China 2000 essays

China 2000 essays What is China? Is it maybe the image of the ancient times with the glorious old dynasties, the powerful emperors, the wondrous temples, the fascinating winding gardens...? Or is it maybe a strict communist world with uniformed people wearing Mao suits and living in dreary gray concrete apartment blocks...? Or perhaps it is the skyscrapers of Hong Kong and Shanghai, the horrendous traffic, the buzzing commotion, ultra modern electronics and plate glass buildings...? In reality, China is all this in one. It is a land that intertwines a miraculous ancestral heritage with a capitalist reality blooming in the heart of a still surviving communist system. In todays China, the gigantic population (1,300,000,000 people) is experiencing an extremity gap between the very rich and the very poor. The still existing Chinese communist system provides "cradle to grave" caretaking for its citizens. All major services like housing, education and medical treatment are currently supplied by the government; however, they are accessible only according to area registration in the community in which people are born. Lack of such registration or change of area of residence leaves people on their own. The majority of people in the cities still reside in old Russian type "one-window" flats composed of a single room with a single window, home for an entire family, which usually have communal kitchens and toilets and no bathrooms (showers are taken at public bathhouses). The newer apartments, though still housing four to five people in a single room, usually have separate facilities. However, both old and new government subsidized housing is scheduled to end by the year 2002 which will inevitably threaten the very old and those "born and bred within the communist system". This termination is bound to annihilate the life of security of the majority of Chinese population. Life in rural China, on the other hand, is less dependent on government housing sc...