PICTURE CHINA

Shanghai’s “Old City” is a four square kilometer section in the south of the metropolis that has yet to succumb to the gentrification and rebuilding which has taken place throughout the rest of the city. This area was the site of the original walled city of the 11th Century and was set-aside as the “Chinese City” when the rest of Shanghai became the base of French and British imperialism in China from the late 19th to mid 20th Centuries.

To walk into this area today is to take a step back in time. In stark contrast to the rest of Shanghai, which in parts could easily be mistaken for London or Tokyo, the old city is a tangled mess of twisting alleyways and dilapidated houses. Still, the area exudes a certain charm and feels more “Chinese” than the rest of the city. Laundry is hung out on telephone wires to dry, children play badminton in the street and everything from live poultry to women’s underwear is sold in impromptu stalls on the side of the road.

If Shanghai represents the direction that China is headed, then the old city may represent the reality of where most of the country remains. While many Shanghai residents have quickly grown accustomed to a more affluent consumer lifestyle, most of the rest of China has seen little of the spoils of this newfound wealth.

A new generation of young Chinese are growing up in a radically different environment than their parents and grandparents. While only a few generations before most people dressed in simple Communist approved attire, young Shanghaiese have taken to the styles of Japan, Korea and the West. In few places are the changes that have transformed Shanghai more apparent than inside one of the city’s huge malls where masses of young people gather to shop for the latest fashions.

The Huangpu River runs through the heart of Shanghai dividing the Pudong New Area from the rest of the city and connecting to the Yangzi 30km upstream as both rivers empty into the East China Sea. The river is one of China’s major shipping arteries and sees a full one-third of the country’s international trade. The water is constantly buzzing with activity as coutless barges compete for space with huge freight ships from places as far away as Panama and the Middle East.

Nanjing Road runs through the center of downtown Shanghai and is one of the world’s busiest shopping streets. At all hours of the day this alter to consumerism is packed shoulder to shoulder with Chinese shoppers at its hundreds of up-market shop and malls.

As Shanghai, and China as a whole, has become wealthier over the past decade, its citizen’s appetite for everything from electronics to clothing to cars has exploded. For the first time in China’s history an emerging upper and middle class has been faced with excess cash and their reaction as been to spend. This phenomenon has not been lost on the business world and more and more international companies are looking to China’s huge consumer market to drive their businesses forward.

The official party line is that 70% of what Mao Zedong did was right and 30% was wrong. This pretty much sums up the ambiguity with which most modern Chinese see their often criticized former leader. His detractors condemn him as a mass-murderer who was responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the wake of the disastrous reforms of the Cultural Revolution. His supporters point out that during his tenure he dramatically increased the living standards for most Chinese and send the country on its way to becoming a modern nation. Either way you look at it is impossible to deny that the China that we see today was at least in part shaped by his hand.

For the next generation of young Chinese who have grown up in the years after he died and reformers like Deng Xiaoping started to transform the country, Mao has become a more and more abstract figure. While his face still appears on the Chinese currency and his portrait hangs on Tiananmen Gate, he is seldom mentioned by the government and his teachings are not so strongly emphasized in Chinese schools. In a nation where it is second nature the tear down and rebuild, the legacy of Mao and the turbulent years that he represents will no doubt fade the collective conciseness and become fodder for the history books as China races ahead in the 21^st Century.

The former British colony of Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997 as a “Special Administrative Region” but still remains a world apart from the mainland. The Chinese government has allowed the area to remain a capitalist and quasi-democratic entity under the policy of “one country, two systems”, partly because Hong Kong’s robust economy is the single largest source of outside investment in the PRC and partly because the government would like to use Hong Kong as an example to show Taiwan than it can play nice and entice it to rejoin the mainland.

For such a small place, Hong Kong is extremely diverse- both in its people and its landscape. While the population is over 90% Chinese, Hong Kong has an international flavor as a result of its long occupation and large groups of immigrants from Europe, the Philippines, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. While many areas do live up to Hong Kong’s image as a densely populated city of towering skyscrapers, you don’t have to go far to find a secluded beach or a mountain hike through a sub-tropical rainforest.

