A personal account of a nation's tryst with 8

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By Xiong Lei (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-08 07:52

Still in my 50s, I'm enjoying my sixth year with 8.

I've gone through 1958, 1968, 1978, 1988, and 1998. All interesting and memorable, while the current one, 2008, is the most eventful and colorful.

Each of the six years with 8 seems to leave its marks on the nation's history and together they demonstrate great changes we and our People's Republic have undergone in the past six decades.

The first of the six - 1958 - would easily remind the Chinese of my generation and older ones of the Great Leap Forward, a movement which swept the whole of China into a zeal to get modernized overnight.

The slogan of the day was to "Strive for a steel output of 10.70 million tons", which was to double the previous year's production. "Backyard furnaces" were built to join the modern steel complexes and help accomplish the goal.

Too young to construct the furnaces and make the steel, my pals and I happily went around to pick up used nails, abandoned utensils carrying iron or other metal pieces, as valued feed into the steel-making furnaces.

Back then I could not comprehend what 10.70 million tons of steel meant except it was a mark for us to "catch up with Britain". Nor did I know much of the steel produced from those backyard furnaces was much below the standard and ended in scraps.

But an article I read from a children's magazine that year claimed that given the speed of our progress, we the Chinese people could hold sports meets in 1968 in the moon, where everyone could upset the world record in high jump.

Instead of going up to the moon to play high jump 10 years later, my second year with 8 - 1968 - saw me and millions of educated teenagers bid farewell to our parents and city life to go to the countryside.

I became a worker on a State farm in Heilongjiang - at the time I didn't know by the United Nations standard I was a minor not up to the age to labor.

On the farm near the border with the former Soviet Union, I learned to do all kinds of farm work and build our own houses. This experience brought young city dwellers like me closer to the hard life most of the rural Chinese were leading. More important, it endowed us with a down-to-earth outlook and self-confidence.

That may explain why, despite the hardships we went through, to this day many of us remain grateful for such an experience. This year marks the 40th anniversary of our going to the countryside and hundreds of my fellow farm workers have set to revisit our old farms to refresh that experience.

My third year with 8 - 1978 - was a turning point for both my motherland and myself. The institutions of higher learning resumed the system of entrance examination for enrollment, two years after the chaotic decade-long "cultural revolution" (1966-76) ended.

I passed the rather competitive examinations and was in one of the first groups of graduate students enrolled after the "cultural revolution". My major was journalism, at the newly established Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

That was also the beginning of an era when people have ever greater freedom to choose a professional career. Later that year the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China held the Third Plenary Session, which steered China onto the track of reform and opening.

The dominant line of thinking in those days was to Emancipate Mind and Seek Truth from Facts. Then the school invited some American professors of journalism to teach us - making us the first batch of journalism graduate students trained in the Western style since 1949, a training I continue to benefit from to this day.

As a mid-career journalist, I became a Jefferson Fellow of the United States' East-West Center in my next year with 8 - 1988 - and enjoyed good exchanges with my counterparts from other countries as well as the host country.

My fifth year with 8 - 1998 - found me and some Chinese colleagues critical of Western mainstream media's coverage of China, which we felt dominantly stereotypical of looking at everything from a "good-or-evil" approach. This stereotypical vision, we held, was quite superficial and misleading.

That year also found me busy reporting to our overseas media clients on China's floods, the worst of its kind in decades. While some officials attributed the floods to bad weather, I and many other colleagues relied on scientific data to report that the floods were "a revenge of Nature on our neglect of ecology over the years".

This notion was finally recognized by most of the people and the central government turned over to the policy to return farmland to forests, grassland and lakes and ban the logging of natural forests on the upper reaches of the major rivers.

Eventually the policy evolved into the Scientific Outlook on Development which emphasizes balanced and sustained growth and aims to foster harmony between man and nature.

Now I'm in my sixth year with 8 and still on the Earth, but China has put men in space and launched a spacecraft orbiting the moon. And with no more "backyard furnaces", China has become the world's leading steel producer, with the crude steel output topping 400 million tons last year.

My country and I have learned to grow stronger in adverse conditions. I'm sure we'll have more bright years with 8 and other figures ahead of us.

The author is a council member of China Society for Human Rights Studies

(China Daily 08/08/2008 page10)