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The Parallel Universes of China

by Orville Schell
Winter 2007 , Page 88

Mark Leong Shenyang 2006. Man salvages scrap metal from the ruins of what was once China's largest manufacturer of screws and other standard parts.

As any recent visitor knows, 21st-century China has a way of dazzling visitors with its prodigious energy, hyperdevelopment, and hell-bent rush into the future.

The new urban tableaux of glass curtain-wall high-rises, shopping malls, apartment buildings, restaurants complexes, museums, concert halls, and hotels topped by tiaras of construction cranes and ringed by tangles of highway flyovers—almost all of which have appeared over the last decade—supercharge China with a palpable air of irrepressible dynamism and invincibility.

In the wake of our thrall with Japan’s seemingly unstoppable economic march in the 1980s and our 1990s infatuation with the high-speed development of the so-called Five Dragons—Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia—we have now designated China as the latest Asian “economic miracle.” In each decade we have allowed ourselves to be tantalized by a beguiling mixture of mysterious Asian otherness, provocative economic challenge, and a hint of menace to our dominance that has always had a way of exciting our deeply rooted alpha-male sense of global competitiveness.

That this land, once known as the “sick man of Asia” for its famines, floods, poverty, pestilence, warlords, and foreign occupation, could have been reborn as the militantly socialist epicenter of Maoist revolution was unimaginable enough. That it then managed to molt its Maoist carapace to become an exemplar of boomtown market capitalism was even more unimaginable. China has undergone perhaps the most dramatic serial transformations of any country in modern memory.

From being at odds with almost every nation around it and being a cauldron of fratricidal factional struggle at home, China has now managed to negotiate tranquil borders with such countries as Russia, Vietnam, and India, and to undergo three changes in its top leadership without overt struggle. At the same time, it has transcended the humiliation of the Tiananmen Square Massacre to march forth economically around the world with growing confidence and pride—exactly the qualities that for so long eluded its people.

Underlying the extraordinary reincarnation of this People’s Republic is a huge fault line of contradictions. The fault line is not as readily evident to visitors, who tend to flock to the great, booming cities and never see the vast and often poor hinterland. On the one hand, the dazzling cityscapes suggest a vibrant country that has pioneered a new and hopeful development model, a model that has enabled China to escape the surly bonds of backwardness and that can perhaps be an example for others in the world to follow. On the other is the mirror image of the miracles—the host of seemingly intractable problems that lurk just beneath the glitzy surface and suggest a country in a state perilously close to unsustainability, if not disequilibrium.

All of this is visible in the work of Mark Leong, who has been photographing China for many years. As his illuminating photographs show, this is a country not only in transition and on the move but one of the most unresolved countries in the world, suspended between starkly different economic and social systems with no clear road map of where it intends to go.

Leong’s photographs include images of China’s new bourgeois lifestyle, such as the pudgy child in a supermarket being proffered a cereal sample by a saleswoman, and the late-night bar in Beijing littered with empties. The images depict the nouveau riche enjoying the heady, often decadent, pleasures of a booming consumer culture. At the same time, Leong opens a porthole onto an entirely different world, that of the poor and dispossessed, where immigrant laborers sleep in a disorderly pile in a train station and a street urchin survives uncared for. Like China itself, his portfolio is one of glaring social contrasts.

We are left to integrate parallel universes—universes that evoke modernity and backwardness, hedonism and deprivation, optimism and pessimism, order and chaos, hope and despair, stability and instability—into a general view of China. Even for someone such as myself, who has been to China scores of times over many decades to chronicle its unpredictable odyssey, this most counterintuitive of countries leaves the visitor to confront an equation embracing almost unintegratable factors. The scenarios it implies for the future are confoundingly equal and opposite.

