Unnatural aristocrats

CLOSELY tracking the Shanghai Composite Index in its downward slide in August was the reputation of China’s government for consistency, competence and even common sense. Worse, its hapless response to the bursting of a stockmarket bubble, which its own propaganda had helped to inflate, was only one of a number of bungles. It mismanaged a modest devaluation of its currency, the yuan. And a catastrophic explosion in the northern port city of Tianjin revealed appalling lapses in the enforcement of regulations. All governments make mistakes. But China’s bases its legitimacy on its performance rather than a popular mandate. Now foreigners and citizens alike are asking whether the Chinese authorities have lost the plot.

Despite the rash of bad news, the Chinese Communist Party can still boast more than three decades of success in fostering spectacular economic growth and in raising China’s global standing. A few rough weeks do not give the lie to “the China model”—in which authoritarian one-party rule is said to be justified because it produces the social order and wise leadership that beget economic growth. Supporters of this idea like to point to the...

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Tanks a lot

Greetings, now go home

EVERY city suffers some inconvenience for the sake of pageantry. The authorities in Beijing show little restraint in inflicting it. Residents are used to coping with road closures, car-use bans and the suspension of subway and bus services before large events. But aggravation related to the staging of a military parade through the city centre on September 3rd—the first in six years—went much further. Occupants of buildings overlooking the procession were told not to open windows or take photos, much less line the streets. Some hospitals stopped admitting new patients for the day, lest the movement of the sick disrupt that of the thousands of troops. Offices along the main route were told to shut for most of August. Flights to Beijing were subject to delays for an entire month while military aircraft trained for their flypast.

The biggest disruption resulted from efforts to ensure that Beijing’s ever-present smog gave way to what state media call yuebing lan, or “parade blue” skies. Outdoor barbecues (a popular Beijing cuisine) were shut down. Road transport fell by 35-...

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Parade’s end

AFTER weeks of market mayhem, it must have made a nice change for Xi Jinping, China’s president, to be reviewing ranks of smartly-dressed people who move in perfect synchronicity and do exactly what he tells them. Vast military parades may have gone out of fashion elsewhere, but Asian countries still like to strut their stuff. After displays of hardware and prowess in India, Pakistan, Russia and Taiwan this year, China held the most vainglorious march-past yet under clear blue skies (especially seeded for the purpose) in Tiananmen Square on September 3rd.

The event marked Victory Day, which was invented as a holiday only in 2014 to mark the end of the People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, as the years leading up to and during the second world war are known in China. It was China’s first large-scale military parade since 2009, the first to celebrate anything other than the Communist Party’s rule and the first involving foreign troops. But Mr Xi (pictured above) did not have to hold it. Such parades had always been reserved for the decennial anniversaries of the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1st 1949. This one...

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Young, single and what about it?

IN HER tiny flat, which she shares with two cats and a flock of porcelain owls, Chi Yingying describes her parents as wanting to be the controlling shareholders in her life. Even when she was in her early 20s, her mother raged at her for being unmarried. At 28 Ms Chi took “the most courageous decision of my life” and moved into her own home. Now 33, she relishes the privacy—at a price: her monthly rent of 4,000 yuan ($625) swallows nearly half her salary. 

In many countries leaving the family home well before marriage is a rite of passage. But in China choosing to live alone and unmarried as Ms Chi has done is eccentric verging on taboo. Chinese culture attaches a particularly high value to the idea that families should live together. Yet ever more people are living alone.

In the decade to 2010 the number of single-person households doubled. Today over 58m Chinese live by themselves, according to census data, a bigger number of one-person homes than in America, Britain and France combined. Solo dwellers make up 14% of all households. That is still low compared with rates found in Japan or Taiwan (see chart), but the proportion...

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The kin and I

LIU CAIPING is a former maths teacher, now 71, who has lived alone in the western city of Xi’an since her husband died last year. The radio is her steadfast companion. Her eyesight is failing and she rarely goes out. Like many city residents, her former neighbours have scattered, and her two daughters are far away. When she can no longer cope on her own she will go to a nursing home, she says. That option remains extremely rare for old Chinese. And that highlights the problem: China is struggling to cope with a rapidly ageing society and a rising number of elderly people living by themselves.

For most of the past two millennia the family has been central to how Chinese have seen themselves—and the state has been seen as a family writ large. Filial piety was somewhere near the heart of a Confucian order regulating society, and the family was an extended, stable unit of several generations under one roof. A very common saying encapsulated it all: yang er fang lao—“raise children for your old age”.

Today multi-generation families are still the norm. Almost three-fifths of people over 65 live with their...

