Chasing the Chinese Dream

Front matter

William N. Brown

Chasing the Chinese Dream

Four Decades of Following China's War on Poverty

Preface

For more than two decades China served as the most potent anti-poverty weapon the world has ever known.... Of every five people in the world who escaped poverty during this span —a total of roughly 1.1 billion people — three were Chinese.

World Economic Forum, Feb. 3, 2016

In my youth I dreamed of visiting Australia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, but I had no interest at all in Asia. That I ended up in China was, as Chinese say, sheer Yuanfen (fate).

When I arrived in Xiamen, I was impressed by the nation’s goals and the people’s excitement and optimism, but I wondered if reform and opening up benefited people in the remote interior. I determined to find out for myself—and I’m still exploring to this day.

If I had scripted my own life from cradle to grave, I could not have conjured up a more exciting or fulfilling adventure than witnessing firsthand the world’s most populous nation single-mindedly eradicate absolute poverty. For over three decades I’ve explored every corner of the country by bicycle, boat, car, train, plane—even farm tractor a few times, as well as on foot into inaccessible valleys. P’ ve interviewed hundreds of people from all walks of life—farmers, fishermen, teachers, doctors, engineers, merchants, street sweepers, barbers, scientists, and athletes. ve been inspired by students like Feifei, who as a five-year-old sold herbs on the street side to support her struggling family but made it to Xiamen University, graduated top in her class, then graduated from Harvard, worked for McKinsey and Google, and is now a professional and proud mother of two.

And there’s the farm girl with four years education whose Chinese Dream was to earn 20 Yuan a month as a maid for a Xiamen University professor but who is today a multimillionaire philanthropist with international schools, real estate ventures, and a biotechnology company. And I can’t forget the boy who had no shoes until he was a teen but today is one of China’s top tunnel experts, philanthropist, and producer of historical documentaries.

I’ve met Mongolian herdsman who track their cattle by mobile phone and China’s Beidou satellite navigation system and Tibetan farmers with online shops for their vi Preface traditional products, as well as boat people who had never stepped foot on land until Xi Jinping gave them homes and training. One of the shy mothers that I met now earns more from aquaculture than I earn as a professor. The village still keeps a sampan in the square to remind everyone of where they came from.

Honey farmers, geneticists, doctors, street sweepers—their stories all prove that China has done so much so fast not just because of top-down visionary leadership but because of bottom-up grassroots industriousness and innovativeness.

But I’ve also been fortunate to meet many of the visionary leaders behind China’s rapid transformation—people like premiers Li Peng and Wen Jiabao, or a young Xi Jinping, whom I witnessed tackle poverty in Fujian and slowly move up the ranks from Xiamen vice-mayor to Fujian governor to president of China.

Until I met Dr. Huang Chengwei, former director of the entire anti-poverty program, I had no idea of the sheer complexity of balancing so many diverse factors, including rapid economic growth, regional disparity, urbanization challenges, and environmental protection. Yet the UN and World Bank have documented how China has excelled in virtually every measure. I have witnessed mistakes and failures, of course. What nation with 1.4 billion people would not have missteps? Yet China learns from successes and mistakes alike and presses forward.

New Nation, Ancient Ways

Although I’ve witnessed phenomenal changes, one thing that has not changed, in 30 years or 2,000 years, is the nation’s commitment to what Confucius called the “Ancient Ways”—the moral imperative for a just and ethical government to maintain peace and stability and to meet the needs of the people—some 56 million even 2,000 years ago according to China’s census in 2 A.D. Old China’s leaders led the nation with unsurpassed inventiveness, ingenuity, and passion for most of 2,000 years. I’ve no doubt they would have been proud at what New China’s leaders have accomplished in only seven decades.

