Even on an ordinary day, Luo Jinquan is an unlikely poster boy for China’s spectacular economic development. A peasant from Yunnan, one of the country’s poorest provinces, he is a down-to-earth man of the soil, the opposite of the entrepreneurial urbanites often presented as the country’s new model workers. Today Luo is fertilising his fields — a sweaty, smelly job that necessitates him slinging a 20kg basket of sheep manure on his back and wading back and forth across the fast-running river between a dung pile and his plot of land.
For Swiss photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer, it is his earthiness and industry that make the farmer’s story worth recording. By the time they find Luo, he has already ferried across 20 basketloads. He is tired, but patiently poses for a portrait, standing in the middle of Weishan river for nearly 30 minutes with a heavy, malodorous load strapped across his forehead. It proves a striking image, a powerful example of how economic development is touching the lives of poor villagers in even the most remote regions of China. While the photographers set up their lights in the middle of the river, Luo (27) says that his income has increased tenfold compared with five years ago. It is the same across his village, Douyijin, where families now earn between 3Â 000 and 6Â 000 yuan (about $400 and $800) a year.
”Life has changed so much. Things are much better than before,” he says. ”We grow different crops, like sweet potatoes, and we can do migrant work in the cities. Incomes are better. Many people are building new homes.”
Later in the year, the local government will build a bridge across the river — one of the smallest of tens of thousands of infrastructure projects reshaping China. For Luo, the completion of the bridge will be a historic moment: today’s basketfuls of manure may be the last he has to carry through the river.
Braschler and Fischer were commissioned by the Guardian to make an epic journey across China, capturing moments just like this: shots of ordinary life that together illustrate a nation on the move. Over six months, they drove 32 000km through all but three of the country’s 34 provinces, making portraits of people from a broad range of Chinese society. They include the super-rich of the eastern megacities, a poor nomad from the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, a Long March veteran in Shaanxi, a nuclear guard in Gansu, a prostitute in Shenzhen, and factory workers and peasants everywhere. Along the way they had frequent run-ins with the authorities.
Their last project, just before the 2006 World Cup, was a set of 30 portraits of the world’s leading footballers, including Beckham, Zidane and Ronaldinho, taken seconds after the final whistle of a match. ”This time, we are doing almost the complete opposite of the footballers project. We are taking pictures of people almost nobody knows,” Braschler says.
I joined them for five days in Yunnan, China’s southernmost province, famed for its ethnic diversity, rich biology and spectacular mountain scenery. The couple were aiming to take a portrait a day. Luo was the first they photographed on this leg of the trip. Braschler spotted him in the valley as we drove through the rain on a winding mountain road.
Where to go next was the subject of a long discussion — should they try to photograph the builders working on Xiaowan dam, a few hours’ drive to the south? This is exactly the kind of project Fischer and Braschler want to record, but in the end they decide against it. It would mean a detour of almost a day, and there’s a chance the police might detain them for photographing a sensitive project. This has already happened twice. In Xinmin, Liaoning province, the authorities held them for several hours after they took a portrait of a 16-year-old mechanic — whether because the boy was covered in oil or because he was under age, the police felt the town’s image was threatened. On the second occasion, the two photographers were caught as they took pictures of a railway security guard in Xinjiang province, which is the second most restive area of China after Tibet.
We stop for the night instead. Before turning in, Braschler and Fischer show me Polaroids of some of the people they have already shot. In Dalian, two oil terminal workers — Yang Jianguo and Sun Yongyi — could be model workers in a socialist realist painting. Other images are timeless: children training at the acrobat school in Shandong province; infant members of the travelling circus near Hukou falls; the cotton pickers of Hami in Xinjiang; and several farmers and coal miners whose tools and clothes could easily have come from the 19th century. Some remote areas are still untouched by development. In Inner Mongolia, one young nomad woman, Wuluchua, did not know what the Olympics were, nor could she name the president of her country.
