Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2013. Its data and events are from 2013, including the property tax on second homes, the gift-advertising ban, ghost cities and censorship. Its statement that China promises to become the world’s largest economy reflects 2013 forecasts.
China is on course to become the world’s largest economic power. Its rapid growth has created “socio-economic-political” problems that are unique to the country, and today we look at some curious things that, at least in principle, only happen in China.
1. Grave robbers sell corpses for “ghost marriages”.
China has a traditional custom of ghost marriages, usually arranged so that young people who died before marrying can do so after death. The practice has spread to the point that grave robbers have appeared who sell these bodies without the families’ consent.
2. Parents hire assassins to kill their own children.
One father hired a professional to take his own son’s life, because the son had quit his job and spent much of the day playing video games, something the father couldn’t stand. It isn’t an isolated case: Chinese courts are full of open cases involving sons who turned up dead after deciding they didn’t want to carry on in their father’s company.
3. Couples divorce to avoid tax.
Since the government announced a 20% tax on home sales for couples who own more than one property, divorce has become fashionable: that way, one of the two sells their home and they avoid paying the tax.
4. China bans gift-giving and stalls retail sales of luxury goods.
In an attempt to cut corruption and stop public officials being bribed, China banned advertising for luxury products such as high-end watches, rare stamps and gold coins. Since then, companies in this sector have seen their sales fall. They complain that the message has been distorted, with some Chinese people even believing it is illegal to buy these products as gifts for relatives (especially if the relative is a businessperson).
5. Buildings topple over whole, with their structure intact.
This construction model is probably unique to China, where buildings are designed to withstand strong earthquakes. Still, only in China could you be walking down the street one day and see a building fall over sideways, with its structure completely intact.
6. A record number of ghost cities.
The construction boom has been such that China now has newly built cities the size of Jaén (a Spanish provincial capital) where nobody lives yet. Of course, this has also happened in Spain, though on a smaller scale. It makes us think China could be close to the bursting of its property bubble.
7. Money invested in bridges nobody will use.
China can boast of having the longest bridge in the world, which required an enormous investment. The thing is, the bridge has no traffic, because using it means driving twice as far as taking any of several alternative routes. We’ve nicknamed it the “Spanish air bridge”, since it is about as useful as the dozens of Spanish airports where not a single plane lands.
8. Children with wonderful voices are replaced by more photogenic ones.
China lied about the girl who sang at the Olympic Games. One girl had the sweet voice, but another was considered prettier, so the second girl simply moved her lips to pretend she was singing. Once they were “caught”, China said it had been done for the good of the nation.
9. Record-breaking censorship.
Its extreme communist dictatorship led China to block Bloomberg.com after the site published an article on the wealth of President Xi Jinping’s family. Facebook is also blocked in China, and after the president’s son crashed his Ferrari, China censored the word “Ferrari” online to stop people talking about the accident.
10. It has sentenced corrupt bankers to death.
China has been the only country in the world to sentence to death bankers and businesspeople who bribed politicians. My guess is that if Spain had the death penalty for corrupt politicians, the businesspeople who bribed them and the bankers who mismanaged their banks, we would have had more than 2,000 funerals for these reasons.
11. The rich use stand-ins in court.
Wealthy Chinese hire people to serve their prison sentences for them, even when the sentence is death or life imprisonment. That way the rich person walks free, and the poor one, through their sacrifice, makes sure their family never goes without.
12. Apple has stores in China it doesn’t know about.
Apple received congratulations on its great expansion and success with the stores it had opened in China, and the company was baffled. Pulling on that thread, around 25 fake Apple stores have been discovered to date, copying the company down to the smallest detail. They were fake stores, but people didn’t know it, and neither did Apple.
13. Companies hang nets to prevent suicides.
The stress at many Chinese companies is such that practically every week workers jump from company windows. This has led many firms to install nets to stop workers from hitting the ground, or at least to try to dissuade them from attempting it.
14. Eating Chinese products is considered a risky activity.
China has created the first “avatar pig”, so called because it glows in the dark, due to chemical components that can’t be very healthy. Milk contaminated with melamine, mercury and detergent, peas painted green to give them the colour they need, and hundreds of other scandals. We covered them in Yellow alert: Chinese food products.
Update, 18 November 2013
15. Chinese men sue their wives for giving them ugly children.
A Chinese man sued his wife for giving him ugly children, and won, because she had hidden from him that she’d had cosmetic surgery before they married. Now the woman, who had already spent about $100,000 on her beauty makeover, must pay her husband $120,000 for keeping the secret from him. He added that he is horrified by his daughter, whom he describes as “incredibly ugly”. These Chinese know no limits. What will be next? (Source: El Imparcial)
Further reading
Sources: Financial Times, Business Insider, CNBC.
Featured image: Popolon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
