BEIJING, China — Red and gold emblems flap around Tiananmen Square in celebration of 62 years of the People’s Republic of China. This holiday, the sprawling square area is thronged with Chinese families of all ages on this warm and sunny fall afternoon.
I am here on a book research trip that will take me into three Asian nations. Of the three, China holds the spotlight as the coming thing. It’s been the coming thing since the 1980s when Deng Xiaoping turned more than three decades of Maoist central planning on its head and started market reforms. A combination of pent-up entrepreneurial zeal that’s part of the Chinese DNA and a huge, young population soon sparked double-digit GDP growth rates that started to slow from 11.9 percent in 2010 to 9.7 percent only this year.
The results are stunning. The capital boasts of new buildings, clean streets, an efficient subway system, and luxury stores and restaurants. Growth is concentrated in coastal areas, such as Guangzhou and Shanghai where I stopped first to pick up my wife who is spending the year teaching there. Conventional wisdom has it that with its wealth and growth levels, China is fast eclipsing the United States as the world’s leading power — a view that my otherwise pleasant French Canadian seat mate mentioned as many as five times on the flight over from the states.
Shanghai is likewise a shiny jewel of Chinese modernity, shinier even than Beijing. Its riverfront skyscrapers soar high. Everywhere, gigantic flat screen televisions and LED lights flash out new light architecture. One example of this almost obscene longing for western-style commercialism is Wu Jiao Chang, a square that just got a new subway stop last year. At least four huge, multi-level shopping malls surround the square. Its focal point is a passenger rail line running through the center that has cladding shaped like a giant dirigible covered by thousands of tiny, color-coordinated flashing LED lights.
“People in Shanghai don’t seem to want anything more than eat, shop and have their hair done,” my wife says. Her words echo those of French philosopher Jean Paul-Sartre who once said: “Hell is all the people at a Shanghai department store at the same time.”
The mass-overconsumption so complained about on this blog is in full throttle in China’s big cities. Does it mean true modernity and western values? Not at all.
For an example, let’s go back to Beijing. We stayed at a no-star Chinese hotel near the massive airport because we had an earlier morning flight and couldn’t handle morning traffic. It wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle after years in the former Soviet Union, but it was tucked away in what you might think of as the real China. Garbage lay on the steps of the little eateries and hair dressers in a little strip mall that seemed destined soon for bulldozers. I needed the Internet to get in touch with Expedia.
I ended up in an “Internet cafe” up the dirty stairs of a building. The room was filled with 60 or more terminals with young Chinese playing Net games at some. But you don’t just sit down and boot up. You have to go to the bar where a man examines your passport and writes down all pertinent information for the police. The Net is tightly restricted since the Communist government fears the kind of Twitter-based backlash that this year brought down regimes in Egypt and Tunisia and probably Libya.
I sat down at an ancient Acer desktop with a keyboard that has been through several iterations of rebuilding. The keys are alternately black and red. It’s slow and pokey. A scary thought goes through my head: Do I want to put my Expedia personal data on this? Hell no.
I remember a Wall Street Journal story from earlier this year reporting that Chinese governments officials allegedly hacked hundreds of Google email accounts. The hacking was tracked to the People Liberation Army’s technical reconnaissance bureaus in the city of Jinan. This Big Brother approach is reminder of just how much China hasn’t changed, despite the glittering lights.