正文
Kowtowing to the wild East
Catherine Armitage, our former Beijing correspondent, counsels caution before going courting the emerging economic giant, China
-----------------------------------------------------------
February 25, 2006
IN the kaleidoscope of characters and conundrums I met these past four years in China, few stand out as vividly as Gold Jade Wang of the Seven Colours School.
The chain-smoking former peasant, one-time family planning official from a dirt-poor village in central Henan province would be regarded as a social entrepreneur in the West.
But it seems too grand a label for this 41-year-old with a sagging jacket and black teeth characteristic of his class.
As we talk in the icy staffroom of the school he founded on Beijing's outskirts, he spits on the floor then (out of politeness) grinds the slag in with his foot.
"I don't feel a sense of achievement," Wang says, looking out to basic brick classrooms surrounding a rough courtyard where bus-spewed children run past.
"I would like to see more beautiful buildings with laboratories and a garden style-courtyard and a proper playground where they can do some sports activities."
Five years ago Wang started this school for the children of people like him, displaced rural workers seeking a better life in the city.
During my four years I came to see these so-called migrant workers as the human face of China's huge transformation. In my view it is their uncertain fortunes, more than those of the multiplying millionaires, that will mark the regime's success or failure.
Time and again I was drawn back to their story. Like me, they were strangers in a new land. They stuck out like foreigners on the streets of every big city. Expectant and afraid, in groups, they lugged their worldly possessions in shabby bags, looking for work, or a place to sleep, or a bus stop.
For now the estimated 100 to 150 million floating population move back and forth between country and city as circumstances dictate. But 20 million a year are staying put. China plans to break the cycle of chronic rural poverty by moving 500 million more to the cities by 2050, doubling the urban population to catch up with the rest of the developed world by then.
Thanks to Wang's guilt-driven determination (see story below), his school's 1100 students, admittedly scarcely a splash in this human tidal wave, now face a slightly less bleak future. The uniquely Chinese, typically tragic family story that washed him up in that cold staffroom illuminates a few recurring themes of my time in brave new China.
He crystallised for me how, in a public culture that rewards individualism and greed, the extraordinary individuals who try to pursue the greater good are forced too often into conflict with the system. How the aspirations of the people sometimes support and sometimes clash with the aspirations of the state in its rush for superpower-dom. How fragile is the social contract, which gives the Government legitimacy in the eyes of the people only as long as it gives them better standards of living.
For Gold Jade Wang's Seven Colours school, head east from Tiananmen Square for about 10 kilometres, leaving behind the multi-billion-dollar, super-five-star, international hotels, ritzy shopping centres and space-age office blocks taking frenzied shape before the 2008 Olympics. Turn left off the Tianjin expressway to Tongzhou. It's one of the soulless new satellite cities built to house Beijing's overflowing population, though Wang's constituency are not to be found in its forest of pastel-painted apartment blocks.
They're holed-up in single-roomed hovels and the remnant shells of half-done demolitions. Their parents - construction workers, rubbish collectors, coal carters, cleaners, vegetable sellers, security guards, servants - do all the dirty work haughty Beijingers decline to stoop to in their booming city.
The road to the school is an avenue of rubbish. At 7.15 on a cold December morning, children warm their hands at piles they've set alight on the way to long, cold hours in class.
The staffroom is a jumble of mismatched furniture and teetering towers of dog-eared textbooks, the only heat source a decrepit coal stove scarcely big enough for a teapot. Breathing steam, Wang frets aloud about how to pay a 900 yuan debt to the coal carter: "Mei banfa!" ("No way out").
Less than 20 per cent of students can afford the full fees of 640 yuan a year. Salaries to the 50 staff are often paid a month or more late. Most students leave the school when they are 13 or 14. Only the exceptionally gifted will make it much beyond that.
Life in the village where he grew up was already intolerable by the time Gold Jade Wang came to Beijing in 1994. The propitious name bestowed by his parents looked more than ever like a cruel joke.
Among the 1000 villagers under his watch as a family planning enforcer there were 100 abortions a year, yet the population of his own village had tripled since his childhood. So the land allocation per head had dropped by more than two-thirds to a tiny 900sqm.
