China Through a Baby Boomer’s Eyes

China is big news these days. But it was not as a journalist that BoomerCafé co-founder Greg Dobbs and his wife toured the crowded country that remains somewhat mysterious to westerners … they were on a well-earned vacation and had set out to learn all they could about China and its people. Now back home in the U.S., Greg shares his notes …

There are so many things to say about China: it is packed with people; it is now more modern than we dreamed; it is still more backward than we thought. But perhaps the most cogent question to ask about China, especially in relation to the United States, is, “And we’re scared of exactly what?”

Yes, China is huge: 1.3 billion people in a land mass not a whole lot bigger than ours; you feel it everywhere you go. Maybe the best metaphor for how many people there are is that when you’re walking down a sidewalk or through a store or a marketplace and your arm bumps someone else’s, no one says “Excuse me.” There’s no need; everyone expects to be bumped.

And yes, China’s economy is hot, growing at a faster rate than ours.

But in the U.S., we only have to divide our GDP, our Gross Domestic Product, by about 300 million people to see what each of us is turning out and to what degree we’re prospering; divide theirs by 1.3 billion and you start to see how hard it will be to keep raising the Chinese standard of living. It is higher than it has ever been, but when a bartender on a boat ride down the Yangtze River told us he can only afford to take a date to McDonald’s about once a month you begin to understand prosperity in relative terms.

Minimum wage in China is the equivalent of less than a hundred bucks a month; pensions for government employees are the same. On the other hand, while incomes by our measure are still quite low — apparently the annual average in the nation runs between four and five thousand dollars and plenty of unskilled workers earn all of 60 cents an hour — taxes are low too. I was told that the total tax burden is something on the order of five percent. Then again, you get what you pay for.

But the standard of living, one measure of the Middle Kingdom’s leap into the Global Economy, indisputably is going up, which is obvious wherever you look; the skyscrapers in Beijing and Shanghai might be a metaphor for both growth and modernization. Steel and glass, and sky cranes hoisting more steel and glass, in every direction. Not just in a single “downtown” core, but stretching out for miles. In Shanghai, which is the financial capital, the tallest tower is a new 88-story building that looks like a combination of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in New York.

But development has come with a price. There are endless stories of people being uprooted from their homes without benefit of appeal because the government — or a private developer — has a better idea for how to use the land on which they live (of course we have eminent domain, but it is pale in comparison). By the way, “land” in China is an interesting concept; the Chinese nowadays are entitled to own their homes and their stores, and farmers can own their crops — but no one actually owns the land. That is still the province of government … and helps explain why it can relocate anybody it likes, at will.

Having said all that, my most vivid and lasting impression of China is, it may be the most polluted place on earth. I don’t mean the streets; to the contrary, you see people everywhere in bright orange suits with rustic long straw brooms, sweeping the streets (and usually wearing a surgical mask over the mouth, which tells you something about the air). On the Yangtze, we saw lots of what they call “trash boats” with people who are paid by the government to stick handheld nets into the water and scoop out the floating debris.

But the pollution is in the water — you simply don’t drink water from a tap, not even in a luxury hotel— and more obviously, the air. For a couple of hours on a couple of days, we saw snatches of blue sky. But that was it. Otherwise, it was bleak and brown.

Very sad, and a reflection of how fast China has modernized and industrialized. There hasn’t been time, or evidently inclination, to worry about emissions from cars or factory smokestacks. The factories run mainly on dirty coal, which is abundant in China, and now they’re paying the price. I’ve been told that for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, they’re going to ban cars from the city (or charge them so exorbitantly that it’s as good as a ban) and shut down factories in the area weeks or months before the foreign visitors arrive. Pity the poor athlete who has to gasp for air.

On the other hand, the Olympics should be good for China, because as we’ve seen in other countries with similar political systems, once the system gives way even a little bit, it’s hard to go back to the old one at all. This pertains to levels of prosperity for citizens, and levels of openness for foreign visitors. A high-ranking Chinese Olympic official told a Newsweek correspondent when he remarked on a refreshing new era of relative openness for journalists, “Once we open our doors, we won’t be able to close them.”

But for any flowering of freedoms, there are still plenty of things you won’t see out in the open in China. Gay couples. The disabled (the closest thing you see to any kind of accommodation are ramps at tourist sites that have about a 20 percent grade; try pulling your wheelchair up something like that!). Women behind the wheel. Visible signs of religion; aside from the preservation of ancient sites that reflect the religious practices of obsolete dynasties, people did talk to us about their religious freedom … but we saw nothing.

You also won’t see a shortage of staff. Anywhere. It is probably a reflection of two things: China’s mammoth population, and its way of perpetuating full employment, which is still on the Communist agenda. In any event there are people to help you absolutely everywhere you go (at least in the kinds of places western tourists like us go). As a result, none seems to have a whole lot to do. In fact probably the busiest guy we saw on the whole trip was on a steep street in the city of Chong’qing. He was climbing the hill carrying a heavy load of four fully packed cardboard cases, two on each side of him, suspended on ropes from a three or four foot long bamboo rod cutting across the back of his neck. He and others who do this painful looking work are called “bamboo stick soldiers.” Personally, FedEx seems more humane.

