From Ha Long to Ha Noi

May Day special from two Communist countries

　. . . to Ha Noi

From Ha Long . . .

by Kumar David-April 30, 2016

After a quiet New Year in Colombo I emplaned for Hong Kong in the wee hours of the morning of Apr. 15 and crossed into Guangdong (Canton) Province on a tour through two southern Chinese provinces into northern Vietnam for the next five days. I did it differently, not by air as tourists do, but by coach, train and rides on dilapidated buses. Travelling at the best of times is a stressful but on this occasion I was nursing a right-hand forefinger which an ungrateful horse I was feeding through a fence tried to chew off. Fortunately I found a foster mother (bastard that I am, I put on a show of distress), who took care to dress my wound and steady my geriatric stumbles.

Booming Guangdong Province I know well and have visited often; I still hold a time-unlimited professorship at the South China University of Technology. Guangdong is the richest province in China and where Deng’s opening-up made its break through because it is next to Hong Kong and is Cantonese speaking. The province’s capital city, Guangzhou called Canton in the old days is a bustling city of 10 million and the most advanced after Shanghai and Beijing. The province does not interest me much anymore though I marvel at the pace of conurbation and industrialisation every time I pass through. It was the next transit province Guangxi (Guangxi Autonomous Region) that I had my eye on. China has five autonomous regions; the others are Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia, where minorities are numerous and enjoy a degree of cultural and linguistic independence (but no ways political – if at all repression is starker in Tibet and Xinjiang).

I promised my readers long ago that I would visit Guangxi which has 30% Zhuang minority people with their own language but Han Chinese now predominate to the extent of 60%. I did not find the towns we passed of much interest from an ethnic perspective (Guangxi is nowhere near as vibrant or colourful Yunnan) but what is interesting is that the province’s former leader Cheng Kejie was executed in 2000 for corruption. Cheng was Provincial Governor, a CCP highflyer and a doer; his achievements in infrastructure development are everywhere to be seen; but he was also a ten percent man and when he fell out of favour when the leadership it was curtains. I need hardly rub in analogies – big time infrastructure expansion, getting things done, ten-percent and then the pitiless finale. There is much to learn from the Middle Kingdom, the four great inventions, paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass; but it seems much else as well, eh?

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