Modernity

I took these photos on the Saturday of the weekend of the dragon boat festival, alas the last national holiday for quite a while. Hunker down for the endless 5-day weeks.


Just a normal summer morning in Guangzhou - these were taken around midday with the afternoon storm just starting to announce its presence.

Being a national holiday, once again everybody and their grandmother is engaged in the national pastime, to wit, shopping. Or at least, walking around shopping centres. Me too, the A/C is fantastic.

A lot of people here aren't comfortable with escalators; I've noticed it before but today the problem seemed particularly noticeable, perhaps because it causes a break in the holiday-relentless flow of people. Perhaps because a lot on Sunday escalator-users (would that be escalateurs?) are out today. People hesitate at the top waving one foot in the air trying to time their first step. Does that happen in Australia? My feeling is that it doesn't, but then, I have another feeling that one is much more observant when not at home. It's at least plausible though, that in Oz everybody has grown up with escalators and the first step problem has been relegated to a reflex by about the age of five. Perhaps there is another generation or two to go in China before escalators are not a significant obstacle. (But, really, is it so difficult? Maybe I just notice it more here because there are more people and more escalators)

Coming to the mall, I crossed the road behind a couple who had just got off their bikes, chained them to a railing, and set off across the road towards the TEEMALL emanating all the excitement and anticipation of a big day out. (Is it really possible to notice that kind of thing?) Judging from the bikes, gearless, heavy and without any sign of the original paint, which were the kind that everybody rode even five years ago – bikes have almost vanished from the roads by comparison with 2002 – and their clothes, they were not going to buy anything in the mall, except possibly lunch.

That's a little bit unfair, although it sounds more harshly than it should. Look at it this way. I would say they were roughly my age, which would put them into a generation who were and generally still are extremely frugal (they were born in the middle of a massive drought, which has left people in their parents' generation in North China still picking edible weeds out of the lawns in public parks, and while it may have been fun being a pre-teeen in the Cultural Revolution, life wasn't providing anyone with much more then the bare minimum) . They could, in fact, easily have had the money to be buying things, despite the fact that they appeared not to have spent anything on their bikes or clothes for twenty years, because their generation wouldn't bother replacing a bike that worked or could be repaired; likewise clothes. But even if their churchmouse appearance was the result of frugality rather than poor-ness – I'm deliberately avoiding the word poverty, which more properly belongs to the countryside than the cities – that same frugality would militate against their buying much in the mall, because everything in the mall can be purchased elsewhere for much less. Not, perhaps, the Mont Blanc pens, but apart from that.

They might have been meeting their children there to pay for a wedding, too, because their generation spends an extraordinary amount of money on financing their children's entry to modernity, and because the big malls will generally have four or five big wedding planner roadshows on the holiday weekends. Weddings are big business. And a western style wedding is the must have accessory for the modern couple. And that is absolutely not to mock - it's the must have accessory for the average Western couple too, if you judge by the number of wedding-related businesses in the yellow pages in Oz.

But I reckon they were having an excursion to the capitalist 21^st century from the socialist 20^th. And they were planning to enjoy it.

This is one of the things that I find repetitively seductive about China; its zest for its new world. My own life has been – I would say it was typical of a pretty solid subset of the population – imbued with a solid distrust of the mechanisms of the modern capitalist state. But I've never tried to live without the benefits of said state either, so it would be foolish to deny that my distrust doesn't have a hypocritical side; or if that is too strong, a complacent side.

I imagine that the mood here is not wholly dissimilar to the mood in the West in the 1890's, the 1920's, the 1950's, the great booms that pushed modernity into existence, baptized it and consolidated it. (Historians who actually know what they are talking about are welcome to dispute that potted summary of the last 120 years) I missed out on the optimism; but here in China it is on display everywhere. It's not an unmixed blessing, it's optimism tinged with a great awareness of the weight of the future, but it is rather infectious.

Outside the sports centre, which is the geographical focus of Tian He, there were a couple of guys with Chinese chess endgame problems, collecting 100 RMB per sucker in the crowd who thought they knew the answer. They were coining money hand over fist, at least 2000 RMB visible in one guy's hand. What makes people think they can win this kind of bet? Not one of the punters even asked how they could be certain there was a winning sequence – I didn't see any sign that there was a choice of colours involved in the bet. From what I saw, I would have had a better chance of analyzing the position than anyone actually handing over their money, and I couldn't see the remotest possibility. That doesn't mean it wasn't honest, good chess puzzles are like that, but honestly, do people think the guy with 2000 RMB in his hand is there to give money away?