Editor’s note: This is a translated and edited blog post from caijing.com. The author is warning about the dangers of the Chinese people becoming too caught up in a feverish rush to always be number one in the fast developing economy. He argues that China should learn the lesson from Japan, where people are so busy they have almost lost their interest in sex.

The fading feeling of happiness

“Can’t afford to go see the doctor, can’t afford to buy a house, can’t afford to go to school, can’t even afford to die since the undertaker is too expensive.” This has become an all too common refrain for the common Chinese in describing their daily struggle.

Are the university students happy? Their parents have spent much of their savings on their education but still they can’t find a suitable job after graduation. Are the elementary school pupils happy? This period which ought to be the happiest and most carefree time of their lives, is being taken away from them by the well meaning demands of parents to participate in piano classes or other extracurricular activities. Are the people who buy an apartment happy? If they started saving money ten years ago, then that money can’t even buy them a decent toilet nowadays! What about the sick people then? The healthcare system is reformed and then reformed again, but the outcome is always the same: a relentless rise in the prices of medicine. Then what about the government officials, normally seen by people as always well off? Well off maybe, but definitely not happy, as the recent spate of suicides by government officials shows us. Apparently no one is happy!

What has gotten into the Chinese? Why have we let ourselves become so anxious about our lives? To understand the depth of this phenomenon we can take a look at the situation in the universities of our country, where students already start to prepare the examinations for a master degree in the first year, while first year master students are busy boosting their CV’s with extracurricular business courses. As if this was not enough, our PhD students, supposedly the nations finest, are busying themselves by copying foreign discourses in their first year. If you as their teacher try to ask them to spend some time reading the Classics, then you can be sure that they will see this as a terrible waste of time.

It seems that the whole nation is in the grips of this “career fever”, and has all but forgotten the old virtues of deep knowledge and wisdom acquired over time. Was it really the intention of the country’s economic reform and the subsequent strong growth to encourage the Chinese people to live such an exclusionary, anxious life?

We can see that the government has noticed this unfortunate situation, and has thus chosen “happiness and respect” as a major theme of the Premier’s work report of 2010.

The Japanese Experience

We Chinese can learn a lot from the Japanese development, as it rose from the ashes of World War II to become the second biggest economy of the world and later on encountered the so-called “lost decade of sluggish growth”. Following the fast expanding Japanese post war economy, the life expectancy, average housing size, car ownership and number of young people obtaining higher education all rose to unprecedented heights. The only thing that did not grow however was the feeling of happiness among the people. Products like a washing machine or a camera, to name a few, were once seen as luxury items but are now perceived as necessities. The generations growing up today cannot appreciate the benefits of, for example, having a washing machine like their parent generation could, since for them it is already a common necessity.

During the course of Japan’s economic growth, the only thing the Japanese feel growing is the work load and pressure of daily life. The heavy work pressure even influences the sex life of the hard working Japanese, who after a hard days work more often than not prefer sleeping over having sex. According to a survey conducted by the British newspaper The Guardian, 39.8% of Japanese between the ages of 16 and 49 did not have sex in more than one month. This lack of interest in the pleasures of the bedroom, obviously also has an adverse influence on the birth rates, which are not surprisingly plummeting.

In 2010, China became the biggest industrial country in the world, the biggest trading nation, as well as the second largest economy on the planet, thereby overtaking Japan.
All this is no doubt a sign of the rebirth of our nation, but at the same time we need to ask ourselves which values are needed in this brave new world, and if our youth is prepared for this. Let us hope that they will not go down the same road as the Japanese!
 

Source: caijing.com
 

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Keywords: chinese society pressure work stress China unhappy chinese sacrificing happiness for development China