Perspective: Country of Contradictions

Today's China is still dictatorial yet freer; awash with poverty yet one of the world's fastest growing economies; suspicious of outsiders yet eager to step onto the world stage with the 2008 Olympics.

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By ROBYN E. BLUMNER

Our guide through Beijing, Fan Heng Sheng, or "Hanson" as he asks us to call him, tells us this story matter-of-factly using the amplification system on the bus:

Four years ago the local police station called his mother to inform her that Hanson had to turn in his hunting rifle. A new national program was being implemented that required everyone to turn in their guns. "Don't worry, Hanson," the police told him, "we will hold your gun for you." Hanson said he treasured his rifle, but knew he had to give it up or face five to seven years in prison. So he turned it in, but not before removing all its internal mechanical parts.

Here Hanson smiles.

The sabotage was a small assertion of will, a minor transgression in protest over being unjustly stripped of his property. And it is this newfound independence streak in the populace that has the leadership in China both deeply worried and hesitantly encouraged.

If this seems contradictory, it is. China sees its future in embracing economic dynamism and entrepreneurialism, while at the same time being scared to death by the prospect.

China is in the throes of a tumultuous period of change. Remember isolationist China, protectionist China, collectivist China? Well, wipe that away. Now try: wireless China, bottom-line China and individualistic China. When Deng Xiaoping said in the late 1970s, "to get rich is glorious," a large number of China's 1.3-billion people exhaled and got to work. You can feel the kinetic energy. On the ground in Shanghai, natty dress has replaced the boxy Mao tunic; and in Beijing, construction cranes level dilapidated houses to build yet another luxury skyscraper.

The modern accoutrements and dizzying skylines are far removed from the China of just 20 years ago. But they also have the feel of a Hollywood movie set. Move beyond the premier cities and China is still largely a poor, rural, uneducated country. For all its newfound financial freedom and stylish buzz, China is still authoritarian and censorious. There is no free press, no free religion and no tolerated political opposition. Any adherence to the rule of law is at least a generation away, and visitors are warned by the State Department that they could be detained without cause.

This is China -- a cauldron of contradictions: Dictatorial yet freer in some ways than ever before; awash with economic dislocation and poverty yet one of the fastest growing economies in the world; suspicious of outsiders yet now eager to step onto the world stage with the 2008 Olympics and to join the World Trade Organization.

China's most prickly conundrum is a decision it's been trying to avoid but will ultimately be forced to make: Which is more important, micromanagement by the state to retain social order or economic prosperity? It wants both, it's trying to have both, but it can't. The use of state controls on the economic sector retains stability but chokes off growth. Yet, when controls are lifted, people lose their livelihoods in the name of competition, leading to disaffection and dissatisfaction. Then there are those who succeed in a free economy. Their acumen brings self-confidence in their own judgments and an independence of finance and thought. Not an assuring prospect for China's unelected central government.

These opposing forces -- the push for freedom and the pull of control -- are now dangerously whipsawing the country. It's hard to know what kind of China will emerge on the other side.

And we're off

As a group of 24 editorial writers and columnists from the United States and Canada, we are traveling for the purpose of understanding a country that has a 5,000-year-old culture and a reputation for putting up a false front for outsiders.

We have two weeks.

Officially we are sponsored by the foreign ministry. Sponsorship by a Chinese government office or organization is necessary for a group of journalists to get visas. But before the foreign ministry formally agreed -- about three weeks before our departure date -- a great deal of detailed information had to be provided about our intentions. Through China's embassy in Washington, we were asked to communicate who we are, what newspapers we work for, where we wanted to go, who we wanted to see and what questions we were interested in exploring. This was all ostensibly to help us fulfill the goals of the trip, but it also had the feel of control.

In China, our national guide is Liu Xiao Jie, who accompanies us throughout Shanghai, Xian and Beijing, but leaves us as we board the plane to Hong Kong, where mainland Chinese are barred without a special permit. Liu is a modest, gracious man who later in the trip loosens up enough to sing a snippet of Chinese opera over the bus' sound system and then leads the group in an "American" song he knows: Edelweiss from the Sound of Music.

We don't know whether Liu is making reports to the government. He claims otherwise, but it's impossible to know for sure. For the first few days of the trip, this question is the source of much tittering and speculation. After that, though, no one seems to care whether Liu is a spy. We like him either way.

The trip itinerary was arranged by submitting requests to the Chinese embassy, which were then forwarded to the foreign ministry. Our most Western stop is Xian, home of the famed terra cotta warriors, the 7,000 larger-than-life soldiers created to guard the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang 2,200 years ago. It is here that we are promised an opportunity to visit a rural farming village in order to see how 68 percent of Chinese live.

