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Perspective On China

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China is big.

The population is staggering with a billion and a half people. It’s a matter of getting perspective. Our home state of Oregon only has about 1.5 million people. By comparison Hong Kong has 7 million. Westerners hear mainly about the Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, but Guangzhou, the first mainland city we visited two hours north of Hong Kong is a westernized city of commerce with nearly 7 million people…it’s province of Guangdong having 46 million. Kunming, which reminds us of Denver Colorado…a mile high, cold but sunny…has nearly 4 million people but its located in rural province of Yunnan that has nearly 44 million people.

Guilin has nearly 1.4 million people…it�s province of Guangxi having nearly 75 million. Yangshuo, an hour south of Guilin, felt like a small village in comparison with the bigger cities but the guidebook shows it with a population of 300,000…bigger than our home town of Salem, Oregon.

Chengdu has over 11 million people but it’s province, Sichuan, has 109 million. Chongqing, the city where we started our Chang Jiang (Yangze) River trip, is a sophisticated lively city that reminds us of San Francisco with 5.8 million people…it�s province having 32.5 million. You get the idea–lots of Chinese folks—and lots more on the way even with their one child policy. Ultimately a formidable group.

How is China Doing?
As near as we can tell, China’s cities and it�s citizens are doing well. The significant story is in the poorer rural areas where only 10% of China’s land mass is capable of agriculture…encouraging genetic engineering of food to force an increase in production and where unemployment and disastisfaction is high…and where China’s leadership will continue to be challenged by demonstrations that are never reported in the Chinese or Western press.

The arguments against the Yangze River dam pale in comparison to the country’s need for electricity…and in comparison to the economic power China will become because of it. Mao Tse Tung decreed nine categories of enemy: landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents, capitalist-roaders and…The Stinking Ninth…intellectuals. The motto then was “Serve The People.” “To Be Rich Is Glorious” is the motto used now by a new practical generation…the first to grow up with no spirituality, no Confucius and no interest in politics…unhampered by religion and it’s dogmas-Taoism, Buddhism and even Christianity-unhampered by emperors, by chairmen, by gods.

China’s youth wants democracy and freedom. But the Chinese “never know when to stop,” says Paul Theroux who recounted his trip through China by train in the 80’s in his “Riding The Iron Rooster.” Where will the brakes come from when China is headed toward excess…in a China already plagued by corruption?

When I asked one of the teenagers in Ruili if he could go to Hong Kong if he wanted to answered “No Money…No Happy!” Another, Paul, a teenager who plays the guitar in his rock band, when asked what he thought about Hong Kong, answered: “Paradise!” You Western capitalist running dogs…look out for the younger generation in Communist China…the generation that is so excited that they are finally free to work hard…free to put money in their pocket…already making materialism in the West look ascetic.

I would love to have a conversation with Ma Jian, the poet, painter and writer who, being harassed by communist cadres, left Beijing in the early 80’s and traveled through China for three years. In his book “Red Dust” Ma foreshadowed the thinking of the next generation when he recounted his thoughts after getting lost and nearly dying in a desert: Walking through the wilds freed me from “worries and fears, but this is not real freedom. You need money to be free.”

When, after a student demonstration in the 80’s in Guangzhou, Paul Theroux asked Andrew, a university student, if he expected to become a capitalist-roader, Andrew answered “I think we have a lot to learn. We want to use the good features of capitalism but not the bad ones.” “Is that possible? Paul asked. “We can try” Andrew answered. Maybe it is only fair that now China gets it’s turn to try…

Conversation With Roland

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Had a final dinner at familiar and cozy Sekura’s Cafe in Old Town Lijiang…splurging on Western food…sharing our beer with Roland, a 30 year old economics teacher in a university in Singapore. (Surprisingly and to his delight Jana guessed his age…so many young Asians look much younger than they are.) Roland had attended the University at Flagstaff Arizona and a small business college in Whitewater Wisconsin.

