Two-China policy

President Richard Nixon surprised the world with a visit to Beijing in 1972, so secretly orchestrated by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger that State Secretary William P. Rogers was excluded from the delegation who met Mao Zedong. Winston Lord who would later become U.S. Ambassador to China was the fluent Putung Hua speaker in Kissinger’s staff. To follow diplomatic protocol, his photo was extracted from the meetings with Mao to avoid offending Roger’s Office. China was not the only one familiar with the practice of “saving face”.

Furious meetings with then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that saw Nixon visiting Beijing, the Great Wall, Hangzhou and Zhou’s Shanghai, resulted in the reestablishment of U.S.-China diplomatic relations, both recognizing and adhering to a one-China policy, withdrawal of U.S. forces from Taiwan, and final establishment of embassies and consular services in each other’s domain 1979.

Every morning at 4am on Kunshan Rd. and 4pm on Tai Beishan Rd. in Huanggu District of Shenyang, (northwest of the city within looking distance from the fifth floor where I stir my morning coffee and pour my afternoon Shenyang beer), and in many streets and back alleys in China, street markets, not unlike Saipan’s Garapan Thursday street gathering by the Paseo de Marianas, sprout out like mushrooms after a tropical storm.

Pick-ups, dollies and three-wheeled tractors full of vegetables and fruits, seafood, and marine products, dry goods and kitchen wares, along with pedicabs connected to all kinds of mechanical gizmos that mill grains, sharpen knives, mix dough, fry-boil-or-broil all kinds of dishes etc., descend on five-to-seven city street blocks to create instant outdoor markets.

These sidewalk markets virtually eliminate the sidewalks and drive the unwary or unfamiliar driver who makes a wrong turn mad and furious. These markets are staffed by itinerant sellers who sleep in their cabs, or on make-shift tents on fair weather, or live in city hutongs (back alleys) that are still abundant in all the urban centers though they are rapidly being bulldozed by city administrators.

Rural to city migration is closely monitored by the Chinese government, and the official population count for Shanghai is 17 million while the unofficial count is 20 million. This 15 percent discrepancy is attributed to undocumented “aliens” who were rapidly absorbed by city industries but are just as rapidly spewed out when there is a decline in contracts and product orders for manufactured goods. The current situation is caused by the radical decline in the construction business as the global market demand shrunk and the residential and industrial expansion shriveled.

In any case, these street markets represent 20 percent of the nation’s commerce and trade assets but serve 80 percent of the population. The markets are common, lively, noisy and earthy. They exist everywhere from Lhasa (Tibet) to Qianjin (Heilongjiang), from Ala Shankuo (Xinjiang-Uygur) to Xiamen (Fujian), from Erenhot (Nei Mongol—Inner Mongolia) to Sanya (Hainan). Not surprisingly, they are also a reality in Keelung to Kaohsiung in Taiwan, in the tri-cities of Guanzhou-Shenzen-and-Kowloon, the Beijing-Tianjin corridor, and the river plains in-between the Nanjing-Shanghai-Hangzhou triangle.

In all the major urban centers, there also exists what transpires on Zhangshan Rd. downtown Shenyang everyday. Something like the Zhong Xing commercial and trade center gathers the 20 percent of the nation’s population who has access and command of 80 percent of its assets. They have gotten their kids to enjoy the offerings of the double arches or its local equivalent with all its accompanying calories and the resulting obesities; their teenage and young adult sons and daughters order their lattes from the Seattle waterfront Café franchise or its local imitators whose Columbian coffee plantation workers hardly benefit from the $4 I spend for a single cup (non-refillable) of coffee.

Step outside Starbuck Café and any establishment worth a signage on the Parisian Avenue des Champs-Élysées is represented. A little wedding gown shop has fresh pink roses crammed on two 2-ft. by 2-ft. boxes to blend in with their advertised gowns that easily go for $3,000-10,000 each, with matching rubies, jades and diamond jewelries in the next stalls to match, with its astronomical prices as well. Weddings are a growth industry in China analogous to Fiestas in Iberian-influenced places.

These shops would not be in business if there were no customers to patronize them and the nouveau riche in the gated new high-rise apartments and condominiums who keep Benz and Porche, BMW, and Volvo, Audi, and the Cadillac, the big R and Jaguar (I drooled over a sleek XJR parked in an ordinary parking lot!) in operation are not hesitant to spend their wealth and display the symbols of their new social status.

Icy-cold Harbin in the Northeast licked the street level open markets as well as the pricey boutiques by building markets and shopping centers underground that they may practice their trade and exercise their commerce below ground in winter. The size of four-by-four blocks fronting the Harbin rail station alone is one underground shopping mall by itself!

The foreign policy of two Chinas that was a feature of the Cold War may be gone but the reality of two Chinas remain. They coexist in the street level of Shenyang, but the open street markets of the early morning and late afternoons tend to serve the needs of the 80 percent of the population who are the new maintainers of urban dwellings and dwellers—folks from the countryside along with the elderly, the low-income laborers, shop employees, construction workers, and consumer goods buy-and-sell traders. The Confucian literati and Deng Xiaoping’s glitterati who merit cushy government positions, private sector management offices, military commands and professional trades, patronize the Zhong Xing centers and its related consumption values and virtues.

The same issue of distributive justice that haunts the rest of the world has also come to roost in proletarian China; the street level markets might circulate 20 percent of China’s wealth and thus retain its value at the street level but the 80 percent of the nation’s wealth that the 20 percent owns and manages flies out quickly to the coffers of the Camps-Elysees crowd distributed globally by the network of financial institutions who take their substantial cut, managerial associations and their exorbitant fees, and value-added marketing gurus who have appointed themselves as guardians of our global tastes and advisors to our spending propensities.

Alas, this pattern follows the whole geography of the planet. We live in two universes in one planet, and if there is anything we need to learn from the catastrophe generated by the global financial crisis triggered by the unmitigated greed of the military-industrial complex and the structural contradictions of the so-called free market economies, we need to shift economic valuation to the resource and product developers and distributors rather than to the keepers of books of our fortunes. When we learn that, we may actually be saving the face and the future of the planet Earth itself.

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