The Great Leap Forward
China today compared to 40 years ago
I was a student in 1985 when I was last in China. In that time the world has changed hugely, but surely nowhere more so than here. Back then, crossing the border from British-run and fully westernised Hong Kong felt like stepping back 30 years. Mainland China was filthier, the place was congested, and the people were poorer. Now, China has developed. Fully. So fully, in fact, that you could argue that in those 40 years it has pulled ahead of the West. It is clean, comfortable, and frighteningly efficient.
The Chinese have fully embraced everything electronic, so much so that life has become absolutely impossible without a phone. It has become a cashless society ruled by QR codes (see Ancient and Modern). Gone are the two currencies: Renmibi which could only be bought with foreign currency and which were worth two to three times the local Yuan on the black market. Gone too are the import shops, the only place where imported goods could be bought, and with Renmibi only. Instead of the plethora of little stores, along newly built streets you’ll come across Macdonalds, KFC, Starbucks and even Aldi, although thank God they aren’t ubiquitous outside tourist zones and big cities. And whereas tea was the only drink available (except in Kunming near the Vietnamese border), now you can get a decent cappuccino anywhere.
The connectivity of the technology here is impressive. For example, the Didi system (Chinese Uber) is connected to the traffic lights, such that the driver and waiting passenger both know the duration in seconds of the red light that the car is stopped at. Many services – for example home deliveries, hop-on and off bikes, Didi, and both intercity and urban transport – are accessed seamlessly through the WeChat or Alipay payment apps. That’s very developed!
If your measure of development is infrastructure, then China has definitely pulled ahead of the West. There is strong 5G signal everywhere – underground, at 5,000m high passes in the middle of nowhere in Tibet, and even when travelling at 300km/h. There are motorways linking everywhere and public transport is phenomenal. Once you have mastered the electronic ticketing systems – which use your passport or a QR code at the ticket gates – it’s a breeze. No more queueing at any ticket offices! From what I can tell, absolutely everything runs on time, and it is all spotlessly clean. If it’s urban transport, there are plentiful buses and extensive, often newly-built, subways.
For the long distances, the high-speed train network is phenomenal. Frequent 300km/h trains connect pretty much everywhere with a significant population. The construction site for a new railway connection was advancing apace for the only place I went to that required a bus: Xiahe on the edge of the Tibetan plateau.
It is hard to believe that the last time I was in China the trains were so overwhelmed that they were all always full. There were a dozen places on each train at double the local price put aside for foreigners only. On arrival in a town, the first thing you would do is queue at the station ticket office to book your train out of town. This was never earlier than 3 days ahead. Lack of that time is the reason I didn’t stop in Xi’an 40 years ago. I went through it in the dead of night on a steam-pulled sleeper train – which left me filthy with soot!
The way the Chinese have transformed their congested towns is impressive too. I remember vividly that in Shanghai they had staggered working hours in order to avoid rush hour – because there was simply not enough physical space on the main roads to accommodate the sheer number of people, let alone traffic! Sparing the historical buildings, they have bulldozed the whole town, and created the carefully planned mega city it is today, widening the streets to multi-lane highways, extending to Pudong on the other side of the river, building a fabulous subway system and putting up hundreds of high-rise tower blocks. (The well-thought-through plan is all clearly laid out in the Urban Planning museum) The haphazard development we live with in the West is not the Chinese way. The pollution is gone – all the 2 wheels are electric or pedal power only and the vast majority of cars are electric – and barging your way through the crowds is no longer necessary.
Most surprising, though, is the change in people’s behaviour. There used to be a constant chorus of loud coughing and spitting with spitoons on the litter-strewn pavements surrounded by near-misses. At restaurants, people would spit their bones on the table or the floor, and say “thank you” silently to the waiters by tapping on the table with two fingers. At one rural restaurant, as they had no refrigeration, the chicken I ordered was chased around the courtyard to be killed! This time, there has been barely a live chicken in sight – not even at the markets – and the owners of the multitudes of street-food stalls would be appalled if you didn’t use the recycling bins and spat your bones on the street! Rush-hour Shanghai on the subway is no more crowded than London, and the only thing that remains of the old China I remember is the very occasional loud cough and spit. I don’t miss most of those bad old days, but I do miss seeing lots of people doing their Tai Chi on the streets and parks in the morning any more.
So, what an example to us all. But…. and there’s a big but. At what price all this progress?
I remember feeling 40 years ago that the political changes under Deng Xiaoping had the potential to unleash, on an unimaginably massive scale, the entrepreneurialism and industry for which the Chinese diaspora across the world are famous. That’s what has happened. All this progress has been earned and very well-deserved.
But, inevitably, China’s growth is now slowing down and evidence of the debt crisis facing the housing sector was plain to see: across the country, everywhere I went, there were massive empty high-rise suburbs, even whole – huge – tower block ghost towns. Yet, even so, more high-rise, road and railway building was going on. I have no idea why this huge market failure is going on, but it does not bode well. Also, so typical of Communist countries, there seems to be quite a bit of over-employment. Most of the hundreds of security guards I came across were superfluous.
And then there is the human cost of this progress. Bulldozing a city like Shanghai in order to make room for the much-needed highways and subways must have had huge repercussions on the human scale. Where have all the people gone who used to live in the little houses down sociable alleyways with the communal toilets? Probably rehoused in a tower block, maybe not even nearby. But then in China, the right of society has always come before the rights of the individual.