We immediately fell into a discussion about the likely future of China…the cities will eventually be fine but what will give the Central Government trouble, everyone agrees, will be rural China. There is great unequal distribution of wealth…but as Jana says…where isn’t there? Roland said that conservedly 95% of all food, whether horticultural or animal, are genetically altered and we agreed that China will never export food to the United States because of it. A chicken develops from embryo to full grown fryer in six months, he says. Safe ecological methods, it seems, is a luxury of rich nations. Roland has done some consulting for various environmental groups and says that the Philippines has done the most of any Asian country in terms of using ecological methods like crop rotation etc. instead of the overuse of fertilizers. But the bigger problem, Roland says, is that more efficient methods of agriculture do not rise to the surface because of individual initiative as in the United States. China, because of it’s centralized government imposes one unified model, regardless of local needs and conditions, that is communicated to all the villages via satellite TV.

I mentioned the book I had been reading, “The Coming Collapse of China,” and Roland laughed…saying yes, for every opinion you will find economists agreeing or disagreeing largely because of the lack of reliable statistics. China’s problems, the book says, could be solved with political reform but the Communist Party will never let that happen. China insists it’s GNP is growing at 8% but many believe the figures are cooked in order to get that rate, Roland agreed. Yes, the GNP is growing now, but my book says the banks are going broke because the central government is spending at breakneck speed to bring China into the 20th Century world market…last year it joined the World Trade Association. Can that kind of growth be sustained at the same time that the unemployed workers in rural China, who are already demonstrating on a regular basis, cause bigger trouble for the country? And are China’s reserves really as big as they say they are?

Than we lapsed into more esoteric subjects like evolutionary biology and creationism which requires faith…and the personhood of the chimpanzee…which was the subject of Jana’s son Jordan’s Master’s thesis…a huge leap which, Roland thought, also required faith. We ended with a discussion of the probable end of the species…at the very least a stimulating end to the evening.

When we returned to Mr. Yang’s Inn at 11pm Mr. Yang, who has taken very good care of us for almost two weeks, was waiting up for us so he could close the gates…Welcome Home… he said with a smile.

The next morning as we were leaving for the bus station, Mr. Yang told us in his limited English “to take care.” We will miss this gentle man who brought Jana two eggs instead of one to eat when she was sick.

And we will miss Fifi the Lijiang dog and Debu the Beijing puppy who loved us enthusiastically and unconditionally.

End of the Burma Road

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Sunday Dec 1-3 2002
Arrived at Kunming from Guilin after 23 hours on the train. We had gained considerable elevation throughout the night. We took a taxi to the Camellia Hotel where we booked a triple room. Driving through the city�s nice clean wide streets in the cool fresh air at high elevation, we were reminded of Denver Colorado.

Jana went to the Kunming Museum. She was given some pictures and documents by a former co-worker that his father had saved from thetime that he worked as an engineer on the Burma Road…the road ended at Kunming and Jana thought there might be a depository of artifacts in the museum. This was the famous 1000km dirt road that was carved out of the mountains from Lashio Burma to Kunming in 1937-38 during WWII with virtually no equipment. It would provide the US forces, in a bid to keep China from falling to Japan, a way of getting supplies into China. Today, Renmin Xilu marks the end of the road in Kunming.

Jana was invited to an inner office to talk to the curator who was very pleased with the addition to the museum collection and of course Jana was extremely pleased that her mission was successful!

At a nearby Pizzeria/used book/cafe for dinner and I found �Behind The Wall,� a travel book about China in the 80�s by the British author Colin Thubron.

Wednesday Dec 4
We feel we have yet to experience local Chinese peasant life…the large cities of Guangshau, Guilin and Kunming are very western cities full of commerce and big upscale hotels and restaurants….all close to the business centers of Hong Kong. We are anxious to get into the countryside. We have seen very few Western tourists-certainly no Americans-but there are many Chinese tourists.

Mobbed at Yangshuo

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Southern China Guangxi Province
Tuesday Nov 26, 2002
At Yangshuo we were mobbed by women selling hotel rooms. I stayed with the backpacks while Bob and Jana looked at a few rooms. We chose one with a veranda overlooking the main tourist walkway in the shop and cafe area.

Yangshuo is a small village set up against beautiful limestone pinnacles called karsts that jut straight up out of the ground…some lit up beautifully with green lights at night. There are two mainstreets…one being the main artery leading to Guilin and the other, Xi Jie, is known as �Foreigner Street� because it is a pedestrian mall lined with Western style cafes, hotels and tourist shops free from bicycles, traffic and the infamous Chinese tractors.

Later, Jana and I took a walk for several hours with Esther, our tour leader, to Moon Hill Village and Moon Mountain, so-called because the mountain has a moonshaped hole in it at the top. Esther fixed us a lunch of egg and tomato, pork and vegetables and rice at her home in the village. We visited with a group of Chinese middle school children and they eagerly let us take their pictures.

Esther had a hard life. She said her educated parents-her father taught college in something like engineering-were killed during the Cultural Revolution (as many of the elite educated were) when she was five At the time there was also much starvation. The family had seven children…one died as a baby…which left three girls and three boys. Her younger brother and she were kept in an orphanage and had to workhard as a child…no school…she kept apologizing for �no education.� She said her husband was 67-much older than she-and that he doesn�t treat her well-plays cards and drinks. She said he is very angry with her because she bore him three daughters and no sons. They have three
daughters…her two oldest are in college in Guilin and her youngest, who we met, is in middle school.

After lunch Esther walked us out to the highway and flagged down a very mini bus for us which we took for ten cents the few miles back to Yangshuo.

In the meantime Bob had rented a bicycle and rode around the area by
himself…being lost most of the time.

Wednesday November 27
Jana and Bob went on a bike ride to Moon Mountain with Mo She Feng-another guide. They rode on the opposite side of the valley from the walk the daybefore. At 42 years old She Feng (the given name is written behind the family name) was in great shape. She cooked three dishes…egg and tomato, pork and vegetables and rice. After lunch they crossed the highway and climbed the 800 plus steps to the arch of Moon Hill. Raining on the way up, the steps were very slippery but at the top there was a 360 degree view of the whole amazing valley full of karsts.

That night we ate dinner at an open-air restaurant in a street market outside the tourist area…marveled at the tubs of live fish andtables of cut up meat and vegetables that were thrown into huge woks for stir-fried dishes. The tables were covered with cloths that were then covered again with thin clear plastic. When the diners were finished a new piece of clear plastic was put over the cloth as is also done in some other countries.

Thursday November 28
We had T shirts made with our email monikers…mine said Laughingnomad China 2002-2003 in English on the back and in Chinese on the front. Jana�s moniker is �Gaia (earth) Traveler.� We laughed about some of the shirts hanging on the walls like �Minnie Mao� with a picture of Mao Tse Tung! Another had a list of things in Chinese and English that Chinese people shouldn�t do to the foreigners like �Don�t Spit� and �Don�t Use Foreigners to Practice English.�

Ate that night at a used buy/trade book shop/cafe that was owned by a nice young Chinese guy with excellent English who seemed to attract young Chinese guys who wanted to practice their English. Bob bought a couple used books-�The Sheltering Sky� by Paul Bowles who died recently in Tangier Morocco and �Riding the Iron Rooster� (train trips across China in the 1980�s) by Paul Theroux.

While we ate we visited with some young Chinese students who pulled up their chairs to our table and wanted to practice their English. Then two guys from
Montreal came in and told us the run-down on Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge
that we will visit soon.

Westerners Go In The Back

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Video

Thursday November 21 2002
Reading “The Coming Collapse of China,” a book written by a Chinese American economist…a dissenting opinion…he gives China five years to get their banking system in order…which he doubts will happen.

