China's locomotive

This morning the autumn tiger (two consecutive days in September with highs above 95°) finally left Wuhan. In fact, we’ve had many more than two days of high heat and brutal humidity. Today, the tiger was vanquished by cool winds and rain. The contrast is almost dizzying, although coming back to China after thirty years away, it’s a minor contrast compared to many others.

Our first residence at Wuhan University, 1979 (now torn down): no heat, no hot water.

The Tastee Coffee Shop that's replaced it.

 Such as traffic. When we lived in China in 1979-81, there were few cars. People rode bicycles. We rode all over Wuhan on our bikes, mostly on two lane roads. Now there are four and six lane overhead expressways all over town and traffic jams which develop at a moment’s notice. In Beijing, there were 77,000 cars in 1978; now there are 4 ½ million.

You’ve probably heard about the 100 kilometer-long traffic jam north of Beijing that lasted for a week. Bicycles are almost a relic. Most commuters (2/3, I read somewhere) used to bike to work. Now it’s less than 1 in 5, and this hardy remnant complains about the dangers of riding bikes amidst ferociously assertive car drivers and scooter riders.

Another contrast: money. Back in 1978, most university professors made 50 or 60 yuan a month -- about $30-40 at the then-exchange rate. They had free or almost free accommodation and medical care, and not much else to buy besides food, which was rationed then. Now, they make $5000 to $10,000 yuan, or $750-1500 a month at current rates, but must buy an apartment and car.

The price of apartments in the high rises that have sprouted all over town is a constant source of discussion. People talk like New Yorkers about the cost per square meter for apartments; even a small one can run a million plus yuan in Wuhan, a bargain by Beijing or Shanghai standards, but the price goes up every week.

Official statistics in China aren’t always reliable –the inflation rate is claimed to be 3.5%, but everyone says it’s much higher and cite examples of prices doubling every few months.

Even the government, however, admits that property prices are out of control, officially said to be up by 9.3% in August, with new home (i.e. apartment) prices up by almost 12%. There are, indeed, fears of social unrest as prices jump while salaries are stagnant; there have been worker suicides and strikes in foreign-owned factories like the ones that assemble parts for I-Pods.

Nevertheless, there’s an air of prosperity and push that wasn’t present back in 1980. There are impressive new buildings, like the Foreign Language Building on the Wuhan University campus, a contrast to the grey relic that was our classroom building back then.

The old Foreign Language Building at Wuda (from a 1980 slide)



The new Foreign Language buildling (picture by Luo Cheng)

There’s the impressive new Hubei Provincial Museum nearby, just winding up a traveling exhibit of paintings from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

 

Hubei Provincial Museum, Wuchang. Photo by Yang Yasha

  There are Starbucks (8 in Wuhan), McDonald’s (many), Walmarts (3 in Wuhan), and multi-level shopping malls, crowded with domestic and imported merchandise (and intriguing signage in English, such as the one in my local Walmart pointing the shopper to “Alice Mo’s mat,” apparently a reference to car floor mats). You can get Lay’s potato chips, Ragu spaghetti sauce, or a pretty fair Chinese cabernet.

And so it goes, in contrast to three decades ago, when we got our vegetables from a state market and had to produce ration tickets to buy meat. You can get DVD’s of American TV sitcoms (I bought seasons 1-4 of 30 Rock for $3 yesterday) or go to an I-Max showing of Inception, which I did the other day in the company of some of my former students, one of whom is an I-Max executive.

That great scene in Inception of the runaway locomotive careening through city streets, scattering people in all directions, seems to me a good metaphor for China’s economy today. The Wuhan of thirty years ago was a sleepy place where people rode bicycles to work and made about the same salaries.

You can still glimpse that Wuhan down old residential alleys where people sit on stools gossiping, smoking, and playing Chinese chess.
But out on the big commercial streets there’s that runaway locomotive going who knows where. It’s an exciting ride, and certainly for me great joy to have the opportunity to talk about the changes with my former students of thirty years ago.

With three of my former graduate students at a "Hubei specialties" banquet.

First week in Wuhan

JianghanLu 2010

JianghanLu 1980

Tuesday August 31 – a reminder, if any were needed, that I’m in China: as I sat down to write this first week blog, my access to Blogspot (along with Facebook and similar sites) is blocked by the government in China.

There are ways around this censorship, including the VPN I’ve been using which (for a fee) provides a server in the U.S. that masks one’s presence in China. But it’s not foolproof; the multiple internet addresses of VPN’s can be stymied, at least for a time.

