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By 2010, seven of the 10 largest shopping malls in the world will be in China. The government is trying to encourage people to spend rather than save as a way of increasing economic growth. It has imposed on 20 percent tax on interest on savings accounts. Economists say that savings won’t really stop and consumption beginning until Chinese have more confidence about there future. "Problems" with Credit Cards in China
Thus far banks have banks have failed to make much money on credit cards in part because the idea hasn’t really caught on and frugal users avoid overspending and paying the stiff late penalties, which have traditionally been the primary way that American lenders made money off credit card. Only around 2 percent of cardholders frequently roll over their bills, compared to 56 percent in the United States. The government has said it wants 30 percent of retail purchases to be made with credit and debit cards. One of the biggest obstacles in the credit card business has been overcoming the lack of national credit bureau. One was established in Shanghai. An effort s being made toe establish such a system nationwide. Another problem is the preference for cash. Union Pay, the main payment system, is expensive for retailers, who prefer to deal in cash anyway to avoid taxes.-- Many Chinese over 30 have experienced great upheaval, change and twists of fortune in their lives and are quite happy with where they have ended up. One official in Shanxi told James Fallows of the Atlantic monthly, “Do you understand how different this is. My mother has bound feet...If it had not been for Deng Xiaoping, I would not be sitting here right now wearing a neck tie and talking to a foreigner.” He then described how he developed self confidence serving in a labor gang as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution.” Some Sichuan earthquake survivors have said that the earthquake was no worse than what they went through during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s.
Many Chinese over 30 have experienced great upheaval, change and twists of fortune in their lives and are quite happy with where they have ended up. One official in Shanxi told James Fallows of the Atlantic monthly, “Do you understand how different this is. My mother has bound feet...If it had not been for Deng Xiaoping, I would not be sitting here right now wearing a neck tie and talking to a foreigner.” He then described how he developed self confidence serving in a labor gang as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution.” Some Sichuan earthquake survivors have said that the earthquake was no worse than what they went through during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s. In the Mao era there was little crime, unemployment, or unplanned children. Everyone lived in identical nearly free apartments, earned the same salary (about $35 a month) and received free health care, insurance, utilities and free foodstuffs like flour, eggs and cooking oil. Families that lost stars according to a 10-star good behavior system lost privileges. Marriages were held in group ceremonies on January 1s. Children attended school from 5:35am to 8:00pm, and social life revolved around political study classes. For decades, life in China under the Communist Party centered around tight-knit government work units that were responsible for everything from housing assignments to granting permission for marriage. In the old days the government controlled everything. Certificates were required to marry, divorce, have kids, retire, change jobs, travel inside the country, move, go abroad. Now people can find their own jobs and travel where they want. Where certificates are necessary they are easier to get. In the Mao era simple things such as buying a TV, getting a land-line telephone installed and renting or buying property were often an incredible hassle with a mind-boggling amount of red tape. Patience was required and helped to have guanxi (connections). Since China embraced capitalist reforms life has become increasingly urbanized and Chinese are much like their counterparts in other industrialized countries: they commute, work in offices and live in anonymous apartment blocks. Among the worries that ordinary Chinese have are the high cost urban housing, education and future jobs for their children and inflation. Many complain about the conspicuous consumption of the nouveau riche and corruption among party officials.Book: The Corpse Walker, real Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu (Pantheon Books, 2008) a collection of oral histories from a Chinese, mostly Sichuanese, with strange jobs or circumstances. Links in this Website: RURAL LIFE IN CHINAFactsanddetails.com/China ; VILLAGES IN CHINAFactsanddetails.com/China ; URBAN LIFE IN CHINAFactsanddetails.com/China ; HOME LIFE AND POSSESSIONS LIFE IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; CHINESE CUSTOMSFactsanddetails.com/China ; BAD MANNERS IN CHINAFactsanddetails.com/China ; EATING AND DRINKING CUSTOMS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; CONSUMER CUSTOMS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ;
Daily Chores and Bureaucracy and in China
