The Door To China Swings Open A Little More...

It's been at least fifty years since I last set foot in China and, in that time, China has gone from the Dark Ages to a serious contender in world leadership.

At the time, no American was allowed to travel to Bejing or Shang-hai. As a consequence, we tended to hang out in those bastions of Empire such as the Penninsula, the Mandarin and other five star hotels where monumental decisions concerning the shape of Empire were already beginning to seem like ancient history. At the time, China which had ceded Hong Kong to Britain after the Opium Wars, was due to get the Crown Colony back in 37 years!.... The ex-patriot Mainland Chinese were already worried about that settlement date and making plans to re-invest elsewhere.

The Shang- Hai Canton railroad ended at Fan Ling at the border. British Ghurka’s were boarding lorries returning from maneuvers at the border just as I arrived.

It was raining lightly, I recall, and the sky was growing threatening, a metaphor perhaps for the fact that China was waking up after a long sleep and coming to the realization that it would eventually play a major role in the world. At that time, however, it was still trying to assimilate the decisions of Chairman Mao.

There has been much water in the bridge since then...

A rice paddy I had stood on at the time has now morphed into a modern city of skyscrapers with a population of a million plus.

This has happened because China has changed it has become an inexorable force towards industrialization and commercialization. With it, however, has come a multitude of problems that seem to finally have surfaced reaching the attention of party operatives after many years of being ignored or swept under the tables.

It all began when China's leaders realized that they had no choice: They had to transform themselves into an industrial powerhouse in order to survive and once that happened, there was no stopping them.

Last night, two more installments of China From the Inside played on PBS. This program has earned plaudits for being the frankest, most objective take on the new China and if you've missed it, I would suggest that you make the time available to see the program that touches on the people, the environment, the rule of law n China. Why? Because China can only play a bigger part of our future lives.

The thing that impressed me most was that this was not a tightly choreographed program featuring content pre-screened by the government; instead it visited all of the areas of China, including Tibet in the West and the areas to the north of Bejing and told it like it was without gilding the lilly.
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It is an objective view of their problems and the changes taking place that in essence are changing everything. Farmers who have lived in backwards parts of China are being moved to farm lands that have become the beneficiary of new irrigation policies that will provide a living for the farmers. Unfortunately, the downside of this new expansionist policy is that the people have very little say as to what happens.

Although to us, it may appear that China is a homogeneous country where everyone works and follows the government's line is simply not true. This program showed the individuality of the native Chinese that varies from province to province, from community to community.

For example, although there are very few environmental lawyers practicing in China today, they are practicing and they are winning cases. One lawyer depicted had won eighty pollution cases in recent years, something unheard of only a few years ago where pollution was considered part of the expansion and the growing commitment to industry . This is not to say it is very hard to get your environmental claim recognized and pursued in a court of law. Those not receiving satisfaction in the legal system may petition the government in Bejing; however, while a legal counsel admits on air that eighty percent of those petitions are legitimate; only a fraction of one percent ever are approved.

So, there is much work to do.

The program also showed how the law applies and enforced. For the most part, those imprisoned may be imprisoned without a court of the people or with convincing evidence; it is enough that the local judge feels that they are guilty. They may then receive up to a four year sentence to which there is no appeal involving forced labor at sprawling government re-education centers across China....

The Chinese do not think that taking over Tibet was an act of war but just acquiring property that legitimately belonged to China.
Today, the Dali Lama is daily denigrated as a traitor and the people seem to have fallen into place brainwashed by the non-stop "re-education."

But for the first time in my recollection all of the fears that we who lived in Hong Kong, China is beginning to open up, to show its real self to a world that knows very little about a country that is the fastest growing economic power in the world and is in a contradictory way, emerging from the Dark Ages...

Truly, we should learn as much about China as we possibly can.

A good reason is that China has set its goals on leading in industrial growth. There is evidence, now, that they have targeted the automotive industry and while they only have showed a few cars, the fact remains that within ten years they will be competitive with the industry leaders.

They are graduating many more scientists and engineers than America turns out and many of our own leading companies are building research centers or manufacturing enterprises in China. Intel, the leader in microchips is building a plant in China that called for an investment of over one billion dollars to meet future demand. Microsoft has built a headquarters for research and development.
But they are only the tip of the iceberg of a burgeoning technology center for the world.

What this will do to America's leadership is a moot question that has not been answered but it is clear that a country with 121 cities with over a million population--many of them built in the last twenty years---and a population of 1.25 billion people is not a force that we can afford to ignore...

Presently, America's foreign debt of over sixty billion dollars a month; most of this goes to China who holds a trillion dollars of our debt. Whether it's because of China's potential or the problems it faces in dealing with its growing environmental challenges, it is clear that we shall have to work together in the future if there is any hope for tomorrow.

As of now, the conditions for building a relationship on trust are not in place. The Bush regime has failed in the eyes of most of the world to inspire confidence and to demonstrate a vision of peace that we can all embrace. Therefore, the situation in China, and what it brings bears close scrutiny. And we may have to look elsewhere to gain a better understanding of the biggest competitive threat to America in the whole world.

Les Aaron