A week in Wuhan has been a time of heady experiences revisiting and recalling places and experiences from thirty years ago. This morning a young colleague in the English Department met me at the Foreign Language Building to familiarize me with the classrooms I’ll be using. The new Foreign Language Building, about ten years old, is imposing on the outside, especially in contrast to the old FL building I taught in from 1979-1981.

That building still stands, a remnant of the original Wuhan University (Wuhan Daxue, or Wuda), looking shabby and neglected, bushes growing from its green tiles. The current building has central heating and cooling, while the old building had neither. In winter, the classroom was warmed by a single charcoal brazier carried into the classroom to keep the expensive foreign teacher from freezing. Chilblains were common among students. There was a common room used by all the teachers in the English specialty as their office; it happened to be right next to the cesuo, the public toilet, which had no flush capacity: waste just accumulated until someone came with a bucket to remove it.

The classrooms of 1979 had only a blackboard and chalk; today’s have overhead projectors and computers. In 1979 a telephone call was an ordeal for everyone involved, involved a lot of shouting “Wei? Wei?” meaning “Hello?” and hearing only a faint answering shout at the other end. Now cell phones are everywhere and reception is good, though this doesn’t stop people from shouting “Wei?”

A couple of days ago I headed down to Hankou, the largest sector of the three cities that make up Wuhan (total city population: 8 million; 30 years ago: 3 million), to see what the main shopping street, Jianghan Lu, looked like. On the old Jianghan Lu, there wasn’t much to buy or many places to go. The biggest department store, Wang Fu Jing, was a dreary place where you were separated from items for sale by a counter and a grumpy salesperson who hauled things off the shelves behind her and flopped them on the counter.

Even with the poor quality of my 1979 picture of Jianghan Lu (copied from a slide, but looking like something from the early days of photography), you can see a lack of panache in the Jianghan Lu of those days. The new Jianghan Lu is a pedestrian shopping street, close to a Wal-Mart, crowded day and night with well-dressed shoppers. If you look closely, however, you can see that the massive shop hoardings have been hung over the old stone buildings of European colonial days, when Hankou had a foreign concession zone. A block of two away from the shopping area you can look down any alley and see life going on as if unaffected by the changes: old men sit on stools playing checkers; women sweep the sidewalk in front of their small noodle stands, small stores sell cigarettes, soft drinks, fruit, people spend much time lounging and chatting.

The question of which is the apparent and which is the real crops up all the time. One name for it is shanzhai, meaning fake. Fakery is a huge industry in China, which I had an experience of this week when I bought my first cellphone, a Nokia, complete with Nokia box, owner’s manual (in Chinese). I’d barely got it to room before the cover started peeling off like a snake shedding its skin. A Chinese friend took a look at it and commented, “Oh, shanzai.” People stand on streetcorners chanting “Fapiao, fapiao.” They are offering to make fake receipts for people needing, for example, reimbursement for something they didn’t do, or perhaps a doctor’s excuse.

Enough fakery for now. Tomorrow I head out for a few days in Wudangshan, a Taoist retreat in Western Hubei province, before starting classes. So far, anyway, China hasn’t disappointed. There’s enough of the China of 1979-81 to feel at home and enough of the new to be interested in what’s going to happen to this country in the next thirty years.

MA Orals for the 1981 graduate student in English class, after graduate and undergraduate degree programs were reinstituted in China. The "guiding" from Beijing announcing the decision to reinstitute degrees came as a surprise, since students hadn't learned research methods nor were there library holdings adequate to support graduate research. With no internet, materials had to be sent by colleagues in the U.S. to support the graduate students writing their M.A. theses.

Students at Wuhan University in the university library, studying under the eye of Mao Zedong, 1980. The library had a small collection, with almost no foreign language acquisitions after 1966 -- the beginning of the Cultural Revolution -- and few since 1949.

Two views of Wuhan university: on top, aerial view of Wuda with East Lake in distance, probably 1930s or 1940s. Below, view from East Lake (1980).

Friday, July 3rd, 1981 - Me with the Wuda students and faculty members who came to see me off.

English graduate student class, Wuhan University, 1979-1981.
The first group of graduate students in many years at that university. I'm hoping a thirty-year reunion of this group will occur in the spring of 2011, when we can get caught up on the many different lives this outstanding group of individuals have led since our parting. (The pictures are copied from slides; thus the rather poor quality).
Back row, from left: Shi Kuan, Li Qing-sheng, Chen Jian-ling, Ying Lai-xi, Zhou Xin-ping, Huang Ke, Liu Han-bing, Song Xiao-ping, Yang Ya-sha, Cao Lu-bin.
Front row, from left: Luo Cheng, Zhang Yu-jiou, Xu Hai-lan, Yang Yu-sen, Xuan Shen, Huang Mu-qiang. The right hand five in the front row are teacher colleagues.