LIFE IN COMMUNIST CHINA
TAYLOR, CHARLES
Life in Communist China by CHARLES TAYLOR This is the first of three articles on Communist China by Mr. Taylor. They are adapted from his forthcoming book, Reporter in Red China, to be...
...Life goes on—much as it always has —but to find it, you have to go behind the great boulevards and the new public buildings...
...In workshop after workshop I saw idle machines and idle men...
...According to Marco Polo, Kublai Khan had skating parties, and at the turn of the century the Manchu scholar Tun Li-chen found on the Pei Hai "skillful adepts, who skate like a dragonfly brushing the water, or a swallow piercing the waves...
...Although the setting is far from lavish, there is no lack of artistry and dedication...
...there is no bridge today, but the bazaar and fair have survived the fall of dynasties, the Japanese occupation, and the Communist victory...
...Most were near major cities and seemed favored in terms of irrigation works, tractors, electrification, and fertilizer supplies...
...In the afternoons I sometimes went to Tien Chiao, a crowded, dirty complex of shops and theaters outside the city wall...
...Even the simple pastime of sitting on the stoop and telling tales is under attack...
...It was not enough for the Communists to restore the old...
...During his stay he was one of four correspondents from the West and the only North American...
...Yet nothing in China is ever really remote from politics...
...Only in Shanghai, always a pacesetter, have I seen new housing that is something less than totally offensive to the eye...
...While Chinese architects have never been afraid of huge blocks, broad walls, and clear lines, these new creations seem too solemn and pretentious, with little sense of grace...
...It is the same throughout the year...
...This was 1965, and after three relatively good harvests China had only just recovered from the setbacks and shortages of 1959-61, when a combination of bad weather and bungled planning had brought the nation to the brink of disaster...
...No longer driven to make crude steel in backyard furnaces, peasants are once again allowed to tend their tiny private plots and to raise their private livestock...
...Often stripped to the waist, old men and women sit on stools, fanning themselves and swapping tales and gossip, while naked and grubby children play noisy games around their feet...
...There was open talk of a "new leap" and some hints that the Party was itching to take back the peasants' pri vate plots—a move that would un doubtedly be disastrous in terms of food supplies and morale in the countryside...
...I knew already that for most Chinese life was better than under any previous regime—that food supplies, although hardly lavish, were distributed fairly, that tremendous progress had been made in health and hygiene, that vicious exploitation by landlords and factory owners had been eliminated, and that the shameful foreign concessions were no more...
...On trips around the country—from Harbin in the extreme northeast to Kunming in the far southwest—I had seen striking evidence of the comeback...
...Tien Chiao is as timeless a part of Peking as the temples and pagodas, and much more lively...
...Eggs and sugar were also plentiful and relatively cheap...
...While the children clamber around the swings and slides, the old men, surrounded by intent spectators of all ages, play Chinese chess with their cronies on rough stone benches...
...But old hands say that the squeeze is on, that the color and vitality of Tien Chiao are being steadily drained away, and that each year finds fewer theaters and sideshows...
...Even ancient grannies join the throng, hobbling painfully up the steep incline on their tiny bound feet...
...It was all very rational— as any city planner would agree—but something was lost...
...But others "are talking a great deal about food, clothing, and having a good , time, and telling superstitious and feudal stories...
...And it is the same in the teahouses where, the People's Daily warned, the same bad elements were actively at work...
...Good deeds were in the air...
...Above all, the children sucking their taffy apples and flying their lovely, intricate kites on Tien An Men Square still manifest the unique Chinese ability to derive great joy from the most humble occurrences...
...On all my trips I went early in the morning to the markets and watched the housewives swarming around the stalls and filling their baskets...
...And although the cotton-cloth ration had been increased, she still had to mend and patch her family's clothes with great care, since the average yearly ration was little more than enough to make one high-collared jacket and a pair of trousers...
...In such key areas as steel, transport, and chemicals, there were signs of definite expansion, yet many of the factories selected for foreign gaze were operating well short of capacity...
...Outside another theater a barker harangues the crowd, while inside a woman storyteller relates a complicated tale of passion and adventure with singsong cadences and a wealth of subtle gestures...
...It was not so much the giant blast furnaces and heavy machinery plants of the Northeast that impressed me, for there, in former Manchuria, the Chinese were building on a Japanese base, and often with massive Soviet aid...