"I saw villagers fighting each other for land," he says. "Sometimes a bloody fight would break out over several inches of farmland." With a greater population the peasants will have even less land. "How can the peasants feed themselves from that?" wonders Wang.
But prospects in the city weren't much better. On the streets he saw children just "seven or 10 years old, wandering the street with nothing to do". Beijing schools were beyond reach, charging nearly four times what his school now charges, plus bribes to paper over the offence of attending school away from their registered birthplace.
Since then life has become a little less fraught for migrant workers. Restrictions once intended to keep families on the farm have eased, though many parents still leave their children behind at inferior village schools to be cared for by friends or relatives.
But the accelerating mega-trend of urbanisation scares many, including the Asian Development Bank, which is urging the Government to "please prepare for the negative consequences", according to Tang Min, the ADB's chief economist in Beijing. China's stunning 1980s achievement of the most rapid poverty reduction in history has stalled. Since the mid-'90s inequality has risen sharply, with rural China falling well behind the cities.
The ADB says very strong action is needed within two or three years to build urban infrastructure such as housing, schools and sanitary facilities if China is to avoid the urban slum scourge that blights cityscapes elsewhere in the developing world. "They should put less money to fancy high rise and more to preparing the basics," Tang says.
The most the Seven Colours school has ever received from government was a once-off donation of 10,000 yuan and a computer when the district Communist Party secretary visited on Children's Day 2004. That visit marked a turning point in the official attitude towards the school from outright hostility (the first campus was demolished for parkland), to mild encouragement. "But they don't offer practical help," sighs Wang.
SINCE I moved to China in 2002, the effects of the plan to catch up with the developed world by mid-century have been felt around the world. There is no end to mind-boggling statistics about the Chinese juggernaut. And it's only the beginning. Up to 30 new nuclear reactors are to be built in the next 15 years, to be powered by Australian uranium. Mobile phone users have doubled in three years to 377 million, twice as many as the US.
Australia, happily endowed with the natural resources China most wants, has been among the countries most affected in a good way. Our Government boasts that we are "China's fastest-growing major trading partner", with two-way trade up an annual average of 20 per cent for the past five years. The only limit to the new wealth pouring in thanks to China seems to be inadequacies in our own infrastructure which prevent us from feeding Chinese growth fast enough.
For a student of economic history like me, it is a fascinating story. Even China sceptics brave enough to visit are left gasping in awe or envy at the spectacle of the world's most populous nation, now the "wild east" of capitalism, attempting 18th century England and 19th century Japan and US-type industrialisation at a scale and pace never before seen.
They're building a $US60 billion ($81billion) channel to divert water from the flood-prone south to the arid north. The western city of Chongqing, one of many undergoing massive makeovers, is getting a $US200 billion facelift. About $US20 billion is being spent on the port of Tianjin, two hours' drive beyond Wang's school east of Beijing. In Tianjin, where Sydney's Meriton property magnate Harry Triguboff grew up, the input of architects from sister city Melbourne is so prominent that the new colour for bollards and bus-stops is supposedly called Melbourne green. The World Bank predicts China will overtake the US to become the world's largest economy by 2030.
China's leaders cultivate the image of a benevolent superpower in the making. Yet so much could go wrong. I fear that Australia, in its eagerness to be a partner in China's growth, is too easily seduced by the hype.
The costs of warp-speed growth are beginning to be counted. A top government environmental official recently threw an explosive new statistic into the heady growth mix: pollution levels could more than quadruple within 15 years unless China curbs energy consumption and car use.
China is host to 20 of the 30 most air-polluted cities in the world. Already the nation is peppered with "cancer villages", where locals attribute clusters of illness, premature death and birth deformities to industrial pollutants. Only half the population have access to clean drinking water. Clean air, water and energy are being gobbled up at unsustainable rates, too often for the sake of government "vanity projects". Capacity constraints preclude many of the grandiose schemes to solve such problems from ever taking shape.
The banks are weighed down by bad loans squandered on wasteful projects by government cronies. Over-dependence on foreign investment increases China's vulnerability to external economic shocks. Anger over corruption, rising inequality and more recently, pollution, sets off protests on a scale that would signal social collapse in any other country.
China is like a vast bubbling mud pool, with small eruptions threatening to combine at any time. Who knows whether a volcano lies beneath? No wonder any attempt at organised opposition is mercilessly crushed.
