From Mao to Mammon

CHINA is a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma, I told myself as I boarded China Eastern Airlines8217; first direct flight from New Delhi to Beijing last week. The description had once been used by Winston Churchill for Russia, but I knew that it held equally good for the wide-eyed Westerner searching hard for that kernel of truth that would make all the pieces in the puzzle palimpsest called 8216;Zhung Kuo8217; or 8216;Middle Kingdom8217; fall into place.

But of course I would be different. I would not be taken in by the glitter, by China8217;s determined wooing of the Western world in the last decade. Instead, I would look beneath the shine and the gloss and check out the streets behind the squeaky clean skyscrapers that lined the front avenues. After all, I was from a 5,000-year-old civilisation and I knew what it meant to dress up and water down the dust on the front streets for visitors.

By the end of eight days, my smug, self-satisfied arrogance about ancient glories and past exploits lay in smithereens. The moment of truth occurred when we crossed the bridge across the Huangpu river in Shanghai. 8216;8216;Oh, what a beautiful suspension bridge,8217;8217; I exclaimed to the young boy doubling up as guide, sitting in the seat next to me, 8216;8216;just like the one across the Hooghly in Calcutta!8217;8217; He waited for my enthusiastic smile to either stick or subside, then said, 8216;8216;This is one of the four bridges built across the Huangpu in the last two years.8217;8217;

Two years. The second bridge across the Hooghly had taken 22 years. Okay, so this was a one-party dictatorship even if it was for the proletariat and we were, truly, a democracy. Slippages were bound to occur. But over the next half-hour, from Shanghai8217;s new airport to the state guest house, as the statistics flowed thick and fast, my senses grew increasingly benumbed by the very same glitter I had promised myself I would resist. By the end of the drive, I closely resembled the mass of shivering sea-cucumber that had gently waved its horns at us one lunch, three light-days ago.

So what does one say about Shanghai? Or Beijing? Or even China8217;s northern warm-water port city called Dalian, with its saucy bunches of inverted glass grapes for streetlights and a dynamo for a development zone? Fact is, leave your pretensions behind when you come to China. Forget about those paternalistic principles of state-ownership that have been the life-breath of independent India for some 55 years. This is China, a nation that has dared to shift course in mid-gear because its experiment with socialist truth was not working as well as Mao had once decreed it would. And, unlike Russia, made a success of it.

The skyscrapers of Shanghai are really a manifestation of what China8217;s latter-day Buddha ordered. Zhu Rongji was mayor of this city only 12 years ago 8212; around the time the Ram mandir movement was unleashed by L K Advani 8212; when he took to heart Deng Xiaoping8217;s 8216;8216;Gai Ge Kai Feng8217;8217; slogan, meaning 8216;8216;open door policy,8217;8217; first enunciated in 1978. By the time the Babri masjid was destroyed in 1992 by chauvinistic hordes aiming to rewrite historical myths, Zhu was dreaming of a modern city that could hold its own against any in the world. Today he is China8217;s Prime Minister. So the farmland across the Huangpu, the 8216;Pudong8217;, was acquired and handed over to the construction czars.

The result is an impudent splash of glass and steel jutting into the sky, edged by the pink Oriental Pearl television tower on the banks of the river, said to be the third highest tower in the world after the ones in Moscow and Toronto. Across the river is the Bund, the area leased out to foreign concessions after the Opium Wars of 1842. Dazzled by the showy and fantastic in the new city, I am determined to catch my breath at the Yu Yuan gardens in the old part of town, a rebuilt mirror-image of 16th century fluid, Chinese lines and a heartbeat away from the ancient Jade temple of the Buddha. The viewing platform on the television tower really epitomises the citizen8217;s side in his nation. For inscribed on the glass walls of the platform, in English and in Mandarin, are the names of key Chinese cities and their distance from this spot. So, He Nan and Zheng Zhou are 820 km away, Shanxi and Xi8217;an are 1,200 km away, Qing Hai and Xi Ning are 1,880 km away and Yunnan and Kunming are 1,800 km away. We will not forget you, sisters and brothers, even if you live so far away, the graffiti seems to say.

But to begin at the beginning of my journey, in Beijing. This is a city of history, of power and intrigue, the Forbidden City of the Qing and Ming emperors weaving a continuous thread to Zhongnanhai, the residence of the ancient kings and currently inhabited by the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. A series of palaces of the City give way to Tiananmen Square, the infamous site of the 1989 uprising, curbed as ruthlessly into the dust. Beyond Beijing, a mere two hours away by car, stands the Great Wall, the best example of the isolationism of the early emperors who wanted to keep the foreign hordes out. Today, in an attempt to transform old attitudes, China is pulling down all the barriers that come in the way of reform.

Back in Beijing, a cherubic portrait of Mao hangs on Tiananmen, a reminder of the recent past and the in-your-face present. But Tiananmen, just like Mao, is only a link to a new capital on the make. There are more shopping malls on the central Zhang8217;an avenue of Beijing than all the ones in India put together. Marx has been replaced by Mammon, with the same flourish of the paintbrush that once coloured China red.

Shanghai airport, the last stop on this whistle-stop tour of this great country, dazzles me some more. Seven hours later, we land at New Delhi airport, but the immigration officer does not even know that direct flights have been established to China. The depression begins. I am home.

The writer was on a week-long tour of China sponsored by the Chinese government.