Three Chinas

Index

Preface

The people of Scotland, Quebec and Puerto Rico have democratically chosen to put their material well-being above nationalism and accept domination by a foreign culture. The Chinese have never been given the opportunity to express that kind of preference. In the tradition of the ancient emperors, the Chinese have been expected to adapt themselves to the decisions of their rulers. Nevertheless, history has chanced to divide the Chinese into three groups: those who live in Macau and Hong Kong as colonial subjects of European cultures; the Taiwanese who until recently pursued a modernized version of the traditional imperial system; and the mainlanders of the People’s Republic (PRC) who’ve tried to develop an autonomous and modern China by adapting the principles of international communism. All three groups started from the same base of physical devastation at the end of World War II, one an independent client of the United States, one allied with the Soviet empire and the third supported by colonial governments. With democracy now establishing itself in Taiwan and colonialism soon to be terminated, without the consent of the governed in Hong Kong and Macau, how have the three groups fared?

The economic statistics are published for all to see. The political history is widely known. By those two measures the colonies have prospered and the mainlanders have suffered, with the Taiwanese somewhere in between. But, as a minority of Scots, Puerto Ricans or Quebecers would vehemently attest, national pride is an important end in itself. Is a colonial subject in Hong Kong really better off than his mainland relative when all the cultural and psychological aspects are considered? Can he bring up his children proud of their colonial heritage?

These rhetorical questions have no answers, but it might be instructive to look closely at the lives of typical Chinese in Taiwan, in Hong Kong and on the mainland and try to understand how their lives and world views differ. In the following pages you’ll meet three such ordinary people and perhaps be able to form your own opinions.

A warning, though, about my observations of the mainland. Since about 1985 life in the PRC has been changing at a dizzying and accelerating pace. Only a newspaper could hope to convey an up-to-date picture. This is no newspaper, so I’m forced to offer you instead a snapshot of the situation in the early 1990s, a period which may turn out to have been the threshold of re-unification. Hong Kong and Taiwan are dynamic places by world standards but, even so, my descriptions should remain fairly typical for a decade or more. On the mainland they’re out of date by the time they’re written.

A second problem is geographical. Mainland China is an enormous country and, as we’ll see, its society is by no means egalitarian. Life in the cities is vastly different from life in the countryside – in some ways the standard is better, in some ways worse. The quality of the diet, the availability of water, and economic opportunities vary enormously from one province to another. Even among the city dwelling elite there are vast differences from city to city. I’ve tried here to give a true and balanced account of life in one Chinese work unit in one Chinese city at one point in the PRC’s breathtaking evolution. It’s essential to remember that this part of my story can be generalized only with the greatest caution.

In today’s three Chinas it’s not necessary to disguise the identities of my subjects. In today’s mood of optimism it’s possible to hope that such disguise will never again be necessary. But two factors dictate caution. Re-unification of the three Chinas remains an ideal that most Chinese seem to accept. A generation of mainland leaders is reaching the end of its long march and it’s conceivable that within the next few decades the three Chinas could find themselves reunited. At the same time recent Chinese history has seen some remarkable shifts and upheavals that caution against unguarded optimism about the future course of events. Whatever eventuates, my three friends will have to live with the coming decades of Chinese development. With that future in mind I’ve taken the precaution of disguising their identities.

Much of what’s reported here is based on my own experiences in Hong Kong, in Taiwan and in mainland China. But I must also acknowledge the important contribution of my wife Sheila. She too has many years’ experience working in Hong Kong and on the mainland and she has contributed many important insights and observations. But the opinions offered here, and the errors as well, are entirely my own.

1

On Common Ground

Let me introduce you to some friends of mine. The big guy on the left is Andrew, this is Pat, and this is Dr. Su. Although I have known each of them for at least a couple of years, and although they are all Chinese, in fact they know each other only through me, their common Western acquaintance. Let me tell you something about them.

Andrew is 33. He is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. His main hobby is long distance running, though right now a lot more of his attention is being devoted to preparations for his upcoming marriage. Pat is 30. As it happens, she too is a distance runner. But they have certainly never raced against each other, because Pat lives in Hong Kong. She works in the administration of a high-class private club, and that brings her into contact with plenty of eligible men. Nevertheless, Pat is at an age where she is beginning to wish that she too had an impending marriage to preoccupy her. Dr. Su is a friendly sort of guy who will insist that we drop the Doctor. He is not a runner and he has been happily married for four years now. Like Andrew, Su can also call himself an educator, for his work unit is the Anhui Medical University. Su, you see, lives in central China in the important agricultural city of Hefei.

