China: Scratching Beyond The Surface
What the marriage market at People Square taught me about China
Written by: Randall Wong (Y3 Mechanical Engineering)
When China decided to open its economy to the world, what happened next was extraordinary. The growth of their economy went exponential, slums were gradually transformed into cities and their people grew more affluent with greater purchasing power. China hasn’t stopped growing since and they are currently the second largest economy in the world. All of these took them slightly over half a decade to achieve it. With such expansion and affluence, it is no doubt that China has some of the most metropolis and cosmopolitan cities in the world today. When you think of these cities, Shanghai and Beijing would ring a bell. These cities don’t only look rich, they also host some of the richest, highest profile people you can find in the world today. However, is that really China? Could there be things that have been left out during its rapid development? Could China be more than what it looks? As a foreigner living in this beautiful nation for over a month now, I’ve interacted and encountered instances that challenged the notion and image of what China really is. In this article titled Beyond the Surface, I seek to dig deeper into some of these that might paint China in a different light.
I remembered an odd encounter with a middle-aged looking lady in the heart of Shanghai city — 人民广场, or People’s Square to be exact. As I was taking a stroll at what seemed to be a typical park, I started seeing throngs of umbrella lining up the pavement of the park. I thought there was an art festival going on and I went forward to admire what I conceived to be an art display. To my surprise, there were sheets of paper clipped onto each umbrella, and on the paper were details of what seemed to be people living in Shanghai. My curiosity turned into sheer bewilderment as I soon realized they were candidates looking for a partner. I entered a place for blind dates, also known as the Shanghai Marriage Market; or what I would call a Tinder Park. I stopped in front of an umbrella, and tried to take in the full detail of the prospective guy they were looking for. That’s when the middle-aged lady stepped forward and asked about me. Her questions weren’t simple, and it turned into an interrogation. It got to a point where she kept asking if I were born in Shanghai. I didn’t understand that rationale and asked why she is so insistent on looking for someone born in Shanghai, or Shanghainese. She explained how the system works in China and that day, I became an enlightened young man in the middle of Tinder park.
If you are born out of Shanghai and you moved into Shanghai, you are not considered 内地 but 内外. The treatment given to both groups are really different. For one, the locals have a less amicable attitude towards those from 内外. We all know how expensive and difficult buying an apartment or house can be in Shanghai. The lady told me that only if both couples are born in Shanghai would you have a higher possibility of owning a flat here, otherwise, you will just have to rent apartments. This came as a shock to me as I had always thought that as long as you’re a Chinese national, you would be treated the same everywhere you go in China. I didn’t manage to ask the lady the rationale for having such government policies as she was clearly more interested in finding a husband for her daughter. But this was an issue I will never comprehend and experience back in Singapore as we are a single-state nation.
My personal take on this issue is that this happened due to the fact that different parts of China are at different levels of development and therefore, there will be an influx of Chinese to the bigger cities. I didn’t come to realise the drastic difference in development of the different regions in China until I entered the country itself.
Rapid development of the country has left areas in China still as rural and undeveloped as they were 50 years back. While it may be true that these areas have greater access to technology and you could still use cashless payment in these areas, the living conditions there are not on par with the other major cities in China. Here in China, there is a classification system for the different cities known as the Chinese City Tier System. According to the South China Morning Post, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou belongs to the first-tier category while areas like Tibet, Urumqi and Quanzhou belong to the bottom-most tier cities. I’ve personally witnessed the difference in development between cities in different tiers. Kunming is a second-tier city while Lijiang is a third-tier city. When I last visited Yunnan, I made a trip from Kunming to Lijiang. Kunming was evidently more developed with the presence of more amenities, a wider transportation network and higher population. On the other hand, Lijiang was only connected by several public bus networks with less access to amenities. We don’t know for sure if it was the tier system that made the cities the way they are or was it because the cities were already at their development level which gave rise to the system. However, one thing is for sure, there is a huge difference in terms of development all throughout the country. The difference in the cities’ development was startling and it made me realized that for a large country like China to undergo rapid development, there will be parts of the country that will be left behind. This is only natural, and the only way things can improve is to give China more time to develop their country.
The areas that I have dug deeper in this article are only some of the many issues China face. Beyond what China seems to be on the surface, I saw a country that may not be as homogenous as I thought it would be. The purpose of digging deep and uncovering hidden unknowns about the country is to strip away the fantasies that surround the idea of China as a land of the rich. It is when we learn to look beyond what is on the surface, will we begin to see China for what it is. For a country so big and diverse, contrasts and contradictions abound but that is what makes it uniquely China, a nation that is more than the stereotypes it is characterised by.