At breakfast at small noodle shop up the street in Hong Kong, seated at back table again. Waited for the waiter to clean off all the surrounding tables and then he finally came to take our order…hmmmm.

Arranged for Chinese Visa; Bob told the ladies that he picked Jana and I up off the street; another lady who heard this stuck her head out a door to see who it was that was picked up! Bob’s sense of humor will get us into trouble yet.

Took the Star Ferry from Kowloon across the bay to Hong Kong Island and took a cable car to the top of Victoria Peak for an incredible view of the city. Rode a double decker bus on it’s route through the city center; got off and tried to find a dim sum restaurant…but Bob was steered to a Japanese sushi restaurant instead so we figured he must be pronouncing dim sum wrong. Finally found dim sum (pronounced din sin in China) restaurant. Managed to order a few dishes from the waitress but never did get the rice.

By the time we boarded the ferry back to Kowloon it was dark and the buildings were lit…Christmas lights beginning to go up…rivals New York & San Francisco.

China’s Secrets I Will Never Know

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Major Cities We Visited

“The opening up of China is a stirring idea,” Lonely Planet says. A foreigner traveling alone today is privileged to see more of China than almost any Chinese has seen in his or her lifetime. I wondered what we could learn-traveling alone. Our images and ideas of China have surely been contradictory and distorted over time.

In the years of the Cultural Revolution after 1966 tens of millions of Chinese had become the instruments of their own terror…a million were killed and some 30 million or more were brutally persecuted and displaced or starved to death. How could so many people be so led?

China has a billion and a half people now. And even now cruelty continues…in a book entitled “China’s New Rulers,” the authors recently published some secret Communist Party documents that admitted to 60,000 Chinese killed by police while fleeing between 1998 and 2001…or 15,000 a year. 97% of the world’s executions take place in China, the book says. It is a historic change that China’s people are becoming less and less afraid of the government than it is of them. For example, 54 year old Mrs. Ma wanted her name published when she told about how she was tortured recently in Zhongxiang, near Shanghai, while her son was tortured in the next cell because the Party wanted her to disclose the names of the people in her church or renounce her Christian faith.

China is a big country. In the two months we have left for travel in China, we have chosen to see Yunnan Province in the southwest…the most varied of China’s provinces ranging from tropical rainforest to snow-capped Tibetan peaks. It is home to nearly a third of all China’s ethnic minorities and nearly 50% of all its people are non-Han Chinese.

Historically, Yunnan, in southern China, was always one of the first regions to break with the northern government in Beijing. During China’s countless political purges, fallen officials often found themselves exiled here, which added to the province’s rebellious character…and probably why it has been so attractive to the countless foreign backpackers who blazed the original trails through it.

I wanted to see China for myself…and now that I am here I feel that every individual Chinese I see is harboring a secret I will never know…

Facing Cambodia’s Past at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

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We got our second wind and almost reluctantly mounted a motorcycle taxi to do what we (or at least I) came here to do and that is to see, after more than 30 years of war and terror, what has finally happened to this country that has survived carpet bombing under Nixon’s secret orders to go after Viet Cong in the 70’s.

Remember Nixon told us we were not bombing Cambodia. We weren’t-officially-our pilots and “advisors” dressed in T shirts and shorts, along with Cambodian pilots, were. Cambodia has somehow survived four years of Pol Pot’s murderous regime and his attempt to completely erase Cambodia’s past by outlawing money and dismantling the entire education system and then another 20 years of political instability and armed insurgencies and coups by various political aspirants, including former president Sihanouk and his own son.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, opened in 1980, is a former high school that became the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 secret prison. After the Khmer Rouge revolutionaries under Pol Pot and inspired by Chairman Mao took over the city in April 1975, they immediately forced the entire population into the countryside as part of its radical social program to turn the country into an agrarian society.

