You Can Tell the Difference, Even at Night

Jones' first visit to Tiananmen Square in 1976...
Photo by: Terril Jones

...and again this past August, thirty-two years later.
Photo by: Terril Jones

I used to take “Jichang Lu,” or “Airport Road,” from Beijing’s International Airport into the Chinese capital in the mid- and late-1980s. It was more of a tree-lined country lane, with room for only one car going each direction. Today the way in from Capital Airport is a multi-lane freeway, and instead of trees and fields, the entire route is lined with building after building.

It’s a far cry from my first trip to China in 1976 with my mother, a Beijing native, to visit my grandfather. It was an era when Flying Pigeon bicycles ruled the streets and Westerners were viewed with curiosity, awe and suspicion – I unfailingly drew a crowd wherever I went. I encountered history unexpectedly.

Mao Zedong died three days after I arrived, and my memories are of traveling in a China gripped by emotional mourning and fear of a Soviet attack, and of a Beijing strewn with piles of rubble from the ruinous Tangshan earthquake.

My visit to the Olympics this summer was my first to China in 19 years. The phrase I heard the most – “Beijing de bianhua hen da!” (Beijing has changed a lot, eh!) – was borne out daily.

My last trips had been in 1989, when China was a huge story of another era: the student-led protests at Tiananmen Square. I was an Associated Press correspondent covering the movement and the eventual army crackdown. Urban youth rebelled against their government, chiding their leadership and citing western countries as models of governance and press freedom. Westerners were less an oddity, and when people found out I spoke Chinese, they peppered me with grievances of how few choices they had in life.

Today, the same demographic bursts with national pride and assails western governments and media for interfering with or misrepresenting Chinese affairs. Young Chinese I met in August were eager to share their tangible delight that the country has modernized enough to host the Olympics. “Beijing can now be considered an international city,” a clearly pleased 20-year-old woman told me in front of the Water Cube swimming stadium.

In another conversation right on Tiananmen Square, a 36-year-old man expressed satisfaction with his life today, noting that eighty percent of his coworkers own cars. And the government? “It’s all rule of law,” he said. “If I don’t steal, rob or kill, they’ll leave me alone.”

I feel lucky to have been in China at its most historic moments in the past 30 years, and to have witnessed some of the country’s dramatic transformation. The extent to which some things have changed – and some haven’t – was brought home to me after dinner with some relatives.

Thirty-two years ago several of them lived in a fading courtyard home without plumbing. One cousin moved from that courtyard into a high-rise apartment building; his son, who grew up with nothing fancier than a bicycle, now owns a gleaming, Chinese-built Buick LaCrosse – an unimaginable aspiration two decades ago. Ironically, in these modern times, my cousin in the high-rise can’t get mail delivered, because in a throwback to the lackadaisical times of 20 and more years ago, “mei ren guan” (nobody looks after it).

Hmm. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” It wasn’t Mao who said that, but in some ways it could have been.