-owned enterprises
(SOEs).
Starting in October, State-owned auto-
maker Brilliance Auto, mining company
Yongcheng Coal and Electricity Holding
Group, and the Tsinghua University-backed
chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup all defaulted
their debts either on bonds or commercial
48
Credit Rating
investor confidence
By Xu Ming
papers – unsecured notes issued by compa-
nies to meet short-term financial obligations.
China’s bond market is the second-largest
in the world, worth over US$15 trillion. As
well as dealing a heavy blow to the market,
the defaults depressed confidence in domes-
tic credit ratings, as the companies in ques-
tion are all AAA-rated which should indicate
a strong ability to repay debts. This again
draws attention to entrenched and sustained
problems with the domestic credit rating sys-
tem, including inflated ratings and an inabil-
ity to give early warnings of defaults.
Prolonged Problems platform operated by Security Times revealed
The issue of skewed ratings is a major in 2016 that bonds issued by real estate com-
problem that weakens trust in the system. In pany Evergrande Group were rated AAA at
China, the majority of bond issuers are rated home but bonds issued abroad were rated as
AA and above. Statistics from Fareast Credit, junk – high-risk but with the potential for
China’s first rating agency based in Shanghai, high returns.
show that in the Chinese mainland the share On November 30, the Securities
of AAA-rated bonds jumped from 43.38 per- Association of China (SAC) released a
cent in 2017 to 62.69 percent in 2018. As of notice on the status of 10 rating agencies
September 4, 2020, over 65 percent of new in the third quarter of 2020. The SAC said
bonds were rated AAA and nearly 90 percent that 136 issuers had changed agencies in that
above AA, according to Wind Information, period. Subsequently, 17 were rated higher.
a financial data provider based in Shanghai. The SAC noted that the number of issuers
The same company can be rated quite dif- for which certain agencies have raised ratings
ferently at home and abroad. A new media is above the average level in the industry, an
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
indication of inflated ratings.
In China, AA and above is the basic thresh-
old regulators require before companies can
issue credit bonds. High ratings make it eas-
ier to issue bonds at lower cost and use debt
as collateral for certain loans, according to
Wang Dalin (pseudonym), who works at one
of the top five rating agencies in China.
In most cases, issuers pay an agency to get
rated (i.e. the issuer-pay model), making it
hard to maintain complete independence
and opening the door to potential corrup-
tion, Wang said.
The corruption case involving Golden
Credit Rating exposed problems like pay-
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
ing for higher ratings, the CCDI said. In a
video on the CCDI’s website, the two former
executives from Golden Credit Rating con-
fessed how they catered to the needs of issu-
ers by helping them inflate their ratings and
received bribes in exchange.
In August 2018, Dagong Global Credit
Rating was suspended from conducting new
ratings assessments for a year, the first case
in the industry. The agency had provided
counselling services to rated companies and
charged high fees, which violates the rule of
independence.
The high threshold for issuing bonds
means a large number of companies are al-
ready filtered out by rating agencies before
they have a chance to get rated, Wang said.
But as the companies that issue bonds, which
are of different qualities, are all rated above
AA, it is a challenge for investors to distin-
guish the good from the bad. Inflated ratings
make things worse.
Local ratings agencies have been criticised
for a long time for being too slow to spot
troubles with issuers and tardy in giving early
warnings, which are supposed to be their core
function. The SOEs that defaulted in Octo-
ber and November all kept their AAA-ratings
and were only downgraded after the defaults.
China Chengxin, another top ratings
49
 ECONOMY
agency in China, is also under investiga-
tion following the Yongcheng Coal and
Electricity Holding Group default, which
the agency had rated AAA. The day after the
default, the company’s rating was down-
graded to BB, meaning weak credibility and
uncertainty it can repay debts in the future.
Shortly after, the ratings of several other
issuers were downgraded by nervous agencies
out of an abundance of caution.
In total, 44 companies defaulted in 2018,
among which only four were downgraded six
months ahead of their defaults. In 2019, only
12 out of the 40 companies that defaulted
were downgraded six months in advance, ac-
cording to data from the National Associa-
tion of Financial Market Institutional Inves-
tors (NAFMI).
Spotting the lag in ratings adjustments
in the third quarter, NAFMI has had con-
versations with agencies including China
Chengxin and Dagong Global Credit Rat-
ing, the SAC notice said. “NAFMI stressed
that agencies should keep an eye on factors
that will affect issuers’ credibility and track
the ratings from time to time to ensure they
reflect the credit level effectively,” the notice
said.
No Proper Ecology
“Without timely, dynamic, unbiased and
objective credit rating agencies and systems
at the helm, risk-based pricing will fail to
reflect the true situation of the market and
it can lead to problems like defaults at any
time,” Wu Xiaoqiu, director of the Finance
and Securities Institute at the Renmin
University of China, told ChinaReport in a
previous interview.
With more than a decade’s experience in
the industry, Wang, the anonymous credit
agency employee, said that a benign ecology
has never managed to form under the cur-
rent system. He cited the fierce competition
among agencies as the main reason behind
the inflated ratings and associated problems.
There are 13 agencies listed on the SAC’s
50
website. “Compared to foreign markets like
the US, where three agencies dominate the
market, there are too many participants to
share the limited domestic market,” Wang
said.
He revealed that to grab a bite of the mar-
ket where issuers pay for ratings, some agen-
cies, particularly latecomers, have no choice
but to give high ratings to win clients.
“Besides, the rating fee is rather low here,”
Wang added. Domestic agencies charge ac-
cording to a self-discipline pact initiated by
five leading agencies in 2007 which requires
them charge no less than 250,000 yuan
(US$38,675) for rating one bond, with the
fee for tracking the rating included, regard-
less of the bond scale. International agencies
like Moody’s charge a lot more and the fee
increases according to the scale of the bonds.
“What’s worse, there is a price war. Agen-
cies usually package several products at a low
price to keep quality clients,” Wang said,
adding that some ratings agencies only earn
around 300 million yuan (US$46.4m) a year
and barely make ends meet.
Under these conditions, the field is
plagued by severe brain drain, which Wang
attributes to low salaries. “Many analysts en-
ter the field and stay for two or three years
just as a springboard to better-paid jobs, like
in financial institutions. The constant lack of
experienced analysts with a sense of judge-
ment certainly affects the quality of ratings
reports and also causes inadequacy in giving
timely warnings.”
Zhou Yuanfan, vice president of Pengyuan
Credit Rating, said that the most important
thing for the industry is not high technology
or education, but the stability of a rating team
and the accumulation of experience and data.
It takes [the industry] several decades’ expe-
rience to do the job well, he was quoted as
saying by news outlet China Economic Net.
At the same time, under pressure to keep
their heads above water, many agencies put
most of their energy into gaining new clients
and producing rating reports, but pay little
attention to tracking the rated companies
dynamically thereafter. “Dynamic tracking
isn’t possible most of the time. Some tracking
is just pro forma,” Wang said.
It is not all the rating agencies’ fault though,
he added. “Rating agencies have limitations.
They produce ratings based on a company’s
financial statements. Sometimes it is hard to
tell if the statements are false,” Wang said.
Late to the Game
The practice of credit rating started late in
China. There is no mature mechanism yet
to judge if the ratings given accurately mea-
sure the risks without sufficient data about
defaults in the domestic bond market, said
a Beijing-based analyst who spoke on con-
dition of anonymity. Although bonds have
been issued for 30 years, the first default did
not happen until 2014.
Besides, in an investment environment
where there is an implicit government guar-
antee and investors believe they can always
count on principal redemption and interest
payments, particularly for bonds issued by
SOEs or government-backed companies, the
credit rating system is not given due attention
for its ability to measure risks, Wang said.
Wang revealed that many investors only
pay attention to the institutional background
of a company when buying bonds. When
it comes to rating local government-backed
municipal investment companies for city
construction, some agencies mainly look
at the financial situation and the economic
development level of the local government,
regarding its financial statements as of lim-
ited value as references. “But the situation
is likely to change in the future. The wave
of defaults between 2018 and 2019 broke
investors’ trust in private companies first.
Now SOEs are proving they are not a haven
either. In a few years, all companies may be at
the same starting line in the bond market,”
Wang said.
For the time being, the ratings market is
supervised by several regulatory bodies in-
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
 CHINA
BYNUMBERS
0.2% Year-on-year change in fixed-asset investment by the private sector