Start with the “miracle.” Consider the following:
• China’s growth rate—almost 11 percent in 2006, more than 9 percent over the past two decades—has created an economy almost 10 times larger (now the fourth largest in the world, behind the U.S., Japan, and Germany) than it was in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping initiated his post-Mao reforms.
• With four-fifths of America’s Fortune 500 companies invested in China, last year China garnered one third, or $80 billion, of the world’s foreign direct investment, known as FDI—a stark comparison to India’s mere $7 billion. (The labor productivity of foreign-invested companies is about nine times that of state-invested companies; they grow at an annual rate of 18 percent, while state-invested companies grow at only five to six percent.)
• Beijing’s foreign exchange reserves have grown to approximately $1 trillion, with China’s investment in U.S. T-bills second only to Japan’s.
• China is now doing some $1.4 trillion worth of foreign trade each year.
• With a growth rate exceeding 25 percent, China’s exports could reach $1 trillion by the end of 2006. China is now positioned to become the largest exporter in the world sometime before 2010.
• Seventy percent of Wal-Mart products are now manufactured in China.
• China will have a projected trade surplus with the United States this year of over $200 billion and an estimated global surplus of $150 billion, up from $102 billion in 2005.
• China is now the second-largest importer of petroleum in the world.
• Some 400 million Chinese have a cell phone.
• More than 200 million Chinese are regular on-line users.
• Chinese universities graduate around 350,000 engineers a year, roughly five times more than the United States.
• China is the largest producer of cement, steel, and coal.
• China’s new automotive industry had a 47 percent growth rate during the first six months of 2006, and is now poised to enter the American market.
• Per-capita income has risen by a multiple of six. Upwards of 400 million people are reported to have been elevated from poverty.
• Shanghai boasts the world’s largest shipyard, Asia’s first magnetic-levitation train, and the largest Ferris wheel on the globe; it will soon have the world’s tallest building.
• The worlds of culture, especially in art—film, fashion, music, rap, and other performing arts—now have a new edge and excitement, even if they are not always welcomed by the Party.
• In 2008, Beijing will play host to the Summer Olympics, an event that is transforming the capital into a much greener and cleaner city.

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winter07 features leong mahjong During this mind-bending development boom, China has managed to rebuild scores of major cities and endow them with new airports, tunnels, and other key infrastructure projects, and to connect them by a rapidly expanding and truly impressive new network of freeways and railroad lines.

This tectonic development has created a climate of rising expectations, in which tens of millions of Chinese now can imagine they have a chance to move into the country’s expanding middle class. In the process of this high-speed development and opening to the outside world, China has edged its population closer to finally casting off its old identity of an abused, defenseless, and humiliated people from a backward nation. Indeed, China is today on the cusp of becoming a “great power.” Everywhere one can feel a new sense of pride and confidence, sometimes even arrogance.

Turn the crystal of the Chinese miracle only slightly, and you get a very different, and far darker, refraction of light.

Consider the following:
• Despite all of its economic progress, China continues to have a repressive Leninist state/party structure that affords its people only limited freedom of expression.
• Rule of law remains weak.
• Maoist ideology, although significantly lapsed, has yet to be officially repudiated.
• The Party has never made amends for its responsibility in such man-made disasters as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, during each of which tens of millions were persecuted, tormented, and dispossessed.
• Party leaders have yet to “reevaluate” the official verdict on the Tiananmen Square massacre, much less apologize for it. The People’s Liberation Army killed and wounded hundreds of unarmed civilians in an action first labeled “a counter-revolutionary rebellion,” then “turmoil” fomented by “hostile forces.”
• The press and the Internet, although invigorated by marketization, remain heavily censored.
• Tens of millions have found themselves laid off, or “sidelined,” from state enterprises, with little prospect of ever being retrained for the private sector. (Despite all the prosperity, some estimates place China’s national unemployment rate as high as 24 percent.)
• Just to maintain the status quo, China must produce almost 25 million new jobs each year.
• While the rise of China’s new middle class has undeniably helped create a sense of economic optimism, it has also helped create an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. In Shanghai, for instance, adjusted per-capita income is around $15,000, while in poor rural areas it has remained just over $1,200.
• The breakup of the old systems of state-owned industry and communized agriculture has left the welfare safety net in tatters and deprived hundreds of millions of peasants and workers of even minimal retirement or health benefits.
• Poverty in the inland countryside, which garners only 16 percent of China’s FDI, has led some 150 million peasants, known as the “floating population,” to seek jobs in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Canton, where they now make up a third of the population. They represent the largest migration in human history. The floating population has provided a crucial pool of low-cost labor but is also a worrisome potential source of future social instability: Should China’s economy take a downturn, migrant workers can no longer return to their villages and expect to find enough work to support themselves.
• In 2004, security officials recorded some 74,000 instances of significant social unrest. That number then rose ominously in 2005, to 87,000. In the countryside, the major causes have been excessive taxes, arbitrary fees, and indiscriminate tithes and land confiscations by unscrupulous officials.

