National Day

Yesterday was China’s National Day, marking the day when the People’s Republic of China was founded on October 1st, 1949. Every 10 years the celebrations are extended and virtually every military division is marched past Tiananmen.

It provides a time for people to look back at their country’s modern history, although usually back only until 1949, and most often overlooking the bad parts (e.g. the film Founding of a Republic was released to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the PRC’s founding conspicuously leaves out the darker periods). It’s important to look back at the entire past century of history, starting with the Xinhai Revolution in 1911 that brought Emperor Puyi and ended the long cycle of China’s dynasties. China’s modern history is chaotic and complicated – the country endured two revolutions, a prolonged civil war and occupation under imperial Japan that killed millions of people, a war against South Korea and the United States that cost one million Chinese lives, the disastrous Great Leap Forward that contributed to the world’s worst famine and 25 to 30 million dead, followed by the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution. Finally, after decades of regressive and destructive policies, China has reopened to the world and undergone a process of industrialization and urbanization at a scale and pace larger and faster than any country has ever experienced.

I’m also fascinated by stories of older people who have lived through so many periods of China’s recent history. There are some great stories about government officials, political dissidents, and ordinary citizens that the journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn met in Beijing and wrote about in the book China Wakes (and one I finished recently).

Two interesting life stories that were profiled in newspapers recently are those of
Wu Jinglian, who helped formulate China’s policies of “reform and opening” in the 1970s, only to be persecuted for speaking out against corruption and poor governance, and the 103 year-old Zhou Youguang who helped create the pinyin system of writing Chinese characters in the Roman alphabet.

What’s in store for China during this century? The are massive problems to work on, all consequences of a rapid and messy process of industrialization and modernization, such as protecting the environment, improving education, reducing income inequality, and reconciling the gap between a liberalized and free economy liberalization and a nondemocratic, authoritarian government. But like Zhou Yougang, I’m optimistic. I only hope to be as intimately involved in the country as he was and to be able to live through more than a century of its changes.