June 17, 2001

At 6:00 it is still dark, but ten minutes later, it reasonably light.  By 6:15, the sports field has about 100 people, taking care of their morning exercise.  It is chilly this morning, but not frigid - perhaps 45 degrees.  Many exercisers are wearing gloves (I bought a pair of knitted cotton gloves yesterday at the street market for $1.30) but not hats.    About l5 are jointly doing calisthenics to Chinese music, which includes counting.  Another cluster is doing breathing and stretching preliminaries for their morning tai ji.  The track is filled with people walking and jogging.   Many swing their arms in various deliberate ways.  A substantial number are walking backwards.

I wonder about walking backwards.  Is this a special element in Chinese culture?  Are Chinese so bound in tradition that they are more interested in seeing where they came from than where they are going too?  When Deng Xiaoping likened China’s reform process to “crossing a stream, feeling the stones on which to step,” was he sort of walking backwards, more aware of where he was coming from than where he was going to?  Walking forwards, it was easy for me to ask an old lady backwards walker why it was good to walk backwards.  She said it was good and patted her lower back.  I tried walking backward for a while, wondering what muscle would feel good, but I couldn’t feel the right effect.

A few days later, the temperature is colder, around 38 degrees, and some are wearing hats.  I asked another person about walking backwards.  Maybe his Mandarin dialect was clearer (here in Shanghai, people prefer to speak the Shanghai dialect), or maybe my Chinese comprehension has improved.  He dismissed my cultural explanation with a much simpler one.  Walking backwards exercises the rump and back.  All day, he reminded me, we walk forward, developing muscles that lift legs forward.  Walking backwards exercises other muscles and is part of balanced, comprehensive exercise.  This made sense, so I walked backwards today quite a bit, and began to feel new muscles working.  Chinese observers noticed too, and as I went around the track, they smiled and gave me a “thumbs up,” acknowledging my efforts to master this Chinese exercise technique.  So, here’s the headline for the National Inquirer: American Scholar Discovers Chinese Classic Secret Exercise for a Beautiful Butt!

Soon the tai ji group starts around 6:30, with its slow, disciplined movements.  It is a special exercise with constant movement, back and forth.

While Chinese like to exercise in a group, there is also individualism and innovation.  One young woman is exercising with long sticks, twirling them as batons, around her body, back and forth.  Another women exercises with large red silk fans. Another man is doing some breathing and shadow punching exercises.  A man scrambles the length of the field on hands and feet, without letting his knees down.  It looked like perpetual pushups.  Another man found a way to exercise some part of his body by standing close to a tree on his heels, while hugging the tree.  One young woman is jumping rope, like a boxer.  I am especially impressed by the woman in her eighties, who does a long set of jumping, punching, and stretching exercises every morning.   Some do tai ji individually, in their own preferred style and pace. On Saturday, after the regular tai ji is finished, the group pauses for a break. Some suddenly materialize with special exercise swords (maybe collapsible for easier transportation) or sticks with taped handles, and continue with the special tai ji sword exercise. As spring shows hints of coming, two people come out with golf clubs and practice putting to each other.

After a week of morning exercises, the Chinese exercisers begin to accept me as part of their morning exercise community.  They smile and say good morning in Chinese or English.  They come close enough to test my language and are delighted I speak Chinese.  This morning I had a wonderful chat with a man who is retired (laid off) from China’s merchant marine, at age 49.  He had been in Houston Texas once for two months, while his ship was serviced.  His main impression of Houston was that it was cold.  I guess he was there in winter months.  He told me a little about his retirement.  It couldn’t be better for me, as my research project deals with China’s retirement system.  This will be wonderful, to interview subjects while I walk around the track every morning!  The next morning I meet a man who services the air conditioning systems of large buildings.  (Indeed, one of the changes in Shanghai in recent years is the proliferation of room heating and cooling devices.)  He is the person who likes to crawl the length of the field without letting his knees touch the ground.  He is very much aware that air conditioning has a big appetite for electricity, and is optimistic that the environmentally controversial Three Gorges Dam will solve China’s electricity problem. Then there is the man who does his tai ji with violent hip movements.  Imagine, if you can, Elvis the Pelvis doing tai ji.  He tells me that this is the original classic Chen style, in which pelvic movements concentrate power for striking the enemy.  He works in a venture capital business and will study at the University of Chicago next fall.  He is eager to practice his spoken English with me.

I finish my simple, undisciplined walking, and return to my dorm.  On the way, I note another jogger on the main street.  He is wearing pink shorts and nothing else, save his socks and shoes.   I don’t try to catch him to ask him what part of the body this almost-naked jogging is good for at this chilly temperature.  He is probably one of those people who cut holes in the ice on New Year’s day and take special dips.  I notice others playing badminton, using a bicycle for a net.

Coming back to the dorm, I pass the street market.  I first encounter the newspaper stand.  It has dozens of different Chinese newspapers, including the English language China Daily and the Shanghai Daily.  Next come the aromas of steamed and fried dumplings and fried bread.   Another attractive food is a pancake with scrambled egg on top, sort of an egg pizza, with scallion and special Chinese brown sauce.   It’s hard to pass them by, and after a few days, I succumb to temptation and curiosity.  With raw eggs and salmonella on my mind, I ask the preparer to make sure the egg is thoroughly cooked, and explain that in the United States, eggs sometimes have bacteria.  He understood, agreed, and flipped the egg-pizza extra times.  It made a wonderful breakfast.  To my disappointment, fruit sellers haven’t uncovered their wares yet.

 Near my dorm, I noticed something new.  At the corner I heard a lot of birds calling and gradually noticed that the trees surrounding the corner were filled with bird cages.  About 15 elderly men were chatting in the street.  A little discussion confirmed that the men take their pet birds out when the sun comes out.  The birds have a grand time singing to each other!  At home, I try to walk my dog at the same time that my neighbor walks her dog; the two dogs love to sniff each other and wag their tails in harmony.  Too bad they can’t sing like birds.

Indeed one of the changes in life here is that pet dogs have appeared.  I have noticed about half a dozen dogs being walked in the morning and evening.  They are small white dogs, a miniature semoyed and a shihtzu, and a couple of other breeds not familiar to me.  They seem very alert and disciplined, some following their owners without leashes.  I wonder about cats.  On a warm day I noticed a gray-black cat, stretched out on a tree branch, enjoying the sunshine.  I asked and was told that cats are very common now.  If you have a cat, you are likely to have kittens in a few months, so many people have several cats.  A few weeks later, someone shows up with a cardboard box with four very cute, very small dogs, asking price of $30-40.

Shopping here is wonderfully convenient a little later in the day when all the merchants are open.  One block away from my apartment, the shopping begins.  Restaurant, drug store, 24 x 7 internet café and convenience store.  I like the convenience store.  It is well lit, has cash registers that scan prices, and is well stocked.  I buy instant coffee, drinking water, soap powder, napkins, toilet paper, and yogurt there.  In the past, yogurt was hard to find, mostly rationed to elderly people in the neighborhood.  I am pleased to find it in the refrigerator at the market.  I guess it was hard to retail yogurt in the past because refrigerators were few and far between .

Past the corner, the real street market begins.  Street food (steamed and fried dumplings, donuts, egg pizza, baked buns, meat patties in the morning), fruit stands, bank, book stores, stationery stores, camera supplies and film processing.  On blankets on the street are costume jewelry, hair accessories, etc.  There are stores that photocopy, do computer printing, and repair and sell such equipment.  I noticed a man with a key-making tool to make spare keys.

One interesting hole-in-the-wall store has computer accessories.   This store reflects the fact that computers have become commonplace in China.  Fifteen years ago, I brought an early generation portable computer.  It was a great novelty for my students, and I had great difficulty buying paper for my printer.  Now computers are in all faculty offices and home computers are quite common.

The owner of this little store fabricated an Ethernet connection wire for me to use in my office.  They had a very neat combination adapter-extension cord, with a wire that plugs into the Chinese wall socket and a cluster of sockets that can receive Chinese, American, British, and Australian style plugs (for $3.00). And, when I got a dialup account to uses a modem to reach the internet, they made a 1 into 2 connector, enabling me to plug both a telephone and a computer into one telephone socket.  This last transaction had a special significance for me.  Years ago, Chairman Mao used the phrase “1 into 2” to explain that societies always divided into two classes, and class struggle ensued.   China is certainly in a different era when “1 into 2” means you can divide one telephone line into two pieces of equipment, your telephone and your computer.

I am not sure if the internet café is Chinese or international.  It is open 24 x 7.  It has about three small rooms, but each room is packed with perhaps 20 computers, and each computer seems to be perpetually occupied, with both uses and their advisors.   If it is a café, the only item on the menu is computer.  Most customers are young men playing video games, gunning down some invader or finding their way through a complex maze.  There are a few young women also.  Some people are sending or checking email, possibly applying on-line for university study abroad.  Between the heat of the computers, the density of the people, and the smoke of cigarettes, the atmosphere is thick.  Through the miracles of modern technology, I can read and reply to email as though I were home at Temple University.  If I didn’t tell, my email correspondent would have no idea of where in the world I was sitting.

