We know about the gender imbalance in much of Chinese society, in large part as a result of the One Child policy. Here's a silly and ironic story about the effects of this, plus urbanization, plus the rise of the market economy in those cities.
Douglas Raymond is a former Google executive who was trying to start his own company in China. When trying to hire employees, he realized that most Chinese engineers are usually only children who must be at the very top of their game in order to reap the most return on what's been a huge investment from (usually) his family to put him through a good school. This makes young Chinese engineers very risk averse when it comes to employment; so they're less likely to work with an untested start-up.
But to add to this risk aversion is the increasing expectation that, in order to sufficiently impress a woman that will marry him, a young man must already own, at the least, his own apartment. This is not easy in a place where many Shanghai and Beijing apartments often cost 27 times the average white collar worker's annual salary. Still, this expectation can exist because of the gender ratio: for every 119 men, there are only 100 women in Chinese cities, which allows women to have their pick of male partners. So with the increasing allure of material goods and capitalist comfort, home ownership is the mere cost of entry.
To illustrate this, Raymond recalled a popular television show called Fei Cheng Wu Rao ("If You are the One"), in which contestants make their pitches to eligible girls, who decide whether to choose or reject them. One male contestant tried to woo the girls by regaling them with promises to take his beloved around Beijing on the back of his bicycle, to show her the sites and experience love in his hometown. In her rejection, 20-year-old female contestant Ma Nuo replied, "I would rather be crying in a BMW than laughing on the back of a bicycle."
Soon after the airing of the comment, the Chinese government forced the creators to change the format of the show to discourage the kind of superficial and materialistic morals this comment, and the show, ostensibly promoted. Nonetheless, the clip and quote went viral, and spoke not only to changing urban Chinese values, but also to important symbols, namely that Beijing's nouveau riche are ditching their bicycles, buses, and trains in favor of (fancy) cars as modes of transportation. It evokes Margaret Thatcher's extremely dangerous quip that, "if a man finds himself riding a public bus at the age of 28, he can consider himself a failure."
Douglas Raymond is a former Google executive who was trying to start his own company in China. When trying to hire employees, he realized that most Chinese engineers are usually only children who must be at the very top of their game in order to reap the most return on what's been a huge investment from (usually) his family to put him through a good school. This makes young Chinese engineers very risk averse when it comes to employment; so they're less likely to work with an untested start-up.
But to add to this risk aversion is the increasing expectation that, in order to sufficiently impress a woman that will marry him, a young man must already own, at the least, his own apartment. This is not easy in a place where many Shanghai and Beijing apartments often cost 27 times the average white collar worker's annual salary. Still, this expectation can exist because of the gender ratio: for every 119 men, there are only 100 women in Chinese cities, which allows women to have their pick of male partners. So with the increasing allure of material goods and capitalist comfort, home ownership is the mere cost of entry.
To illustrate this, Raymond recalled a popular television show called Fei Cheng Wu Rao ("If You are the One"), in which contestants make their pitches to eligible girls, who decide whether to choose or reject them. One male contestant tried to woo the girls by regaling them with promises to take his beloved around Beijing on the back of his bicycle, to show her the sites and experience love in his hometown. In her rejection, 20-year-old female contestant Ma Nuo replied, "I would rather be crying in a BMW than laughing on the back of a bicycle."
Soon after the airing of the comment, the Chinese government forced the creators to change the format of the show to discourage the kind of superficial and materialistic morals this comment, and the show, ostensibly promoted. Nonetheless, the clip and quote went viral, and spoke not only to changing urban Chinese values, but also to important symbols, namely that Beijing's nouveau riche are ditching their bicycles, buses, and trains in favor of (fancy) cars as modes of transportation. It evokes Margaret Thatcher's extremely dangerous quip that, "if a man finds himself riding a public bus at the age of 28, he can consider himself a failure."
If China's burgeoning upper-middle class all wants to drive cars, and that desire turns into pressure to build infrastructure to accommodate cars, we'd see a whole mess of problems: more pollution (on the scale that leads to health problems); congestion (on the scale that leads to not just frustration but also inefficiencies...that can compromise life quality); spatial design that separates people, things, and places (and makes the economy less efficient); to say nothing of the environmental and monetary costs associated with constructing and maintaining that car infrastructure. Mass transit presents an alternative that addresses all of these problems through economies of scale.
But the social association between type of mobility and socio-economic status is one of the biggest hurdles in making those necessary investments in a responsible manner. Ma Nuo derided bicycles in favor of a gleaming car (even if it cost her happiness). And in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, the mass transit rail has long been associated with the poor and downtrodden: its MARTA system is derided with the acronym, "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta," referring to the poor Black Americans who are the system's captive users (they don't have the choice of driving). This association makes it less likely that affluent (White) Atlantans would use the system willingly. Similarly, when the recently installed Pope rode the subway in Buenos Aires, the media took this as evidence that he is "pro poor".
The solution to this problem is, of course, to make mass transit so efficient, effective, (fun), safe, and comfortable that people don't use it simply because it is cheaper, but because it is better than driving a car. The way to do that---in Latin America, the United States, China, and elsewhere---is to give it the resources it requires to keep it in top shape. This is largely a challenge for politics, to ensure that priority and resources are given to transit. But it's also one for economics: running good transit systems, despite their economic benefits, comes with large financial costs, including necessary subsidies for riders, and expenses for operations, management, maintenance, and capital expansion. (I'll have a post forthcoming on how Hong Kong, one of the best run transit systems in the world, pulls this off).
Still, as China---and even the US---go forward, we ought to try and remember what Gustavo Petro, the Mayor of Bogota (which developed the world-renowned Bus Rapid Transit System, TransMilenio), said: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."
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