Fear and Admiration in Communist China

A visit to the Middle Kingdom after a ten-year absence left this seasoned China hand by turns inspired and spooked...

Changsha at Night [Photo Credit By: lzcytao, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55115525]

The recent BRICS meeting in Kazan served as a sharp reminder to Landmarks that our journal has spent too little time lately thinking about countries in the global south and east. The following travelogue by long-time Landmarks contributor and scholar Matthew Cooper provides considerable insight into the technological and moral complexities of modern China today. We hope to do more such meditations on the 'non-West' in coming months and years — The Editors

 

I’ve spent about a quarter of my adult life in China. I studied abroad there, twice. After school, I returned to China as an intern for a microfinance advisory company in 2011 and then worked in various positions in the country through 2015.

This past summer I had the opportunity of returning to China again, through my employer. I was instructed to be on the lookout for ways in which China had changed, and ways in which China’s atmosphere specifically toward treatment of foreigners had changed, in these intervening nine years. I endeavoured to understand the ways in which China has changed over the past eight years regardless of the changes in foreign relations that have made my return much more difficult. 

Hunan is famous for several things. First of all, it forms the core of the ancient state of Chu 楚国, which also regularly encompassed bits and bobs of the neighbouring provinces Hubei, Anhui, Jiangxi and Guangxi, and at its height even extended into Henan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and what are now the cities of Chongqing and Shanghai. A number of important historical personages are native to Hunan: the classical poet Qu Yuan; the statesman, geographer and linguist Wei Yuan; the famous general Zuo Zongtang (a.k.a. General Tso, who did not invent the Americanised chicken dish named after him); statesman and pedagogue Zeng Guofan; and the Communist revolutionaries Peng Dehuai, Zhu Rongji, Liu Shaoqi, Lei Feng and, of course, Chairman Mao Zedong. It is renowned for its particularly spicy food. And it is renowned also for being the regional core of the communist movement that produced the People’s Republic.

One thing I noticed particularly early on upon coming to Hunan, was that communist imagery and symbolism were more prominently displayed than I’d seen anywhere else, at any other time, in the country. Chinese flags, red stars, portraits of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and other communist leaders, and especially hammers-and-sickles, were practically everywhere. So were the public exhortations—not unknown elsewhere, but particularly prominent and prolific here—to socialist virtue and values. (People who’ve been to China know what I mean: the posters touting China’s prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity and friendship.)

It was difficult, early on, for me to understand the nature of this predominance of ‘red’ imagery and verbiage in Hunan’s public spaces. Was this a regional feature of Hunan’s strong connexion to China’s communist past, and thus an expression of local pride? Was this evidence of a more general return to ‘red’ ideology and explicitly-Maoist governance under Xi Jinping? Were people naturally more sympathetic to communism here, for one reason or the other? Or was there some other aspect to it that I wasn’t seeing or understanding?

The more that I spoke and discussed this question with the various people I was in contact with in Hunan, the deeper these questions became, and the more complex the answers appeared. There is very much a strong and heartfelt local pride in iconic Communist figures Mao Zedong and Lei Feng. The best analogy I can think of would be to how a Midwestern town would be proud of a hometown football star. And then there is also (ironically) the entrepreneurial aspect. Communist kitsch, particularly Mao kitsch, sells, and Hunanese people are very well aware of how it sells.

But then there’s the true-believer aspect, which I don’t want to underplay. Especially around the He Long stadium, there were prominent pieces of public propaganda art expounding Xi Jinping Thought: those were definitely new since 2015. There was a definite cultus of Lei Feng, often in businesses where exemplary employees were awarded for their ‘Lei Feng spirit’. There was also a great deal of deference given to Party officials and secretaries in the university where I worked. And for the most part (with only one exception—whom I encountered personally), the Party officials and secretaries I met were polite, friendly, even helpful and cooperative. They were held to very high standards by the people working under and around them, and they tried conscientiously to meet those standards. The criticisms of the government that I heard in Hunan tended to be criticisms from what we would consider the left—for example, earthenware artisans in Tongguan tended to complain that government monetary support for the arts was too shallow and too small in volume.

