Standing on the Brink of the Chinese Century
By Charlie Cook
© National Journal
November 18, 2003
XIBAIPO, China -- Here in Hebei Province,
the political maneuvering in Washington and the ups and downs
of House,
Senate, gubernatorial, and even presidential election campaigns
somehow feel smaller and less consequential than they do
at home.
While the question of who will win the 2004 American presidential
race is fascinating even from this great distance, day-to-day
American political posturing and developments take on a smaller
and perhaps more life-size proportion. Even for a die-hard
political junkie, major developments in, say, the Oklahoma
and South Carolina Senate races seem a bit less earth-shaking
when viewed from half a world away.
And the tremendous changes that are transforming China and
the global economy seem more gripping when observed far from
the minutiae of campaign developments back home. The contrasts
within China are mind-boggling.
With its 1.2 billion people, China is like a very long train
on which the locomotive and first few dozen cars have easily
entered the 21st century and are just as modern as the United
States and Western Europe. But on the endless train that
is China, the caboose and much more than half of the cars
are still crawling along through the 18th century, if indeed
they have
progressed that far.
In Beijing, a city of 15 million people, almost every other
ear seems to have a cellphone attached to it. The city teems
with just about every American food franchise short of Hooters
-- not just the ubiquitous McDonalds, but Kentucky Fried
Chicken, Kenny Rogers Roasters, Baskin-Robbins, and Dairy
Queen. Even in the ancient Forbidden City, a very discreet
Starbucks is tucked away.
The Oriental Plaza Mall is less than a mile from Tiananmen
Square and closely resembles a large, upscale American mall,
such as Tysons Corner or White Flint. Perhaps the biggest
difference is that in the Oriental several car dealerships
have mini-showrooms, each with a handful of cars on display
and an automaker's branded paraphernalia for sale to the
tens of thousands of shoppers passing by.
Auto sales have become a big business in the world's largest
country. My 14-year-old son, David, salivated at the half-dozen
Ferraris in what looked like a more traditional dealership
parking lot in downtown Beijing. And BMW recently opened
its first plant in China to manufacture cars for domestic
Chinese consumption.
In many parts of Beijing, gigantic cranes loom in all directions.
Construction is everywhere. And every day, thousands of Chinese
move into the city to fill construction jobs as well as lower-level,
service-sector jobs, though many apparently return home at
harvest time to help the family bring in the crops.
Beijing, like so many other booming cities in Asia, is increasingly
becoming "yuppiefied," although it has not yet
become as brand-name-conscious as, say, Tokyo is today. But
Asia hands predict that this too will change soon enough.
The Westernization of China is evident all around, as is
the people's fascination with the United States. It's hard
for an American to walk two blocks in Beijing without being
stopped by some young man or woman.
These young Chinese aren't hawking wares or their bodies.
They are just eager to try out the English language skills
they learned in school. On my previous trip to China, a young
Chinese tried to strike up an English conversation with me
by asking, "Are you from California?"
I'm told that the English-speaking Chinese in China outnumber
the English-speaking Americans in the United States. Even
though the fluency of the Chinese who speak English varies
widely, that's still an amazing statistic -- and an embarrassing
one, given how little Chinese most Western visitors know.
But in this remote mountain village, some 600 miles southeast
of Beijing, Western influences are much more muted. At the
elementary school I visited, not one child in a third-grade
class had ever met a "round-eye" -- a Westerner.
Dressed in bright-blue shirts with red, Boy Scout-style
scarves around their necks, these children looked at their
foreign visitors with amazement. Initially, they seemed almost
fearful, but soon warmed up to us. The contrast between those
earnest and extremely well-disciplined Chinese youngsters
and the rambunctious kids in classrooms in the United States
was
amazing.
In this part of China, three generations of a family typically
live together in a four-room stone or brick house. (Virtually
nothing here is built of wood.) Most houses have two doorways
opening onto a courtyard that is surrounded by a six-foot
stone or concrete wall.
In the courtyard, chickens run loose, and a couple of pigs
may be rooting around in a pen ringed by stones or dug into
a hillside. Few houses have outside doors. Instead, residents
hang blankets in the doorway and pull them aside for ventilation.
Cooking is done over an open fire.
