MCLC: 'stick stick spirit'

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: 'stick stick spirit'
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Source: China Real Time, WSJ (4/28/14):
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/04/28/chinas-toiling-masses-urged-t
o-adopt-stick-stick-spirit/

China’s Toiling Masses Urged to Adopt ‘Stick Stick Spirit’
By Te-Ping Chen

Chinese workers are being urged to adopt a new role model: the “stick
stick men” of Chongqing.

Stick stick men, who are also called stick soldiers, are itinerant,
pole-bearing laborers hired to tote heavy loads up and down the city’s
steep hills, ranging from luggage to electronic appliances. It’s bitter,
grueling work, all the more so because Chongqing is known as one of the
country’s “three furnaces,” home to some of the country’s hottest and most
humid summers.

But this week on a visit to Chongqing, just days before Labor Day, Chinese
Premier Li Keqiang exhorted
<http://politics.people.com.cn/n/2014/0427/c1024-24947932-5.html> the
country’s toiling masses to adopt the “stick stick spirit.”

“You are amazing! Every penny is all made through sweat. It’s a symbol of
the hard-working Chinese people,” Mr. Li told one 60-year-old
weather-tanned worker. (Despite the amazingness of the stick men spirit,
Mr. Li also voiced an awareness of the physical realities of the job,
urging the worker to be careful about his back, according to state media
reports.)

Subsequent shots posted by Xinhua, the official media agency, featured Mr.
Li posing amid stick men clasping the heavy staffs that are the tools of
their trade.

Laudable in spirit or not, it’s questionable how much of a model the stick
men should be for China’s economy. According to research cited
<http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-06/07/content_9940874.htm> in a
2010 Xinhua report, stick men have trouble finding work, earn perhaps 100
yuan (about $16) a day and spend about seven to eight hours of their
12-hour workday in idleness, chatting or playing poker.

Perhaps the burnishing of the stick men spirit is one way to encourage the
country’s workers to adjust their expectations downward. A 2012 Tsinghua
survey found that entry-level salaries for 69% of college graduates are
lower 
<http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100008723963904435455045775667528472
08984> than those for migrant workers employed in factory jobs. With a
record 7.27 million students graduating this year, President Xi Jinping
has been urging people to be “down-to-earth” in their job hunts.