Year-on-year growth in 5

cluding the NAFMI, the People’s Bank fixed-asset investment 0

by the private sector
of China (PBoC), the CSRC and more, in the first 11 months -5

and their responsibilities are not clearly of 2020 that climbed -10
defined. This causes overlapping regula- to 49.96 trillion yuan -15
tions or regulatory gaps, experts pointed (US$7.71t), the first
out, stressing the necessity to unify super- positive growth regis- -20
tered in 2020 -25
vision to improve efficiency.
-30
Aside from strengthening self-disci- Source: National Bureau of
Jan-Feb Jan-Mar Jan-Apr Jan-May Jan-June Jan-July Jan-Aug Jan-Sep Jan-Oct Jan-Nov
Statistics of China
pline, it is important to reinforce su-
pervision and increase punishment for
agencies that violate the rules, Wang said.
“Suspending business will probably be- US$3.22 trillion China’s foreign exchange reserves between
January and December 2020 (US$trillion)
come a common means of punishment China’s foreign ex- 3.5
for regulators in the future.” change reserves by the
In a December meeting, Pan end of December 2020,
Gongsheng, vice governor of China’s cen- a rise of 1.2 percent over
tral bank, said that the PBoC and other the previous month and
the highest level since
departments will tighten regulations on May 2016
the ratings market to improve the qual-
ity of ratings and make sure that agencies Source: State Administration of 3.0
Foreign Exchange of China Jan Feb Mar Apr May June July Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
live up to their role as the gatekeepers for
investors. In late December, the PBoC,
the CSRC and the National Develop- Year-on-year change in China’s imports of coal,
ment and Reform Commission issued a 63.3% -43.8% crude oil and natural gas in the first 11 months
regulation aiming to reinforce informa- of 2020
Year-on-year Year-on-year
tion disclosure in the credit bond market growth in the num- change in 10
to better protect investors’ rights to be ber of China’s cross- China’s coal
informed. border e-com- imports in No- 5

More changes are expected. In August merce transactions vember 2020, 0

in 2020 that surged totalling 11.67 Crude Oil Natural Gas
2020, the CSRC released the revised to 2.45 billion million tons -5
9.5% 3.9%
version of a regulation on bond issuing
Source: General Admin- Source: National -10
to solicit opinions, which removes the Coal
istration of Customs of Bureau of Statistics - 10.8%
demand for companies to get rated first China of China -15
before issuing bonds. This will reduce
the issuers’ reliance on ratings and make
rating more of a need for investors rather Share of different industries in overall value-added of China’s patent-
than for supervision purposes, which will 7.0% intensive industries in 2019
help gradually cultivate the market for in- Year-on-year rise in Information and CommunicationTechnology
vestors to pay for ratings services, or the value-added of China’s Manufacturing 20%
investor-pay model, experts said. patent-intensive indus- New Equipment Manufacturing 29.7%
As the rules tighten, the industry is like- tries in 2019, which New Material Manufacturing 12.2%
ly to undergo mergers and restructuring totalled 11.46 trillion Medicine and Health Care 8.7%
yuan (US$1.77t) and
that will squeeze out smaller players, leav- contributed 11.6 percent Environmental Protection 2.3%
ing only a few big ones, Wang said. “That to China’s GDP Information and CommunicationTechnology
Services 19.9%
may help reduce competition and culti-
Source: National Bureau of R&D, Design andTechnology Services 7.2%
vate a healthier environment. After all, Statistics of China
there are too many [agencies],” he said.

