Three Weeks in China

My interest in China probably began during a chat with my good friends Venora and Josh while we were traveling together in Rio. They told me a bit about their families' histories and the Tiananmen Square massacre which happened in 1989. I wanted to go to China to learn more about the country with so much history, and also since I'm interested in business and politics and China is pretty important.

I arrived in Beijing via sleeper train (a relatively smoke-free experience, thankfully), and one hour later I was at Tiananmen Square. It is massive - much more than I expected for a "city square." I tried to picture it just 19 years ago, filled with thousands of pro-democracy students protesting the government, and soon completely surrounded by government officers and tanks, closing off any possible exit route and blasting the students until everyone was dead.

I looked at the painting of Mao that looks over Tiananmen Square. I tried to imagine what it was like to live during the time of Mao's rule in the 1950's through 1970's. Mao militarily forced sweeping reforms that drastically changed the Chinese way of life and killed millions. He first instituted the Great Leap Forward, which forced peasants to abandon family farms and migrate to massive communal farms. Millions were unable to adjust to the new style of farming and widespread famine resulted. After that failed, Mao tried an even harsher policy - the Cultural Revolution. He eliminated all the "olds" of Chinese culture including arts, religion, and even thoughts. He enlisted in the young generation to spy on their parents, and report or beat anyone who might disagree with the Communist Party.

Nearly 100 years of national tragedy and civil wars had led to Mao's rising and the founding of the new communist People's Republic of China in 1949. Beginning in 1840 - after thousands of years of relatively isolated existence - China suffered through invasion by Europe and Japan: Brits forcing Chinese to buy Opium and taking over Hong Kong, and Japanese - as the "superior Asian race" - invading and raping thousands of Chinese women.

(The Chinese remain resentful toward the Japanese to this day, but relations are beginning to improve. During my trip, two significant events occurred. China's president Hu Jintao visited Japan and loaned Japan a pair of pandas, and - making front page of the NYT this week- a Japanese warship visited China as a diplomatic gesture.)

After Mao's death, China's communist government changed tactics again, and started moving toward more capitalist policies of industry, trade and wealth. Industrial towns and factories sprang up, and the "Made in China" tags started being sewn on clothing and stamped on toys. (Though the U.S. and China didn't like each other in the 1970's, they both hated the Soviets more. Richard Nixon visited Mao before his death, to form a new alliance between democratic United States and communist China.... surely a shock to the world in Cold War times.) By the 1980's, the groundwork for trade between China and the Western world was complete and began rapidly charging ahead faster than the Maglev train. (In response to the Tiananmen Square massacre, the United States conveniently took a stance of "engagement without endorsement" and kept on with business as usual.)

SO, after all these years of drastic cultural and economic changes, famine, natural disasters, massacres, etc.... visiting China today was an overwhelming experience, to say the least.

The analogy that made the most sense to me came from a Brit I met in Lijiang, Mark, who had been traveling through the 'Stans for over a year: "It's basically the Gold Rush." (Mark was one of the few Europeans I've met who is pro-American. Bashing America has become kind of the "in" thing to do, not necessarily because of Iraq or annoyance at loud obviously-American tourists, but because somehow we managed to elect Bush ("Yo, Blair!") not just once, but twice. But Mark is sympathetic to Americans because with us it's, "You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't," and within all the bashing on the backpacker circuit, there isn't much real, intelligent dialogue.)

Anyways, Gold Rush. Everyone in China is an entrepreneur.... From the man following us with a horse in Tiger Leaping Gorge, to the woman in Yangshou trying to up-sell me milk with my coffee. Most hotels we stayed at were filled with businessmen, and had "massage parlors" open until 2 a.m. China's 70 million government officials are entrepreneurs as well. Apparently corruption runs rampant at the local government level, and you can bribe your way through nearly anything. I was told by a few people that most Chinese don't actually care about politics; it's not in their interest to. They've figured out how to navigate the system.

Actually, I heard and read several times that many Chinese - even some pro-democracy advocates - believe that China just isn't ready for a Democratic Government right now. China has the world's largest population - which is spread out across a massive area and has high illiteracy in the countryside. After so many years of drastic change and tragedy, many people want China to exist as-is for awhile and not throw yet another major change at the people.