Since New China’s founding in 1949, the Chinese government has said, “A prosperous society cannot coexist with poverty.” In the same way, there is no reason for such a small planet as ours to have unprecedented prosperity coexisting with endemic poverty. Fortunately, China is now tackling poverty in other nations through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and similar initiatives. It’s a tall task, but if any nation can lead the world in eradicating absolute poverty, it’s China.

Ihave met only two classes of people who are able confidently to assert, “We do [understand China]! They are newspaper reporters and globe-trotters. As for myself, I am continually discovering a continental area still unexplored.

Dr. Arthur H. Smith (1845-1932), author and resident of China for 54 years.

Xiamen, China William N. Brown

Preface Vii

1. Photos of author

(Photos by Zhu Qingfu)

2. Interviews in Ningde, Fujian Province . r

Visit to Nantang She Minority Village Primary School in Xiapu County, Ningde, on December 5, 2019 (Photo by Zhu Qingfu)

viii Preface

Interviewing Lan Naizhong, Nantang Village, Xiapu County, Ningde, on December 5, 2019 (Photo by Zhu Qingfu)

Panoramic view of Nantang Village, Xiapu County, Ningde (Photo by Zhu Qingfu)

Preface 1x

3. Interviews in Shaoshan, Hunan

Visiting Mao Family Restaurant in Xiangtan, Hunan on November 12, 2019 (Photo by Zhu Qingfu)

4. Interviews in Eighteen Caves Village, Hunan Province

Eighteen Caves Village is secluded deep within Hunan’s mountains (Photo by Zhu Qingfu)

x Preface

Interviewing Miao villager Yang Chaowen in Eighteen Caves Village, Hunan, November 11, 2019 (Photo by Zhu Qingfu)

Taking a photo with a Miao grandmother in Eighteen Caves Village, Hunan, December 11, 2019 (Photo by Zhu Qingfu)

Preface

5. Visit to Changsha, Hunan

(Photo by Zhu Qingfu)

xi xii Preface

6. Interviews in Yunnan’s Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture a

Panoramic view of a village in Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture (Photo by Li Jintai)

Interviewing a Lisu family, December 10, 2019 (Photo by Li Jintai)

Preface xiii

7. Interviewing officials in Beijing, who are going to Tibet to join the battle against poverty alleviation

Interviewing Liang Nanyu, who volunteered to work in Tibet to help locals, in Tibet (Photo by Pan Zhiwang)

8. Other interviewees

Interviewing Prof. Hu Min, CEO of New Channel in Beijing, July 7, 2019 (Photo by Zhu Qingfu)

xiv Preface

Interviewing Mr. Cui Rui, a blacksmith in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, on July 10, 2019 (Photo by Jie Shangfeng)

Interviewing Mr. Tian Ye, a poverty alleviation official, in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, July 15, 2019 (Photo by Jie Shangfeng)

Preface XV

Interviewing Tibet University teacher Yixi Danzeng in Lhasa, Tibet, July 21, 2019 (Photo by Wu Qiong)

Interviewing Mr. Yang Yuanjian, who volunteered to teach Tibetan students, in Chengdu, July 22, 2019 (Photo by Zhu Qingfu)

xvi Preface

Interviewing Mr. Zhou Dexin, a Xiamen University gate guard, in Xiamen on August 6, 2019 (Photo by Jie Shangfeng)

PartI One Dream, Many Dreamers

Ningde: Xi Jinping’s Training Ground for Governing

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Part I One Dream, Many Dreamers

Chapter 1 A) How My Chinese Dream Began ciecie

China’s targeted poverty alleviation is the world’s only way to help the poor and reach the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, 2017

I first encountered the Chinese Dream in 1976 in Taiwan when I quite literally received a sign from the heavens. Hundreds of leaflets from a mainland balloon rained upon me as I crossed a field on CCK Air Base in Taizhong. I could not read Chinese so wasn’t interested in them, but I was surprised that mainland farmers in the photos so closely resembled Taiwan farmers. When I learned that both sides of the Taiwan Straits were quite literally one family, I determined someday to see the rest of China—but it took me 10 years to get there.

