What life in China looks like

0:00Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts. Boston. Everyone has an interesting story in China. Many of those stories involve trauma, and unfortunately, it's untreated. Sometimes it's the untold stories that say the most.

0:45It's Friday, May 15th, and this is Here and Now, anytime from NPR and WDUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:54Scott Tong has been in China this week, along with President Trump. We've been bringing you some news from Trump's talks with President Xi Jinping. But Scott's been exploring a bit of China beyond the diplomatic cables. And in some ways, it's a different country than it was when he lived there in the late aughts. Scott, it's been 16 years since you lived in China. And the cities that you've been visiting this week, Beijing and Shanghai, they've changed physically just a ton in that time, haven't they? What struck you going back? You know, what strikes me is a little less kind of the buildings, and there are some super impressive buildings in each of these cities, but in Beijing, what struck me was the absence of the pollution.

1:37When I landed in Beijing a week ago, the sky was blue, and that was remarkable. Beijing long had a reputation for just the air was awful. A lot of Americans, foreigners a decade ago, left because of asthma, because their kids were getting sick. There was heavy industry here. There were sandstorms coming. Something happened in Beijing to make it so much better now. A lot of the cars are now electric. That's got to be part of the issue. They don't burn as much coal to make electricity. So the city has really improved people's lives in that particular way, in a way that I just found remarkable. Now, today, it's gray again.

2:20It's not blue skies every day, but it's a vast improvement than when I lived here then. The other big change was taking the bullet train. Now, the bullet trains aren't exactly new here, but my goodness, Shanghai to Beijing, when I was living in China, you could take a plane, which is quite expensive, or you could take a train that took 13 hours, like overnight train. Awful experience. Now, the high-speed train, just over four hours. And they have this screen in the aisle where they show you the speed. And what I saw went up to 370 kilometers per hour, something like 230 miles per hour, like half the speed of a plane, Chris.

3:02It's crazy. That is crazy. I took that train, actually, back in 2015. I visited China. And I was there in 2016 briefly, too, for both of those trips. But that was like my main takeaway, too, was that train. Because that's about the distance between New York and Chicago. and those trains leave several times a day and they take, yeah, like four hours, like you were saying. I've never taken the Amtrak to New York from Chicago because that takes like 20 hours. So it's just a total, yeah, it's night and day. I remember when I was there too, I was seeing this massive build out of transit. I took the subway in Shenzhen a few times and more than once I descended into a shiny new subway station just to encounter a gate at the bottom of the stairs because the route hadn't really been connected yet, but it was on the map.

3:50Oh, really? I'm sure it's finished now. Like they were building that so fast. But trains are one thing. You say that AI is permeating daily life in China and that people really like it. And you met with Jacob Dreyer, who's an American who's been living in China for 13 years. I did. He has two young boys with his wife, who's Chinese. Dreyer told you Chinese people have a more optimistic view of technology compared to Americans. and that includes acceptance of AI in daily life. Let's listen to a little bit of that. There's like all these tangible, concrete benefits that people are feeling every single day.

4:24Like you go to the doctor, you are doing something at work, and it makes it easier. What have you seen this week as far as tech in China? Yeah, technology was the other thing that I left out that is amazing, and that is what you can do on your phone. You know, back in the States, the phone I use has this little pocket because I have to stuff things into it. My credit card, my debit card, my driver's license. I don't need that phone case in China because everything is done on the screen. You order a cab or the equivalent of Uber, you do that. You can go on the bus, you can go on the subway. It's all actually in one app.

5:02They have these super apps where you can shop, you can travel, you can invest, you can date. You can do all of that. You can order food that comes in 12 minutes. You can order. I had to buy an adapter for this electronic equipment piece that I'm using. Order that on the app, and it took like 20 minutes to come. It's amazing what you can do all on the super app. Now, it's a Chinese app, and you have to kind of sign up and make an account. You have to kind of swim across the moat to get into the castle. But once you're in, Chris, it's incredible. Are people skeptical of sharing data or anything like that on those apps?

5:43I'm sure there are people who are skeptical. I mean, I've been here for a week, right? I just folded up my parachute and now I'm going back. And I've talked to people who worry about censorship and surveillance. But I think Jacob Dreher, it strikes me as making sense, just from the people I've talked to in China all these years, is just in general, I think they're more technology optimistic. And I think one reason is in the last 30 years or so, you know, when China kind of went from zero, from dirt poor, to where it is now, you know, they just kind of ridden this wave of different kinds of technologies that are so basic to you and me, electricity, refrigeration, windows, and then the internet.