China took capitalist Hong Kong back from the British in 1997, and operates under the Communist government as "one nation, two systems." But for a communist country, China has policies (er, lack-of policies) that would make many free-market capitalists envious. For example, the chief of the Nigerian Investment Commission said, "The USA will talk to you about governance, about efficiency, about security, about the environment. The Chinese just ask: "How do we procure the license?" Much to the protest of human rights activists, China trades arms for oil with Sudanese warlords, and despite protest from the Dalai Lama maintains a tight hold on Tibet... sparking many anti-China protests during the Olympic torch rally.

On the other side, I can see where Chinese Nationalism also exhibited during the rally comes from. The Chinese view Western countries as hypocrites, because in our heyday we had no problem with human and environmental crimes such as plowing down forests, polluting the earth, taking land from Native Americans and owning slaves. Now that we've become rich and developed from such crimes, we tell China not to do it. China has human rights organizations working on such issues, which they don't feel they get credit for. In response to many years' criticism from the United States, China issued it's own report on America in 2005 beginning with, "American society is characterized with rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people's rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee for people's rights to life, liberty and security of person."

One of the dumbest things I heard during my last job was from a fellow rep, poo-poo-ing hybrid cars and saying, "It's not us - it's the damn Chinese." China - as a nation - is the biggest polluter in the world. But Americans - as individuals - are the biggest individual polluters in the world. If Americans - in all our technological advances - don't take serious steps to adjust our environmentally-destructive ways, then China certainly won't.

Yesterday, I read an op-ed by Ye Tan in the government's China Daily, which mentioned the weak dollar policy the United States has continuously maintained. The words "weak dollar policy" caught me off-guard, since it implies that we intentionally want our dollar to be weak. I asked my guide about it, and said that since the U.S. is so in-debt to the Chinese, we benefit from a weak dollar because then we ultimately owe less. I told him I was surprised because when I usually read about the weak dollar, it's in the context of other economic pains like the crap economy and high price of oil - not written about as an intentional strategic foreign policy. He laughed. "No - and Ye Tan is a good economist and one of the few journalists who can get away with criticizing the government."

Others on the tour, enjoying this conversation, delightfully threw in their 2 cents, "America is threatened by China's rising power." (Also, in response to a question of "What factors make a country Developing or Developed?" one of the New Zealanders jokingly hypothesized "quality of toilets." In a bus ride through the countryside last week, we used public toilets with no doors or actual toilets - just holes in the ground vaguely separated by small barriers. The word shithole suddenly had actual meaning. A week later, we would be in Beijing, surrounded by Lamborghini and Jaguar dealerships, and hundreds of official government vehicles - black Audi A6's with tinted windows...)

That afternoon, still disturbed by the supposed Weak Dollar Policy, I decided to answer it the same way I solve all life's problems: Googling. Despite reports of Google's censorship deal with China back home, I've had great luck with Google here. I was able to research some of China's forbidden topics, such as the Dalai Lama and Tiananmen Square, and fully accessed Wikipedia. The hard part has been actually finding internet cafes, which - while legal - are usually tucked away in basements to avoid too much attention.

The first article I found was from Business Week in 2005, "Bush's Worrisome Weak Dollar Policy," which acknowledges that our dollar is weak because we run such a high deficit (though it seems that it is more of a result from other policies like Iraq, not a deliberate way to undermine the Chinese.) It also says China buys up our dollars to keep it's currency undervalued and it's products underpriced to be more marketable in international trade.

Hmmm. I have no idea how it all actually works, but I do think that the complex relationship between the world's largest developed country and world's largest developing country is quite an interesting topic.

One of my favorite things in China has been the people. I did not have a single bad incident and loads of Chinese from government officials to farmers has smiled and said "Nee-how!" Many people around my age approached me and excitedly talked to me in English. I realize China has a lot of issues - from "cultural genocide" in Tibet, to women's rights issues including abortions resulting from the one-child policy and prostitution, to extreme gaps in social classes between businessmen and peasants, and finally gaps between generations - parents who grew up under Mao's oppression and their children who learn business and English in schools. For so much tragedy in their recent past, they certainly seem like a happy group.