China's New Materialism

...1 asked Chen Hui, an executive editor of the China Daily, the highly informative and entertaining English-language Party newspaper...

...He sighed, shrugged and responded, "If China is poor, we cannot have socialism...

...You don't know if the ground rules that apply today will apply tomorrow...

...But Beijing supports the maintenance of nato as a counterweight to the USSR, and it does not object to the U.S...

...I suggested to a prominent Chinese educator and Party member that to encourage private wealth (no one has yet become a millionaire) and to take pride in the appearance of a class of self-seekNorman Gelb, The New Leader regular London correspondent, has jus...

...enterprises are instructed to compile quality reports on goods they use or sell, and domestically made refrigerators and washing machines come out very poorly...

...Pay raises and bonuses also are dangled before managers and specialist workers in publicly owned enterprises to spur them to improve the efficiency of their operations...

...As the Chinese experiment along the foothills of capitalism and flex their economic muscles, the tempation for them to become increasingly active in international affairs is strong...

...It is an eyeopener to stroll past the clothing emporiums on Dazhalan Lu south of the Forbidden City in Beijing (a street reminiscent of many on Manhattan's Lower East Side in mood and bustle), or to walk through the Number One Department Store in Shanghai and watch the people inspect the wide range of goods on display before clamoring for the attention of personnel behind the counters to make their purchases...

...The Ministry of Public Health is urging more of the country's doctors to pursue private practice as "part of an overall reform in the public health system...

...Similarly, businessmen who are settling in for months, or longer, must stay in hotels at per diem rates...

...Potentially the biggest economy in the world by far is taking off in China, and alone among major nations it ultimately will not have to seek out foreign markets...

...A small faction in the Party does object to the present course as a dangerous Western cultural intrusion and a dilution of the socialist spirit, but an Anti Spiritual Pollution Campaign launched a little while ago quickly fizzled out...

...If he could find some investment capital, the proprietor says, he would build a big restaurant and get rich from the stream of foreigners expected to descend on Guilin in the coming years now that China is opening itself to the outside world...

...The reason is obvious...

...For that reason there are today some 12,000 Chinese students at American universities, more than anywhere else (Japan is second...

...The crowds certainly exist, and their sheer size can be dazzling...

...The revolution now in progress in China is not as dramatic as the Cultural Revoludon or the revolution that brought the Communists to power in 1949...

...It is another attempt at a "great leap forward," except unlike the haphazard, dreamily conceived and inevitably self-defeating previous effort launched by Mao Zedong, this one is the object of constant, close, sober review...

...The handful of American companies that have made lucrative hard currency deals here, like Boeing and General Electric, are among the comparatively few foreign outfits having much toshow thus far from their exploits in fabled Cathay...

...Interestingly, a student in Beijing who confided that he worried about his government veering too far from what he considered the proper path to Communism, spoke highly of Ronald Reagan...

...Retail sales jumped nearly 18 per cent last year...

...One Western diplomat, though, is convinced many of the hopeful outsiders have exaggerated expectations...

...If sustained, its results could be monumental...

...Whether that would be good or bad for the rest of the world is another matter...

...Vigorous and publicized action is frequent as well against enterprises that distribute excessive bonuses to their executives or arbitrarily raise prices...

...Foreign firms setting up offices in China are required to spend small fortunes for big suites in the new hotels, although many would prefer less costly quarters...

...Few Chinese are permitted to enter the Peace Hotel in Shanghai or the Great Wall Hotel in Beijing, except as staff, to keep tourists insulated from the large number of local citizens who might otherwise congest the ornate lobbies of establishments catering to foreigners...

...Foreign business representatives on the spot may grumble, yet they clearly feel there is a sizable profit to be made by anyone able to provide what the Chinese need, or will soon need, to continue their forward spurt...

...It would like to improve strained relations with Moscow, yet the chances of a meaningful rapprochement are sharply limited by the continued presence of large detachments of Soviet troops across the Sino-Soviet border, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, and Soviet backing of the Vietnamese in Cambodia...

...Cut loose from rigid government restraint and told, 'Go out there and find foreign investment to expand production,' the managers are gung ho, chasing up joint ventures with foreign companies .Joint ventures rose by 50 per cent last year...

...In practice, this has meant linking financial rewards to a worker's output and a widening of wage differentials based on job classification...

...The Civil Aviation Administration of China, to cite one example, recently was taken to task for often canceling flights without notice or any explanation to stranded passengers, for having an ineffably rude staff and for failing to keep its airports clean, with the result that the top management was changed...

