The Pulse Of China

Monday, Jun. 29, 1998 By TERRY MCCARTHY ON THE YANGTZE

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Some significant move in the prices makes him excuse himself for a moment to make a transaction on one of two dozen automated share-dealing terminals spread around the hall. He comes back smiling; another bet has paid off on a fast-moving stock. "China is changing, for sure. Before you could only buy half a jin [pound] of meat every month. Now you can buy as much as you want, if you have the money." Politics doesn't interest him much. "Zhu Rongji? I don't know much about politics, but at least Zhu understands the stock market." At 19 Lin Yan is too young to remember the bad days of meat rationing, but she has a fair idea of what the stock market is. She has already moved from working as a hotel receptionist to a better-paying job selling sports equipment in Wuhan's Galaxy Plaza department store. Three nights a week she goes to private English classes, which she pays for out of her salary of $75 a month, "because if you don't know English, you can't use computers. And if you can't use computers these days, you can't get ahead." Her tone suggests the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Sitting outside a cafe in Nanjing sipping tea, Gao Hua shakes his head. "That is all people are interested in now: looking after their own life-styles, doing things for themselves," says Gao, a professor of history at Nanjing University. "The economic reforms are irreversible," he says, but they are also part of something bigger. "Now is a transitional period in China. There is much disorder; people are waiting for something new." Gao chooses his words carefully. He has been in trouble before for being too outspoken politically. "Only a society of diversity contains the seeds of new life. A civil society will emerge, eventually."

The river from Nanjing to Shanghai is wide, one mile across, and the boat traffic has increased exponentially: barges, tugs, dredging boats, passenger ferries, tankers, oceangoing liners and container ships. There are so many vessels that the traffic splits up, as on a highway: downstream vessels keep to the left of the stream, upstream vessels keep to the right-hand side, as the chaos of China's interior inexorably gives way to the more ordered march to prosperity of the coastal regions.

Sally Liu works for Siemens in Shanghai. It was a simple career decision: the state-owned aeronautics factory that she had joined after finishing university studies paid her $250 a month; Siemens recruited her at $875. Her view of her country is simple too: "I hope China will become the strongest in the world. China has been poor for a long time, and no one respects us. If you are the richest, you will be respected."

Her office is in Pudong, the glittering new business district created by municipal fiat across the river from downtown Shanghai. More than 100 high-rises have already gone up in the authorities' bid to turn Shanghai into China's financial capital. Companies that make a large enough investment even get a street named after them--Siemens Street, for example. But walking around Pudong is an eerie experience: at least three-quarters of the office space is vacant. Such is the impatience of Shanghai to become a world-class city: Build it, and they will come.