The People’s Republic of China In My Eye

On October 1st， 1949， I was a young college student in Ohio， USA， having left China only four months before， and when I read that Mao Zedong had shouted from the Tiananmen rostrum “The Chinese People have stood up!” I shouted the same in my little dormitory room. After the last dark years of the Kuomintang regime， the Chinese people， I believed， would now have the chance to build a new China， a socialist China where equality and democracy would flourish instead of exploitation and repression.

In 1932， when I was born in Chengdu， China was a poverty-stricken and chaotic country， “The Poor Man of Asia”， as Western commentators called it. As a child， I experienced a China where the vast majority of the population were impoverished peasants， dressed in rags and doing back-breaking work from dawn to dusk， yet living on the edge of starvation because they were paying exorbitant rents to ruthless landlords.

Just outside our front gate were the fields of such a peasant， whose family lived in a thatched mud hut down to road.They grew a pig， but they could never eat meat—they couldn’t even afford to eat rice because the landlord took their entire crop as rent. The workers in the city lived just as miserably， and many terrible diseases wracked all the poor: dysentery， TB， cholera， typhoid， typhus， schistosomiasis. 60 million people died of infectious and parasitic diseases every year.

Cruel warlords controlled most of the country then， collaborating with a corrupt and repressive government whose secret police spied on everyone; progressives were persecuted， imprisoned or shot for speaking out. In the university where my parents taught， some students just disappeared. The government printed money to finance their operations， creating a hyper-inflation that caused misery for the laobaixing， the ordinary people.

In those dreadful times， I learned from my father that only the Communist Party had a programme to change China for the better. We rejoiced at the victories of the People’s Liberation Army， and I learned to dance the yangge with the progressive student groups meeting in our house.My father arranged for a young woman to listen to the broadcast from Yan’an every evening on our short-wave radio to bring news and instructions to the underground revolutionary movement in Chengdu.

During the summer of 1948， I asked two poor peasants on Mt Emei if they had heard of Mao Zedong. “Oh yes，” they replied， “Mao Zhu will come soon with an army to liberate us.” (In their lore， alive since the Long March passed through that region a dozen years before， Mao Zedong and Zhu De had become fused into a single folk hero!). Just before I left Chengdu in July， 1949， I saw Generalissimo and Madam Chiang Kai-shek on our university campus. It was obvious that they had lost the civil war and a communist-led victory was imminent.

We looked forward to great changes， and we were not disappointed. Within two years， my parents saw land reform eliminate landlordism， and peasant livelihood grew by leaps and bounds.Then small-scale and larger-scale co-operatives raised living standards and began the socialisation of Chinese society.

China’s zigzag road to socialism has seen both set-backs and advances， but the overall progress has been immense. Today， despite enormous problems in every sector of society—economic， social， political and environmental—the life of the Chinese people is immeasurably better than in the China I knew as a child. Every time I visit China， I can see changes for the better.On the Chengdu plain， I have seen peasants turn into farmers and their thatched mud huts replaced by two-storey modern houses. In remote Shandan， where Rewi Alley built his school on the edge of the Gobi Desert in Gansu， I have seen a poor， dirty， ragged population turn into a well-dressed， well-fed， prosperous community living in modern buildings along broad， clean boulevards.Everywhere in China， I have seen people freed from the yokes of repression， exploitation， and disease.

In sixty years the People’s Republic of China has wrought huge changes for the better.May its wise leaders find ways to solve both the internal and global problems it faces and continuealong the path to a democratic socialist society.

(17 August 2009)

The author is former president of the New Zealand-China Friendship Society.