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

51
CULTURE
Northeastern Exposure
In the era of social media and short videos, a new generation of
comedians from northeastern China are taking centre stage
By Li Jing and Kui Yanzhang
C
hina’s northeastern region known as Dongbei consists of
three provinces – Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang. Yet its
identity goes beyond geography. For many Chinese, the re-
gion conjures culture and arts with a distinct local colour, particularly
its comedic style.
Living in a vast land known for fertile soils and cold winters, people
in Dongbei seem to be born with the gift of humour. It’s the birth-
place of Zhao Benshan, China’s “King of Comedy,” and a galaxy of
comedy stars such as Fan Wei, Song Xiaobao, Xiao Shenyang and
Shen Teng.
Unlike their predecessors, who made their names on stage, film and
TV shows like the annual Spring Festival Gala, this young generation
of Dongbei comedians has no formal theatrical training. Instead, they
are connecting with audiences through livestreaming and short video
platforms in a more informal and relatable way.
New Generation
Song Yongjia, better known by his screen name Laosi, became a
comedian by chance. He worked in Japan for four years and had been
a deliveryman in his hometown of Jiamusi, Heilongjiang Province.
On a winter afternoon in 2017 after a heavy snow, Song cooked
a large pot of tofu stew. On a whim, he posted a video on the short-
video platforms Kwai (also known as Kuaishou) and Douyin (China’s
52
Comedy
TikTok) in which he spoke Korean and performed as a Korean man
tasting the stew, emulating a bit he picked up from a South Korean
variety show.
“I liked observing people and doing impressions since I was young.
I didn’t have a venue for it in the past. I uploaded the video just for
fun,” Song said.
To his surprise, the video got 30,000 views within hours, earning
him 1,000 followers. The first video’s popularity gave Song confi-
dence. He started to post videos of his impressions. At first he imi-
tated celebrities, and then developed villager characters.
Song has a series of one-minute comedic sketches. They are all one-
man skits where he plays dozens of characters such as the spoiled wife
Dalingzi, the duo Xiaotao and Dafeng – two brothers-in-law suffer-
ing under the scrutiny of their wives’ family, and the domestic worker
and single mother Chunjuan.
To perform female characters, Song appears in full makeup and
an array of coloured wigs. Zhang Cailin, another popular online
comedian from the Dongbei region, particularly likes the character
Dalingzi. “It’s like he completely becomes a woman while performing
Dalingzi,” she told ChinaReport.
Having made 268 skits in three years, Song has gained more than
4.5 million followers on Douyin and 1.1 million on Kwai, where they
praise his performances as realistic and genuine without relying on
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
Song Yongjia (Laosi) performs one of the six Zhang Cailin, a popular online comedian
roles in his skit “The First Time Bringing My from the Dongbei region (Northeast China)
Girlfriend Home”
over-exaggeration. “Every time I watch your videos, I feel like I’m
back home,” a Douyin user from Dongbei commented.
China’s livestreaming industry really gained steam in 2016. Re-
search from internet giant Tencent shows that in 2016, among the
top 20 livestreamers across all platforms, more than half were from
Dongbei. In 2018, the rise of the short-video platforms Douyin and
Kwai marked the arrival of the short-video format in China. Increas-
ingly, more comedy content creators on the platforms hail from
China’s Northeast.
Before uploading his first comedy video on Douyin in January
2020, actor-musician Zhang Jintiao had struggled for years. Hand-
some and stylish, Zhang had small roles in TV series, appeared in
variety shows and wrote songs for other singers, but never found his
big break. Born in Fushun, Liaoning Province, Zhang had another
talent since he was a kid – making people laugh.
“I always come up with hilarious punchlines and won’t let any joke
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
Zhang Jintiao, an actor-musician who became
popular in 2020 for his comedic short videos
on Kwai and Douyin
flop. I love watching skits, sitcoms and comedy films. It was always
my dream to be a comedian,” Zhang told ChinaReport.
As an actor, Zhang took any role he could get. “In the past, if some-
one approached me with a project, they either wanted me to play
a handsome prince or a villain. Nobody wanted me to try comedy.
It was all quite superficial. They studied your face for a few seconds
and determined what role you would play. No one would go deeper
to explore your potential. So for a long time, I didn’t get the right
chance,” Zhang said.
Zhang has found his venue. In January 2020, Zhang posted a one-
minute video in which he casually chats with his mother in the Dong-
bei dialect. It got 30 million views on Douyin in 24 hours, making it
the platform’s most popular of the day. He has since made more than
150 videos, many of which feature Zhang having amusing chats with
his girlfriend, family and friends.
Zhang is finally being recognised for his comedic talent. He has
53
 CULTURE
Photo courtesy of the interviewee
The popular stand-up star Lin Xueqin appears on the third
season of comedy show Rock and Roast (2020)
more than 4.2 million followers on Douyin. Recently, he was invited
on Golden Comedy Class, a China Central Television (CCTV) vari-
ety show where he performed skits with accomplished professional
comedians.
Oral Tradition
In 1990, Zhao Benshan performed his now classic TV skit “Blind
Date” on CCTV’s annual Spring Festival Gala, China’s most-watched
TV programme.
By 2019, Zhao appeared on the show 21 times, where he per-
formed a number of classic comic sketches, including “Yesterday,
Today and Tomorrow” (1999), “Selling Walking Sticks” (2001),
“Selling Wheelchairs” (2002), “Heart Problem” (2003) and “Not Bad
Money” (2009).
Watching Zhao’s skits are a Spring Festival tradition for Chinese
families. His ability to appeal to people both young and old from
across the country earned him the title “King of Comedy.”
Zhao also starred alongside other outstanding comedians from the
Northeast such as Fan Wei, Gao Xiumin, Song Xiaobao and Wang
Xiaoli in TV comedy series including Liu Laogen (2002), Ma Dashuai
(2004) and Rural Love Stories (2006).
Wang Yanting, an associate professor at Jilin University of the Arts,
told ChinaReport that the Dongbei dialect is an integral part of the
region’s comedy.
The Dongbei dialect is similar to standard Chinese, making it ac-
cessible to people of all regions. It is also a highly expressive dialect
with distinctive diction, dramatic tone and rhythm. To a Chinese
speaker, it has the unique power to make the most ordinary conversa-
tion sound comical.
As the famous line in the singer Zhao Donglin’s song “Dongbei,
Dongbei” goes: “When crossing over the Shanhaiguan, you’ll find ev-
eryone there’s a Zhao Benshan.” Shanhaiguan Pass is one of the major
54
Photo by Xinhua
Zhao Benshan (centre), Gao Xiuming (left) and Fan Wei (right) in the sketch "Selling
Walking Sticks" (2001)
passes in the Great Wall that divides North and Northeast China.
Li Xueqin, 25, is a rising stand-up star. In 2020, she placed fifth
on the third season of hit stand-up comedy show Rock and Roast. A
graduate of the prestigious Peking University’s school of journalism,
Li became a social media sensation in 2018 after she posted several
funny short videos on Douyin where she introduces famous land-
marks to her crush – pop star Kris Wu. Wu responded online, which
immediately put her under the spotlight. She later shone on comedy
show Rock and Roast, appealing to audiences with her wit, humour,
self-deprecation and trademark Dongbei dialect.
Li lives in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning Province and a one-hour
drive from her hometown, the coal-mining city of Tieling. Tieling is
known as “the city of humour”, the birthplace of Zhao Benshan, and
also the setting of Zhao’s popular comedy series Ma Dashuai.
“People always say I’m hilarious… I tell them that’s because they
haven’t really been to Dongbei and don’t have many Dongbei friends.
Once you visit Dongbei, you’re sure to find hilarious people every-
where,” Li told ChinaReport.
Jiang Fan, vice president of the China Folklore Society and former
professor of folklore studies and cultural communication at Liaoning
University, said the reason behind the region’s abundance of comedi-
ans is its long-standing oral tradition.
Since the 1980s, Jiang has worked on writing and compiling The
Ten Anthologies of the National Folk Literature and Arts and conducted
decades of field research in China’s rural northeast.
Part of her research included pingshu storytelling, a folk art where
a single performer narrates stories from history or fiction. Pingshu
stories are broadcast on radio stations across China and are popular
among older cab drivers.
“Dongbei people are naturally gifted [pingshu] storytellers. More
than half of the well-known storytellers in China are from Liaoning
Province. In the 1980s, a number of them emerged who were mostly
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
ethnic Koreans, Manchus and peasants whose ancestors migrated
from North China in the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911),” Jiang told
ChinaReport.
“Tan Zhenshan is one of the most outstanding storytellers. He

