A Country of dream

As it reaches the pinnacle of economic boom with the Great Olympic Games, will Superpower China change? Hardews explores
AMIT SENGUPTA/ Hardnews/ BEIJING

ONE WORLD, ONE dream. Civilisation and harmony. The Great Olympic Games. Beijing 2008. As a country of dream.
If dreams are not nightmares, these slogans, almost metaphysical, mean more then metaphors. As August 8 arrives, the carnival-inaugural of Beijing Olympics, superpower China is getting all decked up, with amazingly ruthless efficiency, organisation and pomp, with world- class bourgeois thrills and frills, and the top-heavy, sickle and hammer Communist Party of China (CPC) does not really mind.
This is the high-point in China's modernity. For the nation, this is the glorious departure from the past. It is at once nationalist euphoria and collective evidence of achievement. For the past many years, especially after the announcement of Beijing as venue, it is like a marathon without a beginning or an end. Entire China became one in creating and consolidating this first public spectacle to the world: look here, we have arrived. And if they top the medal tally this time, then they have already made history.
How authentic and life-affirming is this Olympic dream? Is China experimenting with democracy and freedom? Or is it basically totalitarian? Will the Games open up new windows of creative dissent, political optimism and free political choice? Is the invisible ‘terror' or ‘control' of the omnipresent, one-dimensional State real? Is it Orwellian or is it now becoming ‘Orwellian-American-Libertarian'? And pray, how communist is the Communist Party of China?

EVERYTHING IS ON the dot: On the Mark, Get Set, Go! In precise mappings, design and execution, in total control, as is the doctrine, norm and protocol in affluent Beijing, one of the richest provinces where top ‘communist' bosses, many from super-rich Shanghai, call the shots. Public transport, underground metro, traffic regulations, special municipal zones, pollution levels, earthquake, thunderstorm, rain and sand-storm preparations, hotels, homes, residential villages, hospitals, mobile clinics, communication systems, work stations and stadiums, electricity and water systems, roads and flyways.
India is perhaps a century (if not more) behind China in terms of the highest standards of governance and civic conduct of public institutions and administration, in terms of concrete, urban infrastructure, design, planning, execution. One might agree or disagree with the content and essence of modernity's expression, but in its own mirror-image of globalised, liberalised modernity, this is world-class stuff, functionally efficient and running smoothly, accountable, perfectly fine-tuned everyday. If not aesthetic always, it is still a highly skilled and visionary form of modern development - and we are not talking ideology, economic models, or political contradictions here. Not even Maoism, socialism or democracy. We are talking basic good governance.

AND IT ALL begins with the incredible Beijing International Airport: ‘Harmonious airport. The dream starts from here'.
Incredible, because the airport has little to do with the simplistic, stoic, Maoist ideology of the revolutionary past with only one humble terminal when it began operating in March 1958. The current one, finally fine-tuned in 2007-2008, is a sprawling, infinite, truly magnificent architectural marvel perfectly fitting into the principle which drives the Chinese adrenalin: Anticipate. Think big. Think future. Do it. No questions asked. No shoddy left-overs. No work-shirk. No dissent.
Perhaps one of the largest and swankiest in the world, it is already threatening to outshine the best global airports in the West. The futuristic transit zone is built with a few decades in anticipation, as is the most basic infrastructure in most of urban China - from highways, lifts, drainage and garbage disposal systems, housing complexes, parks and protected forests (except those poisoned by industry), to high-rise multi-stories and ecological hot spots. But that is not the only reason why the airport is so stunningly post-modern, with multi-language signs and landmarks, a virtual free space which is not an overwhelming labyrinth.
This is basically because of its endless expanse, located somewhere between flying and being grounded, between high altitude sky and the transition of rooted geographical space. It is not architecturally intimidating (besides, no security presence literally, but they are watching you, aren't they?), not even remotely vulgar, easy to negotiate, even when you move from one terminal to another in a fast ‘non-manual' train.
Considering China's huge population and domestic linkages and the thousands who criss-cross the airport everyday, it's almost always never crowded. The vast orange terrace moves like an ecological twilight zone, its permanent grid with its steely solidity almost ethereal, with squares of sky and sunshine in equal spaces which makes artificial light redundant. And once out in the open, as you move towards parking, the orange transforms into a blue terrace, with the scorching summer sun in full bloom through spaces of blue and white light, incandescent, natural, filtered streams of sunlight.
