Our poverty attracts the pity of the Chinese

I know our economy has been taking a bit of a bashing recently, but I was a bit taken aback at something my wife said yesterday. Apparently two Chinese friends, independently and on separate occasions in the last week, told her of their surprise at how poor everyone seems to be here.

Both ladies were too polite to amplify, but both had been our guests at a recent party, and no doubt the modest circumstances chez Collard had contributed something to this observation. Still, even I didn’t realise I qualified for the Third World’s pity just yet.

It needs of course to be placed in context. Many of the Chinese living here, especially in the academic world, come from very wealthy families; they’d have to be, to pay full-cost fees for post-graduate as well as undergraduate degrees. So they’re hardly directly comparable to the struggling middle classes of a standard English town. But there are other factors involved.

Only ten or fifteen years ago China’s opening to the outside world had shown the Chinese just how wealthy the Western world was. Going to the West, insofar as that was possible, was like a voyage to Eldorado; one expected untold wealth and luxury, and for the first generation of escapees that was what one got. For those who stayed back home, imagination had to suffice. People would ask, brazenly, how much one earned, translate it into renminbi, and their eyes would start to revolve, thinking how much that would buy in 1990s China.

Which was of course the snag. With so much of the population living on or around the breadline, China has had to keep the basic cost of living very low indeed. Housing, transport, clothing, food, all had to be accessible to those who had remained on Communist-era wages. Thus when middle-class incomes started to shoot up like rocketing pheasants, that income was virtually all disposable. When Chinese come to Britain, therefore, they are not prepared for the fact that most of our monthly incomes, even the higher ones, are swallowed up in fixed costs before they’ve had time to settle in our bank accounts. Somewhere inside them the expectation still remains that we ought to be a lot richer; we’re Westerners, after all. But the reality is that middle-class jobs in Beijing or Shanghai pay hardly less than in the UK, so they have far more cash to buy bling and make whoopee than we do.

So, when you see statistics for the average income in China (£1,275 per annum in 2006) take them with a pinch of monosodium glutamate. There are a billion peasants on far less than that, and several million in the cities with a hell of a lot more. At least they’re becoming sensitive to the plight of us poor sods over here.