China Expat’s Year in Review

What? The year’s over? No offense to Gregorians, but we’ll be wrapping things up after twelve lunar months. That’ll be February 14^th, meaning Valentine’s Day fans here will have to forfeit the intimate Pizza Hut dinner for the traditional family jiaozi-fest. But China is nothing if not adaptable. So sure, we can interrupt the year of our Earth Ox 4706 long enough to review the “past”.

Big Business

China began the year waving around numbers to show it had grown bigger than Germany in 2007, with a GDP of 25.7 trillion RMB. Even more astonishing, despite the Sachs punch to China’s lower export area, the latest data appears to show it grew 9.6, not 9 percent in 2008, and that just 8 percent next year will put it ahead of Japan. Ahead of Japan. There’s a phrase that will roll around pleasantly on a Chinese tongue.

Big numbers are good, but even better are small numbers, with a letter after them. 3G, for example. Until the rest of us can order from magazines on the phone, get a fresh pair of underwear from a vending machine, and enjoy a little whale sushi, no one’s ahead of Japan.

Technology

But China’s certainly taking its cue from Future-land, as the West sacrifices its youths to Playstations and Manga. A new super train takes travelers from the summer furnace of Wuhan to the cooling, fragrant ocean breezes of Guangzhou in just three hours. This in addition to the new Shijiazhuang- Taiyuan link, Shanghai bullet trains, and plans to build more, leaves little wonder that Chinese airline margins are disappearing faster than the free cigarettes at a wedding banquet table.

Health

The flip side of mass transport showed its scary face as China joined the collective panic over, (ominous cello riff), swine flu. Swine are far too integral a part of traditional Chinese prosperity to make an effectively scary disease moniker, however, so here we trembled at the chemical ring of H1N1. Easier to make light of the problem, of course, thanks to China’s rapid-response blitzkrieg of vaccining and quarantining, which limited the damage to reportedly less than forty deaths. Heaven forfend we sound flippant about tragedy, but when we say “limited”, we say so in light of the fact that there were 5,379 traffic deaths in China this August alone. Is there a vaccine for me-first motorists?

Heroism

If there’s no cure for road-hog disease, at least there’s one man with the courage to fight back. This summer, an elderly man in Lanzhou spent three-hours playing Dances with Traffic, smashing the windows of at least thirty cars that ran red lights at what the pedestrian proletariat describe as a very dangerous intersection. He melted back into the crowd from which he came, leaving no one his name, or a chance to thank him.

Sports

They hold up half the sky, and most of the trophies. The Chinese female sport Leviathan donned another mitre as it defeated Sweden 8-6 in the 2009 World Women’s Curling Championship. Sweden retaliated with an edict that all Chinese IKEAS would only allow families to homestead in their display rooms for a maximum of eight hours. Wang Bingyu and her cohorts are heavily favored to curl their way to gold in Vancouver.

Celebrity

One Chinese woman who could benefit from a winter Olympian’s high-carb diet is Zhang Ziyi. China still remembers famine times with sensitivity, a sensitivity outraged by leaked photos of the malnourished superstar warming her bones on the beach with Time Warner fat cat Vivi Nevo, apparently too busy watching for vultures to fetch his tsatskelah a much-needed hot pastrami on rye.

Arts

At the other end of the body mass index, crusading artist and Nobel-aspirant Ai Wei Wei launched a well-publicized campaign to investigate student deaths in the aftermath of 2008′s Sichuan Earthquake. Ai cut his teeth with an exhibit called F— Off, featuring pictures of him flipping off the Forbidden City. Heretofore he’s been the brainy troublemaker who knows just how far to push the teacher without getting detention, but this latest stunt got him a serious noggin-cracking and a charge of subversion. Ai Wei Wei has been taking beatings since he was a poet’s kid during the Cultural Revolution, though, and can suffer everything but lack of attention.

Relationships

Chinese are not all equal in being able to chi koo, however, and the global financial blahblah resulted in trickle-down suffering. According to a Qingdao newspaper, one former high-roller found himself so strapped he had to cut his basketball team-worth of mistresses down to one star center. Inspired by trendy talent show TV, he had all five compete in front of a professional model trainer, singing, dancing, and going shot-for-shot with Chinese liquor.

Things took a tragic turn after one of the losers, a hard case from rural Shanxi, invited the man and former team mates on a road trip, driving off a cliff on the way. All survived but her. If anyone in Hollywood or Hong Kong is reading, yes we have a working script.

Civics

A Chinese magazine online survey revealed that many considered prostitutes more trustworthy than government officials. China’s pink hair salon industry, so prevalent yet so seldom discussed, is still one of the few avenues open to young women from desperately poor families. The sentiment does not surprise; prostitutes are the only professionals who can’t rely on some level of fraud to make a living. Government officials came out well ahead of real estate developers and entertainers, however. Here’s to brotherhood through naked cynicism.

Environment

Obama and his cohort got the old busy Chinese boss treatment in Copenhagen. Using a classic cat’s paw stratagem, the Chinese sent a flunky into negotiations, who left a table bristling with heads of state every few minutes, to call his boss for feedback. Angela Merkel, usually calm enough to handle even an impromptu George Bush-massage with equanimity, turned blutwurst purple. Kevin Rudd, normally not one to have a blue over a piece of bizzo, banged on his microphone like he had a few kangas loose in the top paddock. Wen Jiabao watched the proceedings by closed-circuit camera, chuckling into a snifter of moutai, while carbon- fighter Al Gore sulked in his private plane.

Related posts:

1. Are China Expats De-Facto Colonialists?
2. All Expats in China are Crazy III
3. All Expats in China are Crazy II
4. All Expats in China are Crazy
5. Book Review: Mr. China

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