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



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.