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  3. China’s New Middle Class Xia Jiaping opened his living room window and gazed out across the city he calls home. "None of thi

China’s New Middle Class Xia Jiaping opened his living room window and gazed out across the city he calls home. "None of thi

admin2010-05-26  38
问题                          China’s New Middle Class
    Xia Jiaping opened his living room window and gazed out across the city he calls home. "None of this was here when I was young," he said of the glass and steel towers rising in the distance.
     The new skyscrapers weren’t there before, but then, neither was the new class of Chinese to which Xia belongs.
    His membership in that class is loudly proclaimed by the middle-class furnishings that are scattered about his 14th-floor apartment: a leather sofa, a flat-screen television, a flat-screen computer, a violin for his daughter, a microwave oven, and thick carpets. If the country has a history that’s five millennia long as it says it has, then the rise of the middle class has occurred in scarcely the blink of an eye. Its emergence is one of the most rapid social transformations in history.
    New Change
    The creation of this middle class has either come from or has released from large-scale economic, social and cultural change and, in the eyes of many Chinese, it signals the beginning of a permanent transformation of Chinese society.
    "Nobody in 1990 could have looked forward 10 years and predicted where China is today," said Shao Yibo, who received his MBA at Harvard University. He returned to Shanghai three years ago to start Eachnet. com, a Chinese version of eBay, the online auctioneer. "There have been some unimaginable changes in China. And people just have to be here to believe it. This is clearly a city where things are happening. Shanghai is an exciting place to be."
    Shao’s company, which offers Chinese consumers everything from cars to houses, cosmetics to computers, cell phones to antique Hong Kong bonds, is just one of the thousands of new, privately owned concerns appearing in Shanghai. These companies cater to middle class cravings while creating middle-class jobs.
    China was not like the United States, Europe and even post-war Japan. Its growing consumer class does not have its roots in any middle-class ancestry. The parents of this new class of people invariably were workers or farmers.
    Xia is now a manager at one of the world’s largest software companies. He was born in this city in 1965, where he joined four older sisters in his parents’ two-room home in a dormitory for factory workers. But, when China’s reforms, which began in the late 1970s, meant that universities began accepting freshmen after being closed for a decade, Xia made the move. He was a diligent student, and in 1984 was admitted to Shanghai’s Jiaotong University, to study applied mathematics.
    Taking the Plunge
    When he was about to graduate, an assortment of state-owned companies and research institutes visited Jiaotong to recruit. "I was offered a position by the East China Computer Research Institute, a government institute," Xia said. "At the time there were some other choices but nothing seemed as good as this. Things were in transition at the time but we were not so clear as to what was happening. I’d say most students went to state-owned institutions. " Xia worked for the institute for five years, all the time living with his parents. While he was at the institute he studied programming and became familiar with major software systems. His monthly pay was about US $ 250. Then, in 1993, he got a call that would change his life. "A salesman at this company called me and asked me to join," he explained. "But the first time they asked me I said I wasn’t ready."
    "I said I hadn’t thought about taking the plunge into the sea," said Xia, using the expression common at the time for leaving the safety net of state employment and taking a risk in the private sector. "Then they called me again and came to my home.    I was not alone in thinking it was a risk to do something like this, all of society thought it was a risk.    You have to remember that state-owned industries were still very backward and everybody had the iron rice bowl," he said, using the common expression for cradle-to-grave security all workers were supposed to have; After two weeks of steadying his nerves, Xia decided to accept the offer from Oracle, the giant US software company.
    This tough climb up out of the womb of state-owned enterprise protection is the area of interest of Zhang Wanli, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Zhang studies China’s new middle class.    He points to the vast cultural differences of state-owned enterprises and private companies as having a crucial impact on the mentality of the middle class. One important difference is the level of risk-taking often needed to make the leap.
    And, perhaps no Chinese city embraces this new world with the unbridled enthusiasm of Shanghai, the country’s largest and richest city. It sees itself as Asia’s once and future commercial capital. It has the world’s tallest hotel, the 88-story Grand Hyatt; General Motors chums out Buicks from its US $1.5 billion assembly plant; and one of the world’s first magnetic levitation high-speed trains will begin operation next year.
    Once a sea of drab, cold-water apartment blocks, the city is now hundreds of modern condominium towers that are sprouting, and many hard wired with broadband Internet connections.
    These staples of modern urban life have emerged as rapidly and at the same time as Shanghai’s middle class.
    And Xia adapted to this new environment quickly.    "For me, the big difference at Oracle, was responsibility." The number of employees at Oraele’s office has grown from 10 to 70 since Xia joined in 1993. "I was given much greater responsibility than had at the institute. And relationships among people are much easier. I feel much comfortable here. ’ Along with responsibility has come a compatible pay increase, about US $ 4,000 per month, or 16 times his last pay check at state institute.
Learn to be Independent
    In 1995, he got married with Shi Weiping, an engineer at a state owned shipyard. A year later they had a daughter, Xia Shiyi, but still they live with Xia’s parents. "We saved money that way,’ he said. In 1999, the couple bought one of the new apartments that were springing up like dandelions across the city. For US $ 75,000, a sum unimaginable to his father, who earned about US $15 a month and now lives on a monthly pension of US $ 86, Xia and his family moved into a 365-square-meter apartment, only a brisk 10-minute walk from his parents. Unlike many of China’s newly well-off, Xia does not own a car, testimony, he said, to the city’s appalling traffic, and to hopes that the 15-minute bicycle ride to his downtown office will hold back his growing stomach.
    This year his daughter will begin elementary school. Already, her parents are paying for violin lessons and are preparing her for her annual music exam, which will determine whether she will advance to the next level. The hardest thing, the couple say, is weaning (使…戒掉) Shiyi from cartoons on TV long enough to practice. And, unlike her grandparents or even her parents, Shiyi will be raised to be independent. "We’ll let her make her own decisions," her father said. "She decides if she wants to take extra classes-painting, drawing, violin. She has everything we never had as children."
"Taking the plunge" means ______.
选项
答案leaving the safety net of state employment and taking a risk in the private sector
解析 在Taking the Plunge这部分第二段，作者对此作了解释。中文的对应翻译为“下海”。
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