China Is Not Red Anymore

by Wendy Liu

For those whose concept of China is frozen in the 1970s and for anyone who
would like to know about today's China.

14. What a sea change! 

In the past, Chinese citizens suffered injustice silently. Now they are
taking government officials to court! And this is just the beginning. 
No wonder the author of a selection of 50 successful Min-gao-guan cases 
 published in 1999 exclaimed in its title "In Contemporary China
Citizens Are Suing Officials"! 

 With Min-gao-guan surging as such a powerful development, even
movement, one can not help but remembering the old Chinese saying
describing the unthinkable "[tai yang cong xi bian chu lai le]t" - the
sun is rising in the west. But of course it is not. The sun is still
where it is. It is
China that is becoming unrecognizable.

 Besides lawsuits by citizens against officials, there are also more
lawsuits of all kinds as well as more laws and more lawyers than ever in
China. For instance, in 1982, there was no statistics compiled on economic
litigations. One year later in 1983, there were 44,000. .In 1996, the
number of economic litigations reached 1,519,793!. In 1982, there
were 77,000 civil litigations. In 1996, the number of civil litigations
hit 3,093,995! In terms of legislation, only 52 laws were passed in
the 30 years between 1949 and 1979, while in following 20 years or so
between 1979 and 1998, about 300 pieces of legislation were passed by the
National People's Congress (NPC). As for lawyers, the profession was
almost non-existent before Deng's reform. In 2000, China had 110,000
lawyers, a 50-fold increase in two decades according to the All-China
Lawyer Association. What can one expect with more and more new laws
and new lawyers but a country more and more of rule of law and less and
less of rule of man?

Anything Goes

 Culturally, China has been experiencing an unprecedented flourishing of
art, literature, music, entertainment and recreation of all kinds, many of
the artistic forms would certainly have been criticized or banned in
pre-reform years as bourgeois, feudal, capitalistic or decadent.
Acceptable entertainment now includes rock bands, modern dance,
impressionist art, TV/Radio talk shows, MTV, daytime soaps, as well as old
style teahouse story/ballad telling, traditional operas and even cabaret
and cocktail shows, in addition to foreign music and movies, especially
American ones. The impression one gets is that in today's China anything
goes. A visitor can find almost everything there as can be found in other
countries and then some.

 Socially, the Chinese citizens are also enjoying a relaxed lifestyle on
an unprecedented level, free from many of the controls and restrictions as
in pre-reform days. Being gay, for instance, is no longer considered a
crime or disease as it was. There are gay clubs, gay bars and gay
websites, something unimaginable two decades ago. Sex is also not a taboo
as it had always been.

 From sex education to sex in popular literature to sex for sale, sex is
out of the closet and in the open for the first time in China of thousands
of years of Confucian culture. There are hotlines offering advice on love
and relationships. There are adult shops where customers are anything but
shy. For good or bad, pre-marital sex, once the greatest outrage in
China, is now an accepted practice among China's young.

 So is "trial marriage." Extramarital relationships are not only commonly
acquiesced, they are sometimes expected and sought among successful
business people as well as unhappily married couples. Even the practice of
concubinage, a sad tradition which led to oppression of women in old China,
has come back, with men keeping a second wife and their illegitimate
children.

 Divorce is also less frowned upon and more easily obtained than in the
old days. In fact there are too many divorces these days, with the
concubine phenomenon and the extramarital epidemic, China's national
legislature has been revising the marriage law to protect more and more
abandoned wives and broken families. In 1997, while 9.1 million couples
got married, 1.2 million got divorced, according to China's Civil Affairs
Ministry.(55) Divorce has been so much in vogue in recent years that it
is said friends greet each other with the question of "Divorced?"

 On the whole, China is now a much easier place to live for the average
man and woman, especially the young.