Rapid progress and bold experiments in some sectors founder in the face of widespread bureaucratic rigidity and stagnation. People mainly join the Communist Party to further their careers. Few still believe in the gobbledy-gook think-speak that passes for official ideology. Money is the new god. Making it is the new form of worship. Loyalty is to family and close friends first, then village, province and finally, the motherland China, which in people's minds is distinct from the political entity of the communist nation. Outside the nexus of family and close friends, trust is scant.
People behave in the same selfish way they ride bicycles and drive cars: if you see a gap, go for it. Every man, woman and child for themselves. The state relinquishes responsibility even for services such as health with an abandon that would startle the driest of the economic dries.
No one now expects to be cared for. Only the risky actions of heroic civic-minded individuals carry the possibility of the development of a compassionate, civic-minded society.
"I tell my children they have only themselves to depend on," says Nie Weixiang, a migrant worker whose family of five live in a 3mx8m single-room hovel near Wang's school. Nie scrapes a survival income from menial jobs.
A somewhat belligerent nationalism is cultivated by the Communist Party as the only unifying ideology. The deep-rooted affection harboured by most Chinese for their motherland is channelled into passionate popular sentiment against Japan and in favour of Taiwan unification.
In the excitement of cosying up to the emerging economic colossus, it's easy to forget just how nasty these smiling dictators can be. The values we share with them are far fewer than those we share with the US. How different our region would be if China as we know it now, rather than the US, was calling the shots.
Yes, things are getting better in China. Yes, it's amazing that the leaders have steered China through the Tiananmen crisis, the East Asian financial meltdown and the severe acute respiratory syndrome scare with scarcely a wave in the tide. Yes, moving China forward is a colossal task which takes time. Yet every year those same leaders are ultimately responsible for the persecution beyond reason of scores of thousands of people deemed a threat to them. The persecuted are beaten, tortured and imprisoned, their lives and families ruined, their spirits broken.
I once said in an article on human rights that "a mountain of misery" lay behind China's stunning economic growth. For that I was called in for a dressing down by an urbane and charming Foreign Ministry official, who may (or may not) have been wearing the only genuine Tommy Hilfiger brand pullover in the capital. He said the Foreign Ministry was disappointed in me. He said they'd seen me as a "friend of China", but the criticisms in my story were unbalanced and unjustified.
Referring to documented cases, I asked him how China justified its officials torturing Falun Gong practitioners to death. "These people are sick. We cannot help it if they refuse their treatment," was his chilling response.
These types of exchanges go on all of the time, yet are seldom reported. The fear among journalists is that the Foreign Ministry will refuse their next entry visa.
I met scores of Australian Government ministers, officials and business representatives who self-consciously fell over themselves to avoid offending the Chinese while swinging through Beijing for meetings. Lots of instances spring to mind, ranging from the relatively trivial to the somewhat important.
I heard the Foreign Minister Alexander Downer talk for about 10 minutes to a student audience at the nation's most eminent university, about how Australia had tackled the spread of AIDS. He didn't once mention homosexual sex. It's a taboo topic in China.
A couple of years later Downer delivered China a stunning and unsolicited diplomatic coup when he said at a press conference in Beijing that Australia would not necessarily come to Taiwan's defence if China attacked it, thereby overturning all previous assumptions.
For years, at the start of every meeting with their Chinese counterparts, no matter what the topic, Australian diplomats have been made to repeat the mantra that Australia supports the one-China policy denying Taiwanese sovereignty. It's a modern version of the kowtow.
Former trade minister Tim Fischer, in October, told me proudly that a more junior Australian official he had just accompanied to a meeting was "in fine form" and "didn't blink" when tackled by his Chinese hosts on Taiwan. What did the Fischer protege say, I wondered, sniffing controversy. "Obviously, that Australia supports one China, and strongly so," Fischer replied. In other words, the guy kowtowed just low enough.
Just for the privilege of negotiating a free trade agreement with China, we gave China what it most wanted from the deal before the talks even began, by going along with the obvious fiction that it is a "market economy" in which the state plays no undue role in setting prices.
Our acquiescence in this charade, spurned by others, including the European Union and the US, gives China a big leg-up in contesting anti-dumping cases launched against it under World Trade Organisation rules.
