Just for empirical verification purposes, I’m looking for definitions of Laobaixing that any of you might have to share with us. A friend, Devi, recently told me that a certain LBX of her acquaintance described Laobaixing as “people without rights or power” – simple and terribly true. I also recently finished River Town by Peter Hessler, where he describes a similar LBX self-characterization.
That’s a good definition politically, but LBXes are more than just the helpless byproducts of political systems in which they have virtually no 办法 (means) to change anything. As our goal here is more philosophical and pictorial than political, we’re always on the hunt for solid LBX descriptors. To summarize, if you have a good LBX definition from yourself or anybody else, I’d appreciate responses of any length to this post or by email.
I think the term is really tricky. For example, I was chatting with two friends one night, one entrpreneur from Shanghai (A), one who works in marketing from Heilongjiang (B), both graduates of ShangWai:
[talking about current events]
A: … but that kind of trouble is normal.
B: Yeah, there’s nothing we LBX can do.
Me: LBX?! You two?
A: Sure, we’re normal people.
Me: You’re educated white-collar workers. Relative to all of China, you must be in the top 10% for sure. How is that middle-class?
B: But the top 1% is far richer than us. We still have to worry about paying our bills each month, and we have zero ability to affect the direction of this country. We’re passive recipients of the gilded class’s decisions.
It reminds me a bit of my old discussions about “what’s Midwest (USA)”. Being from Illinois/Wisconsin, I’d say “anything east of Indiana is not Midwest”, whereas Pittsburghers would call themselves Midwesterners because they felt how they differed from (highly-visible and aspired-to) New York City residents much more acutely than that from (not visible and mostly ignored) Wisconsin residents.
Perhaps it’s in people’s nature to see things in a logarithmic fashion. Who knows, maybe families who have only bought one apartment and one car would also call themselves LBX?
Monk,
You bring up an interesting point. Maybe the difference really does stem from straight power to control one’s destiny in addition to material wealth (or lack thereof). As an American who grew up middle class, I don’t feel like a child of privilege (although in global terms I should). That said, I certainly don’t feel like a peasant either since the US government doesn’t tend to block popular entertainment websites whenever they commit a folly. Maybe this difference stems all the way back to China’s history, when there were 君侯 (ruling class) and 百姓 (LBXes), a delineation carried through to modern times in different power structures and terminology.
You’re definitely right about families on the cusp of urban Middle Kingdom middle class-dom. They have more gadgets and free time to divert their attention in their larger, more polluted hamster cages, but in the end they’re still LBXes for sure.
Thanks for the input!
I agree with the point of “without power and right”. the Material wealth is never important in China, in stead, the power is harder to pursued. and the power is always so easily exchanged into the wealth, but not vice versa, whenever in the history or nowadays.
Another point is, I don’t think there is a real “middle-class” in China. Maybe it’s forming now, but it’s still hard to be called as a class.