Photo by VCG
could tell 1,062 stories, as if it was China’s One Thousand and One
Nights,” Jiang added.
The researcher also cites the northeast’s extremely cold winter as an
important factor behind the region’s vibrant oral tradition. “Though Liu Laogen Theatre, a comedy theatre operated by Zhao Benshan, is a
landmark of Shenyang, Liaoning Province
today people have more diverse cultural and entertainment choices,
it hasn’t been that long since we bid farewell to traditional lifestyles.
When electricity was not widespread in the villages of the Northeast,
the most basic form of entertainment for people was to stay at home,
tell funny stories and perform song-and-dance duets to while away
the long winter nights,” Jiang said.

Seek Joy Amid Hardship

Song Yongjia believes that optimism is something deeply embed-
ded in Dongbei culture.
The 1990s was Zhao Benshan’s peak of popularity. But for China’s
northeastern Rust Belt, it was a time of drastic social change.
As the birthplace of China’s industrial drive of the 1950s, the

Northeast was one of the country’s most urban and developed re-
gions. However, ever since reform and opening-up started in the late
1970s, Chinese society experienced tremendous changes as it transi-
tioned from a planned economy to a market economy.
In the late 1990s, there were massive layoffs nationwide, particu-
larly in the Northeast where the State-backed economy was deeply
invested. “Everything changed in 1998,” Song said. The factory where
his parents worked shut down. Like millions of laid-off workers in
the northeast, Song’s parents lost their “iron rice bowls” – the tenured
jobs at State-backed institutions that provided social security for life.
When he was 12, his parents left for Beijing to find work. The boy
was left in the care of his grandparents. A sensitive child, Song read
people’s faces and was good at picking up on people’s expressions and
moods.
His keen skills of observation enabled him to create and perform
characters with vivid, convincing details. Blending his skits with au-
thentic observations of life, he brings understanding and compassion
to every character, no matter how flawed they seem. Zhang Jintiao
calls Song a “master of detail.”
Zhang moved to Beijing with his family at a young age. Every time
he returned to his hometown, Fushun in Liaoning Province, he felt
the bleakness left in the wake of the economic meltdown, a stark con-
trast to the booming and bustling Beijing. “However, no matter what,
people there have a very positive attitude. They have quite an optimis-
tic view of life,” Zhang told ChinaReport.
Jiang Fan said that Dongbei people can seek joy in hardship.
In 1999, Zhao Benshan and actress Song Dandan performed the
classic comedic skit “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” on CCTV’s
Photo by VCG
Er Ren Zhuan, or song-and-dance duet, is one of the most famous folk art
forms from Northeast China
Spring Festival Gala, in which they play an elderly peasant couple.
Recalling the old days when they struggled with poverty, Zhao says:
“I remembered when we just got married, our family only had one
electronic appliance – a flashlight!”
“This line epitomises the cultural personality of the people who
grew up on this black soil – they seek joy in adversity and laugh with
tears. They had to be strong, optimistic and open-minded, otherwise
they wouldn’t have made it through,” Jiang told ChinaReport.
“Dongbei people are usually very frank and straightforward in ex-
pressing their feelings about the world. They are sincere, outspoken
and emotional. Today, as people become more formal, rational and
even mechanical in their expression, the comic effect of Dongbei peo-
ple’s natural and direct way of speaking, abundant oral traditions and
vivid dialect stands out,” Jiang said.
From the old guard of Tan Zhenshan and Zhao Benshan to newer
comedians like Li Xueqin and Song Yongjia, this land has produced
generations of comedians and storytellers, which Jiang stresses is no
accident. “The reason lies in its long historical traditions and cultural
roots. Of course [Dongbei] would produce so many comedians,”
Jiang told ChinaReport.

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

55
VISUAL REPORT

1 2

GOING IN STYLE 3

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

56
 4

In December 1978, a stylish French man in a black wool coat and a

long scarf strode down a Beijing street, attracting attention from
passersby. Unbeknown to them, that man was Pierre Cardin, who
would start a fashion storm in China that forever changed the
aesthetic consciousness of Mao-suited people across the country.
In March 1979, shortly after China adopted its reform and
opening-up policy, Pierre Cardin held a fashion show at Beijing
National Culture Palace, the first Western designer to do so on
the Chinese mainland. He was also among the first to introduce
a Western fashion brand to the Chinese market. In 1985, Cardin
invited 12 Chinese models to a Paris fashion show – the first
time models from the People’s Republic of China appeared on the
international fashion stage. Cardin held many fashion shows in
China since.
Cardin’s influence in China went beyond fashion. In 1983, he
opened a branch of famed Paris restaurant Maxim’s in Beijing,
giving the city one if its earliest tastes of French fine dining.
Maxim’s has since expanded to Shanghai, Tianjin and Hefei.
The fashion mogul passed away in December 2020 at the age
