On China’s diversity.docVIP

On China?s diversity Each time I go back to China, I prepare myself to hear stories of surprising ways that the country has changed since I was last there. I also expect to hear equally surprising reports of personal transformations. During the months since my previous visit, a professor who had no interest in business will have become an entrepreneur. A loyal bureaucrat within the Communist Party Youth League will have turned consultant to an international corporation. Someone who considered all forms of religion mere superstition will have become a fervent Buddhist and then a devout Christian. An earnest graduate student who once said that a visit to Hong Kong was probably the closest that she would ever get to going “abroad” will now regularly be traveling to Europe. China has become what the US famously was a century ago, a land of reinvention. Rags-to-riches stories are as popular there now as they were in America in the days of Horatio Alger – and for similar reasons. I often feel that many of the people I know in China have lived out several lives while I have been making my way through just this one. Consider the case of a longtime friend whom I shall call Ms Liu. Before I met her in 1986, her life had already gone through dramatic twists and turns. She grew up in Shanghai, the child of intel- lectuals, but was sent to the countryside to learn from peasants late in the Cultural Revolution. She was then trained as a Russian-language teacher, only to have that career derailed by the dominance of English-language study. Ms Liu was reassigned to the waiban (foreign affairs unit) of her university, where she took care of foreign teachers and students. That would be enough reversals of fortune to constitute a life of ups and downs, but in the years since, she has continued on a protean course. By turns, Ms Liu spent a year in central Europe as a visiting scholar, worked as a nanny in California, and lived for a time primarily on what she made as a da