History and Language 

Even the official Chinese-language newspaper of the Communist Party, the People’ Daily, which for decades was distributed free as a means of social control, now costs 1 yuan (about 13 cents) at the newsstand. The newspaper’s website carries ads for Coca Cola next to Communist Party ads.   

The 37-year-old Lu, now in the United States on a 16-week program of study and cultural visits sponsored by the World Press Institute at Macalester College, said one of his most memorable moments so far was his first night as a home-stay guest in Ely in northern Minnesota.

“It was the best night’s sleep I have had in a decade,” he said. “The air was so clean and fresh compared to Shanghai, where I live.”

A native of the rural Chinese province of Anhui, Lu’s career choice traces, oddly enough, to a one-year hospital stay as a young boy, during which he read constantly and fell in love with history and language.

Propped up on pillows in his hospital bed, recovering from complications of appendicitis, he read straight through all four of the great Chinese literary classics – A Dream of Red Mansions, Journey to the West, The Romance of Three Kingdoms, and Outlaws of the Marsh. 

A Goose for Company

“For a little child the sense of history is strange,” Lu said. “It gave me my first dose of interest in the liberal arts, and for a while I thought I would become a novelist.” But he veered towards journalism because high English exam scores paved the way for scholarships at his county school, then in his provincial capital city, and finally in the nation’s capital, Beijing.

Lu says he’s often struck by a surreal sense of the path his life has taken, compared to how it might have turned out.

“I was born in a peasant village,” he said. “My world was confined to a limited space, the sun rose on one side and fell on the other, and I had maybe a goose for company.”

Lu vividly recalls the day he was promoted to the China Daily’s elite “state affairs” team of journalists who travel with top Chinese officials.

“For a country boy who struggled every day for survival, now to be in an office sipping coffee and flying around the world with the Prime Minister of China, I felt a ‘wow!’ at the changes in my life.”

Rich-Poor Gap

In his one-hour talk at the Rochester library, Lu cited China statistics that described a colossus propped on sticks, with multiple overlapping social crises created by China’s shift from a centrally-controlled to a capitalist economy.

China’s vast and growing rich-poor gap is among the worst results of that shift, Lu said, not least because China now has the very class-structured society that Communism tried to abolish.

Joblessness in rural areas is especially acute, with some 200 million peasants now moving to live in China’s cities in a rural-to-urban migration of unprecedented scale.

This horde is creating giant urban slums as peasants take the factory jobs that make the cheap goods Americans buy at Wal-Mart and other retailers.

Education for these workers would offer a gateway out of poverty, Lu said, but a government policy change is cementing the rich-poor gap instead.

In 1989, China started cutting back on university scholarships the state had traditionally given to promising students, while at the same time charging steep fees and tuition. As a result, increasingly only children from wealthy families can go to college, while promising poor children have no chance.