This year marks 70 years since Mao Zedong stood in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and declared the beginning of the People’s Republic of China. To the outside world, China’s transformation from a poor agrarian society into one of the world’s most powerful economies is nothing short of miraculous.
“If you think about what China was 70 years ago, essentially a country that had fought its way through two wars and was on its knees and battered – the idea that in 70 years it would be the second biggest economy in the world… and a major global player would have seemed very unlikely indeed,” said Rana Mitter, a professor of history and politics of modern China at Oxford University.
But for those who lived through these years, the pace of change has been dizzying and at times jolting. Almost no other country has experienced shifts as dramatic as China has – almost as if each generation has lived in an entirely different country.
The Chinese who grew up in the early days of the People’s Republic remember ration cards, mass hunger, and political campaigns like the Cultural Revolution, which upended the country between 1966 and 1976 and whose effects still linger today.
Those in the 1980s remember a time of optimism and openness, amid a growing belief that economic reforms be accompanied by political ones, liberalising both the economy and the political system. That chapter of openness was slammed shut by the end of the decade when the Chinese military crushed student protests on 3-4 June, 1989. The nation will remember the Tiananmen Square protests on their 30th anniversary next week.
In the decade after the crackdown the Chinese leadership, faced with a crisis of legitimacy, pursued economic opening even more aggressively, opening stock markets, reforming state-owned companies, and encouraging imports and exports, all in the name of creating a “socialist market economy”.
As a result, Chinese millennials have grown up in relative wealth as the country became the world’s manufacturer. At the same time, they have experienced even more control, censorship and surveillance, aided by advances in Chinese technology.
“It’s not just a generation gap, it’s a ‘generation Grand Canyon’,” says Maura Cunningham, a historian who specialises in modern China.
The ruling Chinese Communist party has hailed the last seven decades as an undeniable success in nation building, a credit to the government’s steady hand. While official accounts may skip over, rewrite or erase the country’s darker chapters, those who lived through them cannot. The picture, according to their stories, is not so clear cut.
“We can’t have chaos” (1949-mid-1960s)
Zhang Xizhen was four years old when the People’s Liberation Army entered Beijing on 31 January 1949. After a 40-day siege of the former imperial capital, the Nationalist army that controlled the city surrendered, hastening the end of a civil war that had taken up most of the last two decades.
Zhang’s father, a lieutenant in the Nationalist or Kuomintang army, was one of those troops who yielded the city without fighting.
After that, things changed quickly. The family, including Zhang and her five siblings, was soon moved out of their spacious house, with a living room and modern flushing toilets, and into a small two-room hutong, or alley, home.
Her father made it through the political campaigns and interrogations. Because of earlier work helping an underground communist cell, he was given a piece of paper signed by Mao, acknowledging his contribution. Zhang’s mother wrapped it up in oil paper and kept it in the toilet, in case his fellow Kuomintang searched their home.
He was able to find work with the CCP, and though he was never officially allowed to join the party, he could earn a living for the family, about 80 yuan a month.
To Zhang, in primary school, the 1950s were a simple time. They didn’t have much after the communist takeover, officially known as “liberation”, but the flattening of social classes and overhaul of the economy meant no one had much.
“We just felt happy to have new clothing for spring festival,” she says, referring to Chinese new year. “My classmates and I were happy as long as there was food and school to go to.”
But by the early 1960s, when Zhang was a teenager, her family was one of millions across the country struggling for enough to eat, a time known as the “three years of difficulty”. It was caused by the Great Leap Forward, an unrealistic industrialisation program to put China ahead of the UK in terms of production within 15 years. As many as 45 million people starved to death by the time the program was abandoned.
Zhang, a singer, had joined a state dance and ensemble troupe, where her rations were slightly more. She brought them home every weekend to give to her mother.
“My mother weighed all the food before every meal,” she recalled. “She had to plan to make sure everything lasted until the end of the month.” Sometimes they would grind the core of an ear of corn, add some beancurd and make it into a cake. “Everything that could be eaten was eaten,” she said.
Zhang’s mother, who ate less so her children could have more, saw her legs swell from malnutrition, a common sight across Beijing, where conditions were better than in the countryside. Zhang heard stories of people starving to death but no media reported such cases.
The “three years of difficulty” were soon followed by another chaotic political movement, the Cultural Revolution, in which Zhang’s father was punished and sent away to serve hard labour, despite his slip of paper signed by Mao. Only in the late 1970s did things calm down and Zhang began to travel the world with the government troupe, performing in Jamaica, Mexico, and at home.
Today, she lives in an apartment on the east side of the city with her husband, spending her afternoons playing pool in the building’s recreation room. On the weekends, she takes care of her grandson. The years before have convinced her of the importance of stability, whatever others may say about the importance of democracy and checks and balances in government.
“I don’t really know what is better, but right now it’s stable,” she says. “We can’t have chaos. We have been through chaotic times and all kinds of movements. We just want stability.”