After leaving Taiwan, I spent three years as an Air Force OSI agent in the U.S. and Turkey, and an assignment with the Shah of Iran in 1979 led me to question many of my assumptions of why so many developing countries remained mired in abject poverty even in a world of unprecedented prosperity. In 1981, I left the Air Force and started a master’s program in Los Angeles, where I met an American girl who had been born and raised in Taiwan and also wanted to study in China. Our mutual interest in China led to friendship, and our wedding that Christmas in Taibei (Taipei).

Over the years, as we awaited an opportunity to move to China, we often traipsed to Los Angeles’ Chinatown to buy copies of China Reconstructs (now China Today). The more I read about China’s advances in everything from industry and agriculture to health and education, the more I looked forward to seeing the changes myself, and in 1988, ten years after I'd left Taiwan, Sue and I finally moved with two small sons to Xiamen University to study Chinese.

We felt right at home in Xiamen because it was only 100 miles across the Straits from our former home of Taizhong, and both sides shared the same dialect and customs. But though we loved the place and people, living conditions were a challenge.

Today, Xiamen has received so many international honors as a modern livable city that it is hard to believe what this island city was like in 1988. We had almost

© The Author(s) 2021 3 W. N. Brown, Chasing the Chinese Dream, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0654-0_1

4 1 How My Chinese Dream Began daily water and power outages. Roads were narrow and potholed, and buses belched black smoke that poured up from cracks in the wooden floors. There were few stores and good items were usually sold out before we could get to them, leaving only the centrally distributed products that no one would buy. I bought a three-wheeled pedicab to help us seek staples like toothpaste and toilet paper.

It took over a month to get permission for a pedicab because they thought I’d use it for business. It was even harder to get a phone. I paid over USD 450 and waited three years for it to be installed.

Yet in spite of the challenges, Xiamen people were cheerful because living conditions were already better than any had ever experienced and they were optimistic about the future—but I was curious if rural life was also improving.

Each evening, the TV station aired a short clip urging urbanites to not waste the food that farmers labored so hard to provide. The first scene was the poor farmer toiling at dawn in a rice paddy, then it showed an urban family eating a meal of several dishes and throwing away the leftovers, and the final scene was of the tired farmer at dusk with only a plain bowl of rice for supper. It was a powerful message. I vowed to be less wasteful—but I also vowed to see for myself how farmers really lived.

Exploring the Countryside

In January, 1989, I began exploring rural Fujian by bus, boat, bicycle and farm tractor. It had been so warm in Xiamen that I left home without a jacket, clueless that we were about to be hit by a very rare cold spell. I spent the nights in dark, unheated granite homes, and was so cold that my gracious hosts, whose clothing was even thinner than mine, insisted on soaking my feet in hot water and giving me an extra blanket for the night—a thin blanket, but the best they had. I shivered the entire night, my very bones aching. By the time I rose, just before dawn, my cheerful hosts had already prepared a big breakfast. Years later I learned they’d served me, a stranger, treats they’d been saving for Chinese New Year.

Although my hosts were poor, they did not seem to know it. Like my city friends, they were cheerful and convinced things would only get better. For their sakes, I hoped so. But given that much smaller and wealthier nations had yet to end poverty, I suspected that change would take half a century, and that we were all “planting trees that future generations could enjoy the shade.”

I dropped my Chinese study after one semester to help start Xiamen University’s (XMU) new MBA program, figuring I could study Chinese on my own, and the more I learned, the more I realized that China was nothing like the country portrayed by Western media. But when I wrote articles to refute some unfair criticisms of China, indignant foreigners complained, “You should not write about things you don’t understand. You’ve only seen coastal China. Inland provinces are not changing!”

“How would you know?” I asked. “You’ve never been there!”

“Neither have you!” they replied.

