Lee chang-rae's Native Speaker

Lately I have been sorting out and attempting to sell or give away books that are in my collection that I have read but would most likely not read again.

One of them was Lee Chang-rae's Native Speaker.

Before I placed it in an envelope to sell it to a Amazon.com book buyer, I flipped through some of the underlined portions, which were underlined because they must have touched me in some way.

These include a description of Arirang, the Korean folk song.

Lee wrote that "like any good folk song it makes the voice of its singer sound lost, or forlorn, incomplete."

And one of the characters added: "Imagine, that that could be the spirit of an entire nation."

I cannot help but sigh at the vivid yet poignant description of Arirang being "lost", "forlorn" and "incomplete", and "the spirit of an entire nation."

Another character in Lee's novel said: "Koreans don't take their own lives, at least not from shame. My mother said to me once that suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better. If you bite your lip and understand that this is the only world, you will persist and endure."

Something to Ponder About China's Privatization Efforts

While reporting on China's privatization and protection of private property efforts over the past few years, I have always viewed such efforts as positive moves.

Even though there are certain quarters in China who argue against such efforts, it is generally assumed that these were die-hard Marxists who would eventually fade away.

These people believed that if large amounts of state assets were transferred to individuals, China's socialist system would lose its economic foundation. And this would in turn threaten the very foundation of the Chinese Communist Party.

But one aspect which is seldom focused upon in discussing the protection of private property is its ripple legal effect.

For instance, as a Zhengzhou University president once pointed out, "what would stop people from claiming the property they lost to the state after Liberation? After the French Revolution, children of the nobility could still claim their property under Napoleon."

Would the claiming of private property open up a Pandora's box?

One Aspect of SOE Reform

In the late 1990s, the mayor of Shenyang (沈阳) Mu Suixin (慕绥新) was trying to sell off state-owned enterprises (SOEs). A needed move, as China's north-east had the largest concentration of SOEs.

He toured southern China trying to find buyers for the factories, but most backed off when they found they have to shoulder the burden of the retired workforce.

Mu even toured London, Rome, Paris and Tokyo, offering to sell the factories for just one yuan.

Golly, just one yuan! Even then, it was not as if there was a stampede for the out-of-this-world offer.

Interestingly, Mu was sentenced to death in 2001 for corruption. He was accused of having broken laws and violated discipline, and becoming "corrupt and degenerate in defiance of Party discipline and State laws."

He was also accused of receiving huge amounts of bribes, appointing people by favoritism and benefits, addressing chiefs of the black market as their brothers, and indulging in the trading of power for money.

Beijing Shougang - Its Days of Glory and its Aftermath

Beijing's Capital Iron and Steelworks, known as Shougang (首钢), had been the source of pollution in the Chinese capital for years. With the advent of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, there are indications that it has been downsized or closed down altogether.

Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) visited Shougang in 1992 and apparently praised it as a model for the transformation of the state sector.

Shougang's then chairman who was a long-standing associate of Deng, reportedly obtained a backdoor listing in Hong Kong. With the cash in hand, the chairman announced that Shougang would quadruple its steel production capacity.

The chairman then sent his son to Hong Kong where he eventually listed six separate companies which by 1995, had a combined market capitalization of US $ 12 billion. The son had gone into business with Deng's second son Deng Zhifang (邓质方), and when the two teamed up with Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing (李嘉诚), no one reportedly dared gainsay them.

With the billions of dollars of capital raised by the two princelings, the company expanded in every possible direction - iron-ore trading, metal trading, shipping, real estate projects in Hong Kong and China, computer components and telephone accessories.

It even went into banking, founding the Minsheng Bank (民生银行). In the process it acquired 262,000 employees, 199 factories, 47 domestic affiliates, 27 joint ventures, and sales offices in 18 countries.

According to Jasper Becker, the company shipped an entire steel plant from the United States. It also acquired an iron ore mine in Peru for which it reputedly paid four times the going price, as well as land in Beijing on which to build shopping centers and villas.

As Becker wrote: "The managers of this vast and sprawling conglomerate, the state bureaucrats, behaved as if they were Western tycoons who had created a fortune. They bought fleets of Mercedes and went on holiday to Las Vegas. They took out golf memberships, bought villas, (owned) mistresses, raced horses, and were always seen dressed in Italian suits and speaking into their mobile phones."

