Archive for ‘Long March’

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04/03/2020

Xinhua Headlines: Guitars, roads and red tours: former revolutionary base casts off poverty

Zunyi, a former revolutionary base of the Communist Party of China in southwest China’s Guizhou Province, has cast off poverty.

Thanks to burgeoning industries, improving infrastructure and distinctive cultural tours, more than eight million people in Zunyi are living better lives.

By Xinhua writers Zhong Qun, Wang Li, Li Jingya and Liu Zhiqiang

GUIYANG, March 3 (Xinhua) — Riding on the fast development of industries, improving infrastructure and distinctive cultural tours, a former revolutionary site of the Communist Party of China (CPC) has formally cast off poverty in China’s southwestern mountains.

On Tuesday, the government of Guizhou Province announced that Zheng’an County in the province has shaken off poverty. The county is under the jurisdiction of the city of Zunyi, where the CPC conducted its early revolutionary activities. The announcement means that more than 8 million people in the entire city of Zunyi have officially bid farewell to poverty.

A view of Huamao Village of Fengxiang Township in Zunyi City, southwest China’s Guizhou Province, Feb. 28, 2020. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

Over the years, Zunyi has taken a variety of measures in answer to China’s campaign to eradicate absolute poverty in 2020.

Major industries such as guitar-making and tea plantations powered Zunyi’s economic growth, while roads, water projects and the revolution-themed tourism also put the city, once mired in grinding poverty, on a fast track toward modernization.

GUITARS STRIKE A CHORD IN REVOLUTIONARY HEARTLAND

When Zheng Chuanjiu decided to build a guitar-making factory in Zunyi’s Zheng’an County in 2013, he was a little nervous.

“There were no raw materials, and transportation was bad,” said Zheng, 42. “But the county had advantages in land and labor and there was government support.”

Zheng, a native of the county, had found success in the guitar industry in Guangzhou, capital of south China’s Guangdong Province. He and his brother established the Guangzhou Shenqu Musical Instruments, a Guangzhou-based guitar-making company, after years of hard work in the southern metropolis.

“The county government of my hometown wanted to develop the guitar-making industry after they found many local migrant workers were working in the industry in Guangzhou,” Zheng said. “They established an industrial park and we were the first to join.”

An employee works at the workshop of Guangzhou Shenqu Musical Instruments, a Guangzhou-based guitar-making company, in Zheng’an County of Zunyi City, southwest China’s Guizhou Province, March 28, 2017. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

The government put forward a variety of preferential policies in rents, financing and taxes, to support guitar-making companies like Zheng’s and allow the sector to prosper.

Today, Zheng’s company in the county has grown into one with an annual production value of more than 30 million U.S. dollars. One of the country’s top five guitar makers, it employs more than 500 local farmers and more than 100 poverty-stricken residents.

Zheng’s company is part of a bigger picture. The company’s success has led many to jump on the bandwagon. After years of growth, the county is now home to 64 companies specializing in guitar-related fields, churning out about 7 million guitars a year to more than 30 countries and regions across the world and employing more than 15,000 locals.

The guitar industry forms part of the government’s efforts to develop local industries. Thanks to geological advantages, the county also saw the emergence of tea gardens and traditional Chinese medicine plantations. All these sectors drove local economic growth.

A group of children trying tea-picking at Hetaoba Village in Meitan County of Zunyi City, southwest China’s Guizhou Province, April 1, 2018. (Xinhua/Yang Wenbin)

BETTER INFRASTRUCTURE, BETTER LIVES

Given the mountainous landscape in Guizhou, authorities in Zunyi knew the importance of improving infrastructure projects if they wanted to bring the local economy to the next level. So they started building new roads to facilitate transportation.

Last year, Guizhou built 8,116 km of roadways. The Guizhou provincial government spent 29.34 billion yuan (4.2 billion U.S. dollars) building the roadways, including 7,386 km in rural areas, according to the provincial highway bureau. The province also upgraded many old roadways.

The construction site of Tuanjie Grand Bridge of Renhuai-Zunyi Highway, which has resumed construction amid strict prevention measures against the novel coronavirus, in southwest China’s Guizhou Province, Feb. 27, 2020. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

In the county of Zheng’an, for example, several major highways not only enhanced logistics to bring specialties out of town but also allowed outside investment to flow to the county tucked in the lush green mountains.

