National pride sweeps China ahead of Olympic Games

LONDON - The Guardian

A wave of nationalist fervour is sweeping across China as it prepares for the Olympic Games. In Yan'an, the once-poor city that was the cradle of Mao's revolution, growing economic and social divisions are being submerged by a heady mix of sporting passion and political pride.

Behind the hills and the skyscrapers the sun is going down on another working day, but Ren Zhirong cannot stop to talk. The carpet still has to be laid on the university's volleyball courts, the spotlights connected, the music chosen. Only then can scores of his finest pupils show Yan'an, a small town in central China, 'what ballroom dancing is all about'.

'This is the moment I have been working towards all my life,' said Ren, 48, as he watched 100 contestants, all from Yan'an University, putting the finishing touches to their make-up and costumes. 'This is my dream.'

The couples adjusting pink nylon gowns and sequinned electric blue trousers do not know it but they - and Ren - are the face of modern China. Far from Beijing, from Shanghai or from the bustling economic powerhouse of Guangdong province, they have grown up in a poor, rural, northern-central province and are often the first in the family to receive more than a rudimentary education - and in some cases the first not to worry about basics like food and a roof.

Shi Tao Jao, in a yellow dress, hopes for a career in 'international tourist management'. Dancing allows her 'to meet boys'. These young people have watched their country evolving at an astonishing pace. In the last competition, Shi came second. Now she wants to be first.

Ren himself knows about change. He set up the club, from which he now earns a good living, with the 60,000 yuan (£4,400) redundancy payment he received when the state-owned factory where he had worked for 26 years shut 18 months ago - bankrupted by the government's free market reforms. 'Once it was just two of us. Now we have 400 dancers,' Ren, a former truck driver, said. And with three weeks to go until the Olympics, Ren's ambitions of teaching all Yan'an the cha-cha-cha have met with official approval.

The Communist party of China is nothing if not flexible. What some might once have considered a bourgeois Western import has been cleverly co-opted. 'We are using ballroom dancing to mobilise young people for the Olympics,' says Shen Chang Liang, in Yan'an's public sports office. As elsewhere in China, local authorities are planning a series of sporting competitions, parades and open days to crank up the popular fervour for the Olympics.

Sports authorities may insist that the games themselves are non-political, but few in China are blind to their internal significance. Bringing the Olympics to the country is widely seen as a vindication of the government's diplomatic skill - and therefore that of the party - as well as its economic competence. It is also seen as a key assertion of a new national identity and confidence.

'Sport is a key part of the project of the party for the nation,' said Liu Haijun, director of the Yan'an Sports Institute.

So Yan'an, population 340,000, now has a new 20,000-seat sports stadium, one of hundreds of such projects across the country. Every afternoon, after lessons in the morning, scores of teenage students train on the stadium's Astroturf. Mainly from poor rural families, they are all students of Yan'an's subsidised Sports Institute. This, they hope, is their way out of poverty.

But equality, sporting or otherwise, is relative. The director's large, new black car is parked outside the students' squalid, rudimentary accommodation and the windows to his air-conditioned office keep the stench from the student's communal latrines at bay.

For the government, sport not only projects national pride and prowess, but is a way of cushioning the pain of immense social and economic changes.

The parents of Lu Fan, 17, an aspiring young sprinter at the academy, live 30 miles north of Yan'an in a flat provided by the factory where they have worked for 20 years. If the state-owned enterprise closes they will lose income, healthcare and their home. Then the £400-a-year fees for the sports institute would be very difficult to find. 'I am always anxious,' said Lu's mother, Li Chunmei. 'But my son has talent, so I am hopeful too.'

Lu says he is 'realistic'. 'I don't dream of the Olympics. But maybe I'll make it on the national stage one day. And I'll make a good living too,' he says.

But sport will only go so far in uniting the nation behind a repressive one-party state ... and the government has other cards to play.

Yan'an is the city where Mao Zedong ended the Long March and built up his forces before finally launching the campaign that brought him and the resurgent Communist party of China to power in 1949. Scattered among the towering new apartment blocks are the simple - but perfectly maintained - huts and halls used by Mao and his comrades more than 60 years ago.

Since 2005, the government has poured huge resources into 'red tourism' here. A vast station is under construction in Yan'an to welcome special trains ferrying visitors from the sprawling coastal cities. The prettiest and brightest local girls are recruited to guide half a million visitors each year. 'The important thing is to transfer the spirit, diligence and patriotism of the old generation,' says Yuan Xin, 23, a guide and local student.

The visitors are mainly on coach trips from factories and schools but increasingly there are individual visitors, too. In the courtyard of Chairman Mao's former home, one woman said she had brought her nine-year-old daughter to learn of 'the sacrifices made by our leaders'. In another, two young boys dressed up as 1930s soldiers and took pictures of each other. 'The hardship the old leaders suffered is really impressive,' one said.

For their guide, there was no doubt. 'The Communist party and the Chinese nation are inseparable. Without the Communist party, there is no new China,' she said.

The success of 'red tourism' reveals one reason for the party's continued hold on China: the legitimacy the party has as a liberator of the country from invaders, colonial proxies and powers in the mid-20th century.

Equally important is a reputation for efficient management, which explains in part why such extraordinary precautions are being taken to ensure a trouble-free Olympics - despite the bad press they provoke overseas. For months, visas have been restricted, dissidents harassed, activists gagged, normally tolerated critics warned to stay silent and even the most innocent tourists vetted.

'If imposing the control of the party on the games means less visitors, so be it,' said one Western diplomat. 'As long as the games are without incident, anything is acceptable.'