China is in the midst of a sweet sunlight dream, despite the protests in Lhasa and the Tibetan tangle. And they hate it if someone's out to disrupt this dream. The Chinese are "terribly pissed" with the exiled Tibetans in Paris, London, Delhi, Kathmandu and elsewhere, as a quiet female student told this reporter. This is especially because they manhandled a ‘differently-abled' athlete in a wheel chair in Paris and snatched the Olympic flame from him, while disrupting the march and extinguishing the torch several times. Most Chinese are very, very angry with the Tibetan protestors and the Dalai Lama: "Why do they have to rake up Tibet and do this violence when the entire country is showcasing the Olympics to the world? Why are they destroying this gigantic effort by the entire nation and this dream?"
This dream: ‘Beijing 2008', is the final and first showpiece which China wants to showcase to the world after years of the Iron Curtain (condemned as anti-democracy and totalitarian by the western media). This, despite a booming economy and unhindered forces of neo-liberal global capitalism unleashed. Come and see for yourself, they seem to be saying, the grand, grandiose, gigantic Olympic Games, in the grand, grandiose, gigantic People's Republic of China.
Hence, they are turning the dialectic upside down. The scale is unprecedented, pushing limits of impossibility, making believable what seems totally unbelievable (See Box). Beijing will plant more than 40 million potted flowers around the Games venues, the Olympic Village, city streets and hotels, and the Tiananmen Square, including ‘heat-resistant' varieties. "July and August are generally a hard time for flowers," said Wang Sumei, deputy director of the Beijing Landscape Forestation Bureau. "We picked up over 20 kinds of heat-resistant flowers from more than 500 species of flowers to decorate the city."
Flowers and parks are growing at the crossroads, meticulously maintained with gardeners in uniforms, as are most subaltern working classes and ‘contract workers'. These are is Green Games, so China is all out to break the "old Three Gorges brand image" of mass ecological disasters. This is, therefore, called the Eco-Olympics.
Thousands of volunteers are being trained in security drills, picking up basic English, though the Rapid English Crash Course is yet to take off. Priests are being trained for sermons in western languages. Intercontinental cuisine is being redesigned or introduced, and Beijing's ancient specialities like roasted ducks cooked in a ‘live firewood' are being showcased. Menus are being re-vamped - dog food has been banned. "It's a myth. It's mostly South Koreans who are into dog food here. In mainland China it's not popular, only in the north-eastern regions," said a reluctant restaurateur.
Mornings start with Tai Che and table tennis in the parks, with bare-chested veterans concentrating with endless green tea flasks. Volunteers are out on the impeccably clean streets to tell people, don't spit, don't throw the tobacco butt there, use the garbage can. In any case, no one's doing anything of that sort here: out of fear or hygiene or civic consciousness, or all of that together. Unlike Delhi, where the entire capital is a virtual male public urinal, especially pavements, no one pisses in public spaces here. "It's not the fear of castration really," laughs a bus driver. "It's basic law and order and civic discipline."
Office timings have been rescheduled, citizens have been advised to stay indoors and work online, traffic has been divided into cars with odd and even numbers and special parking zones, people are being encouraged to discard cars, take public transport or use cycles and walk. Beijing has been turned into an ecologically protected zone and a security fortress with no visible police presence, the ‘Beijing dust and fuel smog' and pollution levels have gone down, new subways have come up, there seems a sense of both ‘artificial and real freedom'. "As a country of dream," says young, dynamic Sun Weide, in impeccable English. He should know: he is the No 2 of the entire global communication and media system of the Beijing Olympics Organising Committee. He represents the ‘new, high voltage China'. And he is in control. "This Olympics stands for two things," he says. "Civilisation and harmony."

SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT Tiananmen Square. Sunshine bathed young faces. Across the transparent light bathing the long stretch at Changan Street and beyond, this seems a prosperous summer of hope and expectation. The Games are still away, but this politically famous square is bustling with youngsters from the city and provinces out to have a good time. Around the next street, at the hip plaza, shopping malls and American fast food joints, youngsters are swarming the place, stopping by to pause before the huge hoardings put up by a local daily on the earthquake. The images touch the inner core, epical moments of human tragedy, devastation, resilience, and ordinary people, so fragile when nature hits back with such ferocity and vengeance, even in a country which flaunts itself as an undisputed economic, technological, military giant.
Young, confident westernised girls with short hairstyles, in short, thigh-hugging denim shorts and jeans, wearing short tops, sleeveless, often backless, almost all of them, as if it's a new post-globalisation uniform. Celebrating skin and body. Walking, hanging out, driving cars and cycles, eating hot dogs, clicking pictures endlessly, completely unselfconscious of their bodies and self-image, totally relaxed, free in their own, eclectic realms of apolitical freedom. Young men, too, are hanging out, cigarettes dangling from their lips, but it's the women who dominate the sunshine square outside the Forbidden City with Mao's huge portrait looking down with detached benevolence. Lovers, single women, school and university students: it's this effortless female presence which marks new China's reincarnation in the one-dimensional reign of the CPC.
Young girls in a row at Beijing Airport checking immigration cards, a few men too. At the mark of a dot, as a new female contingent arrives for fresh duty, the ‘transfer of duty' is quick and lucid. Inside restaurants, bars, shopping malls, fast food joints, old fashioned eating houses, vintage theatre halls, female students, often school pass-outs from the provinces and rural areas, they are the ones who run the show. They have learnt the first tit-bits of the English language for the thousands of foreigners who are going to flock to the Games: "It's a pleasure, this way sir, more tea sir, thank you, that's alright."
You probe deeper: "You are from which province, why did you drop out from school, are you a member of the young communist league?" and you quickly know that this packaged deal of English language skills is a fine trick, even the cultivated American accent. So don't ask too many questions in English. The girls will soon relapse into a lovely Chinese smile, whereby all linguistic acrobatics will inevitably fail. Many of these hardworking girls, after their ‘Beijing stint', return to their provinces to start their own enterprise.
(Indeed, ‘globalised China' desperately needs to learn English, and they are desperately trying hard to do that - if they remain a ‘world power'. They are single-minded, disciplined, hardworking and tenacious in chasing their objectives. For instance, those who master IT software, medicine, or the sciences, or those who go to western universities, they master the language, lab and subject - even it is not in Chinese. But the fondness for Han Chinese language which unites them culturally, the absence of English or other windows of communication, makes it difficult to open up intellectually, despite official interpreters for official dos, with comfortable pay packages. But ‘opening up' - is that what superpower China is struggling/aspiring for - is more than a political and cultural metaphor. Especially when it comes to the Olympics.)
The female presence: In the capitals of provinces and in small towns, in toll check posts and traffic junctions, inside long distance trains (as in Xining to Lhasa), railway platforms and aircrafts, at local airports, as in Xining in Qinghai province or Linzhi in Tibet - the female presence is effortless and omnipresent. At Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, devastated by the quake, hundreds of girls and women are all over the place -the airport looks like a non-stop ‘western' fashion show. Even frisking in several airports are mostly done by energetic young girls, their efficiency and alertness as transparent as their strict demeanour.
Indeed, the new, metro-cosmopolitan ethos of ‘prosperous China' is dominated by the female factor at the ground level, though almost every top official and communist party leader we met turned out to be male - mostly in sober grey/black trousers and white bush-shirts. "It's cool if the girls wear shorts," says a male student, aspiring to be rich. "Parents don't mind if they are out in the world. The last decade has witnessed this new trend, and no one's objecting. It manifestly expresses the new wings of invisible freedoms which the civil society is discovering. At Tiananmen on Sunday you saw precisely that."
Wings of freedom!. Tiananmen Square! So whatever happened to June 1984, the massive, spontaneous, students' uprising?
And the great communist song of liberation, the International; Beethoven's Ode to Joy on the public loudspeakers, with thousands of students on fast, satyagraha, peaceful protests for more freedom and democracy... as the tanks rolled in... Are there any faint semblance of memories still alive, out there in that square, if not traces of blood, songs, posters, slogans, in youth consciousness, in the national psyche of contemporary Beijing and China, despite the "western propaganda"?
