Abroad
‘Too early to say’? Patrick Tobin finds that he has been living history as well as teaching it Although I thought of our recent visit to China as a geriatric first, this was not, in fact, strictly accurate. When I was Headmaster of Prior Park, the school’s connections had taken me twice to Hong Kong during the 1980s, and after the second visit we travelled by train across the paddy fields for a few nights in Guangzhou. But we were thirty years younger then and the world has changed drastically during those three decades. China has undoubtedly emerged as one of the two world superpowers, and in 1997 Hong Kong was returned to China. Modern China cannot be understood without reference to the shame engendered by decades of subservience to western imperialism. I must once have taught the Opium Wars as part of the O level History syllabus, but I cannot remember them challenging sensibility as they do now. From the 18th century, the East India Company smuggled opium from India into China through warehouses in Canton (Guangzhou), whence Chinese middlemen would carry it into mainland China. The trade created millions of Chinese addicts and devastated the large coastal Chinese cities. In 1839, after a letter to Queen Victoria was ignored, the Chinese Emperor issued an edict ordering the seizure of all the opium in Canton. Great Britain turned to gun boat diplomacy and the Royal Navy inflicted a series of defeats on the Chinese Empire. The war ended with the Treaty of Nanking, which ceded Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity and established five treaty ports, including Canton and Shanghai. The strength of Western influence over China was demonstrated by the Shanghai ‘Bund’, a section of waterfront along the western bank of the Huangpu River. Here the imposing mansions built between 1900 and 1939 reflect the neo-colonial influence over the Republic of China in the early Twentieth Century of the banks and trading houses of the UK, France, the USA, Italy, Russia, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Belgium. We flew from Shanghai to Xi’an to spend a day in the company of the Terracota Warriors and, by contrast, to take in some of the features of living in a major Chinese city. As we walked through the Xi’an market, a member of our group murmured, ‘Scraping a living!’ Hard to escape the impression that, for all its vaunted growth, China is still a third world country. Our guide remarked that China calls itself a ‘Socialist Republic’, but, in economic terms, there is very little socialism left. Politically, of course, it remains a one-party dictatorship. Some distance from the city we passed tightly packed clusters of ultra-tall high-rise flats. Why the need to accommodate thousands of people in this way? Our guide next day told us that high rise blocks are built to a height of 100 metres with a maximum number of 33 storeys. Above 100 metres/33 storeys, the government regulations prescribe emergency fire escapes,
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Summer 2019
so that is the working maximum! Property developers buy up parcels of land from the State and will pack on to that land as many apartments as possible. We have been in China some days now and have yet to see a blue sky. Yesterday, our best yet, the sun peeped wistfully through the haze. Many adults and children go around wearing smog masks. From Xi’an by bullet train to Beijing. China is proud of having the greatest high speed railway system in the world, which links all the provincial capitals. We arrived at Beijing West Station and descended into a scene of utter pandemonium - porters shouting at the top of their voices and one of our female guides shouting back at them. How did I get the impression that the Chinese were an inscrutable, uncommunicative people? Then off we set, at a near gallop, the start of yet another long, long walk, the bane of this geriatric’s journey through China, but at least we finally encountered a blue sky above us. As we arrived, tired, at our vast five star ultra-modern hotel, surrounded by an array of new high-rise buildings, I felt buffeted by the assertive modernity and chilling impersonality of superpower China. It was not always thus. Our guide, ‘Connie’, told us that in 1950 transport in Beijing was restricted to 49 tram cars and several hundred rickshaws. There were no private cars. Forty years later, car ownership in Beijing had reached 1 million. Three years later, 2 million cars, now 5 million – an appalling traffic problem and environmental challenge. Beijing’s Summer Palace will always be associated with the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the last Emperor. The ‘Dragon Lady’ seems to have been a singularly awful individual. She was originally in the fifth rank of concubines, but was the only one to bear a son for the Emperor. On his death, she became the power behind the throne, holding the reins for her son. When he in turn died, she adopted a nephew, who also died. Another young man was murdered when he threatened to initiate reform. The dragon lady went on indulging her every whim until her death in 1908. It is perhaps no coincidence that the tomb designed to see the dowager empress through eternity is a marble boat set at a safe distance from the banks of a small lake. Meanwhile, Western powers did not disguise their contempt for what they regarded as a decadent state and in 1903 eight of them ganged up to sack the Summer Palace. By 1911, when the Chinese people belatedly decided that enough was enough and proclaimed a Republic, most of the treasures of the Summer Palace had been either destroyed or removed to western depositories like the British Museum. This sorry story brought home why post-imperial China was subsequently so vulnerable to Maoist dictatorship, and why modern China is not disposed to heed lectures from the West.
