PICTURE CHINA

The official party line is that 70% of what Mao Zedong did was right and 30% was wrong. This pretty much sums up the ambiguity with which most modern Chinese see their often criticized former leader. His detractors condemn him as a mass-murderer who was responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the wake of the disastrous reforms of the Cultural Revolution. His supporters point out that during his tenure he dramatically increased the living standards for most Chinese and send the country on its way to becoming a modern nation. Either way you look at it is impossible to deny that the China that we see today was at least in part shaped by his hand.

For the next generation of young Chinese who have grown up in the years after he died and reformers like Deng Xiaoping started to transform the country, Mao has become a more and more abstract figure. While his face still appears on the Chinese currency and his portrait hangs on Tiananmen Gate, he is seldom mentioned by the government and his teachings are not so strongly emphasized in Chinese schools. In a nation where it is second nature the tear down and rebuild, the legacy of Mao and the turbulent years that he represents will no doubt fade the collective conciseness and become fodder for the history books as China races ahead in the 21^st Century.

As a result of the rapid industrialization of the past decades and loose regulations on emissions, China has become one of the world’s biggest polluters. In fact, a recent study by the World Bank found that China was home to sixteen of the twenty most polluted cities in the world.

China’s pollution is having a devastating impact on its citizens. An estimated 300,000 people die each year as a result of respiratory illnesses caused by air pollution and most of China’s waterways are heavily polluted from the dumping of untreated human waste as well as toxic waste from coal and chemical plants. Half of the country’s population has to contend with contaminated drinking water and acid rain is having a negative impact on crop yields in many areas. Meanwhile, clouds of smog envelope many of China’s cities making blue skies a thing of the past.

The main cause of China’s pollution problem is the heavy consumption of coal which is used for everything from creating electricity to cooking and heating in Chinese homes. With a growing number of vehicles on the road, expanding urban populations all over the country and new factories opening daily, pollution seems to be a problem that will get worse before it gets better.

China’s economic boom has succeeded in expanding the upper and middle classes but has also left many citizens behind. The gap between China’s wealthiest and poorest is constantly increasing; at present the top fifth of wage earners are receiving fifty-percent of the income while the bottom fifth receives less than five-percent. Thirty million Chinese live in absolute poverty while another 60 million live on less than 865 Yuan ($109) per year, which is well below the dollar-a-day standard for poverty established by the World Bank.

The disparity between China’s rich and poor is particularly severe when the thriving urban centers are compared with the poorer rural areas but is increasingly evident within the cities themselves. It is a common site in Chinese cities, both large and small, to see the disabled begging for change, young children reduced to working as street performers to help support their families and the elderly scouring trash bins for plastic bottles to recycle.

The Three Gorges Dam is one of the most ambitious and controversial building projects ever undertaken. Over a mile and a half wide and 600 feet high, when completed, it will be the world’s largest hydroelectric dam and capable of generating as much electricity as eighteen nuclear power plants. The dam will create a giant reservoir stretching over 400 miles and will allow 10,000-ton freighters to reach China’s interior from the Yangzi’s mouth on the East China Sea.

The Dam project has received intense scrutiny both from within China and abroad. Critics insist that the dam will cause more harm than good and it is true that the effects have been and will continue to be extreme. The rising waters of the reservoir have displaced over 1.2 million people and 100 towns, ancient sites have been lost forever and the habitats of several endangered species are seriously threatened. For all that has been sacrificed it is still questionable whether the dam will function as promised. Cracks have appeared as a result of faulty materials and some experts predict that the dam will become so clogged with silt that it will be rendered useless in seventy years.

Proponents of the dam look to solve many of China’s problems at once. The dam is designed to control the river’s flooding, which has claimed the lives of more than one-million people over the past century, as well as provide electricity that is desperately needed by the exploding populations of China’s cities. The dam is also a key component of China’s plan to develop the western half of the country.

For better or worse, the Three Gorges Dam is scheduled to be finished and operational in 2009. In the meantime the Yangzi basin is busy with construction to prepare for the rising waters, businessmen from Chongqing to Shanghai are figuring out the best ways to capitalize on the new possibilities that the dam creates and cruise boats of Chinese tourists are plying the waters of the Yangzi to catch a glimpse of the legendary Three Gorges scenery before it is altered forever.

The streets of China’s cities and towns are filled with all manner of vehicles both large and small, from hand-pulled rickshaws to luxury SUVs. Only a decade ago the bicycle was the preferred method of urban transportation but it is rapidly being faded out in favor of the automobile. Car ownership is seen by many Chinese as a status symbol and is increasing at a rate of fifteen percent per year. While some people point to these developments as a sign of China’s advancement, it is not coming without a price. More so than ever, commuting in China’s cities is an unpleasant experience; smog fills the air and congestion often slows traffic to a crawl.