The tanks rolled in out there, across the square, somewhere between the Great Hall of the People, Mao's Mausoleum and the Forbidden City of the ‘last emperors', when the "juvenile delinquents" and "CIA agents" were crushed, arrested, eliminated, made to disappear from the pages of Chinese history. With Deng Xiaoping at the helm. The Great Helmsman.
The Great Helmsman has transformed ‘Communist China' from the half-starved, cut-piece, blue Maoist suit and stoicism, and collective communist poverty of rural collectivisation, to a super-rich, super power, driven by individual excellence and prosperity to make more money, pushed solely by the mantra of private property, private entrepreneurship, private wealth, private profit, in what still claims to be a ‘capitalist-socialist' country, almost number one next to the US in terms of the political economy of the dollar, with Next Stop: Eternity. Remember Deng's favourite metaphor of ‘economic reforms' which every Chinese recites in sing-song precision: "It does not matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice."
"I was a student in June 1989," said young intellectual Zhang (name changed), married to a doctor. They don't have a car, live in a rented house in Beijing, and are dreaming of a day when their world will change. "I know it was bloody. But what Deng did was right. Or else China would have split. Or a Soviet Russia like situation could have developed. That is unacceptable."
That is, political freedom should not precede economic freedom. Learn from the lesson of history. How the Americans broke up the mighty USSR.
Zhang is a member of the communist party. Most often, joining the party helps in getting a comfortable job -- and political and social security. Many of his friends are businessmen or professionals and they are not members of the communist party. He feels what the students started is still unfolding, but Deng was right in crushing it. "We are witnessing new forms of democracy now. You can see it in the atmosphere. The Cultural Revolution pushed only one doctrine: how to be a great revolutionary. Now we don't have to be revolutionaries. We have crossed that stage. We see new opportunities of growth, interaction, excellence. Today I don't have money, but I can make it. Earlier, there was no such chance. These days there is more dissent then in the past. Democracy will happen, and it is already happening. That's what Tiananmen started as a historical process. Nobody can control it, not even the Communist Party. Civil society is getting more empowered, and it will demand more freedom."
This is the uncanny Chinese characteristic: the ‘dignified' elimination of memory. So what about Mao? Is he over? So why is his face on the currency, on walls, on banners? Why is his body still preserved in Mao's Mausoleum when no one reads his Red Book anymore. "It's like tradition," said Zhang, and his friends nodded. "We don't dump tradition just like that, we don't desecrate memory. Mao did the revolution, he built the new China, he started the war against serfdom and slavery. But his phase is over. His ideas are over. We respect him, so his memory is still there. The respect will always be there. But his ideas are of no real use now, because the world has changed. It's Deng who gave the nation a new philosophy. And that philosophy too is changing."
And where are the student leaders of June 1989, and protestors of that generation? Are they still in jail, or are they rotting in dingy mental asylums? Are they back in circulation, doing what? Laughed a senior journalist, a member of the CPC: "Most of them have happily settled down abroad. Dissent is cushier out there. Many of them who stayed back have come back to normal life here. Many have been freed."
No one knows. In ‘control freak' China, often, what individuals speak with utmost freedom is also officialspeak. (See story, .... Pg ) There is often unanimity in spoken declarations across the population: "Falun Gong is an evil cult." "Criminals in Lhasa did violence." "The Dalai clique." "Deng was right. There was no option but to crush the Tiananmen Square movement."

The question.
So in which phase of history is China currently situated? Which stage of development? If it is capitalist, which it is, has it rejected the communist phase in totality? So what is the next stage of growth? New capitalist war lords and multinationals instead of the ancient feudal war lords? New social disparities and economic divisions? New rich and the new poor? So how and why is the ruling party still called the communist party?
"We have moved to a new economic phase of massive development which is unique to our country," says Zhang Yan, Chinese Ambassador, in Delhi. "We have rejected our mistakes as in the Cultural Revolution and entered a new path of great growth, which is uniquely Chinese. We call it the pragmatic path shown by Deng Xiaoping."
At Beijing, said Wang Pai Jung, Additional Director General in the State Council Information Centre: "After the first stage of development, this is the second stage. Now there will be more democracy and sharing of resources, after the first stage saw huge increase in the resources of people."
