Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [44]
After eating a few main dishes, I went to the toilet and by the time I returned a big group of people had crowded around my table to listen to the Foundation’s representative, so I decided to move to another table.
My Chinese Academy of Social Sciences friend, Hu Yan, was sitting at a table with a French woman from UNESCO and a Thai who was with the One Village One Craft Association. I thought that if I joined them, I’d have to speak English and that would be too much like hard work, so I decided against it. I went over to the Northwest-delegation table, where there were many empty seats because the reporters were all over at the Renaissance Foundation representative’s table interviewing him. Only three elderly ladies who were paper-cutting artists, two female elected village heads, and a Bureau of Culture deputy chief from a prefecture-level city were still at the table. The Northwestern women all looked very honest and kindhearted. My Academy friend always let me see the good side of China. Even though, rationally, I realized that this was not the whole story, emotionally I still liked to meet such good people.
The person I really wanted to chat with was the village head, who was only just twenty years old. She was sitting rather far away from me, and I realized I could not understand her rural Mandarin anyway. All I could do was talk to the deputy chief. She came from a place called Dingxi in Gansu Province. It was originally one of the poorest places in China, but with a few years’ hard work after Reform and Opening, it finally lifted itself out of poverty. She told me how a few years earlier the government had convinced the peasants to organize specialist cooperatives and implement dedicated planting schemes, pushing Dingxi to develop into a major potato-producing area. All the Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s outlets in the country used Dingxi potatoes exclusively. She also told me how the local leadership, at a time of rail-transport difficulties, used their connections to provide a special train to get the local products to market on time. And also how they organized surplus labor to go to Xinjiang to pick cotton during the cotton-harvest season.
I learned a lot from her, and so I asked her very seriously if she could summarize for me why Dingxi was able to be so well governed while so many places with better local conditions were still unable to rise above the poverty level. “Dingxi is very fortunate, we have leaders who know how to work hard and get things done.” I could sense that what she said was very practical and very simple: it’s all about people, she implied. If the government officials are willing to work hard to make things happen, the common people can make the rural economy hum. That is to say, if the present Communist Party cadres had a slightly higher standard of morality and were willing to work harder on practical projects, the Chinese people would be able to live well. As lunch broke up, I thanked her and she said she hoped that members of the Beijing cultural and academic worlds would come to little Dingxi and give them some guidance. I hypocritically told her that I would certainly find time to visit Dingxi.
Feeling very happy after lunch, I went back to the 798 Art District to browse around. Today’s 798 Art District is not like the 798 Art District of ten years ago. Now it apes fashionable foreign trends and tries to combine the bohemian and the bourgeois. That’s why it has been criticized for becoming increasingly gentrified, commercialized, and kitschy. No matter how you look at it, though, having a 798 Art District is still better than not having one. You can’t find another art district on this scale anywhere else in the world. When the foreigners see it they are all amazed and their impression of China suddenly changes, from China as a backward country to China as the most creative country in the world.
In the last two years art and design had become so hot that all the important international art galleries had come to China to set up shop. Famous schools, such as