In fact, Andrew, Pat and Su have never met. In principle they could get together for lunch, but this possibility is a very recent development. Since 1949 Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland have been divided and to some extent isolated one from the other. It is only during the last few years that a certain amount of communication has resumed. Even now Taiwan’s Republic of China (ROC) and the mainland’s People’s Republic (PRC) remain officially at war, so communication between them is still limited and rather uncertain.

So if I were to arrange this luncheon date, the meeting would almost certainly have to take place in Hefei. Of the three, Su is the one least able to travel. The primary reason is simple poverty. As we will see, Su has a highly privileged and responsible job, but his monthly cash compensation would not pay Andrew or Pat for a day. Train and bus travel within China are correspondingly cheap for someone like Su, but travel abroad is prohibitively expensive. Indeed, until recently, foreign travel was almost impossible. The restrictions have now been significantly relaxed, but there is still a long list of permissions and signatures involved, and these remain difficult to arrange.

It will be much easier for Andrew and Pat to visit Su in Hefei, though even this has its problems. Until a few years ago Taiwanese also found it difficult to travel abroad. Business and official trips could be arranged under strict controls, but passports were not issued to ordinary citizens for foreign vacations. These restrictions were part of an intensive screening of anyone entering or leaving the island. The goal was to completely exclude communist sympathizers, though a side effect was to keep at home any foreign exchange earnings that the citizens might have felt inclined to spend on tourism. Over the last few years these restrictions have largely been lifted. Only draft-age young men and workers in defense industries now have difficulty arranging foreign trips. Andrew is neither of these, and so could arrange a trip to Hefei, but it would involve some rather elaborate visa applications.

With the PRC and Taiwan officially at war, it is not surprising that Andrew will need a visa to visit Su in Hefei. To pick up his visa he will have to travel via a neutral country – in this case Britain as represented by Hong Kong. It is rather more surprising that Andrew will also need a visa to enter Hong Kong. In fact, he can probably expect more difficulty in obtaining his Hong Kong visa at the unofficial British consulate in Taipei than he will have in getting a PRC visa in Hong Kong.

With the PRC now hanging on as one of the last bastions of communism, you might expect that Hong Kong and Taiwan would be natural allies. You would expect to find them teaming up in vigorous bilateral trade and in efforts to promote capitalist development in the region. Surprisingly, this is far from the case. There is certainly vigorous bilateral trade, and even growing triangular trade with China, but it gets no official support. Indeed official hinderance would better describe the situation.

Britain was one of the first major nations to recognize the Communists as the rulers of China after the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949. The British government of the day saw this as a move to deter the Communists from attacking Hong Kong and trying to drive them out. In those days Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland were still devastated from the Second World War and Hong Kong had not yet proved its usefulness to the Communists as their gateway to the world. To use a phrase from a later era, the Communists might well have felt willing to destroy Hong Kong in order to save it. In addition, it has since been discovered that senior members of the British administrations of the 1950s were actively sympathetic with communism, so that too may have had something to do with Britain’s prompt recognition of the communist victory. Both of these arguments are thoroughly out of date today. Communism is all but dead and Hong Kong’s prosperity is vital to prosperity and stability in the PRC. Nevertheless, Britain’s antipathy to Taiwan lives on. At the administrative level, Hong Kong handles thousands of transit passengers between Taiwan and the PRC every day, but officially they will do little to help people like Andrew with their travel arrangements.

Pat’s concerns are rather different. She was born in Hong Kong and so has a limited form of British passport. She needs a visa to visit either Taiwan or China, but both are easily obtained in Hong Kong. Many Hong Kong citizens like Pat in fact have a special visiting home pass issued by the PRC government which serves as a passport for trips into China and eliminates the need to get a special visa for each trip. But many Hong Kong Chinese, Pat among them, are reluctant to apply for this pass. The PRC government interprets an application as an acknowledgment that the holder accepts Chinese citizenship and is willing to be treated as a citizen of the PRC after Hong Kong reverts to China in 1997. Pat hopes that not applying for the special pass will in some way help to keep her options open. That hope may prove to be illusory as the British and Chinese never reveal the content of their ongoing negotiations on the subject. Still, Pat and many other Hong Kong Chinese continue to hedge their bets.