BHP Billiton, now reaping record profits on the strength of iron ore sales to China, had a strong case for the greater than 70 per cent price rise it sought for its iron ore in negotiations last year, but caved in after a ferocious campaign waged by the Chinese Government. BHP has been announcing goodwill gestures all over China ever since, presumably in preparation for the current round of negotiations.
In Beijing, all criticism of China by Australian visitors was strictly off the record. That may be polite to the hosts, and prudent business practice, but longer term gives China the impression that we are fine with all the bad things it does, from failing to honour contracts and ripping off intellectual property to business bullying and abusing human rights.
It proved impossible to get a single Australian company on the record over the Chinese theft of its intellectual property. All are too afraid of giving offence to the country that steals from them.
The cost of standing up may not be as great as some fear. The Chinese Government is pragmatic in its dealings with the outside world, at least at the central level.
I think Australia could extract a higher price for its resources, at little cost beyond some uncomfortable diplomatic moments. There are better ways to support progress in China than digging up and shipping all our dirt.
The problem now is that the officials on whom we depend to represent us to China are not publicly accountable for what they do, good or bad. We must take their word for it that they raise human rights concerns at every opportunity. My sense, though, is that such issues are more and more confined to the once a year official bilateral human rights dialogue. We can't know for sure because it all happens under the veil of country-to-country relations.
No one imagines that Australia has the diplomatic clout of the US. The US administration scarcely hesitates in highlighting China's human rights abuses and is known to have gained relief for some victims.
But in this run-up to the Beijing Olympics, when China faces more glaring scrutiny than ever, there is surely greater scope for us to more determinedly test the Chinese Government's frequent claim that it welcomes criticism. We have a lot of resources China wants, especially in energy where there is a seller's market just now. There are plenty of other buyers, including the US, to whom we could sell.
Australia worries that if we put a step wrong the Chinese will never forgive us. I think the bigger worry is that the patterns of behaviour we lay down now towards China, in this early phase of its ascendancy, will be harder to undo later, when China really is a great power.
My impression is that China, always acutely conscious of its developing nation status, can't quite believe the deference with which it is treated by so many countries which are so far ahead of it in terms of economic and social development, not to mention diplomatic expertise and experience.
Britain's Hong Kong representative Chris Patten was pilloried by China for his tough negotiating stance over Hong Kong before the 1997 handover, yet Britain seems to have done no worse than comparable nations in its subsequent dealings. Former Czech president Vaclav Havel spent two days at the Dalai Lama's elbow hosting him on a state visit with no fallout for the Czech Republic other than a burst of fiery criticism at the time.
The cost to Australia and other countries giving in to China too easily and too frequently is not only that we compromise our values and diminish our dignity. Over time, China may come to believe that its more dubious territorial ambitions in our region are uncontested. That increases the chances of dangerous misunderstandings.
SO far, people such as Gold Jade Wang retain some trust in the state which, it appears to an outsider, he has ample reason to hate. But, as China wages an epic battle against outside influences to rein in rising rights expectations among its increasingly affluent population, the risk for the communists is that the fragile social contract that holds China together will shatter. Once-loyal citizens may decide their trust has been misplaced when economic progress falters. World economic history shows that is bound to happen sooner or later.
That could spell disaster for China, for the region and for Australia. For one thing we would be subjected to a flood of boat people on a scale never before seen.
On a different migrant worker story at yet another desolate village this time last year, I spent a day with a family whose bread-winner had just arrived home with their first television set. He'd been eight months working in the toughest of conditions on a city construction site. The family slept in one dirt-floor room with no running water. They could barely afford to keep their two children at school. The daughter aged 13 was dumpy and painfully shy, soon to finish school so she could start earning. Chances are she'll be factory fodder in Guangdong. Her parents will do all they can to keep her younger brother at school for longer.
As we were leaving I called to her from a sympathetic impulse: "You can do anything you want to!" In life, I meant.
How ridiculous that mantra of affluent individualism sounded as it echoed across the dusty yard, and how keenly I wished I could take the words back. For her and the 700-800 million people of her class, they won't be true in my lifetime, or hers. Only when those words are true should we give China its full due.
Catherine Armitage is The Australian's higher education editor.
