Posted on: Sunday, July 25, 2004
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COMMENTARY
Past losing ground to brave new China
By Peter Boylan
Advertiser Staff Writer
ZIGONG, China — You need look no further than this bustling former farm country in Sichuan province to see what China is becoming. An area that was once a collection of riverside villages, cobblestone roads and terraced crop collections is giving way to a forest of skyscrapers.
Far behind Beijing in terms of commercial and residential development, Zigong is on the front line of China's effort to reinvent itself into a free-market economy.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of citizens in China's rural areas who have no desire to part ways with their past. Liu Zhengyou, 52, is one of them.
In 1993, officials began seizing 2,500 acres of land, displacing 30,000 peasants to build what the government called a "high-tech" park. The land was taken through intimidation. Water and power were intermittently shut off, police clashed with peasants, and some claimed their homes were torn down while they were away at work.
Peter Boylan • The Honolulu Advertiser Liu, a contractor who once lived in a three-story house on the confiscated land, filed a petition on the peasants' behalf, complete with 4,000 signatures. In 1995, he filed suit against the Zigong government officials, claiming they did not have central government authority to take the land as they did. The case has never been heard in court, Liu says, because few attorneys are willing to challenge the government.
"Central policy exists in name only," Liu said.
"Local officials don't implement it. There is no future for China if it does not follow the rule of law."
On the land where they once lived, no high-tech park has been built, only apartments.
Such conflicts may seem crazy to Americans, but in a communist country of 1.3 billion people and the world's fastest-growing economy, it is the price of doing business.
China is on the verge of becoming a superpower rivaled only by the United States.
The government is frantically trying to slow the rate of investment, with some success, by restricting loans to over-invested industries such as real estate, automobiles and steel. In 2003, foreign companies invested $53.5 billion in China, a figure that is expected to rise this year.
Everywhere you go in China, you see the seeds of globalization and Western influence scattered in a flood of foreign investment, germinating into a national identity that would confound Chairman Mao.
You can't walk a block in Beijing without seeing a McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken or Pizza Hut. In the Forbidden City, the former sanctuary of China's imperial rulers, a Starbucks occupies the 600-year-old Chinese equivalent of a storage shed.
On the streets, women sport the latest fashions, and Volkswagen, BMW and Audi have cornered the car market.
Status, once alien to the People's Republic, is a much sought-after goal. Billboards advertise luxury apartment complexes and "upscale living" on every major roadway in Beijing.
In 1978, before China moved toward a market economy or allowed foreign investment, some 250 million people, 30 percent of the population at the time, were classified as poor. Since then, many millions have benefited from China's swift economic growth and newly created private-sector jobs.
Today, the government says, 29 million people lack adequate food, clothing or shelter. That is less than 3 percent of China's 1.3 billion people.
But the past is never far behind. Money may be everywhere and development may be building out of control, but the chains of communism linger.
While "Spider-Man 2" was setting box-office records in America, it was banned in China because the government limits the number of foreign films allowed in every year.
A populace obsessed with Western clothing and entertainment would not be denied. You can buy bootleg "Spider-Man 2" DVDs on any street corner in Beijing.
China remains a nation still on the brink, struggling to find its identity while selling itself to the world.
All were given some form of compensation, a monthly stipend or inexpensive government housing in ghettolike collections of dilapidated apartments. None of it compares to the rural life they once had. When you've lived in an orchard or farmed a field, a concrete jungle is not what you want to come home to.
Globalization takes root: Even Beijing's Forbidden City sports its Western franchise.