...In the cities this slow progress and steady improvement were reflected in the daily life of the people...
...Unless challenged by vigilant Communist Party officials, so-called bourgeois elements might use the summer-evening chatting ground to spread their doctrines and prepare for counter-revolution...
...At any rate, the increased preoccupation with political rectitude seemed bound to hinder the nation's economic development...
...From the outside I wondered whether any Chinese had any time to call his own, and whether it was ever possible to relax...
...The houses are small shacks, often desperately propped up with poles and scaffolding...
...On the eve of the much-delayed Third Five Year Plan (which finally started in 1966) there was no tendency to repeat the wild slogans of the Great Leap Forward, when it was stated that China would overtake Britain in steel production in fifteen years...
...It is equally false to assert that Communism has made no impact, and the "traditional" Chinese—cunning and conservative, patient and slyly humorous—is quietly biding his time and preserving his values intact despite the demands of yet another despotic dynasty...
...There is dirt and great hardship, and I sometimes saw tattered old men rooting determinedly through piles of garbage...
...Of course, the dozen or so communes that I visited (out of seventyfour thousand) were clearly above average...
...And so they have put up their own monuments, but with less success than the great Khan...
...Yet when managers measured the progress of their commune in terms of rubbertired carts, the fundamental poverty of the countryside was painfully apparent...
...The reality is much more complex than I had imagined...
...But for the boys who fly them there is a new society that makes demands and offers opportunities undreamed of by their parents...
...Along another alley sixteen lithe acrobats simultaneously ride the same bicycle round and round a narrow stage...
...In an open space a magician with a comic patter exhorts onlookers to throw their pennies and enthralls the wide-eyed children with skillful sleight-of-hand...
...On the field nearby there was often noisier activity, with /swarms of boys playing basketball and soccer...
...But outside the wall, in what foreigners once called the Chinese City, life along the hutungs is poor and primitive...
...But for all their capacity to make enjoyment out of minimal means, something seemed to be missing...
...In the city itself enjoyment can be had with less exertion...
...Only the wall around the old Tartar City is being steadily demolished, but this is probably a practical necessity...
...Not far from the Square, along the vast Boulevard of Eternal Peace, more children thronged around some flimsy stalls...
...Understandably, they shared the feelings of Kublai Khan, who, on moving his capital to Peking, decreed that beautiful and imposing palaces be built to command the respect of the Empire...
...Out were lavish feasts and expensive presents, new clothing, the worshiping of ancestors and household gods, scrolls advocating prosperity and other material blessings, and calendars and New Year pictures showing emperors, courtesans, and other traditional subjects...
...Then the fair in Lu Li Chang was broken up and scattered throughout the capital...
...For while much remains the same, much has been changed...
...Proudly they showed me their "technical innovations," which were often only flimsy contrivances, and boasted of "self-reliance," making a virtue of the necessity forced upon them by the abrupt ending of Soviet assistance...
...It was more exciting and significant to visit the cities of the interior—Taiyuan, Sian, Loyang, Kunming —where the Chinese started almost from scratch (in some cases with Soviet aid, in others without) and steadily turned stagnant backwaters into bustling industrial centers...
...With elaborate care young men pose their girl friends in stiff, self-conscious attitudes beside stone lions and temple gates...
...Immaculately dressed in long white flannels, they played an oldfashioned, baseline game with much grace and absolute decorum...
...On top many of the workers sit in the sun, playing cards with raucous enthusiasm—while gambling is banned, and no money is ever seen to change hands, it is officially and solemnly stated that people playing cards are not necessarily manifesting a bourgeois ideology...
...There are small shops, food stalls, and a oneroom factory where cotton sandals are made...
...Even Tien Chiao is suffering a decline...
...But not all pleasures are banned, and Communist Party control is not as thorough as is often claimed...
...But they are outright monstrosities: grim, drab slabs of red brick or yellow stucco set in stolid rows, without any sense that these are homes, places where people live...
...Gutting through centuries of Confucian tradition...
...In mid-winter the lake at the Summer Palace freezes up, and in the heart of the city there is ice on the Pei Hai (North Lake) and on the moat beneath the vermillion walls of the old Imperial City...
...And here, above all, are the enter tainers in the open air, under a canvas roof, or inside a tiny theater—for Tien Chiao is the home of folk art in the Chinese capital...