“Thanks to improved transportation conditions, our guitars can easily reach many areas in the country and around the world,” said Zheng Chuanjiu.

In Huanglian Village, rural family inns have mushroomed, as more visitors come as more roads were built. Many tourists come to enjoy the countryside scenes during the holidays.

In addition, water projects also began, bringing safe drinking water to local households.

“We used to depend on the weather for water,” said Zunyi resident Zeng Fanyun. “Now we have clean water from the taps.”

For areas deemed inhabitable, authorities moved people out.

Statistics show that Guizhou relocated 1.88 million people from inhospitable areas in 2019.

RED TOURS, GOLDEN OPPORTUNITIES

As many cities in China scramble to modernize and adopt the latest technology to power growth, Zunyi seems to have found a new way to develop itself by looking to the past.

In January 1935, an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee took place in Zunyi during the Long March.

The meeting focused on rectifying the left-leaning errors in military and organizational affairs and established the correct leadership of the new Central Committee, as represented by Mao Zedong.

The Zunyi Meeting is regarded as a crucial turning point of the Long March, leading to the ultimate success of the Chinese revolution.

Since then, Zunyi has become a sacred place for generations of CPC members, and the footprints of the Red Army are forever imprinted on the city’s culture and spirit.

Today, local authorities are promoting “red tours” in the locality, aiming to bolster the tourism sector as part of economic growth.

Tourists are seen at the Memorial of Zunyi Meeting in Zunyi, southwest China’s Guizhou Province, Oct. 16, 2018. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

Yang Zhirong started a family homestay in the county of Tongzi in Zunyi. The homestay is called “The Red Army Road Inn,” because it is close to the command center of a famous battle during the 1930s.

“During the summer holidays, there are barely enough rooms to accommodate all the tourists,” Yang said. “Because the Red Army used to walk near here, the visitors feel they could sense history by staying here.”

Last year, Zunyi received more than 46 million visitors for red tours, generating a revenue of about 35.5 billion yuan, up 24.1 percent year on year, according to official figures.

The red tours also prompted sales of local cultural products, such as handmade soap, wallets and fragrances, all featuring Red Army themes. Forums, hiking and even marathons feature red themes as well in Zunyi.

“Zunyi serves as a good example of the CPC’s ability and responsibility to help people live prosperous lives,” said Zheng Dongsheng, a professor with the Party School of the Guizhou Provincial Committee of the CPC. “Zunyi’s success to cast off poverty highlights the Long March spirit in the modern era.”

Source: Xinhua

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29/09/2019

China anniversary: The deep cuts of 70 years of Communist rule

Children waving Chinese flagsImage copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image caption China’s version of its past is a story of prosperity, progress and sacrifice for the common good

China’s extraordinary rise was a defining story of the 20th Century, but as it prepares to mark its 70th anniversary, the BBC’s John Sudworth in Beijing asks who has really won under the Communist Party’s rule.

Sitting at his desk in the Chinese city of Tianjin, Zhao Jingjia’s knife is tracing the contours of a face.

Cut by delicate cut, the form emerges – the unmistakable image of Mao Zedong, founder of modern China.

The retired oil engineer discovered his skill with a blade only in later life and now spends his days using the ancient art of paper cutting to glorify leaders and events from China’s communist history.

“I’m the same age as the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” he says. “I have deep feelings for my motherland, my people and my party.”

Zhao Jingjia with a paper cut of Mao Zedong
Image caption For people like Zhao Jingjia, China’s success outweighs the “mistakes” of its leaders

Born a few days before 1 October 1949 – the day the PRC was declared by Mao – Mr Zhao’s life has followed the dramatic contours of China’s development, through poverty, repression and the rise to prosperity.

Now, in his modest but comfortable apartment, his art is helping him make sense of one of the most tumultuous periods of human history.

“Wasn’t Mao a monster,” I ask, “responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of his countrymen?”

“I lived through it,” he replies. “I can tell you that Chairman Mao did make some mistakes but they weren’t his alone.”

“I respect him from my heart. He achieved our nation’s liberation. Ordinary people cannot do such things.”

On Tuesday, China will present a similar, glorious rendering of its record to the world.

The country is staging one of its biggest ever military parades, a celebration of 70 years of Communist Party rule as pure, political triumph.

Beijing will tremble to the thunder of tanks, missile launchers and 15,000 marching soldiers, a projection of national power, wealth and status watched over by the current Communist Party leader, President Xi Jinping, in Tiananmen Square.