Near the internet café is small department store, almost obscured by the bamboo pole scaffolding that is being erected on the side of the building for some project.  In this store one can buy a wide range of alcoholic beverages, soaps, office supplies (including the elusive stapler), towels, and electrical and hardware supplies.

It was easy to find the CD music disks for sale.  The “store” was a simple table or suitcase on the back of a motorcycle or on a ground cloth, surrounded by dozens of students, looking for their favorites.  It reminded me of shoppers at Fileen’s bargain basement.  I browsed through one pile, passing the Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong pop singers, and finally found B. B. King, Elvis, and Mozart, each for $.75.

I emailed my teenage daugher, and she gave me a list of her preferred music.  I went to the CD motorcycle, and leafed through the discs.  Unable to find what my daughter specified, I turned to a young woman at my side and asked her to be my consultant.  I asked her to look at my list, determine the style of music, and suggest CDs that were in that style.  She enjoyed this challenge and started picking out CDs for me.  I asked her how she knew the various singers, groups, and styles, and she said that she read a lot of magazines on this topic.   Further conversation revealed that she is a high school junior, and comes to the university campus on Saturdays for advanced tutoring in English and Physics.  She wants to do well on her college entrance examination!  I am happy to report that my daughter loved the selection.

I know that this piracy of intellectual property has created major trade problems between the US and China.  Still, if the Chinese military officials have decided to make money by stealing these artistic accomplishments and if China’s young people can live in their own musical world, rather than complain, shouldn’t we celebrate?

At the corner is a large cafeteria, managed by the university.  The bottom floor has simple dumplings.  The second floor has ready made dinner plates (rice, three scoops of different dishes, and soup, for about $.60).  The food is flavorful, but, since it is ready made, by 6:00 PM, an hour after opening for dinner, it is cold.  This is such a good deal that I am readjusting my eating time to get there just after the big rush but before food gets cold.  The Chinese do not believe in steam tables because they feel that the constant heating makes the vegetables lose flavor and texture.  Better cold than soggy.   There is also a short-order cook for food cooked to order.  The third floor is more like a regular restaurant, with proper chairs and tables, table cloths, and a full menu.  Near the cafeteria is a hair dresser and a bakery shop, where the bread is so good it is addictive.

 Down the street, the food market begins: vegetables, eggs, meat, live chickens waiting to make their ultimate sacrifice.  The seafood section is fabulous, with many kinds of live fish swimming in basins, eel, shrimp, crabs, turtles, turtles, squid, shellfish.  Somewhere in this area are the snake sellers.  Snake is thought to be a very good food for winter-it makes a wonderful soup.  Also, snake liver and its oil are prized for its medicinal qualities, for arthritis and rheumatism.    In China, a seller of snake oil is highly regarded.

The next block has drygoods, including clothing, basins, clothing hangers, shoes, toilets, plumbing parts, tools, etc.   On this block are a couple of men with strong peddle-operated sewing machines, offering to do shoe repair.  Next are three women with lighter peddle-operated sewing machines, ready for tailoring and repairs of clothing.  Down a side street, a small building has been erected on the sidewalk and does dry cleaning.  Nearby, on Saturday, are salesmen with house plants, large and small, including many kinds of small cactus.  Cut flowers were there as well.  Elsewhere are what might be considered repair shops for bicycles and umbrellas, but the word “shop” is an over-formalization.  The mechanics have staked out a couple of yards of sidewalk space and put down their tools and spare parts.  What they can’t fix, they break apart, separating the steel from the aluminum and copper.  As I pass by, they were deconstructing a tiny engine from a motor bicycle.  They will sell the metal to the junk metal man who occasionally comes by with his tricycle cart.

On the block after the street market, there is a “super-market.”  The super market is essentially a moderately sized grocery store, with a wide range of foods - frozen, meats, vegetables, packaged, a photo processing corner and a wine corner.  Of course the foods are Chinese, so if you can imagine a grocery store in an American China town, it is easy to envisage.

Despite the variety, the market is not really deep in its products.  I thought a patio thermometer would be nice to put on my balcony, so I could gauge how many sweaters to wear in the morning.  The local market at the moment does not have such a thermometer.  I found out that I could just telephone 1-2-1 in the morning and get the temperature and weather forecast, in Chinese and English.

As the day unfolds, different kinds of street food are prepared.  Small sticks with barbecued chicken, beef, and squid are made at lunch time.  Some vendors with a barrel of charcoal make baked sweet potatoes.  There is also a chopped meat with sauce, put in a thin bun; it looks like a barbecue sandwich.  Then glazed strawberries on a stick are offered.  One women has boiled eggs, but they are boiled in Five Spice, soy sauce, and other spices.  Another cart makes deep fried chicken parts and yet another makes popcorn.  The vendors have little carts, which have tanks of bottled gas and a burner.  There is a subtle sign of change in this local  “fast food” industry.  Fifteen years ago, street food was wrapped up in pieces of newspaper.  Now it is picked up in small plastic bags and put in another plastic bag.  This simple practice shows efforts to minimize disease risks in food, and also shows the development of the plastics industry.  In addition to the street food, some small shops now offer barbecued chicken to take out.  Surprisingly, there is not a American style Chinese takeout place in the marketplace.

Also in the afternoon, an apparently blind musician sits on the curb, sawing away on his one-string Chinese instrument, a tin cup in front of him.  Occasionally someone drops a coin in.  In recent days I’ve noticed another old man with a very worn, weather-beaten face.  He holds a cup in front and is vocalizing.  I think he is singing, perhaps some Chinese opera songs.  If I stretch my imagination, he is singing the blues, with Chinese characteristics.  Once in a while, a beggar comes to my side.  When I am standing on line for dumplings, I am particularly vulnerable because I can’t walk away.  I know that a very small contribution from me would make her happy, but I refrain, fearing that if I give, she will stalk me out and follow me every time I leave my room.

Sellers come and go over the weeks.  One day there were 6 hawkers from Tibet, with distinctive clothing, selling elaborately tooled hunting knives and pieces of deer and antelope horns.  I wonder how many horns I’ll have to buy to chat with them about Tibet.

This market has grown perhaps ten or twenty-fold since I taught and shopped here fifteen years ago.  At that time, the market stretched about one block, now it is five.  Then, two venders made dumplings and spring roles, and I enjoyed their production every day.  Now at least a dozen make a much greater range of fare.  Fifteen years ago, one was supposed to have specialization coupons to buy grain.  Even when I bought dumplings in the morning, I was asked for grain coupons.  I could never obtain the coupons, so sometimes I was charged a little extra.  Other coupons were needed for meat, cooking oil, and other commodities.  Now, there are ration coupons for anything.  My recollection of the ration coupons from the past was treated as a historical oddity, detached from the present.

Fifteen years ago, I had trouble buying paper for computer printing; now I can buy major parts for a computer.  The 24 hour convenience store (with condoms prominently displayed), the internet café, and the drug store, with standard over-the-counter medicines like Imodium, some special creams for psoriasis (called “cow-skin-disease” in Chinese) and traditional Chinese herbs, were not imaginable years ago.  When one considers the expanded area, the greater density, and the higher price of many products, it is clear that the commercial activity has changed tremendously.

Some of these changes reflect significant progress in the technical infrastructure of the food system.  Bread is more easily available than in the past, and in higher quality and greater variety.  The small rolls with sesame seeds are really wonderful.  The bakery industry must have improved.  Another indicator is the change in the poultry industry.   In the past, duck was cheaper and more available than chicken. This is reversed now, with chicken very common in the market.  Chicken implies that China has been successful in setting up large-scale broiler factories, with a controlled environment, modern feeds, and pharmaceuticals to prevent epidemics from wiping out whole sheds of birds.  This industry is probably linked to the rapid penetration and spread in urban Shanghai of Kentucky Fried Chicken.  When my department had a lunch-time seminar, boxes of Kentucky Fried chicken were distributed for lunch.  We know that good news often dialectically brings its own bad news.  A newspaper reported that the Shanghai chicken farms are now major contributors to pollution of the rivers in and around Shanghai.

Likewise, these overall changes reflect important structural changes in the economy and in people’s lives.  Workers have been dismissed from what they thought were secure factory jobs and have become to entrepreneur retailers in mercurial markets.  Teenagers have become hawkers.   Farmers have become wholesalers and retailers of food products and have become seasonal or long-term migrants, doing the manual work Shanghai’s natives try to avoid.  In many ways, China’s industrial technology, most obviously in the electronic field, is merging with advanced global technology.

The markets reflect another subtle change in technology.  Produce is now weighed, on certified scales, flashing the weight in red electronic numerals.  They are required by the market managers, and are checked from time to time for accuracy.  In the past, produce was weight on a simple balance -- a stick suspended with strings and with weights on one end and a pan on the other.  It looked like ageless technology.  Maybe it wasn't so accurate, but it linked purchases with a whole history of transactions stretching backward indefinitely.  I liked that feeling, even if the weights were not precise.