Hanging laundry is a common sight in China. People have been told to shun driers even if they can afford them because of their energy costs. Describing the preparation of dinner in a Sichuan home, Brook Larmer wrote in the New York Times, “Smoke billowed out of the kitchen, filling the room with an acrid blast of chili paste. Yang, in a blue chef’s apron, stuck his head out of the kitchen. Tears streamed from his hangdog eyes, but he had a grin on his face. Huiguo rou! he said — he was making the twice-cooked pork that is a Sichuanese specialty. Xue smiled up from her chair, holding a box of insoles she had embroidered to make Yang’s shoes more durable and comfortable on his long days driving. Her mother and brother were visiting, and Yang relished the chance to cook for a family again. A few minutes later, he emerged from the kitchen with a parade of dishes: chicken feet, cold sesame noodles, beef and potato stew and twice-cooked pork, all to be washed down with rice liquor. Yang called his new family to the table and, with a flash of yellow teeth, declared, Let’s eat!” [Source: Brook Larmer, New York Times, May 3, 2010] Every Chinese citizen is required to carry an identification cards that contain the holder's photograph, ID number, name sex and birth date. They are relatively easy to counterfeit. China is in the process of issuing new high-tech identification cards, with the first issued in Shenzhen in 2007. These plastic cards contain microchips that contain personal information such as work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. There is even discussion of adding an individual's reproduction history (as it relates the One-Child policy), credit histories, train travel payments and small purchases charged to the card. Keeping track of every resident as a way of maintaining control over the population is a practice that has been done since Imperial times. The system worked well under the emperors and Mao because most people spent their entire lives living in one place. These days the system is inadequate in dealing with the all the people moving about in search of jobs and opportunities. In the Mao era and to a lesser degree today, papers and documents were also needed to get apartments, and receive ration cards and other necessities and benefits. Visas were required on internal passports to travel from one town to another; and when they arrived at their destination hotel guests were required to register with the police. Many ordinary Chinese people increasingly complain that health, housing and education have become three ‘mountains’ (unbearable burdens) on their back.Everyday Authoritarianism in China
Roland Farris wrote in Truthout: “I wake up this morning to the sun slicing warm, golden slits through the barred windows of my little apartment in Dali Old Town, one of southern China's most beautiful and relaxing cities. It isn't the ample sunshine that wakes me up, however, it's the rousing military band music that wafts in from across several courtyards and makes its way into our otherwise quiet corner of existence. The music itself wouldn't be so remarkable, even given its oddly archaic marching-band sound, like some fragment of mid-20th century authoritarianism that got trapped in the stratosphere and recently settled down back into my ear. [Source: Roland Farris, Truthout, February 5, 2012] What is remarkable is its ubiquity. It is the same music I battle to suppress from my on-campus apartment in one of China's major cities. It is the same music that blasts every morning at precisely 7 AM and again at 4 PM on my top-level university campus. To me, it is increasingly the sound of China. Accompanying the music is a voice calling out callisthenic exercises in a cadence that would be almost cheery if it didn't carry such grim undertones of mindless conformity. "Yi, Er, San, Si, Wu, Liu, Qi, Ba, Er, Er, San, Si, Wu, Liu, Qi, Ba," the high-pitched male voice encourages the often-absent students. This is a real-life equivalent of the "physical jerks" in Orwell's "1984." Twice a day, on the mark, speakers across the campus blast out this music. Students at my university are obliged to participate at least once a week. There seems to be a club for those who want to show particular enthusiasm. I am told that these exercises along with their uniform marching music are obligatory daily routines on all school campuses up until the end of high school. Failure to show sufficient enthusiasm in one's daily jerks is grounds for academic penalties. This aspect of living and studying in China is something that it seems is often missed in the excessively positive and business-oriented coverage given by the mainstream media, and it is part of a troubling trend that I am most able to witness in the education system - but which extends to every facet of life in the Middle Kingdom.The Hukou System, China’s All-Important Residency Cards
a hukou
