ZHONGGUO used to be The Middle Kingdom, the centre of the world. Today we call it mainland China. It was in 1984, during the first of my two teaching contracts in Macau, that I encountered China in all its contradictions. Economically it was astonishing, a vibrant, free-market peasant economy carrying on its back all the corruption and inefficiency of an out-of-date communist bureaucracy. Culturally, the atheism of communism had changed many of its traditions. Its ancient religions had faded into the background and women had emerged from oppression. Foot-binding and the tradition of wifely suicide on the death of the husband had, of course, gone some time ago, and women now wore the same blue denim clothes as men. Musically, behind the shimmering of gongs, the crack of fireworks, and the wobbly wailing of sopranos I had started to hear a song that has haunted me ever since in a journey of the soul.
The song of the emperor’s daughter. He hid it well, but I sensed he was astonished that a Guaelo should come into his shop and ask about Chinese opera. He was quite old, polite and self-effacing with a sparse, wispy goatee beard. The shelves in his tiny shop in downtown Macao were untidy and dusty but I hummed the tune and he found the cassette that contained the song. It was in a floating restaurant, of all the unlikely places, that I had first heard the tune, picked out on a kind of zither. And now, on the cassette, it was in the form of a chorus, a lilting melody worthy of Puccini. The rest of the opera was incomprehensible, gongs and blocks, with discordant duets that reminded me of cats yowling. So, while I marked student assignments, we played this one tune over and over while Madeleine picked it out on the strings of a pepar, a Chinese guitar, and the tune sank into my memory.
I sing Chinese opera. One week later in Pinocchios, a restaurant on the island of Taipa, my Chinese students had already given me a full tumbler of Vino Verde and now challenged me to sing a song. I decided to risk it. The words were beyond me, but the students were astonished and said I got nearly all the tune right. They then gave me a page of scribbled phonetics, and said I should try again. My Chinese colleague was also asked to sing a song, and he delivered “Auld Lang Syne” with a fine attempt at a Scottish accent. The riotous evening was eventually interrupted by a typhoon warning and we headed for our hotel. Years later, to take my mind off the stitches Sam Seit, my dermatologist, was sowing into my face, I mentioned all this. He asked me if I could still sing the song. I did and he immediately joined in, to the astonishment of the receptionist next door. Asking me about Madeleine and the pepar, I said Madeleine played most stringed instruments and once played with a group called fingers and frets. But I’m not sure he got the joke, and I’m not sure I got the joke when I saw his bill.
The China tour started at Macau’s Border Gate to China. Unsure of our welcome to the new China and putting Madeleine and Rebecca on their best behaviour, we were passing meekly through the Gate when I was surprised by a booming voice saying “Happy Christmas”. I turned to see a huge Chinese army officer smiling and waving to us. A good start, as twelve of us boarded a tour bus designed for small Chinese people. So the large Englishman ahead of me spent the next five days with his right buttock hanging out over the central aisle. Sun, our cheerful guide had learned English listening to “Voice of America”, and he would say “On the left hand side we have rice” then later on “On the both hand sides we have rice”. We saw much rice. We also saw “Former residence dottor Sun Yat Sen”, then “Dottor SunYat Sen Memorial School”, then “Statue Dottor Sun Yat Sen”, then a farm specially selected to impress foreigners where we admired a meal being cooked in an immense wrought iron wok. Our first hotel was still under construction when we arrived and, with no heating we had to retire to bed after lunch to keep warm. Across a rice paddi I could see a small thin barefoot man, they were still malnourished in those days, trotting along the clay embankment, two large baskets at the ends of the bamboo pole across his shoulders. This was the old China. During a brisk walk downtown that night the entire power supply for the town failed, and we had to feel our way back to the hotel. This was the new China.
Zhaoqing City. Our next stop was at a hotel in Zhaoqing city which had just set up the first disco in the district. This was going to be the new China Sun explained to us and, since westerners knew all about these things, we were expected to demonstrate disco dancing that night. The absurd gyrations of the middle-aged “experts” became so embarrassing that Madeleine and Rebecca had to go outside and sit in the coach. We passed duck ponds outside villages in which we would see flattened ducks hanging in shop windows. But in one window there hung a flattened dog, which prompted Joan to sing out “How much is that doggie in the window.” I had seen photos of those Guilin limestone peaks that had inspired so many misty Chinese ink paintings, and now we were to see the smaller but equally spectacular Seven Star Crags rearing skywards out of the surrounding lakes. At the end of the tour a hovercraft weaved in an out of rusty shipping down the Pearl River to Hong Kong. It was late on Christmas night when we arrived at our overnight flat to find the cupboard was bare. But this was Hong Kong so round the corner was a supermarket selling everything we needed.
