By Australian journalist Philip Luker

A woman, hardened by sun, wind and work, was squatting beside a railway station, her solemn, black-eyed baby tied to her back. She was breaking stones to build a road with what we would call a tack hammer.

The train taking me from Hong Kong to Canton (now called Guangzhou) had stopped at the station. It was an entirely new scene for a 22-year-old journalist whose earlier foreign experiences had been in England, France and West Germany.

The first Australian journalist allowed in

Every minute or so, the woman would stop and look up at the humanity in my train. Then she would go on breaking stones.

She—more than anything I saw in January 1954 as the first Australian journalist allowed into China after the 1949 Communist Revolution—was old China and starkly different from life in Chinese cities today, or for Chinese in cities around the world.

The work the woman was doing would take a machine minutes but was taking her days.

It is still the kind of work done by 647 million rural Chinese, who comprise 45 per cent of China’s population of 1,439 million, 18.5 per cent of the people in the world.

The same work six decades later

And while the earnest, boiler-suited government officials in Peking (Beijing) rattled on to me for hours about new factories and China-made machines and escorted me around their industrial showplaces, I remembered the woman and her lifetime of breaking stones.

I remembered her on my two later trips to China. Even now, six decades later, rural Chinese spend their lives doing the same kind of work.

I arrived in China 17 years before Gough Whitlam did as Australian Opposition Leader and Henry Kissinger did as U.S. President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor in 1971

Nixon himself arrived the following year. I took risks in going to China as neither the United States nor Australia recognised Communist China at the time and had no diplomats there.

Four days trying to sleep

I spent four days trying to sleep in a Hard Class train compartment to Peking because I did not want to play extra for Soft Class.

As you can imagine, I didn’t sleep much. Everyone else in my carriage was obviously surprised to see a European in Hard Class because Europeans, mostly Russians, travelled in Soft Class.

I asked many fellow travellers, “Do you speak English?” One did. I tried to have a conversation with him on and off for four days.

Everything he said about China followed the government’s line of progress, prosperity and perfection. Repeatedly, a song was played on the train’s loudspeaker system.

I asked my friend, “What is that song?” He said, “The song is, ‘We are determined to liberate Taiwan’.” Seven decades later, China is still saying the same.

Conversation with Chinese doctors

I got a fever towards the end of my four days in Hard Class and when I arrived —not very well—at Peking Railway Station, the government tourist guide who met me took me to Peking Hospital, where I stayed for two days while many Chinese doctors visited me and felt my pulse, several times a day.

One who spoke English told me they had never treated a European before. It was hilarious trying to tell the doctors I felt much better and wanted to continue my visit to their country.

Luckily, the hospital gave me a chart with translations into Chinese for “A bottle please” and “A bedpan please.”

I was looked after very well. The nurses were full of charm and kindness.

My Chinese interpreter spoke good English

Out of hospital, I persuaded Intourist to give me an interpreter and a car driver free as I was a freelance and couldn’t charge anyone for my expenses.

My interpreter was Anne, of about my age. Anne spoke good English. In spite of the way she pushed the official line in whatever she said, we got to know each other.

My first trip with her was to a show co-operative farm near Peking. We dove there in a new Ford over the worst road I had ever travelled on.

The local village was an assortment of mud huts, in the biggest of which plump, homely peasant girls served me green tea while the co-op leader, Chao Chen, talked about production gains, full stomachs and overjoyed peasants.

Fifteen million more deaths than WWII

Four years later, at the instigation of revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, the Great Leap Forward killed 45 million Chinese, followed in 1966 by Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which even the current Chinese Government admits killed 30 million people.

Together these events caused 15 million more deaths than all of World War 11.

Today Mao is still honoured in China. The ruling Chinese Communist Party’s verdict on him is that he was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong.

His birthplace, Shaoshan village in Hunan province receives millions of Chinese visitors a year. A large photo of him still adorns the front of The Forbidden City in Beijing.

Huge increase in Chinese factory production

When I toured China in 1954, only 13.3 per cent of the Chinese lived in cities; now, 61.4 per cent do, so intent has the Communist Party been on dominating world production of factory goods.

In 1990, China produced less than three per cent of global factory production; now, it produces 25 per cent, including 80 per cent of the world’s air conditioners, 70 per cent of its mobile phones and 60 per cent of the world’s shoes.

In Australia, which has the world’s highest minimum wage, a person on that wage takes only 18 minutes to buy a local Big Mac; in France it takes 22 minutes, in the U.K. 23 minutes, in the U.S. 35 minutes and in China 183 minutes—ten times longer than in Australia. No wonder China now dominates world factory production.

THE NEXT BLOG CHAPTER will briefly report further significant events on my China trip and also what my father found there in 1920.