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发帖数: 3449 | 1 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peterfoster/100077909/meet-th
Just a quickie today, but if you were wondering why a Jasmine-style
revolution hadn’t broken out in China, I wanted to introduce you to Mr Gao,
a farmer-cum-migrant worker who lives in a village in Shanxi province in
northern China.
I bumped into Mr Gao while I was out reporting recently on the drought
across the North China Plain and he struck me as a kind of perfect advert
for the achievements of China’s ruling party and the reason why the CCP is
well-insulated from the threat of revolution.
Mr Gao, 55, is a medium-skilled migrant worker. He was back home for the
Spring Festival, but most of the time he works in a nearby city in a
logistics company. He said he didn’t have any other side-business, but that
he was well-paid as a forklift truck driver.
That, he said, was how he paid for the new car that was sitting outside his
fairly typical village home. There were several other cars in the village,
he added, most of which had appeared in the last “two or three years”.
The model in question is a BenBen Mini – which roughly translates as a “
Mini Sprint” – and is made by the Chang’an Automobile Co. Ltd in
Chongqing with a 1L engine and a price-tag of RMB 32,900 , or about GBP 3,
100.
I asked Mr Gao what he used the car for (ie any commercial purpose) but he
just said it was for convenience, and for driving his wife to the city.
Mr Gao undoubtedly took advantage of a number of government subsidies that
were available to “farmers” as part of the stimulus measures after the
financial crisis, but people like him explain how 13.8m cars were sold in
China last year, of which 60pc were small cars. |
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