Lisa met a rather bleary eyed group of Australians early on day one to begin our tour of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden Palace. It was a rather subdued bunch of 42 who boarded bus 6 as if hung over from a long night of heavy drinking. We are a motley lot whose youngest age is possibly mid-sixties and some into their eighties. One is visually impaired and walks with a guiding stick, but quite fit. Her partner wears a shirt proclaiming: “I’m a grumpy old man. I can’t stand stupidity!” Whenever he alights from the bus, however, he and his visually impaired partner light up their cigarettes. So much for ‘not abiding stupidity’. Another is quite frail and will require wheel chair assistance and the rest are a bit like M and I - We’ve all seen better days!
Lisa (40ish) lives in Beijing, this city of 24 million with its high rises that march on forever like soldiers in matching uniform; she lives in a two bedroom apartment with her husband and 13 year old daughter just outside Beijing. Rental in Beijing proper is very expensive and she is paying a similar weekly rent to what we might pay in Brisbane. Lisa’s daughter was born in Beijing but Lisa and her husband were born in a city to the north of Beijing. Next year her daughter will go to high school and as such must leave Beijing and return to the place of her parents’ birth for her schooling. That’s the rules! Don’t bother objecting!
The one child policy also dictated that there would be no brothers and sisters. However, she has recently received official notification she may now have another child since the relaxation of the policy. It’s not hard to understand why she declined their kind invitation to another pregnancy. And I suspect that many women who, like Lisa, are trapped in a lifestyle where absence from employment for some years raising an infant would not be wholly positive. She did point out that some couples ignored the one child policy but they tended to be wealthy and prepared to pay exorbitant fines.
There is no doubt that the opening up of China to the outside world has wrought enormous benefits for the people of this vast country with its 1.3 billion people. Tens of Millions of Chinese starved to death during the disastrous ‘Great Leap Forward’. The World Food Conference in 1974 was told there was no way for China to feed its billion people and the country was headed to catastrophe. But since that time, hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty, malnutrition and starvation.
We first took a tour from Hong Kong via Macau, Guangzhou, the New Territories and back to Hong Kong over twenty years ago when this giant was awakening from its slumber of the past six hundred years. At that time they had begun building hundreds of kilometres of highways on which only trucks and buses were allowed. But they were planning for the future. The old traditional ramshackle houses were being compulsorily resumed and residents forced into new accommodation. We had seen the new high rises emerge in the Pudong District across from the Bund in Shanghai and could only describe them as jewels suddenly scattered across a former wasteland. It was clear to us then that China was ‘coming’!
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