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Update on 'Ice boy'

vicar (817 posts) • 0

The pain and hopelessness is written all over their faces. When millions of mothers and fathers are still having to leave home to look for jobs where pay is equivalent to slavery and unbearable hours in a country with an incredible economy and power...you just know something is wrong.

Ishmael (462 posts) • 0

Yes, and it's been happening in many places in the course of 'modern development'. Something is indeed wrong, but it's not just in China, it's in the nature of the concept of 'modernization', and of modernity itself.

Liumingke1234 (3297 posts) • 0

@vicar
I agree but what can be done when you have so so so many people? Do you think they should have a monthly living wage provided by the government? What did the people in olden times do?

JanJal (1243 posts) • 0

@Ishmael: "Something is indeed wrong, but it's not just in China"

I'd still argue that there is something inherently China specific about this when it happens in China.

Chinese would be first to argue that there is no one-size-fits-all solution (to anything), and neither is there one-size-fits-all cause.

China has not, since revolution anyway, been pillaged and looted by western powers like some other countries, and not much about the current situation can be honestly blamed on more distant past - even if Chinese debate would go back to opium wars and national humiliation.

Rather, I blame lot of the development and growth in China on western globalization. Take that out of equation, and China would have even less. This is unlike in some other "poor" countries.

Also China has a supposedly strong central government, that other countries often lack. Yet it fails to deliver.

On a more human note, I often wonder, that there must have been something that drove people to migrate to these remote areas in mountains or elsewhere.

What were they looking for, and would that now be available elsewhere.

The house pictured in OP video is a castle compared to what my wife's family home is, for example. Yet the sole surviving grandmother still lives there, and refuses to move out to live with her chidren and their families, despite there being three of those.

Ishmael (462 posts) • 0

Relative to many others, and thanks to the media focus on this one kid out of millions, my guess is that Ice Boy will do okay. I wonder how many of those who have been touched by this story (and by what was apparently simply a lucky photograph) will bother to do anything for anybody else not in the story, who may well be in worse conditions.

JanJal (1243 posts) • +1

On the topic of government support, a recent development from my wife's home village:

Some government money was available for poor households, which they had to sign up for during CNY, while most migrant workers were back home.

A good family friend of my wife's did this. Mother and father working in east coast, and two kids left behind in boarding schools and weekends with relatives.

So apparently this week it become possible to collect the government money, and the migrant workers have to return to collect the money in person.

Would have thought it could be just paid to bank accounts. Well, keeps the the trains running.

And not only that - the money comes with some arrangement with local bank, and in order to get the government money, the family has to first produce 10 000 RMB to the bank.

So yeah, the government supports but there are bottlenecks and (in my opinion perfectly avoidable) additional costs that eat into it.

Haali (1178 posts) • 0

so the scheme to help poor households is only available to families with 10k floating about... you're not desperately poor if you have 10k in cash!

JanJal (1243 posts) • 0

They borrow that 10k, and try to pay back after they collect the government support.

I wonder if it constitutes a crime to act as a unlicensed bank like that, because I am usually the only one in this extended family with 10k floating around.

Haali (1178 posts) • 0

I see. My Grandad used to say "Never a borrower or a lender be". I once gave my in laws 10k towards a medical procedure, but they instead spent it buying a grave site! Talk about preparing for the worst!

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