From Here in Beijing, China Doesn’t Look So Strong

Opinion|China Looks Strong. Life Here Tells a Different Story.

Every Monday morning, the stirring strains of China’s national anthem stream into my Beijing apartment from the elementary school across the street. Young students in uniform stand in neat rows on a freshly turfed playground as the Chinese flag inches up a pole. Nearby streets are lined with flower pots, ginkgo trees and propaganda signs exhorting citizens to love their nation.

For much of my life that directive had felt superfluous. China’s economy boomed and we were proud of our country.

That pride is harder for many of us to summon today. Behind the orderliness of everyday life, a quiet desperation simmers. On social media and in private conversations, there is a common refrain: worry over joblessness, wage cuts and making ends meet.

Chinese people today live with a strange paradox.

Internationally, China looks strong. It is America’s only rival in terms of the power to shape the world. The recent meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China, in which the leaders announced a trade-war truce, has fed this narrative — one that Beijing is only too happy to promote — a resilient nation united in the face of external challenges.

That muscular facade is punctured here in China, where despair about dimming economic and personal prospects is pervasive. This contrast between a confident state and its weary population is captured in a phrase Chinese people are using to describe their country: “wai qiang, zhong gan,” roughly translated as “outwardly strong, inwardly brittle.”

Many now feel the very state policies that have made China appear strong overseas are hurting them. They see a government more concerned with building global influence and dominating export markets than in addressing the challenges of their households. A state crackdown launched several years ago on the private sector is widely blamed for undermining middle-class livelihoods, even as financial resources are channeled into industries that the government deems more strategically important, such as electric vehicles, solar power and shipbuilding. Meanwhile, the global chokehold China has secured on the supply and processing of rare earth elements has caused air and soil pollution at home.