Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
India’s cabinet approved plans on Wednesday to build 10 nuclear reactors with a combined capacity of 7,000 megawatts (MW), more than the country’s entire current capacity, to try fast-track its domestic nuclear power programme.
The decision by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government marks the first strategic response to the near collapse of Westinghouse, the U.S. reactor maker that had been in talks to build six of its AP1000 reactors in India.Westinghouse, owned by Japan’s Toshiba, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March after revealing billions of dollars in cost overruns at its U.S. projects, raising doubts about whether it can complete the India deal.
India has installed nuclear capacity of 6,780 MW from 22 plants and plans to add another 6,700 MW by 2021-22 through projects currently under construction. The 10 additional reactors would be the latest design of India’s Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor.
“This project will bring about substantial economies of scale and maximise cost and time efficiencies by adopting fleet mode for execution,” the government said in a statement.
“It is expected to generate more than 33,400 jobs in direct and indirect employment. With manufacturing orders to domestic industry, it will be a major step towards strengthening India’s credentials as a major nuclear manufacturing powerhouse.”
Westinghouse has said it plans to continue construction of its AP1000 plants in China and expects to bid for new plants in India and elsewhere, without elaborating on how it plans to do so.
Indian companies such as Larsen and Toubro, Kirloskar Brothers Limited and Godrej & Boyce welcomed the government’s move.
Sanjay Kirloskar, chairman of Kirloskar Brothers Limited, said: “nuclear power plants will go a long way in reducing the perennial energy deficit,” while Larsen and Toubro’s director S.N. Roy called the move “bold and historic.”
CHINESE officials describe the far western province of Xinjiang as a “core area” in the vast swathe of territory covered by the country’s grandiose “Belt and Road Initiative” to boost economic ties with Central Asia and regions beyond.
They hope that wealth generated by the scheme will help to make Xinjiang more stable—for years it has been plagued by separatist violence which China says is being fed by global jihadism. But the authorities are not waiting. In recent months they have intensified their efforts to stifle the Islamic identity of Xinjiang’s ethnic Uighurs, fearful that any public display of their religious belief could morph into militancy.Xinjiang’s 10m Uighurs (nearly half of its population) have long been used to heavy-handed curbs: a ban on unauthorised pilgrimages to Mecca, orders to students not to fast during Ramadan, tough restrictions on Islamic garb (women with face-covering veils are sometimes not allowed on buses), no entry to many mosques for people under 18, and so on.
But since he took over last August as Xinjiang’s Communist Party chief, Chen Quanguo has launched even harsher measures—pleased, apparently, by his crushing of dissent in Tibet where he previously served as leader. As in Tibet, many Xinjiang residents have been told to hand their passports to police and seek permission to travel abroad. In one part of Xinjiang all vehicles have been ordered to install satellite tracking-devices. There have been several shows of what officials call “thunderous power”, involving thousands of paramilitary troops parading through streets.
Last month, new rules came into effect that banned “abnormal” beards (such as the one worn by the man pictured in front of the main mosque in Kashgar in south-western Xinjiang). They also called on transport workers to report women wearing face veils or full-body coverings to the police, and prohibited “naming of children to exaggerate religious fervour”. A leaked list of banned names includes Muhammad, Mecca and Saddam. Parents may not be able to obtain vital household-registration papers for children with unapproved names, meaning they could be denied free schooling and health care.
Residents have also been asked to spy on each other. In Urumqi, the region’s capital, locals can report security threats via a new mobile app. People living in Altay in northern Xinjiang have been promised rewards of up to 5m yuan ($720,000) for tip-offs that help capture militants—over 200 times the local income per person.
Across Xinjiang residents have been asked to inform the authorities of any religious activities, including weddings and circumcisions. The government is also testing its own people’s loyalty. In March an official in Hotan in southern Xinjiang was demoted for “timidity” in “fighting against religious extremism” because he chose not to smoke in front of a group of mullahs.
Mr Chen is widely rumoured to be a contender for a seat in the ruling Politburo in a reshuffle due late this year. Displays of toughness may help to ingratiate him with China’s president, Xi Jinping, who has called for “a great wall of iron” to safeguard Xinjiang. Spending on security in Xinjiang was nearly 20% higher in 2016 than the year before. Adverts for security-related jobs there increased more than threefold last year, reckon James Leibold of La Trobe University and Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology at Korntal, Germany.
