Peking Wary of ‘Spiritual Opium’ : Canton Goes Own Way as China’s New Boom Town

Early this month, the Canton Evening News called for a ban on late-night disco dancing and other forms of “capitalist dissipative night life” in this city.

Recalling an old Chinese expression, the newspaper said in an editorial that it feared the new forms of entertainment might turn the young people of Canton into “worms during daytime work but dragons at night.”

The editorial typified the current campaign by Chinese officials to assert some control over Canton, now the fastest-changing city in China. As has happened before in Chinese history, Canton is being accused of ignoring edicts from Peking and going its own independent way.

China’s urban economic reforms and its policy of opening up to the outside world have taken root in Canton much more quickly than anywhere else in the nation. Private storefront businesses abound, entrepreneurs negotiate with relish, and foreign companies rush in to make deals.

Relaxed Tolerance

At the same time, the city displays a relatively relaxed tolerance of prostitution, pornography, black-market transactions and the unsocialistic attitude that money comes first. Before the Communist victory in China’s civil war, Shanghai was considered the sinful center of foreign influences in China. Now, Canton has taken over this distinction.

Newcomers here, both Chinese and foreign, find it hard to believe that Canton (which since 1981 has been Los Angeles’ “sister city” in China) is really part of the People’s Republic.

While most of the rest of the mainland’s people still move around by bicycle, Cantonese are beginning to swerve through the city’s traffic-choked streets on Honda motorcycles, much like people in Bangkok and Taipei.

Dress Up and Shop

And on Sundays, young parents and their children dress up and wander freely through the shops and restaurants of new Hong Kong-style hotels--exactly the sort of Westernized establishments that ordinary Chinese residents of Peking and Shanghai are prohibited from entering.

For the last two years, traditionalists who oppose letting foreign influences into the country--mainly members of the conservative wing of the Communist Party--have been devising code words and phrases to explain their desire to maintain the status quo in China. Two years ago, the Chinese people were warned to guard against “spiritual pollution.” Last winter, it was “unhealthy tendencies.”

Now, during the last few months, the purists have come up with a catchy new phrase, one that seems aimed directly at Canton. The Chinese are being told to beware of “spiritual opium”--a phrase that calls to mind the time nearly 150 years ago when Canton and the surrounding area of Guangdong province were the entry point for the opium trade by British merchants in China.

In 1839, the Chinese Emperor Dao Guang in Peking dispatched a special commissioner named Lin Zexu to the Canton area with instructions to clean up the drug traffic.

Before his arrival, Lin sent an open letter to the “gentlemen, merchants, soldiers and peasants of Canton,” telling them that their province was notorious for opium-smoking and that authorities in Peking were determined to stop it. Lin’s efforts, which included the destruction of more than 1,300 tons of opium, soon resulted in war with Britain and the loss by China of Hong Kong Island.

This past summer, soon after having negotiated the eventual return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, the regime in Peking began calling up memories of Lin Zexu and honoring him as an authentic national hero. To mark the 200th anniversary of his birth, authorities put up statues, published stamps, sponsored academic symposiums and gave speeches warning the nation not to give in to the allure of “decadent bourgeois ideology.”

Villages Also Affected

Evidence of the changes that so concern the authorities in Peking extend outwards from Canton itself to the small towns and villages of Guangdong province.

One overseas Chinese woman with relatives in a small coastal town in the province traveled there recently for the first time since 1980 and said she was stunned by the transformation she saw.

“When I was there five years ago, relatives were asking me about televisions and refrigerators, how much they cost overseas, and so forth,” the woman said. “This time, people were asking me about the price of gold. They said they were buying gold to get it out of the country and help pay for their children’s education.

“The town was full of private shops, cafes and bars, where people would pay five yuan (about $1.67) just for the privilege of sitting down. The local fashions were so Westernized that I was no longer spotted instantly as a foreigner.”

Guangdong appears to have prospered more than any other area in China from economic reforms, initiated by Deng Xiaoping, China’s top leader, that tolerate a little small-scale private enterprise.

Last month, the official New China News Agency disclosed that Guangdong now has nearly a million self-employed people working in small businesses in which they have invested more than $230 million.

