Roadmovie in the new China

High above the Tian Shan mountains, on the border between Kyrgyzstan and China, Wei begins to talk about his life. He is a Chinese man from Beijing, in his late sixties. He lived and worked in Western Europe for more than thirty years. “I can tell you a lot about China, but you can’t use my full name. I don’t want my family to get into trouble.” It is dark in the airplane and Wei speaks softly. Most of the passengers are asleep. Beneath the belly of the plane, a camera films the snow-covered peaks and glaciers sliding past. “No country is as diverse and as beautiful as China,” he says.

Wei was born in the 1950s, near the capital. It was a time of great poverty. Mao Zedong’s disastrous economic experiments led to the deadliest famine in history. An estimated forty million Chinese people died. Wei did not consciously experience Mao’s Great Leap Forward, though his childhood was not without hardship. “We had no electricity or running water. We still used oil lamps and rarely ate meat.” What he knew of the world came from propaganda. “At school, we were told that Europeans were desperately poor and that you were exploited by a small group of capitalist slave drivers. I really believed that.”

READ ON (Dutch, paywall): https://www.standaard.be/buitenland/dwars-door-china-de-grote-baas-denkt-niet-aan-ons-gewone-mensen/109223487.html