China is a fiercely hierarchical country. We see this in human relationships as well as throughout society, including on the roads. Big trucks automatically have the right of way everywhere and at all times. Busses can bully automobiles, cyclists have no rights against autos, and cyclists show little concern for pedestrians. So also on the waterways, as we see here, with two rafters frantically trying to avoid a ferry. The rafters are floating logs down the Yangtze River to a lumber mill. Building materials were in high demand for housing at this time because for the first thirty years of the PRC all resources were devoted to heavy industry. Mao was obsessed with the idea of building up China’s military strength so that China would never again be put under the guns of the Western Powers. This policy resulted in too little housing built for China’s rapidly increasing population.

Since the dawn of Chinese civilization, muscle power ruled. This man is pulling a heavy load of thick crockery urns to market. I was struck by the contrast with the comfortable, leisurely couple in the Pedi cab.

Muscle economy. China’s large population and available cheap muscle labor influences the continuation of handcarts that has been in use for over 4000 years. Many things that pay off in the West donÕt pay in China. For example, the large size of our farms in the West makes a tractor investment economic, but the small size of a Chinese farm rules out investments in expensive modern mechanization. In China, a cheap labor force and an ox on a small farm are affordable and economic. Thus, in modern China, we still see a lot of labor like this.

This farmer is making a delivery to downtown Beijing in 1979. He is wearing flimsy PLA type tennis shoes common to everyone and typical farm wear. His split bamboo pole is pound for pound, stronger than steel and enables him to carry his heavy load. The main vehicle traffic at this time is trucks and bicycles. Beijing streets, once quiet and empty with clean air, no longer exist.

The use of handcarts is closely tied with the invention of the wheel. Carts from Central Asia were introduced to China around 1200BC and are still being used today. Visitors to China are often astonished to witness the heavy loads being moved by a single person. For a small businessperson, it is much cheaper to move products by handcarts given the availability of low cost labor.

A building boom was just getting underway in 1979 under the new government of Deng Xiaoping that followed Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. In the countryside, dynamiting could be heard from the quarries every morning when I was there. In some quarries, prisoners were used to manually break the granite down to smaller pieces or to specifications. Manpower being much cheaper than horsepower, this muscular workman is hauling granite to a construction site. The granite was shipped from the quarries to the city on riverboats.

It was sad to see a man with a badly deformed back work as hard as this person at manual labor. Despite claims of being a socialist state, China did not provide a safety net for such people.

Li Jiang, in Yunnan Province, is where the Naxi minority people live. Those living in the nearby mountains carry enormous loads long distances to do their marketing here at the town center. A typical shopping journey from a remote mountain village may be a 2-4 day journey.

Women not only work in the home and in the fields, but they do much of the marketing as well. They carry heavy loads over considerable distances to get to the market town. The headgear tells us these are minority women in Yunnan Province.

Unloading ships in Hong Kong was a clutter of well-organized muscle power. Boats flying Taiwan’s flag and the PRC’s tied up side-by-side without conflict throughout the Cold War years.

There was a surge of new construction starting in 1979 before World Bank loans and foreign investments began to take hold. Construction materials and techniques were still primitive compared to what was coming in the following decades. Here, along a canal in Suzhou, boats full of rocks for building and road construction are unloaded by hand.

An unrestored old palace like this is hard to find today. Prosperity and the five-day workweek introduced two decades later opened the floodgates for the local population as well as foreigners to enjoy tourism. Today, this site is packed with locals who at last can see where the emperors lived. Observe the family at the left squatting down for a photograph. That was a 1979 phenomenon, Until that time, cameras were regarded as evidence of bourgeois decadence and confiscated by authorities. Rampaging Red Guards destroyed even family photographs. I visited an elderly couple and thinking I could commiserate with them, said, “I suppose the Red Guards destroyed all your family photos.” “Oh no!” they said brightly. “We burned them before they got here.”

People were conveyed to hospitals on flatbed tricycles. In one of the remote villages I visited, by being tied to motorcycles.

China began to ripple with all kinds of new construction after the death of Mao. It was as if the country was waking up from a nightmare. Much of the work was done by muscle power. Modernization of equipment was yet to come.

