Bullish China

Our family is like a little chicken.
When it grows up it becomes a goose.
And it’ll turn into a sheep.
The sheep will turn into an ox.
And after the ox is Communism.
And there’ll be dumplings and meat every day.……”
Communism, or at least China’s bastardised version of it – what would Marx have made of fourth-class railway compartments in a supposedly classless society? – has duly performed its miracle. The path has been far from straight, the journey anything but painless, certainly not bloodless. But the Communist party, by its own criteria at least, has delivered. As the hero of To Live, a 1994 film by the director Zhang Yimou, promises his son and later his grandson, life has indeed got better for most Chinese.
The story of To Live, and indeed the life of Mr Zhang, a once-banned film director recast as the Communist party’s propagandist-

in-chief, tells us a lot about China 60 years after the founding of the People’s Republic and 30 years since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. An epic drama, soaked in the misery of collectivism and the madness of Maoist dogma, its portrayal of Communist rule was enough to get it struck down by censors. Yet, in the end, the film somehow manages to be optimistic, a celebration of the nation’s unity and capacity for progress after 150 years of colonial humiliation and internal strife.

That optimism is almost palpable in China’s frenetic cities, where nearly one in two people now live compared with one in 10 in 1949. Born of the belief that today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be an improvement on today, optimism is a powerful antidote to the resentment of autocracy that many westerners too readily assume to be the norm.

Meat and dumplings are not enough to buy off everybody. But they help. After 30 years of breakneck growth averaging 10 per cent a year, per capita income on a purchasing power parity basis has hit $6,000 (€4,100, £3,750). That still makes China a lower-middle-income country, more Angola than America. The average also hides a yawning income gap that keeps the party leadership awake at night. Yet it has been enough to release hundreds of millions of people from poverty. More importantly, it promises to release hundreds of millions more.

Aspiration is everywhere. Each year, China produces 700,000 engineering graduates and 30,000 MBAs, says Beijing Axis, a consultancy. There are 650m mobile phones in circulation, roughly the number of pigs slaughtered every year. In the late 1990s, the consultancy reckons, only 500 Chinese residents knew how to ski. Last year, 5m visited ski resorts.

Nor is it merely a question of personal opportunities. China will shortly overtake Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy. This year, its people will buy more cars and trucks than Americans. Beijing has sent a man into space. China, in short, is well on the way to erasing the memories of colonial subjugation that have haunted a nation once accustomed to thinking of itself as the centre of civilisation.