Sleeping Giant Decides to Rise and Shine
I wasn’t prepared for China. Not this China. Not the Audis crowding the roads or the low-slung Ferrari in the hotel valet parking lot. Or the grand opening of Tiffany’s Beijing. Or the gleaming banks--as in development banks and export banks--along almost every commercial block. Or the crazy symphonies of perpetually ringing cell phones everywhere I turned, all personalized to the musical tastes of their bearers. Or the Olympic-bid spit and polish of the city boulevards and gardens.
I wasn’t prepared to hear people talk about the imposed class equality of communism with the same kind of past-tense finality that they express for the imposed class inequality of Imperial rule.
I wasn’t prepared for the unstoppable, world-winning confidence that so many Chinese seem to wear on their sleeves. I wasn’t prepared to see dirty beggars on the sidewalks either.
“We have a saying,” a man who uses the Western name of Daniel told me. “We will have to let some people get rich first so that the rest of us can follow.” Finding a Mao button required a search, really.
I arrived in China for a two-week visit with the standard conceit of a Westerner. That is, China looms as a “potential market” for us. I quickly learned a different perspective: China regards the world as its market. Given its size and determination, China’s perspective may be closer to the coming truth, as Western companies stampede to join in the country’s vehement manufacturing expansion. “The big question,” Jeffrey E. Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management, observed recently, “is whether the world economy is becoming so dependent on China as an industrial lifeline that it will soon be dangerously vulnerable to a major supply disruption....
“In other words,” Garten wrote in the June 17 issue of Business Week, “will China’s importance to global manufacturing soon resemble Saudi Arabia’s position in world oil markets?”
Capitalism and free markets bring the promise of not just material advancement but freedom to the Chinese, or so we tell ourselves.
Not all Westerners swallow the line. In the June issue of Harper’s magazine, writer Barry Lynn suggests that China’s looming dominance, even control, of global industrial production may perversely position the West as having to support, not challenge, China’s ruling elites.
Visitors on official business are advised to bring small, ceremonial gifts for Chinese officials. The gifts should be made in our homeland, we’re told, and symbolize the region in which we live. Not an easy task to wander through U.S. gift shops and find something--anything--that suggests Southern California but is not made in China or elsewhere abroad.
Some of my travel companions settled on postage stamps, or just greenbacks folded in envelopes. Not an impressive showing, I’m afraid.
Undeveloped, developing, developed. That’s the journalistic shorthand by which nations are characterized. China is at least two of the three. The tallest things around seem to be construction cranes lifting new skyscrapers higher still above the cities. In Guangzhou, a mountain park has been used for centuries as a place to gaze down on the city and the undulating Pearl River. Today you mount the summit and your eyes are drawn upward to a glass high-rise of modern China.
People still read newspapers and fliers posted on neighborhood bulletin boards. But they also throng into bookshops so big as to swallow up the city-block-size Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Ore., the largest in the United States. Prominently displayed are translations of Western tomes about winning at business and local authors advising on home decor and entertaining.
My guidebook speaks of “authentic” donkey carts just outside Beijing on the 50-minute drive to the Great Wall. But since that book was written, someone has plowed up parts of the countryside and erected a sprawl of single-family housing tracts that could have been copied from California.
That’s what I wasn’t prepared for in this China of today: The powerful sense of momentum.
In a short time, under limited circumstances, a visitor can penetrate only the shallowest depths of a complex culture. But exuberance is a hard thing to miss.
