With momentum slowing across the board from real estate to consumer and tech sectors, some in heartland China feel their chances of moving up the social ladder have diminished by PhilipWen11 stellaq0420 ywchen1 Follow the series:
ZHENGZHOU, China - For the last decade, the city of Zhengzhou has been getting a taste of the Chinese dream.
Personal incomes in Zhengzhou over the past decade have doubled on average, hitting 33,105 yuan last year. That has allowed many residents a taste of middle class life; consumer appliances, luxury goods and apartments of their own. A traveling salesman of Chinese calligraphy brushes, his father eked out a living crisscrossing Henan to provide for the family, while imbuing in Gong the value of hard work.
“We didn’t anticipate the market would fall off a cliff,” the soft-spoken Gong, now 26, told Reuters in a fast-food outlet in downtown Zhengzhou. He said he had drastically cut back spending on clothes and stopped eating out. He hasn’t given up on his lifelong aspiration of running his own business, but says he needs to be realistic and is trying to come to terms with having to get a regular office job for now.With a telecommunications degree from a top Beijing university, a foothold in the Zhengzhou property market and marriage in the offing, all by the age of 26, Wu Shuang would normally be seen as a winner by many Chinese.
As property prices soar, in particular, many are forced to rely on their parents financially well into adulthood, he said, a practice known as kenlao, or “gnawing on elders”. For generations, the Suns plied their fishing boats up and down the Huai and Yellow Rivers, living off their daily catch. Like their grandfather and father before them, brothers Sun Genxi, 44, and Sun Lianxi, 32, were born on a fishing boat.From their floating vantage point on the Yellow River, about an hour’s drive north of central Zhengzhou, they have gawped at the provincial capital’s dramatic development.
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