【外交政策 20150325】兄弟，来点人民币？

满仓

【中文标题】兄弟，来点人民币？
【原文标题】Brother, Can You Spare a Renminbi?
【登载媒体】外交政策
【原文作者】BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN
【原文链接】http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/25/china-fake-beggars-inequality-charity/




当代中国谁应该是穷人？中国南部浙江省的一个男人或许值得同情：他每天趴在一个简易拼凑的滑板车上沿街活动，明显瘫痪的双腿压在身体下面，拿着一个铁罐乞讨零钱。但是在2014年12月，中国国家媒体新华社的一名记者私下里拍到这个人站起身来，收拾好装备，跳上一辆公共汽车。他的报道在中国的互联网上迅速传播，掀起了对目前中国臭名昭著的一个现象的愤怒——假乞丐。还是在那个月，中国中央电视台报道，中西部城市重庆的警方抓捕了一个职业乞讨团伙，成员有名表和高端手机。3月2日，国有媒体中国网报道，警方抓获了一个“乞丐百万富翁”，这个人通过装瘸讨到了大笔现金，已经在北京购置了两套公寓。

中国是不是突然变成了一个骗子国度（商业行为方面尤其明显）？我们不大了解假乞丐是一个新现象，还是长久以来就存在的问题，只不过媒体在近期给予了关注。但毫无疑问的是，自从1978年中国经济改革开始之后，共产党拆散了这个国家大部分的福利制度，只为城市贫困人群保留了极少的社会安全保障机制。国内人口流动限制的放松让农村人口大量涌向城市，快速但不均衡的经济发展让中国的贫富差距位列世界之最。这意味着，中国的确有很多穷困潦倒的人，但同样明显的是，那些厚颜无耻装穷的人手中有大笔现金。问题在于有多少人伪造了自己的乞丐身份，还有多少人被错误地贴上了这种行为的标签——也就是“假假乞丐”。

围绕这些新现象所出现的讨论，有些类似于美国人对福克斯新闻等媒体的报道的反应，美国也发现了一些懒汉、骗子和其它号称贫穷却过着富裕生活的厚颜无耻的现象。

但是在中国，40年前几乎所有的人都生活在贫困线以下，这样的讨论前所未见。一位用户在一个抨击沿街乞讨现象的论坛中说：“现代社会里，乞讨已经不再是可怜、绝望、被迫和陌生的行为了，而是一个高端的产业，几乎不需要任何投入。”另一位用户说，乞丐获利非常丰厚，“很多人都不愿意去救助站”。另一个人批评那些好心肠的施主：“如果没人给他们钱，人们就不会在人行道和地铁车厢里遭到音乐轰炸”——中国常见的乞讨手段——“他们也不会无论刮风下雨都站在街角举着牌子阻碍交通。”

网络上的讨论还包括，如何区别假穷人和一些西方人所谓的“必然穷人”。3月20日，一家问答网站“知乎”上出现了一篇帖子“如何区分真乞丐和假乞丐”，最常见的建议是给他们一些物品，不给现金。如果乞丐接受了，那么说明这个人真有需要；如果乞丐不接受，那就是骗局。另一位用户建议行人把乞丐送往最近的救助站，如果他们拒绝，那么他们就不值得相信。还有人说，她只会给幼小、年老和残疾乞丐施舍。“如果是个有手有脚的年轻人，我一分钱也不会给他们。”

中国国有媒体站在自身的角度，似乎把主要兴趣集中在揭露这些人的欺骗行为上，而不是去关注隐藏在背后的深层次社会问题，因为这有可能把责任推到政府身上。《中国日报》在2013年6月报道，在南方城市南京，地铁中80％的乞丐都是假的，意思是说这些人有能力工作，而且不是出身于贫困家庭。这种狭隘的定义并没有考虑很多重要的因素，比如为什么一个身体健全的人无法找到工作。文章引用《现代快报》的报道，说一些乞丐“月收入超过1万元人民币（1,630美元）”，是南京居民人均可支配收入的三倍还要多。