The lack of a permit means Pat has to get a Chinese visa like any other tourist. In practice this has never proved to be much of an inconvenience. Over the past ten years Pat has vacationed in half a dozen countries around Southeast Asia, but she has been to China only a few times. Each visit was an excursion of a few hours just across the border.

So, from Pat’s point of view, a luncheon in Taipei or Hefei would be about equally inconvenient. However, she would much prefer Taipei. Pat is scared to travel in China. In common with many Hong Kong women, she regards the mainland as a place not just of extortionists, smugglers and currency swindlers, but of pickpockets, thieves and even butchers attacking tourists and stealing their eyes and kidneys to sell for transplants. If my three acquaintances were to arrange to meet for lunch in Hefei, you can be sure Pat would bring a friend.

And how would they get there? Those who have never travelled in China, including Pat and Andrew, are inclined to imagine that it would be quite an ordeal. They visualize packed buses with chickens foraging under the seats and grim railway cars with overflow passengers crammed standing for hours in communal filth. Well, yes, such conditions do exist, but they are not typical. It is not Switzerland, but China does have an efficient railway system serving every part of the country with frequent and reasonably punctual service. Every passenger who does not insist on paying absolutely the lowest fare is accommodated in some sort of reserved space which, if not spotlessly clean, is quite tolerable for the duration of a train journey. Bus trips are normally another level down in comfort, cleanliness and price, but they are also much shorter. All the major cities are on the rail lines. Bus trips are for the really out of the way places.

Unfortunately, although Hefei is a provincial capital, it has uniquely bad train service. From Hong Kong the only practical access is by plane. It is not that the train does not go to Hefei. If you could get the tickets, the express services would be fast and reasonably direct. But that is only if you could get the tickets. China’s railway ticket sellers are not computerized. In City A you can buy tickets only for trains originating in City A. If you want to catch a train coming in from City B, you are normally obliged to buy a standing room ticket and try your luck for a seat with the conductor once you are aboard. And if you have to change trains in City C along the way? Ah well, there friend you are on your own. City A can sell you a ticket to C and perhaps tell you the schedule from there to your destination. But how long you will wait at C, how long you will stand in line and what class of seat will be available when you finally get to the window, no one at A has any idea or any way of finding out. The Chinese themselves would do their best to avoid ever undertaking a trip like that unless they had a good friend at C who could be relied upon to arrange some accommodation for them and help with getting the onward tickets.

Chinese air services are another story altogether. It used to be that no one could afford to fly and services were sparse. Prosperity in recent years has changed all that. China is a vast country – about the same size as Canada – and now that there is some money about, air services are multiplying. The national airline has been broken up into numerous semi-independent regional subsidiaries. These operate independent schedules, aircraft, maintenance and reservations systems. Like the railways, they are not computerized. They cannot even sell a round-trip ticket. And, unlike the railways, the airlines have difficulty keeping to their schedules. Flying in China involves many long and unexplained waits.

These would normally give the aspiring passengers ample time to reflect on the airlines’ terrible safety records, so the airports feel obligated to give them something else to worry about instead. This they do by levying unpredictable and outrageous fees and surcharges. Passengers pay the fees at the airport door, then present the receipt when checking in. The Chinese learned about this form of taxation when they began to travel to other Asian countries in the 1980s, including Hong Kong. Until recently, though, they never seemed very practical because air passengers were mostly government officials and their friends. When private travel became possible it did not take long for the fee system to run amok. The fees are dreamed up by the provinces, the cities and counties, and by the airports themselves. So they are consistent only in increasing from month to month. On short haul flights, the airport taxes can easily amount to 20% of the cost of the ticket.