of 98. Chinese netizens mourned his death online, expressing
their reverence and gratitude to the legendary designer for
enlightening Chinese people’s perceptions of style and beauty and
helping the country embrace global fashion.

1.Pierre Cardin’s first fashion show at Beijing National Culture

Palace,1983. It was the first show held by a Western fashion
designer in the People's Republic of China

2. Pierre Cardin draws attention on a street in Beijing,

December 1978

3. Models walk in Pierre Cardin’s restaurant Maxim’s, Beijing,

1988. The restaurant was the first Maxim’s opened outside Paris

4. Pierre Cardin stands under a portrait of former Chairman

Mao Zedong after landing at Beijing Capital International
Airport, November 30, 1978. It was his first trip to China

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

57
VISUAL REPORT

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

58
 2 3
4

1. Billboards advertising Pierre Cardin are

displayed on a city street in China, March
24, 1993

2. Models appear during Pierre Cardin’s

spring-summer 2020 fashion show held at
Aranya Gold Coast, Beidaihe New District,
Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province, September
5, 2019

3. A model poses along the Great Wall

of China during the Pierre Cardin China
Legend 40th Anniversary Fashion Show,
Beijing, September 20, 2018

4. Pierre Cardin addresses a crowd after

his spring-summer 2008 fashion show in
the desert of the Mingsha Mountains near
Dunhuang, Northwest China’s Gansu
Province, October 20, 2007

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

59
OUTSIDEIN
Perspectives from within China
Wuhan
City at the Crossroads
Now known all over the world, Wuhan is very much open for business, and the city along
the Yangtze is extending welcome to tourists again
By Andrew Braun
I
still remember the day in March 2020
when I received the message: The docu-
mentary is confirmed, please book your
tickets and hotel and prepare for production.
At that moment I knew I was going to the
most locked-down city on the planet. I was
Wuhan bound.
The city was technically open, but things
can change quickly and suddenly in China.
Negative Covid-19 test in hand, mask
covering my face, and bags prepared to go,
I made my way to the railway station. That
sense of excitement during the taxi ride to
either the train station or airport is border-
line addicting, and this was no different. It’s
the adventure and the journey that can be so
much more impactful than the arrival to the
destination, but this time, the excitement of
wandering a city that had been so impacted
to the point of dystopian, that inner adven-
turer was, for a lack of better words, stoked.
The high-speed train from Shanghai to
Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, was the
perfect length, between four and five hours,
60
and unsurprisingly half-capacity to basically
empty by the time it arrived at the final des-
tination. As the doors opened at Hankou
Railway Station, I was greeted by a man in
a full hazmat suit, goggles and heavy-duty
mask. Though the city was open for inbound
travellers the precautions were very much still
in place and a bit daunting at first.
Wuhan is basically the gateway from South
China to North China and from east to west,
and the incredible ebb and flow through the
city is something that can’t be overstated. If
China is a wheel, Wuhan is the central spoke
that the whole country spins around. As one
of the four major transportation hubs in
China, the importance of this city can’t be
downplayed.
It is bisected by the Yangtze River, which
divides the city into the southern district of
Wuchang and the two north bank districts of
Hankou and Hanyang, themselves divided
by the Han River, a major tributary of the
Yangtze.
It is known as hub for manufacturing and
also as centre for higher education, and of
revolutionary activities. Former Chairman
Mao Zedong was fond of the city, often visit-
ing his villa in the 1960s, which is equipped
with a swimming pool, if he decided not to
swim along the Yangtze itself.
I biked everywhere. I walked everywhere.
There were many days were I clocking up to
10 kilometres on share bikes and an addition-
al 20,000-30,000 steps per day. I explored the
whole city as best I could. A foreigner couldn’t
always access the ever-important QR code
that was required to enter everything from
taxis to the metro and even some of the malls
that were open. My Shanghai green QR code
worked for the majority of these places, but
I had to explain myself each and every time.
One thing I wanted to try so much was
the hot-dry noodles. As a big fan of noodles,
I desperately wanted to try a proper version
in the place they originated. But with many
mom-and-pop restaurants still not open, I
was resigned to eating the version from the
hotel.
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
 PRACTICALITIES:
At the centre of
China, the city is
easily accessible by
plane and high-speed
train. Flights from
almost anywhere
in China only take
around two hours.
At the middle of
the north-south and
east-west high-speed
rail lines, trains from
Beijing and Shanghai
take four-five hours.
It is also the gateway
for Yangtze River
trips trough the Three
Gorges, destination
Chongqing.
Temperatures in the
summer can get very
hot, and there may
be floods, and winter
can be cold and
damp, so spring and
autumn are the best
times to visit.
Photo by VCG