Like many other things in modern China, the Communist legacy is… complicated.

~~~

A number of aspects of 2024 China that I encountered in Changsha were, in my perspective, highly salutary. On revisiting my wife’s hometown in Luoyang, one of the first things that struck me was how much cleaner the air was. There were no offensive smells on the street. No bluish pall of exhaust and particulate matter choking the air. One could see all the way down Longhe Avenue from a vantage point on Luolong Street.

I could see two reasons for this cleanliness to the air. The first was that there was a lot more greenery on the streets. Urban Luoyang as I remembered it from 2015 didn’t have a lot of tree cover. In the present day, there were shade trees not only along the streets but inside the gates of apartment complexes and school campuses. There were brand-new bamboo groves. The medians of the larger streets had carefully-tended flowering shrubs and low-growing trees, rather than just being the bare asphalt and concrete that I remembered from the better part of nine years prior.

The second was that a larger proportion of the cars on the street were electric. Electric car manufacturing in China has taken off like mad—and electric as well as plug-in hybrid vehicles are easily identifiable by their green license plates. (Conventional gas- and diesel-powered vehicles have blue licence plates.) Big domestic marques like BYD and Wuling were the most popular EV manufacturers that I could see, followed by smaller marques like Trumpchi, Aeolus, Arcfox, Lynk & Co. Overseas marques and brands of electric car like Nissan, BMW, GM and Tesla were less common, but still noticeable. I was told by one of my hosts that the domestic EVs, in particular, were becoming more common because they were affordable and (in the long run) cheaper than conventional gas vehicles.

The EV boom has been enabled by a clear choice by local governments in particular to invest in electrified infrastructure. Charging stations and public outlets are practically everywhere—both in above-ground lots and in the subterranean parking garages which are increasingly common in large apartment, school and hotel complexes. The problem appears to be enforcement. In most places (Changsha, Luoyang, Fujian and Shenzhen all included) where I saw a bank of charging stations, I also saw at least one conventional gas vehicle taking up space there.

Regarding China’s efforts to reduce (at least in this aspect) the messiness of its industrial growth spurt, my critiques are fairly mild, and I largely applaud what I saw of these efforts.

~~~

With regard to the city planning that I was able to see (from a, Jane Jacobs-inspired perspective), I saw some rather stark examples of both good planning, and poor planning.

On the one hand, there were clear examples of healthy and active urban ecosystems in places like Changsha’s Wenheyou and Luoyang’s Shuxiangyuan. The local governments had clearly taken notice of certain successful business models, and moved to support them. At Wenheyou, what started off as a venue for street-stall food and snacks in Changsha, was quickly encouraged by local government and businesses and enabled to evolve into something like an indoor-outdoor 1970s- and 1980s-styled theme park: massively popular among Changsha’s Gen X’ers and their families, as well as tourists. Luoyang’s Shuxiangyuan is a bit more of a conventional example of ‘smart’ urban planning: a self-sufficient, walkable community with amenities of all sorts—not just the usual shops and restaurants and convenience stores, but outdoor farmer’s markets, post offices, clinics, schools, libraries—all within a single city block. Shuxiangyuan was only in its infancy when I was in Luoyang in 2014 and 2015. Now one can see that it is a vibrant, healthy, flourishing neighbourhood: young families and old people of all sorts, a meeting-point for rural and urban.

Even people who would normally have been homeless prior to 2015—people with massive physical injuries, missing limbs, or disabling conditions like cerebral palsy—were being taken care of. Some of them had their own transportation venues. They clearly had places to sleep and wash up: they were wearing clean clothes, for example. The absence of homelessness in Luoyang and Changsha thus did not have sinister overtones to me. Those who were formerly homeless had not been shoved further into the cracks, but instead caught up by the social safety net.

On the other hand, there was also massive overbuilding in some areas. I was not particularly impressed by this. During my time on the high-speed rail (I spent quite a bit of my trip travelling between cities), I passed by these massive blocks of apartment housing which were clearly newly-constructed, and also clearly vacant. It struck me as I was going by that China’s government was taking a massive gamble and leap of faith on young families.

About other aspects of 2024 China, I am much, much less sanguine.

Cash money is clearly being phased out. Most vendors and stores have QR-scanners which enable customers to pay via WeChat (in a similar way to how we’d use Venmo). And some stores don’t even accept cash anymore, which to me (a foreigner without a working local SIM card) was… more than a mild inconvenience. Facial recognition technology (shua lian 刷脸) is ubiquitous—both on the university campus where I worked, and in the train stations. It didn’t work too well in my case. On campus, I was given a special QR pass to use in place of the shua lian kiosk. And in the train stations, I resorted to the staffed (ren gong 人工) line with my passport in hand, rather than brave the shua lian queues.

I also encountered, in Changsha, a fully automated convenience store. Fully-stocked store, no clerical staff. You could walk in, take what you wanted, and walk out… and the store would automatically charge your WeChat account. This would be impossible to pull off in a society with lower social trust than China clearly has: the potential for abuse would be too great. (It’s telling to me that when I came back, the first questions people here asked me about this store, were about how easy it would be to game the system or avoid the cell phone scan!) But on the other hand, it could very well not be an indication merely of social trust. This aspect in particular spoke to me of the unhealthy omnipresence and omniscience of a panopticon surveillance state which treated people as extensions of their cell phones. The shua lian and social-credit technologies are still, at least in my experience, far overblown in terms of how they are imagined by Western observers… but it was here where the premonitions of Svetlana Lourié regarding the direction of Chinese technology systems rang, to me, the truest.

For a country which is growing and changing at as breakneck a pace as China is, any attempt to describe or analyze it is going to be, at best, impressionistic. I’ve highlighted here some of the more outstanding aspects that might be of interest to American readers. But there is much, much more to say on the subject that can’t be condensed into a 2,000-word essay.