An Innovator's Suggestion for Elderly Care in China

I helped to draft another guest post featured in the Asian Healthcare Blog, accessible here.  It discusses the issues surrounding elderly day care centers in China.  These are a form of care for elderly citizens which are typically located in densely populated residential areas and are intended to provide a center for seniors to have their health monitored while they engage other seniors in a variety of social, as well as physically and mentally challenging activities. However, the truth presents a much more mixed picture.  At worst, some simply become majiang halls, while the better managed only cater to the segment of the population that needs its services the least. 

The post was also inspired in part by the recent book, The Innovator's Prescription, which discusses the need to identify the latent demand in the healthcare market.  I have reproduced the concluding paragraph below:

The difficulties encountered by elderly care centers reflect a discomforting reality in China's elderly care industry. From policy formation, service design, implementation to quality control, there are still too many areas of weakness that need to be addressed. Potentially, the publication The Innovator's Prescription could give us some inspiration to find a solution here. The book draws a parallel between the healthcare industry and personal computers. In the dawn of the technological revolution, the true visionaries did not simply target the existing market for large computers manufactured for research purposes, but recognized consumers' latent demand for personal computers (see the author's conceptual model). Similarly in elderly care centers, the real opportunity might lie in the group that is currently not using elderly day care services (non-consumers) who are a much larger group than current users (consumers), and in addition are a group with much simpler demands to satisfy. To begin with, a simple solution would be to create day care services tailored to the most urgent nursing care needs of seniors with willingness-to-pay rather than the wishful thinking of making self-sustainable activity centers.

Passive Voice and its Political Connotations

Again I reference the writing of the Language Log, which published some time back a piece entitled "Suicided: the Adversative Passive Form as a Form of Active Resistance."  In short, the piece explores a popular usage of the passive indicator bei in Chinese.  Traditionally, the word is placed after the subject and before the verb in a sentence to indicate that the passive voice.  The Log offers this example: tā bèi quántǐ dǎngyuán píngxǔan wéi zhǔxí "He was elected by all of the party members as chairman."  

This grammatical marker, which usually bores students to sleep in Chinese 101, also has several controversial political uses.  For example: 

bei + employment = employmented: mocks the way organizations (i.e. government, universities, etc.) manipulate statistics to make it appear that more graduates have jobs than the actual amount

bei + harmonize = harmonized: this is in direct reference to the state's social program of a Harmonious Society, meaning that something was censored due to controversial material 

(Often in comic jest, the word for harmonize is replaced for its homonym, river crabs.)

bei + suicide = suicided: to be beaten do death, and have the authorities make it look like suicide

These examples are mentioned in the Language Log's explanation and are the ones I see used most often.

This linguistic phenomenon has already been fully explored by those with much greater qualifications to do so than I.  In fact, I would like to draw a parallel to something I found on Renren.com (also known as China's Facebook) some time back.  It is a partial list of public figures who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution.  It is a sobering list of 150 people who suffered brutal treatment and immense suffering in the time leading up to their passing.  Below, I have translated a few:

Deng Shi, People's Daily Chief Editor, 1966.5.17, poisoned to death

Wu Han, Vice Mayer of Beijing, historian, 1968.10.11 committed suicide in prison, had his hair torn out before he died

Wen Jie, Famous poet, 1971.1.13 used coal gas to commit suicide

Chen Xiaoyu, Art critic, 1966.8.24 after being paraded, jumped into Beijing's Longtan river

Yang Ni, Writer in San Wen style, 1968.8.3 ingested sleeping pills and died

The list, of course, goes on, and real number of deaths is not limited to the one circulated on this widely used social media site.  The reasons I pair the two articles together are below:

1. There is reason to believe that not all suicides were voluntary.  This topic is best pursued by a historian, but it is interesting to note that the concept of 'suicided' does indeed have a specific historical precedent in China.

2. One comment reads: I bet this is going to be river crabbed (bei he xie).  Interestingly, some weeks after this user left this comment, the post in its entirety still exists online.  The authorities certainly has a reputation for river crabbing information not in its favor.   Discussions of the Cultural Revolution, however, are becoming less and less controversial (as long as it is not used as a platform to denounce the Party).  One argument is that those in power at the time are deceased.  The current leadership has little to lose politically by allowing that previous policies were flawed.  One might also claim that this generation grew up during that time, and witnessed the chaos and violence, as well as the impact it had on China, and by allowing some discussion of the Cultural Revolution, hope to educate those who cannot remember it or never lived through it.  It also serves to symbolize the importance of current leadership's policies and of a relatively progressive path.