Amelia’s Marketplace

Amelia Heaton-Renshaw decided to open a food business after relocating to Shanghai five years ago.

An engineer drives from England to Mongolia, stops in China, starts building racecars and abandons that career to make…strawberry jam?

For Amelia Heaton-Renshaw, that implausible yarn is the true story of her two-year-old Shanghai business, Amelia’s Marketplace, which bills itself as the city’s “jam and chutney hotline.”

She’s one of four expat foodies behind Pantry — a tiny storefront off West Nanjing Road, one of Shanghai’s busiest shopping streets. The shop is bringing hard-to-find treats to homesick Westerners and, they hope, a new audience of Chinese eaters. All of them discovered an entrepreneurial bent once they arrived in Shanghai.

“Baking isn’t my passion. Cookies are,” said Lexie Comstock, a 23-year-old American who sells chocolate-chip, oatmeal-raisin and other varieties from her shop, Strictly Cookies. “I think they are the absolute best dessert and should be part of everyone’s life.”

She arrived in Shanghai in August 2010 and opened the store two months later. “In America,” she said, “people are realistic, yes, but also pessimistic. Here, we have a more reckless attitude.”

Christine Asuncion, who runs Spread the Bagel, moved to Shanghai in 2008 to study Chinese, later working at an outsourcing firm. When she started her bagel operation, her oven could only accommodate two at a time.

“You should’ve seen the first bagels that came out of that oven,” she said. Now she churns out 200 a day from her one-bedroom apartment.

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Sina Weibo

A screenshot from the Sina Weibo microblogging service, where a user posted a photo of Shanghai Metro President Yu Guangyao bowing in apology.

The Shanghai Metro posted, deleted, then re-posted an apology on the microblogging site Sina Weibo on Tuesday following a subway accident that hurt about 260 people. At a press conference, the subway operator was unable to offer an explanation why.

Instead, its president offered up a visual that’s burning up the Chinese Internet, demonstrating yet again how technology offers the Chinese public a chance to critique certain parts of the establishment.

At the press conference late Tuesday, a reporter for the website of local newspaper Xinmin News asked about the removal of the first apology. Yu Guangyao, president of the subway operator, responded, “It’s not clear to me whether anything has been revoked. But on behalf of Shanghai Metro, I’d like to offer deep apologies to the city’s residents and passengers for the commuting inconvenience that this has caused them. I’d also like to convey my deep solicitude to injured passengers.”

He began the press conference with a humble bow, a deeply unusual move in Chinese officialdom. Photos and video of the bow soon popped up across websites, soothing the anger of some microbloggers. “At least the attitude is much better than that of the high-speed train accident,” Sina Weibo user Jiajianvwudeatongmu said, referring to the July clash that left more than 40 people dead near Wenzhou. Online critics have expressed frustration that nobody has taken responsibility for the that crash. No official investigation report on that accident has been issued.

“Learning to bow to apologize is at least a sign of progress,” the blogger continued. “When have you seen any government official or leader bow? Chinese officials need to learn how to respect life.”

But many more are still fuming. “Apologizing to the passengers in the name of the company is an act under pressure. It’s not sincere,” said Weibo user Bayi. “Since ancient times, the ruling class on the land has never had the tradition of apologizing to the people.”

A large number of comments went much further, asking Mr. Yu to follow the example of the president of Hokkaido Railway Co. He apparently committed suicide earlier this month after leaving notes expressing regrets for a train accident in May that left a number of passengers with minor injuries. His death was widely discussed on the Chinese Internet in the wake of the Wenzhou accident.

“Follow that Japanese official,” said blogger womendoushjaysuizhe. “Hurry to kill yourself to appease public indignation.”

For many people, however, the biggest worry is still whether their daily commute will be safe. “The key to apology is to make sure this won’t happen again,” wrote Duanxiang. “It’s not simply making a bow.”

–Li Yuan

Not so, according to a new polling data from Gallup.

In results that seem to contradict a similar poll by the Pew Research Center, Gallup’s 2010 global wellbeing survey, issued this week, found only 12% of Chinese people thought of themselves as what Gallup calls “thriving,” while a whopping 71% said they were struggling and 17% said they were downright suffering.

Meanwhile, only 38% of people in the U.S. said they were struggling and a full 59% judged themselves to be thriving, according to Gallup.

Even given China’s struggles with runaway housing prices and rising food costs, it’s puzzling that nearly three quarters of Chinese people see themselves as struggling, particularly when the majority of people in the U.S., which spent all of last year flirting with double-digit unemployment, feel just fine.

The Gallup results are also surprising because they clash with Pew Research’s Global Attitudes survey, which finds Chinese people feeling significantly more optimistic about their lives.

Both the Pew and the Gallup polls measure life satisfaction by asking survey respondents to rank their lives on the Cantril Scale, or what Pew calls the “Ladder of Life”–a measure of present and future life quality ranging from zero to 10, with 10 representing the best possible life. In the Pew poll, 31% of Chinese people gave their present lives high marks (seven to 10) and 74% said they expected to live highly satisfying lives in the future. (Gallup combines present and future life ratings, with “thriving” roughly equivalent to a “high” score in Pew’s survey.)

It’s not entirely clear why the polls offer such different pictures of China. Pew surveyed more than three times as many Chinese people as Gallup, so sample size could be a factor. Scope might also come into play, with Pew talking disproportionately to urban residents, who are generally wealthier than people in the countryside.

Interestingly, according to the Gallup study, China is not the only fast-growing economy with a pessimistic population: Only 17% of Indians and 16% of Vietnamese people placed themselves in the upper echelons of life satisfaction–both below the global median of 21%.

Indeed, people in Asia as a whole scored slightly below the global thriving median, while residents of both Europe (25%) and the Americas (42%) scored well above it.

Accounting for the regional optimism gap may be as simple as looking at per capita GDP. In an analysis of Gallup’s 2006 global well being survey, Princeton economist Angus Deaton discovered an almost direct correlation between life satisfaction and GDP per head–people in wealthier countries were generally happier–while finding that economic growth actually had a negative effect on people’s sense of their own well-being (PDF).

Other economists have tried to account for economic growth’s negative relationship with life satisfaction–known as the Easterlin Paradox–by theorizing that a person’s sense of well being is determined by relative, rather than absolute, income. The idea is controversial in economic circles, but it might shed light on low levels of optimism in China, where a growing wealth gap has stoked increasing social tension.

While Gallup doesn’t touch on the subject, culture offers another explanation for Chinese pessimism. Unlike the U.S., driven since at least the 19th century by the sunny notion of Manifest Destiny, China, with its long history of boom and bust, has tended to value humility and a relatively strict management of expectations.

Evidence of this attitude is visible in the Communist Party’s insistence, even as it presides over a record-breaking pursuit of prosperity, that its end goal is the establishment of a “moderately well-off society” (小康社会).

Struggling, in other words, may be the adjective Chinese people prefer.

– Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin