You Think Your Apartment Is Cramped?
100,000 people in Hong Kong live in 40 square-foot cubicle rooms. Warning: You may get claustrophobic looking at these overhead photos.
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A human rights organization, the Society for Community Organization, just launched an ad campaign to try to urge people to petition the local government (by scanning a QR code) to get officials to address this unhealthy situation.
Last year, The Economist named Hong Hong the world's most livable city, which helped drive up already high real estate prices.
These are real residences, not sets. Landlords chop up already tiny apartments into these hellholes.
Four more ads below.
Photographer: Benny Lam
Ad agency: Publicis, Hong Kong.
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Ad agency: Publicis, Hong Kong.
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China: The Orient Excess
Three decades of economic liberalisation have radically changed the face of China. With the number of Chinese billionaires increasing rapidly (it now has almost as many as the US and is closing in on the top spot), the communist ideals of the past seem to have faded beyond recognition.
"You can never have enough money. Money helps me fulfill my dreams", says Li Chao, for whom expensive hobbies like motor racing are no longer out of reach. He thinks nothing of splashing out hundreds of thousands of dollars on glamorous supercars and is unapologetic about his growing wealth. After all, he says, he has earned it.
Li represents a new generation of pioneering 'red capitalists', many of them the children of Communist Party officials. Flamboyant, accustomed to success and able to spend more money in one luxury evening in Shanghai or Beijing than others can earn in a year, they are fast becoming the embodiment of the modern Chinese dream. Others, like the real estate developer Wang Dafu, were born into poverty, but have been equally able to build vast fortunes in a country with growth rates that other nations can only dream of.
"When I started working I sometimes couldn't afford a beer and a bowl of noodles,” he says. Now, with his personal wealth estimated at two-thirds of a billion dollars, he could spend the equivalent of 10,000 bowls of noodles on the interior design of his yacht and barely dent his bank account.
It is not surprising that with more and more people splashing the cash, the Chinese auto market is now the largest in the world, its luxury goods market is huge and its art market is booming. This is life - albeit for a privileged minority - in the new China and it is one focused on what many observers now see as an increasingly hollow slogan: "Socialism with Chinese characteristics".
Yet those who run the country clearly do not appreciate the irony. Take the incomes of the members of the People's Congress, the official parliament, which meets once a year. The 70 richest members collectively have assets worth over $85bn. This compares favourably to the relatively meagre $5.5bn available to the 70 richest members of Congress in Washington DC.
Yet Wu Renbao, the former party boss of Huaxi, sees no contradiction. “Whatever the ideology - the main thing is that we become rich together," he says. In other words, everyone has an equal opportunity to benefit; all they have to do is work hard.
But not everyone is happy. Economist Zhang Hongliang is an unreconstructed leftist, who warns that China’s leadership may come to rue its love affair with profit.
"Directors of companies shouldn’t be party secretaries. It should be the proletariat providing the secretaries and the directors representing the capitalists. When a person takes on those two roles, one thing is clear: the Communist Party is nothing but a capitalist party through and through," Zhang says.
This revealing film from Jorg Winter and ORF looks at some of the possible consequences of China’s growing love affair with money and wonders what has happened to the Marxist principles that the nation once paid homage to.
Click here for more People & Power China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know The need to understand this global giant has never been more pressing: China is constantly in the news, yet conflicting impressions abound. Within one generation, China has transformed from an impoverished, repressive state into an economic and political powerhouse. In China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, Jeffrey Wasserstrom provides cogent answers to the most urgent questions regarding the newest superpower and offers a framework for understanding its meteoric rise.Focusing his answers through the historical legacies--Western and Japanese imperialism, the Mao era, and the massacre near Tiananmen Square--that largely define China's present-day trajectory, Wasserstrom introduces readers to the Chinese Communist Party, the building boom in Shanghai, and the environmental fall-out of rapid Chinese industrialization. He also explains unique aspects of Chinese culture such as the one-child policy, and provides insight into how Chinese view Americans. Wasserstrom reveals that China today shares many traits with other industrialized nations during their periods of development, in particular the United States during its rapid industrialization in the 19th century. Finally, he provides guidance on the ways we can expect China to act in the future vis-à-vis the United States, Russia, India, and its East Asian neighbors.  |