The next emperors

Time out from the travelogue for a little cultural reflection on a matter close to my heart: children.

My friends will recognize that was a joke. I don’t have kids, don’t want them, and only care to be around them in limited, controlled circumstances. Don’t even know how to talk to them, let alone manage their needs. But, I’m reading a book about a strange American phenomenon - retirement communities - and the many negative consequences age-segregation can have on the social fabric. I’m also at a stage, positioned at the tail-end of the baby boom, where the question of who’s going to look after me as I dotter becomes more than an academic curiosity. In some way some kid will be involved, so I’d better make peace with Gen-X. And Y and Z.

One of the major social concerns for Chinese city-dwellers is the one-child policy. Instituted a decade ago as an attempt to get control of the alarming rise in population, two interesting consequences have been related to us. With two parents and four grandparents focusing all their nurturing on one kid, the tykes grow up the center of their own little universe, often over-indulged. Known as the “Little Emperor” syndrome, it will combine with the astonishing changes of modernization, technology, political changes, and urbanization, to create an enormous generation gap that is already straining the old patterns of family life.

There is another side to that coin. Imperial majesty can come with strings attached. That single child, if at all precocious, can become the focus of all the hopes of six doting adults, the repository of their aspirations, the fulfillment of their dreams, and the ticket to the family’s security as the world swirls around them. Coupled with the extremely competitive system of exams kids have to pass in order to move toward university, the little sovereigns carry a heavy burden.

Understand: as vexing (and misguided) as standardized tests are for American kids, for the Chinese the qualifying exams can mean the difference between a profession and a lifetime of menial toil. In the US, slackers like me can go to community college and get loans for university, or dropout and fake their way into decent incomes. Not so easy here. Being still a poor country, and supporting an enormous population, there just aren’t enough colleges for all the talented people who deserve that opportunity.

Will it always be this way in China? I still know so very little about this society that all I can do is idlely muse about it. There is no limit to human potential. Everywhere, from the Bronx to Beijing, there are brilliant people, undiscovered, unrealized. If China learns to share its new wealth equitably and to create institutions on the necessary scale, it may tap that potential. Will it then, a couple generations later, devolve into apathy, as many Americans have, and become a victim of its own success? Probably. We are, after all, only human.