Most striking are the images of sudden, dramatic change: Wang Wei, the Communist party secretary, stands among the rubble and desolation of the porcelain factory in BoShan that once employed him. The company went bankrupt, like many other state-owned enterprises, during the economic reforms of the past 20 years.
Then there are the new rich at play: Xiu Yang, the developer and entrepreneur who is trying to resurrect polo in China; Ying Mingshan, the Chongqing industrialist who is building one of the country’s biggest car companies; and Jason Fong, the director of the wealth management department at UBS Securities in Shanghai. After decades of Maoism, China has wholeheartedly embraced the principle ”to be rich is glorious”, laid down by the late Communist party leader Deng Xiaoping. Making money is the national goal, and now that fortunes have been made, there is increasing interest in how to manage them, hence Fong’s success.
We are far from such riches in Yunnan. As we drive deeper into the terraced mountains the following day, it is easy to identify the region’s main social problems. They are literally written on the walls. ”Preventing drugs is everyone’s responsibility” reads a propaganda slogan, hinting at the influx of cheap narcotics from nearby Burma. ”Serious Punishment for Land Seizures” says another that addresses the main cause of social unrest in rural areas (Braschler and Fischer are later to be detained a third time for looking into a property dispute in Anhui). ”Aids is not frightening. There are ways to prevent it” reads another — Yunnan has one of the highest HIV rates in China because of drugs and prostitution. The last slogan we spot emphasises family planning: ”If you follow the one-child policy, you will be rewarded when you are old”, it promises.
‘They drink blood and eat raw meat’
We reach Wuliang, a small rural community, on market day. Our driver is nervous when we ask him to stop. ”Be extra polite,” he says. ”These people are rough. They drink blood and eat raw meat.” The live animals, open-air hairdressers and general hustle and bustle of the mountain market make it a compelling subject, but the crowds drawn by the oddity of foreigners will make it hard to take pictures. ”It’s gonna be chaos,” our driver predicts.
A pork seller agrees to a portrait. He is a good subject: strong features, colourful stall and friendly manner. All he wants in return for the shoot is for somebody to buy a pig’s head for 50 yuan (about $7). But setting up a large format camera and lights takes time. As the minutes pass, the crowd grows bigger. Soon the throng is blocking the thoroughfare and a neighbouring stallholder is demanding compensation for lost business. Fifty yuan, he says, is not enough. There are shouts and jostling. The manager of the market is called. Braschler is forced to abandon the shoot. He is bitterly disappointed. But the driver, at least, is pleased to be leaving what he considers a wild community.
Angel of mercy
A couple of hours farther along the road, at Anding district hospital, we meet Dr Zhong Rufang, who has dedicated herself to providing for the medical needs of women in this poor, remote community. Radiating dignity and intelligence, she comes across as an angel of mercy, but she is also a firm believer in government-controlled family planning and conducts two or three forced abortions every year, some as late as seven months. ”The one-child policy has made our lives better,” she insists. ”In the past, we didn’t even have enough food to go around.” The trend, she says, is towards persuasion rather than coercion. ”In the past, some women who refused abortions were brought here in handcuffs,” says Zhong, who has been a doctor for 17 years, ”but now it is not like that. These days, some so-called forced abortions are actually women who want abortions but can’t afford it, so they wait until the government compels them.”
And contraception methods have improved greatly. I ask if some villagers are able to evade the family planning policy and secretly give birth to second or third children. No, she says: ”The government knows every woman’s situation. There is a propaganda official in every village keeping tabs on this.” And if they did flout the rules, they would be fined.
She is encouraged that far more women are giving birth in her hospital rather than at home, thanks to the government’s new health insurance scheme and a World Bank programme. It means infant and mother mortality rates are lower — and there is less call for her to walk hours into the mountains to care for mothers suffering complications.