Catherine Armitage, our former Beijing correspondent, counsels caution before going courting the emerging economic giant, China
-----------------------------------------------------------
February 25, 2006
IN the kaleidoscope of characters and conundrums I met these past four years in China, few stand out as vividly as Gold Jade Wang of the Seven Colours School.
The chain-smoking former peasant, one-time family planning official from a dirt-poor village in central Henan province would be regarded as a social entrepreneur in the West.
But it seems too grand a label for this 41-year-old with a sagging jacket and black teeth characteristic of his class.
As we talk in the icy staffroom of the school he founded on Beijing's outskirts, he spits on the floor then (out of politeness) grinds the slag in with his foot.
"I don't feel a sense of achievement," Wang says, looking out to basic brick classrooms surrounding a rough courtyard where bus-spewed children run past.
"I would like to see more beautiful buildings with laboratories and a garden style-courtyard and a proper playground where they can do some sports activities."
Five years ago Wang started this school for the children of people like him, displaced rural workers seeking a better life in the city.
During my four years I came to see these so-called migrant workers as the human face of China's huge transformation. In my view it is their uncertain fortunes, more than those of the multiplying millionaires, that will mark the regime's success or failure.
Time and again I was drawn back to their story. Like me, they were strangers in a new land. They stuck out like foreigners on the streets of every big city. Expectant and afraid, in groups, they lugged their worldly possessions in shabby bags, looking for work, or a place to sleep, or a bus stop.
For now the estimated 100 to 150 million floating population move back and forth between country and city as circumstances dictate. But 20 million a year are staying put. China plans to break the cycle of chronic rural poverty by moving 500 million more to the cities by 2050, doubling the urban population to catch up with the rest of the developed world by then.
Thanks to Wang's guilt-driven determination (see story below), his school's 1100 students, admittedly scarcely a splash in this human tidal wave, now face a slightly less bleak future. The uniquely Chinese, typically tragic family story that washed him up in that cold staffroom illuminates a few recurring themes of my time in brave new China.
He crystallised for me how, in a public culture that rewards individualism and greed, the extraordinary individuals who try to pursue the greater good are forced too often into conflict with the system. How the aspirations of the people sometimes support and sometimes clash with the aspirations of the state in its rush for superpower-dom. How fragile is the social contract, which gives the Government legitimacy in the eyes of the people only as long as it gives them better standards of living.
For Gold Jade Wang's Seven Colours school, head east from Tiananmen Square for about 10 kilometres, leaving behind the multi-billion-dollar, super-five-star, international hotels, ritzy shopping centres and space-age office blocks taking frenzied shape before the 2008 Olympics. Turn left off the Tianjin expressway to Tongzhou. It's one of the soulless new satellite cities built to house Beijing's overflowing population, though Wang's constituency are not to be found in its forest of pastel-painted apartment blocks.
They're holed-up in single-roomed hovels and the remnant shells of half-done demolitions. Their parents - construction workers, rubbish collectors, coal carters, cleaners, vegetable sellers, security guards, servants - do all the dirty work haughty Beijingers decline to stoop to in their booming city.
The road to the school is an avenue of rubbish. At 7.15 on a cold December morning, children warm their hands at piles they've set alight on the way to long, cold hours in class.
The staffroom is a jumble of mismatched furniture and teetering towers of dog-eared textbooks, the only heat source a decrepit coal stove scarcely big enough for a teapot. Breathing steam, Wang frets aloud about how to pay a 900 yuan debt to the coal carter: "Mei banfa!" ("No way out").
Less than 20 per cent of students can afford the full fees of 640 yuan a year. Salaries to the 50 staff are often paid a month or more late. Most students leave the school when they are 13 or 14. Only the exceptionally gifted will make it much beyond that.
Life in the village where he grew up was already intolerable by the time Gold Jade Wang came to Beijing in 1994. The propitious name bestowed by his parents looked more than ever like a cruel joke.
Among the 1000 villagers under his watch as a family planning enforcer there were 100 abortions a year, yet the population of his own village had tripled since his childhood. So the land allocation per head had dropped by more than two-thirds to a tiny 900sqm.
