Even Old Base in Yanan Changes : Daily Life Reflects Fresh Vision in Post-Mao China

For more than 11 years, from the end of the famed Long March until after World War II, Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese Communist Party and its Red Army made their headquarters here at Yanan, a sleepy but readily defensible market town in the remote reaches of north-central China.

Yanan (formerly spelled Yenan) was the crucible of China’s Communist revolution, its Valley Forge. It was in Yanan that Mao rebuilt the Chinese Communist Party from a tattered band of a few thousand survivors of the Long March to a force of more than a million. And it was from here that he directed the Communists’ successful campaign against Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.

Mao was not a man of sentiment or nostalgia, and once he settled in Peking, he never returned to Yanan. But if Mao were alive and were to come back to Yanan today, he would find many signs of change, indications that daily life in China has departed, in many ways, from the vision he once had for the country and its 1 billion people. For instance:

--Mao did not believe in population control. “The more people we have, the more powerful we are,” he once remarked, and his words were memorized by the entire nation. Now, the biggest billboard in downtown Yanan advertises the virtues of the one-child family.

--Particularly in his later years, Mao sought to wipe out religious influence in Chinese life. While Yanan was the Communist headquarters, “the Cave of the 1,000 Buddhas”--a shrine overlooking the town built in the Song Dynasty (960-1279)--was used by the party’s Central Committee as a print shop. But two years ago, the cave was reopened as a religious site, and it is now full of incense sticks brought in by Buddhists from the surrounding area.

--Under Mao, Western music was denounced as “bourgeois” and “lacking in class content.” Now, the anthem of the Cultural Revolution, “The East Is Red,” has fallen into disuse, and through the windows of the sooty old houses on the outskirts of Yanan a visitor can hear the recorded voice of John Denver singing “Country Roads.”

--Worst of all, from Mao’s point of view, on one of the main streets of Yanan, in a row of blue-painted, metal-frame shacks, China’s new class of getihu-- private entrepreneurs--are trying to earn some money selling straw hats, food and wine. A decade ago, Mao and his radical supporters would have looked on such an endeavor as the “tail of capitalism.”

There is nothing unique about modern-day Yanan. The signs of change seen here can be seen virtually everywhere in this gigantic nation, for in the 10 years since Mao died, daily life in China has undergone some startling transformations.

Sometimes the extent of China’s turnabout is misunderstood in the West. What has happened over the past decade falls far short of a revolution.

Harry Harding, a China specialist at the Brookings Institution, said in a recent interview, “There’s a tendency to exaggerate the change in some quarters, to accept wrongly the notion that China has renounced Marx or gone capitalist.”

In fact, what the Communist Party now seeks is not Western-style capitalism but a new form of socialism, in which the inefficiencies of a centrally planned economy would be minimized. The aim is to let production and price levels be determined increasingly by market forces rather than be fixed by the state, and to allow a private sector to develop for small-scale industries. The regime has emphasized, however, that it intends to preserve state ownership of major industry.

Still a Poor Country

Despite some economic advances, China is by world standards still an extremely poor, underdeveloped country. And despite the new importation of foreign technology and expertise, it is still a country where foreigners are deeply mistrusted.

Despite the eye-catching pictures showing the arrival of Cadillacs and fashion shows, China is still a land where most city dwellers wear plain, cheap clothing and ride bicycles or buses to work. And despite the new tolerance of private enterprise, the overwhelming majority of urban Chinese still toil away, often for life, at jobs assigned to them by the government.

In Yanan, people still live in huts, caves and drab, nondescript factory housing. Recreation facilities are so limited that children play Ping-Pong on the front steps of their houses, using bricks for a net. On the outskirts of town, where peasants gather to sell their produce, night soil collectors still ply their age-old trade, and a foreigner still attracts a crowd.

Nevertheless, as Harding and other China scholars point out, the shift in the direction of Communist Party policy since the death of Mao has brought about some remarkable alterations in everyday life in this often intractable, tradition-bound country.

These changes permeate even the tiniest details of Chinese life, such as ordinary speech. A decade ago, Chinese addressed one another as tongzhi-- comrade. Now, the term has fallen into disuse, and people often call one another shifu-- master.

Envoy Recalls Past

The changes affect the appearance of China’s cities, and the life style of its people. Clifford Borg-Marks, a young Maltese diplomat who came to China as a college student in 1975 and stayed on for more than a decade, recalled not long ago: “You know, in 1977 there was a single furniture store in all of Peking, a state-owned store, and people would sit outside it all night on the chance they would be able to buy something the next morning.

“There was only one place in Peking where you could buy plate glass, one restaurant in town where you could buy Mongolian hot-pot to eat. That was it, one place for everything.”

These days, by contrast, furniture is sold all over town, restaurants abound and most ordinary consumer goods can eventually be found--for a price. Indeed, visitors here from East European countries are often surprised to find how relatively plentiful food and consumer goods are here.

Early this year, shortly before leaving China for a new assignment, Borg-Marks said, “Now, when old friends from Peking University come over to our place, they look at the black-and-white TV set and say, ‘Boy, only black-and-white TV! You’re being pretty ascetic.’ ”

Morals Also Shift

Chinese are not only less ascetic about material goods than they were a decade ago; they are also less inhibited about sexual matters. When Mao ruled China, extreme puritanism was the order of the day. Dating, dancing, even colorful clothing were frowned on.

Now one sees young Chinese wearing stylish, well-cut clothing in all colors. An increasing number of divorces are blamed on “third parties,” the Chinese euphemism for adultery. Premarital sex has increased, too--activity that the official media often complain about and that the authorities try to counter with counseling and basic sex education.