By the way, you’ve probably never heard of Chong’qing. We were in several cities we had never heard of, even though their populations overshadow all but the biggest western cities. In fact in a couple we were told, “Oh, we’re not a big city;” they had populations only in the two- to three-million range. But Chong’qing? The “municipality,” which is quite large geographically, has a mere 32 million people. Almost the population of the whole state of California!

Now, here’s one more thing you won’t see in China: large families. As you might know, they still have an official “one child policy,” which means you will be fined, and fined big-time, for having more than one child. There are exceptions; if a rural family has a girl first, they can try again. And “minorities” (Chinese minorities) are permitted to have bigger families; I figure it’s China’s way of preventing their extinction. One woman told us of the policy’s benefits, mainly, that her parents poured all their affection and all their resources into her. Frankly, when you move through China and realize that you just don’t go very far without seeing lots of people, you can understand how necessary they might believe their one child policy is. Yet there’s still something chilling about a government telling me how many children my wife and I can have. Maybe the solution to the population problem is implicit in the phrase our male guide in Xian used to describe marriage: “Entering the tomb.”

I just mentioned “minorities” and we had a fascinating conversation with one guide, in the city of Guilin, about minorities. On the road in from the airport, she asked where we came from. Since we reside in the Rocky Mountains, I told her we lived in America, near the middle of the country, in the mountains. And her response was, “So you are minorities.” Evidently only minorities in China (and they count 55 minorities) would live in the mountains, so naturally that’s what she assumed about us.

Then in a later conversation we got an even more amazing glimpse. She asked us, “What do you think of white people?” We probably looked kind of shocked, and told her, “We are white people.” She patted her own cheeks and said, “No you’re not. Your skin has color.” What we learned is, this woman (and who knows how many more?) thought that the dominant population in America is the color of snow. It tells you something about the continued isolation of the average Chinese. They do have Internet access, although everything I’ve ever read tells me that content is still fairly heavily censored by the authorities.

So there seem to be five things that are growing in China, for better or worse. One is population. Another is pollution. A third is tourism. A fourth of course is the economy. And the fifth is congestion. There are still bikes all over the place — my wife and I rented bikes ourselves a couple of times, including one challenging day riding around the Forbidden City and through the forbidding streets in bustling Beijing. But of all the bikes I saw, probably thousands that I noticed, none was a newish kind of recreational bike. People ride bikes to get from one place to another. And lots of them are laden with huge loads over the back wheel, sometimes over the handlebars too. And they compete with motorbikes, and motor scooters, and motorcycles, and cars and taxis and trucks and pedicabs and buses. The only two pieces of advice I can offer about negotiating the streets of a Chinese city are, when it comes to a question of right-of-way, you have to challenge your adversary; winner takes all. And, don’t assume a one-way street is a one-way street!

While I’m at it, if you ever go to China (and this is true for other places too), here is a bit more advice:

1. Have someone at your hotel write your destination in Chinese on a piece of paper so you can show it to the taxi driver. And carry something with your hotel’s name in Chinese so you can make it back home.
2. Learn a few words in the local language (Mandarin Chinese), which I do wherever in the world I go and it buys you a lot.
3. If you don’t want to buy something from a vendor hounding you on the sidewalk, don’t even look at her or him. And definitely don’t show any interest. And if it’s something you do want to buy, hold tight to your money until you’ve bargained … and the deal is done.
4. Don’t go in the hellish heat of summer!

So far, I’ve written more about what we learned and felt than what we did and saw. Like the Great Wall. We must have climbed about 600 steps in the couple of miles of the wall that we hiked on a day as hot as a furnace, and it was thrilling. There are soldiers’ huts evenly spaced along its length, no further apart than the distance that two arrows (one from each hut) could fly. In a recent contest, the Great Wall was named one of the seven manmade Wonders of the World. Deservedly so.

And there’s something near the city of Xian (“she-AHN”) that ought to be the 8th Wonder. The archeological discovery known as the Terra Cotta Warriors. It is an army of life-size clay soldiers, clearly made by a living army of slaves, and first found in the early 1970s by a farmer digging a well. An emperor in the period around 240 BC had them fashioned, then buried in standing formation near the site of his tomb, in keeping with the custom of having things around you in death that you might need in the next life. They are still excavating, but already have uncovered thousands and thousands of cavalrymen, and infantrymen, and officers, and archers. No two faces are alike. Guides will tell you that the ones with the fat bellies are the generals. Some of us would have done well in this emperor’s army!

But so much of the older China is gone now, never to be seen again. On the other hand, these days you’ll see a society in transition both physically and politically. And arguably also in shambles. We flew out of Shanghai on an overnight non-stop to Vancouver, in western Canada. All the cabin window shades were shut before it got dark outside so people could watch movies. But I looked out the window. And I saw stars. It occurred to me that in 16 days in China, I hadn’t seen a single star. For the time being in much of China, stars are only part of the past.

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