An incomplete narrative of progress

Like Mr Zhao’s paper-cut portraits, we’re not meant to focus on the many individual scars made in the course of China’s modern history.

It is the end result that matters.

Mao Zedong declares the People's Republic of China in Beijing on 1 Oct 1949Image copyright XINHUA/AFP
Image caption Mao Zedong pronounces the dawn of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949

And, on face value, the transformation has been extraordinary.

On 1 October 1949, Chairman Mao stood in Tiananmen Square urging a war-ravaged, semi-feudal state into a new era with a founding speech and a somewhat plodding parade that could muster only 17 planes for the flyby.

This week’s parade, in contrast, will reportedly feature the world’s longest range intercontinental nuclear missile and a supersonic spy-drone – the trophies of a prosperous, rising authoritarian superpower with a 400 million strong middle class.

It is a narrative of political and economic success that – while in large part true – is incomplete.

New visitors to China are often, rightly, awe-struck by the skyscraper-festooned, hi-tech megacities connected by brand new highways and the world’s largest high-speed rail network.

Shanghai skylineImage copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image caption Those in China’s glittering cities may accept the trade-off of political freedom for economic growth

They see a rampant consumer society with the inhabitants enjoying the freedom and free time to shop for designer goods, to dine out and to surf the internet.

“How bad can it really be?” the onlookers ask, reflecting on the negative headlines they’ve read about China back home.

The answer, as in all societies, is that it depends very much on who you are.

Many of those in China’s major cities, for example, who have benefited from this explosion of material wealth and opportunity, are genuinely grateful and loyal.

In exchange for stability and growth, they may well accept – or at least tolerate – the lack of political freedom and the censorship that feature so often in the foreign media.

For them the parade could be viewed as a fitting tribute to a national success story that mirrors their own.

But in the carving out of a new China, the knife has cut long and deep.

The dead, the jailed and the marginalised

Mao’s man-made famine – a result of radical changes to agricultural systems – claimed tens of millions of lives and his Cultural Revolution killed hundreds of thousands more in a decade-long frenzy of violence and persecution, truths that are notably absent from Chinese textbooks.

Archive image of a starving woman and child during the famine in ChinaImage copyright GETTY/TOPICAL
Image caption Tens of millions starved to death under Mao, as China radically restructured agriculture and society

After his death, the demographically calamitous One Child Policy brutalised millions over a 40-year period.

Still today, with its new Two Child Policy, the Party insists on violating that most intimate of rights – an individual’s choice over her fertility.

The list is long, with each category adding many thousands, at least, to the toll of those damaged or destroyed by one-party rule.

Chinese baby in front of Chinese flagImage copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image caption Beijing still regulates how many children families can have

There are the victims of religious repression, of local government land-grabs and of corruption.

There are the tens of millions of migrant workers, the backbone of China’s industrial success, who have long been shut out of the benefits of citizenship.

A strict residential permit system continues to deny them and their families the right to education or healthcare where they work.

And in recent years, there are the estimated one and a half million Muslims in China’s western region of Xinjiang – Uighurs, Kazakhs and others – who have been placed in mass incarceration camps on the basis of their faith and ethnicity.

China continues to insist they are vocational schools, and that it is pioneering a new way of preventing domestic terrorism.

The stories of the dead, the jailed and the marginalised are always much more hidden than the stories of the assimilated and the successful.

Viewed from their perspective, the censorship of large parts of China’s recent history is not simply part of a grand bargain to be exchanged for stability and prosperity.

People holding pictures of Mao and the Little Red Book in Tiananmen Square, 1966

Getty
Timeline of modern China

  • 1949 Mao declares the founding of the People’s Republic of China
  • 1966-76 Cultural Revolution brings social and political upheaval
  • 1977 Deng Xiaoping initiates major reforms of China’s economy
  • 1989 Army crushes Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests
  • 2010 China becomes the world’s second-largest economy
  • 2018 Xi Jinping is cleared to be president for life
It is something that makes the silence of their suffering all the more difficult to penetrate.

It is the job of foreign journalists, of course, to try.

‘Falsified, faked and glorified’

But while censorship can shut people up, it cannot stop them remembering.

Prof Guo Yuhua, a sociologist at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, is one of the few scholars left trying to record, via oral histories, some of the huge changes that have affected Chinese society over the past seven decades.

