Feature From the ninth floor of Shanghai’s stately old Park Hotel, Nanj- ing Street stretches like a promenade before us, the street and building lights marking its way in colourful patterns along the river front. Far below, the sidewalks teem with peo- ple; the sounds of voices and traffic drift- ing up are festive, the continual honking of horns making it seem like a never- ending wedding procession. Outside on the balcony, Cheng Zhili, the head of the press department of Shanghai’s Communist Party, points to the street below. Ten years ago, it would have been quiet on the street,” she says. “But there have been great changes in China.” Every day, the river ferry captains squeeze their huge craft expertly out from the tight moorings at the Shanghai dock and pilot thousands of sightseers down the Huangpu River. For 15 kilometres, from the building that houses Shanghai’s municipal government to the confluence with the powerful Yangtze, the port is a visual clamour of building and construc- tion, loading and unloading, with convoys of ancient old river craft vying for river passage with ocean-going freighters. Suddenly there is a glimpse of home and we watch as for a moment as the Canadian Pacific ship Fort Calgary unloads its cargo of logs, undoubtedly brought from British Columbia forests. Inside the cabin, our hosts are riveted to the television set. They are watching videotaped episodes of the American crime drama Hunter, which has been dubbed into Chinese for its regular Satur- day run on China’s Central TV network. If the choice of imported television pro- grams seems curious, it is also symbolic of the dramatic change that this country of _ 1.06 billion has undergone in the last decade — and the contradictions that have often gone with that change. Oct. | marked the 39th anniversary of the founding of the People’s of China, proclaimed by Mao Zedong on that date in 1949 from the gates of the former emperor’s Forbidden City. For a decade and a half following that historic change, the country made great strides, ending decades of imperialist domination and feudal backwardness, introducing modern industry and giving its millions of people a new standard of living. But for most Chinese today, the begin- ning of the new life in China began in 1978, with the third plenary session of the Communist Party’s 11th central eommit- tee. It was that meeting, held in December of the year, that launched China on a sweeping program of economic reform, intended to bring the country out of the stagnant backwater of the Cultural Revo- lution. “For the first six years — from 1978- 1984 — the reform focussed on the rural areas,” says Wu Yufeng, the deputy direc- tor of China’s State Commission for Eco- / nomic Restructuring. He emphasizes that ' the rural population, at 800 million, con- stitutes 80 per cent of the total population of the country, and is a decisive part of the economic structure of the country. To a large extent, the reform has involved taking large, collectively-held lands and leasing them out to individual farmers on a contract basis while the state continues to play a role in providing machinery, fertilizers and other supplies. Farmers contract with the state to pro- vide a given amount of production, with any surplus available to them for their Own use or, more commonly, for sale in one of thousands of markets around the country. “The proceeds from production go to individual farmers which makes the results of reform quite tangible for them,” Wu notes. 6 e Pacific Tribune, October 10, 1988