Chaos, hope, change: stories from 70 years of the People's Republic of China. By Lily Kuo
Seven decades after
Mao declared the beginning of a new era, Chinese people reflect on the dizzying
and jolting changes that have forged the modern nation
“I have seen the true face of the teachers, government officials, trade unions, police, and the courts. They don’t care about the workers. “They don’t want to solve problems. They just want to solve the people who reflect the problem”
This year marks 70 years since Mao Zedong stood
in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and declared the beginning of the People’s
Republic of China. To the outside world, China’s transformation from a poor
agrarian society into one of the world’s most powerful economies is nothing
short of miraculous. “If you think about
what China was 70 years ago, essentially a country that had fought its way
through two wars and was on its knees and battered – the idea that in 70 years
it would be the second biggest economy in the world… and a major global player
would have seemed very unlikely indeed,” said Rana Mitter, a professor of
history and politics of modern China at Oxford
University.
But for those who
lived through these years, the pace of change has been dizzying
and at times jolting. Almost no other country has experienced shifts as
dramatic as China has – almost as if each generation has lived in an entirely
different country.
The Chinese who grew up in the early days of the People’s Republic remember ration cards, mass hunger, and political campaigns like the Cultural Revolution, which upended the country between 1966 and 1976 and whose effects still linger today. Those in the 1980s remember a time of optimism and openness, amid a growing belief that economic reforms be accompanied by political ones, liberalising both the economy and the political system. That chapter of openness was slammed shut by the end of the decade when the Chinese military crushed student protests on 3-4 June, 1989. The nation will remember the Tiananmen Square protests on their 30th anniversary next week....
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“When I saw the pain
of the people around me and my own family, I was eager to change this reality.
I thought there could be some simple sense of justice and responsibility,” he
says. “I wanted to cultivate myself, and contribute to the country, to serve the
motherland and the people.” But Chen was soon
disappointed after arriving in the capital. He immediately joined the Marxist
Society at the university, eager
to implement the tenets he had studied for years in school. He and other
members of the group helped workers on campus defend their rights, for the
minimum wage and overtime pay, insurance and other protections.
Soon school officials
and the police tried to stop their efforts. Many of the students have been
detained, grabbed in broad daylight. One was detained while on his way to
attend the celebration of Mao’s birthday last December. Chen, who is using an
alias, says he and all the other student members are under strict surveillance. “I really didn’t
understand before I went to college. I was confused by the official
description. I thought that the policy was to help the people, that the state
protects the interests of the people.”
Chen says he now
understands. “I have seen the true face of the teachers, government officials,
trade unions, police, and the courts. They don’t care about the workers. “They don’t want to
solve problems. They just want to solve the people who reflect the problem,” he
says.
He can’t leave campus
without permission. His relatives back home have had to cut off contact with
him. Minders are always within 10 metres of him, monitoring him with a camera,
even when he is eating at school cafeterias. When he turns on his phone, he
immediately gets a phone call or a message from local security, just checking
up on him.... read more:
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