A modern China faces changes and challenges

Kindergartners in in-line skates wobbled along the concrete edge of the Yangtze.

Well-dressed parents fussed behind them, within sight of but decades away from the docks and squalor where their forebears toiled.

Today, only the river matches the description given a century ago by Edwin Dingle after he splashed ashore “stiff and hungry, and mad with rage.”

He was no famous explorer or scientist, just a young Englishman naive enough to think he could cross half of China on foot, with revolution brewing and warlords fighting for control of an uncertain nation. He succeeded.

To retrace 200 miles of his route today is to traverse a landscape roiling again, as change catapults some into a promising future and maroons others in enduring hardship.

The social and economic rules imposed by communism have been overturned, leaving a nation of radical contrasts: upbeat entrepreneurs and embittered farmers, those who have benefited from new freedoms and those who suffer under persistent corruption.

In the century since Dingle walked here, China has weathered war, upheaval, political mania and mind-boggling growth. Yet, China in the 21st century faces pressures similar to those it confronted 100 years ago: to employ, control and satisfy the world’s largest population.

The parents enjoying a day at the river’s edge know they are fortunate.

“My grandmother had 10 children and worked on the docks carrying sacks of rice,” said Li Jing, 32, a stay-at-home mom. “Her life was bitter.”

As she spoke, she watched her young daughter, in an oversized red helmet and kneepads, skate effortless curves across the concrete, insulated from such hardships.

Edwin John Dingle was a 28-year-old journalist in Singapore in 1909 when he got the urge to see China in as much detail as possible. He resolved to walk.

He had never visited China. He spoke not a word of any of its languages. Nevertheless, he planned a route through China’s heartland, from Chongqing to the border with Burma (now also known as Myanmar), 1,000 miles to the southwest. He estimated it would take six months. It took nearly two years.

Today, his yellowing, leather-bound volume, “Across China on Foot,” is among the only outside accounts of China’s interior in the moments that gave birth to modern China.

Trailed by three porters and an assistant carrying his typewriter, Dingle found a China on the brink of chaos. The nation of 430 million people was awash in cries of “China for the Chinese,” as popular movements struggled to expel colonial powers and topple the imperial regime.

He had entered a nation divided by privilege and decayed to the breaking point. On the road, he passed silk-clad Mandarins riding in sedan chairs on the shoulders of their countrymen, while the masses faced “the same life of disease, distress and dirt, of official, social, and moral degradation as they lived when the Westerner remained still in the primeval forest stage.”

Dingle soon reached Luzhou, a hardscrabble port on the Yangtze. The city, like others across the region, was already fated for revolution. Two years earlier, Sun Yat-sen, who would become the father of modern China, had dispatched agents and bomb makers to Luzhou to foment insurrection.

By 1912, revolutionaries had overthrown the Qing dynasty and established the Republic of China. But political change alone did little to end poverty.

Poor was all that Xiao Zezhen ever expected to be.

“I was the youngest of 10 children, only five of whom survived,” said Xiao, who has lived in Luzhou all of her 50 years.

She was raised by a single mother who earned less than $3 a week peddling soy sauce and vinegar.

Xiao grew up, left home and, by the grim standards of the 1980s, found a plum job: making fake leather in a factory where employees were permitted to gather the discarded scraps of hog fat and bring them home for dinner.

“It made you very popular in the neighborhood,” she recalled.

By 1990, Xiao saw her opening. She quit the job that was the envy of her neighbors and took a chance on running one of the city’s first karaoke clubs. Today she is an entertainment tycoon, clad in designer jeans and a T-shirt with a Warhol-style print.

“At the time, my neighbors could not imagine that I was breaking the ‘iron rice bowl,’ ” she said of her decision to quit her state job. “But it was the beginning of my new life.”

Along Dingle’s route lie stories that convey the breadth of China’s transformation. He followed an ancient caravan route tiled in flagstones. Today, most of it has been replaced by vast rivers of asphalt, part of a massive road-building spree that has helped open up China’s interior.

Those roads and the growth they symbolize have brought new strains. Village after village is hollowing out, as workers seek city jobs and leave aging grandparents to care for school-age children.

Of course, there is continuity as well.

A lone farmer still wades hip-deep through rice paddies behind a snorting water buffalo that splashes the water with a fly-swatter tail. Women by the roadside still shuck peanuts for pennies a bushel, and toddlers squeal with curious delight at the rare foreigner who wanders by.

And, of course, Dingle’s domain is still riven by struggles over justice and leadership.

In the hills over Chongqing , a seething village believes the government has failed.

Pan Daikuan, 73, a father of six, stooped in the mud and lifted the end of a narrow white tube. Brown water -- the village drinking water -- spat into his hand. “We don’t know what the color comes from. We don’t know what the effects are,” he said. “But the people no longer feel safe.”

The leaders of Huang Sha say a nearby mining operation has ravaged their water supply, and nobody seems able to help. The village has been trying to get compensation from the mine, Tianqing Sihua, for five years.

Last month, the dispute boiled over. In a scene being repeated across the Chinese countryside, scores of men and women marched up the hill to the mining compound to halt production, witnesses say, but security guards and police intervened. Four protesters were injured, organizers say.

A company official, in an interview, denied any conflict with the village or any effect on its water. But the village is enraged.

“We have no other options,” said Zhou Quanyi, 31, a farmer and former soldier. “We tried the court. It didn’t work. The local government just protects business.”

The particular challenge facing the Communist Party is that farmers like these are not dissidents or rabble-rousers. On the contrary, they were once true believers. Zhou joined the Communist Party while in the army and now finds himself in the unexpected position of leading a challenge against it.

“As a party member, I am supposed to walk in front and lead the people,” he said while neighbors crowded into his home. “Many years from now, when they finish mining, we will have nothing more than a hole in the ground. What will be left for us?”

The future was very much on Dingle’s mind as well when he set off on his journey.

“In China we shall see arising a government whose power will be paramount in the East,” he wrote. He felt compelled to understand that increasingly powerful country. Someday, he predicted, our lives will be more entwined with China than ever.

“We shall not see it,” he wrote in 1911, “but our children will.”