Some say that China’s Great Wall, a 6 000 km structure built over 2 000 years to keep out foreign invaders, can be seen from the moon.
Now there is a new beacon on the Chinese horizon, Shanghai’s 460m-high Jin Mao skyscraper, the fourth tallest in the world. Its name means ”golden prosperity”.
Incorporating the Chinese pagoda-style architecture, it seems to head ever upward, like almost all the economic statistics in China’s financial capital.
”Shanghai is a window of China’s opening up to the outside world,” Foreign Affairs Vice-Minister Yang Wenchang told South African journalists on a recent visit to his country.
The city’s economic growth rate in 2001 exceeded 10%. That of the whole of China has levelled at about seven percent, according to South African ambassador to Beijing Themba Khubeka.
Direct foreign investment in China amounted to $46,8-billion last year.
”Every multinational concern one can think of is here,” Khubeka said.
He is concerned that not enough South African businesses have followed suit yet. ”Whatever product you can think of, if you can just win one percent of 1,3-billion people…”
China was growing with leaps and bounds, the ambassador said.
”Sometimes one feels that people look at China as the China of the past.”
With 7 000 years of history, and revolutionary changes in the past century, it is easy to get lost in China’s past.
Two decades ago, then leader Deng Xiaoping set in motion market-led reforms and started opening up China to foreign investments and influence.
An event still fresh in the memory of many is the death of masses of pro-democracy supporters on Tianan’men Square in 1989.
National Foreign Affairs representative Zhang Qiyue, describing the country’s political system as multi-party co-operation under Communist Party leadership, believes it is not heading for a Western style democracy.
Citing the example of the melt-down in the former Soviet Union, Zhang’s Shanghai colleague Kitty Xia said: ”Political reform is a very heavy task. It will be very cautious.”
Yao Weiqun, associate president of the Shanghai World Trade Organisation (WTO) Affairs Consultation Centre, believes economic reforms will push political reform, because of the principle of transparency.
But Foreign Affairs official Li Wen said that if political transformation occurred too fast, it could damage the economic reform.
”If the boat capsizes, all will be hurt.”
Zhang said many Westerners had a misconception of China as a police state.
Asked about human rights issues, Zhang said Chinese conditions applied in China.
Regarding the one-child policy, for instance, she said this was only applied strictly to civil servants and in the cities. The first offspring of that policy in the cities would now be allowed two children per family.
”If China’s population doubled, the problem would not only be China’s, but the world’s.”
Tibet, she said, had been part of China since the 13th century. ”Go there and see for yourselves. The living standards have improved vastly.”
The Taiwan matter is still very much on the Chinese agenda, with government believing it would be reunited with the motherland under a policy of ”one country, two systems”, like that of Hong Kong, sooner or later.
Human rights advocates have voiced suspicions that China uses its anti-terror stance as a cover-up to crack down on groups like the Uighur separatists in the Xinjian Uighur autonomous region, Tibet and rights activists and Falun Gong practitioners.
More than 10 000 Falun Gong practitioners have reportedly been sent to labour camps and over 200 are claimed to have died of abuse while in custody.
But Zhang said only the leaders were prosecuted, not the ordinary people. ”We tell them of the dangers.”
The government has said the practice has claimed 1 400 lives, among them children who died because their Falun Gong disciple mothers neglected them. In a booklet outlining its policy, it likens Falun Gong to cults like David Koresh’s Branch Davidians.
”Prohibition of information associated with evil cults and their ideologies and theories” on the Internet is one of the functions of the State Council Information Office, according to deputy director-general Liu Zhengrong.
The internet affairs bureau also sought to restrict internet content that could persuade people to act against the government or could cause confrontation among ethnic groups. There were also restrictions against pornography and what Liu termed ”disinformation”.
China’s more than 280 television stations and over 2 000 newspapers belonged to the state, said Vice-Minister Cai Mingzhao.
”If they abide by the law, there is not much government entanglement,” he said.
Huang Qing, deputy editor-in-chief of the China Daily newspaper, said: ”Journalists like us decide what goes in the paper. If the government is not happy, they’ll call us. We get calls from foreign governments as well.”
Another senior journalist told Sapa that his newspaper reported on corruption, but could not criticise the government or the Chinese Communist Party. ”They support us.”
He said his paper was obliged to publish the government and party’s policy ”so the people would know what to do”.
He did not foresee private media ownership soon. ”It won’t work.”
Huang said: ”In the West newspapers define themselves as an adversary. Here we try to be constructive…
”The West makes a fuss about China’s rights. We have a huge population. There is a tremendous amount of work.”
On the question of South Africa’s position about human rights in China, Khubeka said: ”South Africa is not taking a similar role to other countries like the United States… South Africa is not tackling the dragon in a way that might undermine its positive engagement with China.”
China entered the WTO last year, which means that it is now subject to global trade rules. For example, it had to reduce customs taxes for 1 000 products within five years, Yao said.
Khubeka said this would favour South Africa, which was trying to promote its wines and spirits in China.
Vice-minister Yang said China was not a massive investor in Africa. He believes some of the capital that had flown into the country since economic reforms began, could find its way to Africa.
The agreement whereby China undertook to give preferential treatment to African products still needed a lot of flesh before it became operational, Khubeka said.
Last year, the Chinese government granted South Africa approved destination status for tourists.
A memorandum of agreement in this regard could be signed by September, the ambassador said. Once operational, this could result in a minimum of 50 000 Chinese tourists visiting South Africa annually.
The new status meant, said Foreign Affairs’ Zhang, that Chinese citizens, who could formerly not travel overseas freely, could now apply for passports to go to those countries.
According to Yang, many Chinese tour agents are interested in what is termed a ”diamond journey” to South Africa. China Daily’s Huang said that to the West, China might look quite prosperous, but it was still far from being a developed country. ”We still think of the developing countries as our brothers and sisters.”
China shares some of Africa and South Africa’s problems, like huge economic disparities between the coastal areas and the west, as well as poverty. The government claims to have reduced the number of poor from 250-million to 30-million over the past 20 years.
According to Huang, Africa and China are both portrayed negatively in the world media.
”They portray China as a power… and the rest is all negative.” – Sapa