Fortune cookies for the few

By Fuchsia Dunlop
Hunan, southern China

China is now attracting record amounts of foreign investment

A United Nations report on China this week said the country had made real progress in alleviating poverty, but that its economic reforms had created new problems.

The gap between China's rich and poor remains one of the largest in the world.

It was Saturday night in the Hunanese capital Changsha, and my friends and I were going out for dinner.

We cruised through the downtown streets in our chauffeur-driven car, passing expensive boutiques and nightclubs decked in glittering neon.

Our driver pulled up outside the city's newest and most fashionable restaurant, where a glamorous girl ushered us up a grand sweep of a staircase and into a private banqueting room.

There, we joined some other friends to feast on local delicacies, including smoked bamboo shoots and aromatic bacon.

Later, we returned to my friends' apartment, where we stayed up late, sipping fine teas in a room decorated with antique tapestries and ceramics. The husband runs a private design business which is thriving in an atmosphere of fevered competition.

When I visit the same friends in their sumptuous apartments, it is I who feel like the poor relation

They have a live-in nanny and a cleaner, and a live-in driver who is always at their beck and call. They dine out often, wear fashionable clothes, shop in expensive supermarkets, and hope to come on holiday to England soon.

It is a lifestyle which would have been unthinkable when I first started visiting China more than a decade ago.

Then, all my friends lived in similar apartments, their concrete walls painted in similar shades, their chairs and tables and thermos flasks almost identical.

No-one ever went on holiday, and certainly no-one had a car.

They were always amazed that someone like me, barely out of university, had my own car back at home in England.

But these days, when I visit the same friends in their sumptuous apartments, equipped with every technical innovation, it is I who feel like the poor relation.

But then, these are the people who are doing well after two decades of economic reform.

Rural counterparts

In the countryside it is another story. After my recent stay in the Hunanese capital, I went to visit the parents of another friend who live in a village in one of the poorest parts of the province.

There, many people still live in wood and mud-brick houses with floors of stamped earth. The main road up the valley is just a track.

There are few modern conveniences and life is tough.

The villagers use water buffalo to plough their small patchwork fields. Almost everything else is done by human labour.

Many young people are leaving the countryside in search of city riches

My friend's mother cooks in a large wok on a wood-burning stove. Water is boiled over a fire laid directly on the kitchen floor. And in the cold midwinter, the only heating comes from bowls of glowing embers on the floor.

In the days I spend there, almost everything we eat is home-produced.

There is pork from the pig they killed a week ago, home-reared chicken, green cabbagey leaves plucked fresh every day from the fields, and all kinds of wonderfully spicy pickles. Even the rice and tealeaves are homegrown.

To a city-dweller like me, these fresh, natural foods are an extraordinary treat. To my friend's family, they are the fruits of a life of exhausting labour.

Her mother and sister-in-law spend much of their time in the kitchen, preparing vegetables, laying fires, boiling water,cooking and cleaning. Her father, barely 60, looks like a much older man, worn out by a lifetime of gathering firewood and working in the fields.

New generation

Everyone knows that this is one of Hunan's poorest areas. But these days there is food on the table, and social stability, and for the older generation they are good times indeed.

That is because my friend's parents are not comparing their impoverished lives with the flashy affluence of the cities, but with the bitter years of their own youth, when China was ravaged by famine and the political madness of the Cultural Revolution; times they only survived by foraging for wild roots and leaves.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao Address to the National People's Congress on economic growth: key themes

It is different for the younger generation.

Most of the young adults in the village are living away from home, working as casual labourers in the booming coastal cities, sending money home to help their parents and pay for their children's education.

They do not have the bitter memories of their parents, and they can see with their own eyes how wealthier Chinese live.

When they come back to the village for Chinese New Year with their gifts of clothing and food, they complain about the cost of education, and the lack of jobs and land in the overpopulated countryside.

It is this younger generation the government will have to satisfy with its promised drive to improve rural lifestyles.

In this village there are already plans for poverty reduction. A new tarmac road is being built to link the valley with a nearby town, and there is talk of tourists coming to enjoy its unspoilt scenery.

As my friend and I wave goodbye to her family from the back of the pick-up truck, on our way home to the city, I wonder if things will be any better when I next visit them.

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From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 27 March, 2004 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.