Beijing, China - I arrived in China for my Olympic Games visit on Wednesday August 6. I am here for three weeks but already I don’t know how I am going to describe China in a way that African readers that have never been to China can understand the incredible things going on here.
As BBC World TV commented about three months ago on China , this is the fastest and greatest economic growth known to the world in the last 300 years. This is the future we are headed to.
Arriving in Beijing , I made my way into the largest airport building on earth, the Beijing Capital International Airport. It was designed by the British architect, Sir Norman Foster. It is also the second-largest building in the world.
Those that have travelled through Dubai International Airport know its size. Entebbe International Airport has five departing gates. In East and Central Africa, the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport of Nairobi, Kenya, is the largest by far. But all this is minuscule when compared with what we have in the Far East.
Dubai International Airport has 50 gates. Beijing International Airport has 70 gates. If our small Entebbe airport can cover a third of Entebbe town, with Beijing we are talking about an airport building complex the size nearly the size of Kampala city. Just the airport.
On the way to the city, your eyes are overwhelmed by the sight of this strange new development in world history --- six lane road highways; endless rows and rows of sand-coloured housing estates, massive buildings visible for miles around; a feeling of massive size and scale, and wide spaces.
This is size alone. Let’s go to the quality. On Thursday, August 7, I visited some shops in downtown Beijing nor far from the area near Tianemenn Square where I am staying. This is like Kampala Road , Colville Street , or Kimathi Avenue in Kampala or Kimathi Street in Nairobi .
Beautiful, tree-lined streets and avenues. Clean streets without a single pot hole or crack. A sense of order, purpose, the clean, the well-paved, the wide and spacious. The feel of an advanced people and civilization.
I went into a confectionary shop to take a look at the chocolate and cakes. Most of us associate chocolate with Switzerland and all the posh and fine quality and standards of that European country. Now, picture chocolate produced in China by Chinese for the Chinese market: the inner gold or copper-coloured wrapping of Benson & Hedges cigarettes, meticulously printed English and Chinese lettering, and what we have is a fascinating image of a new world: the finest products of an ancient civilization dressed in the colours and designs we usually associate with the best of Europe.
A Section of Beijing at Night
This is the new face of East Asia. It is an Asia, with China now at full speed, that is returning to the glory it once had in centuries past but which is fusing this new found power with the undeniable finesse that in the western world's technology and design.
Even though China’s economy has been exploding at a phenomenal pace for the last 15 years, most of us still view this growth in terms of figures, construction sites, buildings, and container ships. It is when you get down to the every day items like chocolate, soft drinks, women’s clothes and shoes that the astonishing side to this emerging China becomes apparent. This new China is taking the form of these posh world cities and countries of East Asia like Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Macao, South Korea and Taiwan .
Then there are the people. I have not seen a single person --- not one --- in all of Beijing so far that is not well-dressed. It has been said that the undesirable residents of Beijing were taken out of the city in order not to embarrass the country when the Olympics started.
Even if that were true, and one can't necessarily refute it, there are still too many ordinary people even in low ranking jobs wearing these western designer labels that we usually consider sophisticated and expensive: Louis Vetton, Calvin Klein, Banana Republic, The Gap, Polo, Tommy Hilfiger fashions to suggest that this is a new, large, and fairly affulent middle class that Beijing has.
At first I wondered why everybody, rich, poor, young, old women and men, children, police officers, taxi drivers, everybody is this well-dressed, wearing modern and what seems like brand-new designer clothes. Then I remembered: American and European designers take their design and art work for production in factories in China , of course, because of the combination of hard working and diligent people and low wages.
This is the China that I am looking at in every direction on the street. Everything is large, getting larger, modern, increasingly westernised --- and cheap.
The state-owned Chinese Central Television (CCTV) has multi-channels and the quality of lighting, graphics, adverts aired and other visuals does not look like the state-controlled media of a Communist country.
In fact, the idea that China is ruled by the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party is almost laughable. Apart from the iron grip the Communist party and government still have over the country, China is all but a fully-fledged capitalistic country.
So, in summary, it is not that I expected all the economic growth rates we read about to mean nothing. What I and am sure most people have is a disconnect in my mind. We have the mental image of a rapidly growing China but still think of it as growth from building dull infrastructure like dams, roads, bridges, warehouses, and army barracks.
One expected the daily TV news to feature Communist party leaders in grey Communist suits speaking about peasants, workers, and land reform in the countryside.
I was not prepared for a fashionable, stylish, ultra-modern China. All this leads me to a problem: how to define the term "developing." Officially, China is still a developing country.
This trip, seeing China at the street level, has made me understand better than ever where all the world output of cement, steel, copper, and other materials is going.
It makes one wonder: if this China that has more 20-storey buildings on any one street in Beijing than there are in all of Nairobi and Kampala combined, is still being formally described as “developing”, then what shall be said of Africa? What shall we say about Africa? Are we too a developing region?
We might need to ask if African governments should be dissolved, independence withdrawn, and we are returned to United Nations supervision as trustee territories like Namibia under the League of Nations after the First World War. Let us just admit that we Africans are nice people, but we failed to govern ourselves.
By Timothy Kalyegira
Mr. Kalyegira is a columnist with the Daily Monitor paper of Uganda.
timothy_kalyegira@yahoo.com
