Seeing China’s economic evolution in one family’s story

Judy Woodruff:

The president's decision to hit China with new tariffs today underscores the kind of powerhouse it has become on the global stage economically. In fact, China is ranked as the world's second largest economy, well behind the U.S., but on its way to becoming the largest.

Tonight, our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, hears a personal take about how the country has evolved in the modern era, through generations of change.

It's part of his weekly series, Making Sense.

Man:

This is a good one.

Man:

Yes.

Paul Solman:

Alvin, Anna, and Scott Tong are longtime Americans. But the family's history over the last century tracks China's evolution into a global economic power.

Woman:

From American Public Media, this is "Marketplace."

Scott Tong:

Rising lifestyles and expectations fuel this consumption boom.

Paul Solman:

Scott Tong, a former colleague of mine at the "NewsHour," reported on China's explosive economy a dozen years ago as China bureau chief for Public Radio's "Marketplace." But he was advised to take the long view.

Scott Tong:

When I first moved there in 2006, a banker, a salty old banker who had been there for more than — more than two decades, said, you people come and you get skyscraper syndrome.

Paul Solman:

Tong told this story to me, and to an audience, at Portland Oregon's Powell's City of Books.

Scott Tong:

And I said, what is that? And he says, well, you kind of — everything is new, so you think China is a new story, and you don't really understand the long story.

Paul Solman:

So, after his stint in modern Shanghai, Tong returned, with his parents, to seek out his and China's past.

The result is "A Village With My Name," which starts with Scott and dad Alvin visiting the ancestral village where everyone shared one key trait, as Alvin learned when he tried to be polite to an old man there.

Alvin Tong:

So I said, "What's your honorable last name?" He looked at me as if, you idiot. I'm a Tong.

(LAUGHTER)

Paul Solman:

Scott's paternal great-grandfather was remembered for leaving the village to study in Japan.

Scott Tong:

We learned that he was part of the scholars who are part of kind of this enlightenment generation in China, so this early opening to the outside world.

Paul Solman:

Great grandfather Tong Jun-Yung (ph) symbolizes, for Scott, the first of three eras that define modern China, globalization at the turn of the 20th century.

Scott Tong:

They were all connecting with these modern ideas, these isms of the time, Darwinism, feminism, capitalism, empiricism, Marxism, all these modern ideas at the time. And they were kind of these cultural middlemen.

He also marries a Japanese wife, Japanese woman, which comes at a great surprise to his Chinese wife back in the village when he goes back there.

Paul Solman:

When Mao Zedong's Communist Party took control in 1949, China closed its doors. Collectivizing agriculture helped cause a famine that killed up to 40 million people. And a new generation of cosmopolitan Tongs found themselves on the wrong side of history.

Scott Tong:

My father was 10 years old, and he got to Taiwan. And he eventually comes to the U.S. for graduate school and has this great white-collar American career. And his brother gets left behind.

Paul Solman:

And his brother got left behind because?

Scott Tong:

My grandfather decides that he is just going to take his older son with him. And he leaves one son, and the wife he leaves behind is pregnant with another son.

Paul Solman:

Those left behind were punished for their family's ties to Mao's opposition.

Scott Tong:

Well, my uncle was a great student, but he wasn't allowed to go to the best schools. During the Great Leap Forward, during the famine period, they had fewer rations than other families. They're eating the — they're taking the — scraping tree bark off of the trees. But they had to soften it somehow.

Paul Solman:

Just to get it down.

Scott Tong:

Just to be able to get that down. The other thing that happened to my uncle was, he and other students were sent away to learn from the peasants.

Paul Solman:

Learn how to farm.

Scott Tong:

Learn how to farm. Learn the values of the revolution, and then come back. And my uncle received one of the longest sentences of 10 years.

Paul Solman:

On Scott's mother's side, his grandmother, Mildred Jow (ph), escaped with her children to Hong Kong. But his grandfather Carleton (ph) was convicted as a counter-revolutionary.

