A life paralleled by a changing China
“I stood in the middle of the road. I couldn’t figure out where to go. So much change had happened, so much building and development. All the older housing just disappeared. I had to ring my parents and ask them to come and find me.”
Prof Fan had only been away a few years but the change that preceded that return visit in 1993 was extraordinary and the pace has accelerated since. Now director of the School of Asian Studies at University College Cork, she sees those changes through the eyes of both a Chinese national and a long-time resident of the West, finding them remarkable, promising and unsettling.
All of Prof Fan’s adult life has paralleled the changing China. She turned 18 the year Mao Tse Tung died and with him was buried the failed experiment of the Cultural Revolution. As the child of teachers, she was destined to be excluded from third-level education under Mao’s reinvention of Chinese society. “Teachers had knowledge so they were considered enemies. You had to come from the workers or the peasants or soldiers to be allowed into university and they would check your origins for three generations back.”
Mao’s death and the emergence of Deng Xiaoping as his successor changed all that as he embarked on reforms aimed at undoing the past and pushing China forward. “Most of the leaders in China now benefited from that. It led to a huge transformation of society.”
Not that the young Fan was very appreciative. She had made the national swimming team and was distraught when her parents insisted she take up a precious place at university instead.
She studied history and did a masters in sociology, focusing on the importance of sport in society. She graduated and worked for the sports ministry, but after a few years, felt an urge to explore the world. She secured a place at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland, to research her doctorate and found her education began the minute she stepped off the plane.
“Because of the education we got, we thought capitalist countries were the poorest in the world and it was our duty to go and help them. The impression I had of Britain before I came out was almost like a picture out of Charles Dickens. I imagined Oliver Twist — everybody hungry and miserable and cold.
“It’s different now when the young people go abroad. They have TV and internet and they know the world. We didn’t have tv at home until the mid-1990s. I was so impressed when I came to Britain — I could spend hours sitting in front of it.”
She went on to become professor in Chinese cultural studies at De Montfort University in England before moving to UCC in Jun 2006, a move that alarmed her parents. “People in China still sometimes mix up Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland so when I told my mother I got a job in Ireland, she said, ‘please don’t go, there are a lot of problems there’. I had to reassure her that I was going to a peaceful place.”
In fact, the peace is what she loves about Cork after coming from a middle-sized city in Sichuan province. Middle-sized, she explains, means: “More population than in all of Ireland.”
She does miss home though. “My parents and my brother and sister are still there and our relatives and the friends I grew up with. Their lives have changed very much. My friends can be divided into two groups.
“Those who went to higher education and got good jobs working in universities or as civil servants or as company heads have done well, but there is another group that did not get the opportunity to go to higher education and when all the economic changes came they lost their jobs.
“There is some social security but it’s very low and they have to rely on their families to support them. The changes in Chinese society were so quick, they didn’t have the skills to keep up or to match the younger generation.”
There have been other sacrifices on the road to modern China, she says, remembering her vanished childhood neighbourhood. “At first people were very pleased to move to new apartments with proper baths and toilets.
“But then we see the loss of traditional architecture and gradually start to realise that we should have tried to retain this character. Now everywhere looks the same, there is no difference from one place to another.”
But Prof Fan is wary of a recent revisionist movement that suggests China has gone too far in emulating the West. “There is a danger that because the young generation, those born after the 1980s, did not experience what happened before, that they look at some of the bad things that have happened during the opening up of China — the corruption, the gap between rich and poor — and they think we need equality and we should go back to the old days.
“There are bad things happening but they can be fixed. China has to be very careful and should learn from the problems Europe has faced. We need to understand property bubbles and recessions and not make the same mistakes.”
