Consistency amid Change

By PAMELA LORD

    I first came to China in 1982, three years after the reform and opening policy enabled individuals as well as tour groups to travel within the country. My first stop upon disembarking the ship I'd sailed from Hong Kong to Shanghai was the local police station. There, a local official listed the places I intended visiting on an internal “passport.” Second was the bank, which exchanged my U.S. dollars for Foreign Exchange Certificates (FEC) – the currency mandatory for buying goods at the state Friendship stores.

    Shanghai in 1982 had no advertising billboards, and its skyline was undistinguished. Other than a few young dudes in nautical blue-and-white striped tee shirts and olive green strides, local residents going about their business by bus and bicycle were generally dressed in white shirts and dark trousers. Those keen to practice their self-taught English skills took every opportunity to engage me and other foreign visitors in conversations that invariably featured the four modernizations – agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology.

    When I revisited Shanghai in 1990, both the domestic passport and FEC had disappeared, but Shanghai’s city walls were still innocent of neon-lit advertisements, locals were still largely uniform in their dress, and cars were few. It was when I arrived in Beijing six years later that change had perceptibly gathered pace.

    The stream of bicycles, buses and yellow miandi vans on the city roads were interspersed with privately owned, joint venture-produced Cherokee jeeps. Younger local residents wore beepers clipped to the waistbands of their Western style jeans, and entrepreneurs negotiated deals by mobile phone.

    The end of state-allocated housing in 1998 became apparent to me when Chinese colleagues at the school I worked in Beijing’s southwestern suburbs began, with the help of government cash allowances, to buy their homes. By the turn of the millennium the Internet cafes that had opened in towns and cities throughout the nation had made the World Wide Web available to all.

    Change gathered momentum in 2001 after China’s WTO entry, when the resultant drop in auto prices transformed the ethos of car purchase from an impossible dream into an accessible reality.

    Today, the beeper is long-since obsolete. Rural and urban residents alike have mobile phones, and the style uniform for hip young residents is spikily shaggy hair, baggy pants and an ipod in one ear.

    Chinese contemporary art, as exhibited at the 798 Art Space in Dashanzi, has risen from relative obscurity to high international demand, and young Chinese film auteurs such as Jia Zhangke and Zhang Yuan have emerged from underground along the path trodden by their fifth-generation peers, notably Zhang Yimou and Tian Zhuangzhuang.

    But as the late Deng Xiaoping said, changes of this dimension are bound to carry a certain degree of negative impact. Higher standards of living have fattened the population, cars are squeezing bicycles off the road, to the detriment of both the environment and the national physique, and traditions such as the Spring Festival family reunion are challenged by the lure of overseas travel.

    But China’s technological and economic transformation seems not to have affected the national psyche, judging from the common family values and confidence in the government’s ability to maintain national stability that come to the fore at times of natural disasters, like the May 12 earthquake and the floods that periodically devastate areas of southern China. This is an aspect of life in China that no amount of technological progress or global influence is likely to change.