A Country with a Long Way to Go

Seediness, poverty and neglect belie the propaganda images

The dusty reality of China remains today surprisingly different from the glowing myth so long propagated by Peking's ideologues. After touring the southern provinces, TIME Hong Kong Correspondent Richard Bernstein, who speaks Chinese, last week reported these impressions:

The nameless small alley is littered with discarded, rusting kerosene cans and shards from broken roof tiles. Ragged bundles of kindling wood tied with string line the sidewalk. Chipped red bricks, tin washbasins and wooden buckets for carrying water are scattered over the hard-packed earth. A few bicycles, all carefully locked, lean against the facades of three-story buildings. Three chickens cluck quietly inside a slatted wooden cage. Children mill about, some of them skipping rope, while their parents do the weekend wash, drawing water from streetside cold-water spigots.

The seediness and poverty of this street scene is a far cry from the calendar-picture China: ruddy-cheeked girls picking ripe fruit in an Eden-like orchard, smiling, neatly dressed workers in a brightly lit industrial plant. But this small alley in the provincial city of Nanning (pop. 500,000), capital of the Kwangsi Autonomous Region bordering North Viet Nam, is typical of China's overall appearance.

To be sure, China has its imposing factories and impressive, lush communes to show off to visitors. But to wander into small urban streets or tiny rural villages is to discover what may come closest to the real China. It is a country with a long way to go.

Local propaganda boasts that at the time of "liberation," Nanning had only four factories and was a "consumer city," importing the produce of other areas to sustain itself. Now, authorities proudly point out, Nanning has quintupled in population, it has 400 factories, and it has been transformed into a "socialist producer city." There are an impressive hospital, housing complexes and several well-laid-out factories employing thousands of workers.

But Nanning is also poor. On this little alley, as in so many others, the houses have no running water. Most rooms are lit by dim naked light bulbs that dangle by electrical wires from the ceilings. Window casements are broken, cracked and stained. Nothing looks new or even recently painted. There is inadequate ventilation in the hot summer months. Small braziers, fueled by stamped cakes made from coal dust and mud, serve as the only cooking appliances in shared kitchens. Families live in two or, at most, three small rooms, decorated primarily with peeling propaganda posters or the still ubiquitous portraits of Chairmen Mao Tse-tung and Hua Kuo-feng lined up side by side like altar gods.

None of the apartments have toilets; instead the residents use a large common facility around the corner from their alley. The apartment dwellings look as though they were constructed decades ago. In fact, they are barely twelve years old, having been built in 1966, just before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution that plunged China into a decade of chaos.

"Since then, the Gang of Four has prevented us from making any progress," claims one resident of the Nanning alley, a worker in a film production studio. "We are very backward," he says, and adds, "If you return in ten years, you will find everything changed. We are going to make it all over again, all new and modern in ten years' time."

That statement is heard throughout China. Propaganda slogans calling on the people to contribute more to the Four Modernizations are ubiquitous. Factory managers, commune heads, workers on shop floors, all seem to be imbued with the religion of the modernization, which is gradually replacing the religion of Maoism. There is an almost palpable feeling that China, inspired by the hardheaded realism of Teng Hsiao-p'ing, has turned a fabulous new corner. But, despite obvious and portentous policy changes, the China that meets the eye and the ear is only marginally different from the China of six years ago.

In the heady days of 1972's Ping Pong diplomacy, foreign visitors started trooping to China and writing often rhapsodic reports. Now, as then, there is strong evidence that the Chinese--at least in areas open to foreign visitors--have an adequate if spare diet, that most enjoy basic good health, that they are adequately if unstylishly clothed. But it is hard to discern any real improvement in living standards.

The cities are extremely dilapidated.

Their most common features: stained whitewashed facades, crumbling brick, worn, peeling wooden doors. Even some proud monuments suffer from a lack of care. In Canton, the principal theater is the 5,000-seat Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, built in 1951. The hall still looks imposing from a distance. Inside, the walls are shabby, and the pillars and beams, once decorated in temple-of-heaven-style brilliance, are faded and unrestored.

A comparatively wealthy and sophisticated city, Canton shows signs of the regime's increasing tolerance of individuality. Hair styles, for example, are becoming more varied; many women sport pageboy-style cuts or have even had permanent waves. Earnest pigtails, however, are still the rule rather than the exception. There is more color in clothing styles; a red-and-black plaid is now particularly popular. But both men and women continue to wear drab, baggy, amply patched blue-and-gray unisex work suits.

