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再见

That’s goodby in Chinese: zàijiàn.

My introductory two weeks to Nanjing and Beijing, the country’s southern and northern capitals (with a side trip to Haikou on the South China Sea), ended yesterday. I barely scratched the surface, but maybe a few initial impressions are in order.

I was expecting a still Third World country. China hands tell me I would still find that in the countryside, where incomes are far lower. But the city centers are definitely on a par with major urban centers in Europe and Asia, even without a visit to Shanghai. The physical infrastructure is particularly impressive: roads, railways, subways, and airports exceed American standards while handling extraordinary numbers of travelers.

Facilities are often crowded, but people are orderly. Traffic is intense but well behaved by my Roman standards. Most people queue calmly. Jostling happens in close quarters,  but it is gentle compared to New York City or Tokyo. Crime is rare. English language capability on the streets is too. Public toilets are not only widely available but remarkably well maintained, even if not always so modern. The streets in city centers are cleaned day and night, including on weekends. I literally stumbled on one street cleaner sprawled on the sidewalk to polish the bracket that held a litter basket.

That however betrays one of China’s vulnerabilities: it makes low-paying work for large numbers of relatively unproductive people. It is  not a paladin of productivity. Stores are jammed with unoccupied salespeople. The internet is slow and unreliable. I encountered two French entrepreneurs (after all, it is a French word) making a living, with difficulty due to bureaucratic obstacles, speeding up cyber communications.

Construction has played a key role in China’s economy in recent years. Tens of thousands of new, middle class, apartments populate every Beijing neighborhood I saw while crisscrossing the city many times to get to meetings. But in Haikou (a provincial capital in the south) I saw just a lot of mostly completed high rises empty. Someone is not getting paid for those. Bad debts are not a good foundation for future prosperity.

The big looming problems lie in slowing growth and the prospect of demographic implosion. The experts I’m reading think it will be difficult for China to escape the Japan syndrome, which has made Japan stagnate for two decades.

That would have serious implications for stability in China, where competitive politics have been limited to the local level and to the interior of the Communist party. Most people, including those working inside China’s government-sponsored, well-endowed, and well-informed think-tanks, seem to think that is fine. Even in Beijing’s wonderful 798 art district, politics were notable for their absence.

That was not however true at the National Museum, which I visited Sunday after a quick stroll past Mao, who is lit up like a Halloween pumpkin in his Tienanmen square “Maosoleum.” The museum has interesting and well-labeled sections on coins, jade, Song dynasty bas reliefs and other things, but two main permanent expositions: one on Ancient China and one on “Rejuvenation.”

The politics of Ancient China are clear and explicit but do nothing to detract from the magnificent objects on display, some of which date to 5000 BC. The message is cultural pride, economic progress, and social  multiethnicity. China’s frequent wars are mentioned only as they are overcome. The dynasties are treated as essential divisions of the time line, with little reference to their particularities except to note their multiethnic dimensions. A peasant revolt around 200 BC is one of the few other political glosses, included to presage the Communist rebellion.

Rejuvenation couldn’t be more different. Here the theme is recovery from the century of humiliation, which began with the Opium War and imperialist invasion in 1840. Nothing subtle follows. It is all courageous Chinese standing up to foreigners, complete with patriotic songs and dioramas. The Nationalist/Communist civil war goes by fast, blamed on Chiang Kai-shek’s attachment to dictatorship. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, arguably the darkest periods of Chinese Communism, go unmentioned, as I am told they do also in Chinese schools. The political message thunders: you owe pride and progress to the Communist party, nothing else.

I walked out of this loyalist but obscurantist display into a street replete with the greatest concentration of Western brand names I’ve ever seen: Max Mara, Prada, Burberry, Ferrari, Rolex, Zegna… If contradictions are what drive history, China is in for a lot more history. But the Rejuvenation exhibit was far less populated than the one on Ancient China. Maybe the people are voting with their feet.