This reporter asked this question to a variety of officials and communist leaders in China and the ‘Tibet Autonomous Region'. The answer was almost always the same. As if it has been learnt by heart.
The only difference arrived when we met the top boss of the State Council Information Centre in Beijing. The State Council is one of the highest bodies. Young and open-ended, Director General, Dong Yunhu, Professor of Philosophy, was reasonably frank and honest, within the ‘paradigms' of diplomatic restraint. For once it appeared that even top communist officials can speak their critical minds. Also perhaps because they might be in the close circles of the establishment in power (in this case, the structure led by President Hu Jintao). Hence they can break the apparent rules of protocol and push the Iron Curtain's threshold. This also reflects the simmering inner debate within the party, which seems faceless and non-critical from outside.
Said the professor rather candidly: "It is my personal view. Reforms have opened up a ‘can of worms'. We have to take it in that pace or movement so that different groups of people are not left behind by the reforms. So that's a transition of the whole society. I went to university in 1979. The reforms changed things very rapidly. I know some people might feel tired or exhausted to chase this rapid development of society, not to mention those who live in the rural areas. I believe the government needs to take this factor very clearly and carefully."
Continued Yunhu: "There is definitely no doubt that everyone must have a share of development, so as to create and sustain a harmonious society. Human rights are enshrined in our Constitution. All people have the right to development and social progress. In that context, social justice will be a
long -term issue. Indeed, all developing countries will have to deal with this problem."
So will it create a new class of millionaires and the rich in ‘Communist China', while the poor will remain where they are?
"There are such worries in the academic circles," says the professor. "My personal view is that in societies with great economic progress a certain extent of divergence is necessary for progress. That will provide the impetus. This divergence has to be reconciled at an appropriate level - so that social conflict does not escalate. This depends on the art of leadership. A group of people becoming rich first is like the situation of still waters - you stir the waters to create a ripple. By allowing this difference... now the risk is that this divergence, if it is too big, can affect the stability of the whole society. You can't jump forward with two legs. We believe in socialism. We won't become America. We have to move neither too fast, nor too slow."
Human rights is a slogan, he says. China respects human rights. What if you want to protest peacefully against the government? You are allowed to do that, he says, with due permission and if it does not violate the law or social norms. Besides, no one is hauled up in jail, he claims. Everyone gets the due process of legal help - lawyers, friends, relatives, and you are innocent till presumed guilty.
Indeed, there is no way to test this. No one can protest in China, even peacefully, in text, principle, or action. Recent protests in some provinces aggainst atrocities have led to quick crackdowns. Even quake victims who have been raising questions on corruption (on collapsed school buildings, for instance) are reportedly being silenced. The entire media is government controlled. No genuine protestor who knows the ropes will take government permission to protest- he will then become a sitting duck. Reports say, if you are caught, over or underground, as a radical dissenter or as a branded threat to the State, however peaceful, what happens to you after you are picked up remains a mystery. The trial is almost never fair and just. There are a few political parties in China, including non-communist, centrist parties - but they are all linked with the ‘one-party government'. Indeed, this is a black hole of China's ‘new democracy': the human rights face. And if it is all western propaganda, let the Chinese government come clean on it publicly. Indeed, will they undo this spectre in Beijing 2008?
Across the urban and rural landscape you can see disparity, despite the best efforts of the government to hide it. Inside Beijing the poor households have been ‘air-brushed' behind fancy green zones of trees and parks. If farmers, workers or the displaced from mega projects don't have a work permit they can't work in Beijing (this is to compulsorily stop rural migration into posh Beijing - while the new bourgeoisie celebrates the new affluence).
Behind the Tiananmen Square there is a huge stretch of broken down, dilapidated and stunningly poor quarters of the poorest of the poor. What is starkly ironical is that they have been walled out, by a long-winding wall which stretches endlessly: behind the artistic frescoes of these walls there is this huge expanse of stark poverty and humanity. "These houses will be demolished," said a journalist, "to make way for high-rises. They will perhaps get houses elsewhere." Across Beijing, you can see ‘muti-storied' buildings reeking with oldage and ruination - small match-box like structures where people seem ghettoised.