“Many things were ridiculous, even absurd, irrational” (Cultural Revolution – 1966-1976)
Zhu Xindi was getting ready to take university entrance exams in Kunming in the summer of 1966 when the Cultural Revolution “fell suddenly from the sky”, she says. Exams were cancelled, and universities and schools shuttered. Zhu, who had been top of her class and planned to take a degree in science and engineering, instead went to the countryside to help build “a bright red new world” like many other youth.
The Cultural Revolution, a decade of social and political chaos kicked off by Mao in an effort to reinvigorate the socialist spirit of the country, is one of the least understood events in China’s modern history.
Even two decades later it is hard for Zhu to make sense of it. She spent a year farming and living among the Dai, an ethnic minority group, in a village in Yunnan province, near China’s border with Myanmar. She woke before daybreak and farmed all day. Most of the young people she found herself with had never farmed before. Their initial revolutionary spirit soon faded.
“Everyone thought we were about to make great contributions to the nation, that we were going where the country most needed us to build a new socialist countryside,” she says. “When you were actually there, it wasn’t like that. We wanted to leave, but we had no choice.”
Zhu eventually left, trekking to Myanmar in the hopes of aiding communist insurgents. Turned away, she travelled throughout Yunnan, getting sick and almost going blind in one eye. “For three years, I roamed. I didn’t have food to eat. I was considered mangliu,” she says, referring to herself as a “blind migrant”.
Zhu’s family also suffered. Red Guards, overzealous youths tasked with rooting out counterrevolutionaries, beat Zhu’s little sister and forced her to shave off her hair. Zhu remembers how the family decided to take a family portrait in case they were separated.
Each person snuck out of the house one by one, so as not to arouse the suspicion of their neighbours, and they met at the photo studio. Afterwards, her mother gave each of them a copy to keep. “In case we lose each other, we’ll be easier to find,” Zhu remembers her mother saying.
After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 and schools reopened, Zhu finally took the national exams she was meant to take years earlier. She went to university at the age of 30, studied medicine and became a dentist. Retired for the last 10 years, she now lives in Hangzhou.
She doesn’t feel angry about the years that were taken from her. “It was very difficult and every day I didn’t know if I would make it to tomorrow,” she says. “Looking back, you can say many things were ridiculous, even absurd and irrational. But at that time, the whole country was irrational.”
She said: “For the generation now, you have choices, and when many choices are put in front of you, you feel lost. But for us, we didn’t have any choices. My whole life, I didn’t have choices, and I did the best I could in the tiny space I had to make choices.”
“One step at a time” – (Reform and opening 1977-1980s)
Chong Li, a native Beijinger, was an early adopter of the market economy. At the age of 19, he borrowed tools from his classmates, set up a shed and began fixing bikes for money. It was a year before Deng Xiaoping, who later succeeded Mao, launched reforms in 1978 that would transform the economy.
Chong’s neighbours were shocked, causing his parents to worry. The Cultural Revolution, when people had been severely punished for showing capitalist tendencies, had ended only a few years earlier. Chong still remembers a family relative who had been arrested for buying a bag of peanuts at a train station.
“All private businesses and shops had been stopped, so people were scared and afraid this would happen again, and they would be beaten down again,” he says of the years before reforms gained speed in the 1980s.
“I also struggled mentally. But whether it was real or not, I didn’t think too much. I took one step at a time to see how far I would go. Like Deng said, ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’,” Chong says, quoting a famous saying of Deng’s to describe China’s gradual marketisation.
Chong had little choice. The eldest of four siblings, he needed to do something to help support the family. Because he was born with cerebral palsy that affected his ability to walk, he had never been given a work assignment or a danwei, a feature of China’s planned economy in the early years.
Around him, the city was changing. Young people who had gone to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution were returning to cities and looking for work, putting pressure on officials to find employment for them. People began quitting their jobs to run their own businesses. In 1985, you could earn as much as 400 yuan a month on your own, compared to 50 yuan a month as a state employee, according to Chong.
People began to open restaurants and other entrepreneurs like him began fixing things other than bicycles or torches. Households now needed help with their typewriters, radios, televisions, and refrigerators.
Despite the changes around him, his hutong stayed quiet, without many shops. People went to work in the morning and came back by evening, keeping regular hours. “People were warm to each other,” he says. “They lived well together and weren’t selfish … and they were sincere. That is what made the biggest impression on me and has become my own standard.”
Chong still tries to maintain some of that same sense. He stopped fixing bicycles about 10 years ago after injuring his hand. Now, he runs a small shop selling goldfish and birds. He doesn’t make much money and spends most of his days smoking, painting and chatting with old friends and neighbours.
“Today there are so many ways of transportation – with shared bikes, Didi [a taxi-hailing app]. Before, there was nothing like this. People only had their two legs. Those who had a bicycle at home were considered well off,” he says.
“A seed that keeps growing” (Struggle for democracy, 1989-1990s)
For Duan Peng, from the south-western city of Chengdu, one of the experiences that marked him the most is one he did not understand at the time: the pro-democracy protests that swept China in the spring of 1989.
