Discovering the Real China

As though rising from a dream, tall buildings and television towers protrude dramatically from the dense air below. On the horizon, the first rays of sunlight streak up to illuminate the undersides of high, thin clouds, and downward to reveal the flat surface of a thick gray smog hugging the sprawling city of Shanghai.

The revolving restaurant on the forty first floor of the downtown hotel seems suspended between the sky and ground, and between China's past and future. It is the boundary between the teeming, noisy reality lived by 13 million Chinese and some better life they hope to someday live.

Three years earlier I traveled into far western China, the China of the ancient Silk Road. There, on the trading routes connecting China with the Mideast, where China's minority cultures live out their lives much as they have for hundreds of years, I began to feel the stability and to understand the sense of tradition held tightly by the Chinese, generation after generation for 5,000 years.

But here in Shanghai, change comes more quickly, more quickly than actual progress. For even though Shanghai considers itself cosmopolitan and by Chinese standards is very modern, the neon signs and high rise buildings are only symbols of modernization. The reality of life in China is found in the back streets, where people cling tightly to time honored traditions.

Metal basins for washing clothes stand in long rows in narrow walkways between five story buildings. In this endless maze, expressing more curiosity than disapproval, working women surrounded by squealing children glance at the stranger strolling the neighborhood. Two and three generations of families crowd small apartments. The sounds of living are at high tilt, reverberating up and down long alleyways.

On a street corner, a woman tending a huge steaming pot offers long strands of noodles as I stroll past, accepting my polite rejection with a smile. An old man sits on a curb with his bicycle pump, collecting a minor fee to inflate bicycle tires. It is a vital service in a city where people of all walks of life consider bikes vital transportation. How odd that amid the hustle and bustle of this town with a modern facade, bicycles are so crucial.

Along larger streets, students tentatively try a few words of English. "Hello sir," lofts from one group as I pass by. Boys laugh and girls giggle when I respond, "hello to you too." Meanwhile, expressionless faces press the windows of crammed old busses that slowly grind their way down the clogged streets. Dangerously close, in the gutters, old women sweep with straw brooms.

Aged men, designated as members of the street patrol, proudly display arm bands demonstrating their authority and wave small flags in the almost feckless effort to keep the traffic moving. Even though there is almost no private ownership of cars here, government owned busses, trucks and other vehicles compete with bike riders by the millions and hoards of pedestrians for every inch of space. From early morning through late night, horns blare the discordant international music of crowded cities everywhere, as carts, wagons and people carrying heavy loads scurry out of the way.

"Street food" is everywhere. Butchers hack and chop in storefronts lining the sidewalk. Bakeries vent scents to tempt those passing by. Pungent spices are scooped and sold from burlap sacks. Meats, fish and vegetables of all manner and description are served from impromptu sidewalk "restaurants" as steam and smoke rise from hundreds of overworked woks.

Exploring Shanghai on foot is done without fear. Day or night, one feels safe. Locals sometimes note the presence of a foreigner, but they seldom stare and never appear threatening. Men do not ogle women. People everywhere return smiles and warmly offer assistance to the lost. Strikingly, there is a sense of small town "kinship" in this huge metropolis.

The "feel" of other Chinese cities we visited, Beijing to the north, Ningbo and Canton to the south, was similar, but Shanghai was unique and special. It is a city of great energy and optimism. And although many great cities worldwide share those traits, few have had to recover from such difficult upheavals, including some in the very recent past.

Only 24 years earlier, the year Mao launched the Cultural "Revolution," Red Guards took to the streets and invaded homes in search of those persons who had achieved financial success and were therefore enemies of a Communist government.

Members of the Red Guard were mostly teenagers, whipped into nationalistic frenzy and unleashed on innocent people, people like Nien Cheng whose late husband had worked for Shell Oil and had studied overseas. For having committed "offenses" such as these, she and thousands of other innocent people were singled out as "enemies."

Many people were brought to "town meetings" where they were humiliated and threatened into confessing things they knew nothing about, all in the Red Guard's effort to demonstrate success in cleansing the country of outside influence.

Mrs. Cheng's possessions were destroyed; she was put on public trial and then spent nearly seven years in solitary confinement in a detention house. During that time she was not told the fate of her daughter who, she discovered many years later, had been killed by interrogators. Mrs. Cheng was finally able to leave China in 1980 and lives now in Washington, where she finished her book "Life and Death in Shanghai." It hit the New York Times bestseller list as an inspirational and amazing tale of human courage. Only twenty months before our visit, there were echoes of the past, but this time is wasn't violence against older people. A crackdown on protesting students in Beijing stunned the world.

There is an understanding here that China cannot stand isolated from the community of nations. China needs much of what the outside world has to offer, but there is fear that with those "advancements" can come unwanted western values. But the fires of free market commerce have been ignited in China and will continue the internal debate over how and how much China should be allowed to change.

These thoughts come to mind while walking the streets of Shanghai, a city that, unless one looks beneath the surface, hides much of its immediate and ancient past. It is difficult to put our own Civil War and race riots into perspective in our own country.

It is hard to fathom that these are the Shanghai intersections where old people were beaten and killed by jeering crowds only a generation ago, and where students marched in sympathy for the Beijing students only a year before.

Those things seem hazy in memory, as hazy as the thick air rising from this gasping behemoth of a city. The coal that China uses for cooking and heating produces thick clouds of smog. Yet, that is only one of the cloaks behind which China obscures its hard edges from the world.

Looking down from the revolving restaurant, one could conjure a romantic image of this thriving, dynamic, bustling city with a fascinating history. And in fact, in unusual and interesting ways, this is a romantic city.

It is thought provoking to know that somewhere down in that dense, dirty air sits an old man quietly observing the scene from a small room. Without expression, he watches the cycle of life, from the first deliveries of morning to the closing of the last shutters at night.

He has seen political upheavals and wars and many struggles for the basics of life and human dignity over the decades.

He was there when bombs fell from Japanese planes. He was there when civil war forced the Nationalist Government to Taiwan in 1949.

He watched the mob mentality of the Cultural Revolution and the more recent bloody student protests.

He has seen it all. He has seen China open its door and slam it shut, and open it again just a crack. He is proud. He is ashamed. He feels safe today and yet fearful of tomorrow. He has no influence and few possessions.

People passing by as he sits there would never take note of him. But there, quietly recording the sporadic but relentless evolution of a fifth of the world's people, sits one of China's many overlooked, unappreciated and underdeveloped treasures.

China's historic tapestry is rich, complex and difficult to understand. It is frustrating, for the longer one probes and sifts in the attempt to truly comprehend its mysteries, the more of China's many faces one sees. China is the movie set city of Shanghai, where uncomfortable realities can hide behind false fronts. It is the romantic, fascinating mixing of cultures along the Silk Road in the far west.

China is gentle and jarring, strong and fragile all at once. It is dynamic and energized, yet bound by many traditions. It is underdeveloped and yet advanced in ways not easily understood by those of us unaccustomed to witnessing the growing pains of a bubbling, complex five thousand year culture.

Yet, this culture, and these people, may one day dominate the world economic community. It will be wise of us to learn the ways and character of this nation which, although poor by some standards, is rich by so many others.

Those who attempt the comprehension of life here, and who in the first rays of morning sunlight look down through the haze into the throbbing heart of Shanghai, grow frustrated with an unavoidable realization: the more the deeply etched, weathered and paradoxical face of China takes recognizable form, the more it seems mysteriously to change.

Don Hardy

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