When I was a child my parents demanded we eat everything on our plate.
“”Think of the starving masses in China,” my father said.
At that time, the early 1960s, there were starving masses in China. Mainly caused by Mao Zedong’s idiocy. He had caused famine with an economic program called the Great Leap Forward. Peasants were distracted from growing crops to making steel, and fairly low-grade steel at that.
“”Well, we’ll wrap it up and send it to them,” I cheekily replied, pointing out the flaw in the logic of Australian children having to eat their dinner because masses in China were starving.
I thought back to this earlier this month while on a tourist boat on the Yangtze River as the waitresses bought the 10th and 11th plate of our nightly banquet.
No more large-scale famine, I thought after what I had seen. People were buying and selling food on street markets in every city. It is difficult to see a reversal to the chaotic policies of Maoism.
But there is another, perhaps more important, message in the eat-up-your-dinner story. It is about parental influence carrying perhaps one or two generations, even if it does fly in the face of logic and newer experiences.
My parents harped on about wasting food because they were brought up in the Great Depression. Today I might know that, in fact, it is more wasteful to eat the food (because of the medical costs of over-eating), but I still feel guilty about leaving food and avoid it doing it.
In China, a very disproportionately large number of people are aged 20 to 30. These people were born during the chaotic Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. In that time Chairman Mao actively supported population growth because he thought China would be able to survive and win a nuclear war that way — through sheer force of numbers. These people are the Children of the Cultural Revolution. They are China’s equivalent of the West’s baby-boomers and will likewise dominate fashion, consumption and social and family attitudes.
The one-child policy did not begin until the late 1970s and is only really biting now. So the Children of the Cultural Revolution can in turn have only one child and that family model dominates. Even at only one child per family, those children in turn create a demographic bulge because their parents’ demographic bulge was so significant. (see the graph.)
I met Wong, aged 30, eldest of six children who has only one child himself and will have no more. But all his siblings, too, have one child. Naturally, the single children are pampered. The boys are called crown princes, and there are more of them than girls. Girls are often aborted. The first thing you notice in China is how few children there are and how many people are aged between 20 and 30.
But let’s go back to the shaping of the Children of the Cultural Revolution because they will shape the course of China in the 21st century. Western economic commentators do not tend to see them as children of the Cultural Revolution, but as great consumers, which is true only to a point.
These children were brought up by parents who endured two utterly unnecessary periods of famine and hardship brought about solely by the selfishness, and misguided ideology of their own leaders, not by poor weather or foreign invasion, China’s usual cause of famine.
We have mentioned Mao’s Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s. Mad collectivisations and the push for heavy industry and steel meant peasants were distracted from the task of growing food with a little extra to sell on the side.
In the early 1960s more pragmatic people were brought into the leadership. By 1966 they had isolated Mao who was becoming just a figurehead, but a cult figure nonetheless. His orders to party functionaries were just being ignored. He could not just denounce these senior party officials because for so long people had been told that the party could do not wrong. So he used his cult status to launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966. He said students could ignore their teachers or denounce and humiliate them. They could destroy old culture, old ideas and the cultural symbols of the old. In short, Mao turned the equivalent of millions of young soccer hooligans on the street who took great delight in not going to school and smashing public and private fine artefacts: temples, museums, sculpture, artwork, everything.
Anyone with a modicum of education was sent to the countryside to do hard labour in collectives that were run badly and where there was no incentive to produce.
Mao said you had to destroy the old before you could create the new.
China’s tourist industry will pay for it. Sure, lots of tourists go to China. But so much has been lost. Of course, the selfish Communist Party rulers kept the exquisite places they lived in in Beijing intact, and mercifully, China’s greatest archaeological site, the tombs of the terra-cotta warriors, was discovered after the mania of the Cultural Revolution had subsided. And, of course, they could hardly smash up the Great Wall. Much so much else was lost.
The only moderating force to stay in power during the Cultural Revolution was Zhou Enlai. To what limited extent he could, he saved cultural heritage from the soccer hooligans. In Shanghai, for example, he craftily installed great portraits of Mao in front of the Buddha in the Jade Buddha Temple knowing the hooligans would not dare touch a Mao portrait. The Jade Buddha Temple is one of the few old cultural sites worth seeing in Shanghai.
For a decade, China was run according to whatever was the latest Mao slogan. He once said that plants that had no economic value softened the revolution and should be pulled out as capitalist luxuries. Millions of people then tore up whatever trees that survived the Great Leap Forward’s steel furnaces. They tore up shrubs and even grass. You see very few trees over 30 years old in China.
People were denounced as capitalist roaders, counter-revolutionaries or rightists. It meant jail, re-education, hard labour, humiliation, fear and uncertainty, and loss of home and family unity.
Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, a leading figure in the Cultural Revolution, said, “It is better to have socialist poverty than capitalist prosperity.”
Mao slowly got his way and the pragmatists at the very highest ranks of the party were denounced. No-one was safe.
The death of the moderate but still-in-power Zhou in early 1976 was the catalyst for the end of the Cultural Revolution. He was genuinely mourned and popular anger swelled when wreaths were removed from Tiananmen Square overnight.
