When I first visited China while Mao Zedong was still alive, the Peking Hotel had the only automatic sliding doors in the country. Beyond the hotel gate and the security guards, small groups of Chinese people gaped at the foreigners entering and leaving through the automatic doors. They wore cheap Mao suits and carried small cloth satchels with the characters "Serve the People" stencilled on the flap. They were from the provinces, taking a quick peek at the capital while changing trains; others came on sponsored trips for model workers or peasants.
When one of us appeared on the pavement to take pictures or ask some hesitant questions, they swarmed around eagerly until someone wearing a superior quality of Mao suit materialised; they would then move back in hasty silence. If only, I said to myself, I could follow just one of those spectators home, to the factory at the end of the road outside the county town, or to the dormitory in the steel factory hidden in some mountain valley. What rare insights might I not gain? It was as if they too passed through an automatic sliding door which shut behind them-a door to the real China which we could never open.
Today there are few doors in China which are left closed. Most parts of the country can be visited, whether or not they are technically on the open list. Thousands of Chinese visit, study or work overseas- many of them willing to discuss and share their experiences. Social and economic problems are widely debated in serious Chinese journals. Business and academic visitors have fruitful conversations with their Chinese counterparts. Only the elite politics of Beijing remains a closed book, but who really wants to read between its lines and be a China-watcher these days?
Yet the much sought after access to China which we can now secure has produced less insight than might have been expected. This is partly because our geographical focus remains too narrow, concentrating on the coastal region and the outwards signs of urban modernisation. There is also bias on the ideological map. Throughout the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping enjoyed the benefit of the doubt; he was praised for promoting economic modernisation and managed to get off lightly for his repression of political dissent. In June 1989 the sight of tanks in lethal action on the streets of Beijing obliged western countries to recoil officially-although they soon resumed secret contacts with the regime. When Deng launched his "southern expedition" in 1992, buying off political dissent with the promise of future riches, most governments and many sections of the media responded almost with relief, hailing the prospect of a new "economic miracle." Deng became Man of the Year on the front cover of Time magazine (for the second time) -and in the Financial Times too. China's most-favoured-nation status was restored by Bill Clinton as dissidents were forgotten in the scramble for markets (how different from western championing of Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s).
There was indeed a Chinese economic miracle of sorts-there still is. But the high price being paid for it has not been part of western calculation. Official Chinese statistics were quoted uncritically after decades of being regarded as suspect. John Major himself, when faced with the argument that the miracle was flawed, particularly in rural China, expressed the sanguine western view: "With 10 per cent growth, we would gladly put up with a few problems in Britain."
The social cost of "market Stalinism" (the term coined by the Oxford economist Cyril Lin) is not really so hard to discern. But it requires putting some distance between the observer and the entrepreneurial culture of metropolitan China. It is not necessary to plunge deep into the western provinces whose backwardness is officially recognised; a few tens of kilometres off the beaten track is often enough. The biggest gulf, away from the rich agricultural suburbs of the east, remains the gap between rural and urban China. There is no need even to go into the villages: the migrant peasants (there are said to be 50m of them on the move at any one time) who doze on their bundles at city railway stations, waiting for a train or a job, will willingly tell their tale. Most complain of extortion by local officials levying illegal taxes: "They will pull the roof off your house if you don't pay," they complain. Inflation and the rising cost of fertiliser is also blamed: the classic "scissors" between the reward for primary products and the cost of manufactured inputs is widening again-the peasants refer to this as "being mah-jonged."
Mao's revolution depended on peasant support-"as the fish swims in water." After 1949, he had sought to reverse the historic balance between urban and rural China: in the Cultural Revolution thousands of cadres were "sent down" to learn from the peasants. Today, urban Chinese view the rural millions with mixed feelings-as a source of cheap labour, essential for the new construction boom, but also as a source of crime and instability as migrants flock into the cities. Should the influx be kept out by refusing residence permits, or should the barriers be lowered to eliminate the need for illegal entry? Is this exploitation or is it a necessary form of "primitive accumulation" from which the whole country will eventually benefit? There has been little official discussion of these questions, although they go to the heart of the Dengist development strategy. And most urban Chinese, no longer obliged to "go down," are profoundly ignorant of what peasant life may be like just a few tens of kilometres away. The problem of illegal taxation was finally aired in 1993-94, prompting new prohibitions from Beijing. But in January this year the People's Daily reported that restrictions were widely ignored, with some peasants paying 50 per cent of their income instead of the 5 per cent allowed by law.
China's long list of social problems-corruption, the return of prostitution and drug taking, the revival of secret societies, rising crime, theft of public property and the abuse of police and army power-are usually seen in the west as exotic side effects rather than structural flaws. We are aware of environmental damage which has sharply reduced the area of arable land and led to grain shortages; water tables are falling, lakes shrinking in size. Yet environmentally dubious plans are applauded. China is now intent on developing a mass private car industry with a production target of 1m new cars a year. Every province has plans for a land-consuming motorway network marching across the peasants' fields. Foreign comment, especially from business, is usually indulgent.
However, there are signs that western indulgence towards the Dengist reform is beginning to change. There are two main concerns, but sometimes they are at odds with each other. China may simply become too successful, as Business Week has recently warned. But alternatively, Deng's death might-in the words of the New York Times magazine-lead to "a political collapse which could spiral into the warlordism that plagued China before the 1949 revolution." China is at the same time both too strong-and too weak.
Deng was widely congratulated not long ago for having avoided the Soviet "mistake" of putting political ahead of economic reform. Now this is becoming a matter of reproach: the absence of democracy is assigned central responsibility for the dark side of the economic miracle. Democracy is needed in China-to build a civil society which can defend rights and restrain bureaucratic abuse, and to temper the aggressive patriotism which is now causing real alarm in the Taiwan Straits. (The new tension in the region generated by China is a lesson to those who believe that economic competition has replaced older forms of rivalry.)
But democracy would have had to evolve extraordinarily fast to exercise any significant control on market excess and corruption; its absence should not become an alibi. A widening rich-poor divide, urban slums and the exploitation of cheap labour can be found in many third world states with formally democratic systems. Nor is China any more likely than these states to degenerate into "warlordism." The analogy with the 1920s is forced. China's provinces are no longer potential "independent kingdoms," but belong to intertwining regional structures. The sense of national awareness is also much more highly developed-except in the ethnically non-Han Chinese peripheral states such as Tibet and Muslim Xinjiang.
China has often swung between extremes. But last October the official comment surrounding the new Five Year Plan drew back from 110 per cent support for Dengist reform. The new plan stressed the need to adjust the balance between poor and rich, and between the coast and the interior. "If inland areas are allowed to continue with their backwardness," warned the People's Daily, "there will be no stability in China."
Official statements also showed a new concern for the environment and the social costs of modernisation. Some western commentators described such statements as "conservative" opposition to reform. It is true that valid criticism can be easily hijacked by obscurantist Communist party hardliners. But this does not dispel the dangers posed by the chaotic and unequal growth in China (and now in India too), and the need for a much more balanced approach to economic development.
This poses a dilemma for western governments and business leaders. Rather than swing between excesses of optimism and pessimism about China, we should recognise the imperfect reality which some Chinese are also beginning to face.n
