How does the city stay so clean??

China has consistently had a very low unemployment rate for a number of years. One would wonder how that is possible, given that it has a population of 1.3 billion people. I guess it is because China has taken upon itself the responsibility of employing every single person, even if that means they have to create (useless) jobs for people to do.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve noticed that the streets are immaculate. By that I mean that the flowers, trees and bushes are beautiful and there is no trash on the ground. However, not only is there no debris on the streets, there are also no leaves on the ground. “How is this possible?” you may ask? Well, they have leaf sweepers.

In the early morning they have someone drive through all of the streets spraying down all of the trees, knocking some of the dead leaves off of the tree. Then, later in the morning they have someone else sweep it all up using what looks like giant feather dusters. And since the city of Chengdu is so big, and there are many, many trees, there must be hundreds of people with this “leaf sweeper” title.

Yesterday I was waiting at a bus stop when a small car pulled up alongside me. Out jumped six people. Five were women who had large brooms and mops, and the other was a man, whose only job was to drive them from bus stop to bus stop. They then proceeded to all try to clean the bus stop at the same time. Five people did the work of what one person could have easily done in about the same time.