>>5370
ДВ русачки через лет 100 будут конкурировать за выживание, еще и в низу иерархии будут в Нео-Шанхай Сити))

The crews of the liners docking at Shanghai often try to keep the scavengers off with cold water from a hose, for the Chinese in these sampans have a bothersome habit of hoisting small children on their long bamboo poles through the open portholes of passenger staterooms. The children snatch what they can and return down the poles.

Ashore the coolies fight for your baggage as men fight for it in Cherbourg or Havre, only more savagely and there are more of them. Their shouts to you and to one another drive you half out of your wits. They jostle you with their unmentionably filthy bodies, and snatch, snatch, snatch with their long-nailed filthy hands like monkeys at feeding time.

The abundance and cheapness of human labor, or at least the theoretical presence of it, is noticed as soon as you reach your hotel. If it is a good one, a coolie will be assigned to squat by your door and rise to open it when you come and go, day or night. Another will layout your things if you leave your bag open. Innumerable others will make their appearance out of nowhere. There seems no limit to the supply. They don't like to sit or stand when they work. Shining your shoes or doing anything else, they like to squat on their haunches. They are more agreeable than serving people in Europe - that is, those employed and wanting to keep their positions. This brings up a principle ever emphasized through all experience in China - that a Chinese is readily manageable by any allegiance to authority. He has a theory of responsibility, and pressure upon that point will stir him to proper action. You do not tip the hotel coolies direct to individuals. You tip the No. 1 Boy for the lot. He settles with each according to some arrangement of their own. They work for him and are responsible to him. He is responsible to the hotel, or whatever other organization the connection may involve. The coolies are his own gang, generally relatives, and the system is a sort of clan system. The No. 1 is the head man, the king. He keeps most or a large part of the takings, and a wellemployed No. 1 is usually well-to-do for a low-class Chinese. He exacts a percentage cut from curio dealers or other persons who sell to you in his domain. He demands that his under-coolies turn in to him any tips direct from an inexperienced stranger. If they don't, and are caught, they face dreaded penalties from him. He will search them when he likes for hidden money.

In the dining room the same system prevails. You tip the dining room No. 1. The employment system in the hotel is a picture of the way much of the labor in China is managed. Nobody relies altogether on his personal earnings for a livelihood. Nor can anyone keep his personal earnings for himself. Each strategically brings pressure to collect toll-squeeze as it is called in China - from somebody else. And somebody else is ever waiting to collect from him. Even the beggars are organized into guilds, with elaborate systems of squeeze and counter-squeeze upon one another, and the whole organization, in turn, must pay squeeze to other organizations. Everybody pays to get a job and pays to keep it. And everybody is ferociously determined to make his collected squeeze as big as possible and his paid-out squeeze as little as possible.

Such a system has brought about a degree of skill in deception absolutely unimaginable to a Westerner. Survival depends upon out-deceiving competitors. With the credentials of economic success a matter of deception, those who are at the top may be expected to be better at the game than those lower down. Experience with "high class" Chinese, especially officials, bears out this proposition with sad frequency.