Few in Yan'an, or elsewhere in China, mention democracy or human rights. Some are too frightened. For others, perhaps conditioned by 60 years of tightly controlled media, such ideas seem alien. 'China? Democratic? What a funny idea!' one Yan'an housewife exclaimed. Others repeat the government's argument that China is too big and unstable for Western-style democracy to work.

Among the scores of people interviewed by The Observer in Yan'an only one, a Christian woman student from the Mongolian minority, expressed a desire for greater democracy because 'people would then be more free to practise their religion'. She was quick to add that President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao were the best leaders for 40 years.

The party is far from a tiny elite, as some commentators claim. Its official membership is 73 million and growing. Its members range from the powerful technocrats in the upper reaches of government to village chairmen. They include committed socialists, bureaucrats of every variety, quality, honesty and competence and, increasingly, ambitious young networkers.

Yet 'socialism' appears as something of a relic in the new China and 'communism' an inherited but empty title. Few states have embraced neo-liberal capitalism so quickly, so enthusiastically and so thoroughly. Decades of economic growth appear to vindicate the choices made by party leaders in the early 1980s and during a second wave of economic restructuring a decade later.

Alongside the legitimacy conferred by their forebears (the famines and brutality of the Mao era are carefully obscured) and the loyalty resulting from decades of social engineering, is the party's trump card: economic development. And in Yan'an, though perhaps less spectacularly than in Shanghai, the new wealth is very evident.

Outside a small rustic restaurant a new Jaguar belonging to businessman Wang Cheng, 45, is parked. 'It cost me 1.5m yuan (£120,000),' he said, tucking into a meal of pork intestines and chilli. 'I have one philosophy in life: a man's worth is his wealth, his value is his riches.' Wang, a property developer, hotelier and son of a government clerk and a farmer, is not a party member. 'That does not mean I am not a patriot,' he insists.

At the university, staff are proud that the car park is full. 'Now we have more than 80 cars for 270 staff. Ten years ago there were none,' said one lecturer. Even menial labourers living 18 to a filthy 'cave' house on the slopes around Yan'an insisted that life was 'much better' - though they complained about rising prices, the cost of healthcare and school fees. And a 61-year-old woman who earns £1 each evening from collecting plastic bottles for recycling said that life was easier, at least compared to the grim days of famine and political brutality of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.

Drive off the new motorway running down the fertile valley and on to the rutted road that leads east from Yan'an into the hills and, for 120 miles, the landscape does not vary: wooded hills fissured by erosion; small ponds staked with fish nets; terraced fields sparsely planted with wheat; and villages, a hundred identical dusty clusters of brick, concrete, peeling paint, fading slogans and chickens. On the final ridge before the Yellow river gorge, Wang Zhi Hong, 44, is tending his apple trees.

Wang's village, Zaho, is a long way from the sparkling image of the new China that the government hopes to showcase during the Olympics. Wang admits that, like most of his neighbours, he eats meat only about a dozen times a year. Jars beside his earth-and-brick house collect rain from the roof for drinking and washing. Though some villages have mains water, Zaho's 280 inhabitants cannot find the 300 yuan (£24) for each connection. Most young people have gone to work in the cities.

The daughters of Wang Cui, 51, are in Beijing. 'What do you expect?' she asks. 'This place has not changed for 30 years.' Even the new house she has built with cash sent by her children brings worries. 'Now all our poor relatives want to borrow money,' she says.

But however much Zaho's villagers complain - about poor healthcare, the distant school, corruption and partisan local officials - they remain loyal 'to the great project of building a new China', as described in the slogans painted on their walls a year or so ago. They are grateful for recent tax cuts for farmers and proud that their country is hosting the Olympics. There is only a trace of nostalgia. 'In the old days, 30 years ago,' says Wang. 'Everyone was poor and life was tough ... but at least we were all equal.'

Down in the gorge that funnels the Yellow river through the mountains on its way to the plains and the sea, a crowd of tourists - all Chinese - take photographs. The games, the Chinese authoritarian model, the Western statements on Tibet, their country's economic success, all combine in an outpouring of identity and emotion, of pride in their nation, 'their' Olympics and their government.

There are, of course, threats to the party's dominant position that could become serious in the decades to come: the global economic factors and local environmental problems could derail the economic growth that so many believe will bring them or their children wealth. It is clear that the 'rush for growth' is leading to such profound inequality that stability could be threatened. In one shop in Yan'an, where five pairs of Italian-made shoes, each costing what the staff earn in a month, are sold each day, there were rumblings of discontent. 'It does make me angry,' whispered one shop assistant. 'The gap between the rich and the poor is getting too big.'

The real trouble for the ruling party may come not from this generation but the one that follows. But that is some time away yet. For now, in Yan'an and the rest of China, the dance into a capitalist future goes on and the Communist party continues to call the tune.

Cradle of revolution
· Population of Yan'a n: 340, 000.

· Size: 3,541 sq km.

· Formerly known as Yanzhou, city records go back 1,400 years.

· The town was used as a military headquarters during the Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945) and China's civil war (1945-1949) between the communists and the Nationalists (KMT) led by Chiang Kai-shek.

· When the town was razed by Japanese bombing during the the Second World War, Yan'an's inhabitants took to living in yaodongs, artificial caves carved into the surrounding hillsides.

· Yan'an was the end point of the Long March trek of the Red Army to escape attacks from Chiang's Nationalist armies. It began in October 1934.

· It is the location of the general offices of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party.

· The town was the venue for meetings and interviews between the communist leader, Mao Zedong, and the American journalist and author Edgar Snow, as well as his fellow American journalist, Anna Louise Strong, who was a communist supporter.

· The town contains 140 sites that are regarded as significant in revolutionary history, such as the Wangjiaping site, Yangjialing site, the Date garden and Pagoda Hill.

· The Hukou waterfall nearby is the only Yellow river waterfall and the second biggest waterfall in all of China.