200 Years; Twentieth Century China

from communication center the university of texas at austin this is two hundred years in the year nineteen seventy six the american republic celebrates its two hundredth anniversary as a part of the us bicentennial program at the university of texas at austin two hundred years explores the past present and future dynamics of history's longest living democratic society this weekend two hundred years we'll be talking about the people of china and the last half the twentieth century the subject of increasing interest to americans but goes amiss you're the celebration of our bicentennial we have bad relationships with chernow almost the entire time they're ending the existence of this country except for a lockout in the previous period with us are and were groans associate professor of history at the university of texas at austin to lobby for all assistant professor of chinese and the department of oriental and african languages and charles greer in structure and

geography at ut austin now that america has begun to establish relations with the government of mainland china again and a few americans have been able to visit there is information about modern china really available about the chinese culture about their literature and their way of life let's start with charles yes certain kinds of information are readily available i think more kinds of information than most americans are aware of we get the daily our reports in the newspaper increasingly now the articles written by people who've traveled to china but they're also publications it screened by chinese government at least published by the chinese government to be sure but there are publications that described a social life the literature the culture industrialization and social development from the chinese point of view i think we have a quite a

lot of information about china as charles says syria via publications produced in the mainland and we also have reports that by people who have been able to travel in china i think that one of our concerns as people are interested in modern china is sonata in a gathering more and more information but in knowing how to interpret and evaluate the information that we do have we're meeting today in solder from one of the use of common fear the and too many stressed at the year norton on availability of information that china is not an open society like america and literally do not get as much information out of china are no such as much about china's we do about the united states the information does exist and which is a great deal that is chosen genetic mentioned are already restricted and that do we know essentially what to do with the leadership in china would like us to know

i think one thing that we all three she remembered is that there's more and more information available through universities i think asian studies and university campuses i'll work which we all three are involved in is becoming more more popular and i think the kind of critical evaluation of the information available the ad described how can be found that were well our visitors to china now able to move more freely about the citizens out in the country and able to meet and noble people this brings to mind though problem right at the beginning how many americans know chinese the language the nominee are able to communicate with the people directly in their language can get a percentage on how many know about it very very clear and the number who are able to travel to china a minute you'd think that we would hope anyway that the people who know chinese will be doing to be able to travel for that that's not the case consistently they one of the other reflections on as i think it is a problem and i was able to go to china

about a year and a half ago with a group of american engineer answering your first question about freedom of movement it's a quite intimate control of terrorist groups have in the sense that when you first arrived in china you established rigid chinese host's worry will go how you will spend your money or three weeks in china within the framework of some flexibility in the sense that you have if you have fried chicken walk around the city or visit with people on the streets or any extended time allows and language ability allows let's go on to the culture of the country it was literature which seems to be you or your specialty the americans know much about contemporary chinese literature who the boy tara do they have poets who the people who are writing novels are pros do they give the answer

what is johnny's look of course there are poets there are people reading stories i don't think americans know very much about it because i think that chinese literature it is not the same kind of literature as our student of literature like to study in other words it's a didactic literature is meant for its men specifically to you the present models for the chinese people to follow when they encounter a problem in their daily lives and that it's not that it really isn't very interesting to a lot of people who are studying the western literature was the soviet departure from classic journeys with twitter well i think they died at this is and has always been a mainstream in chinese literature so this has always existed in chinese literature but other kinds of military activity of have in the past gone on side by side along with that literature which is much more interesting to westerners and now

there's only one kind of literature that i know of that comes at a time and that's this literature literature that serves the people and what about the kinds of literature we do we hear about being involved in the politics of chinas someone discovers that there was movement against a political leader and it's a political faction then later china watchers in this country discover that this attack was foreshadowed the novel is written deep in the court when in peking or something is is there much of a kind of literature that is very important i really can't and i think that in politics and literature are tied up very closely and they're not always tied up in ways that are very clear to those of us on the outside are those with what the excuses of a use for making judgments that they make are not always so terribly believable to

be a major role of leader after being counted for literature has been using an asinine ella continues to today and to be so that data's use that as political criticism than indirectly especially since we're really you do not have a free press for example and so in the new place for example one the pleasant that heralded the cultural revolution was a was a play about area traditionally me minister alan in traditional china who have been fired in this was supposed to be a criticism of a vivid in contemporary china they have a feeding fish you who have also been fired and so you do have to back to back to houston political uses of literature today and this is also traditional the americans ever understood that

the you know the weather many sayings about our own ability to comprehend the oriental culture and is this more true than in contemporary sense of it was in the classic sense he liked a problem when they may be true we're in the sense that it's a chinese seems to do some rather strange things and since we we we do not our sales go up in that kind of environment and i can't actually i think it's hard for us today to evaluate understand what's happening that superficially looks rather strange and furthermore the chinese leadership has not fully explain quite often the things that happens we have two and guess where but i don't think that the chinese are really in retrospect the chinese and looking as a historian you can do if you use insects to a lawn of the things become clear right now works look at some other areas of the civilization

man sits there been any profound changes with a new government a whole lives of them really as the chinese communist government right now roughly speaking twenty five years basically certainly took power in october nineteen forty nine officially established the people's republic so this october it will be twenty seven years and then twenty seven years what has happened in education as well as the average chinese educated that contrasted with the american west for a start the process of universal education that has characterized neon industrialization process of modernization process this has been going on in china where certain maybe individual characteristics of the chinese education system that that is the basic fact that as china has begun to develop and begun to transform from an agricultural society into an industrial

society the education population has been important so that's i think the basic change that has begun in these twenty seven years there's not a lot of them it added it's regarded them as education is universal and that elementary school level but that higher school education no skill and critically college education is very much restricted to that that only very few people get to go to college well is this a radical departure for an educational system prior to the revolution but i don't think it's a radical departure i think a big part of a departure there is and that everybody now has the opportunity to go to to get elementary school education that certainly is a departure the viewers of number going to get a college education and it's pretty most people can afford it we have been

living under the impression that the chinese are not to sharpen technological development then all of a sudden we hear the atomic bomb has been exploded how did this come about educational background or did somebody give it to them are dismissive adam someone or does anyone know it i think that science and technological field of education i received a great deal of emphasis since nineteen forty nine i think that cooperation with the soviet union during the nineteen fifties how can that particular military capability of course since nineteen sixty there has been no out close to the core economic or scientific corporation for the chinese england premature since that time since nineteen sixty another interesting facet of education i think is language reform and standardization of language and throughout china and simplification of

turkish to know how successful as a government i think again that this is a problem and we don't really know how to interpret the information that we get and the time to say how successful it's actually been we know that great strides have been made in the wealthy area reform of the written language and in standardizing the spoken language and i understand it in shanghai for example certain groups of people have been selected to be taught the standard language people who come in contact with travelers so just so stark workers and hotel keepers streetcar conductor conductors intimate have been singled out too intensively study that the standard language and i think with this kind of the program only the language reforms will make very rapidly what though was a great difficulty of language before we have a chance there are two prongs one with the spoken language and one with the written language and the

problem with the spoken language is that the people in different areas of china spoke what we usually call different dialects of which are in fact different languages so did people from the major cities peking shanghai can time i cannot speak with each other that they speak different languages and of course is a major problem and that was very important that everyone and when one liners that illinois than picking style language to be they a common language right now what is the relationship between spoken language and the red line that we've heard a lot about characters and one was a problem with characters the problem though with characters is their very difficult to learn to read and write it takes a lot of continental united and that a student has to learn to a three thousand characters as opposed to the twenty six letters of our alphabet in order to be literate it takes a long time and that's why

the main drawback with that system when in the past that or literacy has been confined to classes have enough leisure time to spend learning how to read and write and so there's a class problems involved here but standard of living in china today is better than for the general public or worse than it was before the communist there's brave band before it comes to harbor that see all sorts of extenuating circumstances the war and so forth but i think compared to even the best years in the past that then and probably better sorry for the common people now clearly again we do not win as well this is the immediate impasse way leaders today but certainly benefits to produce a society has been more evenly than before is the population still as great as it was earlier is a greater population