The market street area is very crowded, with shoppers, pedestrians, and bicycles.  This was true fifteen years ago.   However, there now are more motorbikes and trucks.  At the same time, Chinese people here tend to walk on the street, not the sidewalk.  There is a good reason.  Sidewalks here are unsafe.  The pavement is uneven, the sidewalks are loaded with construction materials and debris from torn down buildings waiting for separation by the garbage pickers and removal by the recycle workers.  In the middle of sidewalks are telephone poles, or holes where there used to be telephone poles.  And then, of course, sidewalks are used for parking bicycle.  With all these obstacles, walking in the street is far more convenient, except, of course, for the vehicular traffic.  Drivers of everything from bicycles to big trucks are very careful, but they presume that pedestrians maintain their speed and direction with Newtonian precision.  I am learning that if I want to slow down to look at something or if I turn to go towards I a store, I risk creating a collision.  I am learning to turn my head backwards to check for traffic before I turn to buy my newspaper or look in the bakery window.  When walking, one needs to use the same care as changing lanes on a crowded highway!

All this is a five-minute walk; no driving, no parking.  At home in our suburbs, we forget the enormous convenience of dense urban living.  In China, parking lots accommodate bicycles instead of automobiles, and about 20 bicycles can fit into the space of one car.  The space used for parking is roughly about 5 percent of that in the U.S.

With all this evidence of progress, there are also reminders that China is a land with little farmland and an immense population.  In the last 50 years the population has roughly tripled, while housing and industrial development have taken over farmland.  So land is used very intensely.  Green vegetables are harvested right next to sidewalks.  Beans are planted in one corner of the athletic field!

My office, another block away, is on front face of the sixth floor of the social science/humanities office building.  When I taught here 15 years ago, the building was a plan and a pile of bricks.   It was built and renovated many times.  The elevators now work with a sense of confidence.  My office has an Ethernet connection and my classroom has an Internet projector, so I can use my normal web pages for instruction.  I have been given a special office, with an air heater/conditioner.  However, the classroom, with its fully modern electronic system, is not heated; I wear long underwear for teaching.

About 30 years ago, the university built a large statue of Chairman Mao, right in the front middle of the campus.  My office building was placed across the street, facing the campus.  As a result, Chairman Mao is directly facing my office window.  If I keep my head down low, he can’t see me and I can’t see him.  But when I stand up, he sees me and I greet him.  I’m comfortable with this arrangement, and He doesn’t seem to complain either.  In Beijing, Chairman Mao used to stand right at the center of the gate at Tiananmen Square, looking south along a special spiritual line of the Chinese cosmology.  Here at Fudan he also looks south, and my office is right on whatever line he is looking at.  What special fortune put me at such a special place?  Down the hall is a men’s room.  Fortunately, the urinals are on the side wall, so no one can accuse me of urinating in the general direction of Mao.  I wonder if Mao is watching me.  This may be one of the only urinals in the world that Mao is checking.

I live in the dormitory for foreign visiting scholars and professors.  It is called the Expert Building, and it optimistically presumes that all foreigners, at least those invited to this university, are really experts.  I am in apartment 304.  Fifteen years ago I was in apartment 404, so the main difference is one less flight of stairs to climb.  Two years ago the building was renovated, and the differences are subtle.  We now have carpets, warmer but harder to clean than the old floors.  The plumbing is very much improved.  Fifteen years ago, toilet plumbing functioned quite randomly.  Adjusting water temperature for a shower was a very deep lesson in dialectics; the scalding water and the icy water were right next to each other on a one-handle valve, and getting the proper synthesis was almost impossible.  Back then it was a mystery how a country that could launch satellites couldn’t provide decent household plumbing.  Finally the bathroom has caught up to world standards.  Fifteen years ago, as the fall weather turned cold, we had an invasion of mice.  They circulated through the air ducts that serviced our apartments’ kitchens and over our bathtubs, feasting on experts’ cheeses and breads left on counters and terrorizing women taking showers.   At that time, the building’s staff put up screens to control the mice.  Now, the air ducts are more hidden and effectively screened.  The building is quite comfortable.  After a day in unheated buildings, I especially appreciate and no longer take for granted a heated room.

My practice in China has always been to do my own laundry.  I follow Chairman Mao’s policy of “self reliance.”  After a shower in the morning, I plug the bath tub, put water and detergent powder in, and soak and then scrub my underwear, socks, and shirt.  A nice thing about my apartment is its balcony, with a bar for putting up hangers with wet clothing.  This is typical of most Chinese apartments.  On sunny days, clothes dry quickly and get bleached a bit by the sun.   On rainy days, clothing dries slowly, but my apartment heating has an unexpected benefit.  I can put my damp clothing on the hot air register and turn up the fan, and I can hang my shirt on the drapery hardware above the register.   Luxury is highly relative, and right now, on a cold, raw, rainy afternoon, my built-in clothes drier seems like a real luxury.   I am told there is a washing machine available for residents of this building for about $.70; however, there is no drying machine.

Another change from 15 years ago is the quality of the roads.  Back then, the city was installing underground sewers in preparation for paving the roads.  When it rained, the walkways were very muddy.  When we came to the sewer construction area, we had to stay on planks, and a misstep would result in a muddy mess.  That road now is a large road with heavy, fast traffic.

There was another change I wondered about.  Fifteen years ago, the municipal water had an offensive odor.  The water was drawn from a river, and the river clearly had some industrial waste chemicals, as well has high levels of chlorine to disinfect it. They say that tap water is drinkable here, but the culture of not drinking tap water is well established in China and in my mind.   Chinese always boil water (for tea and sterilization) and put hot boiled water in thermos bottles in all hotel rooms.  When my room is cleaned every morning, I get a new thermos bottle of hot boiled water. Fifteen years ago, the boiled water may have been reasonably sterile, but it had a strong chemical odor.  At that time, it was said that the death rate for liver cancer was elevated and linked to this problem.  The city government said it would place the improvement of the drinking water situation as a high priority.

So, needless to say, when I arrived, I opened the thermos bottle in my room and sniffed.  The water had the same chemical odor.  My partial solution is to buy a gallon of good water at the convenience store.  I use this water to make instant coffee and to brush my teeth.  I am a little concerned about the water used to make soup in the cafeteria, but I think the cumulative affect of this problem will not be too great for me, as I will be here on this trip less than three months.  I later found out that my Chinese colleagues do much the same.  It turns out that the university constructed a large water purification plant and sells (cheaply) five-gallon jugs of pure water, both on campus and off-campus.

The changes have been greater in housing.  Fifteen years ago, a professor moved from a dormitory into his newly constructed apartment.  The big improvement was that he had is own, private toilet.  He had entered, as he said, the “Having Toilet Class”!  He still had to use a communal kitchen down the hall, but that was fine, because that way the cooking odors (which are very substantial in Chinese cooking) would not penetrate his living space.

When I visit professors’ new apartments now, the change is stunning.  A nice apartment is in the range of 90 to 100 square meters, around 1,000 square feet.  It has three bedrooms, a living room, dining area, one-and-a-half bath rooms, and a kitchen.  There may be a separate room for a study, or a bedroom might be used.  There is a balcony for storage and drying clothing.  Household furnishings include (in rough chronological order) a color television (now larger and more than one), refrigerator, washing machine, telephone, air conditioner-heater, computer.  I have also seen a special water dispenser that uses a five-gallon jug of purified water and dispenses at the touch of a button hot or cold water.  Another device caught my eye.  It looked like a dish washing machine, but it wasn’t.  Dishes are washed in the sink and then put in this machine where they are sterilized with ozone.  The newest apartments have very nice hard wood parquet. Somewhat older apartments might have a vinyl floor and more of the wiring is exposed.

To get to one lovely apartment, one must walk up many flights of stairs.  I am not sure of the building code here, but in one case I had to climb seven flights of stairs.  The positive way of thinking about this is that the apartment has an automatic aerobic exercise facility you use every time you come home.

While these apartments can not be compared with a large suburban house in the United States, they can be compared with modest apartments in New York or Europe.  The Chinese apartments will be less desirable than the nicest, most modern or some old and large apartments, but that it is possible to think about comparison is quite amazing.

I visited the home of a senior person who has some vague military connections.  (He is a relative of one of my former graduate students.)   His new home, on the 9th floor of an elevator building, has 120 square meters, is very nicely finished and equipped, near a subway to downtown, in a safe neighborhood, close to stores, schools, and super Chinese restaurants.  This would be a very nice apartment in New York City.

This home is in what used to be a suburban farm town.  Just a few years ago, the subway reached out and the farm town was incorporated physically and legally into Shanghai City.  Rice paddies were converted to high-rise apartments.  A very large building was constructed for the local district office.  More striking, a huge, domed courthouse was built.  I am not an architectural historian, but it looks something like the U.S. Capitol Building, although there might be a European model for it.  I assume the corruption and profiteering in the construction of these buildings was in the same league as our public construction projects in the past.

I don’t want to suggest that this is the standard housing for everyone.  This probably is about as good as it gets for middle class people like professors, with seniority.  Most people live in less, and many city residents still live in their old houses.  Still, it is the case that cities are sprouting up new, tall residential buildings in astounding numbers.  Over the next five and ten years, such apartments will be within reach of a substantial portion of the urban population.

