How China banished the toiling masses and retained foreign collaboration, all in one plant

Miracles on the steel factory floor

The toiling masses on the factory floor of Bao Steel no longer exist. China’s largest steel producer has so vigorously revamped its gargantuan iron and steel enterprise located on the outskirts of Shanghai that it not only no longer bears little resemblance to the sick industries so common in the still-new republics of the former Soviet Union, but even the many public sector undertakings at home. The fact that China has been making great leaps forward in the last decade is not news in the West. Surprisingly, though, so little of this new country is known in India that chauvinistic and needlessly juvenile emotion so often replaces real analysis. Bao Steel has many advantages of course, among them the fact that it is located right on the banks of the mighty Yangtze river, enabling easy import of raw iron ore, including from India, as well as the export of finished steel products. Manufacture has been almost entirely computerised and seems surgical in comparison with older, open-cast methods, although it still can’t hide the very primeval transformation of raw material into blazing hot steel ingots. With a whoosh and a thunderclap the ingots are flattened into shape, washed and cooled by constant jets of water.

Incidentally, the installed machines have been made by Mitsubishi of Japan. Clearly, even as Beijing makes other political points with Tokyo, including a nag over the rewriting of the Japanese occupation of China in its history books, Chinese industry has no intention of reinventing the wheel by doing everything itself from start to finish. The accent is on getting things done and out of the way, so that everybody around can make some more money.

Tripping the light fantastic

‘‘Gai Ge Kai Feng’’ or Deng Xiaoping’s ‘‘open-door policy’’ from 1978 continues to transform China in so many different ways. The practice of Buddhism, once sought to be obliterated during the Cultural Revolution, is slowly being renewed with great faith and much fervour, even though many of China’s new Buddhists are hardly aware of the ritual that accompanies it. No matter. In the tiny Buddhist temple in China’s northern city of Dalian as well as at the larger Jade temple premises in the heart of old Shanghai, believers hold bunches of incense sticks to their forehead while praying. Cauldrons of fire rage in front of the sanctum sanctorum, one to light the incense sticks, the other to burn the various offerings.

So when Chinese devotees at the Dalian temple heard they had Indians in their midst, it was as if a magnetic field had suddenly come alive. Again and again, they folded their hands, again and again, as if to say, oh here were visitors from the land of ‘‘their’’ Buddha. They knew the story of Gautam and how he had abandoned his kingly pleasures in search of the Light. They said they prayed equally to the Bodhisattvas as well as the monks who had brought them the faith from India. They pointed out that more and more Chinese, in their prosperity and poverty, were beginning to return to the fold.

Two much for some

Deng Xiaoping’s blessed legacy of reform is also often leavened by the often-traumatic one-child policy still in force in China. Government officials will sidestep questions, delay answers and often point-blank deny the tribulations caused by the policy in the last 22 years. When it was first announced in 1980, a couple who disobeyed and gave birth to a second child was punished with a 1,000 yuan fine (about $125, valued much more then). A decade later, that had been increased to 2,000 yuan. Beijing’s argument that negative reinforcement is the only way out so as to have some effect on traditional attitudes is a well-taken one. Still, the one-child norm is strictly practiced in the cities, especially with the majority Han Chinese. Minorities, like Uighur Muslims, are allowed more children, and in the villages, if the first child is a girl, then the couple may have another child. Across the country, though, the most educated will admit that second pregnancies still occur in search of that elusive son to carry the family’s name forward.

A ‘year-ender’

Here's an old Chinese saying: if you want to see a 100-year-old city in China, go to Shanghai, it was set up only at the turn of the century. If you want to see a 1,000-year-old city in China, go to Beijing, with the architectural splendour of its old dynasties. If you want to see a 5,000-year-old city in China, go to Xi’an, the burial place of the terracotta army of the Qing emperors.

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