Reform touches many fields — from crops to kung fu
The Communist Party of China announced the gaige kaifang program, or “reform and opening-up,” after its third plenum in December 1978.
Last month I asked some Chinese from different walks of life in different cities what they felt about the changes the country has witnessed since then.
They spoke of their personal experiences of the economic reforms, with a mix of nostalgia (greener mountains, cleaner rivers when China was not as industrialized as it is today), memories of difficult living conditions (cramped houses) while growing up and optimism for the future.
China is the world’s second-largest economy but it is also the largest developing country, which is aiming to eradicate extreme poverty by 2020, a drive being watched elsewhere.
My interviewees cited the collectivization of agriculture in the early 1980s and Deng Xiaoping’s southern tours in 1992 among key milestones of the past 40 years.
It appears to me that Deng’s 1984 quote — “poverty is not socialism” — has become one of the most quoted remarks by a Chinese leader in media stories on China.
The country’s industrialization between the 1970s and ’90s moved much of the labor force from the farms to the factories, which resulted in a large migrant population. And from that aspect the household registration system, or hukou, is still in need of reform to enable more access for migrants to public resources in a host city.
Economic changes have created both wealth and disparity in China, as they have in some other countries.
A 31-year-old Buddhist monk told me during our recent conversation on reform, “If there are no challenges, there will be no progress.”
Yan Xun, a resident of the Shaolin Temple in Central China’s Henan province, was born in Yunnan province in the southwest. He recalled seeing people from neighboring Myanmar visiting his hometown for their jade-and-jewellery businesses during his childhood.
Foreigners can understand and study Shaolin culture better, he said, adding that it was his personal opinion when I asked him if kung fu’s spread abroad was helped by reform.
When I visited the temple in 2016, I learned it had thrived in imperial China, especially under Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) patronage, but that kung fu was outlawed by the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the last monarchs of China, owing to the fear of a coup by the “warrior monks”.
The temple is said to have been set ablaze in the days of the Republic of China by a warlord and it was shut down during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76).
Shaolin’s revival came in the 1980s and ’90s, on the heels of the economic reforms. The mystic complex was rebuilt with private and government funds.
And while kung fu’s influence on popular culture, cinema in particular, has waned in recent times compared with its heyday in the early 1970s when the late actor from Hong Kong, Bruce Lee, made it world famous with his films (and later by Jackie Chan), Shaolin remains one of China’s earliest softpower exports.