6:27I mean, all that happened so quickly in the span of, say, a lifetime in China. And so technology is, in general, has made life such a better thing. Right. And we'll hear in just a minute from some of your reporting how, you know, this is by no means everyone in China enjoying, you know, extremely risen standard of living. But statistically, I mean, a lot of people have rapidly, you know, risen up that curve. It does make sense that people would be more optimistic, I guess, about the future when you see that kind of progress. I don't know, I guess I wonder, like, with the people you've been talking to, there's been this big meeting between Trump and Xi, and there don't seem to have been any major surprises out of it.

7:06But does it seem like the meeting was a success for either China or the U.S.? Do you think people on the streets in China you've been talking to have, you know, were excited about it or were they paying much attention to it? My sense in Beijing, and again, you know, I was here off and on for five days, is the people going about their lives in Beijing don't know about it. Or maybe they know a little bit about it. They hardly care about it. They're going about their lives. So that was my sense. Beijing is a gigantic city. So maybe that's not a surprise. The thing that I found interesting, I think, was more what the Chinese president Xi Jinping talked about.

7:42And that is, it is kind of a relationship of respect, a relationship of peers, that the world is changing. He used those kind of words. And it came back to a word that, you know, I'm Chinese American, I heard growing up all the time, and that is respect. And for all the optics, you know, for all the photo ops and the handshakes, just the appearance of being respected as peers, you know, the two largest economies in the world, that matters a lot to China, I think. to be treated that way, number one. And then number two, in practical terms, to be able to say, we want a relationship of stability.

8:18Both presidents made a nod to that. And that, from China's point of view, might seal in, okay, we're buying a little bit of insurance against the United States coming back and hitting us again with tariffs. Yeah, with a trade war, right. Not allowing certain semiconductors to be sold to China. So no giant news coming out of here, but I think from China's perspective, having that respect in front of the world mattered and a stability that allows China, from its point of view, to just get stronger, to build up, to recover from this trade war that has hurt both sides. Very interesting. All right, it's late where you are, so I'll let you go.

9:00But there's one thing I've got to know first. What's the best thing that you've eaten so far in China? Oh, the second night I got here, I went to a restaurant from Xi 'an, which is in the western part of China. It's where the terracotta warriors are. Yeah. And there they have a lot of lamb. So I had this lamb noodle soup. I haven't matched it yet. And it was like$2, Chris. You got to come. I know. Sounds great. All right. We're going to take a short break and hear some of Scott Tong's reporting from China in just a minute. Scott, thanks so much. Thanks, Chris. Great to talk to you. You too.

10:06This comes from Green Chef. Green Chef is certified clean with organic produce, responsibly sourced proteins, and real whole food ingredients backed by nutritionists. Choose from 40-plus customizable recipes each week, tailored to your needs, delivered straight to your door. Enjoy Mediterranean, plant-based, verified gluten-free, and more. Get 50 % off your first box, then 20 % off for two months at greenchef.com slash 50NPR with code 50NPR. At the start of their summit this week, Presidents Xi and Trump met at a historic site in Beijing, the Temple of Heaven, where emperors in the past prayed for harvests and for weather.

10:48Scott Tong visited another very old spot, a traditional neighborhood of Beijing going back 700 years. It's a good place to see the ways that China has transformed since the 1980s, as well as reflect on the poverty that remains despite China's progress. It has a museum featuring audio files of old sounds there, including a historic tofu peddler. I had to record it.

11:23This was a good place to meet Melinda Liu of Newsweek. She's the dean of American journalists here, having spent three decades in Beijing. And Liu has her own long view. The China that I dropped into had almost no private cars. The Newsweek Bureau had its own car, but it was unusual. And so very few people had private cars. Very few people had telephones. As a foreigner, I had one. But many times Chinese families would be dependent on their work units, one telephone. So you would call someone, ring, ring, ring, ring. And then someone would say, why? You know, just hello. and then you say, oh, is old Wong there?

12:04And then they'd go off and find old Wong. There's one number. The employer has one number. So now cell phones are everywhere. There are Chinese who've never even had a computer, you know, like a laptop, certainly not a desktop. They would do everything on their phone. Some of them don't even really deal with websites. They just do apps, social media. Yeah. You're living in a city where you're describing how technology has so enabled life. But there are still hundreds of millions of Chinese who are still living a pretty simple life, yeah? Absolutely. And I think that's one thing that Americans should remember.

12:49They should be careful not to have a misperception that this is all, you know, going to the moon or whatever, there are still in China many provinces that are quite poor. And there are still farmers, literally with donkeys. You know, we back in the States, we interview these China experts, these analysts, these professors, and often they say, like I say, the context for this presidential summit visit is the Chinese government wants stability outside its shores because it's still working on this domestic project. And there are different facets of it. But what you're just talking about, bringing still a lot of people up to modernity, that's still part of the project, yeah?

