CONTRADICTION: Haves and Have Nots

When you drive out of downtown Beijing, before you're outside of the 6th Ring Road you begin to pass through villages where you can see the development of recent years has not yet come to pass. Storefronts vary between brick or concrete blocks to tin-roofed shanties selling groceries and mobile phone charge cards, and everything is surrounded by farm fields. The people here aren't destitute, but they are generally the part of Beijing making less than the city average of about 5,000 RMB (~$800 USD) a month--probably much less.

And then there's the haves. Grabbing lunch just now at 7-Eleven the guy behind me asked for a box of condoms from behind the cashier. Not a totally uncommon request, but it was asked in a kind of brazen way that's uncommon with locals here. He was wearing a baseball hat, common for Korean folks especially and Wangjing, but more and more for internationally-inclined Chinese locals as well. Walking outside I was impressed to see him driving away in an Bentley with no license plates--a sure sign of government connections, which I guess is ubiquitous for most rich folks here.

It comes up quite often in staff discussions, how unfair it must seem that foreigners make such high salaries for jobs like English teaching in comparison to Chinese white-collar workers doing work of equal or more difficulty and making fractions of foreigner pay. Then again, you see locals driving around in Bentleys and begin to see that the have-nots here are just surrounded by what must appear like ridiculous opulence at times, and there's not a whole lot to do about it.

We had an employee post a very damaging message yesterday on our company microblog site that gets circulated to all of our clients. It was known for a while that he wasn't happy with his pay, though he was being reimbursed at market with relatively decent working conditions. To be honest, can you really blame young Chinese professionals for the resentment they must harbor against all the riches they see around them? Thinking about it more, this is the same vein that Mao must have tapped into in inspiring popular support for the Communist revolt.