Exploring the Countryside 5

They had a point. So in 1993, I bought a 15-passenger van and we drove 10,000 km around S.E. China, and in 1994 explored another 40,000 km. We averaged only 25 km/h as we spent three months driving from Fujian up the coast and over to Inner Mongolia and the Gobi Desert, west to Qinghai and Tibet, and back to Xiamen through South China. I was surprised at the massive investments on roads, electricity, healthcare and education even in the poorest corners of Ningxia, Gansu, Guizhou— places that even UNESCO officials had deemed hopeless. It was heartening from a humanitarian standpoint but as a businessman I did not see how they could justify spending a fortune on such impoverished, relatively unpopulated regions. I slowly learned that China’s leaders were very farsighted.

Give Fish or Teach to Fish

Chinese have long said, “Give a fish, feed for a day; teach to fish, feed for a lifetime.” Early on, China learned the hard way that simply doling out aid, though sometimes necessary, does not solve the root of poverty and can lead to dependency, so the nation shifted from “blood transfusion” to “blood production”—from aid to enablement. China taught the poor to fish by giving them an improved environment that fostered self-sufficiency so they could lift themselves from poverty. This approach showed that the government had tremendous faith in the people’s ability and motivation to seize new opportunities—and it paid off because Chinese people today are as industrious as their ancestors.

Rose Talman, a Xiamen missionary from 1916 to 1930, wrote in her unpublished memoirs of the Chinese love for peace, and their “will to love and fight against poverty”:

To their conditions they have developed responses — frugality (nothing wasted in China), patience, industriousness, sense of humour — a philosophical approach to the realities of life. These are the qualities that make the Chinese tough and persevering and give them the will to love and fight against poverty. The Chinese enjoy few luxuries in material things. They are not an acquisitive society. The people yearn more for peace and stability — a climate for work rather than affluence or wealth for the sake of pleasure. There is a great difference in the psychology of Eastern and Western society.

Over the years, I’ve collected hundreds of books and documents written by foreigners in China over the past few centuries, and they uniformly admired and respected both China’s system of governance and the people’s enterprising spirit—and that spirit is just as evident today.

South Fujian is famous for China’s best tea, but in the early 1990s, my tea farming friends were so poor that they could not afford to drink their own tea, brewing weeds and herbs instead. Yet whenever I made the several hours drive to visit them, navigating torturous dirt roads snaking through mountains, they served me the best tea they had. Only years later did I understand their sacrifice. Today, concrete roads lead to villagers’ very doorsteps and they drink tea whenever they want it. They also now use electricity instead of kerosene and candles, and spend evenings watching

6 1 How My Chinese Dream Began a wall-mounted flat screen TV bigger than my own (they were watching American Idol the last time I visited; hopefully they’ll progress beyond that).

China has had exceptional, visionary top-down policies but they have been successful only because of the bottom-up industriousness and ingenuity of people like my friend Madame Yang Ying. As a farm girl with only four years of schooling, her dream in 1981 was to earn 20 Yuan a month as a Xiamen University professor’s maid—10 Yuan to keep and 10 Yuan to send home. She achieved that dream, then sold fish, cornered Xiamen’s market on pork, opened a rural credit union, invested in real estate, and today has several international schools, a biotechnology company, a bone-marrow bank for leukemia patients and is helping to build 1,000 Hope schools for less advantaged children. She also supports every retiree in her hometown.

Mr. Lin Zhengjia, another country kid with only four years of education, did not own shoes until he was a teen, but today he is a leading tunnel expert, documentary maker and philanthropist pouring millions into education and cultural exchange programs.

And tomorrow’s leaders are being prepared and empowered today by teachers like Dr. Hu Min, a country kid who would have been expelled from school had it not been for one teacher who urged he be given one last chance. Hu Min was so moved that he buckled down, tested into college at 15, taught in a university until he was 30, and today is CEO and founder of New Channel Education Group, the “Father of IELTS”, has published over 300 books and audio-visual materials for his more than 100,000 students around the country, and stresses students’ “global competencies” to prepare them for China’s growing international role.