There is another aspect of these apartments, in addition to their livability.  The government or work units generally gave employees substantial housing allowances to buy these apartments.  They are now fully owned by the resident (unless there is a mortgage).  These apartments can be sold if a person moves or dies, and I guess there will be a substantial windfall profit.  In short, the government is helping China’s urban residents to become owners of valuable property and to have an additional set of vested interests in political and social stability.  Very soon, they will be concerned about “property values.”

Of course in most urban areas, construction first required destruction of old buildings.  People had to move somewhere temporarily until new buildings were available.  The whole process must have been very unsettling.  I can observe the destruction of old buildings on my daily walk to the market.  After stripping the building of furnishing, glass, window frames, etc., they brought in a power shovel with a mechanical pounder on the end.  As many sidewalk supervisors watched, the machinery pounded away at one or another part, until the brick and concrete building slowly fell down, wall by wall, floor by floor.  It took Three days, and workers were careful to stop from time to time to retrieve the iron reinforcing rods for recycling.    I have no particular knowledge of construction standards, but I was surprised by how many reinforcing bars were imbedded in the structure.  The building did not come down by large pieces, only by small pieces.  I guess there are some real building codes and enforcement.  Historically, Shanghai is not a place with a high risk of earthquake, but I would not be surprised if the construction standards have that possibility in mind.

In classic Confucian thought, a country’s ruler has the full authority of a parent.  Children and citizens don’t vote for either their parents or rulers or parents, they just obey (or rebel).  This spirit hasn’t changed much over the millennia.  One manifestation of this is the Internet.  The government exercises the same type of “parental controls” to protect citizens from inappropriate web pages as parents are told to do for their children in the United States.

I doubt the Chinese government is more able that a typical parent to control effectively what the children see on the internet. I cannot connect to the web pages of the New York Times, CNN, National Public Radio.  On the other hand, I did connect with ABC News, USA Today, The Economist, Financial Times, the extremely useful web page from the Taiwan Security Research Organization, as well as material from the Brookings Institute.  Japan’s prestigious Asahi and Yomiuri newspaper’s English language websites are available.   My very superficial test of pornography sites indicated they were accessible.  One can hardly say that Chinese are cut off from the world.  Fifteen years ago, short-wave radio was a critical link to the outside world.  This has been supplemented and substantially replaced by the internet.

Chinese television has always been a window into Chinese life.  Television is filled with international sports competition.  US basketball, English soccer, women’s volleyball, fencing, etc. remind China that competition is global in many dimensions.  Images of culture are fascinating as well.  Television shows Western and Chinese opera singers in beautiful duets.   China is in a ballroom dancing era, and television shows tango demonstrations, from world class competition to naive five year olds practicing the dance of love.  What will they dance when they grow up?  Then there are the situation comedies and classic and modern Chinese operas.  There are interesting travelogues from China’s interior provinces.  The cooking program emphasizes the importance of washing hands, knives, and cutting boards carefully.   There is an investigative reporting program, perhaps modeled after 60 Minutes.  In addition to embarrassing questions, the video images included clear pictures of accounting books and receipts.  Buried in the middle of this are the reports of the upcoming National People’s Congress.  The following week, however, this major political meeting does command extensive coverage.

 English language news broadcasting is very much expanded, compared with past years.  China’s nightly news comes at 7:00 and 11:00.  It is surprisingly cosmopolitan and analytical. It has some of the same driving music as CNN.   Its biases are tilted in a different way from U.S. news, but not much more.

In the past, China considered itself the “central kingdom,” around which the universe revolved.  Times have changed, and perhaps we have taken on that attitude, thinking we are the one and only superpower.  We consider that we should be able to solve problems of the world (including the Balkans, Sudan, and the Mid East) and share/impose our superior values on the rest of the world, in exchange for granting access to our technology, trade, and wisdom.  The image of the world that appears on Chinese television is quite different.  The world is filled with many different peoples, cultures, and countries, each with its own soccer team, dance troupe, technology exchange, trade opportunities, and prime minister, each important in its own way.

One day’s issue of China Daily gives an interesting image of the world.  About China’s relations with the United States, two articles report comments by a spokesman for China’s Foreign Minister and by the US ambassador in Beijing.   Another article chronicled and analyzed school shootings in the United States.  (A few days later, I read in disturbing detail about the spread of heroin among early teenagers in American suburbs, including my own suburb outside of Philadelphia.)  Brief announcements were made of planned visits to Beijing of political leaders from Bangladesh, Albania, and Poland.  Another article discussed the plans for construction of 300 miles of railroad through Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.  This seems obscure, but this is a critical link between the Chinese rail system and the European rail system.  When this link is completed, China will have its second rail link with Europe, from the Pacific Ocean through southern Europe to France, capable of hauling over 10 million tons of freight a year.   Over time, this may be an exceedingly important development.

While the university community is fairly compact and self contained, it is well linked to the larger resources of Shanghai.  About a 15 minute walk from my apartment is Wu Jiao Chang, where five major roads come together in a large traffic circle.  This is the nearest major shopping district.  Fifteen years ago, it was a muddy area, with lots tables on the sidewalks.  Now it is a small city, with large department stores comparable to the anchor stores in major malls in the U.S.  It has banks, a post office, an office where I established a computer dial-up account, a McDonalds, and a Kentucky Fried Chicken.  What used to be a modest Agricultural Bank is now a 25 story giant tower; the old Lan Tian hotel, where we used to go for a treat, has been torn down so that a larger structure can be constructed.  Here as well as everywhere else in China, what is most impressive is not the buildings but how crowded they are.

From Wu Jiao Chuang, it is about a 20 minute bus ride to downtown Shanghai.  Some lines have double-decker busses to handle the crowds.   Fifteen years ago, the bus fare was about $.02.  The fare has now increased by 10 times, to $.25.  What used to be a 2 yuan dinner is now 20 yuan.  In the past, the largest bank note was 10 yuan.  When I received a salary and bonus, it was a huge pile of 10 yuan notes, that filled my large shoulder bag.  I hauled them downtown to the Bank of China and traded them for eight US $100 notes that scarcely made my wallet bulge and covered my airfare to and from China.  Along with all prices, the currency has inflated; now there is a 100 yuan note.

I continued my shopping expedition by going to downtown Shanghai. Downtown Shanghai has experienced enormous change.  In 1986, Shanghai was a living museum of a modern city from 1930.  It was trapped in time, with its neo-classic buildings, charming but now out of date.  Shanghai was China's richest city, and it contributed a major portion to the tax revenue of the central government; nothing was kept in Shanghai for modern development.  However, in 1986, the central government decided to allow Shanghai to keep some of its profits and to seek external funds for development.  The result has been a massive change.

Shanghai now is filled with large, elaborate, striking buildings, including office and residential buildings and public buildings such as the opera house, museums, and spectacular court houses.  There are elevated expressways, tunnels, bridges, subways, light rail, and pedestrian malls.  The changes are just tremendous. My guess is that the changes are roughly comparable to what happened in New York City between 1900 and 1960.  Now, it is possible that Shanghai has more buildings constructed in the last decade than any other city in the world.

Central Shanghai is on a river, about 20 miles from the ocean, on the west bank of the Huang Pu River.  Until a decade ago, that 20 miles east of the Huang Pu to the ocean was essentially all farm land, planted in rice.  This 20 miles is rapidly changing into a major financial manufacturing center in the global economy.  Next to Shanghai is the new Shanghai on the east bank of the Huang Pu River.  Its skyscrapers are ultra modern, including one building that is 88 stories.  Its form is some blend of a traditional pagoda and a futuristic rocket ship.  The tower includes a hotel for which the lobby is on the 54 floor, accessed very quickly by a high speed elevator.  Restaurants and hotel rooms go up from there.

When I go downtown, I generally take a taxi.  Taxi cabs cruise the streets and are generally available within a few minutes.  The trip downtown costs $4-$5, depending on traffic and precise distance.  Most of the taxis (and other cars too) in Shanghai are a special model of Volkswagen.  Fifteen years ago, Volkswagen was building a joint venture in Shanghai.  By now they have produced a very large fleet of vehicles that look like Jettas but are a little larger.   Most of the taxis are fitted with a second fuel tank, a large cylinder for compressed gas, located in the trunk.  They have two holes to fill fuel, corresponding to the two fuels they use, and a special switch on the dashboard to select the fuel.  I was surprised and delighted to see that China is taking this important step to reducing the air pollution from automobile exhaust.

In more recent years, General Motors has also built an automobile factory in Shanghai, and Buicks are becoming evident.  Detroit is not so far from Shanghai.  There is now non-stop air service, Shanghai to Detroit, less than 13 hours.

These automobile factories symbolize another component of the new development of Shanghai. Going further east towards the ocean is the new Buick factory along with dozens of other factories that supply parts for Shanghai's automotive industry.  Electronic and other industries are sprouting in this region also. Not far in another direction is a huge steel mill, that provides the girders for bridges and buildings, as well as the metal for cars and ships. The new, ultra-modern airport is right on the ocean coast.  There are plans to build a super high-speed mag-lev train system, to zip through the industrial area and deliver passengers downtown in eight minutes.

In short, Shanghai is well on its way to recovering its historic status as a major industrial and financial center in East Asia, and of serving as China's primary gateway to the global economy.