对于假乞丐的声讨，有可能在慈善事业尚处于萌芽期的中国找到忠实的听众。其中一个原因是4年前在社交媒体上发生的混乱事件，其影响至今无法消除。2011年，中国最大的慈善机构中国红十字会陷入了丑闻。一个名叫郭美美的女人谎称是红十字会雇员，她发布了与一辆玛莎拉蒂汽车和很多奢侈生活的照片。质疑的声音甚嚣尘上，郭从哪里得到这些钱？中国红十字会如何使用人们的捐款？丑闻影响到整个国家的慈善事业，当年的慈善捐助金额从2010年的166亿美元下降到136亿美元，中国到目前尚未恢复到2011年本来也算不上很高的捐款水平。与美国相比，中国的慈善事业乏善可陈。据政府发布的报告，中国在2013年记录在案的捐款额为159亿美元，仅占美国当年捐款总额的4.7％。根据英国非营利组织慈善援助基金会所发布的2014年世界捐助指数报告，在2013年的一个月时间里，中国成年人群只有13％有过慈善捐助行为，美国的这个数字是68％。

坦率地说，中国慈善事业是未来依然是明亮的。2014年初，电子商务帝国阿里巴巴创建者、中国首富马云建立 一项价值高达30亿美元的信托资金，目的是遏制中国大范围的污染现象。房地产大亨张欣最近成立了一个1500万美元的基金项目，把中国的贫穷学生送入哈佛大学读书。2014年12月，她在《纽约时报》上撰文称，中国正在出现崭新的、积极的一代人，他们愿意为自己得到的机会而回馈社会。尽管很多中国人对于帮助乞丐感到不安，但那些真正施以援手的人还是得到了赞扬。3月20日，共产党喉舌《人民日报》在其微薄账户上发布一条消息。一个年轻的女人在一家餐厅吃早餐，一位老人走过来说“我饿了”，女人把自己的早餐让给这位老人。这条消息得到了7900多个赞，1000多条表扬性评论。

但是在一个财富和不平等现象持续增长的国家，贫穷和解决贫穷的方法从来不是这样的非黑即白。知乎的一位用户是一个年轻的大学毕业生，在上海工作，他说最近在一个繁忙的上海火车站遇到了一个抱小孩的衣衫褴褛的女人。他写到：“我的第一个念头是”，不明白她为什么在无力抚养后代的条件下还要生孩子。但他很快批评自己这么快地下结论。“一个单亲母亲一定很难在上海找到工作”，女人的困境和他自己的反应让他左右为难，他说就像是“两个小人在我的头脑里相互争吵”。最后，他掏出一些零钱给这个女人。“有些问题不是那么容易就想明白的。”

这些问题，或许就是第一世界国家所必然要面临的问题。






原文：

China's new First World problem: deciding who's truly needy.

Who deserves to be poor in modern China? One man in China’s southern Zhejiang province certainly seemed sympathetic: Each day, he pushed himself along the street on a homemade wooden skateboard, his apparently paralyzed legs tucked under his body, holding out a can to ask for spare change. But in December 2014, a reporter from Chinese state media agency Xinhua secretly photographed the man standing up, tucking away his gear, and hopping on a bus, an incident that quickly spread through the Chinese web and set off online anger at a phenomenon now notorious in China: fake beggars. The same month, state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) reported that police had busted a professional begging racket in the southwestern city of Chongqing; its members owned expensive watches and high-end mobile phones. On March 2, state-run China Net reported that police had busted a “beggar millionaire” who made so much money pretending to be crippled that he had purchased two apartments in Beijing.

Has China suddenly become a nation of (admittedly entrepreneurial) scammers? It’s not entirely clear whether fake begging is relatively new or is a long-standing trend that social media has made easier to detect. But there’s no debate that since China’s economic reforms began in 1978, the Community Party has dismantled much of the country’s welfare system, leaving only a thin social safety net for the urban poor. Relaxed domestic travel restrictions have unleashed a flood of rural migrants to the cities, while swift but uneven economic development has left China with a wealth disparity among the widest in the world. That means there are many in truly desperate straits, but there’s also more money sloshing about for those with the chutzpah to feign poverty. The question is how many have truly falsified their beggar status and how many have been erroneously held out as exemplars of the practice — fake fake beggars, in other words.

The chatter surrounding the new phenomenon might sound familiar to Americans reared on outlets like Fox News that bemoan the sloths, shills, and other ranks of shameless who plead poverty while (allegedly) living the rich life.