Before leaving the states, our group was briefed by China experts from the University of California at Berkeley. They tell us that the agricultural sector of China is seriously suffering. The collective farms that existed under Mao Zedong have been sliced up and leased to the peasantry. But arable land is relatively scarce. Each farm plot is only a small strip, sometimes carved in a ziggurat into the side of a mountain. Interestingly, despite these tiny plots, productivity went up after privatization. People using hand tools were able to produce more when working for themselves than they had on large collective farms using tractors. Still, with the abandonment of most government price supports, farm incomes have been dropping.

Officially, China reports that 42-million of its people live in poverty, which it defines as less than $50 per year. If you use the World Bank's standard of poverty, which is less than $1 a per day, more than 200-million Chinese are acutely poor -- 18.5 percent of the population.

The persistent poverty in agricultural villages is leading to restlessness and instability. In an unusually blunt assessment, a recent investigative report by a top Communist Party research group describes a spike in demonstrations and riots by farmers angry about local corruption and the growing inequality between China's haves and have nots.

But this is not what we saw at our tour of Xia He, the rural village handpicked for our viewing. As soon as we arrive, more than a dozen men, women and children pounce on us with souvenirs, faux terra cotta warriors, postcards and colorful trinkets. This village is the birthplace of one of the men who discovered the buried warriors in 1974, and today half of the income of the village comes from tourism.

No one is starving here. The single-story brick houses are compounds really, each with detached kitchens and bathrooms. The amenities are rudimentary but comfortable. All seem to have electricity and television. To add to our suspicions, we are told that when President Clinton visited Xian in 1998, he also was taken to this "rural" village.

This is not the harsh reality of agricultural China, where men are heading for the cities leaving women, children and old people behind to fend for themselves (which might explain why suicide is the No. 1 cause of death for rural women between 19 and 45.) This is the contrived, Disneyland edition. We are told the village is just slightly better than the median level of how rural peasants live. The claim is unconvincing, and we leave the village feeling duped and weighed down by the bulk of souvenirs we purchased.

The floating population of China tells a much more desperate story of life outside the cities. No one is officially allowed to move within the country without a hukou or residence permit. However, today there is an estimated "floating population" of 130-million people -- half the size of the entire U.S. population. These are people who left the hardscrabble farms and came to the cities seeking any kind of opportunity, but they do not have government permission to be there.

In Shanghai, groups of men sit on street corners. Next to them lie their tools: paint rollers, brushes, masonry tools. As day laborers, they sit and socialize together, waiting for someone to come by and offer them work. In the same way that America's illegal immigrants are condemned yet welcomed by those who need their cheap labor, so too are members of China's floating population. They do much of the dirty work without accessing the government's social services.

Emptying the Iron Rice Bowl

The Iron Rice Bowl was the promise of Communism: In exchange for government control, employment was guaranteed for life. Uncompetitive state-run factories weren't just places to work; they were centers of life, providing everything from day care to shelter. "In the old China, there was a steel factory that was really a community of 180,000 people," said Kevin O'Brien, a China expert at the University of California at Berkeley. "The factory's manager told me that, of the 30,000 employees, 20,000 could be fired without affecting production."

But when Deng Xiaoping began restructuring state-owned enterprises into competitive businesses, factories started closing, others downsized and people were laid off. The iron rice bowl of Communism was becoming the porcelain one of capitalism. Some people were being left behind, and, in China, "some" is a lot of people.

Today, the country's unemployment rate stands at more than 10 percent. In order for the economy to absorb those tens of millions of workers, plus the flood of new labor entering the work force every year, the economy must grow at an impossibly high rate. But the rapid double-digit growth of the 1980s has slowed. Last year, China's officially reported growth rate was 7.8 percent, and Western experts say it was really half that. To come close to the kind of growth needed to maintain stability, China's leaders believe their best hope is to join the WTO.

Accession to the WTO, the organization that promotes and polices free and fair trade practices around the world, has eluded China for 15 years. Officials of a non-governmental organization on China's accession claim the reason is that the United States has stood in the way "to keep China weak."

Closer to the truth is that China, once a command economy, is still a place where the government controls or subsidizes most economic activity and where high tariffs burden foreign goods. Fair trade requires transparency and even-handedness, but the application of law here is a "who you are, who you know" affair. The corruption problem is so severe that American industries doing business in China refuse to rely on the civil legal system for the enforcement of contracts, instead using private arbitrators. Only 2 percent of China's judges have any legal training. It's not important to understand the law if you have no intention of actually applying it.