The growing economic inequities, manifested so clearly in Mark Leong’s photos, have led to an ever starker contrast between rich and poor, and a concomitant rise in the number of violent clashes between ordinary people and armed police. Some top leaders, like Premier Wen Jiabao, have become deeply concerned, even to the point of canceling all national taxes on peasants’ harvest and income. But as China has grown wealthier in aggregate, the gap between rich and poor has also continued to grow, reaching a point where it has begun to remind many older Chinese of exactly the kinds of intractable socioeconomic fault lines that once helped fuel Mao’s socialist revolution.

Exacerbating these social tensions is a rising tide of official corruption. Because the state still controls most property and assets, and because officials are usually poorly paid, the temptation to profit from bribes and kickbacks is enormous. So serious has this trend become that the well-known economist Hu Angang has estimated that during the ’90s, losses from corruption cost China upwards of 17 percent of GDP. The absence of a viable legal system, coupled with the Party’s unwillingness to lose control of the anticorruption process, has led the Party to call upon its own extralegal Discipline and Inspection Commission to launch thousands of investigations and even to jail and execute some offenders. The strategy, as the traditional Chinese saying goes, is to “kill the chicken to scare the monkey.”

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winter07 features leong runaway One of the most serious structural blocks to China’s smooth economic evolution is its four major state-run banks. They carry on their books some $300 billion to $400 billion—no one really knows how much—in nonperforming loans, and are thus technically insolvent. This debt is reported to equal roughly 30 percent of GDP. But the state, which controls the banks, continues to pressure them to make “policy loans” to state enterprises as a stopgap way of keeping workers from being laid off. As a result, the banks fail to assess risk as rigorously as outside commercial banks would. Fortunately, the savings rate of the Chinese people is 40 to 50 percent (in the United States it is only 1 percent), and because the banks retain something of a captive clientele in the absence of competition, they have an incomparable advantage over outside commercial banks. But shaky bank loans are hardly a recipe for success in an economy growing as rapidly as China’s.

The most logical alternate source of domestic development capital is the relatively new financial markets. However, the two existing stock markets, in Shanghai and Shenzhen, remain so poorly structured and regulated that they are unable to generate anywhere near the amount of capital China needs to continue developing. Although management is improving, widespread insider trading, inadequate regulation, official manipulation, and lack of fiduciary transparency mean that the bourses are as much casinos as reliable financial markets. Larger and more reputable Chinese companies that wish to go public seek listings on foreign exchanges.

Finally, there is China’s rapidly deteriorating environment and natural resource base. For starters, China now has twice as many people as it did 50 years ago, or approximately 25 percent of the world’s population, living on only seven percent of its arable land. Any road trip through China leaves a traveler dazed by the magnitude of environmental degradation caused by China’s development boom. Statistics present a grim picture:
• China is the world largest user of energy, with two-thirds of that use derived from relatively polluting coal with high sulfur content.
• It recently surpassed the U.S. as the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses.
• While per capita energy use is still only one-ninth that of the United States, China uses almost five times more energy than the U.S. and almost 12 times as much as Japan to generate a single dollar of GDP.
• Roughly 3 percent of China’s land mass is subject to acid rain, which also spills over to Korea, Russia, and Japan.
• Approximately 75 percent of China’s lakes and urban rivers are substantially polluted.
• The water tables in places like the arid North China Plain have plummeted, and entire major river systems have ceased flowing.
• The rate of desertification has doubled since the 1970s and continues unabated.
• Sixteen of the world’s most polluted cities are reported to be in China.
• Air pollution has become so severe that it reportedly causes some 300,000 to 400,000 premature deaths each year. (Indeed, residents of many major cities can go for weeks without ever seeing the sun.)
• The estimated cost to GDP from all this environmental degradation is estimated to be as high as 12 percent of GDP annually.

In short, China risks becoming the world’s industrial park—an outsource manufacturing dumping ground for the developed world’s most polluting industries. It can certainly show a short-term economic gain for its trouble. However, in the long term it may find that it has accrued a debt for which there will be no possible payment—a debt extracted not from a bank, stock market, or international lending agency but from China’s own patrimony of natural resources.

So how to begin reconciling the opposing parallel universes? There is no other way than to embrace their essential contrariness. After all, they are real parts of China’s spellbinding work in progress.

When considering contradictions, Mao was fond of proclaiming “the unity of opposites,” by which he meant that there is almost always a curious yin/yang relationship between seemingly opposing forces. Especially in unresolved situations, opposite things must be simultaneously admitted into evidence without either being discounted as untrue, or even less true than the other.

Due diligence on today’s China begs us to hold in our minds both the light and the dark. This is precisely what Mark Leong has done for us in his photographs. Through them, we see a China of opposites and extremes, neither of which is necessarily more real or more representative than the other. Both simply are, and both help compose a riveting but as yet unclear whole.

