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50.0%ANMag Issue 24 Public Surveillance
Memoirs of a Geisha? Nope, Just the Memoirs of a Chinese
By Hanin Ababneh, Staff Writer
Beirut, Lebanon − With the world’s new obsession with China’s rapid economic growth and phenomenal breakthrough into the global arena, we cannot help but notice the absence of human perspective. As images of workers scattered across widespread rice fields and enormous factory buildings crammed full of laborers come into our minds with the mere mention of China, it is evident that a whole side of a comprehensive story is lost. We must not forget the tortures suffered by the people and the torments they were directly subject to before they became such a celebrity in world affairs. The human side of this drastic change in life systems and daily normality has slipped through the cracks of the glamorous façade of modernity.
China is thousands of years old with a civilization rich in tradition and culture; yet, this civilization was built by families that have taken a step back to make space for the larger image.
On October 1949, Mao Zedong marched into Beijing claiming all land and people as slaves to communism. The people were struck with fear and worry that their lives had been flipped over from a rural wonderland to an industrial hell of smoke, dirt and sweat. China had started on its very bumpy path of reform and ‘development’, but the people were paying a very heavy toll for this entry into the global arena. Families were broken up, children were stripped from their parents and malnutrition and over-exhaustion became a common illness of all families. A land once celebrated for its elegant gardens and wondrous emperors and courtesans had become a haven for crime, filth and violence with its people caught in the midst of its turmoil. On January 1, 1979, Beijing and Washington restored diplomatic relations allowing immigrant families and broken homes to come back and reinstate themselves once again in their motherland. People had lost their lives of lavishness and luxury to single room houses and cheap cloth-like clothes to protect them from the dire winter.
Mao died and Deng Xiaoping intervened to bring reformations of another kind to the people. The people were adamant on the opening up of their country and societies, and protested in favor of this with banners such as, “I Need Food But I’d Rather Die For Democracy” in the flurry of strikes. People were crawling out of their shells and mobilizing themselves in order to create a better world for themselves and their children to live in. They were not about to sit idly on the sidelines and passively allow the horrors of the past to torment their futures. Slowly but surely, China pulled itself out of a smoke stricken horror and depressed population to grow into the economic spectacle that it is today.
Deng kept pushing industrial growth and investors kept flooding in from Hong Kong and Taiwan to become a part of this vision they had for the country. However, these investors turned a blind eye to human rights that were absent from the massive factories and through exploitation of cheap labor. As long as the work was getting done and the country pumped forward, who cared? But China cared. It was being lost under Deng’s famous slogan, “To get rich is glorious,” and weeping for its people. In 1992, he went around promoting the economic boom of the country and its financial capabilities. Night clubs opened up, advertisements of beer and cigarettes were common in the streets and western-influenced Fuji films were airing. Beijing was hopping. By 1996, Taiwanese investment had reached approximately $24 billion and tens of thousands of them had indeed moved to live in the midst of where this investment was being placed.
It is claimed that at some level, every Chinese has a desire to regain the imperial glory they once had. With its booming economy desperate for fuel and energy, it seems we have lost the faces involved in moving this vision forward. As old homes are being torn down to make room for shopping malls and farm lands become foundations for factories, the world needs to stop looking at China as the economic giant it is known to be and instead look at it as the sobbing child it is.