At
times I feel so separated from the general politico-social opinion that I
wonder whether we are all living on the same planet. Take, for example, our
situation vis-a-vis China.
I know, for example, that China is
not a bright, shining democracy such as we are always claiming to be ourselves.
But taking that into account, I still feel an automatic surge of understanding
of almost everything the Chinese do.
I know I have been too much
influenced by my experience of working in China for three months in 1978,which
turns out to have been the very year they were turning away from Communism
towards creating a fully capitalist economy. And I confess they often did
things that drove me and my colleagues on the National Film Board crew pretty
far up the wall. Still, I was fascinated and hugely encouraged by what I saw
was happening in that remarkable country.
Let’s just consider this for a
moment: in 1949, after a civil war lasting decades, complicated by a Japanese
invasion and the depredations created by the Second World War, the Communist
party under Mao Tse Tung arrived in power. They took over a nation that could
reasonably have been described as the world’s poorest --- a nation of untold
millions of people, saddled with an archaic social system, desperately trying
to grind a living out of one of the most deprived and degenerated regions on
earth. I don't think anyone could
reasonably contest those facts, and when one adds to the mix that the Chinese
people constitute almost one out of every four people alive on the earth, the
scale of the challenge undertaken by the Communist Party can be described as immense indeed, of an almost
superhuman scale, so large as almost to defy
description. And, incontestably, theirs is a challenge the success of
which is vital to every person on Earth.
By1978 they had passed through almost
30 years of transformational change, much of it tragic in its consequences, but
overall, it seemed to me, beginning to yield positive results, such as the
provision of work, housing, education,
health care and the growing of food sufficient to provide an existence
somewhat above subsistence level for hundreds of millions of people. I was in
awe at the scale of this effort, and felt myself privileged to be allowed to
examine how they were proceeding to meet the challenge at the level of the
ordinary person.
With a remit to make at least two
films on the situation we found in China, as part of a government-to-government
agreement, we were placed in the organizing hands of their national documentary
film studio, who decided we should be based on the city of Zhijiazhuang, a city
at the centre of what one Western geographer has described as the greatest
collection of agricultural communities on Earth. It had the additional interest
of a connection with Canada as the burial place of the legendary Canadian
doctor, Norman Bethune, who died from injuries suffered while working an
innovative, just-behind-the-lines operating service to the revolutionary army,
and whose sacrificial service was so highly regarded in China that a
well-equipped hospital had been created and named for him in the city.
At the time ---- late 1970s, eighteen
months after the death of Mao, a few
months after the arrest of the Gang of Four (including Mao’s wife), who ran the
so-called but brutal Cultural Revolution against all settled authority ---
China’s agriculture was dominated by the commune system: production teams at
the lowest level, gathered into brigades, which together formed a commune with
an element of direction exercised at each level. The cadres responsible for our
visit had chosen two communes for us to visit with a view to choosing one for
our film-making, and in addition two cotton factories in the city with the same
objective. The communes were obviously among
the more successful although we did not get the impression they were completely
unusual from the ordinary communes surrounding them. Anyway, we chose a commune
called Wushing, and descended on it for the inevitable banquet of welcome. At
the head of affairs was an elderly man attached to the county government, a man
of high colour which seemed to betray a fondness for the bottle, but he was a
charming, amiable old guy, introduced to us as a treasure of the Chinese
people, by which they meant he was an
old revolutionary soldier, whom we
henceforth always referred to affectionately
as the Old Treasure.
The commune was under the command of
an amiable, stolid, younger man, with various sidekicks who approached their
work with differing levels of intensity. His deputy was a Miss Liu, a young
woman with a ready smile, and an evident fondness for working among her followers.
Our daily movements were orchestrated by a Mr. Yuan, full of bonhomie, but a
guy who, if he wanted to tell you no you couldn't do something, stuck to his
word with endless smiling, and implacable determination. Here's a story about Mr. Yuan. When he told us that an elderly citizen
had been given the job to cycle around
the streets to watch out for the droppings from the horses, we asked if he
could set up for us to film the process.
Mr, Yuan demurred gently, saying he could not control the movements of
horses. But eventually he suggested that
after lunch one day we might try to set up our cameras at a particular place
and hope for the best. We did so and quickly a horse trotted by pulling a cart
and leaving its droppings behind. Immediately a little old man, dressed in his
beautifully laundered white shirt, arrived on his bicycle, dismounted, picked
up the offending material, and took it home to his house, where he had
installed a pit in which he was manufacturing enough electricity to run his
kettle and an overhead light in his house.
In recognition of this success, before we left the commune I got
together a certificate naming Mr. Yuan
Director of Animal Functions of the commune, a joke that he seemed very
much to appreciate
There were plenty of other
apparatchiks attached to our enterprise, some from the city foreign affairs
department, some from the county level,
others attached from who knew where?
We chose a number of families around
whom to build our story of the commune, including a lovely old guy who had
suffered all the worst times his people had known. He was delighted with the
new set-up, and appeared to be unconcerned about restrictions on his freedom of speech, something he had never known in his
life anyway. At the end of his life You Lin Tchou no longer had to lug around
those ridiculous burdens he had always been assigned. Now he had a comfortable
room, enough to eat, and believed he was living the life of riley, if I may
coin an expression. He was the first to speak at a meeting designed to ginger
up the population for the coming harvest. The commune director spoke about
their duties then invited the people to say what they were thinking, The old man hesitated a moment, then spoke: “Having heard
my leader speak,” he said, using just the words his bosses were hoping to hear from him, “I’m excited.”
When I told my kids this story, “having heard my leader speak, I’m excited,”
became a regular response whenever they felt I was getting too pompous for my
own good.
