China: the south rising

National Review, Sept 14, 1992 by Robert Elegant

GUANGZHOU (CANTON)

TRAVELERS emerging from the dilapidated "soft class" train at Guangzhou are set upon by throngs of teenage volunteer porters and led through corridors awash with sweating humanity. A ramshackle fleet of yellow taxis and black minivans awaits the hordes discharged each day into the metropolis of South China from North China, the Yangtze Valley, and Hong Kong.

The vast plaza is crampacked with men in patched clothing. Every year several million destitute countryfolk pour in from other parts of China. All are looking for work.

Jobs are scarce elsewhere, but Guangdong, the southeasternmost province, sucks in job-seekers to supplement the labor power of its own 65 million inhabitants. Guangdong's is the fastest-growing economy on earth. Last year, the gross domestic product rose by 20 per cent. Industrial production increased by 50 per cent--as it has every year for the past decade.

The change is not only quantitative. The government-run Dong Fang (Great Eastern) Hotel was abysmal nine years ago and grim five years ago, when I made my last visit. It is now excellent. The rooms are not only clean, as they definitely were not in the past, but extremely comfortable.

Service is prompt, intelligent, and-- extraordinary contrast with the old, dour Maoist China--smiling. No longer do charwomen in filthy tunics swish grimy mops around the feet of diners who stay after 7 P.M. No longer are diners driven to expostulate, as I did once to the horror of the heirs of the world's oldest living civilization:

"Nowhere in the civilized world do people behave like this!" You can stay as late as you want, and the food is superb.

That may sound like a plug or a statement of the obvious in a nation with the world's most diverse and most delicious cuisine, the claims of France notwithstanding. It is neither.

Quite simply, forty years of Communist rule had almost destroyed the culinary art. But, today, visitors and locals who can afford the prices enjoy sophisticated dishes from a dozen provinces in the Great Eastern's eight restaurants.

In those air-conditioned eyries they do not hear the din as the three-story swimming-pool complex comes down for rebuilding. Elsewhere, swinging iron balls and staccato jackhammers would demolish a reinforced-concrete structure. Here, demolition is entirely at the hands of scrawny men swinging sledgehammers with flexible handles.

In the time of Chairman Mao, politics was in command. Today economics is in command--and human beings are cheaper than machines. Those toilers will receive, at most, 70 RMB (People's Dollars), roughly U.S.$II, for a 12- to 14-hour workday; as little as 30 RMB if they are casual workers, or even 10 RMB if they are contract labor. The contractor takes a lion's cut, as he did in the bad old capitalist days. There are plenty more where this gang of laborers came from--and they know it.

ON THE NIGHT of June 3, the eve of the third anniversary of Tiananmen Square, the streets of Guangzhou were thick with policemen. But they were very southern cops. With stained cotton uniforms baggy on their spare frames, they lounged on benches and chairs. There was no apparent need of their presence to deter demonstrators. Pedestrians on the busy, half-lit streets were purposeful, but not tense.

The Cantonese have not forgotten the atrocity. But they are not foolhardy. They will not take on a security apparatus that is almost as powerful as ever under the control of a Communist bureaucracy that is as fierce as ever in asserting its monopoly on political power. Besides, the Cantonese are too busy to get into battles they cannot win. They are busy obeying "paramount leader" Deng Xiaoping's injunction to "get rich." They are just as busy enjoying themselves.

Li Gardens occupy most of the city block across the street from the Great Eastern Hotel. Two identical midgets wearing white shirts and black bowties welcome patrons at the gates. The door of the chrome-shiny, neon-lit seafood restaurant inside the compound is opened by a Sikh in full regalia: white turban, blue tunic, jodhpurs, and imposing beard. Shades of wicked prewar Shanghai, where Sikh policemen and guards abounded ! A sign in the window gives the price of enjoying the songstresses of "KTV." The letters, incongruous amid the Chinese characters, stand for Karaoke Television--and invite singing along to a video. An antenna aimed at Hong Kong transmissions crowns a trelliswork tower. Twenty-eight tanks display live fish and crustaceans for diners' choice.

Guangzhou bears the stigmata of protracted Communist rule: dingy, gritty greyness marked largely by broken window panes and cracked pavements. Most incongruous is the boxy shape glimpsed in a copse of saplings in the Gardens: a gleaming black Rolls-Royce, the largest made; the Winged Victory atop the radiator gold, rather than chrome; the license plate Guangdong 1212.

"That?" says a midget. "Oh, that belongs to the Boss, the Owner."

This is Communism? Well, not quite. This is Deng Xiaoping's new economic policy, which attracts the Hong Kong capital that fuels the boom. That policy is epitomized by a city called Shenzhen, roughly halfway between Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Deng Xiaoping used the example of that New Economic Zone to launch his latest campaign to quicken the pace of economic reform. That campaign, which in essence seeks to transfer responsibility-and profits--to the actual management, government or private, is now going very well indeed. Yet the need for the 87-year-old Deng to repeatedly relaunch the campaign demonstrates the extent of opposition by diehard Maoists, as well as the immense practical difficulties it faces.