Despite the booming private-car market, the best example of making do is the bicycle. Urban bicyclists, sometimes spookily masked against pollution and sandy winds, stream along their special lanes with only the swishing of their wheels and the jingle of bells like a stealthy armada, still vastly outnumbering every other kind of transportation, both passenger and freight."
Cellular phones are popular in a country where private home phones are not widely available. [...] The telephone books for cities with populations in the millions are less than an inch thick."
Li Tai was getting rich by Chinese standards as an exporter, but he still didn’t have a credit card. Banking systems for individual customers haven’t quite caught up with the enormous flood of yuan circulating through the economy. Chinese shoppers pay with fistfuls of cash even for large-ticket items such as video compact disc players, which as selling like scallion pancakes for $360 to $960 in Beijing."
Since the government relaxed the resident permit system that kept rural Chinese (80% of the population) tied to farms or villages, China has become a nation in motion. Its permanent floating population, traveling from city to city to seek higher wages, is estimated at 100 million."
As of 1996, China is the fourth largest mobile phone market in the world behind the U.S., Japan and England, but only four of every 1000 people in China use them.
Even citizens... thousands of miles from the main part of China, are beginning to enjoy new levels of prosperity. In the largely Muslim city of Kashgar, where most people are of Turkic, not Chinese, origin, employment in the small Coca Cola bottling plant means that some workers can afford to replace their donkey carts with trucks for farming the family land."
Young Chinese say it is easier to find the ideal mate than to locate private living quarters. Today, China’s chronic urban housing shortage is as much responsible for the traditional extended Chinese family, two or three generations living under one roof, as is the age-old custom."
Western manufacturers view China as a vast, promising market for a billion toothbrushes or pizzas, with good reason: long-denied living standards under the old Communist rules, the Chinese have become avid and acquisitive consumers, especially the relatively well-paid urban dwellers, workers in the special economic zones, and farm families in the fertile agricultural area along the coast."
Across the nation, well-off Chinese manage to afford VCRs, computers (with Chinese characters), foreign cosmetics, and designer clothes, many with French or American labels but made in China."
Huasan was saving for a motorcycle, but none of our friends had a car, or much hope of getting one. It takes $30,000 to join the growing fleet of privately owned Japanese compacts on Shanghai’s ring roads, or $10,000 for a Chinese-built auto."
While a decade ago, television sets might also have been shared communally in a housing complex, now they’re installed in nearly every apartment, especially since government programming has been enlivened with Hong Kong news programs and kung fu movies pulled in by satellite dishes. Officially banned, the dishes proliferate on the rooftops of many cities."
* The changes discussed here are recent changes in relation to the publication date of this brochure.
+Shanor, Donald, and Constance Shanor. "Letter from China: Tilting Toward Prosperity" in Popular Science. August 1996, vol. 249, no. 2, pp. 44-5.
**Prices are approximate and are based on the general exchange rate from the summer of 1996. Prices vary by city and region.
One of our collegues visited China in the summer of 1996 and was surprised at the number of foreign products (food, cosmetics, restaurants, and clothing) being sold in metropolitan areas of China. The average exchange rate during the summer was 8.31 renminbi (RMB) to one U.S. dollar. These are some of the products now in China:
Have your students calculate the equivalent U.S. dollar amount of each product. How do these prices compare to prices at local U.S. supermarkets? Do the U.S. prices vary by store, city, and/or region? What are some factors that determine price differences within a country? Have your students do some research on which products are (1) manufactured inside/outside the U.S. and (2) distributed inside/outside the U.S. What raw materials are needed to make the product, and where did these come from?
Recent changes in China have resulted in a wide array of U.S. and other foreign companies entering the market in China. A few of the U.S.-based companies now present in China: