China:
Ancient Culture,
Modern Society
China:
Ancient Culture,
Modern Society
Copyright 2009
All rights reserved — Peter Xiaoming Yu and G. Wright Doyle
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, from the publisher.
Strategic Book Publishing
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ISBN: 978-1-61204-331-9
Printed in the United States of America
We gratefully dedicate this book to those
scholars, past and present, whose diligent
research has made our modest
introduction to Chinese civilization and
society possible.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. AN OVERVIEW
Chapter 1—China
Chapter 2—Hong Kong SAR
Chapter 3—Macau SAR
Chapter 4—Taiwan ROC
Chapter 5—Overseas Chinese
II. A RICH HERITAGE
Chapter 6—History I
Chapter 7—History II
Chapter 8—Literature I
Chapter 9—Literature II
Chapter 10—Painting
Chapter 11—Calligraphy
Chapter 12—Architecture
Chapter 13—Chinaware
Chapter 14—Medicine
Chapter 15—Calendar and Festivals
Chapter 16—Marvels
III. BELIEF SYSTEMS
Chapter 17—Confucius
Chapter 18—Confucianism
Chapter 19—Laozi and the Dao De Jing
Chapter 20—Daoism
Chapter 21—Popular Religion
Chapter 22—Buddhism
Chapter 23—Islam
Chapter 24—Christianity
IV. CHINA TODAYAND TOMORROW
Chapter 25—China’s Changing Society
Chapter 26—Education
Chapter 27—Chinese Character
Chapter 28—China and America
Chapter 29—Olympic Scoreboard
Chapter 30—China’s Future
Bibliography
About the Authors
The authors wish to express their gratitude to Joy Ting, the editors at Strategic Book Publishing, and to Laura Philbrick, who performed extensive editing and selected the images for both this book and the companion Web site.
Everywhere you go, the Chinese are there!
Once found mostly in restaurants or on the West Coast, Chinese now penetrate all levels of American society: the smart kid in your AP chemistry class, the winner of the piano competition, the pretty television news anchor. Chinese excel at our universities, provide essential manpower for our advanced laboratories, and make Silicon Valley possible.
Not just in America, but all over the world, China and the Chinese have stepped onto center stage. China sits on the U.N. Security Council and sends peacekeeping troops to several troubled countries. This rising superpower has forged strong links with Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, the Sudan, and a host of other nations. Chinese tourists roam the world with their new-found wealth. As hosts for the 2008 summer Olympics, Chinese athletes garnered more gold medals than anyone else.
China has a larger population than any other country in the world, occupies the third-largest land mass, has the fastest-growing economy, and boasts the world’s largest military. China manufactures more goods than any other nation, by far. Once it was “Made in Japan”; then, “Made in Taiwan”; now, it’s “Made in China.” Chinese is poised to become the second—and perhaps the first—language of the Internet. China’s insatiable appetite for oil has led it to muscle into markets once dominated by the United States; its construction boom has gobbled up huge amounts of raw materials; until the slowdown in the fall of 2008, its manufacturing surge and galloping wealth drove up the price of all sorts of commodities, including precious metals.
We could go on and on, but the fact is, China has arrived, big time. To ignore the Chinese is foolish. To learn about them and their great culture has become an essential part of understanding the modern world.
China: Ancient Culture, Modern Society will help you understand both China’s rich tradition and its current situation. The following pages deal not only with China’s history and art, but also its economy, society, belief systems, and possible scenarios for the future.
China: Ancient Culture, Modern Society is:
We begin with a general introduction to mainland China, including the land, peoples, and economy, then glance briefly at Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese. Part II provides a taste of the stunning cultural wealth of Chinese civilization, while Part III focuses on the various belief systems which have captured the allegiance of Chinese people from the distant past to the present time.
The final section returns to today’s China. Here you will find short chapters on both its rapidly-changing society and some elements of the Chinese psyche that seem to persist. We conclude with a few guesses about the future of the People’s Republic of China.
Please visit the companion Web site to this book for more photographs and information: http://www.globalchinacenter.org/projects/china/.
