Essay 25 China as seen in October-November, 1995

Essay 25
CHINA AS SEEN IN OCTOBER-NOVEMBER, 1995

On our trip to China in 1995, I was absolutely astounded to see the changes in Shanghai since we were there in l986. As usual, there appeared to be a beehive of activity, but this time the city had been transformed, and was being transformed by a veritable frenzy of construction.

I had been invited to visit Fudan University in Shanghai, where I gave a couple of lectures at the Center for American Studies. I was able to ask questions of people who maybe knew the answers, and could thus learn more than if we had been normal tourists. I was told that at present there were more than 10,000 construction projects! Perhaps even more amazingly, a good fraction of those were magnificent buildings of some considerable height, say 20 to 45 stories. These were frequently being built in clusters of five or more, and were scattered over a huge area. Shanghai covers a larger area than Los Angeles, so it is not possible to see a very large portion of the city from any one spot. Even so, no matter where you were, the horizon seemed to be filled with skyscrapers, partially built.

These constructions were not in the fashion of the tenement buildings one sees in New York or Chicago. They were elegant buildings, many gleaming in white tile, and appeared to be worthy of any city in the world, indeed, better than most. Everywhere, construction, day and night!


The mixture of the old and the new China was also fascinating. Every technology was seemingly being used in the most efficient manner. For example, where broken rock was needed, rock was being broken by men wielding huge sledge hammers. Where the most modern machines, trucks, communication facilities were needed, there they were. The object seemed to be the most efficient use of anybody and everything. Because workers are so plentiful, they are used in lieu of machines where that makes sense. But there seemed to be no shortages of equipment, i.e., sophisticated machines were everywhere rampant.

What could this mean? It was very difficult for me to comprehend what I was seeing. How was all of this being managed, and planned for, and paid for, and sustained? And how did this activity originate, when I had so little clue as to the future only nine years earlier?

So I asked that question. Who is responsible for all of this? The immediate answer was Deng Xaio Peng, but as he was reported to be in wheel chairs, and to either nod yes or no, or nod not at all when a paper was placed before him, it seemed unlikely to me that this was the entire answer. The next answer was that it was Zemin, a deputy, who was a native of the Shanghai region, and it was he who drew a ring around the Shanghai area, and five others, and proclaimed that, effectively, people living within those areas could be capitalists. He caused the government to subsidize the peasant farmers; food production immediately increased tremendously, and subsequently those peasants became enormously wealthy, with many millionaires being created. Some of this was underway in l986, for then we saw in action what is called the free market, where farmers brought their products into the city early every morning, sold them for cash, and got to keep everything they made more than a relative small amount of what I'd call tax. It may be that taxes were mostly avoided, considering the cleverness of peasants!


It will be tremendously interesting to see how all this plays out! I can’t really believe that it is possible for a country to allow some people to be capitalists, and at the same time to keep huge numbers of people in a state that can only be considered slavery. Also, the peasants now have access (not all, of course) to some TV. While everything is controlled, still there are Chinese who are learning for the first time that there exists a world outside of China--and a world that is filled with things beyond their imaginings. Incidentally, weather forecasts are prohibited! I concede, however, that the communist doctrine that power comes from the barrel of a gun is powerfully successful in keeping dissidents quiet.

Meanwhile, few in the US ever have any really factual information about what is going on in China. I consider myself reasonably well read, but I was totally unprepared for what I saw in Shanghai. China’s interior was mostly the “Old China”, but there were signs of an encroachment of western ideas and technologies almost everywhere.

We’re in for a good many surprises vis-a-vis China, and there won’t be many that we will like, at least from a political point of view. But I remain confident that communist systems will ultimately fall of their own weight. The time scale for this is problematic, and I am keenly aware that 100 years is a very short time, and that 2 years can be very long.

I would like to live long enough to see China become a successful republic.
That doesn’t seem very likely, but we can always have hope.