Young children were trained as guards that became exceptionally cruel to the engineers, technicians, intellectuals, professors, teachers, students and ministers and diplomats that ended up in mass graves in the extermination camps of Choeng Ek. As the revolution reached greater heights of insanity the torturers and executioners who worked here killed their predecessors and were in turned killed by those who replaced them. When asked if the guards knew they would end up being killed the tour guide said they probably did not owing to the paranoia and secrecy of the regime. S-21 and all its many branches was headed by a former mathematics teacher by the name of Kang Kek Ieu or Comrade Duk.

When asked, our guide said that the movie “The Killing Fields” was only about 40% true…suggesting that the horror was about 60% greater than the film allowed. The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis, were meticulous in keeping records and the walls of the school-turned-prison and now museum is covered with the photographs of the men, women and children who were later killed or sent to the countryside to work in the rice fields. Incidentally, several foreigners from Australia, France and the US were also held here and tortured before being murdered.

The situation was made especially complex by the fact that China supported not only Pol Pot but also Sihanouk who is still living in Beijing after all these years. Thailand supported the Khmer Rouge and harbored Pol Pot in a fenced compound throughout the 80’s, the Soviet Union supported Vietnam-a historical enemy of Cambodia’s-and the US and the UN supported anyone that was anti-Vietnamese, including the Khmer Rouge, because after all the Vietnamese were communist. Never mind that the Khmer Rouge was communist too…so the Western world stood by silently while Vietnam intervened in 1979 to help insurgency groups try to kick out the Khmer Rouge.

But the Vietnamese stayed. Finally in 1989, when, suffering with it’s own disastrous economic experiment, it withdrew it’s troops. However, with most of the Vietnamese gone, the opposition coalition, still dominated by the Khmer Rouge, launched a series of offensives against the government forces and in the first 8 months of 1990 another 2000 Cambodians lost their lives. Well, it’s all as clear as mud to me too but you get the idea. (The expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and events through the mid 70’s are documented by William Shawcross in “Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon & the Destruction of Cambodia.”)

The UN
Then a plan was devised whereby the UN was to supervise the administration of the country and ensure fair elections in 1993, which it did, before it packed up and went home leaving behind a mess because so many of the powers involved in brokering the deal had their own agendas. It was a travesty that the Khmer Rouge was allowed to play a part in the process and must have seemed like a cruel joke to the Cambodians who had lost family members under its rule. To make it worse, when the UN left it took weapons away from rural militias who provided the backbone of the government defence force against the Khmer Rouge.

According to analysts, by 1994, when it was finally outlawed by the government, the Khmer Rouge was probably a greater threat to the stability of Cambodia than at any time since 1979. But in 1994 the Khmer Rouge resorted to a new tactic of targeting tourists; three people were taken from a taxi on the road to Sihanoukvile and shot and a few months later another three foreign backpackers were taken from a train bound for Sihanoukville and executed. This is the road that Bob is going to take back across the Thai border when we leave Cambodia so he could have a tooth extracted in Bangkok!

Then the government, in a bid to end the war, offered amnesty to Khmer Rouge units who were willing to come over to the government side. But the break-through came in August 1996 when Ieng Sary, Brother No. 3 in the Rouge hierarchy, was denouncd by Pol Pot for corruption. Sary then led a mass defection of fighters that severed the Rouge from the source of it’s resources…the Pailin area rich in gems and timber. Then the paranoid Pol Pot ordered the execution of Son Sen, former defence minister of the regime and many of his family members. This provoked a putsch within the Khmer Rouge leadership to put the responsibility of the mass murders on one person as the hardline general Ta Mok seized control of the movement and put Pol Pot on ‘trial’.

The Communist Party

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People everywhere in Viet Nam confided in me, as a foreigner who would not know who to tell anyway, that they hated the corrupt officials in the Communist Party that are entangled in a growing web of organised crime. They hate the police. The Party has a smug stranglehold on the poorest of the people, especially the Catholics in South Vietnam who find it almost impossible to find a job even if they can scrape up the money to “buy” it as do most people. (This is why you see so many jobless men sleeping during the day in their cyclos or on their moto taxis.)