What sheer audacity, considering that about 80 per cent of Chinese-made steel did not meet international quality standards!

For Shougang, the end came in 1995 when Deng fell into a terminal coma and his political opponents made their move.

Shougang chairman was dismissed and his son arrested and given a suspended death sentence. The government cancelled all projects aimed at increasing the company's steel capacity.

A new management was also brought in which admitted that Shougang was largely to be blamed for Beijing's terrible air pollution. Hardly surprising, as the plant had failed to invest in even the most minimum pollution control equipment.

Plans were also announced to dismissed 30,000 of its 50,000 steelworkers and to spin off all its subsidiary units - the company bakery, the car pool, the cleaners, the security guards, restaurants, hotels, printing presses, power plants, television stations, and even its opera troupe.

Despite Shougang's fall from grace, its example did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of many Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Though hopelessly bankrupt, many continued to list on the stock exchange.

Hong Kong in particular showed a feverish interest in buying these so-called "red chip" stocks.

"Red chips ... are often controlled by Chinese government agencies and thus have strong guanxi or connections in China that allow them to buy assets at bargain prices," reported the South China Morning Post (南华早报) in explaining the popularity of these share offerings.

1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign

In 1981, the Chinese Communist Party delivered a verdict on the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, known as "The Resolution on Some Historical Questions of the Party since the Establishment of the Country".

While the "resolution" did not go as far as to admit that the campaign was a mistake, it did concur that it had been "broadened" too widely.

A former Xinhua News Agency (新华社) reporter noted: "According to Party documents, only 96 were originally targeted but the campaign was expanded to cover 552,912 people. So this was broadened by a factor of 5,000!"

"This is worse than Chiang Kai-shek (蒋介石) who in 1927 massacred Communist Party members, saying it was better to kill a thousand than to let one go free."

Chinese Population and Eugenics

The creation of a people with better genes and higher calibre has been an ongoing issue in contemporary China.

During the late Qing dynasty, reformer Kang Youwei (康有为) advocated the establishment of state "pleasure hotels" where selected young people could mate. He also advocated prenatal education, and the sterilization of the disabled and the mentally deficient.

During the same period, a Chinese Committee for Racial Hygiene, founded by Dr Pan Guangdan, said to be the father of Chinese eugenics, sprang into existence and put into practice the beliefs of influential reform Tan Sitong (谭嗣同) who held that "if we pay attention to the science of racial advancement, each generation will be superior to the last; through endless transformations, it will give birth to another race."

During Mao Zedong's (毛泽东) time, publications such as Population and Eugenics (人口与优生) issued by the Population Research Center of Zhejiang Medical College in Hangzhou (杭州)continued to advocate that genetically fitter elements of the population, such as educated urbanites, should be encouraged to have more than one child, and that the state should take measures to check unhealthy genetic trends in the countryside.

In 1988, Gansu province (甘肃省) became the first to pass a law prohibiting mentally retarded people from having children. Officials there complained that the province had 270,000 retarded people who were breeding 2,000 retarded children a year. Since then, Liaoning (辽宁), Zhejiang (浙江) and Hunan (湖南) provinces had passed similar laws.

At a national eugenics conference held in 1989, officials reported that China had 30 million genetically defective people whose maintenance was costing society up to 8 billion yuan a year.

This prompted a senior family planning officer to declare that "eugenics not only affects the success of the state and the prosperity of the race, but also the well-being of the people and social stability."

A subsequent legislative drive culminated in 1995 in a National Eugenics Law, later renamed the Maternal and Infant Health Law. It authorizes officials to carry out pre-marital check-ups to see if either parent suffers from a serious hereditary, venereal or contagious disease so as to prevent "inferior births". If the official deems it necessary, he can order sterilization or even an abortion.

Indeed, many Chinese believe that something must be done to improve the nation's gene pool which is felt to be too narrow. Centuries of inbreeding have supposedly resulted in a population where 30 per cent suffer from some sort of hereditary handicap.

As Jasper Becker wrote: "Eugenics promote a biologising version of society in which the reproductive rights of individuals are subordinated to the rights of an abstract collectivity."

One Difficulty of SOE Reform in China

This is perhaps one of many reasons why the reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China is an uphill battle.

According to Willy Wo-Lap Lam in his book The Era of Jiang Zemin (Prentice Hall 1999), Jiang Zemin (江泽民) was known to have given special favors to factories which he was sentimentally attached.