...Of these, the first is by far the most important to Beijing right now, almost to the exclusion of the others, because it does not feel the national security is threatened...

...cafes like the La La in Guilin that have sprouted here and there...

...A resident American bank executive, who seemed to thrive on the problems of doing business in China, confessed it really wasn't much fun...

...The aim of all this is, of course, to harness individual initiative and personal aspirations and thereby lift China out of its historic economic backwardness...

...But the significance of the crowds in new, consumer-oriented China has changed radically...

...returned from a month 'sstay in China...

...Personnel in responsible positions who are deemed lax or inefficient can find themselves identified in print and lose their normal bonuses...

...Staying in Beijing's Xiyuan Hotel—25 floors with a gym, indoor swimming pool, and revolving rooftop restaurant and disco—is like living in a comfortably appointed foreign ghetto...

...You don't know what they'll do next," he said...

...They line up at the hotel telex office to pass some word to Chicago, Dtis-seldorf, Milan, Grenoble, and to await telexed instructions on what to do next...

...Virtually every other aspect of China' s economy—heavy and light industry, the distribution of most consumer goods, public services—remains under the guidance of the central planning authorities...

...Chinese commercial, technical and cultural delegations also visit the United States in a virtual procession...

...Today's drive for overseas sales is aimed at earning hard currencies required to buy the equipment and expertise that will assure independence tomorrow...

...Shanghai introduces a floating price for pork, China's staple meat, as part of the program for testing how market forces can operate in the country's socialist economy...

...They want more and they are getting it...

...Foreign businessmen are not having an easy time here...

...There are 1 billion Chinese and the People's Republic is rapidly, albeit belatedly, advancing along the road to industrialization...

...Long denied much selection, the Chinese have become consumers with a vengeance...

...Friction between the United States and China is due primarily to un-happiness with Washington's position on Taiwan, followed by disagreements over trade and Third World policy...

...Thanks to special inducements and access to free markets, for example, the traditionally poverty-stricken farmers have done particularly well...

...Whatever the case, those whose image of China is frozen in the past have visions of hordes of Orientals, veritable ant colonies of humans paralyzed into incapacity by their sheer numbers...

...Tourism is growing at a furious pace...

...and (3) reunification (reclaiming Taiwan...

...Not again...

...military presence in Korea or the Pacific...

...When will the daring entrepreneurs be reined in and perhaps sent to the countryside to do penance for their antisocial presumptions.' When will the accumulators of goods beyond their needs be stripped of them...

...It won't happen," Chen insisted...

...China tends to see the United States as the nation having the most to offer, a view of particular significance in the light of its own aspirations...

...ing entrepreneurs is to undermine the conventional Communist belief in the class struggle...

...When will China experience another Cultural Revolution that will abruptly reverse all that is now happening...

...Among other things, the reforms it propounded sought to make class antagonisms irrelevant, announcing, "History has shown that egalitarian thinking is a serious obstacle to implementing the principle of distribution according to work and that if it is unchecked, the forces of production will inevitably be undermined...

...They are, however, very reluctant at this point to become overly concerned with problems beyond their borders, preferring to pursue their priorities: (1) modernization of China...

...They are also required to pay the government almost five times the wages that are then given to the Chinese employees assigned to them...

...Moreover, I noted, the notion that these entrepreneurs will help lead the way to a better life for everyone sounds remarkably akin to the trickle-down philosophy popular in the American Republican Party...

...Last October, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China stood Marxism on its head...

...But you never really know whether the person you' re dealing with has decision-making authority, or whether, if there are profits in an operation you have pumped your company's money into, you'll be able to take them home...

...In addition, the Secretariat of the Chinese Dramatists Association has declared that the influence of "Leftist" ideology must be eliminated from the theater, and the declaration has been published in the Party press...

...In the sense that socialism is the public ownership of the means of production and distribution, China to be sure is, and will continue to be, very much a socialist state...

...Every individual was hurt as well...

...and, bafflingly, peddlers of "Made in Hongkong" shoes openly displaying their wares in the streets of Canton...

...2) the security of the country...

...An entire stratum of Chinese is emerging that possesses far greater earning and buying power than other levels o f mainland society...

...Each week, sometimes several days in a row, there is a new development: $2 billion in precious hard currency is spent to import substantial quantities of foreign goods in great demand—electrical appliances, cars, trucks—soaking up surplus funds...

...After all, the planners' stated aim is to maintain an annual growth rate of 7 per cent and quadruple the country's industrial and agricultural output by the year 2000...

