Golden week in Chengdu

I spent most of “Golden Week” -- the national holiday celebrating the birthday of the People’s Republic of China -- in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province. The city was something of a revelation of how far China’s modernization has come in these thirty years. It’s further along than Wuhan, where streets and sidewalks are torn up as work proceeds 24/7 to construct the city’s subway system.

Instruction on boarding a car

 The first route in Chengdu’s subway system, running north-south, just opened. It wasn’t just the shiny new subway stations and cars that said “modern” but the amount of planning that had gone into the system’s introduction. At every station, crews of attendants showed people how to buy tickets from touch-screen ticket machines and how to use the ticket at entrance gates.

On the train platform, attendants with bullhorns educated amazed residents on where to stand when the car doors opened. Announcements of upcoming stations are in Chinese and English; a lighted schematic every few feet along the car walls shows the train’s current location. The subway runs to suburban destinations like “Ocean Park,” “Century City,” and “Incubation Park.” More such suburban developments – forests of twenty story apartment buildings, not individual houses -- are promised as the metro system expands. Ads for “Luxetown,” “Europe City” or – get this, Kansas City – “Mission Hills,” are already on billboards, sporting images of golf courses and speedboats.

Thirty years ago there was virtually no advertising in China because there was nothing to advertise: now it’s omnipresent. Every city bus and motorized pedicab is decorated inside and outside with ads; a TV usually runs in the front of the bus with more ads. Ron Popeil-type merchandising is appearing: a Chinese tour group I was traveling with was diverted into a sales center where we were subjected to an hour of sales talk about the virtues of a knife set made out of artillery shell metal. And that isn’t all, we were assured: there’s also this handy melon peeler. And that isn’t all….

When one emerges from the metro station to Remnin Street, there are wide, uncrowded roads, new – and in some cases striking – buildings, and an absence of traffic jams (unlike Wuhan). Alongside are sculptured beds of impatiens, poinsettias, marigolds, petunias, and salvia. Signs in English in Chengdu rarely feature the “Chinglish” errors that so tickle English speakers other places in China (though I would have suggested the owners of a tony downtown hotel consider a name other than “The Caesarian”).

Architecture with Chinese characteristics


If cell phones are everywhere, that’s only to be expected; it’s as if they’ve been surgically attached to the young globally. Even litter bearers were talking on cellphones as they transported the disinclined or indisposed up steep flights of stairs at Mr. Qingcheng while the rest of us toiled on foot. The internet is likewise ubiquitous, in Chengdu as elsewhere: there’s hardly a tiny shop selling bananas without a computer screen and someone staring intently at it.

Buddhist monks at Wenshu monastery

In Chengdu's Wenshu monastery, I heard a guzheng, the traditional Chinese zither, being played by a Buddhist monk. I peered into his cell, where he stood over his instrument; to his left, his laptop screen glowed, beside his bed were a set of weights for daily exercise. In the outside corridor his electric scooter was charging. Back in 1980 I once tried to explain bumper stickers to my Chinese students, and discovered they didn't know what a "bumper" is, or any other parts of the car, having had no experience. That wouldn't be a problem now.



Huanglongxi ancient town crowd

 And there are other, less material indicators of Chengdu’s and China’s modernization. For example, queuing. When I wanted to take bus trips out of Chengdu to the local sights, transportation hubs were invariably jammed. Trying to get to the famous “ancient town” of Huanglongxi I almost gave up at the sight of the milling crowd.

Inside, however, the crowd resolved itself into a dozen patient, orderly lines. Thirty years ago, buying a ticket in a station could be a free for all. Wickets were often a hole into which you thrust your money while trying to yell your destination louder than the next person. At the Chengdu bus station, in contrast, the line moved steadily forward and line jumpers were faced down by the ticket seller.

Somehow, crowded as everywhere was during Golden Week, there were no collisions. Things kept moving, slowly and with a kind of invisible efficiency. When it came time to leave Huanglongxi, around 8 p.m., the student I was with called the bus driver to find out the location of his bus amidst the great snarl of buses bound for Chengdu. After a long delay while the driver sorted through piles of tiny tissue-paper tickets to be sure no one was missing, we were off. The tickets, round trip, cost 10 yuan -- about $1.50.

China’s modernization is stunning, and disorienting. In Chengdu I felt at times like an old gentleman I saw accompanying his little grandson to see the new subway station. The grandson hopped nimbly onto an upward bound escalator but I don’t think the grandfather had seen one before. He paused, doubtful, watching steps appear out of nowhere. The grandson had to come back down to get him. Everything was fine in the end; the grandfather was smiling by the time he got to the top, a convert to escalators.

But perhaps there’s nostalgia for simpler times. One can see it in the number of people who make offerings and obeisance at Buddhist and Taoist temples, something frowned on three decades ago, or in the “Cultural Revolution” kitsch – the Mao statues, little red books, posters, and 60s newspapers – for sale.

Buddhist observances at Wenshu monastery

If the development of Chengdu’s urban center and satellite suburbs is impressive, one doesn’t see the other side: the condition of those who come to the city from the countryside. Rural migrants provide the cheap labor on which the city’s prosperity is based, yet none could afford the exorbitant price for a flat in “Europe City.”

In Beijing there are 3 ½ million migrant workers living in outlying “walled villages,” within which they’re confined at night. In general, migrants lack “hukou,” the household registration giving the right to reside permanently in the city. Access to education and healthcare is limited as a result. For Americans, it sounds all too familiar.

There are probably similar villages for migrants in Chengdu, a city of 10 million. The national government is implementing rural development policies to move production inland while trying to discourage migrants from permanent settlement in the cities. But for anyone who’s read studies of contemporary rural life in China like Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao’s Will the Boat Sink the Water? or Ian Johnson’s Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China, it’s difficult to believe rural migrants will want to return to the countryside, or, if they do, that their condition will be happy. China’s problems seem sometimes as great as its enormous achievements. Which also seems all too familiar.

And, yes, there are pandas in Chengdu. Here's my favorite picture of the ones I took at the "Panda Research Base":


Contemplative panda