Take for example the Shanghai Yi Min Foodstuffs Co where Jiang worked as a vice-director for two years in the early 1950s.

By the early 1990s, Yi Min had fallen on hard times due to factors such as having too many retirees on its payroll.

In a meeting in early 1994 with then Shanghai Party boss Wu Bangguo (吴邦国), Jiang reportedly said, "You must not let it fail", adding that the municipality had to take "active measures" to bail it out. Why?

As Lam wrote: "It was a matter of face - and feudalism. Beijing's top leaders considered it de rigueur that institutions, factories and farms where they had worked be seen as model units."

Chinese Universities Resisting Mergers

Not too long ago, a reported attempt to merge the famous Peking (北京大学) and Tsinghua (清华大学) Universities met with vigorous protests, and was subsequently abandoned.

In 1999, students in Sichuan province (四川省) boycotted classes and tried to demonstrate against plans to merge the South-west University of Politics and Law (西南政法大学), where many senior legal officials were trained, with the far less prestigious Chongqing University (重庆大学) which is much easier to get into.

The opposition to merger is easy to understand, especially for Peking and Tsinghua. The move is as incredulous as trying to merge Harvard and Yale.

But other mergers did take place.

Shanghai's famous Fudan University (复旦大学, pictured) did merge with the Shanghai Medical University and the Shanghai Languages Foreign University to become a massive institution with 28,000 full-time and 8,000 part-time students.

State of Education in China

The following accounts were said to have occurred in the 1990s, but have they been totally eradicated?

In Hunan (湖南), teachers reportedly ordered their students on to the streets to sell apples.

In Shanghai (上海), teachers were found peddling boiled eggs and ice-cream.

In Guangzhou (广州), teachers disrupted classes in order to train pupils as professional mourners at funerals, who were in turn hired out at 5 yuan per head.

In some schools, teachers touted for business on behalf of insurance companies and publishers, and local governments levied fees to cover the cost of textbooks.

The more fees that were levied, the more children dropped out. And good teachers often resigned, go into business, or become local government cadres.

Even at the renowned Peking University (北京大学), students complained about the terrible food in the canteens, the cramped living quarters in which they slept six to a dormitory room with bunk beds but no space for a desk, and the very restricted library opening times.

KFC Versus Ronghuaji

We all know about KFC. So what is Ronghuaji? Well, it was supposed to be the Chinese equivalent to KFC.

Apparently in the early 1990s, the Ministry of Internal Trade issued guidelines and produced a national development plan for the fast food industry, earmarking seed funds and supporting, amongst others, the Ronghuaji (荣华鸡), or Glorious China Chicken Company as a competitor to KFC.

But it soon became clear that Ronghuaji was no competition at all.

One Ronghuaji executive said in 1997: "We are a six-year old child in the business and KFC is a sixty-year old veteran. KFC has reached levels of capitalism that we cannot match."

Ronghuaji also failed to match KFC in terms of management, cleanliness, efficiency and above all, in consistency. By the turn of the century, it was struggling to keep a dozen outlets going.

How Western Consumerism is Changing China

It was interesting to read in Jasper Becker's book The Chinese about the ways western companies had to adapt to when operating in China, and how they had in turn changed China.

Unilever's subsidiary, Walls, found it had to give away refrigerator boxes and carts free to vendors before it could sell its brands.

Cadbury had to make a slightly less sweet chocolate.

But Chinese too have changed as a result of the foreign onslaught. They rarely ate potatoes in the past, yet began to acquire a taste for potato chips.

Even cheese, which the Chinese are generally thought to dislike, is now produced in China and eaten, if only on pizzas. Indeed, one German company Hochland, has even produced cheese flavored with banana or strawberry in the hope of persuading the Chinese to acquire the taste.

Introduction of western consumerism has also brought about a change in Chinese habits and customs.

Chocolate manufacturers now promote Valentine's Day while McDonald's have encouraged parents to bring their children to their restaurants for birthday parties.

The Story of Yang Baiwan

Yang Baiwan (杨百万) was known as a model investor and the first in China who made a fortune trading in government bonds.

A Shanghainese whose education was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, he ended up in the 1970s as a warehouse watchman earning 68 yuan a month. Initially he tried selling electrical wire in the countryside.

