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  Beijing's Balancing Act: China's Summer of Living Dangerously

Beijing's Balancing Act China's Summer of Living Dangerously

By Ullrich Fichtner

Part 4: A Growing Gap between Rich and Poor

When the Olympic Games open on Friday, China will celebrate its symbolic arrival on the international stage, an event that is meant to mark its return to the grand coalition of great nations and has been meticulously planned for years. But this well orchestrated image has already started to tarnish in the eyes of many Chinese. There are quite a large number of people in China who scoff at the games as merely an "economic program" for Beijing. Even the yuppies at the table in Shanghai see things that way. They criticize the Olympic tour de force as a pointless exercise -- especially in light of the very serious social, environmental and political problems facing the country.

There is a nagging feeling in the country that the glittery office towers only reflect a distorted image of China. The fact of the matter is that China remains primarily a rural country, a vast backwater. Anyone who has ever seen how poverty-stricken rice planters in Jiangxi live, or how peasant women in Yunnan eke out a living as they push their wooden carts, night after night, to the flower market in Kunming, will be appalled at the social inequalities and the growing gap between rich and poor that can be witnessed everywhere in China today.

Here in the deep south, in Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, the Chinese government demonstrates its vision of minority policies. To the west and the south, the region borders on Burma, Laos and Vietnam. A total of 25 ethnic groups live here in harmony, small groups with names like Yi and Bai and Miao and Zhuang. Members of these ethnic communities hardly stand out on the streets of Kunming. Sometimes their skin may be a bit darker, sometimes lighter, and their facial features vary slightly from most Chinese. However, at Yunnan Minority Village, on the edge of town, they are allowed to wear their full traditional dress and demonstrate their unique qualities to paying visitors.

Li Eyima, a beautiful Tibetan woman from Shangri-La, works as a guide at the theme park. She wears a white fox cap and her body is wrapped in silk scarves with colorful fringes. The Tibetan is one of 80 girls who show visitors through the faux villages and ubiquitous souvenir shops. Guests stroll over bridges, passing by mythical creatures fashioned out of stone and wood, and walk over stone-paved squares where the spirits dwell. Tourists can ride on elephants or drum on cow skulls, as members of the Wa people supposedly do.

'Am I Too Greedy?'

Li smiles continuously and says, "Welcome to China." She's been working at Minority Village for four years. Before that, she attended a tourism vocational school for three years. She earns 1,500 yuan, or 140 euros (218 dollars) a month, rents a one-room apartment in the city for 200 yuan and dreams of going to Macau to strike it rich in the casinos. She likes to talk about her dream man -- and she has very concrete notions about him: He's got to have an apartment, a car, be good looking, always give her money and obey her every command, she says, in that order, before asking in a flirtatious tone, "Am I too greedy?"

The path to Tibet weaves through the park's fun zone, where water slides have been erected and visitors can row on an artificial lake. The Tibetan village consists of a few buildings with typical gables and façade paintings around the windows. Today is a Monday. To mark the earthquake in Sichuan that struck on Whit Monday at exactly 2:28 pm, monks are sitting in the temple of the park and speaking prayers. Li also kneels, gesticulates as if she were washing her face, and lights a stick of incense. Tourists timidly take a photo and then remain standing with their heads bowed.

Then they serve tea with rancid butter -- that's also part of the program. When an attempt is made to ask a question, Li quickly makes it clear that she has nothing to say concerning "problems" or "events" in Lhasa, that she won't answer questions concerning independence, and above all not a word about the Dalai Lama. She shakes her head and makes a nasty face. By Chinese standards, she is almost impolite. Then she says, "I'm not so smart, I know nothing about politics." And that's not necessarily a lie.

Minorities in China are treated as folkloric elements. Every form of political expression is perceived as an attack on the country's unity. The Tibetans have learned this, along with the Uighurs in the western part of the country who are Sunni Muslims for the most part, and have been more intensely persecuted since they began to stand up for their rights.

China's Unity as a Nation

It is easy to criticize the policies of the government in Beijing, but it is also easy to understand their fear of the 60 to 70 minorities in the country (though Beijing only officially recognizes 55), some with populations as large as small European nations. If they seriously started to talk about autonomy or even independence, it would threaten China's unity as a nation. To head off any conflicts, the government makes an effort to please even the smallest groups, and the success of this policy can even be witnessed deep in the Manchurian forests.

The town of Heihe lies far to the north on the Amur River, which forms the border to Russia. During the winter, temperatures here drop to minus 40 degrees and below. In this small city we learn that despite the forces that threaten to pull it apart, there remains a great deal of cohesion in China. Even Heihe, which is located in the remote northeastern corner of the country, participates in its own way in developments in China.

Large new housing projects have been thrown up over the past few years. To make way for the new buildings, the "old town", as they call it, has to be demolished: a large slum of wooden shacks with dirt streets where locals still fetch their water from dilapidated wells. The new apartment buildings look basically like housing that you would expect to find in Germany or France. People who live in the shacks say that they are looking forward to their upcoming move. There is no nostalgia. Progress has also reached Heihe.