"I saw villagers fighting each other for land," he says. "Sometimes a bloody fight would break out over several inches of farmland." With a greater population the peasants will have even less land. "How can the peasants feed themselves from that?" wonders Wang.
But prospects in the city weren't much better. On the streets he saw children just "seven or 10 years old, wandering the street with nothing to do". Beijing schools were beyond reach, charging nearly four times what his school now charges, plus bribes to paper over the offence of attending school away from their registered birthplace.
Since then life has become a little less fraught for migrant workers. Restrictions once intended to keep families on the farm have eased, though many parents still leave their children behind at inferior village schools to be cared for by friends or relatives.
But the accelerating mega-trend of urbanisation scares many, including the Asian Development Bank, which is urging the Government to "please prepare for the negative consequences", according to Tang Min, the ADB's chief economist in Beijing. China's stunning 1980s achievement of the most rapid poverty reduction in history has stalled. Since the mid-'90s inequality has risen sharply, with rural China falling well behind the cities.
The ADB says very strong action is needed within two or three years to build urban infrastructure such as housing, schools and sanitary facilities if China is to avoid the urban slum scourge that blights cityscapes elsewhere in the developing world. "They should put less money to fancy high rise and more to preparing the basics," Tang says.
The most the Seven Colours school has ever received from government was a once-off donation of 10,000 yuan and a computer when the district Communist Party secretary visited on Children's Day 2004. That visit marked a turning point in the official attitude towards the school from outright hostility (the first campus was demolished for parkland), to mild encouragement. "But they don't offer practical help," sighs Wang.
SINCE I moved to China in 2002, the effects of the plan to catch up with the developed world by mid-century have been felt around the world. There is no end to mind-boggling statistics about the Chinese juggernaut. And it's only the beginning. Up to 30 new nuclear reactors are to be built in the next 15 years, to be powered by Australian uranium. Mobile phone users have doubled in three years to 377 million, twice as many as the US.
Australia, happily endowed with the natural resources China most wants, has been among the countries most affected in a good way. Our Government boasts that we are "China's fastest-growing major trading partner", with two-way trade up an annual average of 20 per cent for the past five years. The only limit to the new wealth pouring in thanks to China seems to be inadequacies in our own infrastructure which prevent us from feeding Chinese growth fast enough.
For a student of economic history like me, it is a fascinating story. Even China sceptics brave enough to visit are left gasping in awe or envy at the spectacle of the world's most populous nation, now the "wild east" of capitalism, attempting 18th century England and 19th century Japan and US-type industrialisation at a scale and pace never before seen.
They're building a $US60 billion ($81billion) channel to divert water from the flood-prone south to the arid north. The western city of Chongqing, one of many undergoing massive makeovers, is getting a $US200 billion facelift. About $US20 billion is being spent on the port of Tianjin, two hours' drive beyond Wang's school east of Beijing. In Tianjin, where Sydney's Meriton property magnate Harry Triguboff grew up, the input of architects from sister city Melbourne is so prominent that the new colour for bollards and bus-stops is supposedly called Melbourne green. The World Bank predicts China will overtake the US to become the world's largest economy by 2030.
China's leaders cultivate the image of a benevolent superpower in the making. Yet so much could go wrong. I fear that Australia, in its eagerness to be a partner in China's growth, is too easily seduced by the hype.
The costs of warp-speed growth are beginning to be counted. A top government environmental official recently threw an explosive new statistic into the heady growth mix: pollution levels could more than quadruple within 15 years unless China curbs energy consumption and car use.
China is host to 20 of the 30 most air-polluted cities in the world. Already the nation is peppered with "cancer villages", where locals attribute clusters of illness, premature death and birth deformities to industrial pollutants. Only half the population have access to clean drinking water. Clean air, water and energy are being gobbled up at unsustainable rates, too often for the sake of government "vanity projects". Capacity constraints preclude many of the grandiose schemes to solve such problems from ever taking shape.
The banks are weighed down by bad loans squandered on wasteful projects by government cronies. Over-dependence on foreign investment increases China's vulnerability to external economic shocks. Anger over corruption, rising inequality and more recently, pollution, sets off protests on a scale that would signal social collapse in any other country.
China is like a vast bubbling mud pool, with small eruptions threatening to combine at any time. Who knows whether a volcano lies beneath? No wonder any attempt at organised opposition is mercilessly crushed.
