China's rulers are unnerved by the uncontrollable pace of change the boom has brought with it. With 80 per cent of the wealth owned by less than 20 per cent of the population, is the country's brand of capitalist communism heading for meltdown? Miriam Donohoe reports from Beijing
Take the short taxi ride from Tiananmen Square to Beijing's central business district. Stand on the bridge near the China World Trade Centre and do a 360-degree turn. In every direction the skyline is dominated by construction cranes. Huge buildings are mushrooming out of the ground. You are now in the middle of the biggest building site on the planet.
The pace of change and development in China is breathtaking. There are an estimated 130 million migrant workers driving the building orgy all over the country. Hundreds of thousands alone are based in Beijing. New office blocks, luxury hotels, apartments, shopping centres and roads are appearing every day as China is swept away on the tide of a major economic boom.
China's economy grew by 9.7 per cent in the first quarter of this year and evidence of this spectacular growth hits you everywhere in the Chinese capital. The layers of China's communist system are being stripped away and replaced by expansion, prosperity and new development. Consumerism has caught on. However, there are concerns that this boom may go bust and that the fallout could be felt in every corner of the globe.
The first thing that hits you as you travel on the six-lane highway from Beijing Capital International Airport into the city is the traffic. Car ownership is increasing rapidly, with 5,000 new vehicles being purchased every week. There are now more than two million cars on the city's streets. The bicycles, known here as "flying pigeons", which were once synonymous with Chairman Mao's China, are fast becoming a thing of the past.
Tune into the Chinese channels on the TV set in your hotel room and you will be bombarded with ads for western goods. Cosmetics, stereos, designer clothes, flash cars and apartments are all being heavily advertised to the biggest consumer market in the world.
Walk around the business district at night and you will be confronted with high-rise buildings, neon lights, restaurants, trendy bars and expensive boutiques. You could be forgiven for thinking yourself in Times Square in the heart of the capitalist US rather than a short distance from Tiananmen Square in so-called communist China.
In Beijing, preparations for the 2008 Olympic Games are driving unprecedented construction. The capital will spend up to ?20 billion on new subways, roads and glittering stadia in the next four years. The Games will be China's chance to showcase its new-found economic and social ascendancy to the world.
But China is paying a price for its rapid modernisation. Violence, murders, suicides, health problems and even an obsession with fortune-telling are on the increase.
"We are suffering the psychological problems that have plagued the West for decades. We are catching the social diseases of the West," says Gao Fan, a young Chinese professional.
A recent survey by the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences concludes that as China changes, more and more people are complaining of "living under heavy pressure". The survey refers to two serial murder cases in China in 2003 which, it says, are directly related to the pressures of modern living. Huang Yong, from central China's Henan Province, killed 17 adolescents in one year for no apparent reason. Another killer, Yang Xinhai, was caught last year after murdering 67 people in three years. The Chinese public security department says there were no obvious reasons for many of the serious violent crime cases since 2000.
There is huge pressure on young people to study hard and to succeed. With only one college place for every eight applicants, competition is tough. Earlier this year, the case of a 23-year-old college student from south China's Yunnan Province, who killed four of his classmates, was widely reported. He complained of being stressed.
Meanwhile, the suicide rate, per capita, is above the world average and continues to rise. Statistics from the ministry of health show that around 280,000 people commit suicide every year in China.
Divorce, excessive drinking, drug abuse, petty crime, sexually transmitted diseases and domestic violence are also on the increase. The rate of obesity is rising among China's young people. The one-child policy means that China's "little emperors and empresses" are being indulged, often by six doting adults - their parents and two sets of grandparents. In Beijing, the sight of overweight Chinese children, known as "chubbies", eating in one of the hundreds of McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, is common.
According to Gao Fan, who works with the British Council but who hopes to get a scholarship to study journalism in the US later this year, the pressures of modern life can be tough. "When I was in college one of my classmates killed herself. She couldn't take the pressure any more. It is not good enough to just get into college, but coming top in the class is very important."
Xiao Xiao (19) is in her first year of medical school at Wuhan University. It will take her six years to finish her degree and she wants to specialise in paediatrics. She hopes she will be able to come to Ireland to finish her training and to perfect her English. Her parents have worked long and hard to get the funds together to send their daughter to college.
Xiao Xiao starts studying at 7.30 a.m. every day until her classes start. She finishes studying at 11.30 p.m. every night and only takes Sundays off. She doesn't have time for socialising or boyfriends.
"This is the most important thing in my life at the moment," she says. "To get my degree and to make my family proud. There is a lot of pressure to succeed."
Despite China's robust growth, there is a yawning wealth gap between rural and urban areas and increasing concern at government level about the widening gap between rich and poor. Already, less than 20 per cent of the population owns more than 80 per cent of the wealth. This is one of the issues which the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, who visited Ireland this week, says he is keen to address.
It is the poorest of China's poor that are bearing the burden and creating China's economic miracle. There are 130 million migrant workers in Chinese cities, the equivalent of half the total population of the US. Thousands are pouring into Beijing every week looking for work. Labourers can be seen carrying their possessions in big sacks as they arrive daily, with bewildered looks on their faces, at Beijing's main railway station.
It is lunchtime on the construction site of one of Beijing's new subway lines in Dongzhimen District. About two dozen workers are huddled together in their dormitory on the building site, eating bowls of noodles. The room measures about 40 feet by 40 feet and has rows and rows of bunk beds lined up along all four walls. This is home to men who have left their families thousands of miles away so as to survive.
