The liberated areas need more sunshine
Sunday, 16 January 2011
”The sun always shines more brightly over the liberated areas” was a very popular song in China during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. If the atmospheric accuracy of the song was dubious when it was written, it seems absolutely absurd in the context of today’s smog shrouded industrial Chinese landscape.
I was reminded of this last Sunday when I went to Guangzhou for the day to help accompany a group of 12 of our students back to Hong Kong (see photo above). The students had spent the previous three 
weeks of the winter break helping to teach local students at Alcanta College, an independent IB school near Baiyun Mountain in suburban Guangzhou. In return for their labours, Alcanta College had kindly hosted our students, providing meals, accommodation, and sightseeing trips. It was a wonderful win-win partnership for all concerned, especially because our students made such a strong and positive impression on the staff and students at Alcanta.
Although Hong Kong was sunny all day last Sunday, the skies surrendered their blue colour as my train passed through Shenzhen, and they had transformed into a murky pale grey by the time I reached Guangzhou (see photo to the right). The Pearl River Delta region between 
Hong Kong and Guangzhou is China’s new industrial powerhouse where gains in GDP per capita have exceeded 20% every year for the past quarter-century. My first train trip between Guangzhou and Hong Kong was in April 1982 when most of the countryside was very photogenic farmland, dotted with peasants and their water buffalo working in the fields. Today, the 150 kilometre railway journey between Shenzhen and Guangzhou follows an almost unbroken strip of factories, blocks of flats, expressways, and bland cities - with neither a peasant nor a water buffalo in sight.
As a result of this phenomenal industrial growth, the air over the Pearl River Delta is almost always thick with grey or brown smog - as we know only too well in Hong Kong when the north-
westerly winds blow the motherland’s atmosphere down to us. Actually, to be absolutely politically correct, Hong Kong has also been a ‘liberated area’ since the peaceful handover 1997, but when the famous song was written, Hong Kong was still “British occupied” (to quote the maps of the day), so the point remains valid I think.
Although the air pollution is a negative consequence of China’s remarkable economic growth, the positive changes in China over the past few decades are simply astonishing. In an earlier blog, I shared some observations about China’s rapid change, and perhaps it is time this week to share another.
As background, in November 2010, the latest month for which statistics are available, there were 833,100,000 mobile phones in China, meaning that 63.4% of the population had a mobile phone. No country in the world has more mobile phones today, and this figure was in addition to the nation’s 313,680,000 land lines (placing China in number 1 position in that world ranking also).
The situation was very different when I first visited China in 1982. I had been travelling for a couple of weeks through China, during which time I had not had any access to a telephone. As Di was pregnant at the time in Australia, I was keen to get in touch with her to make sure she was okay (and I hoped she might have been interested to learn that I was okay too!). At last, I found myself in a hotel in Xi’an that had telephones. However, there was no IDD (international direct dialling), and all overseas calls had to be booked in advance and arranged manually through a telephone operator.
So, I booked the call, and waited the requisite 45 minutes in my room, following strict orders to sit right beside the phone. At last the phone rang, and I overheard the conversation between the telephone operator in Xi’an and the telephone operator in Sydney:
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Xi’an operator: I have call from China for Dianne Codrington
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Sydney operator: Ooh, I don’t get many calls from China! Which city are you calling from?
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Xi’an operator: Xi’an.
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Sydney operator: What?
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Xi’an operator: Xi’an.
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Sydney operator: (a pause, then) How do you spell it?
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Xi’an operator: (very long pause, then eventually) Sorry, I do not know to spell it. I only know to write it.
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Sydney operator: What???
At that point, I joined the conversation, spelt the name of the city (西安) in pinyin (“X-I-A-N”), and finally managed to have a conversation with my wife, which was dutifully terminated abruptly and precisely at the end of the reserved 3 minutes.
Yes, China has certainly changed, but as the video extract at the foot of this blog demonstrates very powerfully, China’s recent development has not been distributed evenly. While cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou are now as advanced as Italy, poor provinces such as Guizhou are 
more like Pakistan in terms of development, while the rural areas of Guizhou are as poor as Ghana. (Focus especially on the description between 3:35 and 4:00 sec in the video, and you will see what I mean).
That is why our College continues to emphasise its strong links with China and its needy areas, such as through the project I have been involved with for several years to help build medical clinics in the poor, rural areas of Guizhou (see description HERE). So far, two of these clinics have been completed, and a third is almost finished (see photo above to the right, which I recently received from our partners, the Amity Foundation).
When you think about the life-changing impact that such clinics have on extending life expectancy as well as improving the quality of life and health in general, I hope you can appreciate and share my excitement!