...In the park near my hotel there were always Chinese men (but never women) on the tennis court...
...The same is true of the airport building, the railway station, the new hotels and exhibition halls—each an uneasy compromise between traditional forms and the demands of a new dynasty determined to manifest its own solemn sense of socialist grandeur...
...Drab and dusty, they form vast labyrinths between the larger streets...
...Red and green, black and orange, they dipped their wings and tossed their delicate tails in the random gusts of a wintry wind...
...Here there are dating couples as well as groups of stern-faced Party members taking their supper after some late meeting...
...To their credit, the Communists have retained and restored the great gates and palaces, the temples and pagodas which make Peking for me, as it was for Marco Polo, the most fabulous city in the world...
...Watching over this steady recovery, the Chinese leaders were in a cautious mood...
...A wandering barber sets down his stool whenever he finds a customer and draws a curious crowd as he administers a vigorous shampoo...
...Completing the square around majestic Tien An Men (the Gate of Heavenly Peace), the Great Hall of the people and the giant museum are heavy and grandiose...
...Party zealots tell the youth that their basic loyalty must be to the state rather than their elders...
...Some indeed, are like swallows or dragonflies, spurting with casual arrogance through the midst of the beginners, who stagger and stumble behind chairs which they rent for less than five cents and which save them from total disaster...
...To bring beef or pork to their tables was much more costly but far from impossible...
...During the day old men with wise and wizened faces wheel their grandchildren to the parks in bamboo carriages...
...While old men still wheel their grandchildren in the parks, and the three-generation family unit remains more or less intact, the leaders regard the family unit with great distrust since, with its traditional place at the heart of Chinese society, it threatens the authority of a regime which demands total allegiance and tolerates no rival...
...Everywhere I found a new pragmatism and sense of sobriety...
...Instead, factory managers spoke prudently of expansion, preferring to stress the need for thrift and the raising of standards...
...Perhaps the problem was insoluble, but future generations of Pekinese may well bemoan the fact that the architects were allowed to show only such a scanty imagination...
...I liked to think that the Chinese felt the same, and, judging by their laughter and high spirits, I suspect they did...
...But after more than a year of reading Chinese propaganda from the outside, I was also very much aware of the rigid political doctrines and the ceaseless political campaigns...
...Inside they are dark and crowded, and on the hot summer days the people come out in the open to seek fresh air, making the hutungs crowded and clamorous...
...Through the long summer evenings many Pekinese flock to a Sinkiang restaurant in the western suburbs which has tables in the open air and serves watermelon, beer, and juicy mutton slabs on skewers...
...For not much more you can have your picture taken, riding a cardboard motorcycle before a cardboard Forbidden City...
...Children, watched over by their gossiping grannies, run happily and often naked through the alleys...
...today the working-people have stood on their own feet, and the criminal elements are suppressed...
...But on these communes, at any rate, the peasants looked healthy and well-fed, and there seemed to be new security from the ancient menace of droughts and floods...
...Performers from Tien Chiao have been sent abroad on an official tour...
...In the center, around the Imperial City, some are paved, and even wide enough for cars...
...The new housing is even worse...
...However cramped, with whole families compressed into two or three tiny rooms, these offer thousands of Pekinese more space and facilities than they have ever had before, and at low rents, usually only about five per cent of a workingman's salary...
...On the giant farming communes Communist Party control is now less despotic and planning is more rational...
...Along such hutungs, you find the gray stone walls and brilliant red doors that hide some of the larger Chinese homes, with their intricate courtyards and corridors...
...On the vast pavement far below, young boys worked the strings with grave concern, while their smaller brothers and sisters pranced and prattled with delight...
...Some have cameras, still expensive, but already something of a status symbol...
...As they roamed along the Boulevard the crowds seemed more dutiful than delighted...
...In were humble dinners, simple presents for children, and "revolutionary" calendars portraying Chairman Mao Tse-tung or fat-cheeked peasants and beaming factory workers bulging with muscle and high endeavor (it is an interesting change that in classic Chinese painting, man is often a tiny figure, dwarfed by the majestic forms of nature...
...It could have been that my impressions were too subjective, but I could not help thinking that Spring Festival in Peking was lacking in festivity...
...Aside from offering a perpetual insult to their inhabitants, these ugly blocks are a slur on the beauty of Peking...
...They are adapted from his forthcoming book, Reporter in Red China, to be published by Random House...
