The Chinese dream, denied | World News,The Indian Express
The world’s harshest COVID-19 restrictions exemplify how Xi Jinping’s authoritarian excesses have rewritten Beijing’s longstanding social contract with its people.
The narrow alleyways of Haizhu district have long beckoned to China’s strivers, people such as Xie Pan, a textile worker from a mountainous tea-growing area in central China.
Home to one of the country’s biggest fabric markets, Haizhu houses worker dormitories and textile factories in brightly colored buildings stacked so close that neighbors can shake hands out their windows. Once a smattering of rural villages, the area became a manufacturing hub as China opened its economy decades ago. The government had promised to step back and let people unleash their ambitions, and millions flocked to Haizhu to do just that.
Xie made the hopeful journey last year, joining others from Hubei province who had also settled in this dense pocket of the southern metropolis of Guangzhou. They toiled in cacophonous factories, peddled cloth or sold sesame noodles, a hometown favorite. But when I met him a few months ago, his hope had dimmed. Because of a slowing economy, he had been homeless for two weeks before stringing together money to rent a 100-square-foot room for $120 a month.
“There isn’t enough work for everyone,” Xie, 31, a soft-spoken man with hunched shoulders from years bent over sewing machines, said then. “You can’t go to bed every night having to look for work in the morning. It’s too tiring.”
It would get much worse after a strict COVID-19 lockdown silenced the factories and shuttered the noodle shops. In October, Xie was quarantined for nearly a month.
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