INTO ASIA'S NEW CENTURY

Hong Kong, December '99

A lady announcer said, 'We start the journey with soothing music,' and a folk tune floated from the train's loudspeakers as we pulled out of Hong Kong. A young passenger picked up his guitar and started strumming Lennon's Imagine.

Passing midwinter scenery was of towns with fewer cars than bicycles, thousands of them, shrouded, so I imaged, in grey fog I later realize was smog.

'... join us and the world will be as one ...' the young man sang.

Wuhan

Early next morning in Wuhan we were hustled into a taxi. Finding a place to stay was an ordeal. Visitors to China were only allowed to stay at designated hotels.

The city was densely populated with poor people. Something in the air stung our eyes. On a pedestrian overpass I spotted a tiger or a lion's paw for sale. We saw no westerners. No-one spoke English. Even Nicole, who was the better Mandarin speaker between us battled to communicate.

Two days passed while organizing passage down the Yangtze. We'd leave from nearby Yichang, where the air smelled of a million fires burning. In a scrappy park groups of elderly played cards and tai-chi practitioners holding swords were all in flow.

Yichang to Chongqing

Dozens of people waited at the jetty. The ferry was late. A man in a leather jacket took our ticket and we edged through the intense crowd. The ferry over-filled up fast; passengers sat in the passageways'. People spat. The floors were grim.

Deckhands dressed in double-breasted suits with brand-labels left sewn on the cuffs cast us off at 8.15pm. We then returned to the river bank get the bags, buckets, sacks and suitcases of a new round of passengers. We left again about 10.30pm.

Except for a repellent canteen I can't recall other amenities. Brown water came from our en-suite twin-berth's tap. Yet the privacy, and the plastic windows, old curtains, and cold though dry metal floor were luxuries, compared to what our fellow passengers had. Smog-laden Dickensian drudgery seemed to be the riverside residents' lot.

China's re-invention, this crossing of a river by feeling for stones, as goes the saying attributed to Chairman Deng Xiaoping, was more like a hard desperate groping, as the floodgates in Beijing had opened and the currents of some sort of state-reigned market economy were now in full flow.

The scale of infrastructure being installed was impressive. Bathed in eerie late night floodlit-orange we floated through a narrow concrete passage of locks so huge one held several massive vessels.

Songlines of the Yangtse

Those locks were dwarfed in geologic scale when in the early hours one morning we navigated the doomed trio of the San Shan gorges soon due to be flooded to form the world's largest dam. They loomed gloomily over us while a lone twilit man stood on a remote mudbank, draped in rough sackcloth swishing a net through the Yangtse's cold dun-coloured turbulence.

I went back to bed.

And in Songlines the book I was reading by Bruce Chatwin, he recounts how travelling in Yunnan in the mid eighties he met an old teacher who could hum Chopin's mazurkas and Beethoven symphonies. While I read, a ghetto blaster in the passageway outside our cabin started playing Michael Jackson's Dangerous. During the Cultural Revolution, Chatwin wrote, the old Yunnanese teacher's interest in western culture resulted in his twenty one year imprisonment.

The passageway music continued throughout the day. It was mostly Chinese pop bristling with western influences and production values.

Chongqing then / now

In the twenty-two years since we were there Chongqing's skyline has been my google go-to for a quick visual representation of China's rapid change.

In late 1999 the commercial district was drab except for a small section deep downtown where signs of old Deng's orders to to get rich quick were being met in the form of western shopping-malls. This was ground zero of what in the next decade would be identified as the planet's fastest growing metropolitan region.

A man wearing a Santa suit was positioned outside a shop. Christmas tunes were in the air.

We took a cable-car across the river and walked alleyways, and visited a park. Amid trees and mossy ornate stones and ponds and tea gardens where people were out with their kids and caged birds, we met two English teachers. They showed us their school, then took us to eat the local Sichuan hotpot. The fried-oil-dipped dofu, seaweed, mushrooms and veg was delicious yet so spicy that at times I became too phlegmy to breathe or speak.

No escaping new China

The 'hard sleeper' bus we caught out of Chongqing had permanently reclined seats and dirty blankets. In case of emergency there was no easy means of escape with so much cargo piled in the aisles. Along the city's riverside boulevard there were home-appliance repairers and small shops housed in ex bomb-shelter caves .

A town where we overnighted had street poles with mounted speakers that broadcast tinny programming all over the place.

We walked out to farmlands with few roads, where crops were fed night-soil ladled out of pales hung either end of shouldered poles. The sound of wood chopping, voices calling, chickens crowing, beasts lowing, and the crackling of a neighborhood temple's fireworks was preferable to town's programming.

From places like this, I imagine, many young people were being drawn to work in distant industrial regions. Details would punctuate the China-rising tale over the following decade, of factories with nets installed below windows.

Poor people asked for things along the way, and the best parts of us shrink in denying such simple requests for help.

Remote Socket Confusion in Chengdu

Ten days on the track-less-travelled meant not having to deal with the official 'Travelers' Agency'. That changed in Chengdu where we stopped for permit and onward passage to Tibet. Fares were double priced.

Trying to get a cricket score I found occidental news sites at internet cafe computers returned an error sign: The remote sockets seem confused.

Unlike the Soviet Union and other such communist systems, China, still led by 'communists', does not have to use material walls to restrict it's citizens. Apart from its repressed minorities, most of its people, if they can afford it, are able to come and go.

A virtual wall is what concerns the Chinese leaders. The confused remote socket was, I think, an early version of the famous internet firewall that may be more consequential than the Great old one.

Turning to local official paper-based news I read something odd which helped me understand Deng's new China a bit more:

"... Zhang Bin developed a keen sense of Justice when he was a young boy. One day at primary school, he saw a higher grade boy try to break a coin with a knife and went and stopped the boy.

"It is none of your business. I can break my own money," the boy said.

"No one is allowed to break renminbi. You break the law if you break the coin," little Zhang said with the force of justice.

- China Daily 15 Dec 1999.

However, I think I only truly understood the story of young Zhang and the foresight of the Chinese security planners twenty one years later on seeing this headline:

Tibet

The Red flag flew over the airport in Lhasa, and was prominent throughout and in other towns ... TO BE CONTINUED