Analysis Of I Love Dollars And Other Stories Of China

It is common knowledge that communist countries often do not keep their promise of utopia for the common man, abundance and equality for all. China in the 1900s, as described in I Love Dollars: And Other Stories of China, published in 2007, is no exception. The story takes place in a power plant factory in which many workers experience a living hell of corruption on a daily basis. The government does not care for the workers, and for one of them, Xie Weigang, even leaving the factory is a difficult task. According to Jonathan Spence, Zhu Wen, the author of the aforementioned book, “is from a third generation. He was born in 1967, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and raised during that period of frenzied trashing of China’s traditional

In an ideal communist scenario, all the citizens work hard and everyone shares the fruits of labor equally. What happens then, if there is no fruit to harvest, regardless of how much effort was put in? This situation is exhibited in “Ah, Xiao Xie” and the workers received no support. The narrator says, “our nonexistent power plant wasn 't generating any profits, and because our salaries had been squashed as low as was humanly possible— most of us were getting several hundred yuan less per month“ (188). Wen is not saying that an implausible concept; he is saying that it is only plausible when the economy is doing great and there are sufficient resources for everyone. If inadequate capital is produced, a problem arises: many people sharing meager resources leaves everyone unsatisfied. Another symbol relating to this appears when only one bed is available to the factory workers. Wen sees an opportunity to lie down on the bed, but shortly after he does, another worker comes in the room. “Who the fuck are you? he shouted. Bloody hell, I go out for a shit and somebody 's taken the bed!” (207). The one bed represents the issue of scarcity in communism; when times are rough, no one is willing to help because everyone has their equal share of problems. The factory workers serve as a representation of the common man in communist societies; they barely make ends meet, and the government is