All Chinese citizens need a carryhukou(residency card) to live in a city named on the card or move from one place to another. A kind of internal passport, the hukou system was implemented in 1958 to halt migration, control grain rations, and keep tabs on the masses and give rural people a connection to their land. Modern ones are imbedded with chips that have person’s name and place of birth . A residency card is one of the most valuable documents in China. It is necessary to get an apartment and job in a town or city and send children to school. There are many stories of husbands and wives that are separated because the husband got a good job in a distance town and his wife couldn't secure a new hukou. Peasants migrate to cities without hukous in search of jobs and have trouble getting decent housing and places for their kids in school. Keith B. Richburg wrote in the Washington Post, “One of China's oldest tools of population control, the hukou is essentially a household registration permit, akin to an internal passport. It contains all of a household's identifying information, such as parents' names, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, moves and colleges attended. Most important, it identifies the city, town or village to which a person belongs.” [Source: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, August 15, 2010] “The hukou dates back at least 2,000 years, when the Han dynasty used it as a way to collect taxes and determine who served in the army. Mao Zedong's Communist regime revived it in 1958 to keep poor rural farmers from flooding into the cities. It remains a key tool for keeping track of people and monitoring those the government considers ‘troublemakers.’" [Ibid] Fang Lizhi wrote in the New York Review of Books, “This registry system... was not a Chinese invention. It was brought to China during World War II by the invading Japanese, who wanted to halt migration in order to prevent the spread of popular resistance. (The Chinese word for “registry police” comes from Japanese.) Yet Deng Xiaoping, the alleged “education reformer,” enforced this household registry system, and its consequences for education, to his dying day. His successors, too, have enforced it. Vogel refers to the system once, explaining that farmers who moved to cities “were trying to live surreptitiously there with relatives or friends” and caused leaders to fear “that a torrent of rural migrants could overwhelm…urban services such as housing, employment, and schooling for children.” [Source: Fang Lizhi, New York Review of Books, November 10, 2011] The government is afraid is to get rid of internal passports out of fear they such a move would encourage more rural people to migrate to the cities which are already overextended and busting at the seams. The inability of the government to keep track of all the migrants has made it easier for criminals and dissidents to hide from authorities, and, the government worries, for migrants to organize political protest without the police knowing about it.Hardships and Discrimination Under the Hukou System
checking for a hukou
Under the hukou system migrant workers, who in many ways fuel the booing Chinese economy, cannot get urban ID cards. “Critics say the hukou system perpetuates China's growing urban-rural divide, “ Keith B. Richburg wrote in the Washington Post. “Migrant workers flock to the coastal cities to labor in factories and take other manual jobs, sometimes living many years in places such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Because they lack an "urban hukou," they are forever designated "temporary residents" — unentitled to subsidized public housing, public education beyond elementary school, public medical insurance and government welfare payments.” [Source: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, August 15, 2010] “People who live in a city such as Beijing but do not have a local hukou must travel to their home towns to get a marriage license, apply for a passport or take the national university entrance exam. Parents and students say the last requirement is particularly onerous, especially if a student has to take the exam in a province that uses different textbooks.” Some economists here say the hukou system is outdated and unsuited to a modern economy that requires the free movement of labor. Others call it "China's apartheid," saying it has created a two-tiered system of haves and have-nots in all the major cities. "You have a large number of rural migrants who already earn most of their income in the cities, who have been in the cities a long time, but do not have hukou-related benefits," Tao Ran, an economist at Renmin University told the Washington Post. "This system is very bad; it's ridiculous."People Discriminated Against Under the Hukou System
hukous
Keith B. Richburg wrote in the Washington Post, “Wang Aijun is the editor of the Beijing News, one of China's most influential private daily newspapers. Yet here in the capital, Wang said, he often feels like a second-class citizen. He pays Beijing taxes, but his teenage son is not allowed to attend a Beijing public high school. To install a telephone or an Internet line, he must pay in advance. He is charged more for a ticket to some city parks. He doesn't qualify for a subsidized apartment. He cannot enroll his family in the city's public health-insurance program. The reason for the discrimination? Despite having lived and worked in Beijing for seven years, Wang still does not have that most sought-after of commodities: a Beijing "hukou." [Source: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, August 15, 2010] Wang, 42, moved to Beijing seven years ago from Zhengzhou, in Henan province, after he became editor of the Beijing News. The paper could not get him a Beijing hukou, but he took the job anyway. "I thought I should do something I was interested in," Wang said. "I also thought China's hukou system would be reformed in six or seven years." [Ibid] Wamg estimates that nearly a third of Beijing's 22 million-plus people do not have a Beijing hukou —including, he said, most members of his newspaper staff. Some reports put the number of temporary residents in the capital at 8 million. "I've gotten used to living in Beijing without a hukou," Wang said. "A hukou is like the air — you don't think about it normally. But once you need it and don't have it, you get pretty upset." Wang cited the fees he must pay for his 15-year-old son's expensive international school. [Ibid]People Desperate to Get a Beijing Hukou
