On the road to prosperity
Industrialise and strengthen - make our town strong and our people rich. So says a billboard just outside Xinhui, a town in the Jiangmen municipality of western Guangdong. I noticed it halfway through a white-knuckle journey along the main highway from the Gudou Hot Spring Valley near the coast to Jiangmen city . The trip had, until that point, been like a video game, where heavy trucks appear out of the smog a split second before you swerve to pass them.
I remembered this highway being pristine and largely empty the previous year, soon after it had opened. Now, it was dulled with dirt from the trucks we were overtaking as they lumbered from one construction site to another. 'Dirt must be the currency of barter here,' my colleague quipped.
The highway's scenery was comparable to many other parts of China outside the main cities. A country that has so quickly built developed-world infrastructure to link developing-world rural communities provides countless surreal juxtapositions of the two. Cyclists change lanes with impunity. Dogs have an uncanny knack for waiting until your car is a few metres away to begin crossing. Rice can often be seen laid out to dry on the road. I was, nevertheless, a bit disappointed this time; my first occasion to revisit a rural area that was supposed to have learned the lessons of its more industrialised neighbours on the eastern side of the Pearl River Delta. I had expected more visible signs of sustainable progress in Jiangmen's economic development by now, and had wanted to see fewer signs of environmental degradation.
The Gudou Hot Spring Valley was certainly evidence of the tourism boom gripping Jiangmen. It was booked solid through the Lunar New Year at average room rates of nearly 1,000 yuan per night. On its busiest day, more than 10,000 day trippers passed through. Its owners plan to double room capacity in the next few months and are busy building new luxury villas. It is instinctive to wonder whether this is the kind of development that places like Jiangmen need. Yet despite the mud on the highway, the answer must be yes. Jiangmen has natural advantages in its rustic beauty, and its hot springs are the province's best. Tourism is a proven longer-term driver of prosperity, and much as the Xinhui officials might see the priority of industrialising and strengthening, when BMWs start replacing trucks on its highway, they will appreciate the benefits of the tourist dollar more than can now be imagined.
In Jiangmen, as in its thousands of contemporaries across China, this is expecting a lot of the people whose task it is to make it happen. Although officials emphasise their preference for, say, Unesco world heritage sites over motorcycle factories, they have very real short-term unemployment issues to deal with, too. As the old saying goes, you can take the people out of the farm but not the farm out of the people. It is not that easy to craft receptionists and doormen from rice-planters.
But create them they must if the country's frantic urbanisation drive is to succeed. As is now becoming increasingly obvious, China's demographic canvas is being quickly repainted by the one-child policy. The spectre of three generations piled up in a 4-2-1 pyramid (one child supporting two parents and four grandparents) is worrying. Those at the bottom, though obviously better educated, are going to need much better-paying jobs in the next decade than are to be found in textile factories today. Foreign investors in the tourism industry could turn out to be their saviours, especially in places like Jiangmen.
Anthony Lawrance is the Post's special projects editor
