Wedding wows

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

Falling in love

OVERSIZE cupids in pink, furry outfits hand out heart-shaped balloons with “I Do” written on them (in English) at a wedding-themed trade fair in Beijing. Vendors offer romantic photo-shoots of couples under water or at a racetrack, personalised wedding cigarettes, and biscuits with names such as “Date & Fate”. An emphasis on love is a new addition to Chinese weddings—and shines a pink-filtered spotlight on social change.

For centuries, marriage in China was about ensuring heirs for the groom’s family. Ceremonies centred on the groom’s kin: couples kowtowed to the man’s parents but the woman’s relatives were absent. Unusually, both the groom’s and the bride’s family exchanged money or goods. The more money changed hands, the more opulent the wedding.

After it came to power in 1949, the Communist Party imposed frugality. Dowries consisted of necessities like bed linen or a bicycle; guests brought their own food coupons. But since the 1980s the extravagance of nuptials has matched the country’s rise. Celebrations moved out of homes into hotels. Brides swapped traditional...Continue reading

Red red army

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

ENSURING that troops remain loyal to the Communist Party has been a central aim of military training since the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was founded in 1927 as a guerrilla force in the countryside. President Xi Jinping wants to make them even redder.

Political education is already time-consuming. In basic training, troops spend about 40% of their week studying the history of the Communist Party and the military writings of party leaders. After boot camp they continue to devote 20-30% of it to ideology. The top brass are not exempt: an official report last year on a meeting of the Central Military Commission, the armed forces’ high command, of which Mr Xi is chairman, said that participants had genned up beforehand on the military thoughts of Mao Zedong and the like. Political officers, responsible for instilling party discipline, command jointly with officers in charge of soldiering.

Mr Xi, who enjoys more clout in the armed services than any of his predecessors since Deng Xiaoping, says he wants to modernise the PLA and boost its readiness to fight. He sees ideological training as crucial to this; a “magic weapon”, he says, for winning victories. This month he declared that “corrupt ideas and cultures” could damage morale. Soldiers, he said, should be “absolutely loyal, absolutely pure and absolutely reliable”.

Indoctrination is...Continue reading

Class struggle

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

IN THE first week of March university students in China will return from a break of six weeks or more. They will find a new chill in the air. While they have been away, officials have been speaking stridently—indeed, in the harshest terms heard in years—about the danger of “harmful Western influences” on campuses, and the need to tighten ideological control over students and academic staff.

Universities have always been worrisome to the Communist Party; they have a long history in China as wellsprings of anti-government unrest. The party appoints university presidents. Its committees on campuses vet the appointment of teaching staff. Students are required to study Marxist theory and socialism. They are not allowed to study politically sensitive topics such as the grievances of Tibetans or the army’s crushing of the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

There is no sign of an anti-party campaign developing on campuses (students are signing up for party membership in droves, believing it to be a path to career success). But since Xi Jinping took over as China’s leader in 2012, the party has been trying to reinforce its...Continue reading

Class struggle

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

IN THE first week of March university students in China will return from a break of six weeks or more. They will find a new chill in the air. While they have been away, officials have been speaking stridently—indeed, in the harshest terms heard in years—about the danger of “harmful Western influences” on campuses, and the need to tighten ideological control over students and academic staff.

Universities have always been worrisome to the Communist Party; they have a long history in China as wellsprings of anti-government unrest. The party appoints university presidents. Its committees on campuses vet the appointment of teaching staff. Students are required to study Marxist theory and socialism. They are not allowed to study politically sensitive topics such as the grievances of Tibetans or the army’s crushing of the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

There is no sign of an anti-party campaign developing on campuses (students are signing up for party membership in droves, believing it to be a path to career success). But since Xi Jinping took over as China’s leader in 2012, the party has been trying to reinforce its...Continue reading

Parallel lives

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

HONG KONG is renowned as one of the world’s freest markets, but some of its residents wish it was not quite so open to shoppers from the Chinese mainland. On February 15th about 200 protesters, chanting "mainlanders go back to the mainland", heckled visitors to a suburban mall who appeared to be compatriots from across the border on a buying spree in the territory. Resentful Hong Kongers call such shoppers "locusts" because they strip shelves of goods and clog public transport, often as part of organised rackets involving the resale of their purchases on the mainland. "Parallel trading", as this dodgy practice is described in Hong Kong, is fuelling a backlash.