Residency document for a foreign teacher
in China in the 1990s
The Beijing hukou is the most prized, if only because it is the hardest to get,” Richburg wrote. “One reason is education: The capital has the country's most highly regarded universities, and those schools reserve a large quota of places for Beijing hukou-holders. Chinese from outside the city can switch to a Beijing hukou by joining the civil service, getting a job with a state-owned company or achieving a high military rank. [Source: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, August 15, 2010] Some get desperate, taking a job they don't really want if it offers them a hukou. Peng Li, 29, graduated with a law degree from a Beijing university in 2008 and was offered work in a company's legal office. But the offer did not include a guaranteed Beijing hukou, so she took a job as an official in a Beijing suburb. "This job is kind of boring, and the salary is not high," she said. "I regarded it as a springboard to getting a Beijing hukou." [Ibid] Some young people seeking a spouse on popular Internet sites will state upfront that they prefer a partner who has a Beijing hukou. "Girl, 26, from North China, 161 cm tall . . . looking for a guy who was born between 1976 and 1983 and wants to marry within three years," says one posting on a popular site by a girl calling herself "imzly." "I hope you . . . have a Beijing hukou (because I don't have one)." [Ibid]Relaxing and Reforming the Hukou System
Andrew Jacobs wrote in the New York Times Policy makers have been discussing hukou reform for two decades, but beyond limited experiments in Shanghai, Chongqing, Chengdu and a smattering of second-tier cities, the National People’s Congress, China’s lawmaking body, has declined to act. Resistance comes from factory owners who want migrant laborers to remain insecure and cheap to exploit, and from urban elites who fear an even greater deluge of migrants from the countryside if it becomes easier to live in the city. But the most formidable opposition may be that of local governments, which worry about paying for the health care, education and other benefits that migrants and their children would qualify for as legal residents. [Source: Andrew Jacobs, New York Times August 29, 2011]a chop is used instead
of signature In China
In 2010, 15 Chinese newspapers ran a joint editorial calling on Beijing to immediately scrap the "inhumane" hukou system. Some have speculated that China’s labor shortage might embolden migrant to demand a speedier end to the hukou system, which violates the Chinese Constitution.In 2007, the Chinese government began issuing residency cards to the 150 million people that had moved to the cities but had not yet acquired residency. The aim was aimed at addressing crime and gaining better control over China’s floating population of migrants. Keith B. Richburg wrote in the Washington Post, “In the 1990s, some cities, including Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, began allowing people to acquire a local hukou if they bought property in the city or invested a large sum of money. Shanghai further relaxed the rules last year so that professionals who have lived in the city for seven years as tax-paying temporary residents could qualify....The Beijing government has taken several small steps toward hukou reform over the years. A Beijing pension can now be transferred to another city, for example, and the city's public kindergartens and grade schools were recently opened to all students, regardless of hukou status.” Tania Branigan wrote in The Guardian, “Cities such as Chongqing and Guangdong have been experimenting with limited hukou reform. But such programmes are often tightly restricted and cover workers who have moved from country to town within a province. In many cases migrants have been wary of switching registration, fearing the compensation for lost land and home is insufficient to establish them in the city. [Source: Tania Branigan, The Guardian, October 2, 2011] Kam Wing Chan, an expert on migrants at the University of Washington, told The Guardian reforms needed to go deeper and to involve Beijing."Hukou reform has to be gradual, but it has to tackle the core of the issue," he says. "The core issue, for example, in Guangdong, is to gradually accept migrant workers from outside the province — the majority of the migrant workers — as equals." Some critics advocating an overhaul of the hukou system —or abolishing it altogether — said changes must be gradual to avoid large-scale disruption. Some have recommended assigning hukous by income or giving priority to those who have paid taxes in a city. Whatever the pace of change, experts said, the hukou has outlived its usefulness. "Migration is inevitable," said Tao of Renmin University. "We're proposing the government should just open all the cities." Branigan wrote: Wholesale hukou reform is an alarming prospect for officials, raising the spectre of an expensive and uncontrollable surge to the cities. But the alternative is an unbridgeable gap between town and country. Willy Lam wrote: Many government officials worry that throwing out the hukou regime could lead to more overcrowding in already very populous cities ranging from Beijing and Tianjin to Shanghai and Shenzhen. Pleading that their health, education and social-welfare facilities are stretched to the limit, cadres have vigorously opposed allowing more migrant workers to settle in the east. [Source: Willy Lam, China Brief, March 10, 2011]Chops
