Correspondent's Notebook
Reflecting on today’s China
2 October 2009
Radio Australia’s Karon Snowdon reflects on the 60th anniversary of Communist rule in China.
Hello welcome to Correspondents notebook. I’m Karon Snowdon.
China is marking its 60th year as a communist republic.
There’s a lot to celebrate even if the Party’s emphasis has been on parading its military strength.
As I think about China today I wonder how the people I met during a brief visit in 2008 are celebrating.
If they are at all.
There are two in particular who might stop a moment and consider how their lives have changed.
Deng Xiaoping’s edict back in the 1970′s to open the economy and embrace Chinese capitalism has delivered some notable improvements.
For Hu Yunping its meant his ambition to become the country’s leading manufacturer of motor bike electronics was a dream that could come true.
He started out with one employee – himself and a small loan from the local government.
By 2008 his factory supported 600 workers and he was supplying foreign factories nearby, and moving into exports.
Energetic entrepreneurs in China like Mr Hu have flourished.
So have their workers to a large extent, despite low wages and conditions below western factory standards.
Hu Yunping also spoke enthusiastically about his employees as the backbone of his business success and the opportunities he gave for individual advancement.
My other friend is Hou Jinrong who moved to Beijing in 2000 with her husband and three kids from a tiny village in Hunan province.
They risked everything as illegal workers, to make a better life than their half a hectare family farm could provide.
But it hasn’t been easy.
She told stories of eking out a living at first by collecting rubbish to recycle, still the only job her husband can find.
Stories of having to jump out of windows and run from the police more than once.
Of setting up underground migrant schools for the kids.
It’s a bit looser these days but the household registration or Houko system was rigidly enforced until recently.
It created abuse, the denial of wages and access to health care and schooling.
After years of being illegal in Beijing, Mrs Hou works as a cleaner now and considers herself a success.
But now the capital’s persistent development creates constant uncertainty.
HOU: (translation) Most of the houses they are looking for are going to be torn down. So frequently they have to find another house and move on.
The day I met her was the first time in eight years Hou Jinrong had ever travelled from the outer suburbs into central Beijing.
For the first and probably the last time she drank green tea in a five-star hotel lobby.
The hundreds of millions of migrant workers moving around the country played a large part in China’s economic success story of the last three decades.
They built the highways, schools, factories and office towers. They died in the filthy dangerous coal mines to power the miracle double digit growth of the last two decades.
They now wait for the social security safety net that the Party leaders say is the next step in modernising China.
More recently, modernising the People’s Liberation Army has been a priority for several of the Government’s last five year plans.
Beijing aims to be recognised as a power in more ways than one.
It’s become an economic powerhouse on the labour of its workforce — many of whom don’t regret the hardship.
It’s meant their children will enjoy a much easier life than they have had and unimaginable opportunities. As for loyalty to the Party and its tenacious grip on power- that topic isn’t yet part of their agenda.