With the money earned, he began to buy government bonds which were then being offered with a guaranteed return of 15 per cent. Soon, he noticed that there was a difference in the prices at which the government sold state bonds, depending on the intended customer. Simply by buying and reselling such bonds, it was possible to make a profit.

Yang recalled: "I must have been the first Chinese to notice this. At the time, people who wanted to buy government bonds at all were rare. Most people bought them because the government forced us to. But for me, this situation proved an opportunity."

Yang borrowed as much money from relatives as he could and rode around town on a bicycle, buying bonds from one counter and reselling them at another.

He then discovered that bonds in the countryside were sold at a lower price than in the city so he began to go to the villages and buy up their allocations. Sometimes he bought bonds for 70 yuan and sold them for as much as 100 yuan.

After the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, he became worried and decided to declare his wealth. Entering a tax office, he told an astonished clerk that he had earned a million yuan, an event said to mark the start of his fame.

Like millionaires elsewhere, Yang subsequently became a professor. He also toured the country and gave lectures to as many as 7,000 at a time.

In 1998, Xinhua News Agency (新华社) reported that Yang was living in self-imposed isolation, glued to a computer screen in his home in Shanghai.

"I haven't been downtown in ten years and I don't participate in recreational activities," he reportedly said. Instead, he worked at home trading on markets through the telephone and computer.

What has become of him now?

Growing Influence of China's Private Sector

The growing influence of China's private sector can be seen as early as 1989, specifically during the student protests of that same year.

Among the most ardent supporters of the student protests were said to be geitihu (个体户, individual owners) who banded together in squads and raced around Beijing on motorbikes, organizing resistance to the army. Many donated food and drinks to the protesters, while a few gave generous financial support.

Indeed, according to Jasper Becker, the Tiananmen incident "demonstrated how, for the first time in forty years, the private sector was capable of wielding political influence and constituting something like an opposition to the Communist Party."

Hence it was unsurprising that in the aftermath of the protests, the Party begun a large-scale investigation of private companies, and started yet another propaganda campaign, accusing them of evading taxes and selling pornography.

"Self-employed traders and peddlers cheat, embezzle, bribe and evade taxation," wrote then new Party chief Jiang Zemin (江泽民).

Even the children of private businessmen were attacked.

A survey published in the China Education Daily Survey found that "many of their children are often involved in fighting, drinking alcohol, gambling and reading pornographic materials. Eighty per cent of them are tired of collective activities and duties. One student even paid his classmates to do classroom cleaning for him for the whole year."

Milton Friedman and Pudong

American economist Milton Friedman once wondered if Shanghai's Pudong (浦东) will become a "state monument for a dead Pharaoh, just like the pyramids."

As Friedman complained after touring Shanghai in 1993, China's rulers are still obsessed with big government, grand plans and giant state-run industries.

Mr Friedman, these are known as zhengji gongcheng (政绩工程) in China, or projects that highlights one's political achievements. There are few things more tangible than infrastructure developments and grand projects.

Executors of past projects have witnessed a steady rise in their political fortunes, and their achievements have, and will continued to be mimicked by those who want to inch their way up the political hierarchy.

And so far, while there are signs of over-supply, there are perhaps no clear signs that Pudong has turned into a state monument for dead Pharaohs.

South Korean Factories in China

These incidents reportedly happened in the mid-1990s and one wonders if these still occur right now.

In 1995, the Zhuhai (珠海) Labor Bureau took action against the head of a South Korean electronics factory who reportedly kept her workers on duty continuously for more than 24 hours. Some fell asleep during a ten-minute break and were ordered to kneel, while others had to keep their hands raised in the air for ten minutes.

In another Korean-run factory, a woman worker was locked inside a dog cage together with a large dog, and publicly displayed in the factory compound.

Also in 1995, the Worker's Daily (工人日报) reported that 600 female workers had staged protests at a South Korean factory in Qinhuangdao (秦皇岛) in Hebei province (河北省), demanding shorter hours, higher wages and the right not to be beaten or insulted.

They also wanted a labor contract because they were forced to do overtime in excess of the 36 hours a month stipulated by law. The company responded by firing the ringleaders and punishing the others.

In Shandong (山东), the same newspaper found that in South Korean factories, workers had to do enforced overtime to meet deadlines. Indeed, some factories had implemented piece-rate payment and then reduced the payment for each piece to force the workers to work longer to get a satisfactory wage.