Rapid progress and bold experiments in some sectors founder in the face of widespread bureaucratic rigidity and stagnation. People mainly join the Communist Party to further their careers. Few still believe in the gobbledy-gook think-speak that passes for official ideology. Money is the new god. Making it is the new form of worship. Loyalty is to family and close friends first, then village, province and finally, the motherland China, which in people's minds is distinct from the political entity of the communist nation. Outside the nexus of family and close friends, trust is scant.
People behave in the same selfish way they ride bicycles and drive cars: if you see a gap, go for it. Every man, woman and child for themselves. The state relinquishes responsibility even for services such as health with an abandon that would startle the driest of the economic dries.
No one now expects to be cared for. Only the risky actions of heroic civic-minded individuals carry the possibility of the development of a compassionate, civic-minded society.
"I tell my children they have only themselves to depend on," says Nie Weixiang, a migrant worker whose family of five live in a 3mx8m single-room hovel near Wang's school. Nie scrapes a survival income from menial jobs.
A somewhat belligerent nationalism is cultivated by the Communist Party as the only unifying ideology. The deep-rooted affection harboured by most Chinese for their motherland is channelled into passionate popular sentiment against Japan and in favour of Taiwan unification.
In the excitement of cosying up to the emerging economic colossus, it's easy to forget just how nasty these smiling dictators can be. The values we share with them are far fewer than those we share with the US. How different our region would be if China as we know it now, rather than the US, was calling the shots.
Yes, things are getting better in China. Yes, it's amazing that the leaders have steered China through the Tiananmen crisis, the East Asian financial meltdown and the severe acute respiratory syndrome scare with scarcely a wave in the tide. Yes, moving China forward is a colossal task which takes time. Yet every year those same leaders are ultimately responsible for the persecution beyond reason of scores of thousands of people deemed a threat to them. The persecuted are beaten, tortured and imprisoned, their lives and families ruined, their spirits broken.
I once said in an article on human rights that "a mountain of misery" lay behind China's stunning economic growth. For that I was called in for a dressing down by an urbane and charming Foreign Ministry official, who may (or may not) have been wearing the only genuine Tommy Hilfiger brand pullover in the capital. He said the Foreign Ministry was disappointed in me. He said they'd seen me as a "friend of China", but the criticisms in my story were unbalanced and unjustified.
Referring to documented cases, I asked him how China justified its officials torturing Falun Gong practitioners to death. "These people are sick. We cannot help it if they refuse their treatment," was his chilling response.
These types of exchanges go on all of the time, yet are seldom reported. The fear among journalists is that the Foreign Ministry will refuse their next entry visa.
I met scores of Australian Government ministers, officials and business representatives who self-consciously fell over themselves to avoid offending the Chinese while swinging through Beijing for meetings. Lots of instances spring to mind, ranging from the relatively trivial to the somewhat important.
I heard the Foreign Minister Alexander Downer talk for about 10 minutes to a student audience at the nation's most eminent university, about how Australia had tackled the spread of AIDS. He didn't once mention homosexual sex. It's a taboo topic in China.
A couple of years later Downer delivered China a stunning and unsolicited diplomatic coup when he said at a press conference in Beijing that Australia would not necessarily come to Taiwan's defence if China attacked it, thereby overturning all previous assumptions.
For years, at the start of every meeting with their Chinese counterparts, no matter what the topic, Australian diplomats have been made to repeat the mantra that Australia supports the one-China policy denying Taiwanese sovereignty. It's a modern version of the kowtow.
Former trade minister Tim Fischer, in October, told me proudly that a more junior Australian official he had just accompanied to a meeting was "in fine form" and "didn't blink" when tackled by his Chinese hosts on Taiwan. What did the Fischer protege say, I wondered, sniffing controversy. "Obviously, that Australia supports one China, and strongly so," Fischer replied. In other words, the guy kowtowed just low enough.
Just for the privilege of negotiating a free trade agreement with China, we gave China what it most wanted from the deal before the talks even began, by going along with the obvious fiction that it is a "market economy" in which the state plays no undue role in setting prices.
Our acquiescence in this charade, spurned by others, including the European Union and the US, gives China a big leg-up in contesting anti-dumping cases launched against it under World Trade Organisation rules.