Yang Deyuan, the deputy governor of Guangdong, said at a recent conference of self-employed people in the province that he believes the private sector should be further developed. “The self-employed are playing an important role in developing social production, making life more convenient for the people and providing more jobs for the unemployed,” he said.

In Canton itself, economic growth has been so rapid that the city is suffering serious energy shortages. City officials acknowledge that the demand for power has increased so rapidly that they have been forced to close factories and cut off electricity to some residential districts for several hours at a time.

The special nature of Canton and the surrounding region is in large part a matter of geography.

Because of its location on the Pearl River delta, Canton has for centuries served as the “gateway to China” for foreigners. Now, more important, it is the Chinese city closest to Hong Kong, at a time when Hong Kong businessmen are flocking into China by the thousands.

At Canton’s posh China Hotel, which opened last year and offers its guests everything from bowling alleys to a delicatessen, approximately 60% of the clientele comes from Hong Kong, according to hotel spokesman Lisa Sheung.

Access to Consumer Goods

Canton is also the Chinese city closest to the special economic zones of South China where foreign goods can be imported duty-free. As a result, the city has closer and easier access to restricted consumer products from abroad than do Peking and Shanghai.

“Many of the motorcycles you see around here came in over the past year from Hainan Island,” a Chinese source here said. Last summer, the Chinese regime disclosed the existence of a massive scandal in which tens of thousands of cars, motorcycles and television sets were brought into Hainan’s duty-free zone and resold illegally to other areas inside China.

In the early days of Communist rule, Canton’s proximity to Hong Kong was considered more a liability than an asset.

Cantonese by the thousands sought to sneak across the border into the British colony, hoping to escape the poverty of this old and grimy port city. Nearly everyone in Canton knew of some neighbor or cousin with no apparent talent who had managed to achieve prosperity in Hong Kong.

Some Emigres Return

Now, some of these emigres and their children are returning to do business here, providing Canton with the sort of capital and management skills that are in short supply elsewhere in China.

As a result, Canton is faced with a new and different problem: Too many people from the rest of China want to move here. (The population of the Canton municipality is now 6.9 million, including 2.5 million in the city itself.)

“The economy is booming, so many enterprises and departments want to start up operations here,” said Xu Zhi, deputy secretary general of the Canton municipal government.

Beginning last year, both the State Council, China’s version of a Cabinet, and the Guangdong provincial government severely restricted the right to move to the Canton area. Now, any enterprise wanting to set up an office in Canton must pay the city government 10,000 yuan (about $3,300) for every new person it relocates here.

‘The Stink of Money’

Because of its new-found prosperity, Guangdong province has been the subject of some resentment in other parts of China. One Chinese reporter for a Hong Kong magazine noted last year that “visitors from the north . . . think that Guangdong is full of the stink of money. After returning home, some cadres even have made a lot of fuss about the ‘capitalist restoration’ in Guangdong.”

Until recently, the Chinese government did not seem to mind much. There is an old Chinese proverb about local autonomy that says, “The mountain is high and the emperor is far away.” Canton, 1,500 miles from Peking, was left free to develop pretty much as it wished.

This year, however, the regime has begun sending out the message that Canton should not stray too far. When Canton officials announced early this year that they would hold China’s first “beauty contest” in decades, Peking authorities made known their displeasure and ordered the event closed to the press.

At the end of a nationwide conference of Communist Party leaders last month in Peking, some high-ranking officials complained about prostitution, avarice and an abandonment of socialist ideology in coastal cities such as Canton.

Communist Party propaganda has even begun to feature new “exemplary figures” who refuse to succumb to the temptations of Canton.

Unselfish Worker Cited

Earlier this month, the newspaper Peking Daily told the story of a Communist Party member named He Baoxian who has been the chief of the dining car crew on a train from Peking to Canton for 10 years.

Despite suggestions by his friends and co-workers that he was being foolish, the story said, he has repeatedly declined to trade his Chinese currency for the highly prized foreign-exchange currency to which he has special access on the train. “I don’t want anything except more foreign exchange for the state,” he said.