Uighurs have been blamed for several recent attacks in Xinjiang. In one of them in February, in the southern prefecture of Hotan, three knife-wielding men killed five people and injured several others before being shot dead by police (local reports suggested the violence occurred after a Uighur family was punished for holding a prayer session at home). Officials may be congratulating themselves on the success of their tactics; reported large-scale attacks by Uighurs inside and outside Xinjiang have abated in the past 18 months. Yet as in Tibet, intrusive surveillance and curbs on cultural expression have fuelled people’s desperation. “A community is like a fruit,” says a Uighur driver from Kashgar. “Squash it too hard and it will burst.”
After about 90 minutes in the air the plane landed safely back at Pudong airport in Shanghai.
China’s first large domestically made passenger aircraft has completed its maiden flight, mounting a major challenge to Boeing and Airbus.
After about 90 minutes in the air the plane landed safely back at Pudong airport in Shanghai.
The plane is a key symbol of Beijing’s soaring ambitions to enter the global aviation market.
The jet by state-owned firm Comac has been planned since 2008 but the flight was repeatedly pushed back.For Friday’s maiden flight, the plane carried only its skeleton crew of five pilots and engineers and took off in front of a crown of thousands of dignitaries, aviation workers and enthusiasts.
Ahead of the flight, state television said the plane would fly at an altitude of only 3,000 metres (9,800 feet), some 7,000 metres lower than a regular trip, and reach a speed of around 300 kilometres (186 miles) per hour.
The C919 is designed to be a direct competitor to Boeing’s 737 and the Airbus A320.
It’s estimated that the global aviation market will be worth $2tn (£1.55tn) over the next 20 years.
China’s new pride of the skies
Robin Brant tours the C919
The C919 is a single-aisle twin-engine plane with a capacity to seat up to 168 passengers.
It will have a range of between 4,075 and 5,555km (2,532 – 3,452 miles).
According to Chinese media, it will cost around $50m, less than half of a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320.
The plane still relies on a wide array of imported technology though, it is for instance powered by engines from French-US supplier CFM International.
Orders have already been placed for more than 500 of the planes, with commitments from 23 customers, say officials, mainly Chinese airlines. The main customer is China Eastern Airlines.
Europe’s aviation safety regulator has started the certification process for the C919 – a crucial step for the aircraft to be successful on the international market.
China has had ambitions to build its own civil aircraft industry since the 1970s, when leader Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing, personally backed a project.
But the Y-10, built in the late 1970s, was impractical due to its heavy weight and only three of the aircraft were ever made.
Shyam Divan was arguing a crucial petition challenging a new law that makes it compulsory for people to submit a controversial biometric-based personal identification number while filing income tax returns.
“My fingerprints and iris are mine and my own. The state cannot take away my body,” a lawyer told India’s Supreme Court last week
Defending this law, the government’s top law officer told the court on Tuesday that an individual’s “right to body is not an absolute right”.
“You can have right over your body but the state can restrict trading in body organs, so the state can exercise control over the body,” Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said.At the heart of the latest challenge are rising concerns over the security of this mega biometric database and privacy of the number holders. (The government says it needs to link the identity number to income tax returns to improve compliance and prevent fraud.)
India’s biometric database is the world’s largest. Over the past eight years, the government has collected fingerprints and iris scans from more than a billion residents – or nearly 90% of the population – and stored them in a high security data centre. In return, each person has been provided with a randomly generated, unique 12-digit identity number.
For a country of 1.2 billion people with only 65 million passport-holders and 200 million with driving licenses, the portable identity number is a boon to the millions who have long suffered for a lack of one.
Indians will need the identity number to receive benefits from more than 500 welfare schemes
States have been using the number, also called Aadhaar (Foundation), to transfer government pensions, scholarships, wages for a landmark rural jobs-for-work scheme and benefits for cooking fuel to targeted recipients, and distribute cheap food to the poor.
Over the years, the number has taken a life of its own and begun exerting, what many say, is an overweening and stifling control over people’s lives. For many like political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Aadhaar has transmuted from a “tool of citizen empowerment to a tool of state surveillance and citizen vulnerability”.
