AP News, October 15th, 2007
The crowded, bustling, upwardly mobile Beijing the world will see 10 months from now during the eagerly awaited Olympic games is a far cry from the one I knew 60 years ago.
Back in 1947, I spent an enchanted year there when it was ruled by the nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek. Menaced by Mao Zedong's communist armies, it was a provincial, sleepy, laid back city of rickshaws and coolies, mandarins and dreamers.
On the eve of Mao's conquest, the economy was in a shambles. Runaway inflation impoverished the nation. I needed a suitcase of almost worthless yuan to occasionally dine out.
The victorious communists, soon after moving to Beijing in 1949, won initial applause by making an ultimately unsuccessful stab at a multiparty government. Beijing by then was on the move, taking off with a vengeance, a vastly different city from the one I had known.
In their wildest dreams, no one then foresaw the dynamic, gung ho communist capital of 17 million people it would become.
The seismic change is a tale of two cities, the one of 1947 dying a slow death from hardening of the arteries, the other bursting at the seams, eager to become part of the larger world. In the process, it is caught up in the stark problems of progress: industrial pollution, and a headlong and uneven rush to rise from poverty to consumer-based riches. Already the comparatively few rich are getting richer and the numerous poor poorer. And the rule of law,the first big step on the road to democracy from communist dictatorship, has yet to prevail.
Though all this is giving rise to an emerging middle class and an impressive handful of the very wealthy, although the vast majority of ordinary citizens don't reach those heights.
As an AP reporter, I knew a wide spectrum of these ordinary and not so ordinary people in that distant nationalist day. They included peasants, students, professors, generals, government officials, nationalist air force pilots, authors and painters, journalists and composers. Whether they were right-wing or liberal, Buddhist or atheists, they had one thing in common, pride in an inherited 5,000-year-old civilization which informed their lives. Whether they were warlords, their past soaked in blood, or internationally known authors and diplomats, their talk was informed, courteous and not without wit.
I also met many young and optimistic Chinese then. They represented for me the spirit of hope in 1947. None of them communists, they were unafraid of the socialist program it preached, saw instead the promise of a long-denied better future for the New China. Staying on after the communist conquest of 1949, they offered their university studies as a contribution to that future. But Like many others of that generation, they swiftly became disillusioned.
Victims of Mao's 1950s shortsighted campaign against rightists, the fact they knew me, a then officially hated American, or had worked for the nationalists was enough to earn them long stays in the countryside to be brutally taught to mend their ways.
One of them was a champion university gymnast and boxer who, after Mao died, became coach of the Chinese Olympic boxing team, got back in touch with me after an AP reporter interviewed him in 1998.
I resumed my friendship with a handful of these once idealistic youths after China opened up to the outside world in the 1970s under the no-nonsense, pragmatic leadership of Deng Xiaoping.
For me, they represented all that was good and admirable in a race known over the ages for its imagination, creativity, good manners and love of life in all its infinite variety. The young today are freer, speak out more often, and at times don't hesitate to question the communist party to which many of them belong.
I have met them in Beijing and in talks at Oxford and Cambridge, astonished at their independence of mind.
For, little noticed or emphasized, over the years Mao's rigid and dogmatic communist regime has been succeeded by Deng's internationalist philosophy. A stance where the press is less censored; criticism within limits of the government accepted; students, tourists and business people travel widely abroad; and foreign visitors and investors throng the Beijing streets.
Repression persists and draws international condemnation but it is rarer than when I was there long ago. Those days were marked by tough censorship, the bloody crackown in 1989 on dissent and an Orwellian insistence by the government on playing the role of Big Brother, interfering in the most minute details of every citizen's personal life.
The surviving, idealistic youths I knew in 1947 are now old but still optimistic. Some are retired businessmen, others diplomats, government servants or teachers. They have told me they have greater reason to hope now than they did then.
With greater prosperity and a burgeoning economy resting on the liberalizing principles of the free market, more change seems inevitable. Today's Beijing, compared to the romantic but moribund Beijing I knew in the 1940s, has taken off like a rocket economically. But it lags in political reforms.
Deng told me back in the early 1980s that to succeed China will need not only economic liberalization but these political reforms, stalled since his death. Some highly respected Chinese say today they must be enacted. Others see the Olympics, when the outside world looks in, as a possible catalyst.
Growing interaction with the rest of the world gives reason to believe it will happen sooner or later. The question is how and when.
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John Roderick covered China for AP from 1945 to 1984.
