China: Capitalism in the Making

• Share

One day Deng Xiaoping decided to take one of his grandsons to visit Mao Tse-tung.

"Call me Granduncle," Mao offered warmly.

"Oh, I certainly couldn't do that, Chairman Mao," the awe-struck child replied.

"Why don't you give him an apple?" suggested Deng.

No sooner had Mao done so than the boy took a healthy bite out of it, then happily chirped, "Oh, thank you, Granduncle."

"You see, "said Deng, "what incentives can achieve."

—A story told around Peking

In the once sleepy fishing village of Shenzhen, a new golf course stretches out from the Honey Lake Country Club. High-rise apartment buildings tower above newly created avenues, and a 48-story trade center is nearing completion. Scores of foreign-owned operations, including those of such giants as PepsiCo, Citibank and Sanyo, have streamed into the area, where a decidedly unsocialist billboard exhorts, TIME IS MONEY! EFFICIENCY IS LIFE! In the midst of those developments, many peasant families own three-story houses furnished with stereo systems, refrigerators and color TVs (sometimes two per family so that parents can watch one program and children another). When Deng Xiaoping, 79, China's de facto leader, paid a visit in January, he asked one resident how much he earned. Upon hearing the reply (more than $300 a month), the leader observed, with as much amusement as amazement, "You make more than I do."

In the outskirts of Canton, the ballads of Country Singer Kenny Rogers boom across a small store where four youngsters are huddled over a Space Invaders screen. In the streets of Peking, long-haired young men in dapper trenchcoats walk arm in arm with girlfriends in high heels. Near by, in neon-lit consumer emporiums, grizzled countryfolk peel off huge sheaves of banknotes to buy TV sets to take back to their villages. The Jianguo Hotel is a replica of the Holiday Inn in Palo Alto, Calif. Not far away, Maxim's de Pékin serves haute cuisine at $70 a head. The regiments of bicycles that clog the streets have been joined by Mercedes sedans and Japanese-made Hino tourist buses. Earlier this month, the Peking Daily (circ. 500,000) ran a photo of an attractive woman and her family standing next to a new Toyota. Thanks to an income of more than $18,000 last year, Chicken Farmer Sun Guiying had just become the first peasant in the 35-year history of the People's Republic to buy a private car.

These are but a few examples of how dramatically China has changed since a U.S. President last came to visit. The China that Ronald Reagan will see bears little resemblance to the drab and sullen nation glimpsed by Richard Nixon in 1972 and Gerald Ford three years later. The giant billboards that once displayed Mao's quotations now bear gaudy advertisements for cameras, calculators and computers. The farming communes of the countryside, that ubiquitous trademark of the Maoist republic, have in effect been dismantled. Like the imposing façade of the main gate to Peking's Forbidden City, which is shrouded by scaffolding, all China is undergoing a radical facelift.