After more than a decade of China’s gaige kaifang, reform and opening, young Chinese were emboldened to air their opinions and grievances. In the spring of 1989, Chinese students in Beijing, Chengdu, and other cities took to the streets to mourn the death of the country’s reformist leader, Hu Yaobang.
In Chengdu, as in Beijing, the gathering morphed into protests against government corruption and eventually calls for freedom and democratic rights. Duan, in high school at the time, understood little of the slogans the students were shouting. But he would sneak out of his home at night to join the students marching through the city.
“I thought it was fun, walking along the roads, with no police around. It was exciting,” Duan says.
On 4 June 1989, the same day protests in Beijing had been crushed by the Chinese military, police also moved against students in Chengdu, using tear gas, knives, and electric cattle rods, according to witnesses, who said they saw soldiers stacking bodies in trucks.
Duan had tried to get to the protests that day but police blocked off the roads. He heard rumours of gunfire and remembers burning cars and fires in the city’s public squares. He had heard that students in Beijing had been killed and soldiers burned alive. In Chengdu, the death toll would be as many as 300, according to US diplomatic cables later leaked.
After the protests Duan finished high school, went to vocational school and became an architect at his father’s urging. The country was on the cusp of an economic boom. He moved south to Shenzhen, which soon emerged as one of China’s busiest economic hubs.
Duan would witness more pivotal events. In 1997, he traveled to Hong Kong and watched amid heavy rain as the Union Jack was lowered just after midnight on 1 July, marking the city’s handover from British control to Chinese.
Today, he lives in an apartment on the 14th floor, a far cry from his childhood home in Chengdu, surrounded by fields, with no high-rise buildings in sight. The pace of change is sometimes disorienting to him. “My generation, is the one that has been through the agricultural age, the industrial age, and now the internet age,” he says.
As he thinks about his country’s future, he has started to think more about the protests he witnessed in 1989. “Looking back, it has had a long-lasting effect. It’s like a seed that keeps growing,” he says.
“The 1980s was China’s renaissance,” he says. “Now, it’s harder. Right now, we are in a period of transition. What we need is time for the seed to grow.
“It’s a seed that needs proper soil and the right climate, then it can grow and develop. Western countries were born into democracy and freedom ... If we also want that in China we need the right environment.
“The way people are governed is too strict. I don’t think it will last forever.”
“They don’t want to solve the problem” – (2000s and beyond)
Xiao Chen, a student at Peking University in Beijing, represents many of the ideals his country was founded upon 70 years ago. The son of uneducated workers in China’s rural interior, his primary goal is to give back to his country, help elevate the cause of workers and aid China’s progress toward true socialism.
He had seen rural poverty – in his village, there was little else to do but drink and gamble. Some were taken in by pyramid schemes promising quick money. Other young people had few opportunities to get out of the cycle. So he studied, helped by relatives when his parents were not around, and managed to get into the top university in the country.
“When I saw the pain of the people around me and my own family, I was eager to change this reality. I thought there could be some simple sense of justice and responsibility,” he says. “I wanted to cultivate myself, and contribute to the country, to serve the motherland and the people.”
But Chen was soon disappointed after arriving in the capital. He immediately joined the Marxist Society at the university, eager to implement the tenets he had studied for years in school. He and other members of the group helped workers on campus defend their rights, for the minimum wage and overtime pay, insurance and other protections.
Soon school officials and the police tried to stop their efforts. Many of the students have been detained, grabbed in broad daylight. One was detained while on his way to attend the celebration of Mao’s birthday last December. Chen, who is using an alias, says he and all the other student members are under strict surveillance.
“I really didn’t understand before I went to college. I was confused by the official description. I thought that the policy was to help the people, that the state protects the interests of the people.”
Chen says he now understands. “I have seen the true face of the teachers, government officials, trade unions, police, and the courts. They don’t care about the workers.
“They don’t want to solve problems. They just want to solve the people who reflect the problem,” he says.
He can’t leave campus without permission. His relatives back home have had to cut off contact with him. Minders are always within 10 metres of him, monitoring him with a camera, even when he is eating at school cafeterias. When he turns on his phone, he immediately gets a phone call or a message from local security, just checking up on him.
Chen believes there are many more young Chinese who agree with them, who have “seen the inequality the country’s fast economic development has created”.
“What we have experienced in this generation is a polarised Chinese society. When we were young, the countryside was stagnant. There was no development, and the big cities were developing fast.”
But Chen is quick to stop comparisons between student activists like himself and previous generations who called for democracy and other freedoms, such as the student protesters of 1989, many of them also from Peking University.
“We do not discuss 4 June because we understand the patriotism and feelings of students, but we do not support their thoughts and behaviours,” he says. But he believes the student movement today is not dead.
“I believe that the future must belong to the Chinese working class and progressive youth. They will definitely be more and more.”
Lillian Yang contributed additional reporting
