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Spring Festival can be a brief respite from drumbeat of production and consumption
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THE recent Spring Festival had been a very quiet and restful break for me, marked by moderation.
I drank only two cups of wine, smoked four cigarettes — for the sake of setting off firecrackers — and, for the first time in many festivals, I did not overeat.
But when I returned to work last week, I found that all is not right with the world.
Because today in heaven are the economists, not God.
I learned to my horror that during our jubilation the Western stock markets have wiped out a stunning US$3 trillion, blamed on poor economic indicators in emerging markets. Notably, China has moderated.
In the Bible of our economists, moderation is a curse.
Most holidays today have successfully evolved into consumption extravaganzas, but Spring Festival is still uniquely more than that. There were fewer people, fewer cars, virtually no delivery men rushing on the streets, and many shops closed for the week-long observation.
Hence, some residents were in a way confronted with an existential crisis, when steamed buns and baozi became unavailable.
In this context, economists’ moralizing about the state of demand sounds hollow.
Absence of the migrants
We began to notice a segment of the population by their absence. I mean the migrants, who had gone home for the festival. They are the young and cheap blood that fuels the engine that drives Made-in-China.
In one of the most spectacular migrations on the planet, the people long divorced from where they originated are allowed to go home, to be close to home and hearth.
They listen to their biological impulses, and temporarily cease to care about what economists dictate. In their reunion with their left-behind children and parents, they cease to care whether they themselves get left behind. They simply refuse to answer the call of the assembly line.
In this migration, the entrenched triumph of the market and the individual and systemic glorification of greed temporarily give way to ancestor warship, gossip, and family feasts.
Returnees may even sit back and take stock, wondering if their pursuit of “fortune” in cities is worth the sacrifice of long separation from loved ones. Of course they will return to their jobs in the cities. The economists, the priesthood, are keeping up the drumbeat.
Triumph of the capital
But the all-powerful economists have yet to find in their toolbox one instrument with which to translate these mysterious family bonds and affinities into visible profits and assets. It is hard not to write them off as cost, and sunk cost at that.
The lost productivity, the weakened demand, the lost overtime will certainly dim the next quarterly profits forecast. We have mastered the art of measuring the health of our society in light of profits and growth, and have become the envy of the whole world for our elevation.
It would be juvenile to ask “whose profit,” for in the globalized world, your profit is my profit, and saving the Wall Street is the same as saving yourself. So before long, the crystal balls of our economists will state how bad or good things actually are, and tell us, and our stock markets, what to do.
We will be working still harder to achieve the ultimate triumph of capital, when human beings can be neatly reduced to economic metrics: growth, standard of living, GDP, household incomes, median income, demand, consumption, debt, credit.
The weather man had predicted with admirable accuracy the changeable weather during the festival. But our economists can forecast decades into the future.
This break is irrelevant in the longer perspective, and will be excluded from the final reckoning.
Economic gods will argue for demand and consumption with fresh vigor, but take comfort: not everyone can be so lucky as to be temporarily absolved from the inexorable dictates of “sink or swim.”
The column, named after the saying that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” stresses the importance of taking another perspective.
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