...Department-store counters were stocked with even more varieties of consumer goods, and if a bicycle or a wristwatch could still take two months' wages, basic household goods were reasonably cheap, and there was even some small business in cameras and other luxury items...
...Smaller production teams, usually a single village, are now the "basic accounting unit" and have some autonomy...
...You can sit at a rough wooden table and, for a few cents, have a pot of tea and a long sticky roll...
...Rice and wheat flour were still rationed but the allotments seemed not too stringent...
...Read outside the country, such di rectives give the impression that China is a gray, somber, humorless place, with ruthless rulers sternly bent on prohibiting even the simplest pleasures...
...For Spring Festival, some things were Out and others In...
...I knew that whatever the cost in terms of totalitarian suppression, most Chinese had a better chance to lead their lives with security and even some dignity...
...As they saunter around the sights many Chinese have transistor radios in the cheap plastic handbags which everyone—men and women alike— seem to carry...
...Snug in their blue padded jackets, parents looked on with indulgent pride...
...Young and old, the Chinese were taking a three-day break from work and study...
...As seen from the inside the situation is rather more complex than outsiders imagine...
...Foreigners join the skating and it hardly matters that the music over the loudspeakers is not The Blue Danube but Socialism Is Good...
...There is nothing fancy about Tien Chiao...
...Today the parks and lakes are no longer the private preserve of the emperor and his court, and thousands of Pekinese enjoy their skating...
...In Peking and other major cities the food supply was adequate, if hardly sumptuous...
...On Sundays the roads out of the city are jammed with trucks and buses packed with workers, and as it snakes its way over hill and valley, the Great Wall is swarming with humanity...
...Taylor recently returned after eighteen months in China as resident correspondent for The Globe and Mail of Toronto...
...Tien Chiao means Bridge of Heaven...
...While the Chinese leaders do not prohibit simple pleasures, they try to make them serve their own political ends...
...Spring Festival may be somber and restricted, and simple pleasures viewed with some suspicion...
...Life in Communist China by CHARLES TAYLOR This is the first of three articles on Communist China by Mr...
...Gliding high over Tien An Men Square, those delicate kites reflect a love of beauty and a capacity for pleasure that have far from withered away after seventeen years of Communist rule...
...Really to know Peking, to sense the rhythm of its daily life, you have to leave the bigger boulevards for the hutungs—the narrow residential alleys that give the capital so much of its character...
...In one small shack wrestlers with splendid bulging bellies grunt and grapple on an earthen floor, taking their cleverly contrived falls with shouts of mock anguish...
...Excursion parties to the palaces and pagodas hear canned lectures on the iniquities of the old order...
...Just as important, they showed the Communists' determination to eradicate all old-fashioned superstitions and to impose upon the people their own cherished brand of puritanical and revolutionary zeal...
...Proclaimed in newspapers and at political meetings for several weeks before, their Spring Festival directives to the people reflected their awareness that the recovery was still tentative...
...TTIG H ABOVE Tien An Men Square in the center of Peking dragons and butterflies soared gracefully against an azure sky...
...This is where, for centuries, the country folk have come to sell their produce, to do their shopping, and to be entertained at cut-rate prices...
...Parts of the lakes are boarded off for hockey, played scrappily but with great enthusiasm...
...with some notable exceptions the atmosphere in many factories was lethargic...
...His report on China's foreign policy, C(The View from Peking," appeared in our May issue.— TH E EDITORS...
...It is wildly wrong to describe China as a grim wasteland, where people are herded from one campaign to another and simple joys are savagely suppressed...
...There, in satellite towns, apartment blocks are better built, show less monotony in design, and are often pleasantly set off by trees and grass...
...Old China hands say it was a scrambling, grubby, and tumultuous event, with the Chinese seeming to relish their tumbled togetherness, finding sheer joy in their noisy scrape with suffocation...
...The police were having a Love the People month, and everyone was exhorted to sing revolutionary songs, tell revolu tionary tales, and help his neighbor...
...Peking operas are played on dingy stages, but with all the traditional rich costuming, heavy makeup, elaborate tumbling, and stylized gestures...
...As they view the ancient monuments it is often to the raucous, jangled strains of Chinese opera...
...With its usual lack of humor the Peking People's Daily described the "summer-evening chatting ground" as a battlefield of fierce ideological struggle...
