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Foolish deadlines for birth, wedlock and high-speed rail
By Lena Zhang |
August 10, 2011, Wednesday
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Print Edition
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CHINA is home to some of the world's most absurd deadlines.
For example, the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of China marked a deadline for infrastructure projects as significant as the Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Rail, the Yunnan Province Motorway, and the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge.
Now we have several trains that stall for hours on end in less than a month, a motorway that collapsed during its second day of operation and therefore was dubbed the "shortest-lived motorway in history," and the world's longest bridge marred by incomplete crash barriers, missing lights and loose nuts on guard rails - almost an accident waiting to happen.
Young people, especially women, have a deadline to get married by a certain age (28 is pretty much the cut-off point).
If they don't, they are likened to surplus merchandise in a discount-items trolley that only the most disadvantaged might bother to look at closely.
No wonder they are beating each other to the punch to marry themselves off in their early to mid twenties, a ridiculously short period that does not offer any real chance of landing a reasonable husband.
Those who are slightly older are sometimes offered on glittering silver platters to their male counterparts in the false belief that less is, after all, better than none.
Well, perhaps a false belief is still better than having to hope against hope that later they will find a white knight, isn't it?
Early bloomers
College graduates are also in an ever more cut-throat race to be "successful."
Stories of boys and girls who shot to fame or amassed a fortune make headlines in various media. Statistics abound on how many of the China's Richest are under a certain age.
A controversial professor from Beijing Normal University was rumoured to have asked his graduate students not to contact him or claim to be his student unless they had a net worth of no less than 40 million yuan (US$6.2 million) before turning 40. In this day and age, late bloomers no longer seem to exist or count.
Even fetuses aren't spared of the ever-mounting pressure of meeting one deadline or another.
If they only knew, they would be racing to mature faster in their mothers' wombs because their mothers want them to be born before a certain time - September 1 - to get enrolled in school one year than those born on September 2 or after.
Or on a "lucky" date such as August 8 (8-8/ba-ba/wealth-wealth).
Or as the first baby of the new millennium.
Or perhaps in the year of the dragon. What if they can't be naturally born on or before those times? No problems. Why else do we have Caesareans?
Maybe no other countries on earth have been more true to the original idea of a "deadline" than China.
The consequences of missing a deadline can be grave in China.
The invisible deadline turned out to be deadly for those who were unfortunate enough to be driving on the Yunnan Motorway when it collapsed in heavy rain one day after it opened on July 1. The only Dutch comfort in this sad situation was that the motorway was in a remote area so casualties were relatively few.
Those who joined the race to beat the marriage deadline often crossed it only to find themselves reaching a relationship dead-end. And their suffering was further exacerbated by the long-standing stigma attached to a divorce that compelled many couples to remain stuck in a marriage however "dead and alive" it might be.
Russ von Hoelscher, an owner of a US publishing house and otherwise a pretty materialistic person, has urged people not to rush into any kind of relationship. He believes that one needs to work, feel, experience, and love themselves before attracting that truly special loving other.
However in a society full of utilitarian noises such as "reap your youth before it withers," his preaching is likely to fall on deaf ears. And the fact that the teenage suicide rate has been rising in recent years would probably ring a bell with many Chinese.
Weighed down with anxiety about their future, especially if they happened to be lagging behind in one area or another, the loud counting down of time before the "day of reckoning" sometimes proves to be that last straw for already fragile and sensitive minds. Nevertheless it has been somewhat encouraging to see a few people with vision begin to call for China to ease its obsession with GDP and deadlines. They include foreigners who probably have a clearer picture of the madness from their vantage point as an outsider.
We can only pray that imposing artificial deadlines on crucial infrastructure projects will come to be seen as folly and that unrealistic timetables will be abandoned.
It would be better still, however, if this realistic mentality spread quickly to cover other aspects of life so that one day in the not too distant future, babies could be born of their own accord, women could wait for their true love, and youngsters could again find life an inspiring journey of hope and enlightenment worth taking.