is still growing but it's growing at a slower rate i think a basic figures are the population has grown by about sixty percent since nineteen forty nine and food production has slightly more than doubled so the ratio between food production in population as more favorable now population is still growing at somewhere between one percent and two percent annually and it's dropping positive hopefully future in that although still a lot of people when you have eight hundred thousand eight hundred million or nine hundred million people that just a bureaucratic it doesn't as an impression from traveling in chinese citizen chinese countryside just lots of people especially other growers it's surprising how dense population is flying over china plain you look down and see a village approximately every mile

recorded a mile to a mile in every direction on the fertile plains of china villages of a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of people and as this changed or was this a continuance of the way it was before and this is the same pattern to accept that the population has risen by about sixty percent in but since nineteen forty nine most thinking about the population rising know what kind of health programs to really encounter in china today we've heard several dozen terry curators are especially an area of anesthesia or is that an old wound and they've used to what they're trying to do is to adapt acupuncture and use it to over as interim ceo i don't think though that that's that that was the main thrust of their health programs in recent years a main thrust serving in the health programs is to bring

medical care out to the countryside to the people who need it as opposed to in the past having the health facilities that the hospitals and the doctors are being in the season than the patients tend to come many miles to the cities to be treated in and furthermore this was a speed up the training of a paramedic people people are not fully trained as doctors can you can deliver the basic kind of medical services and then sending them out after two one two years maybe less and that training send them out into the countryside to do with you know most of the interior in major medical problems and leaving the more serious problems that are trying and charles mention all of those little bit about the stress and industrialization as a radical change and journalist since the current

people to power oh it's radical only in the sense that there is virtually no industrial development in nineteen forty nine the beginnings had been made prior to the second world war but during the war much of the industrial plant had been destroyed of course so the initial growth was rapid project leading the nineteen fifties when the soviet union was influencing china's economic development since that time and authorization has been slower attorney the chinese have purposely tried to agriculture and a firm foundation before proceeding with further nature of the violence of china's still really only added so called take off stage i think in the naturalization process we seem to know so little about channel one can question almost any aspect of life and come up with additional information that is of value to us as look at the chinese family that i'm home ly

but what has occurred in this area probably not much of a suspect the year growing more than some other areas pat persist into the present what is the best of course this year saw it i think the extended family's was important and in pre modern times has been de emphasized and probably influences people's lives less i think maybe it meant that nuclear family and that that that certainly is very much as it was before and the basic unit of family life both in the city and the countryside we have marriage and shallow way we're both in this country and a yardstick him as there is a change here which is away from arrange marriages warily on the couples are what their marriages are arranged by their parents and they

had no say in this and this has been done away with by the marriage law nineteen fifty two day marriage is ringed by the couples themselves that's a basic family today is about for four people five people living together the couple or two children perhaps not too different from the american dream do venture are mostly of prognostication and anticipate what we might kind of relation to have with china and more in the future it's very hard to say because for larson's nineteen seventy two when president nixon would determine from broke open relations continue to improve not to rapidly of course america been ups and downs in the sense of trade between china and states increased increased quite rapidly for a while and has dropped off in the last year or

two i think of course that you have to look in the context of the city and in japan and in world our relations generally at the president i would i would venture to guess that relations will probably continue on about the same tack than now gradual improvement gradual opening up then perhaps increased opportunities for americans to travel are didn't do they anticipate any expansion in the area of literature in this country of chinese literature and carlo are farmers in this country yes i really really doubt it's a nice modern literature think that there'll be more and more interested in china as a whole and chinese culture as a whole i think more and more people stay chinese and they'll post it didn't become interested in classical conservative but at the end of origin is literature there's not great interest

for population but today we have tried to dig a little bit into the enigma is quote china which is a subject of increasing interest to us in the world because of our relationship with china and in relationships both of us and russia are panelists included edward roads associate professor of history at the university of texas at austin jennifer or assistant professor of chinese and the department of oriental and african languages and charles grey hair instructor in geography at ut austin this as rex we're for two hundred years two hundred years as part of the united states bicentennial program at the university of texas austin is a continuing series of weekly conversations about the past present and future dynamics of history's longest living democratic society two hundred years is produced by katie this is