During the Spring Semester of 2003, I finally realized my ambition of returning to The People’s Republic of China and for several years thereafter I would come back a number of times. I spent most of the time in China living in Shenyang, a large industrial city and transportation hub located in Liaoning Province, in Northeast China, about one hundred and fifty miles north and west of the border of North Korea and six hundred miles north and east of Beijing. I found that in the microcosm that is present day Shenyang, one can see the many changes that are going on in the broader country.

China, and in particular Shenyang, can certainly be considered a study in human tenacity. Even after nearly five thousand years of feudalism and imperial rule, the country remains a powerful and proud nation, yet one still heavily influenced by the historical forces that forged its present existence. And now, after the past three centuries of social humiliation and economic plundering by the Western colonial powers, followed by a brief period of Chinese nationalism, and then complete takeover by communism, the China and Shenyang of today lend themselves well to ethnographic study of its people and its culture.

Probably the most obvious vestiges of the past can best be seen in the influence communist control has and continues to have on the country. The tensions of communism stubbornly resisting the dynamics of unleashed capitalism can almost be sensed in the stagnant, smoggy air of the cities. Today there are 70 million in the CCP—the Chinese Communist Party; these 70 million party members control the remaining 1.3 billion citizens. Though these disproportionate numbers are hard for Westerners to understand, when control of the economy, the military, the government process, the judicial system, the major industries and the public utilities are concentrated in the hands of a few, the hearts and minds of the ruled will most assuredly follow . . . a dynamic reality that has prevailed since the late 1940s. Perhaps this situation can be best summed up by the comment made by a Chinese-American friend of mine. When I asked him if he thought China would ever become a democracy, he said that basically, given the history of Chinese civilization and politics, the people have no predisposition for being able to choose their leaders. "What the Chinese seem to want is for just a good leader who will treat them well, or at least not treat them badly. The people have no propensity for democracy. After 2500 years of imperial rule, they only want a good, fair ruler." And with the growing commercialism that has resulted from the Socialist Market Economic System of Deng Xiaoping, which in reality opened the Pandora’s Box of capitalism, a rising middle class fits well into the oligarchic Communist party. People with more material goods are less likely to revolt. They have more to lose . . . an idea that maybe serves as a refutation to the unanalyzed assumptions Americans have concerning everyone in the world having a predisposition for democracy . . . a lesson we did not learn in Viet Nam and one we probably will not learn again in Iraq or any other country where we try to impose our values in lieu of any appreciation of difference. And because seventy to eighty percent of China’s population is widely dispersed in rural farming communities, these economic, social, and political tensions are most obvious in the larger, densely populated areas in the eastern provinces of the country . . . in metropolitan cities like Shenyang.

Certainly one cannot really know the character of a nation by merely looking at one of its major cities—looking at New York City, for example, does not really give insight into America as a whole. However, the city of Shenyang, with eight million people—small in comparison to a city such as Chongqing, which has an estimated population of twenty-eight million—can be observed as somewhat a microcosm of what is happening in the entire country. The homogeneity of the nation allows for a certain degree of similarity and affinity to course through the lives of the Chinese populace. Thus one can certainly see that the struggles of China, both past and present, are evidenced in Shenyang and the tenaciousness of the Chinese people reflected in the citizens of that city.

Shenyang and the surrounding area hold claim to a major part of Chinese history. The Northeast of China, often referred to as Manchuria, has since prehistory been a major crossroads, trading center, and invasion route. From these regions, as well as areas to the north and west, Mongol invaders swept down and over the Great Wall to lay siege to growing dynastic empires of the "Middle Country." Later, Manchu warriors swept south from here in the seventeenth century to overthrow the Ming Dynasty and impose the Qing Dynasty on the Chinese civilization. Shenyang is home to several of the older Qing Imperial Tombs and to the first Qing Dynasty Imperial Palace—Gugong—a smaller version of the ruling emperors’ Forbidden City built later in Beijing in 1406, after the Qing conquest of the city. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the area proved to be the point of contention for the Japanese and Russians, the culmination of which resulted in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905. In 1912, after the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Puyi, abdicated his rule, anti-imperial forces in the country launched the Republic of China, under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen. Later, through the on-going, unequal provisions of the Russo-Japanese Treaty, Shenyang became a major part of the Japanese occupation of China. After having established a large military and civilian presence in several major cities in the Northeast, Japan’s cancerous invasion started in 1932 in Northeastern China and rapidly spread southward through a good portion of the entire country. Drunk with their imperial might, the Japanese arbitrarily established a new de facto puppet Chinese government by proclaiming Puyi as the figurehead leader of China and establishing his seat of power in Shenyang. Even today, people of that region harbor great animosity toward Japan and the Japanese, no matter how persistent the economic pressures for the suppression of those hatreds are. The cruelty and brutality that so exemplified the Japanese occupation of China continues to haunt the people of Shenyang, and of China as well. In fact, a large museum, the September 18th Remembrance Center, was constructed in the city. On September 18, 1931, the Mukden Incident was fabricated by the Japanese in order to justify the invasion of China. Now the museum exhibits serve as a stark, graphic reminder of the savage, barbaric nature of the Japanese occupation during that era. And even today the forgiveness driven by economics comes slowly to many in the people of places like Shenyang and Nanjing and other areas of Eastern China. Very few Westerners know of the twenty million Chinese killed or the fifteen million who were wounded or displaced during the nearly sixteen terrible, barbarous years of that war.

