Two Surprising Economic Stories from China

0:00Today on State of the World, two surprising economic stories from China.

0:09You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories, up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. On today's episode, a pair of business stories from China that might be unexpected. In a few minutes, we'll hear about an iconic Russian item, nearly all of which are made in China. First, the service industry springing up behind a cultural trend. Young Chinese are having fewer children. But they're buying more pets, and they are increasingly seeing these pets as members of their family. Along with Jasmine Ling in Beijing, NPR's Emily Fang tells us about the companies arriving to serve this market.

0:50Mo Yang Yang, the owner of this funeral home in Beijing, is preparing for a pair of bereaved parents to arrive. They always treat their pets like their kids or their family members. So I would call them like parents. Literally, if you have a dog named Bubble, I would say, hi, Bubble's mom or Bubble's dad. The parents in question are weeping. Their puppy, they say, suddenly died the night before.

1:22Mo guides the sobbing parents through funeral rites. Her pet burial company will help bury the puppy's ashes later. Mua has multiple cats and one dog named Bagel. And as an animal lover, she noticed a societal shift. More people considering their animals as family. So she launched her pet funeral company. You don't have to just toss your pets away after they passed away or just like bury them in some middle of nowhere. The popularity of companies like hers in China is notable because the attitude towards pets in China was not always so personal. It was more pragmatic years ago. This is Elisa Harka, co-founder of a marketing agency called Red Ant Asia.

2:08It works with a lot of Chinese and China-focused companies. The way that the Chinese culture has evolved and the way that those bigger cities and the lower tier cities have evolved around general well-being of humans has then permeated into their love of animals. One Goldman Sachs analysis based on rising pet food sales concluded that Chinese cities could already have more pets than human toddlers as of this year. Meanwhile, China's human population has been contracting since 2022, and its birth rate falling for four years running. Young people in China are choosing not to get married or get married much later, and I think that is closely tied with that need for love has been somewhat filled by other ways.

2:58Like having pets, and people are willing to spend on them. iMedia Research, the Chinese market consultancy, estimates the pet industry is worth about$113 billion in China this year. So when Adidas launched its first pet sportswear line, it launched it exclusively in China. Other companies offer everything from grooming services to much more niche products. Entrepreneur Cheng Xu, for example, makes paper money for pets shaped like their food cans and toys. He says the idea for making paper money for pets came to him when he was staring at the ashes of his own beloved cat, Roro. He had a flash of inspiration to send her into the afterworld in style.

3:45After just about a year in the business, he's now one of the biggest pet paper money companies in China. Sometimes he gets requests from pet stores like Can you make your paper pork chop a little more realistic and more detailed? Cheng loves pets, but he says he does actually want to have human kids in the future. But Mo Yangyang from the pet cremation company says she's very happy as is with her many pets. Now society has a lot of pressure and it's just so much competition going on everywhere. You have to be the best, you have to be this and that. And our parents would have a lot of expectations.

4:24And we are also in a period of time where very, sometimes very lost, even I am. But you know who doesn't have those expectations, she says? Your pets. Like me yesterday, I worked for like almost 20 hours. And the only thing that keeps me going is I know when I open my door, my dog is going to be there. My cats are going to be there. She says her dog and her cats provide her the unconditional love she's always longed for. That was NPR's Emily Fang. There are Russian icon, Matryoshka dolls, those painted wooden nesting dolls that start big and get smaller and smaller as they stack inside each other.

5:01As NPR's John Ruich found out, they power the economy of one town. And it's not in Russia. The train to this small town zips by rolling hills and butterscotch fields of ripe corn. And when it slows to a stop, we're about 125 miles from the border between Russia and China. But not on the Russian side.

5:25This is Yimianpo in China's northeastern Heilongjiang province.

5:32Stacking dolls are important here. There are silhouette statues of them at a major road junction, and bright paintings of them on some of the town walls. There have been estimates in Chinese state media that some 90 % of the world's stacking dolls are produced here in Yimianpo. Wang Haishan runs one of the biggest companies that makes them here in town. He shows us a small workshop where he explains the unfinished dolls are created.

6:04It starts with a lindenwood log, about four inches thick and 18 inches long, stripped of its bark. It's hammered onto a lathe.

6:15A man in a backwards ball cap and mask hollows it out with long metal chisels that look like bladed fireplace pokers. Then he wields a gouge to form the doll's squat, bowling pin-like shape. Each doll is a little smaller than the one before it, so they can stack up one inside the other. Some sets have six, others have ten, or even more.

6:40You can tell they produce a lot. The floor, workbenches, and windowsills are covered in wood shavings. Wang got his start on a lathe after middle school. He worked his way along the assembly line, then opened his own company to make stacking dolls, or taowa, as they're called in Chinese.

7:01Matryoshka is the Russian term, and the first ones were made in Russia in the late 1800s. At that time, the Russian Empire was at its peak, Tolstoy and Chekhov in their prime, The government was building rail lines to expand the empire eastward. They cut through Manchuria, and Ymiampo was a stop along the line. Matryoshka followed. When the carving is done, the blank wooden forms are sent down the road to one of Wang's paint shops. A lone woman listens to a radio program on her phone as she dabs green paint on dolls. Traditional nesting dolls often bear images of Russian peasant women, babushkas, with ruddy cheeks and headscarves.

7:42Wang Xiaor shows one with a Russian-looking castle on it. Others elsewhere are painted with pandas or historical figures like Stalin and Mao. Presumably, there's a market. As for the work, it's pretty flexible, with people coming in from neighboring villages.

7:59Wang Xiaor says it allows her to earn some money while looking after her child, who goes to school here in town. Most of her co-workers are out for the day, harvesting crops. This is a hardscrabble part of China, where the government has struggled for years to revitalize the economy. Millions of people have left for greener pastures. But company owner Wang Haisan and his compatriots churning out Russian stacking dolls here in Yimianpo seem to have figured out a way to make things work. Wang says his company has been growing.

8:32And he shows us a made-in-Russia nesting doll that he bought as a sample to learn from.

8:47Thing is, he says his nesting dolls are more intricate. And they're cheaper. John Riewicz, NPR News, Yimianpo, China.

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