Nonetheless, China's entry into the WTO is expected to occur at the Nov. 4 meeting in Doha, Qatar. In June, Washington and Beijing announced an understanding on trade issues, which means the United States now supports China's bid to join.

The sticking point had been over the degree to which China could subsidize its farming sector. Under the WTO agreements, the Unites States will have substantially freer access to China's agricultural markets, and that has China worried. Feng Jun, director of consulting for the Shanghai WTO Affairs Consultation Center, sharply told us that: "Ninety percent of the population is dependent on farming. If agricultural products come in from the states, it could be a problem for us. If the economy and population is not stable then the government is not stable."

Feng gets so agitated, he lets loose a torrent of angry words about the suffering that China will endure due to U.S. demands. His emotions aside, Feng does make a fair point. The North American Free Trade Agreement may have negatively impacted some American farming and manufacturing jobs, but would we have been willing to open North American trade had a huge percentage of Americans depended on those sectors for their living? I wonder.

The next generation

Walking the streets of Jerusalem a dozen years ago, I remember looking into the faces of the old men and women and thinking of their lives and struggles: every one a soldier, a survivor, a nation builder.

Those thoughts came back to me on the streets of Shanghai, as I watched dozens of elderly men and women embrace the early morning with ritual exercises. Their faces were serenely blank as they followed a leader through slow, fluid, synchronized movements of tai chi.

They had lived through it all: the privations of the Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution, Mao's cult of personality, his distrust of education and individuality, and the last two decades of breathless modernization. These men and women had their lives defined by others. They were used to going along, unquestioningly following a leader, and keeping an inner calm as the next wave of change washed over them.

Sharing their sidewalks, the next generation was busily going to work. A few were in cars, but most were on buses, bicycles and trolleys. They wore Western dress, some with cell phones to their ear, some swinging attaches, but all were walking fast. After all, they have a lot of catching up to do. After thousands of years of feudal history, China wants off the farm; and to that end, the country expects much of its future generations.

Especially in light of China's "one child" limited population growth policy, there is tremendous pressure on young people to succeed in school and make it in the new economy.

Here, though, is where China's transition bumps into tradition. How do you inject the creative thinking necessary for economic dynamism into a culture where independent thought and challenging questions are considered impertinent and even punishable offenses?

Xue Jian Ping, vice principal of Shanghai High School, greets us stiffly in a large room paneled with plastic made to look like wood. Despite its outward gaudiness, this school has pedigree -- it was founded 132 years ago and is where China's elite send their children.

Without any prompting, Xue talks extensively about his students' creative endeavors; how students do independent research and must draw their own conclusions. We encourage students to have a sense of questioning, Xue says. "No question, no discovery, no creating."

Then Xue outlines the students' schedule: 6 a.m. is wake up, 6:20 is exercises, and it goes that way until 9:30 p.m., when lights are to be turned out. Every minute of the day is defined.

The future

Whether we in the United States like it or not, China is part of our future. Economically, more than 100 U.S.-based multinationals have business interests there, and companies such as McDonalds and General Motors have significant plans for growth and expansion.

Politically, things are not as rosy. China is the elephant in the world's living room. We may not want to notice, but it's there lurking, an overwhelming presence. It would serve our interests to be as sophisticated and as nuanced as we can. When President Bush said China is a "strategic competitor," as opposed to President Clinton's use of "strategic partner," the Chinese read competitor as enemy. This kind of language plays into those who claim America wants China weak and humiliated.

Still, China's leaders claim they want to look more like us.

We have no way of knowing if Zhou Wenzhong, assistant minister at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is sincere or merely playing to his audience when he says he sees a China of the future as a more open society "where people air their views freely about what's going on in the country." He says he sees a China where there are more direct elections and a separation between the Communist Party and the state. And that ultimately "the goal is to turn China into a civilized, democratic and modern country."

His words sound promising to American ears. But then I think back to all the signs that this is just empty talk: the day that the International Herald Tribune arrived at our hotel with the same page excised from every edition because it reported on a Chinese arrest of religious dissidents; the way practitioners of Falun Gong have been demonized to such a degree that even the Catholic Bishop of China told us he believes the crackdown is justified; the meeting at Beijing University where professors who had been part of the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 express gratitude for the "re-education" they've received.

This is the China puzzle. Will it emerge a democratic country that respects individual rights or will it remain tightly state-controlled and autocratic even as it adopts the technological and consumerist veneer of modernism?

We will know soon enough.

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