All in all, Hong Kong is very different in many ways from the rest of China but has, and will continue to play a role in shaping the country in the future. Its strong economy has been a model for the liberalization of China’s economy, which has resulted in the explosive growth of the past decade. It is the hope of many mainlanders that the government will also follow the model of Hong Kong and introduce new freedoms to go along with their economic might.

The Mongkok district of Hong Kong is among the most densely populated places in the world with over 50,000 inhabitants per square kilometer. As a result of limited available land, Hong Kong’s city planners have decided to look skyward to accommodate the burgeoning population and the Mongkok area is no exception. The area is a dense garden of modern skyscrapers and aging residential blocks where whole families often share tiny apartments. On the street level the area is a lively shopping district with whole streets dedicated to markets specializing in pet fish, electronics and knock-off designer clothing.

The Pearl River Delta is one of China’s most developed areas and the provincial capital of Guangzhou is one of the countries main business centers. The area started to boom due to the economic reforms of the 1980’s and has not looked back in becoming a sprawling city dedicated to China’s new economy. After the Asian financial crisis in the 1990’s many businesses from Hong Kong sought to relocate to nearby Guangzhou in search of lower costs on the mainland and the area has since become a major center of manufacturing. Almost one-fifth of the cities population is comprised of migrant workers from the surrounding provinces who supply the workforce for the Guangzhou economy.

Less than twenty years ago the town of Huadu (formerly Huxian County) was just another rural Chinese village on the outskirts of the city of Guangzhou. Today it is a self-contained city of over 720,000 residents and an example of the “New Towns” that are being created throughout China to accommodate the surging urban populations. While some of the new housing is in the form of the bland Communist-style apartment blocks, which can be seen throughout China, many complexes cater to China’s neuvo riche and are styled after Mediterranean villas complete with red-tiled roofs and baroque fountains.

While ninety-two percent of the Chinese people belong to the dominant Han ethnic group, there are 55 other recognized ethnic minority groups scattered throughout the country. Muslim Uigur and Mongolian people populate the north of the country, Tibetans in the southwest and Miao in the southern areas bordering Vietnam, Laos and Burma. These groups have historically faced great hardship at the hands of the Han and have had their cultures threatened by Han resettlement. In recent times several groups have been granted status as Autonomous regions and are regaining some control over their lands.

The area straddling the border of Guangxi and Guizhou provinces in Southern China is the home of the China’s Dong minority group and the Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County. The Dong are renowned for their colorful dress, distinctive wooden architecture and incredibly engineered terraced rice fields.

In the villages of Zhaoxing, Che De, and Tang An the Dong people live much as they have for hundreds of years. Farmers work the fields, women use natural indigo dye to make traditional clothing and old men use bamboo to make baskets. Although many things remain the same, the modern world has made inroads even here. Satellite dishes have appeared on some houses, electric mills have replaced the hand milling of rice and in the towns accessible by road, villagers are prepared to greet the occasional Chinese tour bus with handicrafts to sell.

Every fifth day the dusty riverside town of Chong An is transformed into a bustling market as hundreds of people of the Miao ethnic group from the surrounding villages descend on the town. Villagers arrive in their distinctive traditional dress by road, by boat and from countless mountain paths. They come to sell their crops and to buy clothing and household goods.

There are separate sections of the market dedicated to everything that one might need. One street is filled with women selling vegetables, another with dyed cloth and clothing and another lined with butchers. There are areas where live pigs, poultry, fish, cats and dogs are sold and there is a street lined with barbers, dentists and practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine.

While the market serves a very functional purpose for the villagers, it is also a social occasion. Old men smoke and admire each other’s caged songbirds, groups of children buy sweets and there are even gambling tables where people wager a few Yuan on the roll of the dice.