Shanghai also plays a critical role in China's domestic market, with one after another specialty store for wholesale and retail customers.  Still thinking a thermometer would be helpful, I happened to notice a store with scientific and chemical apparatus.  They had roughly 100 different kinds of thermometers to deal with the wide range of temperatures and other requirements in chemistry laboratories and factories.   For about $1.25, I found a nice, simple thermometer to place by my widow.  Its scale is in both Celsius and Fahrenheit.  I now have a better idea about whether to wear long underwear and that third sweater.

Next I went to two bookstores, and found extensive publications for my research work as well as a floor of beautiful western art books.   Most striking was the Shanghai City of Books.  This is a giant bookstore, perhaps 8 stories, and each floor was packed not only with books but people.  The flow of people in and out seemed more like a stadium than a bookstore.  On the business book floor, in addition to classic books on strategy such as Sun Ze’s Art of War or  Thirty-six Strategies, which western businessmen are reading carefully, they had a Chinese book, The American Way of Business Negotiation.   China is a nation of readers.  That was enough for me; my sack was now too heavy to be comfortable, so I took a cab home.

A significant change in downtown Shanghai is the general acceptance of credit cards in large stores.  In the past, only cash worked.  In small stores and around the university campus, also, cash is still needed.  But the large stores downtown are clearly wired into the world economy.
 

The next morning, after two weeks of walking around the track, I finally dared to join the tai ji group.  I had studied tai ji in this very field fifteen years ago, but had not practiced.  I was wondering if I would remember, but was afraid to embarrass myself.  I gently asked and was invited to participate, and was placed in the middle of the group so that no matter which way we turned, I would have a leader in front.  I recalled a few of the moves, but not much.  It doesn’t come back quickly, as bicycling is supposed to.  The exercise lasted a full 40 minutes, and at the end my leg muscles were quivering and my body sweating from these very slow, graceful motions.  Positioning one’s limbs so precisely and slowly takes far more effort than it appears.  At the end, I felt embarrassed at my poor showing, but I was immediately surrounded by more Chinese, congratulating for my spirit and accomplishment.  They urged me to continue study and keep improving.

The next morning I tried again.  At the end of the exercise, I was introduced to a frail, elderly woman, who was a retired physical education teacher.  She could be my tai ji teacher.  I and many others expressed interest.  She explained that the exercisers I was following had different styles and different levels of standardization.  If I continued with them, I would learn bad habits and never learn the proper moves.  She started to show me how to walk, in a very stylized way.  When she started to move, this elderly woman displayed incredible grace, control, and strength.  As she did the first few tai ji moves, I was astonished.  In one tai ji action, one lifts an extended leg slowly.  I can’t get my foot to my waist; she had her foot to her shoulder.  So I start to learn to walk, the right way.

A few days later, I visited a nearby province, and some surprises from that trip are incorporated in the following comments.

One of the most obvious facts of China is that no matter where I have gone, it is crowded.  Whether the local market, downtown shopping district and bookstore, the zoo in a provincial capital, the rural housing in a coastal province - the crowds of people are amazing.  China’s population is now about 1.29 billion, 4.6  times the population of the United States.  China has gained about 200 million people since I taught here in 1986.  Urban areas are flooded with rural migrants, so the crowds are especially noticeable in the cities.  As the post revolution baby boomers reached reproductive age in the early 1980s, China adopted a radical policy of restricting people to one or two children.  Fewer people have been born after that time, and it is this generation that will soon be entering reproductive age, so the rapid growth in population will begin to taper off in the next decade.  Still, it is difficult to imagine all of the consequences of this enormous population on social and political institutions.  For the economy simply to find jobs and housing, not to mention food, for this population has been a perpetual challenge.  To generate significant per-capita economic growth has been amazing.

The growth in infrastructure to allow the population to move around has been stunning.  In Shanghai, over the past 15 years, there have been new tunnels, subways, and express highways.  This infrastructure has enabled suburban farmland to be converted into high-rise suburbs.  At the regional level, railroad service has been expanded and improved.  Regional expressways have been constructed.  For me, the change has again been amazing.  I remember car rides over two-lane roads, constantly dodging mule carts, pedestrians with shoulder-poles, small and large tractors towing wagons, and flocks of geese, being driven to market.  In my last trip on highways, the driver cruised at 130-140 kilometers per hour.  Not till I got to my apartment and did the math did I realize how fast that was-80-87 mph.  Similarly, interregional airlines have improved immensely since I last rode them fifteen years ago.  Standard American type passenger jet planes have replaced the small Russian ones.  Reservations are made easily and are recognized.  Schedules are kept.  And the planes are filled with Chinese people traveling, not with foreign tourists.

There have been great changes in the Chinese people themselves.  The reforms of the past decade have created far more personal freedom.  With the expansion of market forces, people have freedom to go into business, to invest, to hire labor, to buy whatever they can afford, to look for their own job.   There is far more cultural and artistic freedom than in the past.  The spread of literacy has always been considered as part of freedom, because literacy gives people freedom of access to information.  The vast book store and the widespread use of the internet in China is especially significant in this regard. Restaurants have been inventing new dishes.

There also is more religious freedom. Buddhist temples are crowded; Muslims have gone on pilgrimage to Mecca.   On a trip to nearby province, I discovered that in one region, Christianity was widespread and faced no government repression.  A man had built a large room in his back yard and conducts services there Sundays and other days.  Hundreds attend.  As we drove through a nearby city, there was a large beautiful church, obviously built long ago.  Someone bought it recently, renovated it, and put an oversize cross on the top, perhaps fifteen feet high, standing proudly as a symbol above the town.  An American graduate student teaching and researching in northern regions in China last year similarly reported a surprisingly resurgence of Christian consciousness and church attendance.  In one town a new church was built, and it was the largest building in town.  The communist leadership decided to build a bigger building in front of it, but the church remains busy.

By good luck, I was wandering around downtown Shanghai on Easter Sunday and noticed a Christian church.  When I peeked in, I was warmly welcomed, but given profuse apologies that there were no seats available at the service.  It was just too crowded.  I had to sit in the lobby and watch the service on a closed circuit television.

Similarly, when I visited Beijing I was surprised and impressed by an old church.  On the main shopping street of Wang Fu Jing, I had noticed a church on my visits in the early 1980s.  The church was almost invisible, hidden behind a high wall.  Only its steeple was visible.  The church and its grounds were renovated a couple of years ago, and the change was striking.  The wall around the church was removed and the church in its plaza had become transformed into the architectural center piece of the ultra-modern shopping street of Bejing.

The freedom of domestic migration is an important and big change from the past.  One side of the migration involves rural people coming to the city.  They energize the local marketplace, making the myriad food and hawking myriad goods.  They are construction workers, household servants, waiters in restaurants, household servants, garbage pickers helping to recycle, shoe shiners, newspaper sellers, prostitutes, to name the more common activities.

In some cases their living conditions in the city are terrible.  Suddenly behind my dormitory is a shipping container and some crude tents made of scaffolding material and plastic tarpaulins.  They provide limited shelter for about 30 men.  At mealtimes, they squat on the sidewalk eating bowls of rice with a little vegetable. A small table had been set up with a tank of gas and a stove.   They are farmers from Henan, a few hundred miles to the west.  They are digging trenches and installing underground telephone wires in this locality.  This is a slack time in their agricultural calendar, so they are happy to come to Shanghai for a couple of months and earn cash.  They will go home when planting season comes.  As bad as their conditions are, being frugal farmers, they probably would not want to spend more for better temporary accommodations; they’d rather take the money instead.  I guess they have fairly nice, well-equipped homes in rural Henan.  I am like them; I am a temporary worker here and my apartment is clearly temporary, and I am not fixing it up to make it nice.

Other migrants stay longer.  One man from Anhui, a couple of hundred miles away, simply can not support his family of four on the small land he has.  (Of course for centuries, the reality of having a lot of people for little land has been the defining feature of Asian agriculture, and the population growth of recent generations has intensified the problem.) As farmers around the world, he would like higher prices for his farm products, and as farmers around the world, he ends up making money in the urban economy for his rural family.  He works at the market area and sends money home to pay for education expenses, living expenses, and taxes.

Then there is the family, also from Anhui.  They have a fruit stand. I buy my apples, oranges, and pineapples from the wife, pretty much every day, and she selects them carefully for me.  Her husband sits nearby, peeling pineapples, pretty much every day.  Her small son is learning to peel fruit with a sharp knife at too early an age, I feel.  Their fruit stand has is a semi-permanent structure on the sidewalk.  It's inside dimensions are about four by eight feet, and in holds, in addition to fruit, a double bed, television, and one burner stove.  It is their home.  For toilet and bath, they use public facilities in the neighborhood.

One of the chronic problems for rural migrants in the big cities is schooling for their children, so I ask about this.  She says her son is in nursery school.  Coming from another province, they can put their son in Shanghai schools when he is ready, but they will have to pay a fee for “out-of-state” tuition.  One of the two English language Shanghai newspapers had more detail.  About 400,000 children from the provinces now live in Shanghai.  If their parents have employment, a health certificate, a temporary residence certificate, and can pay the fee, their children can go to Shanghai public schools.  About two-thirds go to school this way.  In addition, for children who can not go to the Shanghai public schools, there is a network of hundreds of informal private schools for children from other provinces.