How ironic! The Korean labor force had a long and illustrious history of fighting for their rights and demanding better treatment, pay and working conditions (pictured). But when Koreans venture overseas, they turn into the same monster they earlier tried to slay.

China's Early Debates on SEZs

The setting up of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in China was not without its controversy when it was first proposed.

On the one hand, leftists gathered evidence to show that the SEZs were simply replicas of the old foreign concessions and amounted to selling out the country.

Conservative leader and adherent of central planning Chen Yun (陈云) warned that "foreign capitalists will come on the scene and corruption will rage."

Marxist ideologue Hu Qiaomu (胡巧木) described the zones as "foreign colonies" and the whole open-door policy as "colonialism without foreign masters."

But on the other hand, supporters of the open-door policy would not give up without a spirited fight.

Senior Party leader and reformer Tian Jiyun (田纪云, pictured) mockingly proposed an SEZ reserved for unreformed Maoists.

Tian said: "Couldn't you establish a special economic zone for leftists? ... Salaries would be low, you could rely on coupons, you would have to stand in line to buy everything and suffer everything else that goes along with leftism ... If we actually set up such a place ... would anyone want to go?"

How extraordinary for a Chinese leader to talk like that. I find myself liking Tian tremendously already.

China's Civilization Campaign

China's efforts in building a more "civilized" society started way before its bid to put on a civilized face for the 2008 Olympic Games.

In Jiangsu province's (江苏省) Zhangjiagang (张家港) way back in the mid-1990s, nouveaux rich were told how to speak properly, how to apologize, and how to address their neighbors, relatives and others by their proper names.

Peasants were told not to gape at foreigners or crowd around in amazement. They were also instructed to wash their hands before eating and after going to the toilet, to bathe frequently, to cut their nails, and not to spit because doing so spreads germs.

Indeed, any Zhangjiagang citizen caught smoking on the street is fined and has to stand on the street wearing a yellow garment until he catches someone else violating the regulations.

According to one Zhangjiagang official then, "the model we want to follow is Singapore, not Hong Kong. Singapore is very orderly and clean but Hong Kong has too much crime, gambling and prostitution."

The One-Time Opulence of Pingyao

Mary and Ay Shin, this is dedicated to both of you. Remember our Pingyao (平遥) trip in December 2001 where we nearly froze to death? Whose idea was it to visit in winter?!

Apparently, Pingyao was so rich that when foreign armies occupied Beijing after the Boxer Rebellion, the Empress Dowager fled the capital and came to the town in Taiyuan (太原).

From Pingyao's banks, she was reportedly able to raise 200,000 taels of silver from one house alone to help pay the enormous indemnity imposed on China by the foreign powers.

Guo Huairen, a sixth-generation descendant of an artisan who founded a shop on Pingyao's main street had reportedly boasted that the Empress Dowager "came and tasted my family's yellow rice wine."

Pingyao's most famous family was the Qiao family which was started by its founder Qiao Guifa (乔贵发) who started by peddling beancurd and yams.

In five generations, the House of Qiao grew into a commercial enterprise that included 18 businesses trading in oil and vegetables, 200 shops, several coalmines and a bank with 20 branches across China.

At the peak of its glory, 70 members of the clan lived together and were waited on by 170 servants. For generations, members had to observe the founder's 50 guidelines on how to employ people and 97 rules of behavior.

Frugality was said to be the order of the day, and concubines, gambling, drinking, and the smoking of opium were all forbidden.

But as many pointed out, Pingyao's fortunes were declining well before 1949.

The rise of Shanghai with its modern factories and financial institutions eventually led to the demise of the once opulent town, even though in recent years, it had been restored to some semblance of its former glory.

Wenzhou Entrepreneurs

Wenzhou (温州) is frequently referred to as the birthplace of China's burgeoning private economy.

Indeed, Wenzhou cared less about model workers and economic theories, and showed less evidence of state interference than anywhere else in China. It had never even possessed any commune enterprises.

Some say this was because the region lacked a tradition of state involvement, and has long been regarded as vulnerable to a possible invasion by Taiwan.

With a population of 8 million people. Wenzhou's lack of agricultural land is also said to be one of the reasons behind its astonishing entrepreneurial flair.

Traditionally, locals travelled throughout the country as pedlars or itinerant tailors, and indeed, Beijing even has its own Wenzhou enclave where tailors were ready to copy any garment that was brought to them.

