Country Living with Francis Farragher
Make no mistake about it, if you’re a country boy (or girl), a visit to China and in particular a heaving city like Beijing, will leave you with a huge culture shock.
China will always have its critics – and if you are ‘on the fringes’ out there – in terms of age, health, disability or political beliefs, then survival is really about as good as it gets.
The massive achievement of China is that it generally succeeds in feeding and providing half decent homes for a population figure, that’s now almost touching 1.4 billion people – as one looks across the sparsely populated green fields of North Galway, it’s a difficult number to get your head around.
Ostensibly, China is still very much a Communist country but since the failed cultural revolution of Mao Zedong in the mid-1960s, (when all classes were to be removed and all men were to be equal) , industry, capitalism and enterprise now dominate the economy.
In terms of world economies, China is now second only to the United States of America and that’s a gap that may even close further over the coming years.
While we might all look at China as now being a massive world power – both from an economic and military perspective – the country has endured a troubled-enough history of autocratic leadership from the Ming and Qing emperor dynasties from the 14th century right through to the early 1900s.
No trip to China or Beijing is complete without a visit to Forbidden City, the nerve centre and ruling palaces of 24 emperors from 1420 to the early part of the 20th century. This was the bastion of the ruling class, where no ordinary Chinese person ever entered for five centuries, until the public were finally ‘let in’ back in 1949.
China, for all its vastness and aura of power, suffered pretty badly from colonial domination (a bit like ourselves), with the Japanese instigating a reign of terror and pillaging, that still strikes a lot of unmelodic chords in the mindsets of ordinary Chinese people.
The Japanese occupation came from the early 1930s to the end of the Second World War in 1945, in a period that the Chinese associate with the ‘Three Alls’ – ‘Kill All, Burn All, Loot All’ – an era of quite shocking atrocities committed by the occupying forces.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
