KEY POINTS:
It's Chinese New Year this week and China's capital has closed down. This is one festival where people go back home to celebrate with their families, rather than going out. Such is the homing instinct that crime rates rocket as those who can't afford precious tickets from their
usual sources of income resort to theft or robbery to scrape the funds together. The perpetrators are generally the migrant labourers who leave their rural villages in their teens to look for work on the coast.
Chinese family ties are extraordinary. I remember first reading about them when conducting research on the Cultural Revolution. Often, members of the extended family (for example, parents-in-law or second cousins) were the only people who stood between imprisoned "counter-revolutionaries" and starvation. Often at great risk to themselves, family members brought precious food to people they often did not know directly.
The rationale is obvious. The family is the only thing you can rely on when the state is cruel and arbitrary. But one should not sentimentalise family ties in China. They can be extremely claustrophobic with the focus being on trading favours with each other.
Children can experience enormous pressure to excel at schoolwork and become rich enough to support their parents and grandparents.
In any case, Chinese New Year should be a happy occasion for most people. The economy is still performing strongly and a resurgent stock market will provide that crucial "wealth effect" which policymakers look for to justify their rule.
But some observers, including me, are slightly worried about China's social dynamic.
I was in Japan last week, which like China, is a Confucian and strictly hierarchical society. What was interesting was the way family ties were downgraded in favour of much broader social ties.
In China, those broader ties are very weak. We know this from many horror stories regarding orphans, peasants and the sick. And anybody having dinner with Chinese friends and seeing how they treat the waiters will know what I mean. It's even worse if it's a Xinjiang restaurant, or other "ethnic minority" restaurant. This reflects the fact that in China most people feel no moral imperative to respect or help people outside their circle of family and work relationships.
In contrast, I was impressed in Japan by the fact that social harmony extends far wider than such a narrow circle.
In some ways, the Japanese are now much more Confucian than the Chinese. Confucius used to say that people had to think carefully about which labels and categorisations applied to them, and then live up to those labels.
If you were a soldier or a farmer, you should be proud of your occupation and excel at it. This provided for a hierarchical but stable society, where respect ran up and down the chain.
That's disappeared in China. There is definitely no respect flowing "down" the chain, although lots of sycophancy flowing "up".
Japan was different. I now speak some Japanese and was therefore able to participate in the whole interplay between the service provider and the service receiver.
My Japanese friends taught me that I could no longer walk out of a restaurant ignoring the waiter completely as one does in China, or muttering a half-hearted thank-you, as one does in Britain.
No, I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to look the person in the eye and literally shout my appreciation for his/her hard work and the delicious food.
It strikes me that this social capital - this tradition of mutual support and respect - is one of Japan's greatest advantages, however irrational its economic policies can be.
In China, the economic policies are becoming ruthlessly utilitarian, but the country's social capital is being massively eroded. The new rich in China spend their money to highlight power and status. In Japan, the money goes in a way which highlights that person's "Japaneseness" - artefacts, hand-made kimonos, art, calligraphy, traditional houses.
The result is that in China you feel that you are living on the cusp of something nasty. If you are Western or Chinese and rich, you can lead a great life. If you are not one of the lucky few, you are facing a serious struggle.
But it's the New Year, and thus surely inappropriate to strike too gloomy a note.
It's wonderful that mothers, fathers, grandparents and children are getting together from all over China to celebrate the upcoming Year of the Pig.
The strength of family ties in China is indeed one of its strengths - it's just a pity that unlike Japan, ties to other members of society are so weak.