13:38Totally, it's still part of the project. I've done stories about China's moon enterprise, and a lot of times they say, well, we're going for practical reasons. You know, there's energy sources on the moon. We can have seeds for crops germinated in space. Then they mutate and they become hardier with more protein and more lycopene. You know, tomatoes that are twice as big as normal and they have more lycopene and people can have more nutrition. But we should know, remember, China, this is a place that does not have enough arable land. It does not have enough fresh water for this population. It has long been looking for natural resources that don't exist here, right?

14:19Totally. There have been various campaigns of sort of reclaiming agricultural land back from like real estate development or other types of things like that, golf courses, for example. We're talking about very primal needs and desires. What is, for you, one of the least favorite things about life in China today? Well, I think it's the same thing that I felt when I first arrived for the first time to live in 1980, which is conformity and a sort of herd mentality. and then what comes with it is a certain passiveness, I think. Do you have a for instance of this herd mentality? There are people who go to great lengths to do things because it'll please their parents, even though it really doesn't make too much sense.

15:05There used to be the rent-a-boyfriend at Chinese New Year. Tell me. Like, say, a young woman who's got her independent life working in a city somewhere, but she's going home to her parents' house and she's under intense pressure, not just from her parents, but from their siblings. So the aunts and the uncles are all saying, when are you going to get married and when are you going to have children? And so just to avoid... Avoid shame? Yeah, avoid the hassle. There used to be places where you could rent a boyfriend who would go to the family home with you at Chinese New Year and pretend to be your boyfriend for a number of days and then you, you know, go your own way.

15:42Transaction over. Yeah, exactly. Sort of like that. Beijing has been your base. You've gone after cover wars in the Middle East, Afghanistan. You're in Iraq. I was there around the same time in 2003 as you were. And Beijing, you chose for it to be your place to come back to. Why? Well, at the time when I was working very, very intensely and doing a lot of travel, it was a great refuge. For one thing, it was safe. You're not going to run over an IED in Beijing. You might get hit by a car, but that's different. Also, if you wanted to have that kind of peripatetic work mode where you'd be away for a long time and then come back to a home, this is a great place to have a housekeeper who can take care of your house when you're gone, water your plants or feed your dog or whatever.

16:34So affordable, some of these services. Let me ask you about seeing America from the outside, because you've been away, or mostly away, for a long time. What do you miss? What do you not miss? The thing that I miss most would be close family, because most of my closest family members are in the States. The thing that I really miss is the American society that I grew up in. Very free and very open and very transparent. That is not China. I mean, there are a lot of freedoms here, but I wouldn't call it free. Opacity rather than transparency seems to be a kind of a mode of operation. Now, the really sad thing is that I'm not at all convinced that that openness is still there.

17:24If I were to move back to the States, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't feel that same way. I'm not convinced I'd really feel home once I got there. Well, we have the same kinds of technology back in the States. And if you have a phone, if you're on social media in any capacity, you find yourself in one of several, one of dueling echo chambers. I totally get your point about critical thinking, creativity in the United States. But it seems to me increasingly, there's a kind of what team are you on? Yeah, and I don't rule out going back. I'm at an age where people are saying if you want to go back you better do it soon and you might not be able to adapt to it once you do go if you like too long Melinda Liu in this beautiful old school place in Beijing so good to talk to you, thanks very much Thank you, it's been a pleasure

18:20Coming up Scott Tong explores his own family's past and uncovers a secret chapter of their story hidden out of shame 70 years later, Scott tells that story and explores what it says about China. Stick around.

18:59for exactly this moment. Alloy connects you with specialized doctors so you can navigate menopause with real support and care built for this stage of life. Right now, new customers get $20 off site-wide when you visit myalloy.com and use code NPR. I'm Scott Tong. I'm reporting from China as President Xi Jinping hosts President Trump for a big summit. And I had some time to visit Shanghai, specifically the street where my mom grew up. To chase a story I've been on for more than a decade. To learn about a relative no one in the family ever talked about. My grandfather, I never met him. See, they deemed his story shameful.

19:39He was a political prisoner and died in a labor camp. But seven decades on, telling his story seems overdue. Not just for me, but for the millions of Chinese families wounded by a tumultuous 20th century. Everyone has an interesting story in China, and some of them, many of those stories involve trauma, and unfortunately it's untreated. That's historian Patrick Cranley walking me around what is now his neighborhood. He runs the group Historic Shanghai. Cranley points left and right to buildings more than a century old. Over here, the Cathay Movie House. Everybody around the world back in the 20s and 30s were crazy about Hollywood movies, and Shanghai was no exception.