Fanning across the country, locals also sold buttons, combs, and other trinkets reportedly ignored by state planners in Beijing.

In little villages around the port, small workshops sprang up with a few pieces of machinery where teenage girls sat endlessly punching out buttons, and soon Wenzhou was known as "the world's button capital."

Everyone in Wenzhou was said to have ignored regulations on working hours, health and safety, and insurance and pollution. They could do so because they did not have to rely on state banks for credit, or on the state bureaucracy for contacts to market their goods overseas.

Even in death, Wenzhou people preferred to be buried in private.

The local government had reportedly built a public cemetery in which, to save space, the coffins of the deceased were stacked on shelves like, in the words of Jasper Becker, "cans of beans in a supermarket." But alas, the shelves remained empty, having been shunned by the Wenzhou people.

Tragedy of the Great Leap Forward

Was the Great Leap Forward (大跃进) to be blamed for having planted the seeds of false reporting within the Chinese bureaucracy?

During the Leap, the People's Daily (人民日报) proclaimed double, then triple, then ten times the amount of food that was grown.

According to Jasper Becker, propaganda photos showed wheat stems growing so close together that children could sit on top of them, pumpkins the size of cars, and miracle rice plants that produced three ears rather than one.

In a frenzy of hysterical adulation, Party officials throughout the country outbid each other in reporting the size of the harvest. Those who dared to raise doubts found themselves at best detained, or at worse beaten to death in struggle sessions.

Mao Zedong (毛泽东) apparently believed the wildly exaggerated reportings. When the quotas were later not met, he concluded that selfish peasants were hoarding their grain. Squads of officials were then dispatched to find the peasants' hidden cache. When nothing was found, officials seized clothes, jewellery, livestock, wood, furniture, or anything they could get their hands on.

As Becker wrote: "In imperial times, the state had always required peasants to hand over part of their harvest - perhaps 15 or 20 per cent. In return the local magistrate was obliged to maintain granaries so that the population could be fed in times of natural disaster. Now, under Mao, the state took everything but gave nothing in return."

In his memoirs, a deputy Party secretary recalled that peasants had preferred to die rather than rob the granaries. He wrote: "It proves how obedient our people are, how much they observe the law, how much trust they gave to the Party, and how great is the guilt which some of our leading cadres should bear toward such people!"

Was it merely obedience and law-abiding on the part of peasants? Or ignorance and fear of the law/tyrants.

By the time the peasants realized that they would not be helped, it was too late. Most, already weak from hunger, possessed nothing at all, neither food nor money, and often not even their own work tools.

Separately, during the height of the famine, Chinese leader Liu Shaoqi (刘少奇) reportedly returned to his hometown to see for himself how bad the situation was.

But even then, officials did their best to conceal the truth. A caretaker recounted that trees were even plastered with mud and painted, so that Liu would not realize that starving peasants had stripped them of all their bark.

Model Commune Dazhai

Dazhai (大寨) is an obscure village in Shanxi province (山西省) which in 1964 was singled out as a model commune for having wrestled with nature and won.

According to the state media. Dazhai villagers had levelled terraces, raised dams to prevent soil erosion, and dug reservoirs to guarantee water supplies. Overall, villagers were said to have boosted food production to unprecedented levels.

The Dazhai method relied mainly on mobilizing the population to carry out enormous amounts of back-breaking labor, and was adopted throughout the country, even in regions like Tibet where it was said to be wholly inappropriate.

After 1979, the Party admitted that much of Dazhai's acclaimed success was pure fiction. Its grain harvests had never been as big as had been stated, and the army had contributed much of the labor employed in all that earth-moving.

CCP's Promise to Ethnic Minorities

Guerilla armies usually face many problems when they subsequently take over the reins of power, and the Chinese Communist Party is no exception, particularly when it comes to delivering on some of its promises.

During the famed Long March, the Red Army was almost wiped out amidst the mountains of Guizhou (贵州), Yunnan (云南) and Sichuan (四川) by the fierce and warlike Yi tribes, a Tibetan race whose land straddle the mountains.

By promising the Yi chieftains better treatment if the Communists won power, the Red Army was allowed to continue on its way to the loess plateau.

Communist general Liu Bocheng was even said to have cemented an alliance with the Yi chieftain by drinking chicken blood in a ceremony that made them blood brothers.

