New struggle in China: Keep up with the Chans

As the "year of the dog" arrives in China, a new fad for those partaking in China's success is weekend skiing. Office groups migrate to one of eight new ski "villages" outside Beijing. Many arrive in SUVs, the current "it" car also used for fashionable expeditions to outbacks in Gansu or inner Mongolia.

Chinese who can afford such luxuries are expectation-setters. Along with Olympic games and space launches, they are models of what China can deliver - a prosperous society that President Hu said in his New Year's message will allow "all Chinese to benefit."

Yet officials worry that expectations may have risen too fast. Frustration is felt broadly among those who rub shoulders with wealth but aren't quite benefiting. At Beitang Catholic Cathedral on Christmas Eve, Bishop Liu Yong Bin appealed to a packed house that "we not become angry when we see others have more than we do."

After 15 years of headlong marketization and material progress, China is at a transitional moment. Its leaders face the delicate task of managing a social contract that includes rising expectations - as well as adapting a one-party communist state and Confucian culture to the needs of an increasingly modern and educated populace, experts say.

"Things have gone from all ideology and no materialism to all materialism and no ideology or values," notes veteran China watcher Laurence Brahm, owner of the Red Capital Club in Beijing. "Expectations are a big phenomenon. The '80s were about idealism. Now the talk is 'what brand are you using?' Urban China is about keeping up with the Joneses, or the Chans, in this case."

To be sure, the hopes of ordinary Chinese have never percolated more strongly. Li Wan, just off the train from Jiangxi province, sits at a huge public electronic "jobs board" downtown that flashes ads for "parking lot attendant" or "deputy office manager." He wears the tan socks and slightly bewildered expression of the waidi, or "outside Beijing person." His dream is an apartment in Beijing and school for his daughter. But like so many interviewed for this story, Mr. Li's plans hinge on making $150 more per month, and work is harder to find than he thought.

Around the corner, a young woman chews a chicken sandwich and tells of moving from a Wal-Mart job in Shenzhen to employment as a cosmetics salesperson at Dangdang, an online shop. She hasn't reached her dream of buying a house and getting married. By law, 10 percent of her earnings go into a housing fund she can tapwhen she is ready. "I hope my job will be better, and I can buy a house in two years. Many people are waiting to afford a house."

In just two decades, China has moved from almost zero productivity and capital, and a state-planned society, to being a top manufacturer with massive foreign reserves. A 20-year-old has known nothing but upward mobility. Last month, Yao Wenyuan, the last of the Cultural Revolution's hated "Gang of Four" died, a relic of a poisonous period. Today, success has become a secular religion, reinforced by messages of opportunity in nearly every official speech - "sermons about paradise," as one Western scholar put it.

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