Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [53]
But where is it going? Not even the government knows for sure. True, they still have their Five-Year Plans. And Hu Jintao speaks confidently of building a harmonious society. That will be his contribution: harmony. But the government today doesn’t really plan with a big P. Instead, at least to the lightly informed eyes of this traveler, all one can detect is improvisation. There is no gold-plated Big Book of Rules and Laws in China. Or perhaps there is, but it’s irrelevant. Old neighborhoods are destroyed, villages bulldozed, all to make room for the barreling train carrying China toward some vision of modernity. Sometimes residents are compensated fairly; sometimes not. It depends. Throughout China, factories defile rivers, contaminate land, foul the air, sicken the people. Sometimes these factories are fined, sometimes not. It depends. Every year in China, there are tens of thousands of mass protests of very angry people rising up against corruption, pollution, or even the impervious insouciance of a Party official or businessman. Invariably, these protests are quickly crushed. But sometimes, in the end, there is justice. And sometimes there isn’t, and everyone is told to lighten up and remember what really nasty people the Japanese are.
The one constant, however, in this new, evolving China is money, both its despairing absence and its increasing abundance. A walk through a Chinese city is to experience this particular dissonance in overdrive. I’d look up at the buildings seemingly taking flight, each one reaching higher than the other, and I’d look down and find the most hideously disfigured, dismembered, burned, or otherwise heartbreaking displays of human suffering, lying on a sidewalk, sometimes with a beggar’s bowl, sometimes just huddled there. I’d pause and gawk at a Ferrari dealership—every city seemed to have one—and soon my sleeve would be tugged by an old man with a wispy Fu Manchu beard and a blue cap shaking a tin cup lightly filled with twinkling coins. At construction areas—and urban China is really one vast construction site—I’d admire the big poster boards with the artist’s renderings of skyscrapers and shopping malls filled with happy people with pockets full of disposable income, and then I’d peek through an opening in the wall and see the migrant workers bustling over bamboo scaffolding, welding a building together without welder masks, busy like ants, desperate like ants, doing what they could to hold on to a job that offered an on-site shantytown shack for a home.
Money seemed to be the link that bound China together. Economic growth was the beginning and end of the Chinese Model. There is no vision of a shimmering city on a hill, a bastion of liberty and inalienable rights. So, too, the Commie-speak of yesteryear, this language of class enemies and proletarian revolution, has largely faded into the history books. Indeed, I had spent May 1st, May Day, the most revered holiday in Commie World, ambling on Tiananmen Square, fully expecting to trip over soldiers on parade marching past the members of the Politburo carefully arrayed on a display stand beneath the portrait of a smirking Chairman Mao. But there was nothing. A few more flags. A few more tourists. Actually, a lot more tourists. But it certainly didn’t feel like a celebration of revolution and the glorification of all things red. It felt like Columbus Day.
And so I thought I’d have a closer look at money, and Shanghai seemed like a good place to find it. I’d moved