People will soon need the number to receive benefits from more than 500 of India’s 1,200-odd welfare schemes. Even banks and private firms have begun using it to authenticate consumers: a new telecom company snapped up 100 million subscribers in quick time recently by verifying the customer’s identity through the number.
‘Forcibly linked’
People are using the number to even get their marriages registered. The number, says Nikhil Pahwa, editor and publisher of Indian news site MediaNama, is “being forcibly linked to mobile numbers, bank accounts, tax filings, scholarships, pensions, rations, school admissions, health records and much much more, which thus puts more personal information at risk”.
Some of the fears are not without basis.
The government has assured that the biometric data is “safe and secure in encrypted form”, and anybody found guilty of leaking data can be jailed and fined.
But there have already been a number of leaks of details of students, pensioners and recipients of welfare benefits involving a dozen government websites. Even former Indian cricket captain MS Dhoni’s personal information was mistakenly tweeted by an overzealous enrolment service provider.
The fingerprints and iris scans are stored in high security data centres
Now a disturbing report by The Centre for Internet and Society claims that details of around 130-135 million Aadhaar numbers, and around 100 million bank numbers of pensioners and rural jobs-for-work beneficiaries have been leaked online by four key government schemes.
More than 230 million people nationwide are accessing welfare benefits using their numbers, and potentially, according to the report, “we could be looking at a data leak closer to that number”. And linking the number to different databases – as the government is doing – is increasing the risk of data theft and surveillance.
The chief law officer believes that the outrage over the leaks is “much ado about nothing”.
“Biometrics were not leaked, only Aadhaar numbers were leaked. It is nothing substantial. The idea is biometrics should not be leaked,” Mukul Rohtagi told the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
The government itself has admitted that it has blacklisted or suspended some 34,000 service providers for helping create “fake” identification numbers or not following proper processes. Two years ago, a man was arrested for getting an identification number for his pet dog. The government itself has deactivated 8.5 million numbers for incorrect data, dodgy biometrics and duplication. Last month, crop loss compensation for more than 40,000 farmers was delayed because their Aadhaar numbers were “entered incorrectly by banks”.’
‘Mass surveillance’
There are also concerns that the number can be used for profiling. Recently, authorities asked participants at a function in a restive university campus in southern India to provide their Aadhaar identity numbers. “This is not only a matter of privacy. The all pervasiveness of the Aadhaar number is a threat to freedom of expression, which is a constitutional right,” Srinivas Kodali, who investigated the latest report on data leaks, told me.
Critics say the government is steaming ahead with making the number compulsory for a range of services, violating a Supreme Court order which said enrolment would be voluntary. “The main danger of the number,” says economist Jean Dreze, “is that it opens the door to mass surveillance.”
Details of millions of Aadhaar number holders have been leaked
Nandan Nilekani, the technology tycoon who set up the programme popularly known by its acronym UIDAI, believes concerns about the safety of the biometric database are exaggerated.
He says the identity number has cut wastage, removed fakes, curbed corruption and made substantial savings for the government. He insists that the programme is completely encrypted and secure. “It’s like you are creating a rule-based society,” he told Financial Times recently, “it’s the transition that is going on right now.”
Abused
More than 60 countries around the world take biometric data from its people, says Mr Nilekani. But then there are nagging concerns worldwide about these databases being abused by hackers and state intelligence.
In 2016, personal details of some 50 million people in Turkey were reportedly leaked. (Turkey’s population is estimated at 78 million.) In 2015, hackers stole more than five million fingerprints after breaching US government networks. In 2011, French experts discovered a hack involving the theft of millions of people’s data in Israel.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta has written that the lack of a “clear transparent consent architecture, no transparent information architecture, no privacy architecture worth the name [India doesn’t have a privacy law], and increasingly, no assurance about what exactly you do if the state decides to mess with your identity” could easily make Aadhaar a “tool of state suppression”.
So a lot of lingering doubts remain. How pervasive should an identity number be? What about the individual freedom of citizens? How do you ensure the world’s biggest biometric database is secure in a country with no privacy laws and a deficient criminal justice system?
In many ways, the debate about Aadhaar is also a debate about the future of India. As lawyer Shyam Divan argued forcefully in the top court, “people are reduced to vassals” when the state controls your body to this extent.
Chinese engineers installed a 6,000-tonne key part of the world’s longest cross-sea bridge linking Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macao.