Coming into Hefei from Hong Kong is not as bad as flying domestically. Since Hong Kong airport is overcrowded, the authorities levy hefty fines, payable in hard currency, on flights that do not keep to their schedules. The Chinese airlines make every effort to keep their Hong Kong flights on time. Hong Kong is also the only place where Chinese regional airlines sell round trip tickets, and that for a rather strange reason. Almost all of the dozens of daily flights between Hong Kong and China are officially listed as charters. That is because air service rights are traditionally negotiated government-to-government with reciprocal access. For every official flight from Hong Kong into China, the PRC government insists on being allowed one flight into Britain. Thus official flights are just a few a week, and all the rest are charters. The traveller from Hong Kong appreciates the possibility of buying a return ticket with a confirmed reservation, and mostly the system works pretty well. But the operators exploit their charter status to insist that passengers make absolutely fixed travel arrangements. They allow no changes, they give no refunds and the baggage allowance is only 20kg. Fly it or lose it.

If Andrew and Pat were to undertake the trip to our imaginary luncheon, one of these charter flights is almost surely how they would arrange it. Having arrived at the table, eyes and kidneys intact, it is now informative to enquire what language these people would choose. Chinese, you might suppose. In fact they would probably settle on English. Their choice highlights one of the serious difficulties facing modern China, indeed facing quite a few nations around the world.

There is a Chinese race, a Chinese ethnicity and a Chinese cultural tradition (invariably described using the adjectives long and glorious), but to speak of a Chinese language can be misleading. Each mainlander is raised speaking one of China’s hundreds of dialects. Su, for example, was raised speaking a variant of the Anhui provincial dialect. Some of the hundreds of dialects are to some extent mutually comprehensible, but many absolutely are not. For a majority of the world’s 1.2 billion Chinese, that is the end of the story. These are the peasants who attended four or five years of primary school before giving it up to work full time in the fields. Their entire life is lived within 50km of their home village and their language skills are entirely in their native dialect – quite adequate to communicate with everyone they meet from day to day.

In New York, meanwhile, the United Nations is publishing lists of imperialist powers still operating minute colonies around the globe and lists of countries ranked by the percentage of literacy among their populations. The former list encourages Britain to rid itself of Hong Kong as quickly and as smoothly as possible. The latter spurs China to teach all 1.2 billion to read and write.

Reading, and particularly writing, are absolutely central features of the just-mentioned long and glorious cultural tradition. In the past, however, the tradition has always specified that reading and writing were the special preserve of the ruling classes and inaccessible to commoners. UN pressure, and Mao’s experiments in mass propaganda, have now led to a bit of revision in that part of the tradition. The difficulty, however, is that most of the hundreds of dialects have no orthography. They are not written languages. What to do? Here the UN and Mao agree. Impose a common language on all Chinese.

In the West we speak of Chinese as if it were a language like French or Spanish. In fact Chinese is the name of a language group, rather like the Slavic languages or the romance languages. As romance languages, French and Spanish have many common features, but they are by no means similar enough to be mutually comprehensible. To say that someone is a native Chinese speaker certainly says something about his origins, but if you hope to converse with him you will have to go farther and specify exactly what Chinese language he can speak.

A generation ago a radio was a relatively precious possession in China. At the same time, few Chinese ever travelled more than a day’s walk from their birthplace, so few Chinese had ever met anyone outside their daily round. As a result China’s vast area developed a patchwork of local dialects each spoken over an area perhaps as small as only a few score kilometres in diameter. Radio and television have now begun to erode these ideolects, but it will take a few generations. The situation today is that all Chinese children learn a second regional language which they use with people from outside their family or village. It is rather as if, in Europe, everyone began his childhood with local languages like Breton, Sicilian and Catalan then moved on to French, Italian and Spanish.

In China the regional analogues of French, Italian and Spanish usually carry provincial designations like Hunanese, Shanghaiese or Cantonese. These are then referred to in the West by the group title Chinese. Su speaks Anhuiese, Pat and the rest of Hong Kong speak the Guangdong provincial dialect known as Cantonese, and Andrew speaks Taiwanese. These three languages each have millions of speakers, but they are still mutually incomprehensible.

Doctor Sun Yat Sen is recognized by both the Communists and the Nationalists as the father of his country. He is credited with laying the groundwork for the revolution which overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911. Nationalism was a major plank in his political platform, and Dr. Sun realized from the outset that nation building would have to begin with the overwhelming task of installing a common national language. Dr. Sun spoke Cantonese. Nevertheless, it is typical of Chinese cultural perceptions that he made no attempt to install Cantonese as the national language of his new nation. You will get a sense why if you engage Andrew, Su or Pat in a discussion of the ideal society.