The changes are most pronounced in the countryside, where 80% of the population lives. It was in rural China that Mao and the Communist Party first won the public acceptance that enabled them to take power. Now, once again, it is in rural China that the economic reform program spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death has taken root.

In what is now Zhuqiao township on the outskirts of the Sichuan city of Chengdu, manager Li Jiayu described in an interview the metamorphosis he has witnessed over the past decade.

“This used to be a people’s commune,” he said. “We had a commune system here for 20 years, and there were no changes in those 20 years. The income of the peasants went down a little bit. Apart from farming, you couldn’t engage in any business activities.”

Peasants Till Own Plots

Now, the people’s communes have been dismantled. Each peasant in the township has been given a small plot of land for his own consumption and another, separate plot to grow grain for sale to the state or on the open market.

Li heads the township’s business operations, which combine agriculture, industry and small-scale private endeavors. In township factories, workers stitch rabbit skins together for inexpensive garments and put the finishing touches on Swan brand parkas, all for sale overseas.

Such changes have paved the way for a steady increase in output and living standards for Chinese peasants. Rural industry is the fastest-growing sector of the Chinese economy. Grain production rose steadily through the early 1980s to the point where, in 1984, China’s grain harvest amounted to more than 400 million tons, the largest in this or any other country’s history.

Some agricultural experts warn that these increases cannot continue indefinitely. Indeed, last year, for the first time in half a decade, China’s grain harvest dropped off a bit.

“They have already gotten the easy gains,” a Western diplomat said in an interview. “It wasn’t so much any great thing they did, so much as just stopping the bad things and just letting the farmers grow.”

State Interference Reduced

A decade ago on the communes, peasants were told what crops to grow and in what quantities. Further, the commune system eliminated individual incentive to work hard and raise production, since all increases went to the state.

In effect, what the regime has done since Mao’s death has been to reduce state interference in the peasants’ lives. By adopting more of a hands-off policy, by simply permitting peasants to have their own small private plots and to keep at least a share of what is produced on them, the government has created the conditions for an increase in rural income.

The changes of the past 10 years have helped to narrow somewhat the huge gap in living standards between the countryside and the cities.

Chinese peasants are still much poorer than urban workers, but since Mao’s death they have been catching up. According to a survey by the State Statistical Bureau, per capita income for peasants rose by 15% a year between 1978 and 1984, while workers’ income increased by 8% a year. Workers and peasants are both spending more on clothing and consumer goods than ever before.

A decade ago, the Chinese, who have a passion for numbers, spoke of their desire to have “the four things that go round”--a bicycle, a watch, a sewing machine and an electric fan.

8 ‘Big Things’ to Buy

Now, the “rounds” are becoming passe, and in major cities people aspire to own the “eight new big things”--a camera, a tape deck, a television set, a refrigerator, a motorcycle, a washing machine, an air conditioner and a video recorder. Most of these are still beyond the reach of ordinary Chinese, but their dream of owning them is itself significant.

In order to spur the economy, China has had to open its doors to some extent to Western expertise, Western technology, Western businesses--and Westerners themselves.

Borg-Marks recalled how changes in China’s foreign policy produced dramatic, often humorous changes in daily life at Peking University:

“First, the Albanian students left, because of party differences. The Chinese officials called a meeting of all the foreign students and apologized for the rats in the dormitories. They blamed the rats on the Albanians. Then the Vietnamese students left, and then the Laotians. And finally, at the end, the Americans came, and the Chinese raised all the prices.”

10,000 Foreign Experts

By the end of 1985, there were more than 10,000 foreign experts working in China, teaching languages, translating, editing newspapers and advising Chinese enterprises. In addition, the foreign community includes several thousand more foreign business officials, most of them working in the 2,600 joint ventures that have been set up over the past decade between Chinese enterprises and foreign firms.

Foreign tourism to China also continues to increase. Last year, China received about 1.4 million foreign tourists who spent $1.3 billion--an increasingly important source of foreign exchange for the Chinese economy.

For its part, China has sent at least 37,000 of its own students to universities overseas, including an estimated 15,000 to the United States alone.

However, authorities here still keep foreigners at a considerable distance from Chinese society. The larger universities continue to set aside separate dormitories for foreign students. Virtually every work unit, no matter how small, has a “foreign affairs office” to handle contacts with foreigners. Recently China has permitted foreigners to live for short periods in local homes, but only after they register with the police.

Indeed, although daily life has changed radically over the past decade, the fundamental nature of Chinese society has not. China has changed less in the 10 years since Mao’s death than it did under his leadership after the Communist victory of 1949.

Some Practices Remain

If Mao were to return to Yanan today, he would see much evidence of material and cultural change. But he would also find some aspects of modern-day life to be quite familiar.

Signs of peasant superstition abound, despite the party’s efforts to eradicate it. Poverty and disease also persist, despite the vast improvements in public health that have been made in the countryside. On the streets of Yanan, many children have sores on their heads, and quite a few of them have what appear to be birth defects.

Finally, the contempt with which local officials regard ordinary citizens still exists. Although Mao railed against it repeatedly during his life, although Deng and his allies now complain about it, the Chinese bureaucracy persists, mistrustful of any efforts at change, whether by Mao, Deng or anyone else.

In Yanan, just before dawn one morning last spring, a fire broke out in one of the small shacks occupied by private businessmen. Before the blaze could be put out, three shacks had been gutted.

Later, overwhelmed with grief, the families who owned the shacks and ran the businesses shoveled through the blackened rubble looking for anything, even a bottle of wine, that could be salvaged. One said he had lost at least 10,000 yuan (more than $3,000) in the fire.

A foreign visitor asked a local official whether there would be any sort of insurance to cover the losses. The official laughed at the ignorance of the question.

“ Getihu have no insurance,” he said.