Peter Yu wrote Chapter 1, all of Part II (Chapters 6–17), and Chapter 27. Unless otherwise noted, all English translations from Chinese texts are by Dr. Yu. All other chapters are by Dr. Doyle.
The third-largest nation on earth in geographical area, China is also the most populous. It is located in eastern Asia, but called Zhong-Guo (Central Country) by its people. The term was adopted in ancient times when the people believed that their land was the geographical center of the world, and they were the only civilized people on earth. Westerners probably call this land “China” because of its first empire, the Qin (pronounced Chin) Dynasty.
China’s vast land area includes some of the world’s highest mountains, driest deserts, longest rivers, and richest farmland. Surrounded by mountains and plateaus in the north, west, and southwest, and by sea in the east and southeast, China can be divided into three levels of elevation. The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in the southwest is the highest plateau in the world at 13,000 feet (4,000 meters), and contains peaks such as the Himalaya Shan, also known as Mount Everest, which stands at 29,035 feet (or 8,850 meters) high. Though the region contains about 25 percent of China’s land area, it contains less than 1 percent of the population.
The arc of the plateaus and basins around the Winghai-Tibetan Plateau ranges from 3,300 to 6,000 feet (1,000–2,000 meters) in elevation. Qin Ling, the most important mountain in this region, stands just over 8,000 feet (2,500 meters) above sea level and stretches westward across the central portion of China. It divides the watershed between the basins of China’s major rivers, the Huang He (Yellow River) and Chang Jian (Yangtze River), and serves as the dividing line between China’s wheat-growing north and rice-growing south.
The rest of China’s land drops to less than 1,600 feet (500 meters) above sea level and features most of the rich farmland in the country. This region is the most agriculturally and industrially productive, as well as the most populous. It contains all of China’s major cities, including Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Chongqing. The easternmost portion of China slopes to the sea, with more than 11,200 miles (18,000 km) of coastline. The coast includes natural harbors at Dalian, Yantai, Qingdao, Lianyungang, Ningbo, Shantou, and Zhanjian. Major commercial port cities such as Tianjin, Shanghai, Fuzhou, and Guangzhou are found where deep natural harbors allow large vessels to dock.
The largest island in China is Taiwan, which measures 13,843 square miles (35,853 square km), and includes the seat of the Republic of China (ROC). After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland in 1949, both the PRC and the ROC regard Taiwan as a province of China, and—until recently, when Taiwan changed its position—each claimed legal jurisdiction over the entire country. Over the past five decades, the Taiwan government has added a strong industrial base to complement its agricultural production. Its large ports, such as Kaohsiung and Keelung, have made Taiwan’s international trade the fifteenth-largest in the world.
Hainan, the second-largest island in China, used to be part of Guangdong province, but has recently become its own province. The island covers 13,130 square miles (34,006 square km) and is known for natural scenery and beautiful beaches. The third-largest island, Chongming, sits off the mouth of the Yangtze River, and covers 463 square miles (1,200 square km). It is the world’s largest alluvial island. Hainan and Chongming Islands have little industry or pollution, and thus great potential for tourism in the future.
In general, southern China has a tropical climate, northern China is subtropical, and the interior or highland areas are arid.
China’s geography of highlands in the west and low sea coast in the east allows air masses to blow from Siberia and Mongolia steadily southward in the wintertime. After passing through central China, the winds become somewhat less cold and dry. When they meet up with mild maritime air in the south, storms develop and produce rainfall. As a consequence, winters are cold, windy, and dry in the north, but rainy in the south.
In springtime, winds from the Gobi desert and Mongolian Uplands frequently cause dust storms in many parts of northern China.
In the summertime, southern tropical air masses originating in the Pacific and Indian Oceans spread northward, causing monsoon-generated torrential rains. The gloomy rainy period, called mei-yu (plum rain), occurs in June and July in the lower Yangtze River Valley. Once the plum rains subside, temperatures rise quickly, producing hot, humid days frequently over 80° F.
The temperature difference between north and south is small in the summer but great in the winter. January mean temperatures vary from about 70° F in Hainan Island to about −15° F in Heilongjiang province. In contrast, the July mean temperature covers a narrower range of 35 to 85° F.
With the world’s largest population, estimated to be about 1.3 billion people, China contains one-fifth of humanity. China’s immense population is very unevenly distributed across the land: about two-thirds of the population lives in one-third of the land in eastern China and the other third of the population in the two-thirds of the land in central and western China. Sixty percent of China’s people live in rural villages and small towns; the rest congregate in many large, and growing, cities.
Shanghai is the largest city in China, with 17 million people. Beijing, the capital, comes in a close second with 16 million. This is nearly double the number of people in New York City, the most populous city in the United States, and four times that of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the U.S. In addition to Shanghai and Beijing, in 1997 China had nine more cities with over two million people and twenty-three cities with between one and two million people. The numbers are surely higher now.
Concerned with the enormous population of its nation, China’s government tries hard to limit growth. Since the late 1970s, China has adopted a population control policy including two measures:
These population control measures have met with success, slowing China’s growth rate to 9.8 percent in 1998, down from a peak of 28 percent in 1965, though recently, well-to-do couples have been willing to pay the fine for another child, and the population growth rate has begun to climb again.
Of the 1.3 billion people living in China, 90 percent are descended from the Han people. The ancestors of the Han Chinese settled in the north where the lower Yellow River (Huang He) and Wei River flow, and in the south along the southeast coast. They developed two major types of agricultural products (and consequently, cuisines) respectively: wheat in the north and rice in the south. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Han people had brought the sphere of surrounding provinces—composing what is today modern China—under the influence of their culture, assimilating minority populations along the way.
Chinese who are not of Han descent come from any of fifty-five officially recognized ethnic groups. Fifteen million of these belong to the Zhuang. Others include Man, Hui, Uygur, Miao, Yi, Tujia, Mongol, Tibetan, Bouyei, Dong, Yao, Korean, Bai, Hani, Kazak, Li, and Dai. The population of each of these groups tops a million. Some smaller groups have only a few thousand people. Ethnologists have identified many more distinct groups, but these are not acknowledged by the government.
Language and culture are the primary distinguishing characteristics among various nationalities. Of the fifty-six official groups, seventeen have their own written languages. However, as the economy develops and urbanization continues, smaller ethnic groups once isolated in small mountain areas have found it increasingly difficult to retain their former way of life and have themselves moved to cities, thus risking the loss of their traditions and culture.
The Han people and some others speak Chinese; therefore, the Chinese language is also known as Han yu (Han language). Part of the Sinitic language group of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family, the Chinese language has one common written form but many spoken forms, or dialects. Not all of the dialects are mutually intelligible, nor do they resemble Putonghua (“ordinary language,” known in English as Mandarin), now used by the great majority in China.
The Chinese language is divided into seven major dialectal groups:1
Dialectal Groups of the Chinese Language
| DIALECT | AREAS WHERE IT IS SPOKEN |
SUBGROUPS |
| Northern | Large area north of the Yangtze River, some areas south of the Yangtze River, the lower Yangtze region, and areas in central and southwest China where the Han people form the majority. | 1. North China dialect, also known as the Mandarin Chinese – spoken in Hebei and Henan provinces, Northeast China, and Mongolia. 2. Northwest dialect – spoken in areas in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu provinces and areas in Qinghai province and Ningxia region where the Han people constitute the majority. 3. Southwest dialect – spoken primarily in Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou provinces and large areas in Hunan and Hubei provinces. 4. Jianghuai dialect – spoken in the area north of the Yangtze River and south of the Huai River in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces. |
| Wu | Shanghai, area south of the Yangtze River in Jiangsu province, and most of Zhejiang province. | 1. Jiangzhe dialect – mainly in the south of Jiangsu and north of Zhejiang; considered as the original source of the Wu dialect. 2. Zhenan dialect – south of Zhejiang province. |
| Xiang | Hunan province (because of its geographical position, the Xiang dialect has been influenced by neighboring dialects such as Northern, Gan, and Kejia dialects). | Centered around Changsha, the provincial capital. |
| Gan | Jiangxi province (the dialect is believed to have evolved from dialects spoken among immigrants from North China). | Centered around Nanchang, the provincial capital. |
| Kejia (Hakka) | Northwest of Guangdong province, south of Jiangxi province, and north and west of Fujian province. Also in some Han communities in Taiwan. The dialect has evolved among immigrants from the north. | Centered around Mei County, Guangdong province. |
| Yue (Cantonese) | Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. Also in many overseas Chinese communities. | 1. Yue-hai dialect – the Zhujiang delta area. 2. Qin-Lian dialect – Qin Zhou/Lian Zhou areas. 3. Gao-Lei dialect – Gao Zhou and Lei Zhou on the Lei Zhou peninsula. 4. Si-Yi dialect – including four counties of Taishan, Xinhui, Kaiping, and Enping. Many overseas Chinese speak this dialect. 5. Guinan dialect – in more than ten counties in the south Guangxi region. |
| Min | The most complicated dialect of all – developed as several waves of immigrants from northern China settled here. Still spoken in many Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. | 1. Minnan dialect – in areas around Xiamen, Zhangzhou, and Quanzhou. 2. Mintong dialect – in areas around Fu-an and Fuzhou. 3. Minbei dialect – around Jian-ou county. |
Since its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China has emphasized the use of Putonghua, also known as Guoyu (National Language) or Mandarin (to show that it is used among officials), in schools and public affairs. It has now become the most unifying linguistic device in everyday life in the world’s most populous country and has the largest speaking population in the world. It is a combination of three elements: the Northern dialect as the base language, the Beijing pronunciation as the base sound system, and modern Chinese writing as the base grammar.
When the ten-year-long Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, China’s economy was on the verge of collapse. Almost all of the daily necessities were rationed, from food to cloth, from bicycles to watches; one could hardly survive without ration coupons. Blackand-white television sets and telephones were considered luxury goods, far out of the reach of the masses. Private cars were unheard of. The foreign trade for 1978 was barely over $20 billion.3
Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, in the late 1970s the Chinese government initiated a series of drastic economic reforms. These measures were aimed at restructuring the economy and shifting from a central planning model to a free market one. With that also came the enormous shift from an agricultural society to an industrial one. The word “modernization” was the vogue of the day, and the Four Modernizations Program was the Chinese ambition to catch up with the West in the shortest possible period of time. To raise efficiency, plants were closed and workers were laid off in large numbers. To attract foreign investment, state assets were sold cheap to foreign companies that flooded into China to seek new opportunities.
The process was painful but the outcome was encouraging. After three decades of reform and relentless pursuit, China’s economy today compared to that of 1978 is like day and night. Material goods abound, and those ration coupons can only be seen in museums now. The standard of living for the world’s largest population has improved enormously: In 2006, the average annual income for urban residents was 11,759 yuan (RMB, reminbi, China’s currency) and 3,587 yuan for rural residents, up from merely 343 and 134 yuan, respectively, in 1978. China now has the largest cell phone population in the world and color televisions are commonplace. In less than twenty years, China has developed a manufacturing capacity of close to nine million cars per year, becoming the world’s third-largest car producer following the United States and Japan.4
Unmatched manufacturing resources, traditional business savvy, and aspirations to be “number one” have empowered China to advance in giant strides toward becoming a dominant player in the world economy. Today China is the world’s third-largest economy, with a gross domestic product of over 21 trillion RMB in 2006, up from 7 trillion RMB in 1996, and again from just over 1 trillion RMB in 1986. As the world’s third-largest trading nation, China’s imports and exports totaled $1,760 billion in 2006, eighty-eight times the amount of foreign trade in 1978. There are now 774 commodities of which China is the world’s number one exporter. Because of its huge market and opportunities, China attracted foreign direct investment of more than $69 billion in 2006, becoming the world’s second-largest recipient, just after the United States. China is also the world’s richest nation in terms of cash reserves—it reached $1.76 trillion at the end of April 2008; that amount exceeds the combined cash reserves of the G-7 nations.5 China’s economic achievement during the past three decades is probably unprecedented in human history. Though some of this growth has come at the loss of jobs in the United States and other countries, there are economists who believe that it has been an overall benefit to the world economy.
