2015 China

3 April, Zhengzhou
Datong Hotel 200CNY (special week day deal ended – negotiated down from 260CNY)

It is daunting to be confronted with a breakfast buffet of unknowns, where you recognise only boiled eggs, sweet potatoes and small sections of flat bread. You know, of course, that some of the 20-odd dishes presented to you hold noodles of some sort, but those provided by the Datong were unusual, rubbery and to our palates, not particularly pleasing. We tried to be brave, however, loading our plates with a variety of goodies, finishing what we liked, leaving what we didn’t.

Mao is still idolised in Nanjiecun, a couple of hours south of Zhengzhou, a few decades out of step. Nanjie is the last Maoist collective in China. “During the Great Leap Forward period, Chairman Mao implemented an agrarian collectivization campaign, calling it the People’s Commune. Villages, sometimes up to 20,000 households, were organized into work units and assigned jobs appointed by the party cadre. With individual privacy viewed as counterrevolutionary, workers slept in communal dormitories, shared the same bathrooms and showers, ate from the same kitchen and used the same household appliances. But during the 1960s, with many of the crops exported to urban centers as well as poor management and unfavorable weather conditions, millions of Chinese working in the communes faced a massive famine and starved to death. By the 1980s, just about every collective farm in the nation was abandoned… except for one” (echinacities.com).

Nanjiecun is surrounded by Linying town and the difference between modern China (vibrant, haphazard, varied) and the collective (ordered, tame, quiet) is immediately noticeable and a little eerie. “Nanjiecun is worth a visit ... the only place where you can take a peek at both communism and capitalism at the exact same time ... it’s said that Nanjiecun costs the government 1 billion RMB per year just to stay afloat, while the Agricultural Bank of China – which just so happens to be the only bank in town – finances the entire operation ...” (echinacities.com).

In Nanjie a statue of Mao glistens white and posters of the man greet you around every corner. There is a collective farm, a collective factory, and housing for all. In the residential quarter, apartments come in two sizes, and are apparently identically furnished down to an “electronic calendar with the digital dates arranged around a portrait of Chairman Mao in his prime” (bbc.com).