Zhuhai. We had driven past Zhuhai (“Pearl Sea”), just across the Macau border in 1984, as did Kate and I in 1987 when we saw flattened rats hanging up in a meat shop. The Lonely Planet describes this SEZ (Special Economic Zone) as “one of the cleanest and greenest metropolises in China”. Not so its twin SEZ across the river, Shenzhen, which went from a poor fishing village to China’s richest city in 20 years. “The city draws a mix of businessmen, investors and illegal migrant workers to its golden gates, all of them trying to find a place in China’s economic miracle. At least half of Shenzhen’s population is illegal….the extreme imbalance of wealth and poverty lends an air of desperation.” (Lonely Planet). Someone once described China as combining “European cities and an African countryside.”
The junk. On our last day in Macau our bus left at four while my MBA class was scheduled to end at five. Fortunately, Peter Melhuish was teaching in the next room with an adjoining door. So we shook hands, I left him in charge, and Joan and I caught the jetfoil for Kowloon. All this had been my first experience of “The Orient” and there was to be one last magic moment when we overtook a traditional junk, all its sails bending, as it lurched slowly through the timeless world we were now leaving behind.
Bohennias On the farm
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND
Ancient Chinese history. Two BBC commentators are discussing a devious politician. “He is as bad as Genghis Khan.” “Yes” says the other “But at least you knew where you were with Genghis Khan.” So, who was Genghis Khan? Trailing the blood of political opponents he came down from Mongolia, broke through the Great Wall of China, captured Beijing to the East and, turning West, got as far as Russia. His grandson Kublai Khan inherited not only the largest empire the world had ever seen but the world’s first information superhighway, the Silk Road. Marco Polo travelled the Road in the 1200s and Joan, Ann, Mary and I stopped for refreshment at one of its caravanserais in 1997. China, recovering from the Mongol invasions, itself invaded Tibet, first in 1751 in order to face possible aggression from Russia and Britain, and again in 1950 (see Tibet later). European intrusions into China soon turned free trade into monopolised trade and into the disastrous opium trade. Then, after 36 dynasties had fought over China for 4000 years, the last of these, The Qing, was replaced by China’s first republic and China’s first reforms.
The China Land reforms. In the first quarter of the 20th century we find Sun Yat Sen, later called the father of modern China, launching his Land to the Tiller reform. But in the second quarter, with Sun Yat Sen defeated we find the peasants living at a sub-human level, ravaged by landlords, warlords, bandits, and government and Japanese troops. Then in the third quarter occurred the largest land reform in human history with the redistribution of 150 million acres, from some 10 million landlords, to 300 million Chinese peasants. Emphasising the class struggle, the Communist Party first killed millions of rich peasants and landlords, and then herded the population into a series of failed experiments called collectives, cooperatives and communes. With peasant incentives very low and incompetent central planning in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, mass starvation occurred until Mao died in 1976. “Almost immediately, and perhaps spontaneously, the peasants began to divide up the land themselves and grow food as they thought fit instead of following state directives.” Two years later Deng was smart enough to formalise this popular movement into his Household Responsibility Units (HRUs). Later he said that “what took us completely by surprise was the development of township and rural industries.” The HRUs and these new Town Village Enterprises (TVEs) kicked economic growth from zero to an astonishing ten percent per year, the TVEs then evolving into the giant Special Economic Zones (SEZs) exporting machinery around the world.
Reforms. The first president, Sun Yat Sen, had been educated in Hawaii and Hong Kong where he had picked up some ideas from Henry George and converted these into the “Land to the Tiller” movement. As a middle of the road reformer he was eventually defeated by right-wing Chiang Kaishek, now engaged in civil war with left-wing Mao Zedong. To make matters worse, the Japanese then invaded China. After the allies defeated Japan in 1945 the civil war continued until Mao set up the second republic in 1949. During all this time Mao’s troops marched 8000 kms round China, the Long March, confiscating landlords’ property as they went and redistributing land to the peasants. This popular Robin Hood activity had naturally led to large numbers of recruits. But after 1949 Mao’s disasters, included the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, cost 45 millions of lives. On his death the peasants spontaneously abandoned the communes and returned to their family farms, a popular revolution.
Tibet. As with the causes of the Chinese economic miracle there is still much confusion amongst Western political and economic commentators over Tibet. Christopher Hitchens refers to early visitors to Tibet being appalled at the “feudal domination, and hideous punishments, that kept the population in permanent serfdom to a parasitic monastic elite.” And today “The Chinese are truly baffled by the ingratitude of the Tibetans” (Lonely Planet) having seen at first hand a place of abject poverty and slavery ruled by a ruthless elite. A letter from a Christian missionary who had worked near the Tibetan border suggests that “There were three classes of people in Tibet: the feudal landlords who owned all the land, monks who spent their time reading scriptures and begging, and serfs who worked the land for the feudal lords. The landlords treated the serfs with the same ruthlessness as the landlords of the dark ages in Western Europe….The refuges who came to India were mainly the feudal landlords with their wealth in gold, their servants and some monks, together with the Dalai Lama…The Chinese built roads, schools and hospitals…They instituted land reforms and gave dignity in life to the serfs.”
