Living in Communist China: what's it like
So many people tell me they don’t like Communism and one of the major reasons is you can never own anything.
I’ve been looking at this and found, even though I live in Communist China, the complete opposite is true.
There are currently 1.7 million people with assets over 10 million RMB, that’s about 1.5 million USD and, according to one list, the Hurun Rich list, China has more billionaires than the USA with 846. That’s not bad for a Communist country that people keep telling me doesn’t allow anyone to own anything.
Let’s look at my personal circumstances, I know it’s not typical, because I’m a foreigner living in China but my wife isn’t, she’s a Chinese person living in China so her and her family are where we should start.
I own my own apartment but I don’t own the land its on. My wife also owns an apartment but she doesn’t own the land it’s on either. We have 70-year leases which will last us until the end of our lives. So, effectively, we are living rent free in one of them and the other is sitting empty because it’s not an expensive apartment and there are plenty of rentals available so the market isn’t good, we might get 1200 RMB a month rental but we might also get a lot of headaches having a tenant in it.
So many people ask, why don’t you rent it out, and the answer is, it’s not worthwhile, there are no costs associated with keeping it empty – this is something I personally think should change – empty apartments should attract a property tax but, up to now, they don’t. We pay no rates, no property tax, the maintenance fees for the apartment are less than $100 a year – not a month, a year.
If we want to, when we get near the end of the 70-year lease (I’ll be 120 years old) we can extend it, as the people did who sold my apartment to me, 10 years ago, they extended it, it cost them 30,000 RMB, which is just over $4000 and got a new 70-year lease which I bought from them.
We don’t have children so, after we’re gone, the land will revert back to the country but the apartments on it will not. If the government wants to take them over, they must offer our estate the value at market price, if not, the estate can sell them and whoever my wife and I nominate as our beneficiaries will get the value, less the cost of re-registering the land use for a further 70 years..
We choose not to but we could buy cars if we want, the reason we choose not to, is because there’s nowhere in this city that will cost me more than $30 dollars to reach by taxi and 99% of the journeys I would take in a taxi will cost us less than $5:00. A friend who lives right at the edge of town came over for a meal the other day, he paid 160 RMB to get home, he had to pay an extra 20 RMB for the driver to cover the return journey tolls because it was very late at night – that’s 180 RMB total, he lives 45 kilometres and 40-minute drive away, $22 USD.
Travelling intercity by plane or train, or nearby cities on a bus will cost a fraction of the price of the West, for example, Beijing by train, is 2,200 kilometres, takes 9 hours from our local station with no changes, it’s a direct line and costs 782 RMB ($110), if I drove, the fuel and tolls would be much higher and it would take me about 25 hours, so there’s at least one overnight stop involved in that
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If we wanted to buy a car, we can, there are so many fantastic brands to choose from I particularly like the Zeekr, not a well-known brand but a very well built and affordable electric car, it has a range of 348 miles all the attributes of a Porsche Cayenne like 0-60 in 3 point something seconds and is less than half the price
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What else can I tell you about living under Communism, I have a credit card with a 200,000 RMB, almost $30,000 dollar limit but I’ve never paid a cent of interest or any costs for it, it’s completely free to me because I’ve never had a debt on it, It’s a Mastercard so I use it online to buy things and I use it for cash advances when I travel.
By the way, we pay no rates or property taxes in China, nor are there any standing charges on any of our utilities, so, when I go away for a month my electricity bill is about 50 RMB, less than $10 because I leave the fridge freezer and a couple of other safety features running – I’m confident in doing that because in the last 10 years, I haven’t experienced a power failure. My water bill, every month is less than 30 RMB too but when I go away for a month that reduces to zero.
Everyone owns their own phone here, I guess it’s possible to get a plan with a “free phone” but why bother, my phone, a Vivo, cost me less than $200; I pay around 100-150 RMB a month, never more than $20 to keep it but I don’t make many calls on it, only to my father from time to time in the UK and not a lot else since everything here is done on WeChat, we communicate, send messages, videos photos, pay for everything and it’s all free, because there is WiFi everywhere – there’s also 5G in every single town, village and community in China.
The phones never drop out, they work in elevators, inside underground car parks all though the cities and even on the high-speed trains and they work across the desert throughout China – there are some blind spots in the mountains though, but no one lives there and where they do live, there are no blind spots. I’m sure there are places where my phone won’t work but, having cycled 35,000 kilometres across China, I haven’t yet found any.
I’ve never experienced a burglary but I do have a friend who was burgled once, one friend, one time and that was over 15 years ago. In fact, I don’t know of anyone who’s been a victim of a crime in the last 10 years. The streets are safe, the shopping malls are a pleasure, there are coffee shops, tea shops, restaurants everywhere we go and we can indulge ourselves.
If this is what people are afraid of, I really don’t understand their fear. Communism is only bad if you read about it in Western media, in reality, what we see as our daily lives here in China, it’s a pretty nice way to live.
When people ask me how it is to live in communist China, I tell them these things, and yet for some reason, many people still criticise me for wanting to live here!