Under Mao Tse-tung, the country used a basic but effective network of so-called “barefoot doctors”. But since the introduction of sweeping economic reforms in the past two decades, everything has changed. The reforms have brought new wealth but the collapse of many local clinics and free services mean that poorer families simply can’t afford health care and serious illness can bankrupt them.
Heard this short radio documentary on BBC World yesterday when I was driving. I ended up stopping the car and sat in the parking lot of a store so I could finish listening. The funny thing about growing up along with your home country is you don’t notice your country’s peculiarities until much later. For me, the idea of walking in off the street and getting hospital care seemed entirely natural, until I went back to China a few years ago and found it really strange to go to the doctor as easily as I could buy candy. But then again, how else would China provide adequate health-care to 1.3 billion people?
This is actually part two of two in a series about health-care systems around the world. Part one is about health-care in the US and the UK.
China’s idea of what makes for a better Olympics for foreign consumption—tightened security and cleaning up marginal elements—is exactly what makes Western reporters crazy…you want to clean things up, but the West wants to see the dirt, not the rug it was swept under. It’s the dishonesty, as much as the substance of what’s wrong in China, that seems to get under the skin of Western reporters.
Beijing itself is an expression of the problem…It suffers from the current obsession with fazhan (”development”), which in urban-planning terms replicates the “giant soulless block” development style of Robert Moses and the American 1950s. Authenticity, which Western culture valorizes, isn’t something that Chinese people or planners go for right now. There’s a tendency to either modernize or tear down old structures, instead of trying to preserve their decay in the way Westerners like. It’s all just a little too nouveau riche to get much respect.
As the author of the article later puts it, there’s “a sense that no matter what China does, it won’t really be accepted as an equal on the world stage, that it will always be left cleaning the toilet at the OECD country club.” Maybe that’s why there is such a wide audience for the sentiments expressed in this video:
Came across some innovative new thoughts about street design when I was on The Bostonist this morning. The article talks about redesigning Boston’s streets to be more amenable to pedestrians, by applying some rather subtle psychological tricks, which is encapsulated in the “Shared Space” philosophy of street design:
The curb is a big enemy in the Shared Space philosophy, because the curb is a separator, dictating what belongs to the pedestrian and what belongs to the vehicle. There are other enemies as well: signs, lines on the road, even traffic lights. Pioneered by Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who died earlier this year at age 62, Shared Space gets the street naked, removes all physical and psychological barriers, and forces cars and pedestrians to share. The concept makes the street safe by making it dangerous to proceed without paying attention. We have some elements of Shared Space here; in Downtown Crossing, Winter and Summer streets have no curb and, in the mornings, commercial vehicles mix with pedestrians.
On an unrelated note, this type of unconventional, wholistic thinking reminds me of a passage in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I’ve just now managed to jump on the bandwagon and read. The book has chapter after chapter of enlightening–and sometimes shocking–stories about food, farming, industry, etc, but one of the most remarkable sections was about a agricultural (and political) radical named Joel Salatin and his “beyond organic” approach to farming. After the jump: Why I almost want to be a farmer now, and another TED talk
I don’t know why it took so long for me to get hooked, but it’s official: the Gothamist has sunk its claws into me. Or actually, Shanghaiist and Bostonist are the blogs that have made it onto my Google Reader, the first for its thorough (if at first a bit trigger-happy) coverage of the Beijing Olympic bar ban and the latter because, well, it’s about Boston.
But the addictive potential of the “Ist” family of city blogs don’t stop there. The weekly roundup of interesting stories from all the cities is the real highlight of the Bostonist front page. Is your hunger for postmodern hyper-connectivity sated yet? Didn’t think so.
Two pieces from my favorite periodicals that contain the words “New York”:
1. The New York Times Magazine on architecture in the (post-)postmodern city. Features Dubai and some other new cities, with a lengthy digression on Shenzhen, China’s shining beacon of capitalism (and cultural wasteland, here euphemistically termed “product of unregulated development”). Take home messages: architects have staunch political principles, unless you pay them a lot; dictatorships make some pretty sweet buildings.
2. The New Yorker on music in China. Very thorough overview of the “classical music phenomenon” (i.e. non-phenomenon) in China, if a little bit quick to jump on the well-read-new-yorker-rambling-about-China’s-problems bandwagon. More interesting–and less presumptuous–are the tidbits about the Chinese avant-garde and an expat-led burgeoning of underground indie rock in Beijing. Yes, indie rock in Beijing.
Silly China, it still thinks building up its culture is like playing a game of Civilization IV. Doesn’t it know that all it has to do is give artists freedom and democracy, and their work will suddenly become legitimate, and win the approval of music critics in the West?
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