In professor Dube's mini lacture, I found an interesting fact in the Heathy Life Expectancy map. In the map ( see attached screen shot), it shows both male and female living in the three majoy autonomous cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin are the top longivity cities. Besides the bad weather in Beijing, severe air pollution, or serious driniking water shortage in Tianjin, these three major cities with citizens equipped with higher education are living longer than the other cities.

Base on the data found in China, I can see that a healthy lifestyle could overcome the naturally living conditions?

In Prof. Dubes mini lesson 4 to ward to the end, He mentioned about several challenges that China facing now ( attached screen shot) which I cannot agree more:

Lack of global brands: compared to South Korea, China is 44 times bigger than South Korea, however, this little country as Korea has so many global brands such as SamSung, Hyundae, LG and so on. However, China barely have any global brands. I wonder what is the reason that China cannot create it's own global brands?

Little social trust: So true that in China, Chinese citizens do not trust their government especially the rich ones. They do not trust any of the Insurance companies nor investment products. The rich Chinese are immigrating to develped countries searching for secure retirements and preserve their assets. I wonder why they have so little social trust and are there any solution to it?

What interested me was the change in social norms with the establishment of the Communist party. Mao uses propaganda heavily in promoting the culture he envisions, though the ultimate product of the Great Leap Forward seems to me to be a clash between idealism and reality. I thought the new idealism of Communist China was best demonstrated in the first slide showing early propaganda posters, in particular I focused on the one on the left, of the man fixing/installing the light. Looking at it from an Art Historical point-of-view, the warm colors and bright light create a cheerful atmosphere, the children are on the fringes of the compositon but are noticeably interested in the tools and materials for the job, and all of the lines, especially lines of sight from the figures within the poster, are focused not on the citizen but on the hands and work being done. The ladder points upward and the composition is asymmetrically balanced but the woman's hand with the lightbulb and the man's hands with the fixture form the focal point of the piece. Propaganda is an extremely powerful tool and has a way of subtley changing the mind by suggesting the way things should be. What Mao was aiming for was to change the social norm to one of cooperation first in order to increase and maximize productivity. Interestingly, it was not until later, after Mao, when Deng Xiaoping relaxes the rules of the commune system and allows for the improvisation of the populace, in particular the rural population, that the economy begins to rise. Robert Sternberg (1985) posed that some of the ingredients of creativity include expertise and time for rumination and I believe that when given the freedom to "stretch out" with the relaxation of the social rules, the people were able to begin the enterprising process of improving quality of life through their own industriousness. I'm interested to learn about the extent to which that reinforced the Communist social norms.

China has income and opportunity inequality like many other countries.  The eastern part of China is well developed and has much more capital and resources than the western part of China.  The east coast cities like Shanghai are industrialized and are more open to the western world, and people have more money; on the contrary, vast lands of western region are not even developed with few populations.  People in the west are poorer.  These income and capital disparities lead to inequality of education and other opportunities.  

Although elementary to high school education is free by the norm, elite schools are hard to get in and cost much more.  People with low income aren't able to send their kids to the elite schools which employ higher qualified teachers.  And students who graduate from those elite school have better chance to enter good universities which are highly concentrated in the eastern regions of China.  Closing the gap of income inequality between the east and west of China is a tough challenge for China as well.

Xi wants to revive and make China strong again.  Part of China's ambition is to increase its soft powers and influence the world.  One of the good examples is Confucious Institute which supports Chinese language training in America and other countries.  It has partnered with many K-12 schools and universities across the U.S. to provide Chinese langauge training.  Other endeavors include exporting more Chinese films to other countries and hosting Olympic Games.  Will China's rising economic powers be paralled with its soft powers?

 One of the questions that I have is about what professor Hongbin said that one generation Is rich and the next is poor. Is it because the sons and daughter of those who have money do not worry about working anymore and trust that the system will have a job waiting for them when they are ready and the inverse of the rich will happen to the poor generation.  Also, he talks about one way of moving up in society is thru education and of course those who have the means of paying have the advantage.  So those who have, they will continue having and those who do not have, they will stay the same. It is more likely. That is the part that I didn’t catch because here, if I am not mistaken, USC have rich, rich students as well as poor, poor students and in the middle, which is a door for the poor to get into a prestigious university and live better or claim the social ladder.  In addition, he also talked about education which is like US system and his findings are almost the same among males and females in language (Chinese and English) and art.  females score higher than males.  But in math and science males scored higher in that sense it is almost as ours. It might change.

According to professor Park, he said that labor regulations were developed to protect employees from employers. Employees would not be fired after ten consecutive years of working in one place. With respect to education, he adds that the government has spent a lot of money educating migrants to capacitate them for the industrial jobs. That brought some implications from the locals because the migrants are taking their jobs. Above all, it seams that the system is working, and they are living better and expending money and getting into debt and trusting more at the system.

Those final propaganda videos, especially the rap version with the mantra "everybody let's be friends", makes me wonder if China is looking to bring in new labor. With their own work force shrinking and the population aging, would China possibly want immigrants to move there and bolster the labor population? Is their propaganda designed to entice other countries to be like China or just to be receptive to relations with China? As their economy grows and their wealth gap increases China seems more capitalist and so may seem easier to cooperate with in the global market.