I’ve never seen anything like it since China in 1978.
Summer is over on the Canadian University campus, the
beautiful girls in their little shorts have been replaced by amazons in scruffy
jeans, and they ---- young women and
young men, both --- have arrived in their thousands by bicycle.
The McGill university campus, through which I walk every
day on my way for my morning coffee in downtown Montreal, has suddenly become
infested with bicycles that are attached by strong locks to every available space
to which it is possible to attach them. The university has provided lots of
long bicycle stands, and not only is every one of these full, but it is
overcrowded and so is every available fence, as bicycles are piled on top of
each other by the young people as they
hurry to classrooms where wise men and women are ready to transfer to them the
wisdom of the ages --- at least, that is the theory of it--- a very moving
thing to see as this hopeful self-selected elite embarks on learning something
they think is so precious that it is worth plunging into masssive debt to
acquire it.
But I’m not kidding, I have only once in my life before seen
such a gathering of bicycles, and it was in the
Chinese city of Shijiazhuang, known in those
Communist days as the repository of the corpse of the famed Canadian doctor
Norman Bethune, who, in 1978, was still being held up to the Chinese people as
an exemplar of all that is good in humanity.
I was there with a National Film Board team to shoot some
films that had been agreed upon by the two governments in an exchange of film crews. We filmed for six weeks in a nearby
People’s Commune, the most fascinating working experience of my life; and when
finished there we moved into the city to film everything we could find out
about a state-owned cotton mill, which, as it turned out, happened to be a lot.
It was there that I saw the bicycles. Shijiazhuang was an industrial city of
the new China, full of wide streets, hundreds and hundreds of apartment blocks,
and factories intermingled with them. I’ve forgotten how many people worked in
the mill, but it was several thousands, and not many of them had far to travel
to work. Some walked, some took the public buses, but most of them
bicycled. Every morning, and every shift
change, the streets were thronged with thousands of bicycles, intermingled with
impatient drivers of the relatively few motorized vehicles honking and cursing
their way through the throng. And one of the most important functions at the
mill was the bicycle park which had enough space for 4,000 bicycles that turned
over three or four times a day. I had never seen so many bicycles in one place,
and it seemed kind of miraculous that each worker could find his own bicycle,
when all were completely identical --- except, I suppose, for the ticket.
The city, which then had about 2,000,000 people, including
its periphery, was a rough-hewn place, but it struck me as perfectly laid out to
meet the demands put upon it. I would
think, every time we sallied into the streets to get more shots of the incredible
press of bicycles, that although it was working well under this pressure, they
woud be in the deepest possible trouble if ever they adopted the Western
world’s fascination with automobiles.
Still, surely they would never be
that crazy. After all, all the cycling, in addition to its town-planning
advantages, was keeping people so fit
that it was rare to see an obese Chinese person. In fact, put together with
their massive production of food to feed
that huge population, food that came from the Communes in the surrounding
counties, producing markets groaning with piles of food, day after day, I
figured anyone mad enough to suggest a switch to capitalism would get short
shrift from the peasants, who simply wouldn’t allow it.
Well, what d-you know?
The peasants didn’t have any say in it. The little guy who was running
things there, Deng Xiaoping, said just before we left that one American worker
could produce as much as 10,000 Chinese workers, so he concluded the American
system was 10,000 times more efficient. Of course, he was not including the energy demand made by the American
production system, and it struck me as being a silly thing to say, but how much
did I know? Deng managed to foist the
implications of his thought on to the Chinese economy, with the result that
today, while producing enormous quantities of goods (most of which the world hardly
needs), China today has imported capitalism with all its ills. Shijiazhuang
today is an urban centre with 10,000,000 people, with, at last count, 387
hotels and is said now to have such severe pollution as to make life almost
unbearable. Some improvement!
Dr Bethune is still remembered there, today memorialized by
three institutions in the city, the Bethune Military Medical College,
Bethune Specialized Medical College and Bethune International Peace Hospital. I
remember the last of these fondly, because I broke my little toe while working
in China, and had to go to the Peace Hospital every Saturday for treatment, where
I was expertly tended by a little doctor who told me how satisfied he was with
his iron rice bowl that guaranteed him his needs in life but would never allow
him to rise above --- or at least not far above ---
other ordinary workers.
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