Changing Qualities of Chinese Life PDF
Preview Changing Qualities of Chinese Life
CHANGING QUALITIES OF CHINESE LIFE By the same autlwr GOVERNMENT AND REVOLUTION IN VIETNAM THE PEACETIME STRATEGY OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC Urbanization in Hong Kong - the old life cornered by the new (by courtesy of the Hong Kong Government). CHANGING QUALITIES OF CHINESE LIFE Dennis Duncanson © Dennis Duncanson 1982 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982 978-0-333-30682-6 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1982 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-05805-1 ISBN 978-1-349-05803-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-05803-7 Contents Urbanization in Hong Kong- the old life cornered by the new frontispiec~ List of Plates VI 1 Perceptions of Chinese Life 1 2 Socialist Transformation and Economic Miracle 15 3 Toilers of the Far East 30 4 'Boiling Small Fish' 52 5 From Mandarin to Cadre 71 6 The Chinese Intellectual Crisis 92 Appendix: Old Tipsy's Look-out 112 Notes 114 Index 117 v List of Plates 1 The China that does not change: (a) Cantonese matron, and (b) Temple of Heaven. 2 Beachcombers of Macau: (above) in 1839 and (below) at the same spot in 1979. 3 Prosperous days in Cholon before Liberation. 4 Begging for refuge in Hong Kong, April 1979. 5 Precious Lotus Monastery, Hong Kong: (above) vegeta rian nuns 'Welcome Everybody' in 1949; (below) the manager-bonze waits at the 'cathedral' for package trippers in 1979. 6 ' ... extended the pool and built a pavilion where I could come with the people for recreation ... ' 7 'Self-reliant' wheelbarrow invented in Great Leap Forward days. 8 ' ... dragon-roofed pavilions and rugged artificial mountains ... ' (the Yii Garden, Shanghai). 9 This 'piglet' has found Longevity and Happiness, but hardly Fortune. 10 Bat-wing sails before the east wind in Shanghai's deserted dockland. 11 The Buddha the Communist Party built at Hangchow to further diplomacy with Japan in the Cold War. 12 Trawler from a Pearl River fishing commune. 13 At the crossroads in Shanghai. 14 Young 'rusticates' demonstrate in Shanghai. VI 1 Perceptions of Chinese Life ' ... at thirty, one's attitude is self-confident ... at sixty, one is more discriminating' (Analects of Confucius) The reader will not find a documented treatise here. The book is, without apology, personal- eclectic, discursive, impres sionistic. There exist plenty of methodical treatises on topics discussed in it- on the rural industries of China, for example, or on recondite and controversial subjects such as industrial relations in Hong Kong or the Chinese share of the retail trade in Indonesia. One recent treatise sounds close to my theme - Value Change in Chinese Society, 1 by a team of Ameri can professors; I have benefited from some of the facts it brings to light, but it only deals with small parts of my chosen field. An insight both deeper and broaderis to be had from The China Dif.ference2 by another team of American professors (edited by Ross Terrill), but its focus is the mainland at the present time and the ways in which life differs there from life in America. I know of no comparative overview of the quality of Chinese life as it has been lived, during the last few decades, under the variety of political, economic and social regimes that have imposed themselves on different communities of the Chinese people. My attempt at an overview brings together matter usually deemed proper for separate genres; it can explore none of them thoroughly and comes to few conclusions- it is one man's view. The text began as a series of talks commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation after I had paid a return visit, in 1979, to countries in the Far East in which, for twenty and more of the middle years of my life, I earned my living l 2 Changing Qualities of Chinese Life constantly surrounded by Chinese faces. The tour I made, with my wife, was not a sentimental journey. I admire most things Chinese and prize the privilege of long association with that people; but it is hard to feel sentimentally towards a people whose own ethics spurn sentimentality and who make great show, at every juncture, of the didactic values by which they judge even questions of taste and art. My purpose was more practical and detached: I went in search of glimpses (one could not expect more) of the quality of life of Chinese people today- of Chinese people inside the People's Republic and in Taiwan, and also outside China, in what are called the Overseas Chinese communities of Hong Kong and Macau, of Singapore and Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. My object was to make comparisons in both space and time. The comparison in time was to be the measure of how life has changed for different Chinese communities during the last three and a half decades- during the time that has elapsed since, scarcely out of uniform after a wartime apprenticeship as administrator and magistrate in ancient but rugged and backward Ethiopia, I first landed in a lush and sophisticated Malaya where, though my functions might carry the same titles as in Africa, all else was going to be utterly different. A few months after that first landing, but still two years before China was liberated by Mao Tse-tung's Red Army, my employers, the colonial government of Malaya, sent me thither to learn to read Chinese and speak the Cantonese dialect, on pain of the sack if I did not satisfy a Hong Kong board of examiners every six months as to my progress. At the same time as I absorbed the language, I was supposed to soak myself in the Chinese way of life; the regulations for prob ationers left to chance the extent to which this second injunction was accomplished. What the adventure in travel and study entailed for members of my service was recorded at the time, with commendable sensitivity, by a colleague whom our employers dispatched to a different province of South China from mine but who, like me, wandered further afield than he was instructed to. 3 Mao's Liberation of China was delayed by the god of people's war until my colleague and I had completed our probationary studies satisfactorily. I returned to the university to upgrade my Cantonese into Mandarin and to relate my practical
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