Li Cheng (not his real name) is 24 and has been working in Beijing for 18 months. He came to the capital from Sichuan Province to earn money to send back to his elderly parents and extended family in the village where he was born. His family has a small farm but it doesn't generate enough to feed and clothe everybody .
"There was no work at home. I had to come here to raise money for my family," he says.
Li works 10 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. The work is tough, especially in the winter when temperatures in Beijing drop below freezing. The workers get home once a year, for Chinese New Year. Li says he gets 600 yuan a month, the equivalent of ?60, or ?2 a day. (Tickets for Riverdance, which sold out in Beijing last autumn, were selling for ?60 and were snapped up by China's nouveau riche.)
Gui Yanchao (not his real name) has left a wife and three children behind in Anhui Province. He chuckles when I ask him about having three children. What about the one-child policy? He explains that he comes from such a remote part of the province that the policy is ignored. Rarely do officials go to his village to check that the law is being adhered to.
He has been in Beijing for three years and has worked on several different construction sites. He explains that he, and most workers, only get paid when a job is finished. That could be every 12 months. So they have to borrow from their bosses to send money home in the meantime. Workers tell me that there have been cases of developers running into financial trouble and labourers not getting paid at all after months of work.
Gui says he is sad that he is missing seeing his children grow up. He feels bitter that he has to toil as he does to survive. When I ask him about China's economic prosperity, and about the changes he sees in Beijing, he sneers: "Do the government care about people like me? It is people like me who are making it possible for other people to get so rich."
Not far from this construction site is the office of Wang Chunlei, who works with Sohochina, one of the country's most progressive property development companies, which has won many international awards. The company has just opened its latest development, Jianwai Soho, a luxury residential and commercial development in Beijing's central business district, and the first complex of its type in the city.
Located opposite the China World Trade Centre, Jianwai Soho has a total area of 700,000 square metres, including 350,000 square metres of residential properties and 96,000 square metres of shops. Jianwai Soho comprises several high-rise, ultra-modern glass blocks. On the first floor are trendy restaurants, coffee shops, hairdressers and boutiques. Total annual sales of residential, office and retail space in 2002 and 2003 have exceeded ?300 million.
The development is typical of new complexes springing up in Beijing. To make way for these developments, hundreds of Beijing's hutong and courtyard dwellings have been demolished, with residents (some of whose families have been in the same place for generations) being moved out to modern apartment blocks in the suburbs.
"Soho Jianwai is simple and dynamic and is an effort to create a cosmopolitan centre in Beijing," says Chunlei, an owner of an apartment there. Each block is divided by walking alleys and parking is underground. Only 12 per cent of the apartments have been bought by foreigners. Thirty-eight per cent have been purchased by Beijing Chinese, and 50 per cent by Chinese living in other provinces, such as Guangzhou and Shanghai, who want to have a place in the capital. Chunlei and her husband, a government official who works in another province, are typical of the emerging Chinese middle-class. Their eight-year-old son is in a boarding school during the week as his parents busily pursue their careers.
"People have money now and they want to have the best. They want to give their children a good education, to have bigger apartments and nice cars. People are talking less now about politics and political reform. They talk about money and getting on," says Chunlei. "Chinese people are going frequently to bars and restaurants. Many people eat out every day as they are too busy to cook and they can now afford to," she adds. A Chinese Academy of Social Sciences study published in March found that 19 per cent of Chinese were middle class in 2003, up from 15 per cent at the end of 1999. This includes households with assets worth between ?15,000 and ?30,000.
But people like Mrs Jin, who lives in a hutong near Shisha Hai, is concerned that her home may be demolished in the future to make way for developments like Jianwai Soho. Her family has lived for several generations in a humble courtyard home. Jin and her husband are retired and she has mixed feelings about the rapid changes taking place in her city.
"Many of the developments in Beijing are good. A lot of the new apartments are nice and it gives people better-quality accommodation," she says. "People have TVs, DVDs, and better food now, and that is good. But I would not like to see all of old Beijing going. We have to keep our traditions and culture."
The family's living accommodation consists of three rooms: a small simple kitchen, a bedroom, and a sitting room which doubles as a bedroom for Jin's 25-year-old son. The sitting room is sparsely furnished but there is a huge silver TV screen in the corner. And in a reminder that the West penetrates every corner of China, there's a colour poster of David Beckham over Jin's son's bed. "He loves David Beckham and soccer," she says.
Debate continues to rage over China's rapid economic growth. Is it an exciting boom or a dangerous bubble? Bank lending is up 20 per cent, and investment in factories and infrastructure has increased this year by 40 per cent. One estimate claims that China, which is responsible for 4 per cent of the global gross domestic product, consumed 40 per cent of the world's concrete last year.
The government is clearly unnerved by what it is seeing, but insists it is committed to cooling the economy, and has ordered banks to increase the amount of money they set aside as reserves on loans. Premier Wen said in Dublin this week that steps will be taken to resolve the issue of capital adequacy and non-performing loans.
An economic crash would wreak havoc on already weak banks and would destroy the real estate market. Millions of people would be out of work, which could lead to the social unrest that is the greatest fear of China's authoritarian government.
But for now, the China's economic transformation continues apace.