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In Shanghai, the Communist Party isn't turning a blind eye to the trend, it's cashing in. Who else can people trust to find them a good nanny?
By KRIS HUNDLEY
Published September 19, 2005
[Times photos: Bob Croslin]
Weekly salsa parties attract hundreds of young Chinese professionals to the Silver Moon Bar in Shanghai. Classes cost about $10 each.
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A shopper outside a photo studio in Beijing passes portraits of three late Chinese leaders: Premier Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung and President Liu Shaoqi.
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SHANGHAI, China - The Communist Party Women's Federation here once doled out jobs and kept tabs on troublemakers. Now it helps Shanghai residents find servants.
Though dealing in cooks and nannies might seem at odds with communism's vision of a classless society, it is a paradox the Chinese are willing to ignore as they embrace the perks of newfound wealth.
China's economic boom means the proletariat finally has disposable income. Far from creating angst for Communist leaders, who are reaping unprecedented riches in taxes and fees, it is unleashing an officially-sanctioned spending spree. And no one is about to find fault with the party's maid-finding service when it raked in $2.4-million in profits last year.
"China has a long history of household service, from ancient times until 1949," said Zhou Jue Min, the federation's ambitious general manager. "At that time it was only the rich who could afford servants. Now normal families can afford them."
The Chinese now not only make most of the world's commodities. They are becoming world-class consumers as well. A trashpicker in rural Hubei County can afford a cell phone. A south China factory worker making less than $1 an hour owns a color TV. And families of even modest means can hire someone to clean the toilets and watch the kids.
Zhou, a solidly built 47-year-old with a red Communist pin in her lapel, sounds every bit the capitalist when she says her employment service spreads the wealth.
"It helps professional women take care of their families, while giving work to laid-off women workers who need jobs," said Zhou, whose agency is housed in a renovated hotel in central Shanghai. "It is a showpiece of the fast economic development of China."
Nowhere is the urge to spend, and the potential of this burgeoning buying power, more apparent than in Shanghai, China's wealthiest city.
The rise of the spending class here means a market for trendy dance lessons, infant art classes and Ming Dynasty furniture. Zhou, who once worked for Shanghai's subway system, even dares compare herself to an icon of American enterprise.
"I'm just like Martha Stewart," she said, referring not to Martha's jail time, but her business acumen. "We've been able to turn a government subsidized agency into a real enterprise. I never imagined I could end up in this kind of job."
Shanghai salsaCaft Xu, slightly built and shy, is an unlikely candidate for salsa dancing. But there he is, deftly embracing and twirling his partner as Latin music envelopes the room and colored lights spin across the crowd at the Silver Moon Bar.
Green beer bottles - more Heineken than Tsingtao - litter table tops. Videos of professional Latin American salsa dancers play on overhead monitors, but nobody is watching. The real action is on the dance floor, jammed with pairs of well-dressed Chinese and a handful of expats spinning to the music.
The 30-year-old Xu, who does financial work for a German company, came to Shanghai after college. With few social connections but some extra cash, he signed up for dance lessons several months ago, paying $10 a class. Now he's a regular at weekly salsa parties that attract hundreds of young Chinese professionals.
"This kind of dancing is very interesting because girl and boy play together," said Xu, flushed and sweaty after his turn on the floor. "In Chinese dance, boy and girls never dance together."
Xu's teacher, Shirley Liam, said it took a few years for salsa to take off in Shanghai. She and her partner, Bob Liu, had to recruit friends for their first salsa classes two years ago.
"People were interested, but they were afraid because it looks difficult," said Liam, 38, who said movies like Dance With Me and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights helped popularize salsa . "It was something new."
Salsa was also radically different from ballroom dancing, the only kind of Western dance allowed under Mao's regime.
"In ballroom dance, you take the body very serious and have a fixed partner," said Liam, breathless between dances. "In salsa, you can change partners and relax your body. And the music is like a spirit that makes you high."
The music and moves proved irresistible to people like Xu, who watched friends dance for months before signing up for lessons. Liam and Liu now have three studios, a Chinese-English Web site (www.salsashanghai.com) and a performing group. They have given instruction to nearly 800 students, many like Xu who have achieved professional success and now have the means to enjoy themselves.
"My students have a good education and work for good businesses, but they want to change," said Liam, who could be describing Yuppies anywhere. "They cannot only be chained to a computer."
Teaching toddlersIn Shanghai's pricey Gubei and Pudong neighborhoods, Nick Shiah's Gymboree centers offer art, music and gym classes in English for the under-3-year-old crowd. Tuition is $27 per 45-minute session if you sign up for 12 classes; class prices drop to $16 if you sign up for 96 sessions. Comparable prices for a Gymboree class in the Tampa Bay area range from $15 to $10 a class.
