REGION - China

China Story: The Future
Part 4
On this day 22 years ago, US established ties with Maoist China, closed and in its purest communist form. I had the chance in 1976 to see the giant stirring ...
Jan 1, 2001

On the last day of my journey, I poured through my notes and tried to focus on two main issues.

Firstly, China remained a stirring giant whose actions would continue to determine whether Asia was to live well or badly.

Secondly, while it was obvious that the end was near for the sickly Mao, the leftists led by his wife Ziang Ching, were still in the driver's seat and poised to take over from Mao when he died.

The immediate question was: Would Maoism survive without Mao?

If his teachings of ideological purity and perpetual revolution were to prevail, the cold war with America would worsen. Beijing would continue to export its revolution, threatening its neighbours, including Singapore.

But if his successors take a new direction of economic rebuilding, opening trade with the world and absorbing foreign technology, then the future would be brighter, I wrote.

The answer, I felt, would lie in the characteristics of the Chinese; they were among the most pragmatic people in the world.

It would also lie in China's fundamental needs. Whatever ideology or leader was in control, the basic reality would never change. It started on the simple fact that it had to feed, clothe and house a quarter of the world's population.

Predicting China's future after Mao, I wrote in the Straits Times in 1976: -

Mao's teaching is likely to continue to be enforced for perhaps as long as one or two decades with little dilution and few changes.

During this period, especially in the immediate years after his death, an open clash is generally expected between the radicals, (few in numbers) and the moderates who are extensively entrenched in government and the armed forces.

Most of the Foreign Ministry officials we met had clean, soft hands - not rough hands and weather-beaten features. They, the civil servants, will guide China with military backing, along a moderate road, occasionally parroting extremist slogans, but not following them in practice in the immediate post-Mao years.

In a decade - perhaps two - extremists will be isolated and a moderate civil service and a powerful, moderate, military leadership will increasingly guide China away from ideological idealism and romanticism of the Yenan cave days to face the world of technological, scientific, advance.

This is my scenario for the future of China, based on my impressions of today's China. Like others, it may be totally wrong. I have arrived at this conclusion based on my reading of the Chinese mind, the country's mood, and above all, its desire to overtake the West.

That China has the potential for a much faster rate of growth is not difficult to see.

In my mind, the passage of time in post-Mao China will see - not a retardation of growth but - a greater progress in the country.

My last glimpse of China was two Peoples Liberation Army soldiers snapping to attention as Mr. Lee Kuan Yew took his last few steps away from China at the Lo Wu Frontier.

It was a timely conclusion. For much of what will happen in China will depend on the army, the same that swept American forces off North Korea, and humiliated the Indian Army in the only two wars that China has fought since 1949.

For despite all the forces of power politics, the PLA will hold the ace card. Soldiers are, in fact, the best paid people in China.

Few visitors to China have left without a feeling of awe. It could have been provoked by its history or its achievements or its problems unresolved.

Whether they are speaking of a flower with 500 petals or a banyan tree that is 1,300 years old, China - to any visitor - is a constant mental exercise.

For me, it was no exception.

The welcoming children, so rich in colour and warmth, scenes of breath-taking beauty, its painfully hard life, poverty, pride and achievements. Problems that remained unsolved. All these I was now leaving behind.

Yet I felt I was taking them home with me. For we have to live with the results of China's success or failure, now and in the future.

Since 1976, I have returned to the country a couple of times and watched its rapid development just as I anticipated.

It has entered the new century with some old problems resolved and new ones surfacing. But poverty remains a major problem in the interior.

In its enthusiasm to convince me how poor China was, an official told me a decade ago: "Riding on a train? Millions of our people have never even seen a train."

He was afraid that growing affluence would dilute the ideological fervour of the Chinese, so poverty was good for the Communist Party. The march towards economic capitalism was strewn with tears.

A leftwing reporter in Hong Kong told me after a decade of opening up, some of Mao's "Long March" comrades in the western interior were highly critical of Deng Xiao-ping.

In his defence, Deng's supporters invited these old critics to visit Kwangzhow and Shenzhen with a view of showing them how much progress had been achieved.

It backfired.

When they saw the nightclubs and karaoke joints, some of them burst into tears, asking: "Is this why we fought the capitalists only to bring back this life that we had been fighting to eradicate?" they asked.

Of course, now with the Internet, Pokemon and mobile connectivity, all this seems far away. It is unlikely that Mao's past will be revived.

As our plane was about to land At Changi Airport for home in my last trip to Beijing a couple of years ago. I recalled these words I wrote in 1976: -

China was there below the clouds - to the north. Large, looming, uncertain. It holds a vast potential for good or evil in our world.

That is no less true today.

Seah Chiang Nee

To go to:
Part 1 - A Giant Stirs
Part 2- A New Generation
Part 3 - Mao's China