Photo by VCG
East Lake, Wuhan, Hubei Province, Yellow Crane Tower, Wuhan, Hubei
August 3, 2020 Province, November 30, 2020

While the weather overall was pretty
cloudy and moody, there was one day where
the sun came out and it was warm. On that
day, I borrowed a scooter from a friend and
drove it around to enjoy the city. This day
was full of life. Children were outside and
playing. Couples were embracing each other
and having coffee. It was genuinely beautiful.
Project done and my time being up, I left
back to Shanghai.
Seven months later, I was invited to be on
the first media tour of foreigners to the city
since the outbreak began. I wanted to collect
before and after shots to highlight whether
the city was now really open. And it was.
After a week filming high up in the west-
ern Sichuan mountains, I flew into Wuhan
Tianhe Airport and was whisked away to the
excellent Shangri-La Hotel. Seven days in a
hostel and tents and my back and body were
aching, so the hotel bed was heavenly.
During the three days there, I was able to
visit many of the places I visited before, and
ones that I hadn’t. From the massive East
Lake, which is six times larger than Hang-
zhou’s more famous West Lake, to the Hubei
Provincial Museum, with its bounty of his-
torical riches, this trip was a lot less gloomy
than the previous one. The museum, not
far from the East Lake in Wuchang District,
contains many artifacts unearthed from the
tomb of the Marquis of Yi, dating from
433 BCE. The main attraction is a set of 64
bronze chime bells, along with other musical
instruments, bronze artifacts and weapons.
A major highlight of the trip was visiting
the Yellow Crane Tower, in its 12th reincar-
nation sitting high above on Snake Hill over-
looking the Yangtze.
The tower, which has existed in one
form or another, although not always
in the same spot, since 223, is a kind
of double whammy as it holds a sacred
Tibetan Buddhist relic and the only Lama-
style white stupa in the city. It is also a sa-
cred site of Taoism as scholar and poet Lü
Dongbin is believed to have ascended to
heaven from here. After the city emerged
from lockdown, a ceremony was held at the
Yellow Crane Tower to symbolise that Wu-
han was open for business again.
Near Snake Hill is one end of the Wuhan
First Yangtze River Bridge, built in 1957,
which carries cars and trains across the river
in a double-deck construction – before that,
trains had to cross from northern to southern
China on barges. The other end of the bridge
is Turtle Hill.
The amount of life in the streets was a
drastic difference. It was bustling. The energy
was back with a vengeance. Those months of
forced idleness has made the people wanting
to live and enjoy, and it was everywhere.
From revellers taking in a 1920s experi-
ence on cruise up the Yangtze River to those
in costumes preparing for a Halloween night
of shenanigans to the Wuhan Fashion Week
debutants strolling the catwalk, the people of
Wuhan have bounced back and are definitely
proud.

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

61
essay

Bullish about the Year of the Ox

By Leila Hashemi

After much waiting, it’s finally my Chinese
zodiac year – the year of the ox. I did not
know much about the meanings or auspi-
ciousness surrounding the year of the ox, but
as soon as I saw it looming on the horizon, I
decided to do my homework. With the year
of the rat nibbling its cheese behind us, what
does this strong ox pull in?
Fun fact: The ox was originally supposed
to be the first sign of the zodiac, but the cun-
ning rat tricked him asking him for a ride.
Before the ox could make it over the thresh-
old of their destination, the rat jumped off
and whipped itself in ahead of the ox, fitting
for the rat I’d say, and became the first zodiac
sign.
I remember when I learned what my Chi-
nese zodiac year was. Me and some friends
visiting from America took a trip just outside
Beijing to Longqing Gorge, where there is a
long, long hike to the tip-top of one of the
mountains. Gasping and sweating, we fi-
nally reached the summit overlooking a small
town below. Before heading back down, we
noticed a vendor with some little trinkets
on her table. We got a closer look and saw
they were hand-carved figures of the Chinese
zodiac. I looked mine up and bought the ox
that I still have to this day.
I recently told a coworker that 2021 would
be my zodiac year, and they said that I should
wear red for luck and that when it is your
year, you may face more troubles than usual.
challenges ahead for all of us in the upcoming
When it is your zodiac year, year as the “new normal” is setting in, and we
have to continue to adjust. But a new year is
you will face some challenges.
also a time for new opportunities. As travel-
Apparently for the ox, this year ling out of China this year still may not be on
will see difficulties in career the cards, I have decided to make it my mis-
and studies due to being sion to get out and see as much of China as I
stressed, emotional and unable can. Usually, I would be planning and book-
ing trips home or to some Southeast Asian
to concentrate. I must admit I
country, but now I can focus my prospects on
laughed a little because I think the Chinese mainland.
ox or not, this year will be The best thing is many others are also fol-
challenging for everyone lowing this logic. Scrolling through Moments
on WeChat, I see people have been travelling
to some fantastic and beautiful places that
may have been easily overlooked otherwise.
My list’s first destination is Yunnan Province,
because it’s warm, this Beijing winter has
been brutal, and I love Yunnan cuisine.
Another hope I have for this upcoming
year is to spend more time working towards
future goals, take some online classes, pick up
the fancy camera I bought last year that has
just been collecting dust and discover things
in my own backyard in Beijing. With all that
went on last year and having to spend so
much time inside, it's easy to say I was in a
rut. This coming year, while things are still
not as they were before, I want to pull myself
out of the rut like the strong ox and dig a
new path.
In addition to finding new things to do
with the year ahead, my friends and I are
Illustration by Xiao Zhenduo