Most impressive to me is that, in both Old and New China, most of those whom I have met who rose from rags to riches give generously to help those still in rags. They are capitalists in business, but at heart they exemplify the socialist spirit which says “no society is prosperous if any remain in poverty.”

20,000 Km in 32 Days

As I met people like Madame Yang Ying over the years and read about the changes, I yearned to drive around China a second time to see the changes since 1994, and that opportunity dropped in my lap in the summer of 2019.

The Party secretary of our Xiamen University School of Management said to me, “This is the 25th anniversary of your 1994 drive! You should tour China again!” He saw my hesitation and added, “We’ll cover all expenses!”

I agreed, but then he insisted I have a driver. “You’re 63 now, not 36!” he said, as if I'd forgotten. “It’s too long and dangerous.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. I could write while he drove. But we ended up with three cars and a dozen people, including spare drivers, a medical doctor to keep their aging foreign teacher from falling apart, student assistants and Miss Wang from New Channel Education Group, whom CEO Hu Min sent to help transcribe oral interviews.

In 1994, the 40,000 km drive took three months driving 10 ha day, but in 2019 the 20,000 km trip took only 32 days—and my Chinese colleagues were as astounded as I was by the changes.

In 1994, I had nicknamed Inner Mongolia as “Mudgolia” because the province seemed to have but one color: mud. But in 2019, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, I looked in vain for the barren wasteland where my van had been trapped in 1994. Today, it has a beautiful divided highway with grass and trees on both sides and down the middle.

In 1994, even mountainous stretches of Guangdong, the rich province bordering Hong Kong, had only dirt roads. Today, China has the world’s largest hi-speed railway and highway networks, and concrete roads to remote villages rebuilt with government-subsidized homes, many of them with nice architectural flourishes to reflect minorities’ heritage.

China also has the world’s largest online community and a booming rural ecommerce business with over 4,000 “Taobao Villages” (villages earning at least 10 million Yuan yearly from e-commerce).

All nations struggle with urbanization, with over half of the world now in cities, but in China, many are returning from cities to seek their fortune in their hometowns thanks to improved living conditions and government training, support and subsidies for rural entrepreneurs. But such precision poverty alleviation, from national to village and even household level, has been possible only because of the dedication and sacrifices of China’s First Party Secretaries.

Barefoot First Party Secretaries

Even with the world’s most successful national and regional poverty alleviation programs, the leadership realized it still lacked direct contact with the poorest people. Xi Jinping proposed reaching these people by the creation of First Party Secretaries as a core strategy.! Between 2015 and 2019, China selected some 459,000 talented and dedicated people to serve poverty-stricken villages.

Ihave met many of these courageous and compassionate leaders, and nicknamed them “barefoot first secretaries” because they willingly left families and careers for three or more years and, like early barefoot doctors, live with those whom they serve in China’s poorest villages. I marveled at how they creatively tackled problems ranging from poor infrastructure, healthcare and education to the creation of sustainable green industry. Above all, their example has helped shift attitudes from dependency to self-reliance, innovativeness and entrepreneurialism—or as Chinese put it, from blood transfusion to blood production.

In spite of their challenging living conditions, I did not meet even one who regretted the sacrifices, and several had volunteered for a second three-year stint in

'Trilogy of the First Secretaries’ Poverty Alleviation Mission, July 10, 2020, China.org.cn http:// www.china.org.cn/china/2020-07/10/content_76257976.htm.

8 1 How My Chinese Dream Began spite of family or health challenges. It is no wonder that several farmers in different provinces told me, “We have good policies now because the government understands us and cares for us.”

But several farmers added, “Good policies aren’t enough; we must also do our part.”

