The Pulse Of China

The Yangtze is a raw, uncontrolled and sometimes destructive river sweeping through China, bringing riches to many but drowning others in its floods. And like the river, change is flooding through the nation. Fortunes are being made in private businesses, but millions of workers who depended totally on their jobs with state enterprises are being laid off. More millions are roaming the country trying to find work. Corruption has become malignant, and environmental damage is off the end of the scale.

A two-week trip starting in the town of Yibin down 1,600 miles of the Yangtze, the "Long River" that runs through the heart of China from the highlands of Tibet to the skyscrapers of Shanghai, produced encounters with scores of Chinese obsessed and driven by the desire to improve their lives. Farmers, boat captains, teachers, gangsters, businessmen who work the river and engineers who seek to harness it--all want to share in the new Chinese dream, to become wealthy and regain the self-respect that China lost to colonial powers centuries ago. Political change lags behind, but if few people are ready to defy the one-party system, sneaking admiration for the freedoms Americans enjoy is more widespread than party leaders imagine. In an effort to remove the dead economic hand of the government, which has kept China poor and backward, the new leadership is unleashing the energy and ambition of 1.2 billion people to fend for themselves. It is like opening the floodgates of a dam. It is the force that makes the China that U.S. President Bill Clinton will see this week a much different place from what it was only a few years ago.

Zhong Qizhi is going to make it, whatever the cost. "I am the son of a farmer and a factory worker," he says. "It was impossible for me to get help from anyone." So the 31-year-old from Chengdu taught himself English while working as an elementary school teacher, went off to run a travel agency in Tibet for four years, then set up a computer store in the southern city of Kunming. In 1996 he passed a university entrance exam to study international finance and economics. He paid for his sister to study Japanese; she now works for Sony in Shanghai, and Zhong hopes to join her there very soon, working for a foreign bank or investment house.

"If you take the American Dream, I think the Chinese people have a stronger dream to be successful," says Zhong, sitting in a Nanjing tea shop near the university at which he is studying. He lights a cigarette from the butt he has finished and looks around at the students at the other tables. Most are 10 years younger, from more privileged backgrounds. When Zhong was their age, in the late 1980s, there was no way a peasant's son from rural China could have contemplated hopping between jobs, getting an education and applying for a job with "Goldman Sachs or Citicorp," as Zhong hopes to do. Today, with the economic reform being pressed by Zhu Rongji, the new Premier, the Chinese dream knows no limits. "Making money has become the thing to do in China; people judge you by how wealthy you are," says Zhong. "It is all a search for respect."

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