Instead of signing their name, Chinese stamp their name on forms, bank withdrawal slips and letters with a chop, or signature stamp). Without a chop one can't open a bank account in China or register for a university class. One professor told the Los Angeles Times, "I don't exist in this society without my chop." [Source: Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times, November 28, 2001] Chops are cylinders about the size of a piece of chalk. They have the person’s name carved at one end in Chinese characters and they leave an imprint after being stamped in ink Everyone from the President to a homeless man living in a park has a chop, and they are used for everything from finalizing a multi-million-dollar business deal to signing for packages delivered to one’s house. At some businesses if you forget your chop, no problem, they’ll let you use someone else’s. The average Chinese has five chops but only one is registered with the government to certify ownership and it is only used on important documents. Since these seals are considered too valuable to carry around, people have other seals to use for things like bank transactions and taking deliveries. Many government documents have several chop stamps. According one estimate a typical bureaucrats puts his chop on 100,000 documents in a 25 year career. Chops have a 5,000 year history. Signature seals, which operates according the same concept, were used in ancient Mesopotamia and China. Japan's oldest example of writing is a solid-gold chop dated to A.D. 57. Thousand of years ago Chinese used the imprints of fingers as a way of signing contracts.Economics and Chinese Women Shoppers
Shopping in Beijing
Richard Komaiko wrote in the Asia Times, “Westerners often focus myopically on the growth rate of China's gross domestic product (GDP), which is roughly 9 percent per year. While this is an important indicator of prosperity, it must be considered in tandem with other important metrics, such as inflation and the increasing cost of residential real estate. China's consumer price index rose 5 percent in the first quarter of 2011. This means that the effective real growth rate in GDP was only 4 percent . On top of that, the cost of real estate in many cities is growing at 20 percent per year. Considering these numbers, put yourself in the shoes of the average recent college graduate in a city like Shanghai. [Source: Richard Komaiko, Asia Times May 25, 2011] “You make a decent income, but you can't afford to make a down payment on a piece of real estate, so you rent for a few years. But because the price of real estate is growing many times faster as the overall economy, the longer you wait, the less you can afford to buy. And in Chinese culture, if you can't afford a home, you can't start a family, and so forth.” Young working women are increasingly become major forces in the Chinese economy. Those with good salaries, by Chinese standards, of few a hundred dollars a month think nothing of plopping down $400 for a new cell phone with the latest 3G and MP3 features or $700 a new snowboard and gear to go with it even though they have yet to tried the sport. An economic advisor for MasterCard told Reuters, “Urban women consumers will be spending much of their hard-earned cash on personal travel and related cultural and recreational activities, dinning out shopping, as well as buying cars and pursuing urban leisure lifestyles.” Their spending habits, economists hope will offset the conservative spending habits of most Chinese and make the economic less reliant on investment. Favored brands by female consumers include LVMH, Christian Dior, Valentino, Swatch, Nokia and Coca-Cola.Chinese Shopping Habits
The Chinese really haven’t been consuming very long. In the Mao era there wasn’t much to buy. Now conspicuous consumption is fashionable, particularly in the coastal cities in the east and south and in Shanghai, and many urban Chinese spend their free time on the weekends at Western-style shopping malls. Consumer spending is highest among this between 20 and 49. The people born after 1980, when the economic reforms began ti take shape, are the “real driving force’ of the consumer economy in China, Small store owners often sells items like rice, peanuts, eggs and sugar by weight and gave them to customers in flimsy plastic bags. In the Mao era, customers had their purchases wrapped in paper and carried them home in cloth or net bags. The practice continued until the 1980s when people began shopping more and more at supermarkets and carrying their purchases home in plastic bags. By the mid 2000s, three billion were being even out everyday, with many Chinese thinking nothing of tossing them to wind, creating a gargantuan litter problem. See Recycling, Environment, Nature Because of a lack of refrigeration, the Chinese have developed the habit of keeping a potential meal alive as long as possible. Fish and lobster at restaurants are kept in tanks and ducks and pigs are slaughtered shortly before they are sold. When transported, pigs are inhumanely placed in cramped cages and stacked on three-decker vans. Thirty or forty are sometimes tied together and carried on the back of a bicycle.Wal-Mart's live food section
