China’s new face

BEIJING, China – A giant digital display overlooking Tiananmen Square counts off the time left before the 2008 summer Olympics open in Beijing – days, hours, minutes, seconds.

Tiananmen is the world’s largest public square, holding more than a million people, and it was bustling on this breezy morning. Street salesmen peddled postcards and had knockoff Rolex watches up their sleeves. Parents flew kites and chased children. A long line of Chinese waited patiently to get into the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall on the square.

Nearly 30 years after his death, Chairman Mao remains a folk hero, especially among the older generation of peasant farmers who were freed from their feudal landlords. Many will wait all day for the chance to file by and gaze at their revered leader’s solemn, waxen face in his crystal coffin.

Snaking through the throngs were several tourist groups, dutifully following their flag-carrying leaders. I was trying to take photos and keep up with Xinbo Zhao, who was hoisting a red pennant that said Viking River Cruises. The cruise line, which recently joined the tour operators on the Yangtze River, begins its land-river package with visits to China’s cultural treasures.

Like many tour escorts, Zhao has taken an English name – David – to better accommodate his charges. He speaks their language so fluently that his jokes are usually funny.

“You Westerners all look alike,” he said while taking a head count. “I can’t tell the Americans from the Germans from the Norwegians.”

We marched across the square to the Forbidden City, where bamboo scaffolding obscured many of its elegant palaces and pavilions as workers painted the intricate woodwork and repaired the glazed-tile roofs to get everything shipshape for visitors to the Olympic games.

China is anxious to show off its modern face to the worldwide audience, and dispel any remaining images of its backward past.

“Many Americans’ ideas about China are outdated,” Zhao said. “They still think we all dress in Chairman Mao uniforms. The Olympics will be an eye-opener.”

Outsiders already are getting a look at the new China, as the once impenetrable country becomes an international tourist destination. Lines of visitors follow their guides along the Great Wall, through the mysterious Forbidden City and opulent Summer Palace, and around the pits where the terra-cotta warriors, nearly 8,000 strong, are the centerpiece of an impressive new museum complex.

Some 80 tourist ships, of varying quality, ply the Yangtze River in the Three Gorges area, where a controversial new dam has inundated entire cities and is forcing the relocation of a million people, but also has opened up scenic stretches too shallow to cruise on before and will produce nonpolluting hydroelectricity.

The eyes of this rookie visitor to China had been opened the day before during the bus ride downtown from the new airport. Fifteen million people live in Beijing, and it seemed every one was driving or pedaling on the Street of Everlasting Peace, the main drag that led to the five-star Beijing Hotel, the same hotel where President Richard Nixon stayed on his historic visit in 1972.

Skyscrapers lined the way along the busy boulevard. A fellow traveler marveled at the display of architecture and said, “None of this was here when I visited 10 years ago.”

Indeed, China in the last decade has rejected the socialist principles of the Cultural Revolution and adopted the competitive ways of the free market to grow into an economic power. Communists still rule the government, but capitalism is rampant and on display in a gleaming metropolis such as Shanghai, which is said to have more than 6,080 high-rises.

Westerners are so common these days that they rarely merit a second glance by the Chinese, unless you are exceptionally tall or wide. The only time I attracted attention was my first night in Beijing, as I strolled the crowded street of shops near my hotel, marveling at the neon signs flashing overhead like fireworks.

“Where you from? Where you from?” The inquiry came from a trio of teenaged girls trailing me.

“USA,” I replied, then quickly added, “Where are you from?”

Their eyes widened. “China,” they answered in unison, then exploded into giggles.

Zhao, the guide, said there is a yin and yang to the changing China.

“During the Cultural Revolution, all the clerks were rude – no matter how lazy you were, everybody got the same pay; you could not boost your status,” he said. “This has been completely changed. Now you have stock in the company – and one person has to do 10 peoples’ work.”

China is about the same geographical size as the United States, but has a billion or so more people, with a population inching toward 1.3 billion. One in every four babies born on the planet is Chinese, despite the one-child-per-couple mandate of the government.

As China becomes the light manufacturing center of the world – and India the office center – the chugging Asian economy has allowed young people such as Wei He, another tour escort for Viking, to move up, literally, in life.

As a youngster, she lived with her family in a hutong, one of the traditional communities of one-story brick residences clustered around a central courtyard with narrow alleyways and communal toilets. Now, at age 27, she and her parents have moved to a four-room apartment in a high-rise, the symbol of success in the new China.

“To be frank, the hutong was not as comfortable as your Western house,” said He, who has adopted the English name of Jamye, which she pronounces Jamie. “You share the toilet with 20 families; in rush hour, it was not very comfortable. We really appreciate the government giving us the opportunity to move to an apartment.

“When I was a child, we had a shortage of everything, especially food. The only vegetable we could get in winter was Chinese cabbage. Now, I never touch Chinese cabbage – that was enough for me. My parents never traveled, had no jewelry, no luxuries. They saved every penny. I make 10 times what my parents made. In big cities, some young people even drive the BMW.”

She said the last 20 years have produced huge changes in China. For a first-time visitor, it was a country of contrasts, as heavily laden carts pulled by peasant power waited at traffic lights next to Mercedes taxicabs, and the Chinese Burgers Home sign was next to a familiar golden arch with three Chinese characters on it.