BHP Billiton, now reaping record profits on the strength of iron ore sales to China, had a strong case for the greater than 70 per cent price rise it sought for its iron ore in negotiations last year, but caved in after a ferocious campaign waged by the Chinese Government. BHP has been announcing goodwill gestures all over China ever since, presumably in preparation for the current round of negotiations.
In Beijing, all criticism of China by Australian visitors was strictly off the record. That may be polite to the hosts, and prudent business practice, but longer term gives China the impression that we are fine with all the bad things it does, from failing to honour contracts and ripping off intellectual property to business bullying and abusing human rights.
It proved impossible to get a single Australian company on the record over the Chinese theft of its intellectual property. All are too afraid of giving offence to the country that steals from them.
The cost of standing up may not be as great as some fear. The Chinese Government is pragmatic in its dealings with the outside world, at least at the central level.
I think Australia could extract a higher price for its resources, at little cost beyond some uncomfortable diplomatic moments. There are better ways to support progress in China than digging up and shipping all our dirt.
The problem now is that the officials on whom we depend to represent us to China are not publicly accountable for what they do, good or bad. We must take their word for it that they raise human rights concerns at every opportunity. My sense, though, is that such issues are more and more confined to the once a year official bilateral human rights dialogue. We can't know for sure because it all happens under the veil of country-to-country relations.
No one imagines that Australia has the diplomatic clout of the US. The US administration scarcely hesitates in highlighting China's human rights abuses and is known to have gained relief for some victims.
But in this run-up to the Beijing Olympics, when China faces more glaring scrutiny than ever, there is surely greater scope for us to more determinedly test the Chinese Government's frequent claim that it welcomes criticism. We have a lot of resources China wants, especially in energy where there is a seller's market just now. There are plenty of other buyers, including the US, to whom we could sell.
Australia worries that if we put a step wrong the Chinese will never forgive us. I think the bigger worry is that the patterns of behaviour we lay down now towards China, in this early phase of its ascendancy, will be harder to undo later, when China really is a great power.
My impression is that China, always acutely conscious of its developing nation status, can't quite believe the deference with which it is treated by so many countries which are so far ahead of it in terms of economic and social development, not to mention diplomatic expertise and experience.
Britain's Hong Kong representative Chris Patten was pilloried by China for his tough negotiating stance over Hong Kong before the 1997 handover, yet Britain seems to have done no worse than comparable nations in its subsequent dealings. Former Czech president Vaclav Havel spent two days at the Dalai Lama's elbow hosting him on a state visit with no fallout for the Czech Republic other than a burst of fiery criticism at the time.
The cost to Australia and other countries giving in to China too easily and too frequently is not only that we compromise our values and diminish our dignity. Over time, China may come to believe that its more dubious territorial ambitions in our region are uncontested. That increases the chances of dangerous misunderstandings.
SO far, people such as Gold Jade Wang retain some trust in the state which, it appears to an outsider, he has ample reason to hate. But, as China wages an epic battle against outside influences to rein in rising rights expectations among its increasingly affluent population, the risk for the communists is that the fragile social contract that holds China together will shatter. Once-loyal citizens may decide their trust has been misplaced when economic progress falters. World economic history shows that is bound to happen sooner or later.
That could spell disaster for China, for the region and for Australia. For one thing we would be subjected to a flood of boat people on a scale never before seen.
On a different migrant worker story at yet another desolate village this time last year, I spent a day with a family whose bread-winner had just arrived home with their first television set. He'd been eight months working in the toughest of conditions on a city construction site. The family slept in one dirt-floor room with no running water. They could barely afford to keep their two children at school. The daughter aged 13 was dumpy and painfully shy, soon to finish school so she could start earning. Chances are she'll be factory fodder in Guangdong. Her parents will do all they can to keep her younger brother at school for longer.
As we were leaving I called to her from a sympathetic impulse: "You can do anything you want to!" In life, I meant.
How ridiculous that mantra of affluent individualism sounded as it echoed across the dusty yard, and how keenly I wished I could take the words back. For her and the 700-800 million people of her class, they won't be true in my lifetime, or hers. Only when those words are true should we give China its full due.
Catherine Armitage is The Australian's higher education editor.
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