A journey through Jiang's utopia

THREE hours' drive from Shanghai, the traveller finds a big banner stretched across the road: 'Welcome To Zhangjiagang The Most Sanitational City In China.' This is China's latest utopia where over the past year 650,000 pilgrims have come to study and learn from its sensational mixture of wealth, socialism and good plumbing.

Mao Zedong had Yenan and the miracle commune at Dazhai, Deng promoted Shenzhen, and now Jiang Zemin has given his blessing to this county in Jiangsu province.

This is the Communist Party dream of China comes true and Jiang's picture is everywhere. So is his calligraphy of the Zhangjiagang spirit 'Unite, Struggle and Advance with heavy duties. Put pressure on ourselves and struggle to be the first'.

The county is the embodiment of Jiang Zemin's notion of combining two cultures - the material and the spiritual. Every unit in the county now carries a plaque proclaiming its adherence to this 'double civilisation', which is soon to spread all over the country.

Jiang has put his weight behind a nationwide campaign to return to core values, meaning that people should not only get rich but be good as well.

The collective spirit is to be stressed instead of the individual. And under the guidance of the party, people are expected not to strive to get gloriously rich if this means behaving selfishly and greedily.

So the peasants of Zhangjiagang do not spit or smoke in the street. They do not even beat their wives and curse their children. Instead they are polite and gracious, good neighbourly sorts who do not chuck their rubbish in the gutter, but in municipal dustbins.