When Mao died later that year, the game was up. Within a month his widow and three others who made up the Gang of Four were arrested. Four years later they were tried and jailed for life.
The children of the people who lived through this hell are now China’s driving force, even if they do not rule politically.
The parents taught these children to keep their heads down; that politics is dangerous. These children have been told that the ability to earn money and keep the family together should not be taken for granted (like food on the plate in the eyes of our parents who lived through the Great Depression).
One of our guides, Helen (a lot of Chinese guide adopt a western name), said, “”People are fearful of political dissent. They put their head down a make money. Politics can’t make you money.”
At least now people are allowed to make money without being denounced.
Not only are people fearful of politics, the frequent changes and turmoil have bred cynicism. Jiang Qing is a hero of the party that can do no wrong one day, and arrested the next. Deng Xiaoping is a capitalist-roader one day, and hero of the Four Modernisations the next.
The Children of the Cultural Revolution have no enthusiasm for silly political campaigns when there is money to be made safely.
Perhaps this is why the Tiananmen Square student movement did not lead to a total collapse of communist and the Communist Party, as it did in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many Children of the Cultural Revolution saw engaging in such politics as unsafe, and they were right.
One of my young guides expressed the opinion that the students were too extreme, too obstinate and too demanding.
The west hopes that the huge economic progress in China in the past 10 years will be a catalyst to political change — to democratisation and better regard for human rights than is at present exercised by the fairly totalitarian government. We hope that the collapse of communism will happen in China as it did in the eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
It’s a nice hope, but to hear and see the Children of the Cultural Revolution in action reveals a contrary likelihood. Their attraction to economic activity and their fear of engaging in politics makes it more possible for the Government to keep a tight control.
Communism in China in an economic sense is obviously extinct. It is buried under the teeming street markets full of consumer goods in Shanghai. But political rigidity remains. The Chinese can choose their goods, but they cannot choose their government — at least not this generation.
We have thought, perhaps naively, that it is not possible to have economic liberalism without sparking a concomitant political evolution.
Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatism was in economics alone. When he said, “”It does not matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice,” he was referring to economic rules, not the political framework.
And mice are being caught, but in a Chinese way with a lot of social cohesion and a lot of fear of individuality. Remember, the Children of the Cultural Revolution have been berated by their parents not to stand out.
Many western entrepreneurs think the rules of economics are rational and universal. They talk of market share, thinking that if they could only get 1 per cent of the Chinese market, they would be rich. They should forget about getting one per cent of the market across the board. They need to first work on getting 90 per cent of the market in one village or town, gaining social acceptance for goods.
It may take another generation for outlandish individualism to appear more frequently.
Lack of individualism can, of course, drive mass consumer markets, once a foothold has been gained.
The economic transformation in China over the past 20 years has been astounding. Average wages have more than trebled (in real terms); the growth rate has averaged more than 9 per cent a year; and from 1983 to 1996 international trade grew 600 per cent.
This flipping to extremes seems a paradox in a nation where people respect Yin and Yang and harmony and balance. China has flipped from the stagnant, poverty stricken, repressive hell-hole of the Cultural Revolution to a booming nation of active traders. It has gone from far left socialism to the pragmatic four modernisations. It has gone from rampant population growth (200 million in the Cultural Revolution) to a rigid one-child regime.
One hopes it will not flip back economically. Few think it will.
I was fortunate enough to meet Tom, whose experience commands respect for his optimism.
Tom is 68 and lives in Seattle and before that Hong Kong.
“I bet you never thought 20 years ago that you would be abroad a boat going up the Yangtze?”, I suggested to him naively.
Then he told me.
Tom went back to China in late 1950s, patriotically to help build a new China after the revolution. Things went poorly economically in early 1960s so he applied to return to Hong Kong. He was refused. In 1966 Cultural Revolution hit. He stayed low, but was denounced in early 1970s as a counter-revolutionary. As a hospital administrator he was already in a bad occupation, one of the Nine Bad Elements. Then he applied again to go to Hong Kong to visit his dying mother. He was also foolish enough to point out that a woman who had suicided because there was no medical help might have been saved by money. He was denounced. He lost his job and was sent to a commune to do manual labour.
“They wasted 20 years of my life before they allowed me back to Hong Kong,” he said.
When he saw the threat of Chinese takeover in 1984 he went as quickly as he could to the US.
And now he is back in China. He carries no bitterness. He is optimistic and convinced China will not go back.
“Now everyone is a capitalist-roader,” he laughs. “”They are driving down the capitalist road at great speed; with a vengeance.”
It seemed as if the vengeance was his personally.
I returned to Shanghai and lunched at the Peace Hotel (the old Cathay) near the Bund. In its elegant dinning room with embossed ceiling a waiter in traditional costume with long-spout teapot pours tea from a metre away directly into the cup.
Outside there are shops, street sweepers, elegant people, peasants, banks, neon signs and the huge telecommunications tower — and, of course, Mao’s statue on the waterfront presiding over the glorious inequality and variety of humankind.