China’s window on the world; a sad reflection

Press, 7 August 1982, Page 15

China’s window on the world; a sad reflection

NAYLOR HILLARY recently spent three weeks touring China by train. This is the first of a series of articles in which he gives his impressions of six Chinese cities he visited. Articles in the coming weeks will deal with Shanghai, Nanking, Luoyang, Xian, and Datong.

Canton, on the south coast of China, was the first city to establish links with modern Europe. Since Portuguese traders arrived at the mouth of the Pearl River nearly 500 years ago. Canton has been China’s window on the world: and the world's window, often half-obscured, into China.

Today Canton no longer exists on maps of China. In the new transliteration of Chinese characters it has become Guangzhou. For most visitors to China it is still the first port of call. For many, making a brief excursion from Hong Kong, Canton is the only city of any. size they will see.

There visitors will meet first the enigmas of China 10 years,’.after the Cultural Revolution. In five years, China has gone from haying no tourists in the Western sense to having nearly 300.000 a year. The expansion has strained the system. In Canton, as elsewhere, it

breaks down !sometimes as the China International Travel Service tries to juggle a flood of visitors against limited transport and accommodation.

New hotels are being built rapidly, sometimes as joint ventures with Western firms. Some are good. Some are depressingly bad. with broken plumbing and peeling wallpaper, even before all the rooms are finished. The Nanhu Hotel in Guangzhou is an unhappy meeting of East and West. Its Western partners appear to have foisted on the Chinese materials that are too elaborate, and not sufficiently robust, to be installed and maintained in what is still largely a pre-mechani-cal[society.

Yet the hotel, on a lake a few kilometres north of the city, has an idyllic setting and is intended to be part of a “country club resort." One can only hope its shoddiness will be 'repaired and that all

Western firms will not be judged by such results. In Canton almost any visitor’s preconceptions about a “people’s republic” will have to be re-examined. For a start getting there is easy, with a minimum of formalities and a choice of travel from Hong Kong by train, aircraft, ferry or hovercraft. One of the first sights from the train was of women labouring with railway sleepers while a much larger group of men watched, and supervised.

One becomes accustomed to such curiosities in a world where all are equal. Close to Canton two men were lifting one bag of fertiliser at a time from a barrow, on to the back of a solitary woman whose job it was to run up a steep plank and dump the bag on a truck.

In Canton one learns to dodge phalanxes of unlit bicycles at night on the streets, and to look out for unlit or poorly lit vehicles

which are heeding too well a party exhortation to "save power." Not that there are many vehicles on the roads. The bicycle is used for carrying stock to market, or furniture home from a shop. Bicycle rickshaws provide transport. Among the few statistics thrust on visitors are population and bicycles — in Canton (or Guangzhou) there are five million people and two million bicycles. Here, too. new arrivals have to learn to live with Chinese difficulties in pronouncing English. “We get loom numbers when alive at hotel.’’ “We have lunch at topless alont.” Here one meets the system of dual currency, with “tourist money” given in exchange for travellers’ cheques and able to be spent only in souvenir-laden “friendship stores.” (Change sometimes comes in ordinary money, useful for buying ices and buns at street stalls.)

One meets the overwhelming friendliness of almost all Chinese whose job it is to deal with foreign visitors. The smiles are warm and genuine; the service, within the limits of China's scarce resources, is brisk. Restraints on visitors are so gentle as to seem almost non-existent, although requests to deviate from the China Travel Service’s programme may meet with mysterious hitches. That programme has the air of still being tested. Visits to monuments of the Revolution of 1949 are being

scaled down. Propaganda is uncommon. Visitors to. Canton may be taken to a revolutionary martyrs' •memorial.-The Chinese hosts seem not to expect enthusiasm, or even much interest.

Much more is being made these days of China's ancient past, especially of its Buddhism. Canton offers visitors their first pagoda — the Liurongsi or Six Banyan Temple, and the Huata or Flowery Pagoda. Suddenly, the great age of China seems overwhelming. The temple was founded in 479 A.D. (shortly after Roman rule collapsed in Britain). The present pagoda is a reconstruction from the Sung Dynasty (about the time William the Conqueror crossed the Channel). The pagoda takes its name from a poem by the eleventh-century poet. Su Dongpo. It is 57 metres high with nine balconies and 17 floors inside.

Here, as elsewhere, visitors are encouraged to climb, amid a vast, shuffling throng of Chinese. Here, as elsewhere, the view from the top through China’s mists is worth the effort.

More recent history, too, is back in fashion. China’s earlier, anti-Manchu revolution of 1911, led by Sun YatSen, is used as a kind of bridge to Western sensibilities, a nationalist uprising which Westerners can appreciate and generally feel sympathy with. So in Canton the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall, built by the anti-communist

nationalists in 1931, is shown off proudly by today’s Communists.

In parks, at monuments and temples, visitors are immersed in the mass of Chinese, still generally drably dressed in dark blue or olive greens, although a little more colour is emerging, especially in children’s dress. In Canton, perhaps more than in other parts of the country, that mass of people seems infinitely depressed and depressing; bored to a kind of dull listlessness so that the pace of work, or walking, looks like slow motion.

Visitors are taken to the old European Concession district, conceded in 1859 at the end of the Second Opium War. Here, on Shamian Island in the Pearl River, amid huge banyan trees, the English and French houses and churches look chipped, seedy and decayed. Little, it seems, has been done since the Communists arrived at the end of 1949. Half-hearted efforts are being made to tidy some of the best of the buildings. Nothing can remove the sense, all pervasive in Canton, of a city slowly falling apart for want of care and maintenance, and selfrespect.

It is as though children have taken over responsibility for running the commun-

ity. Will decay destroy the city before the child-like population learns to operate it? Some are learning, but in Canton, unlike some other parts of China, decay seems to be winning.

Yet Canton remains a great trading city, as it has been for hundreds of years through frequent changes of rule. The Chinese Export Commodities Fair, better known as the Canton Trade Fair, is now open permanently in huge new premises. Its range of products is vastly impressive, from sensible. simple agricultural machinery to luxurious Oriental carpets at about a quarter of the prices one would pay in New Zealand for such items.

This is the businesslike city where visitors are given a brochure of welcome with an outline map, a list of attractions, and advertisements for American cigarettes, French brandy, and Chinese “seagull” watches.

Outside the trade fair a world map shows the countries with whom China trades. The only gaps are Taiwan, South Korea, South Africa and Angola. China, largely through Canton, is becoming a great trading nation.

The next article will discuss China’s other great port, the city of Shanghai, a thousand kilometres to the north.