Wu Guangqiang

    jw368@163.com

    WITH the Chinese New Year holiday around the corner, the world will witness another spectacular sight — the largest annual population movement on the earth. During last year’s 40-day chunyun, or “Spring Festival travel rush,” about 3.7 billion journeys were made, tantamount to transporting the combined population of Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania from one place to another.

    Unlike the common sight in India or Bangladesh of hundreds of passengers hanging out from crowded trains, the pictures of Chinese passengers traveling are glittering and enviable: they enjoy the comfort and speed provided by planes, high-speed trains, long-distance buses and private cars.

    Just two or three decades ago, however, traveling home for the Lunar New Year holiday was an ordeal. Before the Shenzhen airport’s completion in 1991, I, with my wife and little son, had to take a four-hour bus trip to Guangzhou and spend a night there before standing for hours in line for train tickets the following day. I will never forget the sight of tens of thousands of passengers packing the whole square of the Guangzhou Railway Station scrambling for a ticket home.

    This is just an episode of the earth-shaking changes that took place in China in the past 30 years.

    Few people will deny that China has created a miracle with its legendary development in economic and social fields. The world has been familiar with the impressing statistics demonstrating China’s outstanding achievements, but I prefer to show off a more civilian and amiable side of the picture. Hopefully, the revelation of the lives of Chinese common folks may help foreigners better understand how the China Miracle came about.

    Like most people my age, I have had the fortune to witness China’s transformation from an extremely poor nation to a relatively well-off one within a mere generation’s time.

    My childhood and adolescence were spent in a period of severe material shortage. Urban families survived on limited food and other daily necessities, including soap, oil, meat and eggs, all of which were listed in a ration booklet.

    The plight of the rural population was even worse.

    By the early 1980s when I, like other city residents, had enough food to fill their stomach, I began to cheer up a little. My joy, however, did not last long. When I learned from the radio that almost every American or Japanese family possessed at least a TV set, fridge, air-conditioner and even a car, I was dumbstruck and came to the conclusion that in no way could Chinese families ever be as affluent as that!

    Thirty years have flashed by and the impossible dream has come true: an increasing number of Chinese people are enjoying material wealth of a similar level with developed countries.

    Most people attribute China’s historic achievements to the policy of reform and opening up and some simply to the adoption of the free market system. They may have missed something more important, or they will be unable to explain why many other developed countries that also adopted free market could not do as well as China, not to mention that some countries suffered disastrous failures after copying Western models.

    Only native Chinese who have gone through every stage of China’s reform process can have an accurate grasp of the nature of China’s reforms.

    One telling example: China’s housing reform. China’s private home ownership rate is among the world’s highest levels, roughly exceeding 70 percent. Foreigners may wonder how come Chinese are rich enough to buy at least one home, and sometimes several.

    This is thanks to the pro-people housing reform in the 1990s. During the planned-economy period, most urban families lived in homes provided by their employers, mostly State-owned, at a low cost. The reform allowed the inhabitants to buy the ownership of their homes for a cheap price. For instance, 20,000 yuan (US$3,043) was the cost to own my first home and my parents’. In essence, it’s the State’s compensation for its nationals’ sacrifice for the nation.

    China’s reforms have proved to benefit the majority of the population rather than a handful of people with vested interests.

    (The author is an English tutor and freelance writer.)