To Get Rich is Glorious
My first trip to China was in the summer of 1980 when I was a sophmore in college. Fresh out of my eight-week intensive Chinese language course at Middlebury College, I went to China eager to a learn about a land that was about as foreign to a westerner as existed on planet earth. Flying into the Beijing Airport at night, an area that was home to some five million people, there were few lights to be seen. On the drive from the airport to Beijing you could just make out in the darkness, horse-drawn carts, bicyclers and pedestrians. Taxis, cars and buses were few and far between. It was July and very hot and as we entered the city, we saw people lying on make-shift beds on the sidewalks to escape the oppressive heat of their apartments. No-one but the most senior member of the CCP had access to fans much less air conditioners. Although Deng Xiaoping, who had wrested power from the murderous “Gang of Four” after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, had recently declared that “to get rich is glorious”, access to goods was still extremely limited for both ideological and economic reasons. China had just emerged from thirty years of political tumult and policy-induced famine and deprivations which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. Conformity to the ever-shifting party line was paramount and people lived in fear of persecution should they be accused of being a “capitalist-roader”.
