China's future lies in its people
David Tang, who has travelled on the mainland for 35 years, says to become a superpower, China must realise its future lies in its citizens, not in state power that operates in opacity
Today, we Chinese in Hong Kong feel thoroughly Chinese, and regard ourselves as living in part of China. Even foreign residents in Hong Kong must be very conscious of living in a Chinese city. But not so long ago, it was not the case. I remember distinctly the Chinese television soap called The Man Within a Web, in which a mainlander was caricatured as a country bumpkin, frowned upon as ignorant, unworldly and awkward.
It was with contempt that the Hong Kong populace regarded the mainlanders. Nor did it like the way the British colony was being handed back to the motherland. It is easy to forget today that all the tycoons were trying to persuade the British government not to return Hong Kong sovereignty to China. Of course, precisely those tycoons who expressed scepticism then are now professed and ardent patriots!
But all that is history, and I do not intend to dwell on it. Nor would I dwell on my very first visit to China nearly 35 years ago, climbing the highest peak at Huangshan , when I felt distinctly Chinese with an acute sense of homecoming. Suffice to say that, at the time, I had not appreciated that China was at an absolutely critical juncture. The death of Mao Zedong , whose terrible legacies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were finally beginning to subside, had effectively placed China in a vacuum.
Thank God we had Deng Xiaoping , who extraordinarily transformed the whole nation with a tiny economic experiment that was almost laughable with hindsight, at an ugly small town across the border of Hong Kong called Shenzhen.
But where do we go from here? What are the next 30 years going to bring? It is inevitable that our destiny in Hong Kong will be totally dependent on the destiny of China. So I might share with you some thoughts on the factors which will determine the next generation of China, drawing on my knowledge and experiences there from my 30-odd years of travels to all the major cities as well as remoter parts.
Consider first the very basics of land, air and water in China. Land: there are only 900 square metres of arable land per inhabitant, which is less than 40 per cent of the global average. Even more alarming is that wholesale rural areas are being turned into urban cities.
Air: totally polluted and appalling. It got so bad that, last summer, the Chinese authorities asked foreign consulates to stop publishing "inaccurate and unlawful" data on air pollution - which was a direct reference to the quality measurements posted on Twitter by the US Embassy in Beijing, which registered descriptions such as "crazy bad" and "beyond index".