Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 10, 1993 TAG: 9403090027
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Mao Zedong was born 100 years ago. In the 1930s and '40s, he was holed up with his Red Army in the caves of a town called Yanan. The small, provincial place became the shelter and cradle of the movement that brought communism to power in China.
Today, the talk of Yanan is a plan for a new shopping mall.
It's to be a glitzy, sprawling facility, with two high-rise hotels, a dance hall and a revolving restaurant on top. Local businessmen, forming something like a chamber of commerce, are inviting foreign investment in the project.
Some Yanan residents, reports the Christian Science Monitor, aren't so happy with the whole idea. The commissar at the local Communist Party school laments that students prefer business courses to party history.
A woman quoted by the newspaper says: "Old people still believe in communism and Mao Zedong thought. But young people just want a better life and to make money." Imagine that.
As the world knows, such aspirations are infectious. Even Mao, in his 100th year, has become a big seller in China, his familiar face adorning T-shirts and trinkets and other paraphernalia sold for tidy profits.
One young entrepreneur is quoted as saying: "My gut feeling is Mao will continue to be hot."
Yanan remains backward, in a manner of speaking. It is in a poverty-dominated hinterland, far from the fast-paced coastal provinces where business is booming. But capitalism is making more than inroads. It is taking over, all across the vast continent.
As it rids itself of the constrictions of a dying generation's ideology, the world's most populous nation is going to get hotter and hotter as an economic dynamo. And this will be good for global growth, for trade and prosperity in an economic system one beautiful feature of which is that a nation does not gain at another's expense.
The Chinese - count on it - are coming.
by CNB