ChinaBlog Day 13

I can’t shake the feeling that I’m walking around in the birthplace of modern China. Or maybe the birthday of modern China. In about a year and a half, modern China will be wrapped up in a blue or pink blanket, snuggled in a diminutive rolling crib, it’s exhausted mother reaching out in vain for one tiny hug as this critical newborn is wheeled out of the delivery room to the intensive care unit. Modern China is a preemie. And right now it is in hour 40 of a very long and tumultuous delivery process. It began with the 1979 water breaking, followed by an early 1980s 80 mph rush to the hospital in a middle-of-the-night taxi. After a 1990s Emergency Room arrival and check-in process, the year 2000 brought modern China into the delivery room, and it is still on its way out. If you’re wondering, modern China’s mother is Communist China, who was left with this child after a recent on-again, off-again, love/hate relationship with the United States. The father’s not around much, but he sends money every month in the form of business and trade. It’s still unclear how much he’s going to be involved in raising the newborn. I think mom is going to have quite a bit of say in that.
--What brings this up is looking at my Beijing apartment complex on Google Earth. It’s the only finished project in a sea of muddy construction sites. As you walk the streets in my neighborhood you feel as if you’ve stepped into Chicago circa 1895, just as the greatest and most influential high-rises in the world were taking shape. They’re still around today, defining the Windy City’s culture and presence. Beijing will be similarly affected by the development we’re watching right now. As more and more rural families, or, more often, family members immigrate to the cities (I use this word carefully, because it is just as difficult culturally, economically, and especially legally, to move from the countryside to the city in China as it is to move from one country to another), the hope is that this explosion in building will match the explosion in urban population. But adolescence is a universal concept, and most likely young modern China will follow the well-beaten path made by every other volatile urban environment as it goes through development and understanding of its place in the world. If it doesn’t end up squatting in an abandoned warehouse with a $20-a-day drug habit it will be better off than most. After years of Failed Urban Nations doing stint after stint in rehab, promising they want to get better, giving hope for a new future only to relapse and end up back on the street, expectations for newborn modern China are preemptively low.
--But here’s the punchline: preemie newborn modern China is not a child, but a baby Elephant in a person-sized world. It is going through all of these developments on a scale unheard of in history. Modern China is bigger than any civilization ever to walk the earth. When modern China wants it’s bottle, where will we get enough milk to feed it? It’s not its fault that it will be hungry after such an ordeal. How will we find a bed for it? What room will it sleep in? It’s a staggering problem for one set of staying-together-for-the-kid parents to deal with. They’re just not that into each other, and having a baby the size of a small car in the house with them isn’t going to settle things down. The one hurt most by this situation is the calf, destined to live in a household where neither parent truly accepts it. Somehow, it will have to find a way to fend for itself, and maybe grow up to be a contributing member of society. The odds are not in its favor.
-c