Wal-mart appeals to local tastes by offering popular Chinese products like live frogs and eels and turtle blood. Some stores offers live river fish, eels and turtles that are slaughtered right on the spot. Sometimes customers catch them in fish tanks with nets, watch as a clerk guts and cleans them and takes them home in plastic bags along with the bloody organs. Shoppers turned up their noses at the idea of buying dead fish wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam. By 2010, seven of the 10 largest shopping malls in the world will be in China.Savings in China
China has the world's highest savings rates: between 38 and 42 percent, despite low incomes, compared to 5 percent in the United States. The Chinese have $1.7 trillion in household savings, or almost 70 percent of gross national product. Total savings in 2005 was equal to roughly half of GDP, compared to 30 percent in Japan and 14percent in the United States. Urban dwellers account for 70 percent of bank savings. The Chinese have traditionally been savers who didn’t seek credit to buy consumer goods. Instead they saved first and then bought something. The Chinese have traditionally emphasized being frugal. One Confucian saying goes: “He who will not economize will have to agonize.” Many Chinese don’t even like to put their savings. Newspaper often run stories about people who have their savings eaten by rats. In the Mao era it was common for people to save everything whether they needed it or not because people had so few things and one never knew when they or a friend might need it. Among the things that people refused to throw away were old clothes, tools, thermos and even plastic bags and cans. Chinese save a lot at least partly out insecurity about the future. The dismantling of the iron bowl since the end of the Mao era has taken away the welfare safety net. People save because they don’t have an inadequate pension, they need to make sure they have money for emergencies, for old age and to educate their children. One effect of the one child policy is that old people have to rely on themselves not their children to take care of them. The rate of return is low on household financial assets and there are of limited portfolio opportunities because there are few alternatives to depositing money in state-owned banks. It is also difficult for ordinary people to get loans. This means that Chinese have to save money to purchase big ticket items like houses and cars rather than borrow against future income. In 2007, the annual inflation rate of 4.6 percent exceeding the one-year bank account deposit rate of 3.87 percent. This deterred many people from putting their money in banks. Many instead invested in stocks of real estate. The government is trying to encourage people to spend rather than save as a way of increasing economic growth. It has imposed on 20 percent tax on interest on savings accounts. Economists say that savings won’t really stop and consumption beginning until Chinese have more confidence about there future.Credit Cards, Debit Cards and Virtual Money in China
Chinese are not big credit card users. The first ones were introduced in 1986 but didn’t attract many users. As of 2004, only 1 percent of Chinese citizens possessed Western-style credit cards and 2 percent of merchants could handle them. Those that had them tended to be members of the relatively wealthy urban elite. In China there is a cultural aversion to going into debt and no central credit rating. The rules for getting credit cards in some places can be complicated There were only 75 million credit cards in circulation in 2007. Between 2004 and early 2007 the number of credit card users increased 17-fold to 50 million with 30 percent of the merchants in Shanghai able to handle them and businesses in Beijing gearing up for hordes of plastic-carrying foreigners during the 2008 Olympics. Credit card revenues in 2006 were round $500 million MasterCard estimates there will be more than 75 million credit card users by 2010 and that revenues at that time will reach $5 billion.. In 2004, Citigroup, American Express, HSBC Holding and the Japanese credit card company JCB all signed credit card partnerships with Chinese banks with their eyes on China’s growing middle class. HSBC’s MasterCard lets customers make interest-free payments on purchases of 1,500 yuan or more, with customers paying a monthly surcharge of up to 0.72 percent of the purchase price. The Bank of China offers Great Wall platinum Visa credit cards, with a frequent flier rewards program. Debit cards are becoming popular. As of 2004, of the 704 million bank cards in circulation 650 million of them were debit cards, used primarily to draw cash from ATM machines. Banks also offer dual currency cards allowing users to purchase item with yuan credit in China and in foreign currency credit outside China. Q-coins are a popular virtual currency used to but goods and service in the Internet,. One Q-coin is equal in value to 1 yuan. The virtual currency has become so popular some it could challenge the yuan. The Q-coins can be bought with bank cards or telephone cards. The Q-coins were originally intended to buy things like online greeting cards, antivrus software or online games but are now used buy anything online and are traded themselves.Problems with Credit Cards in China