Scott Tong:

He got sent to the Chinese gulag in the '50s, the middle of nowhere, horrific weather conditions. And the prisoners who were sent there, like in the Soviet Union, most of them didn't come back.

Paul Solman:

They died there.

Scott Tong:

They died there. My grandfather, he didn't make it back. But we learned a lot of what prisoners went through then.

The prisoners would talk about how many grams of food they got in the worst of times. There is a noted documentary. There's this searing scene where one of the prisoners vomits onto the ground, falls on the ground. And then one of the other prisoners kind of follows him and picks up a couple pieces of food, and he eats that.

Anna Tong:

I have been trying to avoid that subject all my life.

Paul Solman:

Scott's mother, Anna, was understandably reluctant to revisit this painful past.

Anna Tong:

I lost my dad when I was around 10. And it was just too painful to go back. I finally realized every Chinese family in our generation had this story. And so many of us do not want to tell it. And I think these stories need to be told.

Paul Solman:

The Tongs' story continues in the third era of modern China, which began after Mao's death, a reopening to outside investment and ideas, which paved the way for today's massive industrial economy.

Scott's cousin works in a GM plant, one of a dozen in China.

Scott Tong:

And he's very proud that he not only works as a manager in that factory, but he drives a brand with great cachet in China, and that's Buick.

Paul Solman:

So, he's sitting pretty.

Scott Tong:

From the outside, everything looks really good in my cousin's. And Chinese life is improving at about 10 percent a year, right, numerically. Life is just getting better throughout his life.

He has a nicer, sleeker laptop computer than I have. He has a fancier camera than I have.

Paul Solman:

I'm sorry. I'm sorry to hear that.

Scott Tong:

I mean, that's just kind of how it is, right?

But he does have a lot of challenges. And the biggest problem this generation has in China today is being able to afford property. Maybe, in the United States you could work for 10 years and buy some property. There, it was more like 30 or 40 years.

Paul Solman:

Really? Just to buy anything?

Scott Tong:

To be able to buy something, anything.

Anything is just virtually out of reach. And so why does this matter? Well, a lot of women in China, they're not going to marry you unless you have property, right? They're looking for financial security as well.

And this is a place where there's a lot of uncertainty. And the story that breaks my heart about my cousin is his girlfriend in the plant, she left him for one of his other friends in the plant because this friend owns property.

Paul Solman:

Turns out the workers who took American auto jobs have stresses of their own. They're competing for jobs, for property, spouses.

The Communist Party, which has now set up President Xi Jinping to be ruler for life, argues it has the solution.

Scott Tong:

The people defending the Communist Party will say, you know, we have had so much chaos and instability in a single lifetime that we need someone to kind of bring the stability to the country. And that's the party.

Paul Solman:

At a meeting of Alvin and Anna Tong's church book club, members enjoyed Chinese new year's treats and shared their own encounters with the Communist Party.

Scott Tong:

How many of you have been to China? So, this is a lot of people here.

Paul Solman:

Ken Kraft felt the heavy hand of the government when he opened a QVC TV office in Shanghai in 2001.

Ken Kraft:

we always had to bring people in that were part of the government, and we had to make sure that their hands were well-greased in order for them to get to the next level.

Paul Solman:

Jim Godfrey resisted a shakedown in Suzhou, but he says,

Jim Godfrey:

If you ever do a deal with them, you probably didn't get the best deal. They're going to outdeal you every time.

Paul Solman:

And he sees China flexing its might in more worrisome ways.

Jim Godfrey:

Politically, I worry about what's going on in China.

Paul Solman:

The building of new islands in disputed international waters, increased tensions with allies like Japan and South Korea.

So, has China entered a fourth phase, another closing down?

Scott Tong's take? Maybe.

Scott Tong:

There's more open criticism of outside ideas, Western democracy, Western free press. At the same time, we have the Internet and these other ways that a young person can go out and connect with the ideas from the outside world.

So, this is this push and pull that's happening in China.

Paul Solman:

A tug of war that's been going on since Scott's great-grandfather left the Tong village.

This is "PBS NewsHour" economics correspondent Paul Solman, reporting from Portland, Oregon.