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Poisonous connections

What the blast laid bare

RESIDENTS who had their homes destroyed by the huge explosions that rocked the northern city of Tianjin on August 12th are being offered 2,000 yuan ($312) a month for three months. “The government says it is taking care of people who lost their homes,” says one resident, Chang Zaixing. “But they’re lying and cheating. Everyone in Tianjin knows it, but we should let the rest of China and the rest of the world know it.”

After one of China’s biggest industrial accidents, the government’s emergency response is being met with open contempt. Residents with banners, loudhailers and face masks dog officials’ footsteps, demanding full compensation for their homes. Others want to know what has happened to their relatives—65 people remain unaccounted for. It took almost a week for the mayor, Huang Xingguo, to appear before a press conference. When he did, on August 19th, the city’s claim that air-quality readings were acceptable met with incredulity. “Are the data really true?” asked a reporter from the Communist party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily.

Perhaps the...

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Uncivil society

RECENTLY the Communist Party has put forward a raft of proposals aimed at preventing perceived challenges to its monopoly of power. On July 1st a national-security law was passed that authorised “all measures necessary” to protect the country from hostile elements. Now a draft of China’s first law for regulating foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is expected to pass in the coming weeks. The law is deemed necessary because of the threats NGOs are presumed to pose.

The draft law represents a mixture of limited progress and major party retrenchment in a sensitive area. Under Mao Zedong, China had no space for NGOs. But they have multiplied in the past decade to fill the gaps left by the party’s retreat from people’s daily lives. Officials say the law will help NGOs by giving them legal status, a valid claim. But it will also force strict constraints on foreign or foreign-supported groups. No funding from abroad will be allowed. And all NGOs will have to find an official sponsoring organisation. They will then have to register with China’s feared public security apparatus, which will now oversee the entire foreign-backed sector.

...

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Packing up the suitcase trade

A FERRIS wheel visible from the Russian bank turns alluringly on the low island of Daheihe on the Chinese side of the Amur river. But the main attraction is the Daheihe Island International Trading City, with its bright ferry terminal and multi-level trading hall. Russian traders used to flock across the border to stuff their suitcases with cheap Chinese goods. Yet that trade, which long sustained the nearby Chinese city of Heihe, has hit a rough patch. Inside the vast trading hall stall-keepers spend more time knitting, napping and playing cards than they do making deals.

Shi Ying, a purveyor of medicines, tea, cosmetics and knick-knacks, blames the drop in value of Russia’s currency. Just over a year ago 100 roubles bought more than 18 yuan (about $3), but today they buy fewer than ten. The Russian economy has been hit by slumping prices for oil and gas, and by Western sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 and meddling in Ukraine. Russians, Ms Shi says, “have no money, it’s that simple.”

The stalls cover a huge space and offer wigs, watches, wheel rims, studded leather belts, fake Jim Beam bourbon, high-powered...

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Mapping the invisible scourge

THE capital’s “airpocalypse”, the choking smog that descended on Beijing in the winter of 2012-13, galvanised public opinion and spooked the government. The strange thing is, though, that information about air pollution—how extensive it is, how much damage it does—has long been sketchy, based mostly on satellite data or computer models. Until now.

Responding to the outcry, the government set up a national air-reporting system which now has almost 1,000 monitoring stations, pumping out hourly reports on six pollutants, including sulphur dioxide, ozone and (the main culprit) particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter, or PM2.5. These are tiny particles which lodge in the lungs and cause respiratory disease. The six are the main cause of local pollution but have little to do with climate change, since they do not include carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Scientists from Berkeley Earth, a not-for-profit foundation in America, have trawled through this recent cloud of data for the four months to early August 2014, sieved out the bits that are manifestly wrong (readings where the dial seems to be stuck, for instance) and emerged with the most...

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Inferno

After the blast, the blame

“IT SOUNDED,” said Guo Jianfu, who was asleep in a workers’ dormitory at the time, “like the start of a war. I thought maybe Japan was bombing our port.” Just before midnight on August 12th a pair of huge explosions in an industrial warehouse tore through Tianjin, a major city in north-east China, killing at least 44 people and injuring over 400. A swathe of the industrial zone was devastated, with shipping containers strewn about like toys. Residential areas also suffered extensive damage. On the China Earthquake Administration’s seismograph, the biggest blast registered a tremor of magnitude 2.9.

Disasters, man-made or natural, are dangerous to authoritarian governments since public distress can turn to public anger. Social media add to the problems since they make it harder for governments to hush up the scale of damage or the inadequacies of the response.

The Tianjin explosions showed the new rules of disaster management in action. With a few exceptions, the authorities allowed reporters access and have so far done little to censor coverage. Tweets were not blocked, even...