Even here in central Yunnan, there are some people who are getting rich. The keys to wealth are proximity to power and good connections. We stop for the night at Jingdong, the administrative centre of the county. It turns out that our hotel doubles as a karaoke nightclub. The car park is packed with Mercedes sedans, Toyota Land Cruisers and other cars that scream money. Inside, we meet a party of Jingdong’s powerbrokers — the judge, the chief prosecutor, the head of the tax bureau, a factory boss and the manager of the local trust bank. We shake hands, smile, drink a toast to each other and take it in turn to sing and dance. By the end of the evening, we are all flushed and crooning Auld Lang Syne.
‘We’ll catch up in 20 years
The next day we meet again, and there’s an opportunity for some more sober conversation and a little patriotic boasting. ”We’re behind Europe at the moment, but we’ll catch up in 20 years,” the chief prosecutor says. ”Our big municipalities are already almost at the same level as yours in the west.” The portly bank manager, Su Dapeng, offers to take us hunting for wildfowl and to pose for a portrait. His parents and grandparents taught him how to catch the birds, but there’s a difference now. ”For them, it was an important way to get food, but for me it is just a hobby. It doesn’t really matter if I don’t catch anything.”
We head into the mountains in Su’s new Land Cruiser, stop for lunch at a scenic restaurant and then hang around drinking beer and eating fruit as two of his employees attempt to lure the birds with a tape recording of the fowl’s mating call. They return after a couple of hours with the prey in a bag, which the bank manager then holds as a trophy while he poses for a portrait. None of us has moved a muscle or set foot in the forest. We return to the restaurant for another banquet, this time including the bony wildfowl. It turns out that the restaurant is an extra source of income for one of the officials. ”I opened it under my sister’s name. I had to do that because I am a government official. We are not supposed to have our own private businesses on the side,” he explains. The restaurant is aimed at senior officials and wealthy locals — you wouldn’t call it outright corruption but, as everywhere in China, people have their fingers in as many pies as possible.
The growing gap between rich and poor comes across very strongly in the portraits from Braschler and Fischer’s journey. At one extreme, they have people like Ma Jing — the daughter of a general, who is now building a hotel complex in Penglai, Shandong with her husband, Li Haifeng. At the other, there are illiterate subsistence farmers such as Sun Xuejiang, beggars such as Bao Keshun, who plies his trade with a one-legged monkey, and 81-year-old Huang Sufen, who earns less than 40 US cents a day collecting plastic bottles from the side of a highway. Fischer says the woman cried with gratitude when they gave her a Polaroid, some money and a Swiss bell as a token of thanks. ”Sometimes it is hard to believe how brutal this country can be,” Fischer says. ”It is one of the last communist countries, but there is probably no other place in the world where people are more capitalistic than in China.”
Protests and petitions
The previous week, they passed close to the rocket base in Sichuan province where China had launched its first lunar probe — part of the country’s ambitious space programme. Less than half an hour’s drive away, they photographed Zhang Weng Xiang, who makes 5,000 yuan (about $700) a year from two water buffalo and a tiny field.
Amid such inequality and rapid change, it is not easy for the authorities to maintain stability. The officials in Jingdong told us about protests and petitions in their province sparked by forced relocation programmes for dams and other infrastructure projects. In such cases, the responsibility for restoring order lies with the People’s Armed Police, a million-strong paramilitary unit.
Our karaoke friends put us in touch with one of the officers, Zhang Xiqing. He enlisted in the army in his home province of Henan when he was 16, transferred to the police academy and now, with nine years’ experience in the riot police, he dreams of one day becoming a general. ”We got a new uniform and a salary increase this year,” he says. ”Our income has gone up a lot in the past five years. We also have more entertainment. Before, we used to just sit around and watch TV, but now we have table tennis, pool, computer games — and the food has improved a lot, too. Life is getting better for soldiers.”
Zhang is reluctant to go into details of the operations he has been involved with, speaking only of the humanitarian work his unit has undertaken, putting up tents for the homeless following a recent earthquake. But a few months after the shoot, the People’s Armed Police gained worldwide notoriety for their handling of the riots in Lhasa and their protection of the Olympic flame during the protests in London and Paris.