In the backstreets of the Chong An market there is an entire areas dedicated to medicine and dentistry. Some villagers come for traditional Chinese medicine such as herbal remedies, cupping and acupuncture while others come to have an old tooth pulled or have a new set made. Far from the sterile hospitals or modern traditional medicine clinics in China’s large cities, this brand of medicine is practiced out on the streets for all to see.

As a result of the rapid industrialization of the past decades and loose regulations on emissions, China has become one of the world’s biggest polluters. In fact, a recent study by the World Bank found that China was home to sixteen of the twenty most polluted cities in the world.

China’s pollution is having a devastating impact on its citizens. An estimated 300,000 people die each year as a result of respiratory illnesses caused by air pollution and most of China’s waterways are heavily polluted from the dumping of untreated human waste as well as toxic waste from coal and chemical plants. Half of the country’s population has to contend with contaminated drinking water and acid rain is having a negative impact on crop yields in many areas. Meanwhile, clouds of smog envelope many of China’s cities making blue skies a thing of the past.

The main cause of China’s pollution problem is the heavy consumption of coal which is used for everything from creating electricity to cooking and heating in Chinese homes. With a growing number of vehicles on the road, expanding urban populations all over the country and new factories opening daily, pollution seems to be a problem that will get worse before it gets better.

Chongqing has long been the economic focus of southwest China due to its strategic location at the halfway point of the Yangzi river. It is a major center for shipping and commerce moving from the rural western part of China to the cities of the east. The population of Chongqing proper is just over 12 million people, the third largest city in China, but is expected to grow by another 10 million in the next decade. When the surrounding Chongqing municipality is added, the population reaches a staggering 32 million, making it, by some people’s estimates, the largest city in the world.

Chongqing has boomed in recent years as a result of the Chinese government’s “Go West” policy to develop and utilize the western half of the country. Chongqing is seen as a strategic link between the east and west of China and much of the over $100 billion spent in the past five years on infrastructure has directly benefited the growing metropolis.

As in many Chinese cities, Chongqing’s rapid growth has lead to a host of problems for the city and its residents. The city is one of China’s post polluted and the gap between the businessmen who have benefited from the city’s boom and the poor immigrants who have provided the labor is glaringly evident. The city continues to build and grow in anticipation of the 2009 completion of the Three Gorges Dam which will create a giant reservoir leading to Chongqing and allow international ocean freighters to reach the city from the Yangzi’s mouth in Shanghai.

Every year over 8.5 million peasants from China’s rural areas move to its cities and nowhere in the country is this urban migration more evident than in Chongqing. Workers from the surrounding provinces have flocked to Chongqing in search of higher paying jobs and a better life. The reality is much less appealing as they often end up doing long hours of back-breaking labor for very little money.

Many of these migrant workers end up as part of what locals call the “Bang Bang Army”. This 100,000 plus army of laborers are identified by the bamboo poles (or bang bang in Chinese) that they use to carry heavy loads around the city. Due to the hilly topography of Chongqing, the bicycles used to transport goods in other Chinese cities have been abandoned and manual labor used instead. Bang bang workers are hired by everyone from business owners to tourists to move all sorts of goods from ships at the port into town or around the city. For their efforts a bang bang man will make an average of 20 Yuan ($2.50) for working a 12 hour day.

China’s economic boom has succeeded in expanding the upper and middle classes but has also left many citizens behind. The gap between China’s wealthiest and poorest is constantly increasing; at present the top fifth of wage earners are receiving fifty-percent of the income while the bottom fifth receives less than five-percent. Thirty million Chinese live in absolute poverty while another 60 million live on less than 865 Yuan ($109) per year, which is well below the dollar-a-day standard for poverty established by the World Bank.

The disparity between China’s rich and poor is particularly severe when the thriving urban centers are compared with the poorer rural areas but is increasingly evident within the cities themselves. It is a common site in Chinese cities, both large and small, to see the disabled begging for change, young children reduced to working as street performers to help support their families and the elderly scouring trash bins for plastic bottles to recycle.