My World Bank experience working on China is unique: first, I started working on China in 1983, barely two years after the Bank commenced operations there, second, I worked on China for three different parts of the bank, chronologically: the Word Bank Institute, WBI (formerly EDI), the China department (as Lead Transport Economist) and the Independent Evaluation Group, IEG (formerly OED).
This blog, Part 1, focuses on my experience with the WBI.
Signs of the New China
– The Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, and in 1979 the leader Deng Xiaoping allowed some private business to open. Things evolved rapidly.
– Scene at a department store, 1983: Teenage girls trying cosmetics, previously unavailable; old men, in the traditional Mao blue overall, looking at the girls with disgust. Their China was crumbling.
– Wealthy people started to appear. Rural peasants could sell in the city their production beyond government quotas. With their new income they were building in the countryside the first privately owned homes.
– A line for taxis, visible to foreigners and with English signs, opens at some airports.
Interpreters
– Some interpreters told us their lives. They suffered brutally during the Cultural Revolution. Because they could speak English, they were imprisoned and sent to “re-education camps”.
– The life of one speaker turned dramatically for the worse upon returning from a camp. A family, rural and lacking in education and manners settled in his home, and shared his one bedroom, one bathroom apartment.
– An interpreter whose father had been a famous civil engineer in the Old China had his house expropriated by the government and was provided with a smaller one. The interpreter’s opinion: “the government did what had to be done”.
Hospitality
– I started going to China, when there was minimal infrastructure to receive foreign visitors, and no taxis. The government hosts tried their best to find us reasonable places. Often, they knew at which hotel we would be lodging, minutes before meeting us at the airport.
– My first trip to China was to Shanghai. The flight arrived at night. After 40 minutes waiting outside the airport terminal, a person mumbling English approached me. Soon I was installed at the (1929) Peace Hotel, beautifully placed right in front of Shanghai’s Huangpu River.
– Sometimes, during field trips, we could notice a different dimension of an interpreter. Once, we were in Shenzhen, a city close to Hong Kong, a few years before ending the 100 years concession under which Great Britain managed the island. One of the interpreters, stood facing in the direction of Hong Kong, put his right hand over his heart, and, in an emotional voice, exclaimed: “You will soon return to China!”
WBI working arrangements.
– Dealing with my Chinese counterparts on the WBI work was special, because it was a national level activity, in contrast to projects at the state level. The government put together a Transport Training Team, consisting of officials of the training departments of the ministries representing railways, roads, ports and of China’s Civil Aviation Authority, CAAC. I pondered how senior were those officials and what power did they have. It became clear to me when the CAAC airline was broken up in 1988 into six regional airlines the CAAC representative was appointed president of one of those airlines.
– The Chinese team would organize seminars in different places in China; some venues would attract high level officials to the event. Examples include a seminar on a Yangtze river boat and one at Beidaihe beach, a resort for top government officials. Securing the resources for those field trips confirmed that the Transport Training Team had power.
– At the same time, the team had important political responsibilities. On my first visit to China after the student revolt on June 6, 1989, they were expecting me at the airport to provide me with the government’s view of that day.
– Did the WBI work help the Bank’s work? Yes. When I moved to the China Department, most of the senior transport officials I met had been my students.
Mechanistic learning?
– I asked my students to calculate the rate of return of an investment. Practically all the students would solve it correctly. Yet, all solutions contained many decimals, obviously unnecessary to make investment decisions.
– This brought to my mind the trip “From Mozart to Mao” that the famous violin player Isaac Stern made in 1979 to China. Stern was impressed by the technical virtuosity of the violin players. But, at the same time, how little sentiment was expressed in their renditions. Today, international Chinese violin players excel both in virtuosity and sentiment.
KEYWORDS China, Cultural Revolution, training, transport, WBI