Though Gymboree's fees are more than many Chinese earn in a week, it doesn't appear to be a major obstacle in Shanghai. Shiah's spacious center in the Gubei district draws about 1,200 kids a week, the youngest is 24 days old. The Pudong center, in operation for a year, has more than 900 enrolled.
Shiah keeps up with customer traffic - which is three times that of the average U.S. Gymboree center - by having four employees who do nothing but clean floors. One worker is responsible for storing shoes and handing out socks for adults to wear in the shiny wood-floored classrooms.
Parents must accompany their kids to class or send a nanny. Clients include entrepreneurs and an opera singer. Shiah estimates his customers' average income is about $1,200 a month - roughly the same as the average annual income nationwide.
A 44-year-old from Taiwan, Shiah bought the China franchise from San Francisco-based Gymboree three years ago after a management career with Cathay Pacific and Coca-Cola. He has since licensed the concept to entrepreneurs in 13 other Chinese cities, requiring a minimum investment of about $250,000. Shiah expects to have 200 centers in China by 2010.
"In China, they still believe education will bring you a good life and fame," Shiah said. "Especially first-generation wealth. They will send their kids to classes, no matter the cost."
Ming-era opium bedsIn a warehouse district on the western edge of Shanghai, Wang Guo Ting's antique furniture business is finally being discovered by Chinese with increasingly bigger paychecks and homes.
For the past 20 years, Wang, 48, has been salvaging everything from Ming-era opium beds to entire homes from throughout China, often arriving one step ahead of the demolition crew. During the Cultural Revolution, such artifacts were often destroyed as remnants of China's imperial past, and these antiquities didn't fare much better after China embraced industrialization. Pavilions and traditional courtyard homes were bulldozed to make room for factories and high-rise apartments. Old furniture was used for fuel.
Wang, a gregarious man with a passion for his work, was taught furnituremaking by the Communists and put to work in a government factory, earning $4 a month. After five years, he decided to go on his own, collecting irreplaceable artifacts from China's past and hoping to find buyers.
"You have to go deep in the mountains to find some of these things," Wang said, showing off intricately carved wooden screens and fragile bamboo sedan chairs. "You even burst into tears when you see some of those old houses out of excitement. It's unimaginable how they could be man-made."
If it hadn't been for wealthy executives from international corporations, Wang said, his business would not have survived.
"My first client was the general manager from Bell Telephone in Shanghai," he said, referring to the U.S. phone company, one of China's first joint ventures. "He introduced me to a lot of other foreigners. It's only recently that Chinese are realizing these things cannot be remade."
Huang Wei, a 42-year-old, U.S.-educated executive recruiter in Shanghai, has bought several pieces from Wang to furnish a new condo, the second she owns. Among her purchases: a 250-year-old bed that fits together like a jigsaw puzzle and sold for $3,000.
Huang recently bid, unsuccessfully, against film star Jackie Chan for an entire courtyard home. Its hundreds of pieces, which fit together without nails or glue, now sit in pieces in Wang's workshop. When restoration is complete, the house will be reassembled on Chan's property in Hong Kong. Sale price: $100,000, a bargain-basement price by most Western standards.
Wang relies on such new customers, rather than Chinese officials, to spread the word about the priceless value of the nation's antiquities.
"It will be a while before China's leadership realizes that this old pre-Revolution stuff can make money," he said. "By then it will be too late. Too much will have been destroyed."
Party prosperityOver the past three years, the Shanghai Women's Federation has provided household help for more than 50,000 families, earning 11 percent in management fees in the process.
Zhou, the federation's general manager, started the party-sponsored employment service that is the first of its kind in China. The agency does both health and criminal checks on its workers, who are recruited from rural provinces. Without naming names, Zhou boasts that her service has found servants for the richest man in Shanghai.
"There is some degree of protection by hiring through the government," she said. "Especially when you hear about maids who abduct kids."
To broaden her agency's business, which is growing by 10 percent a year, Zhou wants to open China's first household-help supermarket in Shanghai's Putuo district in the fall. Couples in need of a gardener, a cook or a maid will be able to stop by and see prospective servants prune a rose, cook a meal or make a bed before taking them home.
"It will be a one-stop shopping center for household services," Zhou said proudly of her plan, which has elicited both praise and controversy.
Though some traditionalists might question if the Communist Party should sponsor a market where the primary product is a serving class, Zhou brushes off such concerns as outdated.
"The ultimate purpose," she said, "is to let people have a better life."
--Kris Hundley can be reached at hundley@sptimes.com or 727 892-2996.
[Last modified September 19, 2005, 09:45:55]
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