All work and no play in new China

By Louisa Lim
BBC, Beijing

Coming back to Beijing after almost a decade away has been a disorientating experience.

The pace of construction has been so frenzied that walking around the city feels like a virtual reality experience - only the street names have stayed the same while everything else has changed.

Take the street where I used to live. Gone are the tiny restaurants whose tables would spill over onto the road and the market where I used to buy my vegetables.

China's cities have been transformed in the last 10 years

Even the old man who only seemed to sell dog skin trousers is no longer there. Instead there's a new extra-wide road, crawling with honking cars and frustrated cyclists.

I lived here for a year in the mid 1990s, working as what they called a "foreign expert" in a publishing company.

The company was state-owned, publishing Chinese books translated into English.

But we could never work out who these books were meant to be for.

My job consisted of editing the translated books. Every book seemed like a Herculean venture, each one more obscure and harder to translate than the last.

We had half an hour off every morning and afternoon to play table tennis, and two hours for lunch, during which most people would go shopping

I remember a book on the art of masks, one on tomb artefacts and a whole series on Chinese medicine and what it meant if your tongue went white and furry.

A friend who worked with me edited the entire works of a little-known economist, a project which took him months and was immediately shelved when the unfortunate economist fell out of political favour.

The drudgery of work was alleviated by the fact that we didn't do an awful lot of it.

We had half an hour off every morning and afternoon to play table tennis, and two hours for lunch, during which most people would go shopping. Beside that, we had endless meetings, work unit outings to scenic spots and time off when representatives of other work units would visit to try to sell us things.

At that time, the People's Liberation Army was diversifying into business ventures and once, memorably, we were all let off work for the entire afternoon to be given makeovers by a burly soldier touting PLA cosmetics.

Unsurprisingly our work unit seemed to be almost entirely unprofitable, and I hardly ever met anyone who had even seen, let alone bought, any of the books that I had worked on.

So, nearly 10 years on, I was keen to find out what had happened to my old colleagues in the new China.

Walking up the stairs, I still felt the old dread, the fear of that thick manuscript yet to be edited and the grammatical horrors it might be hiding.

The building itself was still the same - one of those imposing Communist facades hiding a shambolic maze of offices with ping pong tables on every landing.

Economic success has come at a price

It wasn't long before I found an old friend and colleague, Mrs Zhang. We settled down for tea in her office, surrounded on all sides by mountains of manuscripts in beige envelopes, and she told me how life had changed.

"We're no longer publishing English language books," she said, "there's just no market for them. We only publish in Chinese now. And we don't even edit the books ourselves, we sub-contract them out to other editors."

"How's the pay?," I asked, knowing this was traditionally the biggest gripe. When I worked at the publishing house some people were earning as little as $30 a month.

"Oh, much better than before," she answered, "but we get paid according to book sales now, so it's a bit unpredictable."

"And what about the books," I asked, "surely they're more interesting?" We both laughed, remembering the sheer pointlessness of spending months working on books that no one would ever want to read.

"Oh those books wouldn't get published nowadays," she said, "they just don't sell at all."

Instead of being assigned projects from on high, Mrs Zhang herself now gets to decide which books to publish. The upside is more freedom, more responsibility and a more interesting job.

Publishing may be market-driven, but Party books will always be printed

But there's also a downside. When I worked there, the entire company would put out about 15 books a year. Now that's how many each editor has to produce.

It's a different world.

"And not nearly so much fun," Mrs Zhang said, with regret in her voice.

"We all work so hard now. We never have any time to see each other and we are all so stressed."

Talking to her, I could see how the harsh realities of a market-driven economy had finally reached my old work unit. It had managed to reshape itself and focus on making money.

But, I wondered, if life seemed harder for those that have stayed on, how much more difficult is it for the millions of unemployed who were never given that option?