20:23Shanghai also is the city which was the Hollywood of China back in those days. It was a modern international place. An old directory of my mom's street shows her neighbors had surnames like Grant, Dietrich, Jobert, and Savitsky. They lived among Chinese families on quiet lanes in homes full of stairs. Cranley leads me through one. When my mother's family lived here, Shanghai was also surrounded by suspicion and spies and war. The 1930s brought World War II and Japanese occupiers. The 1940s, China's civil war. And then the communists closed in. In the late 40s, the writing was on the wall. It was a time of hyperinflation.

21:05People didn't know what was going to happen, but they knew something was happening. And they had to make bets. So my grandfather, his English name was Carlton Sun, sent his wife and his kids to the safe haven of Hong Kong, which was a British colony. He mostly stayed back to run the family business in Shanghai and elementary school. The police came for him in 1951, when the communists were rooting out perceived enemies. During any kind of campaign like this, people are put under pressure to turn in people that may be suspicious. So it sounds like your grandfather maybe didn't know who was complaining about him.

21:42Who knows? Actually, we may know. My mom says her father was turned in by an informant who was actually a family friend. Again, everyone made their bets. Carlton's son went to prison on March 26, 1952, convicted of collaborating with an enemy. Years before in World War II, when Japan controlled much of Asia, including much of China, he went back to his hometown in China, Wuhan, to live with his mom, a widow. And that is when my grandfather took jobs working for the Japanese occupiers, distributing food, helping with messaging. So after Japan surrendered in 1945, people like him were deemed traitors.

22:20Honestly, it's not that easy to talk about. But historian Poshek Fu at the University of Illinois says these wartime decisions were not clear and simple, not black and white. Fu wrote a book on wartime collaborators. You know, Scott, I would suggest that at least you should not see it as shameful. It is very ambiguous. Now, we don't know why my grandfather made the choices he did. But Fu says collaboration often had nothing to do with politics. Say you worked as a Chinese firefighter before the Japanese came. And after they occupied the cities, you were just a firefighter. It did not involve any political, ideological things.

22:59Then you continued in your job. You're just doing a job. You just have a different employer. You just put a different batch. In war, Fu says people took any jobs they could. There was hyperinflation. There was not enough food. And then he says some Chinese were forced to collaborate. That is, my grandfather may have faced, as they say in The Godfather, an offer he couldn't refuse. That was a notorious organization, a spy organization. They forced people to submit. For example, somebody who knows your grandfather, for example, and they want him to work. And then for example, he didn't want to do it.

23:38So they might arrest him and torture him or torture one of his family members. There are many things like that. Many who study World War II in Europe say people who collaborated with the Germans also had complex reasons. Survival, self-interest, hunger, fear. It's complicated. The thing is, in China today, any mention of the Japanese recalls the horrific atrocities they committed in the war, which is true. That is the narrative. So even now, when I mention a relative who, for whatever reason, worked for that side, people kind of back away. It's embarrassing. So I balance that emotion against this argument from historian Fu.

24:20How could we, so many years after the war, judge the people who lived through that at time of fighting, of total uncertainty, of supporting, helping a family to survive? After my grandfather was imprisoned, he was sent with up to 8 million others to a labor camp in the frigid mountains of the far west. Some call it the Siberia of China. The Chinese imported the gulag prison system from the Soviets. Most prisoners, including my grandfather, did not survive. But over the years, I have spoken to a few who did, to piece together that chapter. One is An Dianshiang. He's 89 now. And this week, he told me he was sent to the camps by train.

25:11You ride in one of those stuffy train cars. They're the kind used to transport sheep, pigs, cows, this kind of car. Once inside, you'll notice animal urine and feces on the floor. And Dianxiang said he was forced to work, to carry giant stones to construct a reservoir, to till the farm, to lug coal from the mines by hand. And at night, he was forced to attend meetings called struggle sessions to weed out the unpatriotic. He said there was never enough food. There was overtime work, and I would rush to volunteer. Why? To get an extra small steamed bun. Every day all you thought about was steamed buns.

25:52We were like animals, thinking only about eating, every day. Many prisoners died of starvation. Now Mr. N is not the only former prisoner to tell me that the only way to survive was to steal food. Find a bun somewhere and hide it. pilfer seeds and plant them yourself, whatever it took.

26:16There was no other choice than to steal a bite. You'd end up starving. But you had to adapt to the environment. I was not the only one doing this. Many others did the same.

26:30And Yan Zhang wrote a book about his life, self-printed as no commercial publisher in China would touch it. After all, the party in charge back then is still in charge today. So stories like Mr. An's and my grandfather's are hardly told. Which brings me back to the quiet lane in Shanghai and historian Patrick Cranley. Americans like him and like me may find it healing or human to consider the impossible choices people make in a war. But Cranley says not in China. As historians, we want to hear stories, so we seek them out. But for the most part, these stories are not mentioned. The older generations that suffered, they don't want their kids and their grandkids to be burdened by that trauma.