Chinese lives: Mr. Cai, taxi driver.
I love talking to Chinese, who are very open and honest about their experiences. Nineteen out of twenty of them, for better and for worse, are very Confucist-Daoist-Buddhist, serious about life, enjoying it and optimistic for the future. Here is a vignette of Mr. Cai, a taxi driver.
Evelyne and I got a taxi from Danxia to Meizhou in Guangdong province, over three hours’ drive. The driver’s name is Cai (name changed). He has three children aged 27, 14, and 11. He and his wife had a roaring business in Shenzhen, importing products from Germany and Italy. But due to the COVID clampdown, they went bankrupt. They lost everything but the car we are driving in, a really nice XPeng P7, with a dashboard control panel the size of a small TV screen.
Cai, sadly lost his marriage too, joining millions around the world who saw their businesses and domestic lives wrecked by the West’s COVID Plannedemic. Unlike many companies in the West that were given government payouts during the lockdowns, Chinese entrepreneurs got nothing. Untold numbers of small businesses went belly-up and a very popular fallback to feed the family is driving a taxi.
With the money dried up, his wife proceeded to abandon him and the kids, which among Chinese womenfolk is really unusual. His parents have moved in with him, and he is now driving a taxi to make ends meet, using the EV car from the old business. The good news is that her his 27-year-old daughter was in the top tier of the Gaokao test, when she got out of high school. She got a full ride scholarship at Shenzhen University, and then went to law school in Chongqing, and is now practicing law in Shenzhen. So that’s wonderful news.
His parents are in their eighties, and he said he’s under a lot of pressure, as he’s having to provide for his two kids who are still living at home and his parents living with them fulltime. Cai is worried about his 14-year-old boy, who is not very studious and gets in trouble. His ex-wife has limited contact with the children, by video phone calls.
The grandparents take care of the kids around the clock, while he drives his taxi 14-16 hours a day, 6-7 days a week to put food on the table. While I can see he is carrying a heavy load, he remains upbeat about the future. Cai is another amazing story about the resilience and optimism of the Chinese people.
Epilogue: Cai, Evelyne and I had lunch together at a highway gas/EV station, a huge all-you-eat-buffet for only ¥34, about US$5.00. We of course invited him and then shared cookies and bottled tea in the car the rest of the way. Upon arriving in Meizhou, instead of dropping us off out front on the curb, he insisted on taking us down into the underground parking, park his car and help us with our baggage all the way to the apartment door on the 7th floor! Sino-service at its best…
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These articles make China look and sound exactly like the west. I mean where’s the supposed bottom up, ‘for the people’ in this?
Hi, Bob,
Point well taken. While in the West, billions of dollars and euros were just handed to businesses, big and small, during the pLandemic, and whether or not they will have to pay it back, I have no idea. But with the photocopy machines running 24/7 in the West, they can keep doing that until the Xeroxes run out of ink.
In China, they mint their own money and actually care about their debt, and and are keeping it within reasonable limits. So, Baba Beijing could not sit there and print money for literally 100s of millions Chinese businesses, large and small, to bail them out during COVID. Plus, China is very Confucian-Daoist-Buddhist, thus there is always the expectation that the family will help, the neighborhood will help, the people will group together and survive, which happened all over the country. That does not mean that a lot of people did not suffer during COVID, during the lockdown. In China, a lot of people did go out of business, especially small business people, like Mr. Cai. I have talked to many of them. Yet, all of them are surviving and rebuilding.
My wife and I went bankrupt in 2008 thanks to the West’s Great Con Rape of the Middle Class. We went back to China with our younger daughter with six suitcases and $400, so I can truly empathize with what they are going through. We lived by a great Chinese axiom,
爱拼才会赢 （aipin caihui ying), which means,
Only through giving it everything you have, can you achieve victory.
Or more popularly,
No pain, no gain.
Also, the fact of the matter is that Baba Beijing knew they were being attacked by the West with a bioweapon, which I have reported on extensively. And while they maybe overdid the lockdowns too much and for a little bit too long, we can’t blame them for being worried about what the West could spring on them, as COVID petered out, knowing that the vast majority of Chinese wanted the lockdowns until the very end, because they were rightfully scared, being the most bioweapon-attacked country in history.
Thank you. Jeff