BEING a tourist is usually a good thing. We go to a ‘destination’ to marvel at breathtaking human or natural phenomena; we extend our appetite to its outer limits; and we indulge our senses in exotic pleasures we are too timid to try at home.

We can even disconnect from our daily routines such as thinking through the implications of Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s decision to have a commission of enquiry investigate his handling of ‘Dudusgate’ and the proverbial 800-pound Manatt gorilla staring at him.

With that frame of mind, it was off to China recently (Sep 2-23) with a wonderful group brought together by the Jamaica-China Friendship Association, headed by Fay Pickersgill, former director of tourism.

From Beijing to Xi’an and Dunhuang, Shanghai, Xiamen and Shenzhen by air; to Taishan and Guangzhou by road, and on to Hong Kong by ferry — it was a journey of thousands of miles and several millennia of history and culture. It was also an opportunity to experience the fabled modernisation that has enabled China to grow faster than any other country in history and lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than has ever been done anywhere, anytime.

Obviously, a visitor (especially in such a short time) cannot begin to comprehend the mystique and complexity of one of the world’s oldest civilisations. One can simply explore and form impressions that may help to explain China’s economic and political clout on the world stage today.

Exploration includes the inescapable: The Great Wall, started by the first dynasty — the Qin Dynasty, which unified China around 221 BC from a mix of fiefdoms controlled by independent warlords to a single empire. The idea of the wall, of course, was to keep out foreign invaders coming from the north. This was not always possible.

But the tour guides show it off as a marvellous piece of engineering and Chinese skill. They say Qin deployed about one million people, out of the population of five million at the time, to work on the Wall. That’s the kind of scale and size that may explain today’s mega-factories which routinely employ up to 500,000 workers.

Then there are the various points along the fabled Silk Road — the 7,200 km stretch of inhospitable lands from the ancient capital of Xi’an in China’s central region, across the western region through places like Afghanistan, India and Iran, to Rome, Italy.

That was the route used to transport three of China’s four great contributions to human civilisation-gunpowder, paper and printing. The fourth is the compass. The route also made China rich and famous for its trades in silk and other goods.

Special economic zones

Then there is the China of today that began to emerge with the open-door policy started in 1978 under Chairman Deng Xiaoping with the first ‘Special Economic Zone’ (SEZ) created in 1980 in Shenzhen. Four other SEZs have been created since.

Our visit coincided with ceremonies marking the 30th anniversary of the Shenzhen SEZ. In a speech marking the occasion, President Hu Jintao said, “The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) created a miracle in the world’s history of industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation, and has contributed significantly to China’s opening up and reform.”

The SEZs and related reforms have also created great wealth for a few; today the US is the only country with more millionaires than China.

Incidentally, on the wealth gender scale, China accounts for 10 of the 20 self-made wealthiest women in the world. Zhang Yin, who made her money in the paper industry, is the wealthiest businesswoman in the world, according to Hurun Report, a Chinese magazine. She has a net worth of almost (US) six billion dollars, well ahead of the top American, media mogul Oprah Winfrey.

Is it that there is greater gender equality in China, or is that men and women are equally new to capitalism and were starting from about the same place just 30 years ago?

Evidence of China’s economic success shows up in the familiar global data: China has surpassed Japan and is now the world’s second-largest economy. Economists everywhere predict it will overtake the United States as the largest economy. Some say that will happen in just two decades. However, China will remain a developing country and lag behind the US, in terms of per capita wealth, for a very long time.

Some of wealth’s unintended consequences

Some interesting headlines in the official China Daily English language newspaper caught my attention: One said, “Children face obesity problems”. The report stated that a survey of students in Shanghai found that “21 per cent are obese and 15 per cent are overweight” — way above the average in other major cities. The researchers blamed unhealthy eating (snacks with little nutrition but high calories), infant overfeeding and doting parents.

This may be an unintended consequence of the influx of Western fast foods. It could also be related to the one-child policy initiated in 1978 to slow the birth rate and give the economy a chance to grow, but which results in parents over-indulging their one child.

Another catchy headline: “Young entrepreneurs find starting up a hard sell”. This was a story that a government initiative to get college graduates to “start early on the road to riches” by launching their own businesses rather than looking for a job was not going as well as expected.

The story also reported that since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, the job market has tightened. This year six million college students entered the job market at a time when 800,000 of the class of 2009 were still unemployed.

The government hoped to push self-employment through a range of public policies, favouring loans to young entrepreneurs; however, the move has come up against financial and bureaucratic hurdles. Sounds familiar?

“Courts struggling to handle labour disputes” was a story which stated that workplace disputes are on the rise because of a collision of two competing interests: Employers are trying to hold the line on wage costs and social benefits in order to remain competitive in the global marketplace, while workers are emboldened to demand their rights in the climate of reform.

Statistics from the Supreme People’s Court show that the courts handled 295,500 labour disputes in 2008, a 95 per cent jump on 2007. The trend continued in 2009 and into this year. And this is in a country where there is no collective bargaining.

Today’s China also seems to represent a turnaround from what is sometimes referred to as “the century of humiliation”.

That’s the period starting in the 1840s when China lost the Opium Wars to Britain. The war had its origin in British resistance to Chinese efforts to curb the trade and addiction that was very profitable to the British-profits that were ‘laundered’ into “London stocks, country estates and parliamentary seats” in England, according to one historian.

In the end China had to cede a lot of territory, including Hong Kong and much of Shanghai. Then in 1895 Japan defeated China militarily and imposed a humiliating peace only to inflict further military pounding in the 1930s and 40s.

Will a strong China try to get payback for historic ‘insults’ or pursue peaceful development as the officials in Beijing insist? And how should developing countries like Jamaica relate to the new China? That’s another story for another time.

kcr@cwjamaica.com