The protest (pictured above) in Sha Tin district followed a similar one a week earlier in Tuen Mun, another suburb which is also a short hop from the border. Both areas are common targets for parallel traders, a term used to refer both to the shoppers as well as to the shadowy network of go-betweens who hire them to buy goods in Hong Kong and carry them over the border. It is, from the mainland's perspective, crowdsourced smuggling, which takes advantage of Hong Kong’s low prices (unlike...Continue reading

Tootling back to the village

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

The folks will be so impressed

IT IS often described as the world’s biggest recurring movement of people: a 40-day period spanning the lunar new year (which fell on February 19th this year), during which astonishing numbers of people travel to join distant family members to celebrate the “spring festival”. Officials call this period chunyun, or spring transportation. The term evokes horror in the minds of many: trains so jammed that the only place to sit is on lavatory floors. This year the projected number of journeys on public transport during chunyun, which will end on March 15th, is nearly 2.9 billion, a 10% increase over the comparable period a year ago. Yet there are reasons to be a little less gloomy about what this entails.

The numbers suggest that despite rapid urbanisation, the pull of the countryside remains strong. Many of the journeys involve mingong, or peasant workers, as the nearly 300m migrants from the countryside who work in urban areas are often snootily called. Their families are often divided. Children and parents stay in the...Continue reading

Georgia on their minds

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

MILLIONS of Chinese have dreamed of attending Harvard University. “Harvard Girl”, a how-to manual published in 2000 by the parents of one successful applicant, was a national bestseller. Georgia Institute of Technology, a prestigious university in Atlanta, has enjoyed less name-recognition. Yet this is fast changing: the number of Chinese applicants to Georgia Tech has surged, from 33 in 2007 to 2,309 last year. Some applicants are from the best schools in China, and all are ready to pay around $44,000 (for yearly fees and housing costs)—the equivalent of nearly ten times the average annual disposable income of urban households.

The ambitions of Chinese students are shifting: no longer are they attracted just by the glittering names. Pursuit of education abroad is becoming an end in itself. Universities far less renowned than Georgia Tech are reaping the benefits. More than 800,000 Chinese went abroad to study at all levels in 2012 and 2013. In those two years they made up more than a quarter of the 3m who had done so since China began opening to the outside world in 1978. At the end of 2013 nearly 1.1m Chinese were studying abroad, according to the...Continue reading

Lunar eclipse

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

THE Chinese calendar is often described, incorrectly, as a lunar one. It is in fact a lunar-solar mix, with an extra lunar month added every so often to stay in line with a wholly solar calendar. This ancient system, some 2,500 years old, is not just an academic curiosity. It has a big impact on economic data. The Chinese New Year holiday, and with it a peak in consumption and prices, scuttles back and forth between January and February (in the Gregorian calendar), complicating the annual comparisons.

Every few years—2015 being one—the impact is bigger than most. Thanks to the insertion of a lunar leap month last year, the Chinese New Year holiday falls especially late this February (it begins on the 18th). That astronomical quirk should offer a modicum of comfort to those fretting about the latest Chinese economic data, which, at first glance, portend doom.

The numbers made it look as if China was on the brink of deflation. Consumer prices rose just 0.8% from a year earlier, a sharp decline from preceding months. Trade was also weak, with exports falling 3% and imports down 20% (see chart).

But the distortion of the...Continue reading

In wolves’ clothing

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

ON FEBRUARY 19th cinemas in China will begin showing “Wolf Totem”, a film based on a Chinese novel critiquing man’s impulse to tame nature, in which a young man from Beijing attempts to domesticate a wolf. The release itself marks a change in the natural order of things: for the author of the novel, the director of the film and the state system that produced it.

The author, Lu Jiamin, was jailed for more than a year for his role in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Worried his subsequent writings would be banned, he wrote the novel under a pen name, Jiang Rong. The French director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, had been banned from China for making “Seven Years in Tibet”, a film released in 1997 that depicts the Chinese army invading Tibet and portrays the Dalai Lama sympathetically. But China Film Group, a state-owned giant, and others made Mr Annaud a rare foreign director of a Chinese feature film, with a budget of more than $40m.