There is plenty of unrest in Tibet but it is “caused by the economic disparity between the Tibetans and the Han Chinese and the Hui Muslims who own the majority of shops and businesses…Freedom of religion has very little to do with what is happening in Tibet now.” But China can be brutal and has its own strategic agendas, recognising the importance of Tibet’s glaciers that feed water to one fifth of the world’s population.
Weekend browsing. Before the family joined me in Macau in 1984 I got into the habit of browsing in the university library at weekends. UEA (University of East Asia), though small, had attracted a fair amount of funding and the library was well stocked in three areas. One was Business, which reflected the main reason the students were there. One was English Literature, which reflected the main reason expatriate British teachers were there (Jane Austen was leaking out of every book shelf). But the area that attracted my interest was a collection of books on modern Chinese history. These were written mainly by Chinese authors, translated into English, and rather different to books I subsequently discovered in the Macquarie and other libraries written by Western authors. The difference lay in the historical importance, perceived by the Chinese, of land reform. The West, perceiving problems lying in capital rather than in land ownership have, particularly through the various UN agencies, bungled every attempt to lift the third world out of poverty and obscene inequality.
David Ricardo. Using Ricardo’s theory of rent I wrote a draft paper called A Ricardian Analysis of the China Land Reforms. Next door to us in the residential block lived Rolf Cremer, professor of economics. He had left his wife and German university to run away as far as he could with his secretary Heidi. Both of us being monosyllabic, I got on well with Rolf. His interest was China trade and we talked about David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, a theory well understood by Deng Xiaoping, who was busy opening up China to world trade. Unlike the Chinese authors I was reading, Rolf was not familiar with Ricardo’s other famous theory, that of land rent. I showed him my draft paper and suggested joint authorship. He showed interest, but I think preoccupations with China trade legislation and Heidi distracted him. I filed the paper away and it was not published until 21 years later.
Telecom. Having retired too early I needed money and direction and I got both in Telecom, building software interfaces to allow managers to customise the reports coming out of the massive corporate databases. After two years I retired again, now with a clear objective, to enrol part time in economics with some of my software tools on a diskette and the Ricardo paper in my briefcase.
At Macquarie University I asked advice about the Ricardo paper. The economics department were intrigued but, as a first year undergraduate they really didn’t know what to do with me.
In 1992 they teamed me up with Ihor Gordijew, an expert on the Russian Marxist economy, retired early since they no longer needed that expertise. To drown his sorrows at rejection he brought a bottle of red wine to our weekly, pleasant but somewhat unproductive meetings.
In 1993, after I reminded them of the Ricardo paper, they teamed me up with an expert on the Chinese Marxist economy and, since he too didn’t understand what I was doing, we chatted over the strong coffee he brewed once a week.
By 1994 I had used my software and second year economics to start building simple models of third world poverty and inequality. I gave them names “Malthus (demographics), Smith (first world economic growth), Ricardo (trade and rent), George (land tax), Todaro (third world economic growth), and Olson (institutional drag)” and demonstrated them to the economics department. For the next few years they gave me whatever hardware and software I needed and I started getting papers published.
Meanwhile, since I was not getting all the answers from economics, I started trespassing. I was surprised to find that, though third year economics would have demanded tools learned in first and second year, I was able to enrol in and then easily pass third year units in anthropology, history, politics and sociology.
In the end I never graduated, but continued working with the economists until I fell in with a delightful Chinese rogue in the School of Law. We presented a joint paper to an international conference on environmental taxation and, since he had done most of the work, I was glad to pay him back two years later. I found out about the annual conference of the History of Economic Theory Society of Australia five days before it opened, leaned on the convenor, who I knew, to accept a late entry, and gave Alex Low joint authorship. Though A Ricardian Analysis of the China Land Reforms was entirely my own work, I think linking my name with that of an Associate Professor of Law removed any possible obstacle, after 21 years, to its publication!
China – Quo Vadis? China’s extraordinary success story is now turning sour. The land redistribution that lifted China out of poverty is appropriate for only for rural areas. (You can’t really redistribute urban land. Bernard Shaw and the Fabians, perceiving land reform as “three acres and a cow” had argued for years over what they called an “urban cow” much as the medieval scholars had argued for centuries over how many angels could dance on the point of a pin). And now rapid urbanisation (Shanghai now has twice as many skyscrapers as New York) without appropriate tax reforms is leading to inequality, a renewal of poverty and environmental problems now called “The Great Pall of China”. Confused by the re-emergence of poverty in China, its government has apparently forgotten a solution appropriate to urban as well as rural land, and one appropriate to any kind of polity. For example, Marx stated it explicitly in the Communist Manifesto “the collection of all land rent for public purposes”. Sun Yat Sen’s republican solution was Georgist land value taxation. And buried in Ken Henry’s democratic tax reforms, those that timid Australian governments will eventually implement far too late, are similar recommendations for society to recapture socially the values in land and natural resources that society has itself created.