I should mention that we had two
interpreters assigned to us. The senior was a snarling, malevolent, indifferent
fellow who had somehow gotten promoted to the job during the Cultural Revolution,
a job for which he was totally unsuited. The junior member was a fellow called
Wang Pu, one of the most delightful people I have ever known, who, when he came
to the railway station to meet us on arrival, told me as we walked away from the train. “So you’re from
Montreal? Yes, I know all the big cities of Canada --- Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Gravenhurst….”
The latter of which was the birthplace of Dr. Norman Bethune. Wang Pu turned
out to be a treasure, always obliging, always helpful, aways cheerful, and
always remarkably friendly.
Taken to the top of the village water
tower with the cameraman on one occasion, he seized the walkie-talkie, and sent
messages to those of us left on terra firma a fraternal message. “Wang Pu and
Mr Tony reporting down to the Canadian
friends John and Boyce from the water tower.”
I remember one day, as we were headed in our bus for the day’s work in the commune, we asked him, “Wang Pu, do you have a girl friend?” He confessed he did. Was she good-looking? we persisted.
“Rough,” he replied. She was busy
on some educational pursuit so unfortunately he would not be able to introduce
her to us.
“I will never forget the Canadian
friends,” he said, as we took a tearful farewell, following our shooting. “Tony,
John, Boyce, and Hans. They will remain in my heart for ever.”
I didn’t set out to do it this way,
but you will observe how this piece is turning out: first, before anything
else, the people we met and interacted
with during our three months of work together. This is consistent with our aim,
which was to try to capture on film how it felt like to live in this system of
highly-controlled governance, as nearly as we could come to discover that.
But there are more general lessons we
all learned. First, we travelled extensively back and forth across the plain and
into the foothills , and for mile after mile we could observe the results of
what began to seem to us a possibly unparelleled work. Vast hillsides laid out
in neat terraces, each one laboriously built by hand by the placing of one
stone after another, holding back the waters which were now bringing to
sparkling life beautiful crops as far as the eye could see. All along the way,
especially across the plain, whether in daylight or halfway through the night,
the roads were crowded with vehicles of every type, some of them hand-drawn,
loaded down with produce, or stones being moved from one place to another,
usually with weary peasants lying asleep across the top of towering piles of
hay and other produce. I know we were always told to suspect Chinese
statistics, but the evidence before our eyes was incontrovertible, that a huge effort of transformation was
under way, powered by what seemed to be a willing workforce in which every
single person was involved.
As I kept on persistently asking
questions, gradually more and more details were unveiled, all of them
confirming the evidence of our eyes. The Wushing commune had about 17,000 acres
of land, on which some 3,000 people lived in five small villages. Although it
was built on land that in Canada would be called marginal, and put to no use,
the abundant wheat crop that covered it on our arrival in May had by our
departure in July been replaced by a rice paddy, and between them they produced
enough food for their personal needs plus a substantial surplus for sale to the
nearby small county town. Each peasant home, following an earlier directive of Mao, kept a couple of pigs in their backyard, from which they prepared organic fertilizer for sale to the production brigades. With each brigade and the commune itself also raising pigs, there were probably more pigs than people on te small commune, and these were an essential part of the agri-ecosystem.
They had started many small industries each employing
20 or so people, making crude steel, making hats from the gleanings gathered by
school children following the harvest, stamping out from discarded pieces of
metal bought in from nearby city
factories, small shaped pieces for use in the manufacture of transformers, so
that every person on the commune who was capable of work had a job. In addition
every family appeared to have a house, every child was in school, and the
medical system, operated by so-called barefoot doctors with six months of
training, seemed adequate to keep their health standards at levels that
appeared at least comparable to our own in Western cities.
I have been in poor places elsewhere
in the world --- in India, Africa and Latin America ---- yet as closely as I
could figure, Wushing, in terms of its income, was the poorest place I had ever
seen. Yet how could one explain --- except by a reference to political will ---
how much superior it was to, for example, the horrendous slum attached to
Nairobi, whose main street was so
dominated by huge holes, and by the piles of uncollected garbage, that
one needed a 4 x4 just to get by; or, in comparison with the confident activity
of Wushing, the lassitude that
encompassed those villages we saw in the
Punjab; or the creeping decay observed in Quito, and Buenos Aires, where social
problems appeared to have been simply left to rot and worsen.
I confess I thought the Chinese would
never change their system, not if it was up to the peasantry; not if they
realized that their cities, already clogged with millions of workers cycling to
work every day, would, if they ever got
into motor vehicles, simply create an
unholy mess..
But now that they have changed, in
the process lifting 200 million people out of abject poverty, who am I to criticize
the direction they have taken? Evidently much of the criticism that has arisen
following their immense economic development is based on racism. The recent
kerfuffle about Huawei, and its supposed dangers to our sacred security, would be laughable if it were not serious. It
seems more than obvious that the United States, especially, with its satraps
tagging along behind, is worried not so much about its security as about the fact
it seems to be in process of being beaten hands down by a newcomer among its
economic competitors. So, by fair means
or foul, they are trying to crush the newcomer. So much for their vaunted
belief in the market place.
The arrest of Huawei’s Chief
Financial Officer in Vancouver seems to be a particularly egregious and
unnecessary action which a more experienced Canadian government might easily have
avoided.
If the Chinese are supposed to be so
suspect on security grounds, how come Canada has admitted 140,000 of their students
to Canadian universities? Surely these young people must constitute the equivalent
of a fifth column in our society. This idea is ludicrous, of course, as, in my
humble opinion, is the fear that the Chinese are hell-bent on stealing our
hi-tech achievements. The truth seems to
be that already they are streets ahead of some of our products in some fields,
and with their single-minded attention to upgrading the education of their
people, that can be, and should be, accepted as an inevitable consequence of
the great achievement of the Chinese people in the last half-century.
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