On a national level, the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars in recent years to improve the countries transportation infrastructure. A plan to build 85,000km of expressways connecting every provincial capitol and city with a population over 200,000 is well underway and China’s rail system is constantly expanding, with well-publicized projects such as the Qinghai-Tibet railway opening this year. New airports, tunnels, bridges, dams and shipping ports are being built throughout the country, all in an attempt to keep up with China’s ever-expanding need to move its people and goods around the country and abroad.

Up until the Communist Revolution, Chinese women occupied the bottom rung of the social ladder. Undesirable from birth, women were treated much like property, first by their fathers and then by their husbands. Women were forced into arranged marriages and were not entitled to divorce or to own property.

In the early 1950’s, with the declaration that “women hold up half the sky”, Mao Zedong and the new communist government dramatically changed the status of women in China. At least in theory, women were given equal rights in economic, cultural and family life and equal pay for equal work. A new marriage law granted the right for women to choose their partners, get divorced and inherit property. However, the legacy of thousands of years of servitude did not wear off overnight and only now are some women starting to achieve true equality.

Today in China’s modern cities, the status of women is higher than it has ever been. Certainly compared to many other developing nations, modern Chinese women enjoy a high degree of respect and rights. While Chinese society is still, at times, chauvinistic, women have started to enter the upper echelons of the business world and government. The next generation of young women will, no doubt, enjoy even more equality and play an invaluable role in shaping the China of the 21st century.

Over the past few decades, China’s tourism industry has gone from almost nothing to become the largest domestic market in the world. As a result of the new disposable income being earned by China’s urbanites and eased restrictions on movement by the government, historic sights all over the country have become overwhelmed with camera happy tourists.

The bulk of China’s domestic tourism is concentrated into the three “golden week” holidays. Initiated in 1999 by the Chinese government, the golden week scheme promotes three weeklong holidays per year as a means to stimulate tourism, consumption and the economy. During these periods China’s air, rail and road networks become clogged with travelers, leading to many people being stranded each year.

Independent tourism is still relatively rare in China. Most Chinese tourists choose to visit sites as part of a tour group and the ubiquitous tour busses complete with flag waving guides, megaphones and matching neon baseball-caps are a common sight throughout the country.

The Han ethnic group, known to most simply as “Chinese”, represents ninety-two percent of China’s people and has long dominated the country. Often at the impetus of the Chinese government, Han migrants have spread throughout the country to areas that have long been inhabited mostly by smaller ethnic groups.

The most striking and condemning example of this is in Tibet. Until the Chinese invasion in 1950, Tibet was an independent and insular country that rarely dealt with outsiders. Today in the capitol city of Lhasa, there are more Chinese than Tibetans and over two-thirds of businesses are Chinese owned. Much of the city looks identical to any other small Chinese city and this is being repeated in many other cities and towns throughout Tibet.

Many people see the Han migration as an attempt on the part of the Chinese government to exploit Tibet’s land, water and natural resources and worry that the influx of modern Chinese culture will further dilute Tibetan culture and corrupt the Tibetan society. The effects of migration are set to become more severe with the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet railway and the arrival of thousands of new migrants each year.

Religion has always been an important part of Chinese life. China’s native religions of Confucianism and Taoism have been practiced for thousands of years and Buddhism was introduced from India during the Tang Dynasty (618-906 AD). Christianity and Islam were brought to China via the Silk Road and today there is a significant Muslim minority of ten million people residing mostly in China’s northwest provinces.

During the Cultural Revolution, religion was portrayed as feudal superstition and was ferociously attacked by the Chinese government. In the decade from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, the Red Guard destroyed most evidence of the religious history of the country. Hundreds of thousands of temples and monasteries were ruined and religious and philosophical texts were burned. No area of China was more severely impacted by the religious backlash of the Cultural Revolution than Tibet. In 1959 Tibet had a thriving community of 2700 Buddhist monasteries and temples; after the destruction, only eight monasteries remained with fewer than one thousand monks and nuns.

With Mao’s death in 1976 and the liberalizations of the 1980’s, religion began to slowly reenter Chinese life. Despite remaining restrictions, nowhere in China is religion a more integral part of daily life than in Tibet. Monasteries are being rebuilt and, though at much lower numbers, monks and nuns are beginning to refill them. Pilgrims flock to Tibet’s religious sites and the most holy places are constantly awash with the devout who come to pray and prostrate.

From the lofty peaks of the Himalayas to the sands of the Gobi desert, China’s landscape is extremely varied and has played an integral role in shaping the country. The natural environment has provided inspiration for artists, created boundaries between ethnic groups and, more recently, provided the natural resources to sustain the China of the 21st century.

China’s natural landscape is beautiful but has become threatened by loose environmental policies, pollution and development. Huge areas of the country remain relatively untouched but with westward expansion and uncontrolled building on the rise, they may not remain this way for much longer.