But in China, where 40 years ago nearly everyone lived in poverty, the debate is new. “In the modern era, begging is no longer a pitiable, desperate, involuntary, and unfamiliar behavior,” wrote one user in an online forum generally unsympathetic to those asking for money on the street. “It’s a high-income industry that requires essentially zero investment to get started.” Panhandlers make so much profit, wrote another user, that “many aren’t even willing to go to rescue shelters.” Another blamed the good-hearted people who give handouts. “If no one ever gave money,” wrote the user, “people wouldn’t blast music and walk through subway cars” — a common method of begging in China — “and they wouldn’t stand at street corners in all kinds of weather holding signs, slowing down traffic.”

Online debate has thus far elided the distinction between the fake poor and what some Westerners might call the “deserving poor.” In a March 20 forum on popular question-and-answer site Zhihu called “how to differentiate real beggars from fakes,” a common piece of advice was to offer a beggar something besides cash. If the beggar accepted, then the person was genuinely in need — but if the beggar rejected it, the con was on. Another user advised passers-by to offer to escort beggars to the nearest shelter; if they refused to go, then they too should not be trusted. Still another wrote that the only beggars she gives money to are children, the elderly, and the disabled. “If they are youthful, with hands and feet,” wrote the user, “I don’t give them a penny.”

For its part, Chinese state-run media appears more interested in calling out fraud than tackling the larger social issues at play, which might tend to point the finger at government authorities. State-run China Daily reported in June 2013 that in the southern provincial capital of Nanjing, 80 percent of those begging in the city’s subways were fake, meaning they were capable of work and did not come from poor homes. This narrow definition does not take into account any of the many extenuating circumstances that may prevent a physically whole person from obtaining employment. Citing the Modern Express, the report lamented that some beggars “have a monthly income of more than 10,000 yuan ($1,630),” more than three times the monthly per capita disposable income of Nanjing residents.

Critiques of fake begging are likely to find a ready audience in China, where the philanthropic sector is still nascent. One reason for this is a social media kerfuffle that’s four years old but still having an impact: In 2011, the Red Cross Society of China (RCSC), China’s largest charity, became mired in scandal after Guo Meimei, a woman falsely claiming to be a Red Cross employee, posted pictures of herself online posing with a Maserati and bragging about her luxurious lifestyle. Suspicions swirled about where Guo had gotten the money and how RCSC handled the donations it received. The scandal cast a shadow over the whole country’s charitable sector; that year, donations plummeted to $13.6 billion from the 2010 peak of $16.6 billion, and the country has yet to recover to pre-2011 levels, which were never high to begin with. Chinese philanthropy is especially anemic when compared with that of the United States: According to a government-issued report, China registered $15.9 billion in charitable donations in 2013, a mere 4.7 percent of all U.S. donations that same year. And according to the World Giving Index 2014 report, published by U.K.-based nonprofit Charities Aid Foundation, only 13 percent of China’s adult population donated to charity over a one-month period in 2013, compared with 68 percent of the U.S. adult population.

To be sure, Chinese charity does have a future. In early 2014, Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba and China’s richest man, established a charitable trust worth $3 billion aimed at combating the country’s massive pollution. Zhang Xin, a real estate tycoon who recently established a $15 million fund to send poor Chinese students to Harvard University, wrote in December 2014 for the New York Times that China is “on the cusp of change” as a new, prosperous generation of Chinese look to give back to the society that has afforded them so many opportunities. And while many in China may have qualms about personally helping out beggars, those who do are often admired. A March 20 post by Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily on its Weibo account told the story of a young woman eating in a porridge restaurant who had shared her breakfast with a beggar, after the old woman had approached her and said simply, “I’m hungry.” The post garnered more than 7,900 likes and 1,000 admiring comments.

But in a country of growing wealth and inequality, poverty and its solutions are rarely so black and white. One Zhihu user, a young college graduate living in Shanghai, wrote that he had recently come upon a ragged young woman with a baby, begging outside a busy Shanghai train station. “My first thought,” he wrote, was to wonder why she had chosen to give birth to a baby that she wasn’t able to support. But then he chided himself for judging her so quickly. “How difficult it must be,” he wrote, “for a [single] woman with a baby to find a job in Shanghai.” The young woman’s predicament, and his own reaction, troubled him, and he described it as “two small people in my head fighting each other.” In the end, he fished out some small bills from his pocket and gave them to her. “There are some problems,” he concluded, “that just aren’t that easy to figure out.” The start, perhaps, of a First World problem.

每天的晨吟

难道还有应该是穷人的？