Our challenge is to understand that the die has not yet been cast for tomorrow’s China. Its future remains provisional and malleable. We as individuals and as a nation must do whatever we can to exert an influence on this impressionable and unstable nation in as constructive a way as possible. There is probably no relationship in the world today more important than that between the United States and China. Whichever parallel universe finally prevails will have enormous consequences for both us and the world.

The View From Behind the Lens

Mark Leong arrived in China in 1989 on the day after the Tiananmen Square massacre, carting a camera, a degree in visual and environmental studies, and a vague plan to get in touch with his roots through photography. Early photos documented the area around his mother’s ancestral village in the south; during his next trip, he became interested in Beijing’s youth culture and underground rock bands. More recently, Leong has moved out of the margins entirely, focusing on China’s surging consumer culture. Along the way, his palette has evolved from shadowy black and white to sharp, explosive color. Since 1997 he has lived in Beijing, where he met and married a fellow Chinese-American expat. They have twin two-year-old boys. Leong’s work has appeared in in National Geographic, Business Week, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and other publications. A native of Sunnyvale, Calif., in the Bay Area, he published his first book, China Obscura, in 2004.

ON WANDERLUST It was the classic “Roots” scenario—I was trying to find out if there was any Chinese soul inside of me. My family has been in the U.S. for over 100 years. I wouldn’t say I didn’t have pride in being ethnically Chinese, but there just wasn’t much of a connection. I found that I was a complete outsider, and I had no idea what was going on. That’s why I didn’t put captions on the photos in my first book, because everything was so strange and surreal.

ON INSPIRATION I stay here because it’s really interesting, not because it’s my motherland. There’s surging history here. There are so many problems in China that spring out of having such a huge population: the way people treat each other, the pollution, the way people treat the environment. That makes it interesting for a photographer—death and destruction are actually good to photograph. That’s partially why I focus now on mass consumption: It’s more challenging not to photograph suffering all the time.

ON IRONY The fact that this is a communist country, that they exploit their labor like you wouldn’t believe, that these workers can’t organize, and even if they do, it’s all tied to the company, it’s completely ironic. But the Chinese sense of irony is very limited at this point. They see differences, for sure—like, this person’s rich and I’m not—but they’re thinking that they want to be rich, too.
Recently I was photographing this guy who’s worth about half a billion dollars. He started as a motorcycle repairman, and now he’s got one of the biggest motorcycle companies in the country. People are constantly switching jobs and constantly having ideas on how to upgrade things for themselves. That drive, that sense of entrepreneurship, is very interesting to me.

ON “LITTLE EMPERORS” I feel positive about the one-child families. It means this generation of productive adults is able to take their assets and improve their lives, because they have fewer dependents.
Having kids of my own makes me more empathetic with the little emperors. I might see some spoiled kids on the street, telling off their grandma in front of everybdy, but they’re not all that way. They’re mostly nice kids. It’s also a better-educated generation. When I visit a college, I see these smart, globalized kids who have an idea of what they want to do. It’s impressive.

ON RAISING CHILDREN IN BEIJING My kids just love our apartment, because we have a big window facing out on a construction site. We’ve been here for six months, and suddenly there’s a 10-story building there with construction workers crawling all over it. It’s our very own Bob the Builder.
If it weren’t for the pollution, we might think of staying here permanently. In Beijing the air coats your body, and many days it hurts your throat. This is development; it’s part of what makes things exciting here. But it’s a health issue for the boys.

ON SEX There’s definitely a sex-for-sale culture here. Every city has a huge “barbershop district,” where you see these “salons” where there’s only one hair dryer inside; clearly, the girls are not there to cut your hair. Another surprising thing: there are so many sex-toy shops. They call them “Adult Health Protection.”
I photographed a man who wanted to start a soft-core porn magazine—tasteful pictures of ladies in Ming Dynasty costumes, that sort of thing. The government rejected his license, even though in Beijing, on every block you see shops with dildos in the window. It’s just another example of this divide between official, communist culture and the culture on the streets, this Wild West capitalism.

ON URBAN RENEWAL It’s hard for the big machines to get into the narrow alleyways, so they have migrant workers with sledgehammers come in. You have these crews of guys that can level out a block per day. They walk through a neighborhood, coming down from the roofs, taking out the buildings. The little traditional houses aren’t built that well; the ceilings are grass and paper. These neighborhoods just disappear in a cloud of dust.

Interview by Lindsey McCormack