One of my girlfriends is in China now. She was born in China and lived through Mao. She was a promising young student at the time and was the only child in her neighborhood selected to be sent to a special school in Beijing.
She was one year into the school when Mao started the Great Leap Forward. Her teachers were suddenly abused or even killed, and she was sent to the hinterlands to learn the ways of the proletariat by working in the fields.
She’s now a US citizen, but visits China often. This time, she says that all of her favorite stores are gone, and that she cannot find anything she wants while shopping.
I wonder what that’s about. She did send some pictures from what looked like a huge mall, and it had Christmas decorations and Christmas trees all over the place. This is Beijing.
She said she could still not find the things she wanted to buy.
My wife and I were in China last year for 2 weeks on a tour, and frankly there is little evidence it is a communist country, at least at the every day level. Many Chinese TV stations which seem to broadcast whatever they want (they have a lot of business and economic type programs), unbelievable amounts of money (in Beijing and Shanghai you see people driving around in Lamborghinis and Rolls Royces, etc.) Massive traffic jams because so many people now have cars. Also, all the old is being torn down in favor of the new. A major sight throughout China is seeing piles of rubble where old residential neighborhoods have been bulldozed, and 40 to 60 story condos are going up in their place.
Just as an example of how wealthy the Chinese are now, one evening when we were in Beijing, several of us decided to check out the market down the street which was a Chinese version of Whole Foods. So we went in there, and found the market was mostly imported food from Europe and the U.S. One of the things that caught my eye was the wine department. I saw one of the bottles of wine on display and said, “that isn’t what it looks like, is it?”
Racks of Chateau Latour and Chateau Lafite de Rothschild. Given they were displayed behind plexiglas, but there must have been 40 or 50 bottles. And then I looked at the prices in yuan and then looked at my currency calculator. Each one of these bottles was being sold for around the equivalent of $10,000 U.S.
On your girlfriend’s background. Our guide in Xi’an, an intructor at the local university and very involved in the terra cotta soldiers from an early time, told us his family history. His family was actually Mongolian, but lived in China. They apparently were wealthy landowners at one point. His father was educated in England before the Communist Revolution, became a medical doctor, and had a successful practice in London. At some point during the Korean War, after China entered and its soldiers were taking a lot of casualties, Mao sent out a plea to Chinese doctors around the world, asking them to return and help take care of the wounded. Apparently his father and a lot of other doctors were fooled and made the mistake of coming back.
Things were ok for a while and they were allowed to have nice houses, servants, etc. But when the Cultural Revolution came, his father and many other medical professionals were then arrested and thrown into camps, where he eventually died in prison and his mother then had to raise our guide and his siblings on her own, so they then had a tough life. Mao totally destroyed the medical profession in China, then leading to the necessity of having to have “barefoot doctors,” people essentially untrained in medicine but having to be the frontline medical care.
So our tour guide hates Mao Tse Tung and the hardline Communists, and wasn’t afraid to tell everyone on the tour that. He instead has respect for Deng Hsiao Ping, who took over after Mao’s death and apparently was a pragmatist who tried to undo most of what Mao did.
So a lot of the Communist totalitarianism is now gone (evidenced by our guide who had absolutely no compunction about not being frank and honest about everything going on in China), but there are still consequences. Because of his history, he has refused to join the Communist Party although that is expected. His wife did join the Party and is now a full professor and dean at the university. But he is essentially blackballed and remains just an instructor. It seems like most of the time he now just leads tours instead (and probably makes more money). In addition to Xi’an (where he lives), he takes people on independent tours on the Silk Road, Gobi Desert and to Tibet going through the Chinese side.