This spectacular growth has elevated China from being an economic backwater to an industrial powerhouse, yet at the same time has created tensions not only in the economy (such as between production and resources), but also in the environment and society as a whole. Moreover, some troubling issues will be increasingly scrutinized under an international light.
China’s population of 1.3 billion people is a double-edged sword: it has supplied a huge army of cheap labor to fuel the fast development, but has also fed a serious unemployment problem. For the next few years, there will be an estimated twelve million people without jobs, in addition to the surplus labor from the countryside, which is expected to reach 120 million.
Another disturbing issue is that the overall management lags behind the swift economic changes as China moves from central planning to a free market. In 2005, the Chinese government audited 169 state-owned enterprises and found that they lost 352 billion yuan of assets to either foreign or private enterprises. Another example is found in the banking industry. The central government forgave 1.4 trillion yuan of non-performing loans from the five major state-owned banks in 1999, with the hope that those banks would reform and start anew. The same managerial structure remained intact, however. In only two years’ time, the total of non-performing loans reached 1.8 trillion yuan, exceeding the total capital of those banks.6 By early 2009, however, China’s banking system had been reformed, and was considered quite sound.
As in many other developing countries, China’s recent economic expansion has increased, rather than decreased, the gap between the haves and have-nots. The imbalance between eastern and western regions and the existing urban-rural gulf have only exacerbated the problem.
The most conspicuous problem resulting from the rapidly developing economy has been the damage done to China’s environment. Behind many of the “Number Ones” listed above, there are also many “Number Ones” on the unfavorable side: China is the world’s largest consumer of construction materials and energy, and the number one polluter of both air and water. Seventy percent of China’s rivers and lakes have been contaminated, and under 20 percent of urban trash has been processed or recycled. More than 300 million rural residents do not have access to clean water and over 400 million urban residents are not able to breathe clean air.7
The crucial question that must be asked now is: Can China sustain its high-production, high-consumption model in the future? In other words, is this kind of development sustainable? To many observers, the answer is obviously negative. After thirty years, China stands at the crossroads again, in search of a new development model.
The events of 2008 alone, both within and without China, presented a harsh reality as well as an excellent opportunity for China to examine its economic model and set a new course for its future. Two major natural disasters—an unexpected snowstorm blanketing much of China’s south in the spring and the powerful earthquake hitting central China on May 12—disrupted economic growth to some extent. In August, the summer Olympics (which cost China $42 billion) was a huge success. Yet no sooner had the Olympic touchdown been scored than the contaminated milk powder incident overshadowed the glorified image of a rising China as a world power: four babies have died and over ten thousand others are suffering from kidney stones as a result of consuming the formula. When the Chinese government was busy dealing with its domestic issues, an international financial crisis was looming. The downturn of the U.S. economy, and thus the reduction of its consumption, has seriously affected China’s exports, which have been one of the backbones of its rapid economic growth over the past two decades. The recent meltdown of U.S. financial institutions is making the whole situation worse than ever. By spring 2009, however, some economists were optimistic that China’s economy would recover quickly, though others remained more cautious.
To mitigate the uncertainties overseas and to promote domestic consumption, the Chinese government has announced a new land policy aimed at vastly increasing the income of China’s hundreds of millions of farmers and rural residents by the year 2020. The new policy is intended to stimulate market-driven economic growth in the countryside by allowing China’s 800 million farmers to freely trade land-use contracts that are given to them by the government. In theory, the government is still in control of all the land, but such a measure would be a significant move toward privatization. This set in motion what could be the nation’s largest reform in years.