Those in the Party get the best jobs…those who work for the government get 10 times the salary of ordinary Vietnamese. Doi Moi, which translates as ‘renovation’ similar to the Soviet ‘glastnost’ or openness, does not reach the lives of these people. But as Templer puts it at the very end of his book “The Communist Party has been coerced to relax economic restrictions but it has not liked some of the results. Unable to regain the control or respect it once commanded, its response has been to clench and release its grip on the economy and society in an increasingly desperate manner as its power slips slowly away.”

I told Mr. Binh in Lang Co that this could not last forever as more and more of Vietnam’s youth, like Mr. Binh’s son, become educated and empowered to act. Ten years…he said as he put his finger to his lips. When I left him as I got on the bus, promising to write to him from America, he said “ten years, our secret, ten years.” I made the tears stay inside my eyes until I could find my way inside the bus.

Catholics In Vietnam

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Catholics have never had an easy time of it in Vietnam beginning with the Confucian elite who opposed the intrusions of missionaries among whom was Alexandre de Rhodes who devised the system of romanisation of the Vietnamese language. Catholics refused to join in or pay for important village festivals; instead they often set up their own villages-a process that heightened disputes over land and water. The religion, seen by a majority of Vietnamese as an uncivilised intoxicant that sucked people in and broke their familial and social ties, often cut off converts from their families. It must have seemed as alien and dangerous as some of the stranger cults do today. The role of Catholics, many of whom acted as spies and guides for French expeditionary forces whom they believed would protect them from the anti-Catholic pogroms, rankles with some Vietnamese even today.

As defeat of the French became inevitable, thousands fled to the south. They knew a powerful and atheist Vietnamese state would not be friendly to Catholicism. To make matter worse South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem gave the refugees special attention and often let them settle on some of the most fertile land, a source of resentment among the majority of the population. Diem came from a deeply Catholic family; one of his brothers was Archbishop of Hue and a nephew would become Bishop of Nha Trang. His brutal suppression of peaceful demonstrations by Buddhist monks, some of whom burnt themselves alive in protest against Diem’s policies, and his corruption gave the Communists fuel for their fire and were among the factors that led to his overthrow and assassination, with US complicity, in 1963. In 1975 the seminaries in the South were emptied and many of the men were sent to re-education camps. The Church still arouses an intense suspicion in the Communist Party and the Vatican and Vietnam are something of a match for each other diplomatically, according to Templer.

‘Peaceful Evolution’

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In Viet Nam, the enemies of the Communist Party, in the absence of conflict, has become the democracy and human rights promoted by the forces of ‘peaceful evolution.’ Enemy jets unload tourist dollars and foreign investment rather than bombs. Robert Templer, in Shadows and Wind explains: “Local news publications have become a master at inventing new enemies to excite its military readership. In 1996 it located a hidden menace ‘sleeping under trees around Hoan Kiem Lake’ in Hanoi. This undercover force spoke the language and ate Vietnamese food. They were up to no good riding around in cyclos, dressed in shorts and T shirts. Vietnam could no longer ignore the threat they posed. It was ‘too easy in this age of information flow to mistake enemies for friends’, the newspaper told its readers. The country, the army daily warned, was under siege from young foreign backpackers! Doubtless the Vietnamese breathed a little easier knowing who was the enemy in their midst. But the Lonely Planet Legions were not the only security threat. Executives from overseas, the newspapers said accusingly, were attending business seminars because of their interest in information that helps them work out their investments, calculate prices and put pressure on their Vietnamese partners.” Indeed, a BP Oil executive from the UK that I met in a restaurant in Hanoi said that the BP holdings in Vietnam were larger than Vietnam’s national budget.