There’s no reason to visit Shaoyang. 

It’s far away from the mega-cities of Shanghai or Beijing or Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangdong, and at least an overnight train trip to anywhere worth visiting.  Visitors think it dangerous, locals think it's dirty, but it’s almost entirely undistinguished.  And it's exactly because there is nothing particularly special about Shaoyang that it makes the perfect town within which to sum up China’s odd and traumatic process of changing from communist to capitalist giant and beyond. 

Shaoyang is an ancient place.  The first mention of it is over two thousand years old, an odd line which says, ‘Where the Zijiang and Shaoshui Rivers meet Earl Zhao held court under the gantang tree.’  No one knows what a gantang tree is anymore, but the rivers still meet, and over the modern skyline stand a couple of pagodas, a few temples with their handfuls of monks and nuns.

Twenty years ago the river banks were still lined with stilt houses.  There was a house of many rooms that friends and I used to sit in and eat and drink in summer.  But now you have to search hard to find the last scraps of the old town: narrow alleys and tiled roofs and rustic toilets.  That restaurant, with its wooden walls and rickety flooring has, like the old town and old China, been demolished.  In their place are parallel queues of white-tiled and dirt-streaked flats.  And the speed of change is daunting, even Maoist China is a faint memory now, well-buried under pop stars and supermarkets and shoe shops.   

In 1989 the Tiananmen Square Incident was a clear message to the young people of China that they should focus their energies not on political reform but on business and money and consumerism.  But by 1999, when I left Shaoyang, it was clear to many young Chinese people that consumerism was not what they wanted from life, and many young people were looking back to ancient Chinese culture for their inspiration.  In short they were looking to before Communism to discover what it meant to be Chinese.  This process was what I went on to write about in The Drink and Dream Teahouse. 

Upon my return, speeding from Changsha on a two-hour motorway trip, my initial impression of Shaoyang was a little disappointing.  Not much seemed to have changed.  There was a McDonalds now and a KFC, but the city-scape was pretty much the same, litter piled up on the steep river banks, lost people in crowds, the buildings still tiled and still dirty. 

But whereas 1998 Shaoyang seemed to still be teetering on the brink, unwilling to quite let go of Communist securities, in the seven years since, it and a thousand cities across China, have let go and pushed off from the edge.  Maoist Thought is still a compulsory subject in schools but there is no way back to Maoist days.  The new rich are the bureaucrats and the party leaders.  Like an infected host, the old communist system has been devoured from the inside. Which begs the question, the unspoken hub of capitalist China: what is the Communist Party for?

There are many other changes in Shaoyang.  The children I saw rushing to and from school have grown up quite unlike previous generations.  These are the lone children of the One Child Policy: spoiled darlings of their parents, used to luxuries that people outside the West could never have dreamt of not long ago: private bedrooms, personal televisions, pc games, boyfriends and girlfriends - and of course Klondike lure for capitalism: a disposable income. 

Teen culture of the West has been mirrored in China.  There are fashions and music and footwear, mobile phones and opportunities in work that students couldn’t dream of just ten years ago.  A Pop-Idol look-alike, called Supergirl, is the current ratings rave.  People talk openly in a way that is new: about their love-lives; working abroad, business.  Comparing this Asian tiger with the Celtic variant, IKEA plan to open in China before Ireland.  Old arcane topics of conversation, all tied in with the communist system, like work-units and hukou – the old residence restrictions, have disappeared.  The greeting is no longer 'Have you eaten?' because food is no longer scarce.  University students here typically spend their holidays in Shenzhen factories earning pocket money or paying for tuition rather than going back to their villages and helping gather in the rice harvest.  In fact, in many villages, farmers have abandoned the land in favour of a factory life.   Like many countries around the world, the gap between rich and poor is accelerating fast and each week a couple of peasants stray into town, skeletal thin, too old to work, and pick through the fly-blown garbage. 

But Shaoyang hasn’t changed in one respect, the future is still uncharted and unknown territory, and change keeps coming thick and fast.