A gigantic crane, which was transformed from a tanker, hoists a 6,000-ton key structure of the world’s longest cross-sea bridge linking Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macao, May 2, 2017. The wedge, 12-meter-long and weighing more than 25 Airbus A380 jets, was lowered to connect the immersed tubes of the underground tunnel of the bridge. The 55-kilometer bridge connects Zhuhai in Guangdong Province with Hong Kong and Macao. It includes a 22.9-km bridge and 6.7-km underground tunnel. (Xinhua/Liu Dawei)
The wedge, 12 meters long, and weighing more than 25 Airbus A380 jets, was lowered to connect the tubes which will form the tunnel section of the bridge, said Lin Ming, chief engineer of the island and tunnel section of the bridge.
The 55-kilometer bridge connects Zhuhai in Guangdong Province with Hong Kong and Macao. It includes a 22.9-km bridge and 6.7-km tunnel.
Before the wedge was installed on Tuesday, 33 immersed tubes, each 180 meters long and weighing 80,000 tonnes, had been installed.
“There is only one wedge for a tunnel, and we cannot afford to fail in its installation. It took two years to prepare for today,” said Chen Yue, director of the chief engineer’s office of the bridge’s island and tunnel section. The installation procedure took more than 10 hours.
“The margin of error for the wedge is 1.5 centimeters. We have to measure precisely the influence of wind, current and buoyancy force,” said Lin.
“It is like putting a needle through a hole in the sea — a truly unprecedented event in the history of transportation,” Lin said.
A gigantic crane, which was transformed from a tanker, was used to hoist the wedge, lowering it to the desired destination between the tubes.The wedge will be welded and finished by June, Lin said.
By the end of the year, the bridge will be open to traffic, said Zhu Yongling, director of the bridge management bureau.
Construction began in December of 2009 at Zhuhai. The Y-shaped bridge connects Lantau Island in Hong Kong with Zhuhai and Macao.
Tan Guoshun, an expert in bridge construction who has participated in many big projects, told Xinhua that breakthroughs were made in construction management, technique, safety and environmental protection.
For instance, the bridge is designed to be used for 120 years. “Anticorrosion and quake-proof measures were improved so as to make the goal possible,” he said.
The bridge was pieced together with different parts built in different locations like building blocks. “The progress of China’s equipment manufacturing industry made this construction method possible,” said Zhong Huihong, deputy chief engineer of the bridge management bureau.
Take the floating crane as an example. In the 1990s, China’s floating cranes could only handle about one hundred tonnes. “Now their capacity has reached 10,000 tonnes,” Zhong said.
“Some foreigners believe that completion of the bridge marks a leap forward of China’s construction industry,” said Su Quanke, chief engineer of the bridge management bureau.
The bridge will cut land travel time between Hong Kong and Zhuhai from three hours on the road to a 30-minute drive.
“As economic exchanges between Hong Kong, Macao and Zhuhai deepen, an urban agglomeration has formed. The bridge will further boost the interconnection,” said Zheng Tianxiang, vice president of the Asia-Pacific Innovation Economic Research Institute.
Guo Wanda, executive vice president of the Shenzhen-based China Development Institute, believes that the bridge could also help boost the industrial gradient transfer of inland provinces like Guizhou, Yunnan, Hunan and Jiangxi.
“The area will become an important hub of the Belt and Road Initiative,” he said.
Botanists have unlocked the genetic secrets of the plant prized for producing tea.A team in China has decoded the genetic building blocks of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, whose leaves are used for all types of tea, including black, green and oolong.
The research gives an insight into the chemicals that give tea its flavour.
Until now, little has been known about the genetics of the plant, despite its huge economic and cultural importance.
“There are many diverse flavours, but the mystery is what determines or what is the genetic basis of tea flavours?” said plant geneticist Lizhi Gao of Kunming Institute of Botany, China, who led the research.
“Together with the construction of genetic maps and new sequencing technologies, we are working on an updated tea tree genome that will investigate some of the flavour.”
A botanist collects tea leaves for research
The Camellia grouping, or genus, contains over 100 species, including ornamental garden plants. But only Camellia Sinensis is grown commercially for making tea.
The researchers found that the leaves of the tea plant contain high levels of chemicals that give tea its distinctive flavour. They include flavonoids and caffeine.
Other members of the Camellia genus contain these chemicals at much lower levels.