Another side of the migration is that educated graduates from colleges in interior cities are coming to the big cities and coastal regions where they can get jobs using their skills in English or technology, as well as their entrepreneurial abilities.  They get high-paying jobs.  Considering both the rural and the educated migrants into Shanghai, it is said that about one-third of Shanghai’s labor force is made up of migrants from other regions of China.

I learned about another form of this rural to urban migration when I visited friends in Beijing. My friend's mother-in-law is about 85 years old, and needs some assistance in dressing, managing her wheel chair, etc.  They have hired as a live-in care-giver a woman in her 40's from Kansu, an extremely poor region of China in the semi-arid interior.  This woman is paid about US$80 per month, plus free room and board.  She sends money home to her family.  In her case, her husband has a reasonably good job in the town where they live.  Her two sons are in what she considers decent schools.  Her daughter, who is not going to school, cooks and takes care of the family.  And she is in Bejing, making, by her community's standards, big bucks without expenses.   Judging by her girth, she is taking full advantage of the opportunities for free board.  And my friend's mother-in-law has a wonderful care-giver.

It is obvious to me that in Shanghai and probably in many cities, the urban economies have grown tremendously in the past decade.  The rural economies have also grown, certainly in those areas within reach of urban markets.  The most obvious change from the road is the new farm houses.  There was one round of new houses in the early 1980s, after the government dissolved the collective commune system, assigned land to farm families, and raised farm prices.  The new houses of the 1980s were brick and concrete two-story houses that replaced mud walled houses.  The new houses of the 1990s are three and occasionally four stories, some with very modern architectural features and large windows.  Even with this improvement in the countryside, the absolute difference between the cities and countryside has expanded.

An editorial in China Daily claimed that farmers earn only 39 percent of pay received by urbanites.   Academic that I am, I just happen to have China’s Statistical Yearbook on my bed, so I check.  The data are illuminating.  When corrected for inflation, in the two decades from 1978 to 1998, rural and urban incomes both more than tripled.  Maybe the percentage growth in rural income was a little more.  However, throughout this period, urban consumption levels started and remained roughly triple rural ones, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.  This means that in absolute terms, the gap between urban and rural income also tripled.  Even more striking is the way Shanghai stands out in the statistical record.  Shanghai’s urban consumption expenditures are by far the highest of provincial urban statistics, standing at double the average.  Just to refine things one more step, within Shanghai, there is another gap, between the rich and super rich and the poor and very poor.  Many insights can be drawn from these numbers, one of them certainly is that Shanghai (and other rich coastal cities) is a very powerful magnet for China’s rural population.  For poor farmers from a poor area of a poor province, the nice neighborhoods of Shanghai must seem like another world.

It is also worth noting that a very large part of the growth in rural areas is related to their connections to urban economies: selling fruits, vegetables, and aquatic products, and setting up rural industries that supply various consumer and producer goods to the urban economies.  The rural areas are also getting some of the increased urban wealth by migration of various forms, short term, medium term, and long term, and by remittances sent back from the cities.  This process may be stressful but is normal.  Around the world, people from the countryside flock to cities because of the greater opportunities and wealth.

The power of this economic freedom is amazing.  I visited a small privately owned rural factory that is making a small, obscure machine part.  They have over 100 workers with small, inexpensive, specially designed lathes, making these parts by the container load.  All their product is for export, and they already make a substantial portion of the U.S. market.  The factory owner expanded last year and wants to expand again.  Whether he has any notion of the size of the U.S. and world market is not clear, but this one enterprise will probably be able to satisfy the world’s demand for this product in a few years.  The workers get roughly $120-240 a month, 3-4 times the Chinese average, so they consider themselves lucky.   In the West, no one can complete. Western manufacturers would use sophisticated computer controlled machines to make these parts to avoid labor costs, but instead end up paying for the investment. The only thing the Chinese government is doing to assist this small Chinese company is leaving it alone.

One area of expanded freedom has been in telephone communication.  In 1986, ordinary people simply did not have private phones.  An apartment complex might have a single public phone.  In practice one sent letters, and they were delivered quickly.  Long distance calling had improved technically from the 1970s,  but very few telephones were connected to this high quality (fiber-optic?) inter-city and  international system.  By the early 1990s, private phones started to become available, very expensive at first.  International service was still inconvenient.

The situation now reflects enormous advances in telephone use, at least in urban China.  Home phones, mobile phones, and beepers are ubiquitous.  It is hard to escape the rings of mobile phones.  Long distance and international access has been great simplified.  There are prepaid cards one can buy at the post office.  They are also available from the news stand and other places in my local market.  With the prepaid card, one can call long distance from any phone.  With a special long distance prepaid card, any phone has international service.

There is a new freedom in personal relations as well.  Students on campus now have boyfriends and girlfriends and are discovering the joys and heartaches of falling in love.  Fifteen years ago, this was uncommon.  One reason for this change is that students can now plan and control their lives better.  Fifteen years ago, college was free; the government covered the cost of room, board, and tuition for everyone.  Since the government paid for education, the government assigned all graduating students to government jobs.  (Since the government owned pretty much all industry and controlled organizations, pretty much all jobs were government jobs.)  Graduating students could be assigned anywhere in the country.  To pair off with a love mate was extremely risky, as lovers might end up with job assignments very far apart.  So most students did not think about romance until they were assigned jobs.  If they were assigned a job they didn’t like, romance might be deferred another few years while they tried to move.

Now, students frequently pair off.  However, there are still some constraints.  University policy requires that students remain single.  Married students will not be admitted to the university, and students who get married are subject to dismissal.

When I was here in 1986, there were some preliminary discussions about changing the system of tuition and job assignments.  Apparently after nine years of discussion and preparation, the new system was adopted.  Students now pay for their education themselves and then they find their own jobs.  This way, if they are paired into couples, both can look for jobs in the same place.  Under this condition, romance is far less dangerous and far more common.

Of course when students have to pay for school, there are obvious issues of access to education for poor people.  The university had to develop a scholarship program, which helps roughly a third of the students.  The banking system has started a student loan program.

The current system seems so simple and familiar to us that it is easy to overlook the significance of this change.  It is one element in the fundamental restructuring of the labor market.  It is related to the way the “iron rice bowl” (permanent, unbreakable) jobs of the past have been dissolved, and a new system of voluntary contracting is being phased in.  It is related to the restructuring of retirement programs, unemployment insurance, and health insurance programs linked to individuals, not based on basic work unit.  In 1986, these were just ideas that were logical implications of the policy of establishing a market economy.  It has taken roughly a decade of discussion and local testing before these ideas could be implemented into social reality.  With these new social institutions now phased in, China is ready for its next leap.

Not surprisingly, with expanded personal freedom and romance, there is more sexual freedom as well.  Condoms are now market items, easily obtainable, no longer exclusively distributed to married couples by the family planning organization.  Television programs are filled with love triangles.  It is now no longer impossible for unmarried people to live together.   Some say that in the last year or two, cohabitation has become very common.  People want to be together, even if they are not ready to assume all the responsibilities of marriage.  Considering how this has happened in the United States and Europe, it should not be surprising to find this pattern establishing a foothold in China.

 I have read that some Chinese youth form some web based partnerships, where they pretend they are married and play various games together as a team.  They discover how and if they can work together.  They can also get divorced on the web.  To me it sounds a little like the web version of “playing house,” but maybe it goes beyond that in some cases.

There is a peculiar aspect of the culture of romance and sex in China.  In China, the image of romance and sex is western, not Chinese.  In the past, whenever there was a public image (statue, advertisement, poster, painting, in print, television, or movies) of a woman with clearly defined breasts, be they bare, showing cleavage, or hinting at projecting nipples, the woman was always a Western woman.  That Chinese woman also have breasts has been one of China’s most closely held state secrets.

Now, public images of Chinese women are beginning to show a clearly feminine shape.  One statue I saw in front of a newly built railroad station had an abstract female form, pretty clearly Chinese, with well-defined breasts.  Once in a while, Chinese women are shown with a bit of chest and a hint of cleavage in TV advertisements. (There is an exception to this: In southwest China, there is a minority group whose artistic traditions do emphasize breasts and even highlight nipples with a cross.  These images can be shown publicly.)

One day I thought I discovered an exception.  In the market, right next to a new book of Deng Xiaoping’s
writings, was a magazine with a cover picture of a Chinese looking woman with huge (silicone?) breasts, almost spilling out of her bikini.  But as my eyes moved from the starlet to the magazine’s title and articles, I realized it was a Japanese magazine.  The woman with breasts was Japanese, not Chinese.  The rule had been bent slightly; an Asian woman could be shown, but still not a Chinese one.

The story is the same for bellybuttons.  Western women have them, but Chinese women do not, or at least if they do it is a state secret.  I guess this is another secret that can not be kept for long.   Needless to say, the packaging of condoms show only western people.  I would not be surprised if the Ministry of Culture has formal, written rules on these matters.  Evolutionary biologists can research how China became the most populous country in the world, thinking that sex was a western phenomenon.

