Articles in this document:
·
The road
ahead for China
·
When
capitalism and communism collide
23-year-old Cathy Huang tells Jason Burke why she sees no contradiction in being a communist and an investment banker
The road ahead for
China
Jason Burke in Xin Cun
Guardian -
July 18, 2008
A road has finally come to Xin Cun, a hamlet perched on a sandy ridge beneath a blank grey
sky in
But this is no rural idyll. The river leads to an oil
refinery and a vast new chemical factory. It is the latter that has brought the
road - and its trucks coughing exhaust fumes into the heavy, humid air 24 hours
a day. They pass a few metres from the doors of the
house of Dong Pang's parents-in-law.
Dong Pang, in his neat trousers and clean shirt, stands out
among the farmers of the village. He is visiting his wife's former home and is
quick to point out that he now lives in the city of
"I like to come back and visit the simple people of the
countryside," he says. His wife sits quietly on a thin plastic mat
stretched over the surface of the brick and plaster platform that serves as a
bed. An iron stove is built into it, a traditional way of combining cooking and
heating. There is little else in the house – an old television, two carved
wooden chairs and two large and garish posters. One is of a large and very
chubby baby, the other of an array of plastic fruit and bottles of European
brandy. Dong Pang's wife turns away and holds a small child to her breast. A
small cat crosses the vegetable garden outside the house and stretches in the
evening sun.
The villagers of Xin Cun are very happy with their new road,
Dong Pang's in-laws say when they come back from the fields. Now they can take
their apples to local markets rather than wait for the buyers to come to them.
As a result they get three times as much for their produce – 60,000 yuan (£4,500) annually - and this year their entire crop is
being bought up by the government. "Something to do with the
Olympics," they add.
A hundred miles north and east of Xin
Cun is another village, Zaho.
Here, too, ranks of ridged hills stretch away to the horizon and the slopes of
sandy soil are terraced into thin orchards curling along the contour lines. And
here, too, a road is coming. The village lies at the end of a 100 mile stretch
of bitumen currently being rammed through the gorges and the hills. With its
dozens of bridges, its cuttings, its scores of bulldozers and hundreds of
workers, the road would be a major national engineering feet almost anywhere in
the world – except in China where it is the equivalent of a bypass extension in
rural Wales.
Zaho used to be a tobacco village.
"Conditions were very tough," says Wang Zhi
Hong, the 44-year-old local village head. "We used donkey carts to bring
the water up for irrigation." But tobacco earned just 500 yuan a month - £37 - so they also turned to apples. Zaho is still dirt poor – most villagers eat meat merely on
festivals a dozen times a year - but much more money is coming in.
New water mains run to the village fields and, though Zaho's 280 inhabitants are too poor to pay the fee to have
their homes connected, pipes now irrigate the fields. Those fields are an
increasingly rare commodity. Desertification, reforestation schemes, urbanisation, road-building and a host of other factors has
resulted in a shortage of farmland in
As
Firstly, they say, studies have shown that it is not the
amount of food that is changing but the type. The Chinese now want more
higher-quality products, more processed food, more meat and more dairy products
- but not simply more food. The country remains more or less, self-sufficient
and is likely to be so for the next decade. So the apples produced in Zaho and Xin Cun
go some way to off-setting a big deficit in oil seeds, for example. Even the
new appetite for dairy products may well be satisfied by increased internal
production.
Yet, for anyone used to travelling in
Behind the doors of their mud-and-brick homes, the people of
Zaho refer obliquely to the problems so common in the
countryside everywhere in the emerging world: corrupt or self-seeking
officials, brutal police, avaricious relatives, poor schools and worse medical
care. "I'm a member of the Communist party but that doesn't help much
round here," said Wang ruefully. Some talk about the famines and random
violence of the years of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution or even the widespread
starvation of the earlier Great Leap Forward. Those days were safer, surer,
more equal, even if people were poorer, they say. Then they pause, reflect, and
return to praising the new road and the price of apples.
As elsewhere in
guardian.co.uk
When capitalism and
communism collide
23-year-old Cathy Huang tells Jason Burke why she sees no
contradiction in being a communist and an investment banker
Jason Burke in
Guardian -
July 17, 2008
Ask Cathy Huang if there is any contradiction between being
a member of the Communist party of
Cathy is the new face – or at least one of the new faces –
of the 73 million-strong Communist party, which she joined last year. Her name
is actually Huang Zhaoying but, like many of the westernised elite, she uses an "English name"
based loosely on the Chinese original.
But she hasn't always been a member of the elite. Cathy, 23,
is from the southern
Helped by private tutors, a decent school and natural
talent, she came first out of 300,000 in
"My future is in corporate finance," she says, and
she is probably not wrong.
Like many, Cathy joined the Communist party at university.
The party is represented in every school and university – as it is in every
factory, major business or association nationwide. Teachers or professors or
commissars suggest to likely recruits that they might like to think about
taking the tough entry exams.
Through this system, the party - founded
in 1921 - aims to capture the best and the brightest, those with most
initiative and executive capability. Its members are the pool from which
the economic, military and political leaders of the country are drawn, so the
advantage in making that reserve as deep as possible is clear. Party members
are overwhelmingly urban and educated, largely from the upper-working or
lower-middle classes - exactly the social strata that could pose the most
threat if they were not given a strong stake in the current system.
Ideology has been relegated to second place. Instead, a
sense of duty, excellence, cooperation and, above all,
patriotism are stressed. So if you thought that there was an inherent
contradiction between being a communist and working for American or British
corporate finance houses, think again. Cathy certainly sees no tension. "I
didn't study Marxism too much," she says. "And you don't have to
apply historical dialectic materialism to daily life."
Being a member of the party, she explains, is not a
political choice but is about "contributing to
And it is also about being part of the elite – and about
networking. "Joining the party is very popular," Cathy said. "If
you got top marks then you definitely apply. So here all the top students are
members … and a majority of the business school."
In the cafeteria of another
Their views are similar to Cathy's, a mixture of the open,
the ideological, the idealist, the dogmatic and the nationalist. Asked why they
joined the party, they cite the influence of their parents, of the history of
their "great leaders" taught at school, of how being a member helps
get government jobs. They say that to be a member of the party is "an honour". "You cannot deny what the party has done
for
And they agree with Cathy that there is no tension between
working for a major American investment bank and being a Communist party
member. "If a socialist country wants to develop, it needs finance too so
banking should not be a symbol of capitalism," says Xue
Yan-wen.
And the repression of the democracy
movement in
Mentioning
Of the five, Cathy, with her internships in the
guardian.co.uk