When 800 children from the Third Elementary School gather in the afternoon to rehearse a mass ballet with tennis rackets and hundreds of residents practice formation dances to disco music on the terraces along the river, it all looks like some kind of socialist worker's paradise. In the endless forests surrounding the town, South Korean car companies test their vehicles under extreme conditions. Those who are not fortunate enough to work for the Koreans have to pursue an existence as hunters and gatherers that is reminiscent of our ancestors at the dawn of humanity. But the city has created housing, ensured that there are doctors and teachers in the villages, along with farmers and machinery -- it's an odd world.

The soil here starts to thaw out in May and is already frozen again by October. Summers are short this far north. And should travelers venture into these woods, after a two-hour odyssey they will reach the village of Elunchun. There are 20 houses and small farms here, a town hall, a school, a museum and a restaurant run by Hu Zhenbing, a great hulk of a man who rides out on horseback in winter to go deer hunting and raises wheat and soybeans during the four summer months. At the bar there is a vessel filled with an alcoholic drink flavored with pieces of elk antler.

Roughing it in the Wilderness

The three teachers at the village school are drinking at a nearby table together with a visiting professor from Harbin. Their faces are red from the spirits, their voices raw from smoking cigarettes. At first, they ignore the strangers, but then their curiosity gets the best of them and the professor holds a speech on world peace. He says World War II may have ended long ago, but it should never be forgotten. Then he staggers back to his table, drinks from his glass, and calls out to his colleagues: "I'm giving them a little general education."

The meal consists of large bowls of meat, all of which comes from wild animals that are on the Red List of Threatened Species. The Elunchun minority -- which has the same name as the village -- is not about to let bureaucrats in distant Beijing dictate what will happen to their age-old customs. Our host, Hu, waxes lyrical about hunting, about the joys of riding over the hills at temperatures of minus 40 and roughing it out in the wilderness.

The museum in the village is dedicated to this minority -- apparently there are only 3,000 Elunchun left. The attendant who brings the key is wearing a bomber jacket embroidered with the name of the famous US elite military unit, the 101st Airborne Division. He says, "Love America, never made it."

Down by the river, locals are washing large bundles of wild herbs and a vegetable that looks like wild asparagus, a coveted delicacy that tastes slightly bitter and is dried and sold to South Korea. The gatherers are women who stand in a circle, nine or ten of them, their feet in ice-cold water. They're the only ones who know where the best stems grow. To find this crop, they walk 15 to 20 kilometers a day, hike up to the tops of the hills and down again -- and earn two yuan per pound (about 18 euro cents). On average they take home between one and one-and-a-half euros a day. "But that's not bad," shouts a fat woman and presses her fists against her hips for comic effect, "for that kind of money, I could drink a nice pot of tea in Beijing."

We still hear too little about how the Chinese are a pleasant people who enjoy life, and not just a massive population over a billion strong. Faced with the avalanche of daunting numbers and figures associated with this country, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that behind all the statistics these are people who are not much different than other people around the world. The common perception of China has always focused on the vast, anonymous masses -- and overlooked the individuals who make up the whole. These days, however, the individual is becoming increasingly important in China. The Chinese are no longer simply a people organized from above by their government. Today, they are becoming a dynamic, multifaceted society.

'What Will the Future Bring?'

One of these new social circles is sitting in Beijing, in a private corner of an old tea house, where they have gathered around the man who can explain China. It's now almost midnight and the hot humid air hangs heavily in the room. The windows remain closed as the conversation turns to the fallout from Chinese industrialization, to the consequences for the entire world. They talk about the fact that South Korea and Japan are constantly exposed to acid rain fed by the sulfur coal emissions from China, that a brown cloud of filth, the so-called "Asian brown cloud," hangs over South Asia and the Himalaya, and that on some days a quarter of the particulate pollution measured in Los Angeles comes from Chinese smokestacks.

The point is, says the man, dressed in his traditional silk shirt, that no Chinese ever wanted this pollution, that they see it as a disgrace, as a kind of Asian loss of face. But he adds that the underlying question remains how to achieve and maintain a better life for all Chinese. It's the million dollar question of the 21st century.

The Christian woman, the young political scientist, the Western lawyer and the diplomat from Africa -- they all agree that this can't be accomplished without the party, without a centralized controlling power. And they say so despite the fact that over the past few hours they have made numerous statements that were severely critical of the system. The man in the silk tunic, whose father played an important role in the history of this country, and who has so much soft power, says that it will be very, very difficult. And he wishes that foreigners would make more of an effort to understand the problems facing China.

Every move by this country is fraught with danger, he says, and this is due to the sheer size of the population, the immense size of the country and the turbulent growth of the recent years. Foreign dignitaries who come to China these days with questions concerning human and other rights while they sign business deals in backrooms "shouldn't be surprised if they are not taken seriously by their hosts."

The group in the tea house laughs as if they already know what is coming. "They come from countries," says the man, "that are ten times smaller than the largest Chinese provinces, and still they explain to us Chinese what's good for us." He pauses and sips his tea, his eighth or ninth cup. "But how can they possibly know that?" he asks. "How can they be more knowledgeable about our affairs than we ourselves are?"

These are questions without answers, just as there will be no answer this evening to the question of what will become of China. What will come after the Olympic Games? What will have to change -- and what won't? What will remain from the past and what will the future bring? "You are welcome to come again," says the man who can explain China. He stands at the door of the tea house, looking tired and frail. It took him many hours and many cups of tea just to find the key questions. The answers may take years, perhaps decades, or even an entire century.