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Shaoyang changes. I suppose the physical changes
are most obvious: shops, supermarkets, the destruction of old
buildings and the mushroom-cluster of newer and taller blocks of
offices and flats. But it’s the social changes that are the most
profound, and for a writer, the most provoking.
Some linguistic changes say a lot about the way
China is changing: 'Xiaojie' once meant ‘miss’ but now is a nickname
for a prostitute; ‘Tongzhi’ – ‘comrade’ was the way I learnt to
address people in the early 90s, but now is what young people call
gays.
A couple of other things have struck me as odd:
there was a knife fight between a couple of students last term;
another student hung herself because after becoming pregnant. A few
evenings ago I was in Shaoyang’s most-upmarket hotel, and saw a
pretty Chinese hooker in thigh length boots and embarrassed smile
looking for client. In the room there was a condom dispenser and a
packet of genital rub:
This product is specially designed developed for
washing women’s genitals. It can quickly kill any kinds of latent
germs and pathogens. It’s ideal for use in family on trip or
swimming especially for before or after sexual intercourse as it’s
effective to prevent any kind of disease.
Directions: apply the product to and around the
pudenda by massaging 2-3 minutes and then rinse with clean water.
Sex before marriage was, and probably still is,
illegal in China, but no one I’ve asked seems to care or know. Sex
between lovers seems a small crime now, if crime at all. Brothels
are illegal as well, but legality is a fuzzy concept in China. It
depends how far from any centre of good government you are. Law is
a beacon that seems to quickly falter in the rural areas.
Ultimately legality, I suppose, is what someone in power decides it
to be. It is not a question of laws on paper, but which laws are
enforced.
In Shaoyang laws on prostitution have clearly
lapsed. I was once surprised by the openness of the girls in the
‘hairdressers’ of the provincial capital, Changsha. Now a similar
line of pink-lit and girly joints line one of the main streets in
Shaoyang. And whilst once prostitution was a shameful thing – in
China where money rules over everything, even the Communism -
prostitution is another way to become rich.
There is a saying in China that you can tell a
person’s nature by the illnesses their bodies throw up. Now one in
five Chinese is obese. In my adopted province, Hunan, AIDS is
rampant: spread through lack of information, prostitution and
intravenous drug use. Old women pick the rubbish piles for food and
it’s striking how poor the peasants are starting to look now.
When I was first in China in 1993 it was hard to
tell peasants and city folk apart. Most city folk seemed to be
peasants who happened to live in flats. Their roots were in the
countryside and their loyalties were with the harvest. Few of them
were city folk for more than one generation. But memories die fast,
and the one child policy has drawn a line through the past,
catapulting the lucky generation into a lifestyle of computers and
mp3 players and frivolous fashions. Peasants look like peasants
now, while the young city people are another generation removed.
The changes have been so rapid that they have
left the older generations stranded. They are like confused
puddles, long after the waters have receded. You can see the
bewilderment as they sit in the shade of trees, sit under overpasses
and watch the cars and motorbikes pass them by, or gather in parks
to sing old songs from Mao’s time and before. They no longer know
the country they have helped to create, and even though the living
standard in China is far higher than it ever was – they seem to
lament the simpler world they were once so eager to leave behind.
China’s greatest writer of the Twentieth Century,
Lu Xun, chronicled the problems of 1930s Kuomintang China.
Corruption, extremes of wealth, rural poverty and starvation were
the fertilisers of the Communist Revolution. I remember a peasant
writer of that time saying how he went to the city for the first
time and saw all the pretty city girls in their cheongsams and
parasols, cycling – which was a heady and independent thing for
girls in the 1930s. ‘I do not think they knew or understood the
starvation of my village. The poverty I had come from. I felt
ashamed,’ the writer said.
I think a peasant visiting Shaoyang might well
feel the same today.
It’s not that China is on the verge of a
revolution; but the juggling of hundreds of millions of poorly
educated peasants is a difficult job for any government to manage.
In the news there are tales of drought and starvation in Sichuan;
corruption in the villages; and the old people cannot understand
that in a country that is now so rich beggars and starvation can
exist.
‘I suppose it’s hard to know what is happening in
the countryside these days,’ I said to a friend one night as we sat
at dinner.
‘I think people try hard to not see,’ he told
me.
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