If this policy is carried out successfully, many benefits would follow. Farmers will become wealthy and spend money to promote domestic consumption, which is badly needed for a clearly slowing economy. The enormous income disparity between rural and urban residents, one of the largest such gaps in the world, may narrow. Of course, it may take several years before the full effects, including risks, surface. There will be many challenging issues and few easy solutions. We hope that, under the new leadership and guiding principle of “building a harmonious society with a scientific approach,” China will utilize its great resources and mobilize its masses to embark on a new path and establish a balanced society for its 1.3 billion people.
Terry Cannon, The Geography of Contemporary China: The Impact of Deng Xiaoping’s Decade (London: Routledge, 1990).
John K. Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler, Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Kam Louie, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
John Pomfret, Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2006).
Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990).
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1 Based on the book by Zhan Bohui, Xiandai Hanyu Fangyan (Modern Chinese Dialects) (Hubei People’s Press, China, 1981).
2 The statistics used in this section are quoted from the Web site of the People’s Republic of China State Statistics Bureau, 2007 Annual Report at www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2007/indexch.htm unless noted otherwise.
3 Currency is in U.S. dollars unless noted otherwise.
4 Outlook Weekly (in Chinese). Beijing, China. Vol. 16. April 21, 2008, p.8.
5 So-called “Group of Seven” industrialized nations: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States of America. Statistics from People’s Daily (Overseas Edition), June 17, 2008, p.3.
6 Ibid. Vol. 9. March 3, 2008, p.18.
7 Ibid.
“The most stressful non-combat city in the world, [whose] 7 million inhabitants harness this energy for one end: making money…The most exciting city you will ever visit…A rare mix of energy, variety, and 24-hour audiovisual stimulation…About ten percent of the private cars are Mercedes Benzes…The frenzy of consumption becomes even more volatile when mixed with superstition and a penchant for gambling…”8
The preceding description resonates with this occasional visitor to Hong Kong SAR.9 This fascinating city characterized by the continuous noise of traffic, commerce, and construction; the endless variety of people and products; the beauty of its harbor; and its unique charm as a combination of British colonial rule and overwhelmingly Chinese culture, remains one of my favorites.
In only one regard do I (Wright Doyle) disagree with the guidebooks: despite their frenetic urban pace and no-nonsense approach to human relationships, I have found the people in Hong Kong to be quite friendly. As long as you let them know that you realize how precious their time is to them, and assure them that you won’t take too much of that vital commodity, they will treat you with efficient courtesy.
When the guns fell silent after the first Opium War in 1842, Great Britain had wrested possession of the island of Hong Kong from the ailing Qing Dynasty. Kowloon Peninsula was added after another British victory in 1860, and the New Territories came as a “concession” in 1898, leased for ninety-nine years. When the lease expired in 1997, all of what had become a British colony was returned to China, fulfilling a long-held dream of successive Chinese governments in the twentieth century.
Would-be reformers and revolutionaries sought refuge in Hong Kong from Qing Dynasty secret police before the revolution of 1911. On the one hand, Chinese who were longing for a better government viewed the British colony as a model of clean, efficient administration, which it mostly was and still is. They admired the order which the British brought to all their domains, even down to the custom of lining up for buses, trains, and ferries, a stark contrast to the mad rush common at transportation terminals on the mainland. British-style education offered not only excellent English, but advanced science and technology as well as exposure to Western civilization and history. Hospitals introduced Western medicine. The courts were more or less fair and impartial, and torture was not used to extract confessions. All of these may have been features of life taken for granted in the West, but they were still lacking in China proper.
On the other hand, nationalists resented the arrogance and racism that the imperialists all too often evinced, and which sometimes led to violence against the majority Chinese residents. Nor did they like to see a foreign power occupying Chinese soil.
Hong Kong once again served as a safe haven for refugees when the Japanese attacked in the early months of the Sino-Japanese War. However, it too was attacked and taken soon after Pearl Harbor in 1942. Britain regained control in 1945, and held on to its prize possession in the East even after Mao’s victory in the civil war. Though the Communists did not recognize the validity of the “unequal treaties” that had ceded the territory to Britain, they did not want to pay the price to forcibly overturn the status quo.