I finally discovered a remarkable exception to these general principles.  It is allowable for newspapers and
magazines occasionally to have photographs of Chinese women modeling undergarments!  The women pose standing up, in a matter-of-fact way, as if they were modeling winter coats; nothing suggestive their poses or expressions.

Young women are basically very modest in dress, but this is winter time, when everyone needs several sweaters and long underwear.  I guess summer is different.  I remember in previous summers being surprised by so many women wearing very cool, sheer blouses.  Certainly hair styles have evolved over the years.  Curling is now common, and I notice more and more Chinese with brown hair instead of black.  In one case the brown was lightened enough to approach a dirty blond color.  I haven’t seen any of the blues, reds, and purples that occasionally show up among my American students.

Not surprisingly, prostitution has become fairly common in Shanghai, I have been told.  This is to be expected.  The ingredients are all here.  Anywhere in the world when you mix migration from countryside to cities, escape from tight family controls, and economic growth, sex industry flourishes.  The “income elasticity of demand” for sex services is high in (almost?) all cultures, and the supply response is also high.   Prostitution may be the oldest profession, but it is also contemporary.  For the first time in my many visits to China over many years, I have been approached by a pimp and offered a “beautiful” girl, for about $30.  The pimp politely retreated when I explained that whatever the laws are in China, my own rules are extremely strict on such matters.

As my hair grew long and I started looking for a barbershop, friends warned me that some barber shops are really fronts for brothels.  An invitation to go to a back room for a shampoo should be treated with utmost caution.   I looked into the barber shops more carefully and did notice that in some cases there was a large number of young women assistants.  I stayed away from "full service" barber shops.

As people become more free and state controls are reduced, people can use their freedom in unfortunate ways.  Sometimes people are mentally ill and angry.  The good news is that it is difficult to get guns.  The bad news is that it is fairly easy to get dynamite or make explosives in this country that is always blowing up mountains to make roads.  In early March, a man was angry at his former wife and her mother, his step mother, and some neighbors.   He blew up five apartment houses, killing 108.   Within a few days the police captured him and people who allegedly provided him with dynamite and other equipment.  Chinese justice moves at Olympian speeds.  He and two suppliers of dynamite were convicted, refused clemency, and executed only 42 days after the explosion.

Drugs are also reappearing in China, particularly in Yunnan Province in the far Southwest, near the Burma-Laos “Golden Triangle.”  Heroine is smuggled into Yunnan and is both used locally and transported to other domestic and international markets.  Because Yunnan has very special tourist attractions (the real, original Shangri-La is there), the transportation links out are very convenient.  Not surprisingly, AIDS is part of the drug package.

In some other regions, apparently AIDS was accidentally but extensively spread to farmers through blood transfusions.  Farmers sold blood, and after some blood plasma products were extracted, the blood was returned to them.  For efficient processing of the blood, the blood from many donors was mixed together, so AIDS from one person was quickly spread to hundreds of thousands of poor farmers.  The provincial government, through its health department, apparently was deeply involved in this debacle.   It will be interesting to see how the central government reacts to this man-made disaster of huge proportions.  Will it participate in a cover-up of gross government incompetence and arrogance, or will it use this tragedy as a way to shake up government administration?  As far as I can gauge, AIDS is now well established in China but not pandemic, as in Africa, Thailand and perhaps India.  It clearly is a major danger for China.

Freedom of press has expanded enough to create a counterfeit money problem.  In all my transactions, bills down to the 10 yuan note (about $1.25) are scrutinized.  So far I have not gotten stung, but when I bought my yogurt one day, the women in front of me in the checkout line had her 10 yuan note rejected.  Its paper was a little softer and the printing not perfect.  My unprofessional opinion was that the counterfeiters are quite skilled.

The biggest change in China is the way of thinking, just about everyone says.  In the past Chinese presumed the state would care for them and had a psychology of dependency.  Then as reforms began, they were perplexed and reluctantly began to assume more responsibilities in a market environment.  Now a deeper acceptance and understanding of personal initiative in a market environment.  There is much more space for personal initiative.   Colleagues talk about the costs of buying their apartment (in something akin to a gigantic coop-conversion program) and are wondering about the logic of life insurance and private pension investments to take care of themselves.

There is one peculiar demographic factor that will increasingly fuel China’s individualism.  In the 1980s, one of the worries Chinese had about the one child policy was that single children would grow up to be little princes.  They would not have older and younger siblings to teach them seniority, discipline, and responsibility.  Instead, these single children would be spoiled by their doting parents and grand parents.  My very crude eyeball gauge tells me that today’s students are, on the whole, taller and heavier than students 15 years ago.  As kids, they got more milk and other foods than earlier cohorts.   Lacking siblings to play with, they run around with their friends and hang out in China’s spanking new shopping centers.   Maybe these predictions were correct.  China’s first batch of single children is now in its teens and is already shaping the culture.  They will soon be entering the labor market and having a greater impact.   It is likely that the patterns of individualism will rapidly intensify.

While the ideological changes seem great, there is a possible element of continuity.  Sometimes it seems that the Chinese adopt western ideas in a simplistic, fundamentalist, puritanical, and sometimes patrimonial way.  Mao to some extent can be explained this way, in his adoption of western Marxism and adaptation into a simplistic, collectivist, puritanical (except for himself) doctrine.  A century earlier, a Chinese revolutionary became Christian and led a huge revolution to establish the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace.  The Christian leader I met on this trip may be devout, but he knows little about the history of Christianity.  He did not know about the difference between Protestants and Catholics, not to mention the difference between Protestants sects, but he was quite sure that Christianity was against alcohol, movies, and dancing.  He was a religious leader and factory owner combined, with a western ideology to reinforce economic paternalism.   Curiously enough, when Chinese started showing interest in market economics, they sometimes could not go beyond Adam Smith, and adopted the capitalism uninformed by welfare or Keynsian economics.

In American, I have been asked about repression of Falun Gong, invasion of Tibet, labor exploitation, female infanticide, and lack of democracy. I called my wife on her birthday, and she described a New York Times article about executions of corrupt officials and harvesting of body organs for medical use.

While these are issues are real, this type of question cuts off understanding the enormous improvements in the range and depth of personal freedom, coupled with the very large improvement in standard of living for a large share of the population.  Focusing on these questions in China is as unbalanced as trying to understand the United States by focusing on kids shooting up schools, workers shooting up their offices, drug abuse, or political corruption.  These issues exist and are important and terrible, but they hardly begin to illuminate the broader and more common patterns in society.  In China most people are unhappy about the same issues that disturb us.  In addition, many of the things that disturb Americans about China are already illegal.  Whether in China or America, the police are not completely able to stop all bad things.  This is especially true as the scope of freedom expands and the responsibilities of the state are reduced.

In other cases, of course, these issues do reflect government policy.  While expanding personal freedom, the political leaders have set a well-defined limit on freedom.  There is no freedom to organize people in an autonomous way, separate from the government.  Falun Gong has been extremely successful in doing this with email, cell phones, and web sites, and this deeply disturbs the government.  Religious freedom peters out when believers try to organize publicly and outside of the religious associations set up for them by the government.  The state is very worried and very strict about any organized group that challenges its authority.  Some of the state’s repressive actions are less than popular, but few are willing to go public. Chinese think about how grass survives by bending with the wind, but how the pine trees, standing tall and alone, get blown over.

As for democracy, I have not sensed this as a big issue among Chinese.  The idea of democracy does not come easily in China.  For three thousand years, China’s political traditions have been imperial, autocratic rule, sometimes decent and sometimes terrible, but never democratic.  At a very deep cultural level, the way of thinking about politics still is shaped by Confucianism, and Confucius was a great believer in a good, civilized monarch instead of rule by a gang of ruffians, but he never imagined democracy.  Unable to control directly, the state used brutality to frighten people into conformity.  Considerable imperial law dealt with the modes of execution, subsequent dismemberment, and how many family members would also be executed for which crimes. From Confucius until now, Governments have always ruled people; people have never controlled governments. Governments have been expected to maintain social stability, and part of that involved ideological uniformity.   In more recent years, Mao, incorporating ideas from Lenin and Stalin, shaped China’s politics.  We in the West take for granted the enormous gift we have of the Aristotelian way of thinking about political participation, then filtered through the European enlightenment thinking of people creating their own political systems.  It is hard for us to imagine the political culture that comes from China’s heritage.

Most people are happy with the general direction of policy and indeed wish it had started earlier, instead of having had Mao’s cultural revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  There may be debate about whether Mao’s collectivist policies were wise or foolish in the immediate post war situation of the late 1940s.  In rural areas, land was collectivized.  In the cities, the state owned almost all of the industry.  Workers “ate at the country’s table,” meaning that everyone, no matter what job, no matter what job output, got very similar wages and symbolically ate at the same table.  All workers also had  “iron ricebowls,” meaning that jobs and resulting income to buy food (rice) were unbreakable.

