Word: deng
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Strange, surely, but about the only truly odd tradition I encounter during five weeks in China. By plane, train and car, from the prospering coastal provinces to the country's heartland, where the agricultural reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping ten years ago began a miraculous economic transformation, to Beijing and a village not far from the capital that is infinitely poorer than towns a thousand miles farther inland, I find little that is charming or especially exotic. Just a mostly drab and dusty country, a perfect backdrop for the tedious and too often unrewarding nature of daily life. Still...
Individuals are not the only ones eager to earn extra money. Under Deng's reforms, most state-run businesses and government agencies are expected to turn a profit. An aircraft factory in Xi'an runs a marriage-introduction center that does a booming business serving the needs of hundreds of well- educated women who by their late 20s are desperate for husbands because men with less schooling are reluctant to marry them. In Chengdu the Xinhua bookstore owns a flower shop, a hair salon and a clothing boutique whose manager gets his goods from "a guy in Shanghai...
...tensions generated by the scramble for money are never far from the surface. Orthodox executives of China's state-run enterprises are very much like the Soviet Union's permanent bureaucracy, the nomenklatura. They have coasted for years under the old system, and they dislike Deng's perestroika because it asks them to compete like capitalists, and capitalism has losers. "Keeping their jobs is their No. 1 priority," says Sinclair Choy, a marine engineer from Hong Kong, who in partnership with a coastal town on the mainland runs a fishing boat-repair business. "Order, stability, calm," says Choy. "That...
Three hundred miles south of Beijing, the view from Zouping County is different. Not all Zouping's citizens are true believers, but they appear to revere the army and seemingly remain loyal to the government. Zouping has come far in the Deng era -- it even has a local beer, Hupo, that someday may rival the popularity of Tsingtao in the U.S. (The word on the street has Tsingtao's springwater supply running out in the early 1990s...
...panel investigating allegations of corruption on the huge island in the South China Sea. In the governor's absence, Hainan is reportedly being run by a Russian-educated vice governor with close ties to Zhao's conservative, Soviet-trained rival, Premier Li Peng. Meanwhile, the ambitious plans that Deng and Zhao envisioned for Hainan's economic development are on hold...