Just noticed this short piece in China Daily:
Guangzhou achieves developed city status
(Bernama.com/chinadaily.com.cn) Updated: 2007-01-04 21:48
The per capita of Guangzhou, the capital of China's richest Guangdong province, is expected to surpass US$10,000 last year, becoming the first developed city on the mainland by World Bank standards, the Bernama.com reported on Thursday.
The southern city of seven million has reported a 14.4 per cent rise in gross domestic product (GDP) of 623.6 billion yuan (US$80 billion) for last year, Xinhua News Agency said Thursday.
"The breakthrough in GDP per capita indicates that Guangzhou has become China's first developed city by World Bank standards," said Peng Peng, a researcher with the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences, was quoted as saying.
The city's growth was on the back of automobile, petrochemical, electronics and communications equipment industries, according to Bernama.
Guangzhou mayor, Zhang Guangning, said the city would hold growth at 12 per cent in keeping with the national shift from GDP expansion to achieving balanced and sustainable development.
I mention it here, first of all, because I like Guangzhou. I spent some quality time there for about four months in 1984, living and doing research at Zhongshan University. I have always enjoyed the open and dynamic feel of the city and the people there.
But I also mention it because Guangzhou often gets a bad rap. Historically, the south has been seen as less civilized than the north of China, at least that is the view of the northerners, who who held the political power and wrote the official histories. There is a way in which Confucianism, as a transmitter of civilizing behavior, is understood as a northern Chinese phenomenon/practice that gradually spread over time, bringing humane government and morality to the "barbarian" people of the south and west. Now, it is true that Confucius was from Lu, in the north, but I do not buy the north-as-morally-superior argument. There have been plenty of uncivilized depredations in the north, just as there have been civilized and refined cultures in the south.
One of the best examples of the latter is the kingdom of Nanyue, which encompassed today's Guangzhou, and which had an autonomous political existence from about BCE 203-112. It was a highly civilized place, as evidenced by the tomb of King Zhao Mei (who in the link provided is referred to as a "prince," even though Yue was, in his time, politically independent of the Han dynasty; for a fuller historical and archaeological account, if you have access to JSTOR, look here for a nice piece from the journal Modern China).
Now, some northern chauvinists might want to argue that by the time of the Yue state, the sinification of the Yue people had already occurred, thus demonstrating the north-as-civilized/the south-as-barbaric interpretation. But, as Kwang-Chih Chang argues, in the Cambridge History of Ancient China, "Chinese" culture was the result of several different regional cultures interacting with one another to create a "Chinese integration sphere." The southern predecessors of the Yue people gave to the resulting "Chinese" culture as much as they got - a process stretching back to the four millennium BCE.
The uniqueness of Yue/southern/Guangzhou culture is a point of pride among contemporary southerners:
Yue people's cultural exchange with foreign countries dates back at least to as early as Han dynasty. Yue People are always open-minded, ready to accept new things and are good at copying and apprehending both material and spiritual achievements from the western world, then incorporating them with their own traditional culture.
With their courage to explore new horizons always, their broad insight, their strong sense of commerce and value, and their talent and skill in calculating, they created the multi-dimensional agricultural commodity economy in Pearl River Delta, and gained a reputation of "Guangbang Businessmen"(means Yue businessmen), the story of which extended all the way back to mid-Qing dynasty.
The influence of the advanced western ideology and the adventurous tint in their blood may somehow explain the fact that a bunch of Yue elites in Chinese modern history stood up, one after one, to fight for the overthrowing of the feudal imperialism, and also the fact that they have always be seen at the forefront of the economic development after the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
The generalizations might be crude and post hoc (i.e. they are good at adapting to Western ways because they were the first to be forced to adapt to Western ways; remember where the first Opium War started) but I think the general point is valid. There is a certain open-mindedness and adaptability to southern Chinese culture.
And when I think about how ancient Chinese thought might be made relevant to the modern world it is precisely the qualities of open-mindedness and adaptability that strike me as essential.
I think it's time for me to take another trip to Guangzhou (I haven't been there in ten years!).
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