“Chinese don’t walk in the rice paddies with the water buffalo, don’t wear the silk pajamas to go to bed,” He said. “We don’t eat chow mein and fried rice all day. We don’t even have the lucky cookie.

“You have to come here to see for yourself.”

For his 30th reunion at Harvard Business School, Torstein Hagen was honored as “the guy who lost the most,” a figure he estimated at nearly $100 million. Left only with a million-dollar tax credit, Hagen finagled that into a $5.5 million gain on the Russian stock market, and used that to get into the river cruise business.

Today, Hagen is chairman of Viking River Cruises, the world’s largest river cruise line, with 25 vessels, most of them on rivers in Europe and Russia. Two years ago, Viking launched its first ship on the Yangtze, added the Viking Century Sky this spring, and will have a third ship by next year.

“We have grown from 5,000 guests last year to 18,000 this year, and expect 25,000 next year,” Hagen said. “With all the interest in China, with the Olympics in 2008, you will see much increase in demand.”

Hagen said the upscale Viking ships are the only vessels on the Yangtze to offer such amenities as private balconies for each cabin, elevators and Western-style food, and are the only tour operators with a land package that includes trips to antiquities such as the Great Wall and the terra-cotta warriors.

Viking River Cruises offers five itineraries in China, ranging from nine to 18 nights. The nine-night cruise includes stays at Beijing, Xian and Shanghai, sandwiched between three or four nights of cruising on the Yangtze through the Three Gorges area. The starting price of $1,979 per person includes shore excursions, meals onboard and on land, stays in five-star hotels and flights within Asia. The price does not include airfare to and from China.

Food and service on the Century Sky were excellent, with the young Chinese crew eager to please and flustered when their fledgling English failed them. Our attentive server at dinner one evening had taken the English name of Chocolate. “It’s my favorite food,” she explained.

River cruising still is small potatoes when compared to ocean cruising, with 700,000 on the rivers last year and more than 12 million on the oceans. Hagen said the advantages of river cruising were calm waters and a constant change of riverside scenery.

“Our target group is people like me – 55 years and older, silver hair and all that stuff,” he said. “Not super-rich, but well off, and well traveled.”

After the bustle of Beijing, sitting on my cabin balcony with binoculars, camera and cold Tsingtao beer at hand was a welcome respite. The 306-passenger, five-deck Century Sky moved so silently that I could hear the sloshing of a woman on the bank doing her wash in the murky waters of the Yangtze, and the barking of dogs in the villages.

The hillside farms were a patchwork of green as every square foot was planted in vegetables and fruit trees. The river traffic consisted of tourist ships with the Victoria line, sampans with fishermen casting nets and crowded river taxis with faces peering out the windows.

Wave at those faces and your fellow river travelers waved back eagerly.

The cherry trees were blooming on the mountains outside Beijing as our tour bus headed to the Great Wall. The white blossoms stood out on the scrub-covered hillsides; China’s forests were cut down decades ago. The government is on a tree-planting frenzy as a natural means of cutting the notorious air pollution and controlling the sandstorms that blow in from the Gobi Desert.

The Badaling Hills boast one of the best-preserved sections of the wall, which once was 6,200 miles long and today has crumbled to about half that. The section is surprisingly steep, and many of the wheezing tourists turned back before completing the 20-minute climb to the highest stone tower, which offered a spectacular view of the Guangou Gorge.

The wall was begun more than 2,000 years ago under Emperor Qin Shi Huang to keep out invaders. Qin also had grand ideas for his own demise. Previous emperors had their slaves buried with them, but Qin realized that would cut the labor force, so he ordered the creation of a vast terra-cotta army to protect him in the afterlife.

In 1974, local farmers digging a well outside the city of Xian uncovered terra-cotta fragments, bits of the clay army that had been destroyed by peasants revolting against their emperor’s brutal reign.

Today, more than 8,000 life-sized archers, infantrymen, horses and chariots in full battle gear have been resurrected and restored, each with an individually sculpted face. They stand in formation in the original pits in the three main buildings at the Terra-Cotta Museum, a group of gray-granite buildings on landscaped grounds.

At the museum store, you can buy your own reproduction warrior in various sizes, up to the life-sized version that goes for $1,500, including shipping. Yang Pei Yan, one of the farmers who discovered the buried army, signs books and poses for photos for $1.

The terra-cotta army is referred to as the Eighth Wonder of the World, and, amazingly, other wonders are still waiting to be excavated. A large, brush-covered mound sits about a mile east of the museum, and inside is Emperor Qin’s tomb. China is waiting for funding for the expert technology needed to properly excavate and preserve what could be a treasure trove.

And at site near a neighboring city, another stash of soldiers has been discovered. Although smaller in stature, they are said to be more detailed, and may number as many as 300,000 figures in 81 pits.

Our stay in Xian included dinner at the Tang Dynasty Theatre Restaurant, where we were served a bountiful banquet that included platters of chicken fillets, sauteed king prawns, baked beef tenderloin and a papaya shake for dessert. A Stoli cocktail cost the same as a bottle of Coke.

Onstage, the warm-up Chinese band played “Edelweiss” and “Red River Valley” before a troupe performed music and dance from the Tang Dynasty of 3,000 years ago.

China, indeed, is a country of contrasts.