This did not make me feel good, so I have
already started filling my Taobao cart with all
the red clothes I can find.
I was wondering who else is an ox and
found some other famous oxen are former
US president Barack Obama, Vincent Van
Gogh and Walt Disney. All of whom fit the
character traits of the gentle giant beast –
hardworking, positive and honest.
As I previously mentioned, there was some
talk that when it is your zodiac year, you
will face some challenges. Apparently for
the ox, this year will see difficulties in career
and studies due to being stressed, emotional
and unable to concentrate. I must admit I
laughed a little because I think ox or not, this
year will be challenging for everyone.
Aside from my zodiac sign and all the tur-
moil of last year, I hope to make the year of
the ox a good one. There will definitely be
also planning new ways to celebrate the new
year. Many of us are not allowed to leave Bei-
jing, and temple fairs and large events have
once again been cancelled, so we’ll have to
get creative. This year we decided to have a
dumpling-making contest. We’ll each make
our own handmade dumplings, and bring
them together to share, with a winner to be
announced at the end of the night. It’s not a
grand temple fair or an extravagant trip out
of the country, but it’s a way to celebrate the
coming year still, and we are excited. Here’s
hoping the year of the ox being my best one
yet in China.

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

62
Winter’s Open Door Policy
By Kathleen Naday

It’s been really cold lately in Beijing. So cold
that when temperatures turned relatively normal
for the time of year – hovering just either side of
0 C, it felt positively balmy, warm enough to sit
outside and sip a coffee.
The first thing I knew about the extreme cold
wave was when a food delivery app sent me a
text message, urging its patrons to keep safe.
“We would like to warmly recommend you to
keep warm,” it said. I didn’t know if this message
was intended to encourage us to stay inside and
order takeout, thus exposing its poor delivery
drivers to the extreme cold, or urge us not to or-
der so its drivers would be safer.
How cold can it get, I thought? Just before
New Year’s Eve, temperatures had plunged for a
couple of days to what seemed extremely cold –
around -13 C and a “real feel” of -22 C, caused
by bone-chilling winds. Online that day, people
were delighted to find that apparently, Beijing
was colder than the Arctic. It was record-break-
ing cold, and a weather station in the mountain-
ous county of Yanqing to the northwest of Bei-
jing recorded temperatures of -26 C, breaking a
42-year record.
Until the following week. On January 7,
temperatures plunged to the lowest the capital
had seen for some 60 years. In the evening, as
I swathed myself in scarves and hats to take my
the heating is usually good. Not many people
The weather app said it was were brave (or stupid enough) to go out. Inside
-19 C, with a real feel of -37 C. the café, the temperature could best be described
as brisk. But I’d ordered food and drinks, so I
Winds were gusting from 30-50 had to stay.
kilometres per hour. I was in There are many habits of Beijingers that I
genuine fear that I had inflicted find endearing. Need to pop to the shop on a
frost bite on myself after having hot summer night? Wear pajamas – why bother
to take my gloves off for a few dressing for discomfort. Dance on the street to
weird techno music? Go for it.
seconds to scoop the pooches’ Some are mildly annoying – that way the
poop neighbours have of being nosy about your busi-
ness under the guise of common greetings. Oth-
ers are just downright enervating – the fact that
some people are quite unable to stop spitting
on the street, despite the continuing threat of a
deadly virus.
But the one that really makes me mad, espe-
cially in winter, is the seeming inability to close
a door. There are summer door failures also, but
it’s not so bad when it’s just hot air.
When I first came to Beijing, more than two
decades ago, many buildings like malls, restau-
rants and offices still had door persons. I always
thought these were just make-work jobs, like
the elderly ladies who used to sit in lifts all day
to push the buttons. This caused any person I
knew who lived in these high-rises to rush home
before midnight as if they would turn into a
Illustration by Xiao Zhenduo