...Until recently, virtually all Peking —a city of seven million people— thronged to a single street fair in Lu Li Chang, the narrow thoroughfare of tiny cluttered shops just south of the city wall, where artisans through the centuries' sold delicate jade and ivory carvings, paper-thin porcelain vases, and exquisite painted scrolls...
...They did their best with the meager offerings—stuffing themselves with dumplings and taffy apples and delighting in the pinwheels and other cheap but clever wooden toys...
...Old China-hands shake their heads and bemoan the passing of the land they knew: dirty, corrupt, inefficient, and desperately poor—all that is grant ed—but also infused with life and col or, with humor and dignity and a unique determination to find mirth and pleasure amid the most horrendous predicaments...
...It is still cited in the official guidebook—one of the most dreary of its kind—with a predictable political gloss: In pre-Communist days Tien Chiao was a chaotic place where gangsters, bullies, swindlers, and spies ran riot...
...After reading about the frantic bustle of the Great Leap Forward period, when it seemed that much of the nation was driven to exhaustion, I was struck by the leisurely pace of industrial life...
...To meet a definite need the Chinese are steadily building blocks of apartments, especially in the suburbs...
...Along the hutungs, it stated, some people were telling revolutionary stories and singing revolutionary songs...
...On visits to scores of factoriesalso saw the progress and the problems...
...Still, there was a definite air of bus tle in all the shops and markets—a marked contrast to the bad years— showing the extent of China's comeback...
...In spring and summer factories and offices organize excursions to the Summer Palace, the temples in the Western Hills, the Ming Tombs, and the Great Wall...
...Synthetic fibers had been introduced, but pawing her way through the counters, the cotton-conscious housewife still seemed suspicious of the new fabrics, which were also more expensive...
...Collecting night soil was especially In, and even a vice-mayor of Peking had been interviewed and photographed in the act, smiling sturdily...
...Later, however, there were ominous signs that the Chinese leaders were tempted to make at least a partial re turn to the sweeping, mass-line pol icies of the Great Leap Forward peri od...
...Traditionally, it was always a time to have a bath and a haircut, wear new clothes, engage in feasts, give gifts, and frighten devils with spluttering strings of firecrackers...
...Even in winter they were able to find fruit and vegetables at prices well within their budgets...
...For me it was always a welcome break, and the tedious propaganda and endless Party campaigns seemed far away...
...But I had also been impressed by the enormousness of the tasks that lay ahead...
...As a newcomer to China, I had been startled, perhaps naively so, to find the people so relaxed and so natural in their everyday life...
...It was clear that through their own sweat and ingenuity the Chinese had largely recovered from the drastic dislocations caused by a combination of the Soviet withdrawal, the "natural calamities," and their earlier euphoric planning...
...Hiking and swimming are advocated as "military sports," and young people are told to toughen their sinews so they can better defend their country against any invader, especially the United States...
...You can see whole families skating hand-in-hand, and almost always there are young girl soldiers in floppy khaki uniforms, with pigtails, apple cheeks, and pretty smiles (for some reason, most of the really lovely girls I saw in China were in the army...
...today, he appears on the paintings and posters as larger than life, dominating all...
...And in Tien Chiao, as in the more formal theaters, the old operas and stories are being replaced by ones with "revolutionary" themes...
...With the purge of so-called revi sionists in the spring and summer of 1966, control of the nation seemed to rest with such dogmatists as Teng Hsiao-ping, the tough Secretary-Gener al of the Chinese Communist Party...
...These incentives have boosted farm yields, as have improved irrigation works and greater supplies of chemical fertilizers...
...But there are few obvious signs of undernourishment or disease, and there is great bustle and a sense of life being lived with much good-humored fortitude...
...Clothing was still the biggest problem, and many of the people were decidedly shabby, if not exactly ragged...
...This was Spring Festival, the lunar holiday known to the outside world as Chinese New Year...
...For these have a pompous air that seems remote from the relaxed and lively spirit of Peking...
...Perhaps it was any sense of spontaneity, for it was all strangely subdued and even tame, this celebration of the premier Chinese holiday...
...Apart from their hideous design, most seem poorly built of cheap materials, and many are already crumbling and peeling into slums...
...You also find some embassies and government offices (the Chinese must be the only major power to have their Foreign Ministry in an alley...
...In all fairness, there was little room for indulgence...
Vol. 30 • October 1966 • No. 10