During the Cold War, Hong Kong served as a window on China for Western “China watchers,” and a window on the West for otherwise-isolated China. The influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees during the civil war, and especially after 1949, taxed the colony’s resources but provided a huge pool of cheap labor for its expanding manufacturing energies.
With the start of Deng Xiaoping’s sweeping modernization in 1978, Hong Kong jumped into the action with both feet. Soon its entrepreneurs were building factories and even roads all over southern China, especially in Guangzhou, from which most Hong Kong residents (or their forebears) came. A huge influx of capital and money-making savvy turned the city of Shenzhen, the first government-designated Special Economic Zone, into a manufacturing and commercial powerhouse just across the border from Hong Kong.
For a while, Hong Kong’s money and merchants dominated the new free market sector in China, but soon Shanghai and other rising economic centers competed with the British colony head-to-head. Even the construction of one of the world’s finest airports in Hong Kong has not kept it from losing ground to Shanghai, which has lured vast amounts of capital and thousands of foreign companies into its sprawling new metropolis.
When Britain returned its last colony to China in 1997, everyone wondered what a “one country, two systems” Hong Kong would look like. Would Western-style freedoms survive, or would they be replaced by Communist control? Ten years later, the situation is neither as bad as some had feared, nor as good as the Chinese government had promised. While the rulers in Beijing have allowed the free market to operate mostly unhindered, they have applied various sorts of pressure to stifle a free press and freely-elected government officials. Clearly, China intends to dictate important policy in Hong Kong, either directly or indirectly, through pro-China leaders.
Hong Kong retains enough freedom, however, to allow large demonstrations for democracy, though these too are coming under increased pressure. So far, its “self-censorship” in the press and on the street, and a modus vivendi among pro-democracy activists, Beijing operatives running the government, a relatively clean bureaucracy, and the mass of apolitical citizens may be in the process of developing.
A great deal rides on how heavy-handed China proves to be in bringing this rambunctious region under control. The people of Taiwan are watching to see what “one country, two systems” really means in practice. It’s hard for Communists to allow even a little freedom of speech, of press, of assembly, and (especially) of elected officials to act as they see fit. They will need great self-control if they are to persuade skeptics that reversion to Chinese sovereignty really won’t entail the type of restrictions that they regularly impose upon residents of the mainland.
Freedom of speech and assembly apply especially to religious believers. Hong Kong reflects China proper in its wide variety of faiths, with their meeting places, clergy, and faithful adherents.
Especially prominent, probably because of Britain’s former rule, are Hong Kong’s Christians, both Catholic and Protestant. Offering worship services in hundreds of churches, they also operate schools, hospitals, and a variety of social service centers. Because of its proximity to mainland China, dozens of foreign-based Protestant and Catholic organizations have offices, and even headquarters, in Hong Kong. The Chinese Congress on World Evangelization (CCOWE)—a fully-Chinese-run network of Protestants around the world—serves as just one example.
Despite stringent Chinese laws against such activity, most congregations in Hong Kong conduct some sort of evangelistic outreach in China, often coupled with financial aid or help with infrastructure (such as church buildings). Christian businesspeople, teachers, and doctors also maintain close ties to China, using their professions as a platform for spreading their faith. The Chinese government knows all of this, of course, but usually turns a blind eye because of the financial benefit such people bring to China.
So, the question is: Who will influence whom? Will China clamp down enough to snuff out the freedoms that have made Hong Kong what it is? Or will this tiny region continue to offer China a vision of a different kind of society? Only time will tell.
Fodor’s China
Frommer’s China
Graham Hutchings, “Hong Kong,” in Modern China: A Guide to a Century of Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Mike Levin and Gail Chasan, Hong Kong: A Bantam Travel Guide 1990 (New York: Bantam Books, 1990).
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8 Hong Kong 1990: A Bantam Travel Guide. New York: Bantam Books, 1990.
9 Special Administrative Region