March 20/21: Capitalism, Communism, Confucianism & Corruption. We arrive in the cold gray port city of Tianjin. It's early so I head to the top deck for a walk. But the deck is icy, the smog is thick, and the landscape dreary. I decide it's probably healthier to go inside for a pastry and cup of coffee.
After a few hours we offboard into a huge processing terminal where we are 'processed', then board a bus for the 3-hour ride through a cold gray countryside, finally arriving in the huge capital city of Beijing. This is the first of three cities we will visit in China.
Beijing is a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people. Like any good capitalist city in a communist nation, it spans the full range of just about everything. Great wealth and desperate poverty - great modern architecture and decrepit old buildings. Five-star dining, Big Macs, and things that look like eye-of-newt. Home to the 2008 Olympics, Bird's Nest and Water Cube. Economically capitalistic, politically communist, culturally Confucist, transactionally corrupt to the core. Too big and too complicated to summarize.
We see Tiananmen Square, which is the world's largest rectangular square. It was built as a convenient location for popular uprisings. Lots of history there, most recently the infamous, deadly protests of 1989. The Chinese government, while presumably headed in the direction of increased freedom, is still very sensitive about that episode. Before entering the square our tour guide mentions that he cannot comment on events of 1989 while in the square, even though he was there and has vivid memories. He says one never knows who might be eavesdropping on his conversation. In fact because of his participation in that protest the government prevented him from entering the teaching profession, despite his college degree in Chinese history. So he became a tour guide.
We see the Forbidden City, which was home to a killjoy emperor who forbade just about everything. We spend the night in a fancy hotel called the Shangri-La where we enjoy an overpriced meal with friends. The young waiter speaks surprisingly good English, which he says he taught himself by watching American movies, probably on pirated DVDs. We know that the Chinese like to negotiate everything, but we are still surprised when the hotel staff haggles over our purchase of a single postage stamp. Once we agree on a price, they still try to cheat us.
We visit the Great Wall. We buy silly-looking hats and hike the wall, which is really a series of steep and uneven steps, none built to code. Guides tell us the wall is over 4,000 miles long and can be seen from Jupiter. Originally it was painted with a faux finish to look like stone. This attracted armies of Outer Mongolians who became very fond of climbing the big structure. They would sit on the wall and meditate for hours and hours, trying to get in touch with their inner Mongolian. The visiting armies created a bustling trade that kept the various dynasties in business right up until the opium wars.
The opium wars occurred in the mid 19th century. They were instigated by British and French, ostensibly to combat trade imbalances between China and Europe. An alternate explanation however is that it was started by some merchant-sailors looking for a good time on a Saturday night. There are no reliable eye-witness accounts from these wars, since all of the participants were rendered useless by their opium-induced mental fog. They would spend lazy days sitting atop big pillows, safely ensconced in dark smokey rooms, sipping on their hookahs, thinking deeply about nothing, battling the munchies. That is to say, they were stoned.
In fact they were so stoned they signed away Macau to Portugal and Hong Kong to the British, granting 150-year leases without so much as a security deposit. Macau became a gambling mecca and Hong Kong used its' cool name to attract big shot industrialists. Today both sides have sobered up and both of those cities have reverted to Chinese ownership. However they still maintain their own currency, government, and limited marketing rights. Their opium dens have been converted to shopping malls, and four hundred million Chinese citizens now work hard at manufacturing everything from soup to nuts. The other eight or nine hundred million work in agriculture, which is also related to both soup and nuts.
After much struggle and an excessive amount of history, thousands of years of imperial rule in China came to an end when the last emperor took the early retirement option. He abdicated in 1912, and at the tender age of 6 began a humble life of gardening and imprisonment. This ended 5,000 years of chaos and struggle, and ushered in a new and improved period of chaos and struggle.
Mao Zedong, despite his limited knowledge of trivia, became head of the Communist party. The Cultural Revolution was Mao's attempt to bring some culture to China. He offered low-cost tickets to the ballet, special museum events and communist poetry readings. He decreed that all citizens were entitled to his own opinion. But Mao was out of touch. People wanted to drink and gamble and watch world wide wrestling. Inexplicably, the few intellectuals who actually would have enjoyed some refined culture had been imprisoned by Mao's own cultural police, so the revolution never really achieved the popularity he had hoped for. Frustrated by starvation, low ticket sales, and other domestic issues, the communist party had no choice but to open for trade with the outside world. One way or another this meant having lunch with President Nixon. The two leaders met at a trendy Asian Fusion restaurant in downtown Shanghai and had a nice afternoon eating noodles and exchanging old war stories. They became Facebook friends for a while.
And such was Chinese history. Despite his brushes with harsh communist rule, or perhaps because of it, our tour guide emphasizes the intensity of the capitalism in China and downplays the fact of communism as their political system. He speaks openly of his father's imprisonment by Mao's cultural police. He speaks at length about the one-child policy, and the unintended consequence of significantly more male births than female births. Eventually we learn that in Shanghai, it's the opposite. In that city girls are the preferred gender for new parents, since modern cultural practices make them less expensive than having boys. He notes that at the local level there is an increasing degree of democracy, and that the popular belief about internet censorship is grossly overstated by western media. He notes that Beijing has 100 McDonalds and 110 KFC stores. With obvious pride he characterizes his country as 'more capitalist than the United States.' And in the next breath, and without the slightest trace of irony, he warns us not to buy from any street vendors, stating that they are all dishonest and will cheat us outright.
And so with that heartwarming advice, we leave Beijing to return to the soothing luxury of our ship. We are of course glad we visited, yet equally glad we don't live there. We reflect on our freedoms, our spacious living. However we cannot deny our connection to China; commercially, spiritually, historically and in many other ways, it is a part of our lives in this connected, incredible shrinking world.
For more photos see Brigit's blog at http://anchorsawaygrandworldcruise.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment