About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

Yours truly is making headlines these days. OK, the People’s Daily has still not carried a big pic of David Feng as of late — but the generation your co-blogger belongs to — that of the 80s (80 后) — is making all those shockwaves on the Chinese mass media.

Those 80s folks (read: not folks in their 80s as in age!) are big in terms of money — in the case of the PRC, more like “Maobacks” than “greenbacks”. For many a Chinese in love, their idea partner must know how to deal with the cash (more often than not, the lady has the last say). (This is not the case with yours truly — a firm believer in the absolute 50%/50% rule and economic freedom — but then again he’s with someone already…)

Here’s a breakthrough of what the “generalized masses” are doing in terms of money:

Late 70s and Early 80s: Saving Up

Born when China was shaking its way out from the Cultural Revolution, and nurtured at an age when marriage of a Chinese citizen to a foreigner had to obtain superior government approval to marry, those born in the early 80s are much like their late 70s counterparts in the sense that they tend to save up quite a bit more than those born even a few years later.

Those in the early 80s tend to spend their money wisely. They may wish to save up for some big house, car or speedboat (if they’ve the cash, that is). Most folks in this age ground are already somewhat successful in their biz endeavours, have had quite a bit of cash to keep things going, and are able to make ends meet with the least bit of pain.

Folks in this age group probably have little to worry about. They know how hard it is to make money (legally), and they’re not one to spend whenever the spirit moves them.

Mid to Late 80s: The Yueguang People

And then there are those people who spend like mad.

When I went with someone who is probably better known as “niu-bi” (from New York), we got squashed into the subway by folks more our (as in David Feng’s) age — quite literally. The masses alighted at Wangfujing for their regular Sunday shopping spree. It was a dead giveaway: these were the folks born in the mid to late 1980s. For them, spending cash is something programmed into many a brain — as in ROM.

Those who can make it to Wangfujing actually earn quite a bit more than their somewhat less-than-rich variant (or trendier variant), who get off the train at Xidan. Pop into either two shopping meccas on a typical Beijing Sunday, and you’ll see a sea of young folks (many with a redwood-in-height guy or drop-dead gorgeous gal) shopping until they can take it no more.

Those folks are so into shopping that they spend pretty much their entire month’s allowance or income. At the end of the month, they’re out of cash. These folks make up the yueguang (月光) phenomenon: at the end of the month (月), they’re out of fluid stuff (光), hence making that phrase known as yueguang.

Yueguang is officially frowned upon by yours truly, by the way, but this official policy is easily relegated to the trashcan thanks to microphone mania, something that happens every so often.

Economics with David Feng Characteristics

And then there’s yours truly. A hybrid product of the period when 5 fen bus rides, rice ratio tickets, FECs and planned economy receipts were disappearing, and of the Swiss world of buying gold at your bank (the real stuff!), losing everything to the damned dot-coms (not that damned, actually), and having accounts in yuan, yen, Swiss francs, and all-those-currencies, here’s what I’d like to call Economics with David Feng Characteristics.

Back in the year 2002, David Feng started a massively failed attempt at bringing back (at least on a personal level) the era of the planned economy. In place were rations — a maximum of CNY 30 for the subway would be an example every month. The idea: you’d split your income (or pocket money) into all kinds of different rations (the food ratio, the subway ride ration, and all that kind of stuff). To make things faster, they’d all be stored in bank account cards. Neat idea.

The thing collapsed nearly on the spot. The immediate victim: David’s purse, now chock-full of plastic cards with one digit before the decimal point. Meanwhile, the rations remained in essence nonexistent. A grand plan — bust, right on day one.

In more recent years, though, David’s been steadily moving away from the personally-loathed yueguang masses to one of salting away cash for a rainy day — in the form of non-Renminbi savings. The Aussie dollar yields the most in terms of interest, so many a Renminbi is converted into Hong Kong dollars, and then reconverted into Australian dollars. Additionally, David’s thinking of going back to gold — the price of gold can only go up…

Finally, to keep the whole system from collapsing, David’s doing more paid jobs and has enough to keep going from one month to the other with plenty of cash to go around. Keeping reserve cash helps (especially when it comes to paying those all-too-high freeway bills), as does buying local brands, and constraining those “just-for-the-heck-of-it” spending sprees.

A mix of those different 80s folks? Nope, we’d like to call this Econ with David Feng Characteristics. It is, after all, not the personal finance methods practised by the average local.