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At sea in the city

City rapids

MANY Chinese cities offer “sea views”, but of a kind that arouse fear and anger rather than raise spirits. The term is often used scornfully by Chinese media to describe the floods that render roads impassable and sometimes kill people during heavy downpours. They are largely the product of woefully inadequate drains. Urban areas have more than doubled in size since 1998, but officials have scrimped on arrangements for keeping them dry.

During the summer rainy season, the complaints of urban residents swell as fast as the foul water in the streets. They are targeted at the government. Even the state-controlled press joins in. On July 28th China Youth Daily said it was “beyond understanding” that city planners should give priority to high-profile “vanity projects” while ignoring the need for storm drains and the like. “Money doesn’t seem to be a problem,” it said. Residents of Beijing still harbour bitter memories of flooding in 2012 that killed 79 people (mostly outside the urban core) and caused 12 billion yuan ($1.9 billion) in damage. Much of the mayhem was caused by the flooding of...

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Silent waves

IN THE dog days of August, Beidaihe is a sea resort unlike any other. Swimmers, waddling through the streets with flotation rings around their waists, pause at road crossings as paramilitary police, in tight single-file with ramrod straight backs, march past. Visitors entering town are stopped at checkpoints. Cars require special certification. And tourists know their fun can only go so far: just beyond the westernmost public beach, guards stop anyone approaching a tree-lined boulevard leading to villas where very important people are, apparently, discussing very important matters.

Exactly who these people are is a secret. China’s leaders—President Xi Jinping; the prime minister, Li Keqiang; ministers, provincial bosses and retired senior officials—are probably all now at the resort on Bohai Bay, two hours from Beijing by high-speed train. But ordinary citizens will not find out. Since the earliest years of Mao’s rule, the government has never published a list of attendees at these annual conclaves.

Warm breezes and shaded gardens are thought conducive to debates about policy. “Top leaders have the luxury of time to discuss serious...

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Rising penetration rate

For galoshes, size does matter

IT USED to be that condoms could be found in China only during business hours, at government family-planning clinics, on production of a marriage certificate. In recent years they have become far more readily available—in vivid and sometimes intimidating variety—alongside the chewing gum, cigarettes and crisps on offer at all-night convenience stores, in hotel rooms and in vending machines. Sales of biyuntao, literally, “pregnancy-avoidance sheaths”, are growing fast.

The name biyuntao, however, suggests why use of them is low in China compared with many other countries. Contraception is widely seen as a woman’s responsibility—indeed, abortion is one of the most common methods.

Open discussion of sex remains taboo in most quarters, making it difficult to raise awareness of how useful condoms are, not only to prevent pregnancy but also the spread of disease. Aditya Sehgal of Durex, a British brand, says about 10% of Chinese who potentially are sexually active are regular condom users. That is about the same proportion as in Hong...

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Need a weatherman

ROW after giant row of wind turbines marches towards the snowy peaks of the Tian Shan range, harvesting energy from the air. On a blustery July day in Xinjiang in China’s far west, it is hard to stand upright beside the structures, each 90m (nearly 300 feet) high. China is better known as a land of coal and smog, but it is now increasing the generation of electricity from renewable sources faster than any other country, with more than 100 gigawatts a year of installed generating capacity from wind, a third of the world’s total (see chart). In future, wind power will be a vital source of renewable energy. If it can integrate large-scale wind generation into its electricity network, China will be an example for other countries.

By many counts wind generation in China is a success story. Over the past decade generating capacity has increased tenfold, while the cost of building wind farms has fallen. Three of the...

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Confucius says, Xi does

TWO emerging cults are on display in Qufu, a city in eastern China where Confucius was born. One surrounds the ancient sage himself. At a temple in his honour, visitors take turns to bow and prostrate themselves before a large statue of Confucius seated on a throne. For each obeisance, a master of ceremonies chants a wish, such as for “success in exams” or “peace of the country”. On the other side of the city the tomb of Confucius is the scene of similar adoration—flowers adorn it as if he were a loved one recently lost.

The other cult in Qufu surrounds the country’s president, Xi Jinping. People still recall with excitement the trip he made to the city in 2013. It was the first by a Communist Party chief in more than two decades; in fact, though Mr Xi has visited Qufu he has not, since becoming China’s leader, paid respects at the birthplace of Mao Zedong at Shaoshan in Hunan province. Today plates decorated with Mr Xi’s image are for sale in Qufu’s trinket shops. His beaming face is on display on a large billboard outside the Confucius Research Institute, together with a quotation from the modern sage: “In the spread of Confucianism around the...

