A joke I learned recently goes like this: One American writer visits China for a week, comes home and writes a book. Second American writer visits China for a month, comes home and produces a magazine article. Third American writer goes to China, spends a whole year, comes home and can't write anything at all.
By that model I should be a fountain of wisdom, having spent a total of four days in this South China metropolis, the last stop on a slightly whirlwind Asian study-tour. But what I mainly have to pass on is simply the overwhelming impression of... being overwhelmed. Of everything goingon at once. Of a massive country going through massive changes at such an incredibly rapid pace that almost anything I tell you may not only be fragmentary and lacking in context; it also might be obsolete in another week or two. Jump to a conclusion here and you'll almost certainly fall on your face.
Flipping channels in my hotel one night I hit CCTV 1, one of the Chinese government's several broadcast channels. It was right out of the 1960s, a trip down communism's memory lane. There was Chairman Mao, beaming as members of the Peoples Liberation Army sang his praises, and happy peasants and workers danced in gratitude beneath enormous red flags. Then I hit the remote and switched to CCTV 2, where a sexy model was selling shampoo to today's masses.
It seems to be like that quite a bit here. There is the China we all grew up with on TV - drab buildings, streets filled with commuters on bicycles, rows of tiny shops selling indecipherable items - and then there is the China that is emerging, or perhaps even exploding, into the 21st-century global economy. Bicycle commuters here risk being run down by Buicks; svelte luxury high-rise apartment buildings tower over the street stalls; and it's easier to find a Gucci bag or Sony laptop than a lacquer bowl or silk-embroidered souvenir to take home.
The China Export Commodities Fair in 2001
There was a huge red banner hanging over the entrance to our hotel. "Warmly Celebrate the Grand Opening of the 90th Session of Chinese Export Commodities Fair," it said beneath Chinese characters. The twice-a-year Canton trade fair (Canton is the old Western name for Guangzhou) is a big deal, generating billions of dollars in export business and attracting buyers from all over the world. But it's an anachronism to call the goods displayed here "commodities"; the days when China offered mainly raw materials and cheap manufactured items is long gone. A walk through the trade show is exactly like a walk through the King of Prussia mall; all the appliances, electronics, toys, housewares and gift-store tchotchkes that Americans haul home by the minivan-load are cranked out in the factories that spread out from here on all sides.
That China makes and the world takes isn't news, of course. Nor is the fact that many of the people who produce these goods are low-paidmigrants taking their first step up the ladder from extreme rural poverty. The combination of their labor and capital from Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere has turned this area into one of the fastest growing regions in Asia, or indeed the world. But what surprised me is the speed and apparent success with which the Chinese are riding and accommodating that growth. Roads, housing, schools, and all the rest of what we consider the urban infrastructure are falling into place here, creating a megalopolis that is looking more and more like Atlanta, Los Angeles, or even suburban New Jersey every day.
From Guangzhou south to Hong Kong, in the area known as the Pearl River Delta, the population is now about 14 million. That includes cities such as Shenzhen, on the border of Hong Kong, which was a fishing village of some 30,000 just 20 years ago. It now is home to more than four million people. We're talking about a place the size of metro Philadelphia, created essentially from scratch since Frank Rizzo's administration. Only five years ago, I was told, there were still more bicycles than cars on the roads. Now there are elevated expressways, miles of them, filled with middle-class Chinese workers and consumers. Whole colonies of foreign investors and managers have moved in to build and run factories, office buildings and industrial parks. Our group met the editor of the largest local newspaper at its spanking new printing plant that is already running over capacity as it strains to put out 1.8 million copies per day. Real estate advertising is their gold mine, I was told.
I could go on endlessly (it was only four days, remember), but you get the idea. China is booming, growing faster than you can imagine and creating an optimism that is particularly noticeable these days, when optimism is in short supply throughout much of the world. Listen to aChinese newscast or sit with an official speech, and even if you don't speak Mandarin, you'll still get the idea as recognizable terms like "WTO" "GDP" "Olympics" and "World Cup" punctuate the patter. The Chinese have arrived, whatever that means, and we are all going to get to know them much better very soon.
(By Andrew Cassel in 2001; by the courtesy of Guangzhou Morning Post and the Guangzhou Publishing House)
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