Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [17]
Once modern history began with the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, things got really confusing. A display entitled “Fury Against the British” featured mannequins of British naval officers and an angry Chinese mandarin. The defeat in the Opium Wars has always been a deep-rooted humiliation and agony to China. But perhaps in a city of thriving commerce it was impossible to summon the necessary fury against the British, because the adjoining display had already moved on. In 1878, the governor of Hong Kong suggested founding the Inferior Protection Bureau to protect Chinese women and children. The exhibit marched quickly through the Second World War and straight to Communist victory, a blurry photo of happy faces. Millions of people rejoiced at the liberation.
In the next room, a title stretched across one wall: “A Vision Made Real: From Agricultural County to IT City.” A light board showed photos of the Communist Party meeting at which Deng Xiaoping set forth his program for economic reform and opening to the West. That was in 1978. From one room to the next, the exhibit had jumped thirty years, skipping over the founding of Communist China, the land reform and the execution of counterrevolutionaries, the attacks against “class enemies” and the establishment of the communes, the Great Leap Forward and the famine that killed at least twenty million people, and the decade of the Cultural Revolution.
I had exited History and entered Economy, and now the exhibit came to life. A vast diorama showed the Taiping Handbag Factory with four women bent over a table sewing shoes. A mock-up of the government office where businesses applied for licenses featured the familiar figure of Dongguan Man: a businessman with a potbelly and a pleather briefcase. History picked up speed—Decades passed in a wink—and giant photographs featured highway overpasses and sewage-treatment plants and investment conferences.
A BENIGN CIRCLE OF INPUT-OUTPUT-INPUT
FIRST PREFECTURAL CITY TO HAVE ONE MILLION MOBILE-PHONE SUBSCRIBERS
BUILD ROADS, BRIDGES, AND POWER PLANTS TO GENERATE FUNDS FOR MORE ROADS, BRIDGES, AND POWER PLANTS
An interactive demonstration showed the city’s GDP, exports, balance of deposits, and tax revenue. The final display was a photo of the signing ceremony of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.
A NEW TIME IS COMING!
AS I WAS LEAVING THE MUSEUM, third- and fourth-graders on a field trip were lining up in the lobby in jostling rows. The students wore school-issue sweatpants with Young Pioneers scarves tied around their necks. A museum guide, a young woman with a stern face and sticklike legs, picked up a megaphone. I braced for the Opium War and 150 years of humiliation.
“On the third floor, you will see a model of the city,” she began. “I want you all to find your own house on this model. Do you all know Songshan Lake?”
“Yes,” the students replied in chorus.
“Songshan Lake is our high-tech industrial zone. Dongguan has a motto: ‘One Big Step Every Year, A New City in Five Years.’ We are now in Year Three of that plan.”
She paused. “Do you all know ‘Build the City, Construct the Roads, Renovate the Mountains, Harness the Rivers’?”
Silence. Nobody knew that one.
“It is government policy. Dongguan also has a harbor that is open to foreign ships . . .”
In the seventh century, the emperors of the Tang Dynasty ordered court historians to compose a chronicle of the previous reign. Every dynasty since has written the history of the preceding one, slanting or omitting facts to bolster the ruling regime; since 1949, the Communist Party has done the same, presenting modern history as a heroic struggle to resist the will of foreign powers. But here in Dongguan, the past contained a startlingly different lesson: History was openness, markets, and foreign investment. History began with a handbag factory, and schoolchildren must