Invisible Poverty

by Shao Jinshi

Forty years ago, China was a synonym for poverty, but now she is thriving with wealth---China has been changing. However, that does not mean we have been delivered from poverty.

Let’s first consider whether our country was really poor forty years ago. My parents told me that when they were in their teens, people were leveled in terms of daily goods and incomes. They ate sweet potatoes with gruel for lunch and gruel with sweet potatoes for supper. To them, a sweet potato was as lovely and romantic as its French equivalent “la pomme de terre” indicates: an apple grown on the ground. There was no break-in, no robbery, and no fraudulence as everyone was as poor as his/her neighbor. Curiously enough, back then, the country seemed veritably poor, yet her people didn’t feel poor. In a way, they were quite rich, mentally and morally, as there was a popular sense of unity, or what they called “an enthusiasm for revolution,” created by the red booklets containing Mao Zedong’s sayings, one of the most well-known being “It is glorious to be poor.”

From Mao to now, however, tremendous changes have taken place. (A sweet potato will definitely not give you any delight except when it is used as a way to describe a person’s oval rotund head) With her GDP ranking second in the world, one can never say China is poor, yet her people are feeling poor. But WHY? I hereby venture to give two curious possible reasons which may otherwise be neglected by many.

First, it is education, or rather the wrong belief in education, that pauperizes the Chinese. According to a 2012 survey by China Youth Development Research Centre, an average Chinese family spends thirty percent of its total income on children’s education which amounts to nearly nine thousand yuan per year. If children really benefit from that huge sum of money, it should be considered worthwhile. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Children are usually forced to attend extracurricular classes by their parents who know that their children’s playtime will be suffered but just cannot help doing so under the belief that their children cannot lose at the starting point. A friend of my mother sent her child to seven after-school classes in the past summer vacation, including Olympic Math, writing, English, calligraphy, Chinese painting, piano, and even magic shows, only to have her child lose his interest in learning and get fed up with school. “You can’t let him do that. It’s too cruel for him,” my mother protested. “You don’t know how hard his classmates are learning. The more he learns, the better he is,” said my mother’s friend disapprovingly. But is it so? Losing interest in learning deprives children of creativity and innovation. Can you say a nation is rich without creativity and innovation? Can you say a people is strong when the young generation lack creativity and innovation?

A series of recent events has brought me to the second reason that pauperizes our country---group think. It was shocking that the anti-Japanese demonstration turned into a complete mobbism. The outrage erupted in fifty-five cities in China. In Qingdao, Chongqing, and Changsha, unruly mobs broke into shops, smashed down windows, and trampled on Japanese cars and burnt them, shouting “Down with Japanese dogs and the baneful Japanese goods! Only Miss Blue is international!” While giving a thought to what is patriotism, we need to explore the reason why so many people would be incited by the unreasonable mobbists. It is certainly not because they didn’t know what they were doing was outrageously lawless and would be arrested for that as they truly was. What drove them to join the unreasonable act was “group think”---ignoring alternatives and tending to take irrational actions that dehumanize other groups---exactly the same mistake that we made during the Cultural Revolution. It is also the root of my first point: parents pay and force their children to learn as much as possible without considering the true need of them just because other people are doing so.

However long is Heaven and old is Land there is an end, yet disaffluence lingers for ever as a pit that sees no nadir. At no point throughout history did poverty disappear, nor will it disappear in the foreseeable future. We must remember that poverty is not only material but also mental and moral, and that, for a nation, being mentally and morally poor is more dangerous than being materially poor.