The only obvious sign that we weren't seeing a Chinese village
of 200 years ago was that every house seemed to have a refrigerator,
a television, and, up on the roof, a rusting satellite dish.
Everyone seemed to live in the village and to farm nearby
plots of land, some smaller than a putting green.
The people cultivate every available flat or nearly flat
arable patch, and on the houses' flat roofs, they spread
corn to dry, still on the cob.
Although Mao Zedong had his headquarters near here when
he led the Communist revolution against Chiang Kai-shek and
the Nationalists in the late 1940s, political and economic
events have largely passed this village by. Life today is
little different from the way it was before Mao and Chiang
were born.
One exception is that a degree of democratization is taking
place on the local level. The vote count in a recent local
election was posted on a large blackboard on a stone wall
beside the village's main street. Also posted were an itemized
account of official village expenditures and other community
news.
Village elections here are held in three stages. First,
villagers vote to select an elections committee to oversee
the balloting. The second vote is to narrow the field of
contenders for mayor from six to three. The third round of
voting is a runoff to select one of the three to take office.
For Xibaipo's farmers, though, government doesn't seem terribly
relevant, except for running the schools. The villagers raise
chickens, cows, hogs, sheep, and goats, and they grow corn,
wheat, and cabbage.
Certain crops and animals are raised for the family's consumption
or for barter. Others are sold to distant state-owned stores
or on the open market. The state-owned stores attempt to
stabilize prices, which tend to fluctuate with production
levels.
Except for the presence of televisions and refrigerators,
life for today's villagers seems to differ little from what
it was for their great-grandparents. And aside from souvenir
stands for the tourists visiting Mao's old headquarters,
there is not a store of any sort within perhaps 30 miles.
But now the village has a brand-new computer lab, built
by UPS executives, including CEO Mike Eskew; a quartet of
lawmakers; my son; and me. My trip to China was to speak
to a conference that UPS holds each year for its key public-affairs
people from the United States and 10 other countries. For
the
past five years, the conference has included building a computer
lab or classroom in a rural, low-income area -- in Montana,
Maryland, Mexico, or now, for a second time, in the Hebei
Province of China.
We started at 7 o'clock one morning with only a concrete
slab and two huge containers of building materials shipped
from the United States. By 4 the next afternoon, a 28-by-30-foot
computer lab, with 25 working, Internet-connected computers
was ready to be dedicated.
The project had no prima donnas. The lawmakers, who participated
thanks to the US Asia Foundation, all pitched in with gusto,
as did their relatives. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., had brought
his daughter. Rep. Dennis Moore, D-Kan., Rep. John Shimkus,
R-Ill., and Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Conn., all brought
their wives.
In this era of venomous partisanship on Capitol Hill, it
was terrific to watch these members construct something together.
Party lines, ideology, and seniority were cast aside; the
lawmakers seemed to enjoy the chance to escape the confines
of Washington and get to know one another better.
Congress would be a far better and more effective institution
if every member had a chance to leave the country and engage
in an activity like building a computer lab for poor people.
For UPS, the project was smart on several levels. Having
won its first direct-landing routes into China within the
last three years and knowing how highly the Chinese value
friendships, UPS sought to demonstrate a commitment to China.
The company also forged special relationships with several
U.S. elected officials.
Perhaps the biggest reward for the hands-on builders, though,
was the way the village children's faces lit up when they
first walked through their school's new computer center.
That lab literally opens a gateway from the village to the
rest of the world.
As a matter of culture and history, the Chinese people don't
ordinarily touch others, outside their own family. Simply
shaking hands is relatively new and far from universal. Yet
the opening of the computer lab produced hugs for the American
builders.
China remains a country of enormous contradictions and potential
for growth. The Chinese recently put their first astronaut
into space, becoming only the third nation to do so and the
first since the United States did it in 1961. Yet in the
countryside, oxen pulling plows, tricycle mopeds carrying
a live, trussed-up hog to market, and three-wheeled trucks
looking at least 50 years old are commonplace.
One leaves China with the sense that the United States could
become its friend or its enemy. With its vast human resources,
once this massive country fully enters the 21st century,
China will likely transform the era. We may soon be living
in the Chinese Century. |