In December, 2019, the World Economic Forum noted that between 1990 and 2015, China had accounted for over 3/5 of reduction in global poverty, yet in spite of China’s lead, the rest of the world has not kept on track. The World Bank projects that half a billion people will still live in extreme poverty in 2030.”

My hope is that the rest of the world can learn from China’s experiences because all people are dreamers. We all dream of a better life of peace and prosperity for our families and descendants. But for the first time in recorded history, we have an example of how to make this dream a reality. And not only do each of us have a part to play but, and this is important—there are no small parts.

If we each do our part, even a miracle like the Chinese Dream can be achieved. But only if, as T. E. Lawrence wrote in 1922, we dream by day with eyes wide open.

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.

T. E. Lawrence, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, 1922

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*https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty.

Chapter 2 A) Ningde: Xi Jinping’s Training Ground edt for Governing the Country

The first stop on our 20,000 km drive around China in 2019 was my own Fujian province’s northeast city of Ningde—a young Xi Jinping’s governance training ground. Over the past three decades I’ve watched it transform from one of China’s 18 poorest areas into a prosperous area known for business as well as a beautiful environment and rich minority cultures and customs.

Ningde’s transformation was so astounding that in 2005, I had packed our van with a dozen friends from abroad and gave them a tour, but my goal wasn’t to show them the surrealistic scenery of Tailao Mountain or Baishuiyang Lake, or to taste the famous Xiapu seafood. I wanted them to see the remote villages where, in 1988, a 35- year-old Xi Jinping first started tackling poverty, environment, corruption, education and protection of minorities in one of China’s poorest places.

I drove some eight hours into a remote valley, after which we hiked four hours and ferried across a river. My friends were astonished that such a remote area had electricity, tap water, cell phone service, and TV. But the only inhabitants were children and grandparents. They had all seen China’s prosperity on TV and every villager of working age had fled to cities to realize their own dreams.

Roads First, then Prosperity

Today, Ningde youth are returning home from the cities—and they don’t need to hike or take a boat. New concrete roads snake through deep valleys to even the remotest villages, thanks in part to people like journalist and Mindong Daily chief editor, Qiu Shutian. Locals call this Ningde native “Road Reporter” because for 30 years he has not only chronicled Ningde’s transformation but even spent his own time and money to finish projects in the poorest areas.

Today’s Ningde is a far cry from that of 1988, when the prefecture’s new Party secretary Xi Jinping wrote, “Ningde is almost a world to itself—hard to get to, little information from the outside world, and an economy based on small-scale farming....

© The Author(s) 2021 9 W. N. Brown, Chasing the Chinese Dream, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-98 1- 16-0654-0_2

10 2 Ningde: Xi Jinping’s Training Ground for Governing the Country

When you mention Ningde, five words come to people’s minds: old, ethnic minority, remote, island, impoverished.”

“People were so poor they’d never seen rice,” Qiu Shutian told us. “They’d never seen a 100 Yuan note, so if given one for a wedding or funeral, they might exchange it for a 10 or 20 Yuan note. Some couples shared one pair of pants; one would wear the pants out to work and the other stayed home covered with a quilt. Thatched houses were freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, and when it rained heavily outside, it rained lightly inside. Lifespan was short.”

Young Xi Jinping Gets to the Roots of Poverty

Young Xi Jinping was so shocked by Ningde’s abject poverty that as soon as he took office, he spent a month visiting Ningde villages, companies, schools and government departments to probe the roots of poverty. Qiu said, “I see clearly how Xi developed his ideas on governance and policy while in Ningde... Ningde was Xi’s training ground for governing the country.”

Qiu said that an old idiom said, “stupid bird flies first,’ but Xi had studied Ningde’s rich history and culture and said that Ningde was not stupid, just weak. Xi read how ancient Ningde engineers had shattered stone mountains with fire and water to make the 1400-year-old Huangju irrigation project, and how the area had produced many war heroes. The “weak bird” of Ningde, Xi declared, would not only fly first but cross the seas.