In Xining in Quinghai province, poor mud houses stretch across the spectrum, as two little boys look for an extra buck as coolies outside the airport. Emaciated workers do construction work at the Buddhist Taer Monastery, the monastery fattened by official largesse and patronage. Here they might earn just about $2 a day, I am informed, unlike in Beijing where they earn much more.
Language is a barrier. Despite the affluence and the upfront flaunting of bourgeois pomp and splendour, it's impossible to break the great wall of communication--in terms of linguistic barriers, or social/political dialogue. We are the guests of the Chinese government. There is an invisible control mechanism always chasing us - despite being asked to "write whatever you want - feel free to criticise". Besides, the fear of the State is a tangible, real presence. Every one, stranger, source, friend, official - there is an invisible censorship always lurking in the background, like bitter realism. Really, whatever be their administrative constraints, China is still not a completely free country.
"The fact is," said a scholar, also a communist, "majority of the Chinese are poor. It will take many more years to build a classless, socialist society."
How many more years? And why do you think this new class of capitalist class will give way?
"That is a big debate," he says. "The unanswered question."
The question and answer is indeed blowing in the wind. But there's an uncanny lack. They will have to make the air breathe a bit more free. On the wings of freedom. Only then can it be a civilisation in harmony -- one world, one wonderful dream. One flower, and one hundred flowers. One school of thought. One hundred schools of thought. Outside and beyond the Forbidden City.

Bird's nest, water cube & palm blossom

The palm blossom is a flower of propitious sign in China. Its petals stand for five blessings: joy, happiness, longevity, smoothness and peace. It is seen as the messenger of spring and respected by the Chinese people as their national flower due to its elegance, grace and beauty
-Media Centre, Games Village

Like a tear drop floating in a garden of green. The National Centre of Performing Arts in the heart of Beijing is aesthetically subdued, in soft blue. So when one is ‘moved' by the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube, is because it is humanity's gift of gratitude to nature. This is significant because all big industrial nations, in a hurry to conquer the world, end up with a predatory western clichéd: the conquest of nature with science and technology. China has had its share of this conquest. And nature has often hit back: natural disasters, sandstorms, freak typhoons, poisoned rivers, ravaged landscapes.
But not so in Beijing. As China celebrates the Eco-Olympics, its tribute to nature. Look at Water Cube (above), also be an Ice Cube, floating in rectangle streams of water, cooled and frozen by the sun, blue and pure as the mirror-image of the sky. With 17,000 capacity, this is the stadium for acoustics, with water sports, moist games of muscle and mind. And a thousand drops of water.
‘Bird's Nest', designed by Herzog and de Meuron, has already won ‘Today's Most Influential Architectural Design' award by Time magazine. This is the National Stadium, the nerve, heart and pulse of the open expanse, the miracle and magic of the Games, outshining all other stadiums hosting 37 competition venues, 31 in Beijing, holding 302 events. Impossible to conceive by any stretch of imagination, this is a genius bird's impossible turned possible, a meticulous crisscrossing of multiple geometries and theorems, interwoven in no fixed pattern, every straw like an athletic moment of revelation, playing with sinew and brawn like a lover's kiss, like a bird feeding her chicks. The play of time and sunshine, space and motion, stasis and movement. Against circularity and yet in symmetrical zigzags of amazing and infinite balance, Bird's Nest, with a capacity of 91,000 is China's moment of pride where the inaugural and closing ceremonies will be held, and perhaps, the football final.
Every room in the gigantic media centre is named after a flower, like the Plum Blossom, its vermillion and orange petals, in synthesis, like Haikus. There are two more media centres, one for accredited journalists, other for the broadcast media - both massive in size and proportion. These centres, apart from a media village, will cater to 5, 600 photographers/reporter, 16,000 broadcasters, 21,600 accredited correspondents. Of the 7 million tickets, including cheap tickets for students and ordinary folk, almost 90 per cent have been sold out.
The Chinese trace this realisation to a ‘Century of Dream': In 1908, a Chinese youth magazine envisioned this. In 1984, China won one Gold in Los Angeles Olympics. And in 2008, it is all set to top the charts, drubbing the US. Defeating the Americans. This, especially, is more than symbolic.