There has been no diminution of China's incessant sloganeering, although the messages have changed from abstract ideology (TAKE CLASS STRUGGLE AS THE KEY LINK) to goal-oriented pragmatism (MAKE GREATER CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FOUR MODERNIZATIONS.) Children can now sing about being airplane pilots and flying high in the beautiful sky, as they did in one Canton kindergarten. But these three-and four-year-olds are also taught the obligatory hymns to Chairman Mao, indicating that political indoctrination remains a cradle-to-grave affair. Bombastic recordings of The East Is Red, the most common paean to Mao, complete with loud cries for The Great Helmsman's longevity, still resound through airport lounges or railroad-station waiting rooms. Exhortatory radio broadcasts blast out over public loudspeakers in factories and communes. In Nanning, today's big stage hit celebrates the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Kwangsi Autonomous Region. The show is an interminable series of extravagant cliches depicting the glorious history of the Communist Party in Kwangsi.

Art that does not conform to the canons of socialist realism is now being tolerated. A sign outside the chief bookstore in the city of Kweilin advertises a ten-volume set of The Book of History, a newly rehabilitated Confucian classic. In art schools and painters' studios, traditional scenes of mountains and valleys now predominate, rather than portraits of revolutionary heroes. At Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Canton, the Central Philharmonic now plays piano works by Liszt and violin pieces by Sarasate, composers who a few years ago would have been denounced as "decadent bourgeois." Also on the program, however, is a "proletarian" orchestral piece entitled The Sun Shines upon the Smokestacks. The music is pleasantly imagistic, a kind of Si-nified Debussy.

Most significant, perhaps, the cult of personality that riveted attention on Mao has virtually disappeared. In briefings and introductions, references to the Chairman are few and far between. A few years ago. if a farmer were asked about the most important factor in increasing rice production, he would answer automatically: "Mastering the thought of Chairman Mao." Now he is more likely to respond: "More chemical fertilizer."

The need for chemical fertilizer is far more obvious than the need, if there ever was one, for ritualistic slogans. For the sake of foreign groups that regularly tramp through its fields, the Chung Luo Tan commune just north of Canton has a printed leaflet proclaiming dramatic "year by year" increases in grain output. But the leaflet also includes statistics showing that there was virtually no increase in production between 1965 and 1976. Since the population of China increased by 25% in that period, the commune has suffered a serious net decline in per capita output. Admits one old farmer, carefully tending the private plot where he grows fodder for his own pigs and chickens: "We were better off before the Cultural Revolution than we are now."

Food is neither abundant nor of good quality. Fruit stands in Canton, Kweilin and Nanning display little more than tangerines, apples and pomelos. The tangerines are bruised and shriveled, the apples small and worm-eaten, the dry pomelos no match for those found elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Protein-rich bean curd, once the poor man's meat and a standard part of the everyday diet in China, has become a luxury that is rarely found in city markets.

Since the official stores are chronically undersupplied, much shopping is done at small, free markets set up on sidewalks or in alleyways. This remains by far the largest area of profit-seeking enterprise in China. Roads leading in and out of cities are filled with farmers carrying bundles of vegetables that they have grown on their private plots. They sell them to supplement their cash incomes (which amount to $150 to $200 a year).

The plots are carefully tended, a sign of how important they are. Their existence also points up a serious problem for China's modernizers: if the city is poor, the countryside is even poorer.

This was especially apparent in Kweilin. On a typical chill winter evening, throngs of urbanites crowded the streets, strolling or milling about in a department store, the center of activity after working hours in most cities. A boisterous crowd pushed and shoved at the counter of a shop to buy, for about $2 a pair, a kind of canvas shoe that had just come on the market. On a darkened sidewalk near by, groups of farmers, bundled in ragged blankets to protect themselves against the nighttime cold, sat in front of small piles of peanuts, tangerines and medicinal luo han gourds, trying to sell them to passersby. Later, as the crowds on the streets thinned, the farmers picked up their possessions and, with their blankets draped over their shoulders, began making their way toward their communes on the city's outskirts.

Meanwhile, at a local "workers' cultural palace," the large, ramshackle movie house was jammed to capacity. The film was a series of colorful vignettes, accompanied by syrupy music, celebrating the achievements of Chinese socialism. There were scientific laboratories, gleaming hospitals and glowing blast furnaces. But it was the images of food production --a plentiful catch of fish or trees laden with rich, ripe fruit--that brought loud oohs and aahs from the audience. The gap between the portrait of socialist plenty on the screen and the spare, undeniable reality of farmers bundled in ragged blankets on the street outside is all too conspicuous.

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