Dr Monique Simmonds, deputy director of science at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, UK, who is not connected with the research, said it provided an important insight into the genetic building blocks of tea.
She told BBC News: ”Overall, the findings from this study could have a significant impact on those involved in the breeding of tea but also those involved in breeding many plants used medicinally and in cosmetics, as the compounds that occur in tea are often associated with the biological properties of plants used medicinally or in cosmetics.”
Decoding the genome of the tea plant took more than five years. At three billion DNA base pairs in length, the tea plant genome is more than four times the size of the coffee plant genome and much larger than most sequenced plant species.
“Our lab has successfully sequenced and assembled more than 20 plant genomes,” said Prof Gao, who carried out the work with scientists in South Korea and the US.
“But this genome, the tea tree genome, was tough.”
More than 50 types of plant have now had their genetic code laid bare
The genetic knowledge could lead to ways to improve the quality and price of tea, by selective breeding of tea plants.
Guy Barter, chief horticulturist at the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), UK, said the work gave plant breeders a “powerful new tool”.
“Once you understand the basis for the flavours and the processing quality of the tea, you can then have genetic markers that breeders can look for when trying to produce new varieties,” he told BBC News.
Six main types of tea are produced from Camellia sinensis – white, yellow, green, oolong, black and post-fermented. Each has its own aroma, taste and appearance.The distinctive flavours of these teas are created by their different chemical compositions.
Dr Simmonds said knowledge of the genome of tea helped us understand how the plant evolved.
”Another important finding is that the biochemical pathways involved in the synthesis of the compounds important in the taste of tea are also present in some of the ancestors of tea and have been conserved for about 6.3 million years,” she said.
The first plant genome was sequenced more than 15 years ago.
Since then more than 50 types of plant have been sequenced, including food crops such as the banana, potato and tomato.
The research is published in the journal Molecular Plant.
India-based IT services firm Infosys Ltd said it plans to hire 10,000 U.S. workers in the next two years and open four technology centers in the United States, starting with a center this August in Indiana, the home state of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.
The move comes at a time when Infosys and some of its Indian peers such as Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Ltd have become political targets in the United States for allegedly displacing U.S. workers’ jobs by flying in foreigners on temporary visas to service their clients in the country.
The IT service firms rely heavily on the H1-B visa program, which U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered federal agencies to review.A
In a telephone interview with Reuters from Indiana, Infosys Chief Executive Vishal Sikka said his company plans to hire U.S. workers in fields such as artificial intelligence.
“When you think about it from a U.S. point of view, obviously creating more American jobs and opportunities is a good thing,” Sikka said.
While Indian outsourcing firms have recruited in the United States, Infosys is the first to come out with concrete hiring numbers and provide a timeline in the wake of Trump’s visa review.
Last month, two industry sources told Reuters that Infosys was applying for just under 1,000 H-1B visas this year. One of the sources said that was down from about 6,500 applications in 2016 and some 9,000 in 2015.Indian IT service firms, which typically flood the lottery system each year with thousands of applications, have been among the largest H1-B recipients annually.
Indian politicians and IT industry heads have been lobbying U.S. lawmakers and officials from the Trump administration to not make drastic changes to visa rules, as this could hurt India’s $150 billion IT service sector.
The 10,000 new U.S. jobs would be a small part of Infosys’ overall workforce of more than 200,000.Sikka said Infosys has already hired 2,000 U.S. workers as part of a previous effort started in 2014.
“We started small at first and have been growing since then,” Sikka said. “The reality is, bringing in local talent and mixing that with the best of global talent in the times we are living in and the times we’re entering is the right thing to do. It is independent of the regulations and the visas.”
The four hubs being set up will not only have technology and innovation focus areas, but will also closely serve clients in sectors such as financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, retail and energy, said Infosys.
The first hub, which will open in Indiana in August 2017, is expected to create 2,000 jobs by 2021, the company said.
Infosys did not disclose the financial impact of its plans. It declined to comment on whether the planned U.S. jobs would account for a large percentage of overall hiring in the coming two years.
Based on Infosys’ recent hiring trends, however, the planned hirings in the U.S. could account for a substantial portion of the company’s net workforce additions over the period.