...It may, however, be the most significant development of the closing years of the 20th century...

...One American oil company was persuaded to invest in a region where it would be exempt from taxes, he recalled, only to discover after it had built an expensive installation that taxes were to be introduced there retroactively...

...to midnight, processing almost 2,000 applications, less than half filed by foreign firms seeking a mainland toehold...

...DIALECTICAL DIVERSIONS China's New Materialism by norman gelb Beijing It may not specialize in the snake stew or armadillo broth popular in southern China, but the La La Cafe in Guilin, a tourist city on the picturesque Lijiang River, serves a tasty spiced tofu and a passable cup of coffee...

...It is filled mostly with North American and European men muttering in the elevators about their frustrations...

...To raise capital, many state-owned enterprises have been advised to sell shares to their employees...

...That is hardly the kind of talk you expect in a Communist country, yet it is precisely the sentiment Chinese leaders heartily approve of today...

...In production terms the prospects are almost beyond comprehension—a billion pairs of shoes, a half billion bicycles, 300 million blue track suits with white piping (very popular for children), a quarter of a billion television sets, 300 million cameras with leather casings, computers, machinery, thelist could go on endlessly...

...The Chinese are proving to be very discriminating, shrewd and frugal businessmen, he observes, who are determined to secure foreign investment and technological know-how as inexpensively as possible...

...The official party newspaper, People's Daily, regularly runs profiles holding up for emulation the "peanut king" who transformed his modest street stall into a veritable gold mine through enterprise and hard work, or the man who turned his skill as a furniture painter into so thriving a business that he currently employs 40 workers and earns "huge profits," or the farmers who very successfully founded a hotel when they realized none existed to accommodate the many visitors to their rural neighborhood...

...Despite last year's easing But that guidance is at present directed toward loosening the reins on managers, enabling them to exercise their imagination and ingenuity to step up the production, increase the availability, and improve the quality of goods and services...

...Recent braking measures, described by some in the West as a "slowdown of reforms" or "retrenchment," were actually carefully calculated moves to try to keep the economy from overheating...

...Much that is happening here will astound traditional Marxists and not a few others on the Left...

...Expecting Chinese guests for dinner at my hotel in Beijing, I waited outside to escort them in so that they would not be humiliated by the doorman...

...An indication of the atmosphere in the country is the criticism being published in the Party press...

...Nevertheless, roughly 150 American companies maintain offices in Beijing, compared with only four or five in Moscow at the height of East-West detente...

...We've learned our lesson...

...As part of a campaign to expand the facilities for free-spending foreign tourists, historic landmarks are being denied high-priority protection...

...the day the country's first patent law goes into effect the Beijing patent office stays open from 5 a.m...

...Picture a bus line of hundreds of people, or thousands jammed into a train station, or so many pedestrians on a shopping street that normal courtesies become impossible or irrelevant...

...and in many instances removal of direct government control, only 1 per cent of the economy has been turned absolutely free: the lines of pushcarts and stalls set up in corners of Shanghai, Beijing and every other big city...

...In the long run, too, they will want to own and control the factories, since the interference they suffered in bygone times is vividly remembered...

...To stimulate entrepreneurial instincts, an inheritance law has just been introduced that would allow people to pass on their wealth to offspring...

...Not only the country was hurt by it...

...If it succeeds—if the people who inherit the leadership of the country from 80-year-old Deng Xiaoping continue on his path, if the one-party state can avoid bogging down again in ideological absurdities—China, with its vast population and unleashed energy, could emerge as the dominant global economic power before we are very far into the next millennium...

...Domestic demand will keep planners busy for a long time...

...When comes the backlash...

...He and others I spoke with in Beijing radiated an easy confidence that the current policies of the Chinese government and Communist Party are correct and immune from serious alteration...

...Consequently, permission to build a golf course on the grounds of the Ming Tombs, two hours from Beijing, was recently granted...

...Economic innovations have created an atmosphere of excitement...

...This is all very new, yet already foreign residents report signs of status being defined by the quality and number of a person's possessions...

...Everyone realizes the Cultural Revolution was a nightmare...

...Doctors may operate their own fee-charging clinics, or form groups to run private hospitals...

...The President, he said, had shown how a country's morale can be revived and sustained...

...One of the many seedy looking eating places flanking the main street, Zhong Shan Nan Road, the La La is little more than a literal hole in the wall with six tables...

...China is engaged in a major exercise of trial and error...

...The dramatic political swings of the past are over, I was told, and from outward appearances this would seem to be true— at the moment, anyway...