The Communist Party has sensible reasons to embrace both men. The novel, Mr Lu’s first, is a literary phenomenon: it has sold more than 5m copies in China, in addition to many more pirated ones. In 2007 an English-language translation won the inaugural Man Asia Literary Prize. The acclaim was so great, and so swift to spread, that back-footed censors decided to turn a blind eye to the author’s background and...Continue reading

Rank and vile

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

SO EXTENSIVE was the stash of jade, gold and cash found in the basement of General Xu Caihou’s mansion in Beijing that at least ten lorries were needed to haul it away, according to the Chinese press last October. Given General Xu’s recent retirement as the highest ranking uniformed officer in the armed forces, this was astonishing news. General Xu, the media said, had accepted “extremely large” bribes, for which he now faces trial. It will be the first of such an exalted military figure since the Communist Party came to power in 1949.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—as the Chinese army, navy and air force are collectively known—has not fought a war for 35 years. But the world’s largest fighting force is now engaged in a fierce battle at home against corrosion within its ranks.

Xi Jinping, China’s president (pictured, pointing), has taken his sweeping anti-corruption campaign into the heart of the PLA, seemingly unafraid to show that a hallowed institution is also deeply flawed. In January the PLA took the unprecedented step of revealing that 15 generals and another senior officer were under investigation or awaiting...Continue reading

Let a million flowers bloom

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

From China with love

FROM midnight until 4am trading is keen and fast at the Dounan Flower Market in a suburb of Kunming, capital of the south-western province of Yunnan. Trucks laden with radiant, perfumed blooms clog the surrounding roads. By mid-morning petals litter the ground and most of the 14m stems sold each day are on their way to destinations around China and beyond. Since the local government turned a budding local enterprise into China’s biggest wholesale flower market in 1999, Dounan has become the main supplier of blooms to courting couples and contrite husbands across the country: demand fuelled by a middle-class boom.

Yunnan has rapidly emerged as China’s dominant flower-growing region. In 1994 it had a mere 133 hectares (329 acres) of flower farmland. By 2013 it had 67,400 hectares and accounted for about a third of China’s blossom exports—helped by expanding international air links in a province that was once isolated from global markets. China now accounts for more than a quarter of land worldwide devoted to growing flowers and pot plants, according to the International Association of Horticultural...Continue reading

Plugging the holes

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

TWO of the first things that strike visitors to China are irritants to which some residents have become inured: bad air and poor internet service. For those with money to spare, a (very expensive) solution to the first problem is to buy air purifiers. For the second the solution is much cheaper and, until recently, far more visibly effective: a “virtual private network” (VPN), a software service that tunnels through the government’s extensive obstacles to content it dislikes.

Selling air purifiers remains a growth industry in China, but the VPN business is in trouble. For years internet censors largely tolerated it, perhaps because users of paid VPN services were, at first, mostly foreign residents. In recent weeks, however, the government has changed tack. It has been making unusually strenuous efforts to block access to VPNs. Foreign companies which provide them have been warning customers that these problems will persist as China’s countermeasures become ever more sophisticated.

The censors have also been speaking more openly about their efforts to protect China’s “cyber-space sovereignty”. On January 27th Wen Ku, a senior official in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that the country needed “new methods to tackle new problems” in its management of the internet. State media have suggested that offering VPN...Continue reading

The cost of clean air

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

A DESOLATE scene surrounds Little Zhang’s Tyre Repair in the dusty rock-mining township of Shijing, in the northern province of Hebei. Zhang Minsheng, the owner, still gets some business from passing traffic. But the recent closure of nearby rock quarries, because of air-pollution restrictions, has taken its toll. He reckons his monthly income has fallen by 30-40% to around 4,000 yuan ($640). Next door a wholesale coal business has closed. So too have a small family-owned barbecue restaurant and an alcohol, tobacco and grocery store. Red characters posted by their entrances still forlornly proclaim their “grand opening”.

Last year on a typically smoggy day in Beijing, Li Keqiang, the prime minister, declared “war” on air pollution—a problem that has become a national fixation. Smog remains a grave danger in most Chinese cities, but environmental measures are beginning to show teeth. Regulators in the most polluted provinces are ordering mass closures of offending enterprises. In some areas officials are being punished for failing to control pollution. Policymakers are placing less emphasis on GDP growth—long an obsession of officials at all...Continue reading