Mao died in 1976, but not before he heard the shouts for democracy through the closed windows of his official residence in Zhongnanhai, just off Tiananmen Square. Throughout the late 1970s the country seethed with new possibilities as it staggered through the remnants of Maoism—represented by the short-lived, almost comical rule of Chairman Hua Guofeng—to the defining arrival of Deng Xiaoping, who, by 1980, had set China on the course we know today.
Except that in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, it looked as if it was all going to come crashing down. That repression of young democracy activists still reverberates. Visiting travellers are asked if they know whether or not Tiananmen actually happened. One is often told everything has changed in China, and many things have, but much also endures, including Orwellian Newspeak and denials. Tiananmen is never officially referred to, and therefore never happened. It was merely a counterrevolutionary “incident.”
Slaughter or “incident,” Tiananmen provided a lesson of sorts. Both the regime and the populace seemed to take stock of each other, and within fairly short order most buckled down to an upbeat, capitalist-driven “dialectic socialism.” At least this held out the hope of a better material life. And because the government made a relative success of its new economic zones sprinkled across the country and launched a massive campaign to build infrastructure, China’s workforce has finally been given a chance.
Now that the entire world is experiencing its power and scope, it is amazing that this vast army of workers, numbering more than 700 million, was held back for so long. It is China’s most potent weapon—arguably more threatening than the country’s nuclear arsenal or its tentative ventures into outer space. Fifteen years of economic growth, with the former British colony of Hong Kong successfully absorbed back into the motherland: this stability and achievement is what is fuelling all the tantalizing intangibles of the future.
The most striking difference between Canada and China then and now is that, in 1968, two years into the Cultural Revolution, grain production fell to such low levels that the fertile paddies of Sichuan Province, traditionally a net exporter of rice, were lying fallow as the country imported grain via the Canadian Wheat Board. Today, it may be Canada’s wheat fields that the Chinese will want to buy next.
I have been back to China four eventful times since reluctantly leaving the Globe and Mail’s bureau in 1979. The most recent trip was spent largely in Beijing and Shanghai. To an old China hand, whose affection for the country and its long-suffering people never lessens with the passage of time, the transformation of Shanghai into the most vibrant city on the face of the globe brings unalloyed happiness. It presents images of a China that once could only be dreamed about. Shanghai was always intriguing, but during the bleak years of Maoism it was pitiful to behold: the population dragged down about as low, morally and economically, as it was possible to go.
Today Shanghai is the symbol of the miracle of rejuvenated China, and even if you still have huge gripes about the regime and its remaining capacity for random, or pointedly directed, brutality and injustice, it is impossible to walk around the city without a smile. Life is bustling and people are busy as they have not been in living memory—giving purpose and hope to the whole economic experiment.
The scenes outside railway stations in Beijing and Shanghai, and especially the huge interior cities like Wuhan or Guangzhou, are the dark side. Here are hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, who are no longer protected by Chairman Mao’s philosophy of the “iron rice bowl,” by which no peasant would be allowed to fall below subsistence. This is the raw population, by some estimates as high as 100 million, who provide cheap labour as they move about the land, or stay put in front of railway stations as a reminder that if things go badly for too long there is a large floating population ready to run riot—an urban nightmare that must keep civic officials awake at night.
Certainly, it is not clear how the present leadership would handle the next bad turn, whether it comes in the wake of an economic downturn, or worker rebellions against the grossness of their exploitation. In Mao’s time, regional unrest could be successfully isolated, unless Mao himself wanted it to spread, as he did during the Cultural Revolution. In 1967 and 1968, the worker riots in Wuhan and agricultural slowdowns in Sichuan occurred without international or national scrutiny. These days, that kind of containment cannot be guaranteed.
Not that Communist officials in Beijing are obtuse. The slow, methodical wearing down of freedom of expression and legal protections in Hong Kong are signs of the leadership’s relentless determination. Tibet continues to be ruthlessly governed, and the capital, Lhasa, is being overwhelmed by Han Chinese immigrants, who have utterly marginalized the native population—a tragedy the world simply doesn’t want to deal with, which is its own tragedy.
