A fine day today in Fuzhou. It rained and then this morning sunshine. First I have seen in China this trip.
Took a long walk out to West Lake Park. There is a central “island” in the lake .. connected with a causeway. On the island is a thousand plus year old temple. Lots of people enjoying the day and the spring weather.
To see this backwater Provincial Capital so modern and built up enough to rival say Chicago is astounding to me. There are many canals with quiet walkways along them, and plenty of parks and trees, making it an enjoyable city to walk in.
I have never been here before but I will tell you what it looked like 30 years ago. Concrete. Everything made of concrete. No buildings over four stories because no elevators. Uneven sidewalks of cast concrete pavers. No lights at night. Nothing in the few shop windows but industrial wares like generators and pumps and pipes.
Heaps of food at the intersections, brought rough straight from the fields in Army trucks and dumped onto tarps on the ground and sold using a hand balance. Almost no cars. A river of bicycles, all the same copy of a 1930’s British design.
Everyone wearing a blue or a green suit. With a cap, some with red stars on them. No sign that a dentist or a barber had every lived here. Very difficult to tell the women from the men and you wouldn’t care anyway. A very few grey suits which with a cheap ballpoint pen or two in the pocket designated you as a manager.
Only a few big trees. No bushes or little trees or grass. No cats or dogs or songbirds. Because they ate them all during the famine Mao launched with his great leap forward program in the 70s.
If you lived here you lived in a communal building with common toilets and a kitchen on each floor. No hot water. The communal houses were organized into blocks. Every block had overseers whose job was to know everything every family did and did not do.
Extremely backward industry ran around the clock. The language had evolved such that a discussion of time involved being on shift or off shift. Your company fed you your one substantial meal of the day, rice with the topping of the day (tsai). Your housing was assigned to you through your work. Plus your papers allowing you to have housing and stay in the city. When you were not on shift you were in your rooms.
Yes, it is a surprise to see this city so modern and prosperous.
China has doubled the living standard of the poorest 200 million every decade for 30 years, with the upper income levels doing even better. They are currently building housing units at a rate such that they could replace all of the housing in the USA in 6 years. I have been here for one reaason or another to watch this unfold: the greatest rural to urban migration and wealth creation there will probably ever be. And the unfolding environmental disaster.
Yesterday went to the old section of town, built between roughly 1400 and 1800. Restored and restored, but still the “original” buildings. Full of lots of interesting things to buy. Some pictures.
