The thing about living in a megapolis is that with it comes a surplus of everything. In my small town, I can only think of one or two food stores (or rather, places to buy food/groceries). In downtown San Diego, around the Horton Plaza area, I can think of maybe 4 or 5 areas. Here at my university, I can easily think of 7 or 8 alone, not including the areas just outside all the gates on campus. On the walk to Wudaokou, a good 20-minute walk, there are many more places to buy fruit and other foodstuffs. The same is true for restaurants: in the two hutong I lived next to over winter break, there are about as many places to eat as my hometown of Solana Beach. The food street next to my university also has much more, not to mention even more restaurants in the neighboring areas of Wudaokou and Zhongguancun. I am pretty much guaranteed to pass three or four restaurants (again, I use this word lightly. It’s not as much a restaurant as it is a place where you sit down and tell the waiter to get you this and that dish) in any hutong that I walk through in Beijing. I can easily recall 10 hair dressing places on that walk to Wudaokou, where there are only two or three places in my hometown.
On top of that, since China has no minimum wage (well, it does, but it’s not very enforced), there is also an abundance of workers in any given place. Restaurants usually have very quick service, but a different person serves each dish. It’s not unusual for someone to take your order, someone else to take your money, someone else gives you back your change, someone else serves your food, and then someone else cleans your table. Shops look busy, but only because a tiny little shop will have 7 or 8 employees. Hairdressing shops always have 10 employees, but only two or three customers at a time. It’s absolutely ridiculous to an American like me, after being raised on the joys of capitalism and proper distribution of resources.
As a matter of fact, due to China’s One Child Policy, there is a shortage of labor, and in the upcoming few years, the highest paying jobs available in China will not be white collar jobs for college graduates, but rather, labor jobs, simply due to the low supply of people in China. This has many implications for China. For example, China has been hoping to move away from a reputation as a labor factory for the rest of the world and into a white-collar investment zone, but this disparity in labor demand and supply ensures that they will be a labor source for a while longer. Additionally, families traditionally bring themselves out of poverty by having many children to support them in their old age. Once the family reaches a comfortable level, they start having less and less children. This pattern is quite universal, except for the places where a limited number of people were encouraged, like modern day China, or Soviet Russia. It will be interesting to see how the new urban population of China reacts after the government lifts their One Child Policy to combat the labor deficit.
Seeing this in China has guaranteed one thing for me: I will never complain about a lack of jobs after college. At least I won’t be working in an overcrowded shop with a lack of minimum wage!
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