During their six-month journey, Braschler, Fischer and their Chinese assistant rarely got lost, which is remarkable considering they travelled largely on small roads off the highways, but they encountered plenty of other problems, including three cases of food poisoning, a gastrointestinal infection, a respiratory infection, and a running battle with diarrhoea. They got one speeding penalty (the amount of which was open to negotiation like, it seems, everything in China), bumped the car once and almost got stuck on a ferry on the Yangtze. They crossed a military zone near a nuclear test site in the Taklimakan desert, where they had to bed down secretly in a hotel that was forbidden to foreigners. They drove up to an altitude of 4Â 500m, where the conditions played havoc with the Polaroids. They crisscrossed the Yellow River 10 times, and suffered from the 38C Beijing summer heat and the early onset of winter on the Qinghai plateau, where the mercury dropped to -6C.
Guests of honour
Few people get to view such a breadth of China. In Gansu province, they became the guests of honour at a huge wedding after the six months’ pregnant bride, Bin Bin, decided that the foreigners would bring luck to the nuptials. Among the most spectacular — and piquant — shots is the portrait of window cleaner Zhou Huajing perched hundreds of metres above the cityscape of Chongqing on land that he used to farm before it was planted with skyscrapers.
The opposite perspective is offered by the picture of a coal factory worker enveloped in a cloud of black dust. The contrast between the glory of China’s natural scenery and the damage caused by factory pollution and emissions from the world’s biggest coal industry is very evident in their pictures. ”It is a place of absolute extremes,” Fischer says. ”The beauty of many parts of the country is breathtaking, while the environmental destruction in other parts is beyond imagination.”
On my last day on the road with them, we visit Dianchi lake, which once supplied the drinking water for Kunming city. Not any more. This vast waterway is now one of the three most polluted lakes in China. Effluent, fish farms, river traffic and factory waste have created the perfect breeding ground for bright green toxic algae, which slurps around the refuse dumped into the lake.
As central and local government pass the buck and haggle over what should be done, the lake gets filthier. Meanwhile, one man, Zhang Zhengxiang, a former farmer, has dedicated his life to protecting the lake. His love of the waterway and anger at the despoilers is obvious. ”I got into this because I am an orphan and I have always seen Dianchi as my mother. I want to give something back to her,” he says. He points to a sign written in large, red characters in the middle of the lake. It reads: ”Cleaning up Dianchi is a success of this generation that will be felt by future generations.” He is outraged. ”That’s nonsense. This is the most polluted place and still they dare to write such slogans here.”
Zhang has taken great risks to collect information on polluters, has sued powerful officials, and has blocked the roads used by illegal loggers. His enemies include factory bosses, quarry owners, fish farmers and timber thieves, and Zhang says he has been slashed with a knife, had his teeth knocked out, his hand broken and his camera and cellphone stolen. He has been dubbed a troublemaker, his wife has divorced him and he has gone bankrupt filing lawsuits against polluters. But he vows to struggle on until the lake is restored to its former glory.
Changing China
He is another face of changing China. Thirty years ago, Zhang would probably have been thrown in prison or a re-education-through-labour camp. Today, he is a highly regarded nuisance among residents of Kunming. Everyone is moving on. The Olympics this summer will show not just how far the country has come, but how much further it still needs to go. ·
Xiu Yang, entrepreneur
Polo with a Chinese flavour is the goal of Xiu Yang, an entrepreneur born in 1966 — the year of the horse in the Chinese zodiac — who has spent more than 20m yuan (about $40-million) of his personal fortune building an elite equestrian club in the hills outside Beijing. Xiu hopes to use the sport to promote a gentleman’s culture and to build business contacts among the well-to-do.
It is four years since he started the club, recruiting Mongolian riders, building a stable and inviting several dozen foreign coaches to advise him; he is now planning to launch a national tournament. ”I want to localise the game,” Xiu says, ”to get more Chinese people to know about and play it.” Despite polo’s reputation as ”the sport of kings”, he believes anyone can play — as long as they have money, determination and a good character.