Then after the defeat of the Kuomintang by the Communists and the takeover of the entirety of China by the Chinese Central Party, Shenyang continued to play a major role in the country’s history. As a major industrial and steel-producing area, Liaoning Province and Shenyang served as the main staging and supply area for the Chinese intervention into the Korean War, when hoards of the Red "Liberation" Army swarmed across the Yalu River and drove the United Nations forces far south on the Korean Peninsula. As well, in the 1960s and 70s, being both a major industrial and agricultural area, Shenyang and Liaoning people suffered greatly during the backward and repressive Cultural Revolution of that era . . . those desperate times when intellectuals were persecuted and scorned, when the common people stood in long lines for basic needs and want oppressed all, when students chased Mao’s words and dreams and persecuted their fellow countrymen in place of an education . . . those "lost" or "forgotten" times the older generation mostly prefers to remain silent about. Those who do talk about those times prefer to discuss the "Iron Rice Bowl" . . . the times of guaranteed employment and government succor from cradle to grave that became an outgrowth of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Most of the Chinese who did not farm were assigned to "work units" within government-owned enterprises: industrial, factory, large businesses, trade, construction, education . . . all aspects of the economy. For example, if a person worked at a steel mill in Anshan, an industrial city not far from Shenyang, he or she would be guaranteed a livelihood for life. The state-controlled company provided housing, food, medical care, and retirement, all of which were meager, at best; education and indoctrination were the responsibility of the state, whose communist party representatives oversaw all aspects of the organization. Very little was left to the imagination of the individual: as one old worker told me through a translator, "If there was any difficulty, the government would take care of it. The government worked for the welfare of the people of China."

Since those revolutionary times, certainly much has happened in China. The Opening Up economic policies of the 1970s and 80s and 90s not only decentralized the government’s power and influence and control, the growing swell of capitalism has allowed people more freedom of movement and the opportunity to change jobs or professions and to start private businesses and to engage in private enterprises. Now the times are changing and these changes are more than obvious in Shenyang.

So much new construction is going on in the city . . . ceaseless activity which reveals such a stark, sharp contrast between the old becoming the new, between tradition and innovation. New major freeways and high-speed trains spirit people in and out of the city in remarkable time. New north-south and east-west subways systems are burrowed into the city’s infrastructure to ease the traffic congestion. And Shenyang, just like many other major cities in China, yields quickly to the winds of change and the pressures of economic transformation. Gray smog heavily blankets the city most of the time, a subtle reminder that environmental concerns are often shunted to minor discussions due to the exegesis of an overheated, rapidly expanding economy. The joke around Shenyang, and other major cities in China as well, I imagine, is that the national bird of China has now become the crane, which seems to sit perched atop of so many towering buildings being constructed around the country . . . the steel "bird" immersed in and clouded by the inversion layers of steady "progress" hanging over the city.

When one walks along the streets of Shenyang, he or she can almost feel the pulse and hear the heartbeat of its citizens, of the city, of the nation. The streets are crowded with people having determined looks on their faces, maybe looks of resolve, maybe looks of quiet desperation or perhaps resignation, best described by the Hebrews verse "Foreigners and refugees on Earth." Theirs is the look of "the thousand-yard stare," as we use to say in the military . . . the stoic look of dogged determinism . . . the gaze of acquiescence . . . the squinty-eyed look of American "get-‘r-done." And so many people. The busy streets always resemble a restless, flowing and eddying river of black-haired humans.