Thus far banks have banks have failed to make much money on credit cards in part because the idea hasn’t really caught on and frugal users avoidoverspending and paying the stiff late penalties, which have traditionally been the primary way that American lenders made money off credit card. Only around 2 percent of cardholders frequently roll over their bills, compared to 56 percent in the United States. One relatively affluent executive in Shanghai told Bloomberg, “I use credit cards for convenience not to move myself in debt. My family tradition is that you save first, then you spend.” A financial analyst in Shanghai said, “No one is using the credit line to borrow, so there is little interest income. It’s not that people don’t use the cards, but to make money in this business is extremely difficult.” The government has said it wants 30 percent of retail purchases to be made with credit and debit cards. One of the biggest obstacles in the credit card business has been overcoming the lack of national credit bureau. One was established in Shanghai. An effort s being made toe establish such a system nationwide. Another problem is the preference for cash. Union Pay, the main payment system, is expensive for retailers, who prefer to deal in cash anyway to avoid taxes.Lack of Service in China
As was the case in the Soviet bloc, bad service was a fixture of life in Communist China. Friendship stores, for example, were famous for their sullen, slow sales history. In hotels, the staff often seemed to were more intent in spying on you than helping you. Some foreign complain that things have improved much. Customers at banks at train stations routinely have to wait in long longs and when the reach the window they are told to wait in another line. Sometimes things are not much better in restaurants. A Taiwanese-born American told the Los Angeles Times, “I’ve always had bad experiences with restaurant servers” in Beijing. “They just get basic salaries and so they don’t do much. Unless you complain.” Workers are usually reluctant to perform tasks assigned to someone else out of fear of being blamed for making a mistake. This causes problems for tourists, because usually there is one person assigned to one task and one task only: one person who changes money, another who rents bikes, one person who takes care of maintenance and another who checks people into the hotel. If the person assigned to the task isn't there no else will do the task, which means that tourists have to wait around for the person to come back. Things are improving. Now—especially with the Beijing Olympics coming up and China generally trying to improve is reputation among foreigners—there is more emphasis on service and pleasing the customer. Courses in etiquette and service teach shopkeepers to use polite language, wear socks to work, respond in a timely fashion and not cheat and follow customers around. Part of the training involves driving home the point treating customers well and developing long term relations are ultimately good for business. In February 2007, regulations went into effect that banned shopkeepers in Beijing from getting angry at customers, acting impatiently, making sarcastic comments, grabbing customers or offering vague explanations. The rules were part of the effort to improve manners and address complaints about poor service in Beijing in preparations for the Olympics in 2008. There was no mention of the penalties for breaking the rules. Shopowners complain that it’s the customers are the ones that need the politeness lessons. They complain about customers damaging goods in their stores and not paying compensation and agreeing to a price after a lengthy bargaining process and then walking away without buying anything.We Survived!
Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania wrote on MCLC List: “Here is a translation of the cartoon at left that has been circulating widely on the Chinese Internet. Virtually every line alludes to some sensational event of the past few years that has gone viral on the Chinese internet, such that there has developed a whole vocabulary of memes devoted to things that have led to the death of innocent citizens. The ones in the cartoon constitute but a small subset of the available corpus. [Source:Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, Danwei.com August 19 2011] Man: I’m so glad you weren’t poisoned (to death) by gutter oil, Sudan red, lean meat essence, or toxic buns! Your house didn’t catch on fire! The bridge in front of your house didn’t collapse, right? You’re so lucky that the escalator didn’t malfunction when you went to work! It’s wonderful! We survived another day! Woman: I was so worried you’d get run over by someone supposedly going 70 kph on your way to work! Or get stabbed eight times in a row! My gravest fear was that you would be accidentally injured by chengguan who were beating up someone else! I was also worried you would need to ride the high speed train! But I didn’t dare to call you, because I was afraid your cell phone would explode! Notes: 1) Gutter oil 
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