As Jasper Becker wrote in his book The Chinese, during this period where the Party was desperate for support, it even promised the minorities the right to self-determination.

Mao Zedong (毛泽东) was said to have declared that "the Mongol, Hui, Tibetan, Miao, Li and Gao Li peoples can voluntarily decide whether to break away from the Chinese Soviet Federation to set up independent regions."

Dongguan County in Guangdong

Most of us know Dongguan County (东莞) in Guangdong province (广东省) as a thriving manufacturing post near Hong Kong, producing items such as toys and shoes.

But apparently it is also the first rural town in China to install an optical fibre telephone system where peasants could dial directly to the outside world - at a time when urban citizens in Beijing and Shanghai were still queuing up for public telephones.

Indeed, the county is said to be have become a model of township and village enterprise with which to impress official visitors from Beijing and abroad.

Some Chinese officials even predicted that by the end of the (last) century, Dongguan would have become "the Los Angeles of the East."

All these grand statements. The end of the last century had come and gone, and if Dongguan is the LA of the East, then it is an extremely well-kept secret.

Chinese Poet Su Dongpo and Hainan

Chinese poet Su Dongpo (苏东陂) was the most famous of many officials exiled in Hainan in the old days. He reportedly spent three years (1097 - 1100) on the island province near the end of his life.

Writing in the 1940s, Su's modern biographer Lin Yutang (林语堂) noted that Hainan "was all but uninhabitable from the Chinese point of view. The climate was very damp, oppressive in summer and foggy in winter. During the autumn rains everything grew mouldy, and Su once saw a great number of white ants dead on his bedposts ... (and remarked) "How can a human being, who is not made of rocks or metals, stand this for long?"

Su's western exile was said to be physically hard to endure, and at times he had nothing to eat but vegetable soup. Even rice had to be imported from the mainland.

He wrote: "We eat here without meat, get sick without medicine, seek shelter without houses, go out without friends, go through winter without charcoal, and through summer without cold springs. I cannot enumerate all the things we have to do without."

China's Hainan Island - Then and Now

Hainan province (海南省) is an island of misty mountains, coconut palms, sandy beaches, tropical rain forests, and - in recent years - a booming entrepreneurial urban economy which operates on the fringes of legality.

In imperial times Hainan was the final destination for exiled officials. Though almost as large as Taiwan, it was regarded by those on the mainland as "the end of the earth", excessively hot, as well as filled with snakes and populated by wild aborigines.

After 1949, it was still distant and obscure for most Chinese, though it was becoming an important base for the Chinese Liberation Army in defending China against America's containment policy.

Though Hainan was no longer a place for penal exile, migration was highly organized and most of those who went there had little alternative. In the 1950s, the majority were ex-soldiers and their families, or economic migrants who were settled on state farms to open up the land.

But this soon changed after the island was opened to the outside world in the early 1980s. Described by John Gittings as "China's New Frontier", Hainan was soon known throughout the country as a place where "the enterprising and the unscrupulous could prosper".

Designated a Special Economic Zone in 1986, it attracted thousands of investors and job-seekers from all over China, and in spite of a succession of financial scandals, flourished to become "China's wild southern frontier".

As Gittings wrote: "Hainan's new voluntary exiles from the mainland were soon testing, to the criminal limit and beyond, the post-Mao policy of allowing those with entrepreneurial ambitions to get rich first."

In those heady (arguably even now?) days, junior civil servants and employees from government-owned industry on the mainland may announce that they were visiting Hainan "for a holiday". But all their colleagues knew that they were really going there to check out the prospects, but without breaking their state-provided "iron rice bowls"!

Chinese Former Leader Zhao Ziyang

This may be the best remembered photo of former Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang (赵紫阳).

Here, Zhao was seen holding a loud-speaker during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Many remember him as a sympathizer of the student demonstrations and his political downfall was said to be linked to his sympathy for the students.

But there is another side of Zhao which is less readily remembered.

According to John Gittings, Zhao's family's business ventures topped the "original lists posted by students in their denunciations of corruption in high places."

Zhao's second son Zhao Erjun had also come under attack because of the close links developing between Hainan and Japan - believed to have been encouraged by Zhao senior - and this had reportedly "touched a familiar patriotic nerve."

In the late 80s, the younger Zhao had reportedly sat on the boards of several Hainan (海南) based state trading companies, a trend which was popular then and perhaps even now.