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Render unto Caesar

Its cross to bear—for now

THE Communist Party is struggling to manage the only cult in China bigger than itself—the Christian church. All down the country’s eastern seaboard it is hard to find a village that does not boast a spire or tower topped with a cross. To some in the party, this is a provocation, especially in the south-eastern province of Zhejiang around the coastal city of Wenzhou. Over the past 18 months, party leaders have ordered the demolition of such crosses. But this month the provincial branches of the Catholic Patriotic Association and the Protestant Christian Council—two of the government bodies that administer the official churches allowed in China—each issued an open letter to provincial officials condemning the demolitions.

The letters accuse the party of violating its own commitment to the rule of law. They add that the incidents have damaged the Communist Party’s image at home and abroad. It is, says Yang Fenggang of Purdue University in Indiana, the first time that leaders of official churches have come out openly on the side of ordinary believers against the Communist Party.

Normally it is “house...

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Shaft of light

Risking life to fuel China

FOR decades China’s coal mines served as tragic showcases of greed, corruption and contempt for life: thousands died in accidents every year and many more after prolonged agony from dust-clogged lungs. In 2003 Wen Jiabao, who was then about to become prime minister, went down a shaft to have dumplings with miners. He told local officials that safety was the Communist Party’s priority. Over the next three years, however, just as many coalworkers died in mines—more than 18,000, by official counts—as in the preceding three years. Mr Wen’s words rang hollow.

Then a striking turnaround began. Chinese coal mines became far safer even as they more than doubled output to fuel the country’s economic boom—they produced 3.9 billion tonnes in 2014, about half the world total. Last year 931 miners were killed in coal-mine accidents. It was the 12th year in a row in which the death toll reportedly fell. By one measure of mining safety—deaths per million tonnes of coal produced—China’s record had improved twenty-fold since 2002, to 0.24 (see chart). That is still about ten times worse than in the developed...

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Uncivil

SOME were taken from their homes in the middle of the night. Others had their offices raided, or were summoned to “take tea” at the local police station—a euphemism for being interrogated. According to Amnesty International, around 120 lawyers, as well as more than 50 support staff, family members and activists, have been rounded up across the country since the pre-dawn hours of July 9th. Many have been released, but as The Economist went to press at least 31 were still missing or were believed to remain in custody.

The round-up has been remarkable for its speed, geographic extent and the number of people targeted. Teng Biao, a Chinese lawyer and activist currently in America, says it includes nearly all of China’s civil-rights lawyers. They are a harassed lot at the best of times, but this is the most concerted police action against them since such lawyers began to emerge in the early 2000s as defenders of the legal rights of ordinary people in cases against the state. In the past few days state media have vilified them, describing them as rabble-rousers seeking “celebrity and money”.

The police have focused...

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Tales of the unexpected

WEIJIA is a typical Chinese seven-year-old. He loves riding his bike and anything to do with cars; he is a badminton fanatic and has lessons twice a week. In a few months’ time, however, he will become rather less typical. He will have a brother or sister—something most urban Chinese children lack.

His parents are taking advantage of a relaxation in November 2013 of the country’s strict family-planning rules. Couples are now allowed to have a second baby if one parent is an only child. After more than 35 years of often brutal enforcement of the one-child-per-couple policy, some had expected a mini baby-boom to follow. The National Health and Family Planning Commission estimated that the new rules would allow 11m more couples to have a second child (there were already exemptions for some). It thought that 2m of them would try in the first year. But by the end of 2014 fewer than 1.1m people had applied for the necessary permit.

That worries the government, which has tweaked the rules not out of sympathy for lonely only children or for parents who want a spare heir, but because of a population crunch. The country is ageing rapidly. In...

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Rigging the daddy race

Learning to keep tabs on the property market

INSIDE the red-lacquered door of No. 39 Wenhua Lane in central Beijing is an old-style single-storey home built around a small courtyard. Its owner, an elderly man in a vest, sits on an upturned bucket near a jumble of cooking pots; a pile of old cardboard rests atop a nearby shed. Next to the man, two estate agents hover at the entrance to a room just big enough for a bed, a wardrobe and a rickety desk. They say it costs 3.9m yuan ($630,000). At 353,990 yuan per square metre, this makes it pricier than posh digs around New York’s Central Park—and it does not even have its own bathroom and kitchen. It is, however, close to the state-run Beijing No. 2 Experimental Primary School, one of the best in the city.

Until recently, that would have had little bearing on the price of the room. For years it has been officially required that admission to a school be based solely on how close a child lives to it. Schools have paid little attention. Backhanders and connections have counted for much more. So too have entrance tests, designed to exclude the less able (unless they were rich—...

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