Certainly the changes going on in China are apparent not only on the streets of Shenyang but in the faces and lives of its citizens. A street vendor squatting before her box of baby tomatoes eats the bad ones and moves the plump ones forward for sale. After picking her nose, she wipes her hand on nearby corn husks, which serve as food for the donkey hovering nearby, which has hauled in her produce from the country. The "free" street markets on the city streets are now legal. The competition is great; on both sides of her are people with three-wheeled bicycle trucks who are selling the same commodities—tomatoes, green onions, limp leaks, softball-sized radishes, blocks of tofu, live squawking chickens, glistening fish and squirming eels and evasive turtles moving languidly in turgid tubs of water, and a myriad of other vegetable and fruits and slabs of fresh meats spread pinkish-red on outdoor chopping butcher blocks. Refrigerators are only gradually becoming a part of the average Chinese person’s way of life, so day-to-day buying of foods persists and the street markets flourish. Each vendor is indistinguishable from the other, but each does his or her own business . . . creates his or her "own bowl of rice." On the steps of a nearby apartment building, a few

meters behind the river of street vendors and intent consumers, a large one-child policy Chinese baby, dressed in a pink cotton sleeper, sits on its mother’s lap, fat from her milk. Its chubby cheeks push its slanted eyes closed into mere slits. China grows fat.

Yet so many facets of this city’s daily existence can tend to offend one’s sense of propriety, or should I say my own Western, middle-class, bourgeoisie perception of "reality." A taxi driver stops in the middle of traffic, walks into the bushes beside the road, and urinates openly, leaning casually against a shabby gray wall, a smoking cigarette held between two back brown fingers. Alternating smells of lilacs and garbage and tobacco and murky rinse water tossed splashing out onto the sidewalk and tantalizing smells of cooking from the street carts confront, no, overwhelm one. Sometimes there will be the wispy smell of incense from a store or the charcoal smell from shabby outdoor barbecue restaurants. Often in the wintertime when cold and nasal infections are rampant, one must step carefully, gingerly around the numerous frog-belly globs of mucus spat out or expelled from pinched nostrils and cleared throats and congested lungs onto the sidewalk. After the Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic and general panic in 2003, the Chinese Health Ministry started a health campaign warning about how this practice helps to spreads infectious diseases, but the warnings have pretty much gone unheeded.

The most sobering sights are those that reveal the fact that despite the current economic surge much poverty still exists in China. Crippled children beg openly on the streets, some using makeshift wagons and hand-held paddles to move around the sidewalks. Many locals say hucksters recruit such invalids from the countryside and bring them to the city; at the end of each day, the hucksters supposedly shake them down for the proceeds from their begging and give them only a small portion of the proceeds . . . somewhat, I guess, like an American pimp. I once was roundly scolded on Waishu Jie by a middle-aged Chinese gentleman for giving money to an elderly, shabbily dressed woman begging on the sidewalk outside of the General Hospital of Shenyang Northern Military Region. His rapid-fire Mandarin, coupled with emphatic hand gestures, was probably the same argument used by many middle class people in affluent Western nations: the ragged peasant’s plight was just a charade; at the end of the day she would leave street begging with her day’s earnings and take a taxi to her luxury apartment. How often have I heard the same comments made of the impoverished people in America. In China many people can be seen in the streets of the larger cities, gathering and crushing plastic water bottles to sell, or scrambling to gather cardboard boxes or plastic bags, or picking through the rubble of apartment buildings for anything salvageable. The horribly maimed and medically distressed people await tourists outside of most all main tourist attractions in Beijing, begging for any pittance. I once saw a poor woman walking between the rows of cars in a traffic jam in Shenyang, asking for money with an outstretched hand. She wore a tattered green army overcoat and her fat cheeks glowed red from the cold. She went from car to car, rapping on the windows with her tin cup. I fumbled for my wallet, but before I could weave my way through the cars she had disappeared, as though she had never existed. Another time, as I was crossing the traffic overpass on Sanhao Jie, I happened upon three women sitting in various places on the bridge, all with a child cradled in their laps, who languidly scrawled Chinese characters on the pavement with chalk. One of my students told me later the women were writing lamentation about probably being abandoned by their families and complaints about the unfairness of their situation. Soon the afternoon rains would come and wash away their sorrows and they would disappear.

A colleague once told me that with the many entitlement programs in America, we are much more of a socialist state than China, whose current survival of the fittest, lais•sez faire capitalism appears to be moving it far from the its leftist, socialist background. China, after all, has no broad-based social safety nets: though the Chinese government has been addressing the overall issues of poverty and want in the country, that there has been less success in the development of public services, particularly in the poorer rural areas. Those of us in American take such government programs as unemployment or disability insurance, or Welfare or Social Security or Medicare or retirement benefits or assisted living as entitlements of our citizenship. In China such programs and benefits are at best insubstantial and at worst nonexistent. If a person in China is unemployed or is disabled or becomes old and has no resources or no family to care for him or her, the consequences can often be dire. There are few if any government offices to go to and few social networks or safety nets. In Chinese society, one must make one’s own rice bowl.