(The author is a reader of Shanghai Daily who now lives in Shanghai. Her e-mail: lena828-newspapers@yahoo.com)
For example, the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of China marked a deadline for infrastructure projects as significant as the Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Rail, the Yunnan Province Motorway, and the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge.
Now we have several trains that stall for hours on end in less than a month, a motorway that collapsed during its second day of operation and therefore was dubbed the "shortest-lived motorway in history," and the world's longest bridge marred by incomplete crash barriers, missing lights and loose nuts on guard rails - almost an accident waiting to happen.
Young people, especially women, have a deadline to get married by a certain age (28 is pretty much the cut-off point).
If they don't, they are likened to surplus merchandise in a discount-items trolley that only the most disadvantaged might bother to look at closely.
No wonder they are beating each other to the punch to marry themselves off in their early to mid twenties, a ridiculously short period that does not offer any real chance of landing a reasonable husband.
Those who are slightly older are sometimes offered on glittering silver platters to their male counterparts in the false belief that less is, after all, better than none.
Well, perhaps a false belief is still better than having to hope against hope that later they will find a white knight, isn't it?
Early bloomers
College graduates are also in an ever more cut-throat race to be "successful."
Stories of boys and girls who shot to fame or amassed a fortune make headlines in various media. Statistics abound on how many of the China's Richest are under a certain age.
A controversial professor from Beijing Normal University was rumoured to have asked his graduate students not to contact him or claim to be his student unless they had a net worth of no less than 40 million yuan (US$6.2 million) before turning 40. In this day and age, late bloomers no longer seem to exist or count.
Even fetuses aren't spared of the ever-mounting pressure of meeting one deadline or another.
If they only knew, they would be racing to mature faster in their mothers' wombs because their mothers want them to be born before a certain time - September 1 - to get enrolled in school one year than those born on September 2 or after.
Or on a "lucky" date such as August 8 (8-8/ba-ba/wealth-wealth).
Or as the first baby of the new millennium.
Or perhaps in the year of the dragon. What if they can't be naturally born on or before those times? No problems. Why else do we have Caesareans?
Maybe no other countries on earth have been more true to the original idea of a "deadline" than China.
The consequences of missing a deadline can be grave in China.
The invisible deadline turned out to be deadly for those who were unfortunate enough to be driving on the Yunnan Motorway when it collapsed in heavy rain one day after it opened on July 1. The only Dutch comfort in this sad situation was that the motorway was in a remote area so casualties were relatively few.
Those who joined the race to beat the marriage deadline often crossed it only to find themselves reaching a relationship dead-end. And their suffering was further exacerbated by the long-standing stigma attached to a divorce that compelled many couples to remain stuck in a marriage however "dead and alive" it might be.
Russ von Hoelscher, an owner of a US publishing house and otherwise a pretty materialistic person, has urged people not to rush into any kind of relationship. He believes that one needs to work, feel, experience, and love themselves before attracting that truly special loving other.
However in a society full of utilitarian noises such as "reap your youth before it withers," his preaching is likely to fall on deaf ears. And the fact that the teenage suicide rate has been rising in recent years would probably ring a bell with many Chinese.
Weighed down with anxiety about their future, especially if they happened to be lagging behind in one area or another, the loud counting down of time before the "day of reckoning" sometimes proves to be that last straw for already fragile and sensitive minds. Nevertheless it has been somewhat encouraging to see a few people with vision begin to call for China to ease its obsession with GDP and deadlines. They include foreigners who probably have a clearer picture of the madness from their vantage point as an outsider.
We can only pray that imposing artificial deadlines on crucial infrastructure projects will come to be seen as folly and that unrealistic timetables will be abandoned.
It would be better still, however, if this realistic mentality spread quickly to cover other aspects of life so that one day in the not too distant future, babies could be born of their own accord, women could wait for their true love, and youngsters could again find life an inspiring journey of hope and enlightenment worth taking.
(The author is a reader of Shanghai Daily who now lives in Shanghai. Her e-mail: lena828-newspapers@yahoo.com)
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