So far he has had mixed success — his club has only 30 members — but he says it has helped him to build up contacts with players overseas and to show the outside world how much China has changed.
Two years ago, he invited a team from Australia to his manor house for an exhibition game. It was a bridge for communication, he says. ”It was their first trip to China. They were so thrilled by the economic boom that they described it as like flying on a helicopter.”
Xiu is reluctant to go into details about his wealth, which comes from an architecture business, property investments and construction site management. But as a child, he says, even though he grew up in an intellectual family of chemical engineers, he could never have imagined he would not only realise a dream of riding horses, but be able to build a manor with an en-suite, walk-in stable. ”This polo club of mine is only a small part of my business,” he says, ”but it is a very big part of my life. I designed my bedroom and the stable to be under the same roof, so I am actually sleeping with the horses.”
This year, he plans to tour America and Europe with his team. ”The secret of my success is learned from horses,” he says. ”I have a galloping heart and a strong will. Dreaming is not enough. You have to make the effort to chase your dream.”
Wang Wei, Communist party secretary
It is with some nostalgia that Wang Wei returns to the ruined kilns of the BoShan porcelain factory, in Shandong province, where he once encouraged his fellow workers to put their trust in the Communist party. It’s six years since the state abandoned the firm, pushing Wang, the deputy party secretary, out of a job. Wang (59) still curses those leaders who, he believes, betrayed the party’s principles when millions of workers, like him, were laid off. ”We were drowning and needed someone to throw us a life-saver. But those who claimed to be helping only tossed us a stick, which was no use at all.”
When Wang joined the company in 1994, the golden era of the state-owned factory was already drawing to a close. The government was no longer willing to subsidise loss-makers in non-strategic industries. Deprived of financial support and political protection, public companies were falling like dominoes.
Wang thought the company could turn itself around with reforms and investment. Instead, he quickly found that he had been hired as a scapegoat. His appeals for change fell on deaf ears. ”The harsh reality was that government policy was at odds with the factory’s needs. We were lost, with no way out. When the factory hit real difficulties, the higher authorities came to us and organised the workers to sing the Internationale, telling us we must help ourselves. It was pointless.”
At first, workers were sent home and told they were merely ”off duty”. Salaries were cut again and again. Production fell lower and lower until one day it stopped completely. No one bothered to tell the workers the plant was closing. ”It was like a car without a brake; the crash came quickly.”
Wang now survives on a pension of 1Â 000 yuan (about $145) a month. It is just enough, he says, if he lives frugally and his family stays healthy. He is resentful of the former government officials who get four times as much, even though they are the same age and, he feels, have not worked as hard. ”It is unacceptable. The only reason is that they had a job with the government. Who are the civil servants and who the masters of society? It seems now in China the relationship is reversed.”
Ma Jing, leisure industry tycoon
The daughter of a People’s Liberation Army general, Ma Jing is now a multimillionaire, running a resort complex she describes as China’s answer to Versailles.
Life was dull when she was growing up, she says, and she did not have high expectations. ”The most I hoped for was to join the army and become a doctor.”
But in 1983 she fell in love with Li Haifeng, a poor, unemployed man from a rural family, and married him despite fierce opposition from her family. ”I was born into privilege,” she says, ”and married into poverty. It was unthinkable that a general’s daughter would marry a boy from the country. My friends and relatives thought I must be insane; they said our relationship was immoral.”
Ma resigned from her job as a doctor in a state-owned hospital — again defying her father — and she and her husband went into business. ”We borrowed 5Â 000 yuan (about $725) from friends. First we started a small restaurant. That turned into a mid-sized one, then a big one, then a guest house, then a hotel, and finally a tourist complex.”
In the past five years, Ma says her income has risen from 30m to 200m yuan ($4,3-million to $29-million) — easily enough to send her daughter to study in the United Kingdom. And her father has at last come round to her way of thinking. ”Now he realises private-owned business can also serve the people. It is a win-win situation when you can do that and make money for yourself. He truly feels proud of me.” – guardian.co.uk