There is widespread agreement that at some point in time, they became constrictive, almost like a crab’s shell that had to be removed to provide more incentives and bring further growth.  Since the post Mao policies began in the early 1980s, the supplies and quality of food improved greatly.  The housing for a very large portion of Shanghai’s population is greatly improved in size and quality.   People now own substantial house furnishings that have simplified their lives.  Refrigerators mean they do not have to go shopping for fresh foods every day.  Telephones have changed patterns of communication, and now cell phones are everywhere.  Those who haven’t seen all these improvements yet look forward to them, and those who have them want more.  They all want to maintain the social stability that enables economic development.   In 1986, a professor likened China to a very large, overloaded train approaching a curve in the tracks.  He explained that the train had to slow down and take the curve slowly so it did not fall off the tracks and cause a disaster.  Probably most people feel that the change has been fast enough, maybe too fast.

This does not mean that people are oblivious to or silent about the problems that emerge in this rapid process of change.  Political demands deal with specific problems, which abound.   People complain about official corruption, they are upset about being unemployed, and protest against higher taxes.  They demonstrate against management abuses of factory bosses.  Inadequate compensation for on-the-job injuries can trigger protests by the family members of the worker.  Farmers complain about low farm prices, high local taxes, and corrupt local officials.  They demonstrate against factories that pollute their irrigation and drinking water.  There is widespread desire for further development of the legal system to reduce arbitrary and violent actions by local officials.  With all these tensions and problems, very few people would like to go back to the rigid controls and planning of the Mao years.  There may be nostalgia for the era of zero inflation and zero unemployment, but there is no nostalgia for the era of uneven food supply, small apartments, and almost no consumer goods.

At an institutional level, at the moment it seems that people are putting more hope in the development of the legal and judicial system than in a more competitive legislative system.  People are already using the rudimentary legal system to sue government officials for negligence.  In another strange reliance on the judicial system, one man has sued his wife for having an abortion; he claimed it violated his reproductive rights.   At the end of April, a new marriage law was passed.  Its new provisions made illegal for a married person to cohabit with another person.  No more concubines or mistresses.  Similarly, physical abuse was banned.  The key enforcement of these laws was not jail but financial compensation to the aggreived spouse in a divorce settlement.

Over the years the legislative assemblies have helped write new laws an exercised some controls over the local corruption and abuses, but I have not heard many people think that this will be a source of political change.  A few people have noted the inherent problem of a single party system supervising itself to constrain corruption. I have not heard people say explicitly that they would like to be able to vote for a different party or candidate as leader, but such a view is outside the limits of what can be said publicly.  They are impressed that in the United States, when one party has some scandal, another party can take over from it without social disorder and civil war.   The ideas of reform and personal autonomy are becoming better established and will eventually result in demands for political change.  China will eventually get to this turn in the tracks, but not immediately.   This will take time, and time will probably be measured in an Asian perspective of generations, not an American perspective of 4-year election cycle.

My friends in the park ask me why I am studying China.  I explain that my interests go back to the Quemoy crises of the 1950s, when war between China and the United States was not inconceivable.  I said that I wanted to help the American people understand China better, so that our relationship can be closer and stronger.   My exercise mates were very happy about this.  They know that the United States is an advanced, wonderful, important country, that good relations between China and the United States are extremely important, and that mutual understanding by the peoples strengthens the foundation of this relationship.  Indeed, there is a strange irony.  Just as the United States is feeling negative about China, China is very positive about the United States, our culture, technology, and our consumer goods.  Hamburger has become a favorite dish, and Chinese may have outdone us; their hamburgers come in chicken, pork, shrimp, and beef.   A burger shop opened on campus last month, and I tried the chicken leg burger.  It came with lettuce, tomato, hot sauce, cucumber slice, and a slice of egg.  The sesame bun had been warmed in a microwave.  It was very good, but not quite American in flavor; nor was it Chinese in flavor.  We decided it must be “international” in style.   In Shanghai, a directive was recently passed that all school children must study English from Grade 1.   At a deeper level, China is restructuring its basic institutions to create a market system, with many institutions patterned after ours.

The airplane bumping incident in April 2001 reminded me that Chinese nationalism remains an important element in contemporary Chinese culture.  Virtually every one with whom I discussed the matter was very angry at the United States.  They accepted at face value the report of the Chinese government that the American plane caused the crash by turning abruptly.  They also accepted the Chinese interpretation of the Law of the Sea that intelligence gathering (AKA spying) over a country's Exclusive Economic Zone was prohibited.   While my acquaintances were polite and respectful to me, they were angry at the United States government.  Why did an American plane spy on them?  Why did it crash into their airplane, killing the pilot?

I replied that we did not have enough information to know who bumped into whom.  Deliberately using a slogan of Mao and Deng Xiaoping, I said we should "seek truth through facts," and I pointed out that we did not have many facts yet.  I guessed that U.S. intelligence gathering activities were related to U.S. commitments to protect Taiwan in the event of hostilities.  Concerning international law about spying, I actually went to the Law of the Sea website and read the laws.  My students were fascinated when I showed them how they could do this also.  I shared my conclusion that military activities were generally allowable in and over a country's Economic Zone, but noted the ambiguous statement that the high seas were to be used for peaceful purposes.  Don't military leaders always claim they are keeping the peace?

Chinese replied that Taiwan was part of China, and how the Chinese and Taiwanese people resolved their political separation was essentially a "family question," in which the United States should not interfere.  I agreed with the premise that Taiwan historically has been part of China, and that managing the relationship is much like a family question.  However, I explained that when one member of a family threatens physical force (builds and tests missiles in the region) to resolve a family question, a family question can become a social question, in which friends and policemen become involved.  They immediately understood this logic and were at a loss dispute this viewpoint.

Around the campus, where people knew me already, these conversations were energetic but always concluded by affirming the friendship of Chinese and American people, regardless of whatever disputed their governments have.  Chinese know they can't influence their government, and similarly do not hold American people responsible for their government's actions.

In one case, however, this exchange broke down.  One evening I joined a Belgian visiting scholar and his Chinese friend for dinner in a fancy restaurant downtown.  I got into a conversation with another patron about airplanes bumping.  He was loosened and energized by alcohol.  As I explained my analyses, he blurted out, "You are being logical, but I am very angry; a Chinese airplane has crashed and a Chinese pilot is dead!  And it is your fault."  I did not fully understand his next comment.  It was something like, "I'm going to kidnap you," or "I could kidnap you," or "What if I kidnapped you?"  Not quite sure what he said, I replied, "That kind of activity is illegal, and police could get involved."  He fumed and blurted, "I am above the law, the law doesn't affect me."

At this point, everyone around tried to calm him down.  My table mates explained that I was just a simple professor, and not responsible for U.S. government activities.  Most important, his friends came and realized he was very drunk and was creating a dangerous situation for himself.  They basically hauled him away.  As he left my table, he said he would wait for me outside.  The restaurant owner and waiters moved toward my table to protect me.  We finished our meal very slowly, giving him time to go home, which he eventually did.   The evening was a powerful reminder of the dangerous reality of emotional nationalism.
 

Since these impressions are shaped by the early morning exercises in the park I should point out that these people are not China’s elite or powerful.  They are workers, laid off and retired workers, housewives, and an occasionally a teacher.  At the same time, my images are shaped by being in Shanghai, one of the richest and most cosmopolitan cities in China.  What I am seeing here is probably about as good as it gets in China (except for special compounds for high officials and foreign businessmen).  I am pretty far away socially and economically, if not geographically, from the countryside, the temporary quarters for rural migrants in the city and right next to my dormitory, and the ethnic issues of Tibet and central Asia.

My morning studies of tai ji continue.  Before exercises one morning, my teacher shows me how to stretch. She easily lifts her foot to her head, hooks it on a bar, and starts to stretch her leg and back.  I struggle to get mine to a bar at waist level.   Then she points her toes almost vertical to a post and pulls herself towards the post to stretch the lower leg.  The next day, she is doing this by hugging a tree, and eventually I realize that hugging a tree is an excellent stretching exercise.  I can’t get my toe more than an inch or two off the ground.  I am embarrassed and discouraged, but she is very optimistic.  She is confident that if I come to the park every morning for the next year or two, I can become as limber and she is!
As the weeks go by and my tai ji skills improve, I begin to unfold some mysteries.  Just before the tai ji starts, one of the participants puts a music tape in a player.  Its music is interspersed with strange phrases, but gradually I discover that the phrases are the names of the various tai ji movements.  It is a little like a tape of a square dance, with someone calling out the steps.  That is how everyone "remembers" what to do and does it at the same time!  As I watch more carefully, I realize that many of the morning participants are not very skilled. They are "faking it."

As I walk around the track one man helps me understand.  He says that tai ji is really in the mind, not the body.  Westerners think too much about externalities, while Chinese are thinking on the inside.  As I advance in tai ji, he reassures me that I will make this transition.  If the brain gets trained properly, the body movements are as simple and natural as painting.  When I asked how long it might take, he said it was like raising a child, where maturation does not show up each day, but over a long time it does.

This all helps me understand China better.   Tai ji is constant motion, back and forth, push and pull, turn right and left, exhale and inhale.  It reminds me of the great classic Chinese novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which starts out, “Unified countries separate, separate countries unify.”   China also is in constant flux, with policies changing left and right, rigid and relaxed, advance and retreat.   But these movements are deeply linked to internal mental training.    In tai ji, the cycles take years to master but a few seconds to do.  When China changes, it first prepares its thinking for a decade and then makes its changes over generations.  The underlying dynamic is the same.