Infosys, which added nearly 18,000 jobs in 2015, slowed its hiring pace considerably, creating just about 6,000 jobs in 2016 amid market uncertainty caused by Brexit and heightened clamor for tougher U.S. immigration laws that led some U.S. clients to hold-off on new projects.
“Hiring locally is a compulsion and it’s not just because of what’s happening in the U.S.,” said Harit Shah, research analyst at Reliance Securities. “The model itself is not sustainable.”
The company cautioned last month that it would struggle to reach its ambitious $20 billion revenue target by 2020, as the Indian software service sector has been hit by cautious client spending due to a rising protectionist wave globally.
The United States is the largest market for Indian software service companies, but other countries like Australia have also begun to target Indian IT service companies that use temporary visa programs.Shares in Infosys were down less than 1 percent in midday trading in India, following news of the U.S. hiring plans.
Over the past two decades, Guo Wenli has traveled throughout China, everywhere except Tibet.
The 40-year-old has camped in the Gobi Desert in the north and at the foot of snow-capped mountains in the southwestern province of Yunnan.Mr. Guo isn’t a backpacker. He is one of China’s migrant workers—rural laborers who left the farm to work in factories and construction. According to an official survey, they numbered 281 million in 2016, slightly more than the previous year.
More than 65% of the country’s migrant workforce is male, 39 years old on average, and earns a monthly salary of 3,275 yuan ($475), the National Bureau of Statistics said in an annual report released Friday. More than half either work in factories (30.5%) or at construction sites (19.7%), the report said.
“Young people in our village with some education all find jobs at factories. Nobody wants us old folks,” said Mr. Guo, wearing an orange vest while paving sidewalks in a Beijing neighborhood known for its late-night restaurants.
This latest survey shows the migrant workforce is aging rapidly. More than 19% of migrant workers in 2016 were older than 50, compared with 14% five years ago.
More are choosing to work closer to home, especially women, who now make up 34.5% of the migrant labor force, up from 33.6% in 2015. More migrants are also heading to western China, where the government is trying to direct investment and promote development. The migrant labor force in the west rose 5.3% from a year earlier, the survey said. In the better-off east, which has drawn a large share of foreign and private investment for years, the migrant workforce shrank marginally, by 0.3%, but the majority—56.7%—still work in those areas.
The statistics bureau carries out door-to-door visits to nearly a quarter of a million rural households every quarter for the survey.
A native of Xinxiang in the central province of Henan, Mr. Guo still keeps his farm, where he grows wheat and corn. His wife and two sons remain there, and he returns three times a year—planting season, harvesting season, and for the Lunar New Year holiday, altogether about three months. The crops bring his family an extra 3,000 to 4,000 yuan each year.
Mr. Guo said he earns about 5,000 to 6,000 yuan every month, depending on the construction job. The biggest project he worked on was the 60-story Fortune Financial Center, a landmark office tower in Beijing’s financial hub. He said he spent more than a year installing windows and other glass. He’s seen the completed building on TV, but he’s never visited it himself.
Mr. Guo, who lives in a room in a prefab hut he shares with five other coworkers, typically gets up at 5 a.m., works wherever he is sent by his boss—a contractor with the city government—and returns about 7 p.m. That’s longer than the average of 8.5 hours a day, based on the findings of the government survey.
He said he doesn’t have the time, energy or the money to go to check out the tourist sites in Beijing. His jobs usually last a few months, but he estimates, adding up the stints, he’s spent years of his life working in the capital.
Mr. Guo thinks his life is improving, because he’s earning more than in the past and isn’t living in a tent, as he has done on many jobs. While wages have been rising, the pace has slowed in recent years. Wages rose 6.6% on average last year, down from 7.2% in 2015, the official survey showed.
But he doesn’t want his two sons to follow in his footsteps; he wants them to live like city dwellers and have an easier life.
Nearly 18% of the migrant workers have purchased property in the cities in 2016, higher than the 17.3% in 2015, said the statistics bureau.
For Mr. Guo, buying an apartment Beijing, which typically cost millions of yuan, isn’t part of his dream. He wants to start his own business, growing and selling garlic, if he can get a small bank loan.
Unlike some of his fellow villagers who managed to receive zero-interest loans, he said he doesn’t have connections at the local government or at the bank to get one.
“Without a loan, I can’t do anything. I guess I’ll keep working in cities until the day I can’t move.”
Details of millions of Aadhaar number holders have been leaked
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 