dogs out, the weather app said it was -19 C, with
a real feel of -37 C. Winds were gusting from
30-50 kilometres per hour. I was in genuine fear
that I had inflicted frost bite on myself after hav-
ing to take my gloves off for a few seconds to
scoop the pooches’ poop.
It was so cold, some online influencers tried
to do that trick where you flung hot water over
your head and watched it freeze before it hit the
ground. They must not have realised that in
such strong winds, there was a real possibility it
would blow right back at them, something doc-
tors in North America warned people about as
there was a strong possibility of facial burns.
My flat is already freezing, despite the 24/7
central heating we have, provided for the winter
from November 15 to March 15. My previous
flat was so hot in winter, due to unlagged pipes
running under the floor, that people thought I’d
installed underfloor heating. I had to switch the
radiators off at the wall. This one is designed so
wackily that all the rooms have external walls,
jutting out from the building. It means the heat-
ing is woefully bad. I often use an extra heater or
the air con set to the highest heat setting just to
feel comfortable.
That day, not even that was enough, so I
thought I’d go to a nearby café to work, where
pumpkin. My friend’s building management
worried that elderly residents would not be able
to push their own buttons, which is why this sit-
uation lingered on until at least the early 2010s.
Meanwhile, in the café, the temperature took
a turn for the even more frigid. I asked the staff
why it was so cold. They shrugged, saying the
mall was in charge of heating. Then I realised.
People were still not bothering to close the door.
On this day. Only a thin plastic layer was be-
tween us and temperatures like the top of Mount
Qomolangma (Everest) in summer, which av-
erages -19 C (in winter, it’s -36 C, although of
course it gets way colder). I admitted defeat and
swapped one cold location for another, my flat.
And I am starting to change my mind about
the need for people to open doors. By definition,
they would also be closers.

CHINAREPORT I February 2021

63
flavour of the month
The Roast with the Most: Char Siu
By Mina Yan
What comes to mind when you think of
barbecue? If you say baby back ribs, you’re
not alone. Growing up, barbecue has always
conjured up memories of chicken wings,
corn on the cob and tender baby back ribs
covered in a generous coat of hickory barbe-
cue sauce. You know, the good old fashioned
American style stuff. Over time, I’ve come to
associate barbecue with Western cuisine. But
after moving to China, I realised that’s not
the case.
Not only does every region in China has
its own signature barbecue style, one of the
country’s most popular barbecue is found
topping noodles, over rice and inside steamed
buns around the world: char siu.
If you’ve travelled in southern China,
you’re bound to have seen food stalls with
strips of barbecued pork hanging in the win-
dow. They’re usually very red, a sightly un-
natural look for first timers. That’s char siu,
which is Cantonese for “fork-roasted.” When
I was young, my taste was a lot bougier than
it is now. I liked dining in expensive restau-
rants and having my food served on fine chi-
real chinese
neijuan
Internal fighting/vicious internal competition
A recent photo of a Tsinghua University stu-
dent in Beijing working on his laptop while rid-
ing a bike went viral. However, instead of praising
his work ethic, netizens criticised him for being a
neijuan wang, or a “leader of vicious internal com-
petition.”
Neijuan means “involution,” an academic term
in biology, mathematics and other sciences used to
describe the opposite of evolution, or a stagnation
due to involuntary, internal processes.
While arcane to most, neijuan picked up new
meaning on university campuses in recent years
to describe how some students would perpetu-
ate unhealthy competition among classmates by
64
na. Nowadays, I’m always on the lookout for
good street food when I travel. I’ve learned
that great food doesn’t need to be expensive
and that experiencing a local culture starts
with trying what locals eat. Plus, I need to
pay for my own meals now.
In the olden days, char siu was made with
gamier cuts like wild boar. But over the years,
we’ve come to prefer a more tender cut of
pork. Goodbye to that jerky texture where
you need to keep gnawing like a puppy on
a chew toy. Now it’s all about that succulent,
melt-in-your-mouth taste. Char siu is made
with pork loin for those who still like a meat-
ier texture, pork belly for those who like their
char siu moist and fatty and pork shoulder
for something in between.
Char siu is surprisingly easy to make, and
since custom-built smokers aren’t as common
in China as the US, any small oven at home
will do. To test out the simplicity of home-
made char siu, after a quick Google search,
I had a recipe that was easy enough to rep-
licate. Like with all barbecue, the secret to
a great char siu is the marinade, which calls
working extremely hard. Despite the potential
dangers, much like using a laptop while riding a
bike, many feel the need to follow suit to keep up.
Analysts warn that neijuan is permeating the
Chinese education system. As more parents push
their children to take advanced or extracurricular
academic courses, others must do the same just to
get their kids into a decent middle school. As a
result, children are buried in piles of homework
and hop between after-school classes, further bur-
dening families.
The phenomenon has spread to the workplace.
As a few employees push to rack up overtime and
gain praise from the boss, this forces everyone else
for classic Chinese ingredients. While recipes
may vary, the two must-haves are fermented
tofu, which gives char siu its red colour and
umami flavour, and a generous portion of
Chinese five spice powder. Then it’s just a
matter of patience. After a two-day marinade
(24 hours if you’re impatient), it’s off to the
oven where the cooking time is far less than
the classic barbecue but you’ll need to apply
numerous layers of glaze.
While my homemade char siu is delicious,
it’s nothing compared to that of the profes-
sional chefs from southern China. But I took
away more than just a bellyful of delicious
food from this experience. Cooking char siu
at home involved a lot of research on the food
and the region it originated from. I am now
familiar with the major spices of Chinese cui-
sine that can go in all types of dishes. It might
sound clichéd, but food is really the best way
to learn about a local culture and give you an
appreciation for the simpler things in life that
we sometimes take for granted. 
nèi juǎn
to emulate them. Gradually, bosses appraise em-
ployees based on time spent in the office rather
than performance and efficiency. In January, a
23-year-old employee at e-commerce platform
Pinduoduo suddenly collapsed and died on her
way home at midnight after a long shift, triggering
further debate over neijuan. State media chimed
in, saying that working hard does not mean
“burning the candle at both ends.”
Analysts have called neijuan “internal fighting”
where its costs outweigh the benefits. It forces peo-
ple to push themselves to extreme and unhealthy
levels for meagre productivity gains while increas-
ing anxiety across many levels of society. 
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
CHINAREPORT I February 2021
65
66
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