You may be surprised to discover that these modern, educated people have a tendency to refer back to the precepts of Confucius and the society ruled by China’s ancient emperors. The Once upon a time of a Chinese nursery story usually refers to a time several centuries BC. It is rather as if Westerners were still given to citing Pliny and Seneca, or even Pythagorus and Hippocratus in the solution of modern problems. The West still respects its classical roots, but civilization’s progress since the renaissance is considered to have relegated much classical learning to history. China, however, lost its way somewhere in the 11th century and steadily fell behind the rest of the world until finding new imported gurus in Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin during the last hundred years. The Chinese still seem to feel compelled to refer to a rather distant classical past for guidance.

Dr. Sun considered himself pretty modern and widely-travelled for his day, but he had heard all the usual nursery stories. He found it natural that the most suitable common language for a modern unified China would be the dialect that had been spoken by the mandarins of the emperor’s court. It is rather as if the Central Powers had won the First World War and decided to unify Europe by referring to the continent’s united and glorious past and imposing Latin as the common tongue from Brittany to the Bosporus. Dr. Sun’s was an ambitious initiative and both the Nationalists on Taiwan and the Communists on the mainland are still today struggling to carry it out. This, in fact, is one important area where the Communists and Nationalists agree. Schools on Taiwan operate in Mandarin from the first grade. Mainland schools try to do the same as much as possible. The British, naturally, are burdened with their own cultural baggage in this regard, and Hong Kong schools run primarily in English after the first years of primary school.

The results are uneven. On Taiwan virtually everyone can get along in Mandarin and most people are fully literate. On the mainland Mandarin remains the language of the elite, as it was in imperial times, although many more people can understand it now and it has progressed to the status of a lingua franca. Most people have studied it at one time or another and passed a literacy test for the UN, but working in the fields they have forgotten much of what they knew. Those who have occasion to travel, or anyone who deals with persons from other parts of the country, will have kept up enough Mandarin to get by. It is about what you would expect if you could imagine a European continental language imposed by a totalitarian European Union government.

There is, however, an important sense in which the Chinese languages are more inter-related than their romance counterparts. When the time comes to write something down, all the regional languages are written identically.

It is difficult for a Westerner to imagine how mutually incomprehensible languages could be written identically, but it stems from the fact that the Chinese alphabet is not really an alphabet at all. In a language that is written alphabetically, each letter has a distinct sound. The letters are strung together on the page to reproduce the spoken sound of the language one letter at a time. Languages that sound different in speech of course are spelled out differently on the page. But Chinese characters are ideograms – they are based on meaning rather than sound. A paragraph of Chinese characters has just one meaning. It sounds completely different when read aloud in Cantonese and in Hakka but both readers are understanding an identical message. While they cannot speak to each other directly, they can pass notes without difficulty.

That is why political debate in China centers on wall posters and editorials. Mao never needed much skill as an orator. Most of his followers would never have been able to understand him anyway.

For a pertinent example we need no more than a whip ’round the luncheon table. Andrew and the doctor share the surname Su. On the one hand, Mandarin has several different surnames pronounced Su which are each written using a different character. As far as the Chinese are concerned these families are entirely unrelated. If they are written with different characters then they are different families. The fact that they are all pronounced Su is of no significance. Andrew and the doctor, on the other hand, spell their names with the same character and are considered in some distant way to be related. Su is the Mandarin pronunciation of the name. When Andrew is speaking Taiwanese he pronounces his name, written with the same character, rather as if it rhymed with shah. Pat knows plenty of people in Hong Kong who spell their name with the same character, but in Cantonese the name sounds more like chewey.

That Andrew and Dr. Su should share the same surname is far from remarkable. The 1.2 billion Chinese almost all share just one hundred or so family names. The emphasis on ancestor worship strongly discourages name changes or the dying out of family lines, so a very limited repertoire of family names has been carried down from ancient times. Many educated mainlanders can quote you the ranking list of most common names and tell you as well the rank of their own family name on the league table. The current leader is known in the West as Lee. As with the Sus, these Lees are