Can you imagine being in charge of China? The Mandarins of 中南海 really have an unenviable job. Think about it: every morning they wake up and probably think “please don’t let anything break” – in the [likely] event something does, hundreds of thousands of people are potentially without food, water, or electricity.

As such Chinese leaders must really be losing sleep lately – most serious estimates of the Chinese economy indicate there was a contraction in Q4 08 (this graph), with dubious prospects for the near future. The entire country is on holiday, which means that there isn’t any news coming out – fortunately we still have Imperialist Western Media to cover the People’s Republic. The interaction between crisis and social resilience in the Chinese context is fascinating – even while throwing a monkey wrench into research plans. This WSJ article had an interesting note on perceptions of social mobility, even though most Chinese are much better off than they were at the end of the Cultural Revolution. To a large extent this seems absolutely true – you’re willing to endure quite a bit more with the expectation of a future payoff, for yourself or your children:

“In past years, regardless of how miserable their situation was, migrants had upward mobility,” says Dorothy Solinger, a professor at the University of California in Irvine, who studies China’s internal migration. “Now it’s potentially downward mobility.”

That poses a challenge to the Communist Party, which has staked its legitimacy on delivering three decades of high-speed growth. Already, concerned governments are responding with programs to keep unemployed migrants busy…

Simultaneously, the fortunes of China’s middle class – one child families – are disappearing also. Again, it’s an expectations question, as noted by this NYT article about the (lack of) job prospects for university graduates. 

As this country lumbers into the Year of the Ox, a frisson of anxiety is rippling through a generation of Chinese who had grown up thinking that economic prosperity was guaranteed them. The great boom in urban middle-class wealth over the past decade and a half is slowing because of the global financial crisis, and the job market for college-educated Chinese, even those with degrees from top universities here and abroad, has tightened.