Today was the first time I seethed in anger at the powers that be* here. When I decided to come to China I was expecting a police state. I was expecting to see troops in the street, propaganda everywhere, and little school children practice handling an AK-47 while rolling underneath barbed wire. Maybe not the last part, but I certainly expected an actively repressive system*.
Upon arrival, I was floored by people openly criticizing The Chairman* and bemoaning the CR*. I even heard little jokes here and there about Beijing and curious looks when I asked why people weren't out in the streets celebrating National Day. "That's their day," I was told, "not ours." I assumed that the order here was a less benign version of the de facto single party rule in Japan or [previously] Mexico. China is a huge ship of state to manage and those in charge were doing a remarkable job letting the economy grow and thus most people were content.
My previous apologetics are over. I'm angry. The first thing that got me is the crackdown going on against the street vendors. I watched a poor woman trying to grab her wok and coal heater from her small wooden cart as The Blue* came and took her small potato & dumpling stand away. Earlier in the day I had seen the Pakistani sheep kabob man [who always tries to initiate conversation and always asks if the (different) girl I'm with is my wife] hanging out on the steps. I asked him where his stand was and he walked us into an alley at the bottom floor of his apartment below and grilled my dinner. He told L., who speaks much better Chinese than I, that he and his friends were hiding out from The Blue.
While I have some issue with the trash disposal systems of the street food vendors in Tianjin, there are no such problems in Shenzhen. The streets here, where vending has gone on since I've been at my new apartment, are nearly as clean as the streets in the uber-rich neighborhoods of Shukou where vender's only come out at night. Other than making the Little Guy pay off the powers that be, there is no good reason to walk around stealing their carts.
Crackdown and send KFC running; leave the real entrepreneurs alone.
On to specimen #2; monkeys on the street. I got off the bus today and was entranced by a man whipping at a monkey. He had three Patas Monkey's attached to a single rope. He was agitating them until they would comically come after him and grab his hat or steal the whip or pounce on his head. It was amusing and horrifying all at the same time. Amusing in that it would be funny if they were trained to do this, which I'm sure his audience thought. It was horrifying because they were just animals reacting intelligently to a belligerent keeper. There are no animal welfare laws in China, as witnessed by the recent "animal olympics" in Shanghai and this charade.
And then the kicker...
I have a huge soft spot in my heart for the disabled in China. You see many of them as beggars on the street. Shenzhen being what it is, people come from all over China to escape the grinding poverty of the countryside. It's worse for some than others. It's always angered me that there really isn't much of a social safety net here, certainly no workers comp, and poor cripples fall through the cracks and end up working for gangsters who extort them into begging.
Walking out of dinner with my friend Lilly I saw a man crawling through the street. He wasn't using his feet at all, which were cocked awkwardly in a L shape behind him. He was crawling on his stomach. You could make out a barely audible weeping or moaning each time he moved. Saliva fell from his mouth as he inched forward, skin scraping the road, pushing along a small beggars cup in front of him.
It hurts seeing that kind of stuff. It angers me seeing resources being spent to harass the working poor, who are trying to earn an honest buck, while people like the beggar are ignored and monkey's are being whipped on street corners for amusement.
* going out of my way to use vocab that doesn't draw too much attention
Tags: Treyopia stories disabled China cripples beggars beggers poverty animal rights street crackdown vendors; entrepreneurs; entrepreneur
