Money vs. ideology in a China redefining itself

Last of two parts.

INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

LUSHAN, China - The cinema in this resort city has been showing the same movie for 28 years.

Seriously.

It's called

Love on Lushan Mountain

, and it was filmed here. It's the not-so-epic saga of a young couple whose romance is imperiled by the villainous Gang of Four.

But having a theater that screens only one movie is not the oddest thing about the town. To see that, you need to look closer.

This tourist enclave in northern Jiangxi Province is holy ground for the Communist Party, home to the summer villas of Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping. Yet the houses of the men who led China to atheist communism sit side by side with a meticulously restored 1910 Protestant church.

And nobody seems to notice the contradiction.

"Christianity is becoming more popular in China," a local guide said, as if that explained everything.

Perhaps, as with so much of modern China, the juxtaposition of relics from Christianity and communism posits a conundrum that's best not examined too closely.

"Those contradictions are everywhere," said James Carter, a China scholar at St. Joseph's University. "But it's not seen as being a problem. They both make money."

Ah, money. The preoccupation of so many Chinese, who for the first time see a chance to own consumer goods such as televisions, cell phones, cameras and even cars. Buick is the preferred brand, black the desired color.

As China rushes to the future, swilling oil, burning coal, fouling air and water, creating an unprecedented economic expansion that has lifted millions out of poverty, the question looms: What does China want to be? And what will that mean for people in the United States and in places like Lushan?

"You hope they don't lose themselves," said Patricia Montini, a New Jersey teacher who traveled to China last month to establish a sister-school partnership. "And I'm afraid that they might."

Here in Lushan, the throwback one-movie theater has become its own tourist attraction. The summer home of the author Pearl S. Buck is another. The church lures visitors by staging mock Western-style weddings, complete with a robed actor-preacher poised before a neon cross.

You get the sense that if officials believed they could make money by putting on a Wild West show, they'd do it.

The Beijing Olympics moved this nation a big step toward its goal of becoming a major international player. But spend time talking to people in China about the future, and it's mostly the contradictions that stand out.

"We made great progress in our materialistic life," said 87-year-old Xiangling He, a former vice chairman of the Guangxi Autonomous Region's People's Political Consultative Conference. "But we need to pay more attention to our spirit, to our traditional Chinese culture."

One sign of material progress: About 20,000 new cars roll onto China's streets every day. Another: In some towns, the smog is so thick that it's hard to read the highway signs. And safety belts dangle as ornaments, particularly in taxis.

"I am your safety belt," a Beijing cab driver explains.

China is a land where a student at prestigious, forward-looking Nanjing University offers a sincere farewell by shouting, "Hasta la vista, baby!" And where a developer in Jiangsu Province names his housing project "San Diego," no matter that there's not a beach or ocean in sight.

It's a country where death by starvation dwells in living memory, as many recall the famine of the Great Leap Forward. And where the old national impulse to deny weakness can still overpower reality:

You leave a restaurant table laden with untouched platters and ask if the food can be given to the poor, the way Starbucks donates leftover pastries to the Salvation Army.

"There are no poor in China," the waitress responds.

China generates roughly a third of all international adoptions to the United States, cheerfully uniting Asian children with mostly white parents, but the adoption of a Chinese infant by a Chinese couple can be a secret kept until death.

It's a land where the ultimate Communist Party salutation, "Comrade," has been turned into gay slang, a coded greeting used by people who until recently were regarded by the government as mentally ill.

It's a country that eagerly pursues engagement with the rest of the world, but still has plenty of cities where the sight of an American provokes reactions better suited to a zoo exhibit.

"To them, you are like a panda," a young Chinese explains, giggling at how an American friend draws stares on the streets of Zhenjiang. "A talking panda."

The bride's dress is bone white, traditionally a mourning color in China. The fur cuffs make the gown seem more appropriate for the Playboy Mansion than a church. The groom's tuxedo is too big on him, the tails hanging low.

The fake preacher reads to the couple from a Bible, a book that may be confiscated should you try to bring it into China in large numbers.

"It's not for you, it's for Chinese," a Chinese guide explains. "We put it on because many people don't know about Western weddings."

After the "I do's," some spectators snap pictures at the altar. For 5 yuan, about 75 cents, they can pose for a professional photo dressed as a revolution-era cadre or a five-star general - two types who presumably never set foot inside a church.

Americans in the crowd balk as two Chinese men stretch their arms into old military uniforms.

"These things strike Americans really hard when they travel in China," said Colette Plum, a Widener University Asia expert who has lived and taught in China.

Americans think of China as a homogenous nation, when the country is radically diverse in geography, people and history, she said. The question to always ask is: Which China are we talking about?

Lushan rests among soaring peaks, surrounded by clouds and fog. The rain can shift from drizzle to downpour in an instant, and the thunder rumbles as hard and loud as an earthquake.

The town was established in the late 1800s by white men who came to China to preach or conduct business, and who fled the summer city furnaces for Lushan's cooler climes. After the 1949 communist victory, Lushan became famous as a meeting place for government leaders.

Today people come to see the mountain vistas and to glimpse the past, to ramble through Mao's backyard bomb shelter and purchase copies of his Little Red Book

.

And to buy Nativity sets in the church gift shop.

"It's really money that talks now," Plum said. "Ideology is not what really informs the public consciousness."

China is a society that sorts and assigns people at every level. Children must score well on tests to enter a good high school. There they must rank high to be accepted into college. Peak grades are needed in college to secure a good job at graduation.

Falter early on in your schooling, and it's welcome to the factory.

In Xian, famous for its ancient terra cotta warriors, there are 20,000 Chinese tour guides, and next year there will be more, all of them seeking clients from a tourist pool shrunken by the sour U.S. economy.

The competition in China is brutal. The results can seem harsh.

But Weijing Zhou, an English professor at Jiangsu University, points to how much has changed for the better. For young people in China, progress isn't an abstraction. And it's not glacial. They see real improvement between their lives and those of their parents, who grew up when China was "short of food, short of freedom, short of education," she said.

Parents who labored in dusty factories where they assembled tractors now see their children working in sleek offices where they design cars.

"A different world," Zhou said.

Today, people in China brag that they can talk openly about anything, even Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Still, even among friends, the Tiananmen Square massacre can remain off-limits. People may refer to it obliquely as 1989, a four-numeral shorthand for the army assault on unarmed, pro-democracy protesters that killed several hundred.

Nearly 20 years later, Tiananmen Square remains some of the most sensitive real estate in the world. It's a fine place to relax or fly a kite, but a Chinese friend suggests you not pull out a reporter's notebook on the square unless you want an immediate encounter with the plainclothes police.

Carter, the St. Joseph's scholar, has taught subjects that range from the collapse of the Qing Dynasty to the goals of the Great Leap Forward. He sees in China both power and fragility.

"There's no ideological commitment to communism," he said. "There's a lot of support for the government, but the reason is, the government has delivered the goods, literally, in terms of low prices and consumer goods.

"If the bottom drops out of that, and people don't believe in what the government stands for, they may look for something different. I'm certainly not predicting revolution, but it's not as stable as it may seem from the outside."