The Gini Escapes
As I stepped into the newest shopping Mall in our district, l began to have an uneasy feeling which only grew as I waded deeper into the subtly lit interior. Bulgari, Versace and Valentino were much in evidence, making the place like the Harrod’s of a Beijing Knightsbridge. The food hall was not quite up to London standards, but was clearly getting there and I drooled for ages in front of the deli counter before being intimidated into moving on by the assistants’ insistent invitations to make a purchase. However the uneasiness remained and eventually I left with out buying anything.
At first I could not pin down the feeling’s source, I have a pathological dislike for shopping, but that wasn’t it. I wasn’t interested in the Prada concession or the latest collection from the House of Versace, but they neither disturbed nor excited me in the least. Eventually, I began to realise that it was the undisguised display of conspicuous consumerism that left me cold, even in the Food Hall where I usually set aside my holier than thou attitude to the designer clothing labels and can sell my soul (almost) for a portion of fresh Parmesan. I have long since given up moralising about consumerism; I am too tainted by my own version of it to cast the first stone. I may ignore a Giuseppe Zanotti but if I salivate over an Intel dual processor am I any different? No, consumerism as such won’t send me into a tailspin, however, something about this display left me uneasy, but what?
I now realise that the source of the unease was the contrast with the previous days spent in the Chinese countryside. I had been visiting a group of sisters who struggle with every aspect of their work except the loving care they give to the elderly people in their care. The staff is under-trained and over-worked, they live lives of great simplicity not because of their extraordinary virtue, but because they are dirt poor. They seem content with the simplicity of their lives even as the rest of China seems hell bent on acquiring the Branded lifestyle. My two days in their unbranded universe made the return to “Beijing realities” more than a little uncomfortable.
Crossing between these parallel universes becomes more problematic by the day in China. The rich are getting richer much faster than the poor are becoming less poor! And its official. The published figures for the Gini coefficient (a way of measuring the difference in wealth in a society) show that China has the worst disparity of wealth in Asia. What I experienced in the shopping mall was simply the realty that Gini measures. The easy solution would be to give up the struggle, rationalise the benefits of an office job in the capital, and use the stories of rural horror to impress fellow guests at the dinner parties of the rich and earnest. More conventional, religious, responses seem equally unsatisfactory. Simplistic scriptural solutions, such as shedding oneself of one’s possessions, though dramatic and much admired are, to this writer at least, very naive. I am not the prophetic type and I see only the futility of the gesture. Instead I hope to keep crossing the boundary, refusing to accept the easy comfort of staying in one world only. (I find those who say they identify totally with the poor very self righteous or just odd!). I hope that perhaps in some small way, by introducing people from one side to people of the other, to somehow help to put the cork back in the bottle of China’s malevolent Gini