Her books are banned, her communications monitored and her social media accounts are regularly deleted.

“For several generations people have received a history that has been falsified, faked, glorified and whitewashed,” she tells me, despite having been warned not to talk to the foreign media ahead of the parade.

“I think it requires the entire nation to re-study and to reflect on history. Only if we do that can we ensure that these tragedies won’t be repeated.”

People with poster of Mao ZedongImage copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image caption Can progress really be attributed to the leadership?

A parade, she believes, that puts the Communist Party at the front and centre of the story, misses the real lesson, that China’s progress only began after Mao, when the party loosened its grip a bit.

“People are born to strive for a better, happier and more respectful life, aren’t they?” she asks me.

“If they are provided with a tiny little space, they’ll try to make a fortune and solve their survival problems. This shouldn’t be attributed to the leadership.”

‘Our happiness comes from hard work’

As if to prove the point about how the unsettled, censored pasts of authoritarian states continue to impact the present, the parade is for invited guests only.

Mao's portrait hanging in Tiananmen SquareImage copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image caption Mao’s portrait will, as it always is, be watching over the events in Tiananmen Square

Another anniversary, of which Tiananmen Square is the centrepiece, is also being measured in multiples of 10 – it is 30 years since the bloody suppression of the pro-democracy protests that shook the foundations of Communist Party rule.

The troops will be marching – as they always do on these occasions – down the same avenue on which the students were gunned down.

The risk of even a lone protester using the parade to mark a piece of history that has largely been wiped from the record is just too great.

With central Beijing sealed off, ordinary people in whose honour it is supposedly being held, can only watch it on TV.

Zhao

Back in his Tianjin apartment, Zhao Jingjia shows me the intricate detail of a series of scenes, each cut from a single piece of paper, depicting the “Long March”, a time of hardship and setback for the Communist Party long before it eventually swept to power.

“Our happiness nowadays comes from hard work,” he tells me.

It is a view that echoes that of the Chinese government which, like him, has at least acknowledged that Mao made mistakes while insisting they shouldn’t be dwelt on.

“As for the 70 years of China, it’s extraordinary,” he says. “It can be seen by all. Yesterday we sent two navigation satellites into space – all citizens can enjoy the convenience that these things bring us.”

Media caption What was China’s Cultural Revolution?

Source: The BBC

Posted in 1 October 1949, 70 years, 70th anniversary, agricultural systems, ancient art, authoritarian superpower, backbone, Beijing, benefits, Censorship, chairman mao, China anniversary, citizenship, Communist Party leader, Communist rule, consumer society, corruption, Cultural Revolution, dawn of the People's Republic of China, dead, deep cuts, Deng Xiaoping, domestic terrorism, education, ethnicity, faith, founder of modern China., healthcare, hi-tech megacities, high-speed rail network, Highways, industrial success, intercontinental nuclear missile, jailed, Kazakhs, local government land-grabs, Long March, Mao Zedong, Mao's man-made famine, marginalised, mass incarceration camps, migrant workers, missile launchers, motherland, Muslims, one-child policy, paper cutting, Party, People, People's Republic of China (PRC), President Xi Jinping, prosperity, radical changes, religious repression, residential permit system, skyscraper-festooned, stability, supersonic spy-drone, tanks, Tiananmen Square, Tianjin, Tsinghua University, Uighurs, Uncategorized, vocational schools, Xinjiang | Leave a Comment »

19/08/2019

Activity of journalists retracing route of Long March conclude

CHINA-GANSU-HUINING-LONG MARCH ACTIVITY-CONCLUSION (CN)

Artists perform during an event marking the conclusion of an activity that took journalists to retrace the route of the Long March, in Huining, northwest China’s Gansu Province, Aug. 18, 2019. The activity, held from June 11 to Aug. 18, was aimed at paying tribute to the revolutionary martyrs and passing on the traditions of revolution. The Long March was a military maneuver carried out by the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army from 1934 to 1936. During this period, they left their bases and marched through rivers, mountains and arid grassland to break the siege of Kuomintang forces and continue to fight Japanese aggressors. Many marched as far as 12,500 km. (Xinhua/Luo Xiaoguang)

Source: Xinhua

Posted in arid grassland, Artists, Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, conclude, Gansu Province, Huining, Japanese aggressors, journalists, Long March, mountains, perform, retracing, revolution, revolutionary martyrs, rivers, route, siege of Kuomintang forces, traditions, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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