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2012-December-20

Capital Changes

Before the golden-flanked Hyundai Elantras and Sonatas and FAW-VW Jettas entered the cab ranks in 2004, Beijing taxis comprised yellow mini-buses that went everywhere for a flat RMB 10 fare and the red Xiali, whose dashboards all proudly bore a laminated portrait of Chairman Mao.

The capital’s more affluent denizens drove Jeep Cherokees (XJ), manufactured in the PRC since 1984, when American Motors set up the first automobile-manufacturing joint venture with Beijing Automobile Industry Corporation. The majority, however, still went about their daily business by bicycle. Since then the number of cars in the capital has more than quadrupled to five million.

Time Out

Certain leisure time activities are as popular now as they were in the late 1990s. At early morning and sunset, public squares and parks still double as open-air ballrooms where local residents practice the waltz, quickstep, paso doblé or traditional Chinese dances. The nimble-footed of Beijing tripped the Latin American light fantastic in the early noughties, when clubs like Latinos in Chaoyang Park heaved with locals strutting their salsa stuff. Skate boarding and soccer are still popular street sports and KTV the favorite entertainment venue for work unit junkets and after-dinner outings.

The march of time and technology has transformed the leisure pursuits of the youth everywhere. The Internet, still nascent in China in the late 1990s, now offers games, chat rooms and shopping websites like Taobao that regale netizens with tempting displays of imported luxury items. They are all a far cry from the shadow puppet shows and local Chinese opera that so delighted their great grandparents.

Going to the movies has become a more up-market pursuit since the entry into China at the turn of the millennium of Western blockbusters Titanic and The Fugitive. Movie theaters in the Malls of Wanfujing’s Oriental Plaza are grander by far than the sunflower seed-strewn cinemas like that in Jishuitan, where in 1999 I first saw Zhang Yimou’s haunting The Road Home. Chinese cinema achieved world acclaim in the 1980s due to fifth-generation directors Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzuang and Chen Kaige. A new trend appeared in 1996 with the establishment of the Youth Experimental Film Group. In contrast to Zhang Yimou’s spectacularly cinematographed Raise the Red Lantern and Chen Kaige’s historical epic Farewell My Concubine, films by founder and leading member of the so-called sixth-generation Jia Zhangke and his peers focused on marginalized individuals in unglamorous settings. Jia’s Xiao Wu of 1997, for instance, is about a provincial pickpocket, set against the bleak backdrop of a nondescript provincial town.

Better and Worse

Snowballing auto ownership in the capital and elsewhere is a mixed blessing. Citizens now motor to the countryside or neighboring provinces at the weekend and on public holidays at will rather than according to train or bus timetables. They, along with their offspring, however, are perceptibly plumper. The majority of Beijing residents have abandoned their bicycles. Owing to broader availability of foods as well as the wherewithal to buy them, they also eat fewer grains, potatoes and beans and more animal foods, fats and sugar. A government survey in 2005 showed that one out of five adults is overweight and one in ten obese. This trend has given rise to a thriving weight loss industry, apparent in fitness centers for people of all ages and summer camps for overweight schoolchildren. Concern about its growingly corpulent citizens prompted the Beijing municipal government’s announcement in 2009 of the “Healthy Beijinger: A 10-year Plan to Improve People’s Health” campaign. It aims to reduce the proportion of overweight Chinese adults and obese primary and high school children from 17 percent to 15 percent by 2018.

Another serious consequence of ballooning car ownership is, of course, its impact on air quality. Resourceful as always, the Beijing government has sustained and reinforced measures first brought in ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, namely no-driving days for cars based on their tail plate number. It has also guaranteed priority to development of public transportation.

A Roof and Four Walls

Perhaps the greatest change in the lives of the Chinese people is that of living in commercial rather than government or work unit-allocated accommodation. Housing reforms began in the mid-1980s. But it was not until the late 1990s that they were carried out nationwide to stimulate the domestic economy and expand the per capita living space beyond the average four square meters. The government announced in August 1999 that all vacant residential housing units built after January 1, 1999, were to be sold rather than allocated. The average price per square meter of property in downtown Beijing was then RMB 3,000 to RMB 4,000. As at the first quarter of 2012, it stood at 19,516 per square meter, according to the Beijing Real Estate Association.

The young adults I knew in 1996 as students are now struggling manfully to pay for their homes, cars and children’s schooling while facing the prospect of looking after two pairs of aging parents. The government, however, has again taken due action, having invested RMB 820 billion (US $129.4 billion) in the first eight months of this year in building affordable housing units for low-income groups, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

Broadening Outlooks

I have not, to my knowledge, met a gay local resident of Beijing since I arrived in 1996. The abolition in 1997 of the crime of Liumang or Hooliganism decriminalized homosexuality, but it was not removed from the Ministry of Health list of mental illnesses until the year 2001.

China must be one of the most difficult places to be gay. As continuing the family bloodline is considered a son’s filial duty, many gay men marry purely out of respect for their parents. A recent article in The Economist, “Gay Marriage Gone Wrong,” cites an estimate by scholar Zhang Beichuan, based on census data from 2011, that 70 percent of gay men marry straight women and that two to five percent of Chinese men above the age of 15 are gay. Less detailed information is available on gay women. But July 1, 2012 saw a landmark achievement in the lifting of China’s ban on lesbians giving blood, in place since 1998 and still applicable to gay men.

There may still be a long way to go before homosexuality loses its stigma in China and elsewhere, particularly in view of its HIV/AIDS associations. Taking into consideration the immense changes I have witnessed in just 16 years, there is every reason to be confident that the good sense and humanity of the Chinese people will prevail in this and other gender-related issues.

 

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