Editorial: Pride and Industry

I climbed the stairs to the elevated railway. This new express train between Dalian and the Development Zone isn't very popular because buses are more frequent and cheaper, but I wanted to give it a try. The electric train drew to a halt at the station, the automatic doors hissed open in unison, and as I stepped on board I thought: "It's so modern!"

It's not that there isn't technology in China. There is, and especially in the cities. But it's not so ubiquitous that you can take it for granted. Inside the supermarket they weigh your vegies on a digital scale and stick on a printed label; just outside, the street vendor has a pile of mandarins and a "steelyard" balance. On the road, Mercedes overtake pedal-driven pushcarts and even the occasional horse-drawn buggy. Every morning, men with blue overalls and dirty faces collect the rubbish in handcarts. They make a pile, and wait for the rubbish truck to come. (All the rubbish collectors seem to be men, while the street sweepers are women).

High-tech and low-tech usually rub shoulders, but the express train (although not lightning fast!) was the exception to that rule. The view from the window, however, was the exemplar: near the six lane highway, a horse drags a plough. There are dilapidated storehouses and piles of unidentifiable junk not far from a factory with its huge cooling towers. Dirt roads lead to villages where each small house has a wood fire for cooking and an outhouse in the front yard—nothing like the central-heated city apartments.

Frankly, I was impressed. In Australia, we have money to spend on hiding the ugly side of industrialisation: pipes and wires and factory emissions. As for any sign of what life was like before automobiles and indoor plumbing, that's long gone. We take our modern lifestyle for granted. But in China, when you see cars and factories against a contrasting backdrop you start to appreciate what a significant achievement industrialisation is. Westerners in China are usually unmoved when the locals insist on showing them (or perhaps even giving them a tour of) some recently constructed skyscraper. But the Chinese have every right to be proud of their nation's achievements.

This doesn't mean I'm ever going to buy a mobile phone. Many of the problems that have accompanied industrialisation in other countries, from pollution to consumerism, have come to China too. In a country that is still socialist in name at least, inequality is on the rise: if the large rural population is included in the count, then the gap between rich and poor (in relative terms) is comparable to that of capitalist societies such as America and Australia. These problems have to be recognised, but at the same time we mustn't forget the enormous effort required so that China, by most measures, may now be classified as a developed country.