The central market in Lijiang, Yunnan Province as it appeared before development as a tourist center. Note the small stools put out for customers. Great weights could be carried by a single slice of a bamboo pole which, pound-for-pound, is stronger than steel. For the people living in the surrounding remote mountain villages and hamlets, it is a 2-3 day shopping trip.

With dignity, this tricycle hauler is taking water hyacinth to the country. Pigs grow fat on it. In America this plant is considered a nuisance that clogs waterways. The Raleigh bicycle was imported from England and imitated in Chinese factories. My wifeÕs grandfather owned a factory that manufactured a Chinese Raleigh. In the communist era, factories produced heavier bicycles than the Raleigh and were just one speed. Those are the sturdy bicycles that are seen with big hogs tied over the back wheel being hauled to market. The three-wheeled chain-driven cycle may have been invented in Southeast Asia. The Japanese used bicycle wheels to make rickshaws, which then were introduced to China. The efficiency of the Pedi cab drove out the rickshaw. The vehicle here is called a banche, and in 1979 it was being used as an ambulance, cargo carrier and as a passenger vehicle in the countryside.

By the 1930s, the pedicab replaced the hand-pulled rickshaw. As China modernized, the motor taxis have pretty much swept away them away. However, some still remain, sometimes with a battery-powered electric motor.

These frontage avenues were reserved for bicycles and pedestrians before cars and trucks took over. Now these frontage avenues are filled with parked cars. In some cases, they are obliterated by widening the street to an eight or ten lane boulevard.

Mao famously said “Women hold up half the sky,” a slogan intended to elevate the status of women and also to justify including them in the labor force. This woman has heard MaoÕs call. The downside for women was that while they were expected to work on a par with men, they were still saddled with childbearing responsibilities and housework. Worse, women were criticized if they stayed home and criticized for not staying home if they worked full-time.

This bamboo raft is carrying cargo down the Xiang River in Hunan Province. A scientific study in England proved that oar sweeps like these are much more energy efficient than rowing oars. It was China’s use of bamboo rafts that led China to become the inventor of watertight compartments for ocean going vessels. Every ship that sails the oceans today is based on 2nd century CE Chinese maritime architecture that was brought to Europe by Sir Samuel Bentham in the late 1700’s. Marco Polo described them 1295 but no one paid attention.

The construction boom that began in the 1980’s required construction materials to be brought into town by canal boats from the quarries and kilns in the countryside. The loads they carried were staggering. The materials were then were off-loaded by hand.

These boats are hauling human waste collected from the honey buckets in the city. They will be used for fertilizer for farms in the outskirts of Suzhou after fermenting in pits.

The 2700 miles of the Grand Canal system require constant maintenance. This is muck dredged from a backwater area. It will be applied to farmland to offset erosion.

A tugboat shepherds six barges with quarried stone to urban building sites downstream on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. It 1979, everyone in China was organized like an army and assigned to units. In China, as in any army, everything is organized around a unit and nothing exists outside a unit. From 1949 to 1979, everyone and every activity were organized into a Danwei, or unit. No matter what you sought to do, whether to buy socks in a store or buy train tickets, the first question you were asked is, “What’s your unit?” A unit upstream would be assigned by the government with the task of breaking up stones in a rock quarry and loading them on to barges. The barges would belong to another unit that would have many barges in its command. The unit would be tasked with the responsibility of hauling cargo. The rock unit would pay the barge unit, just like a business would in a capitalist economy. The buyer of the stones would be the construction unit in the city and they would pay the rock unit.   But unlike private companies in a Capitalist country, a China unit does not have to make a profit because the government runs things. You can see what this leads to. So if a hotel is full of guests, the employees have to work hard making beds, cleaning rooms, etc. If the hotel is empty, everybody can sit around and drink tea, smoke and read the newspaper. Either way, the employees get the same pay because the hotel can be indifferent to the profit and loss ledger. Very often in the 1970’s and 80’s, we’d be told that there were no rooms when in fact the hotel was near empty. The great weakness of the Chinese Socialist System was the lack of material incentives. When China opened up to the western world in 1979, tourists began streaming in wearing good shoes, carrying expensive cameras and spending wads of money. Chinese citizens began questioning as to why their Socialist system and all the Socialist countries in the world were so much poorer than the

Xishuang Banna is in Yunnan Province where it borders on Burma and Laos. The harvested pineapple crop is being hand-loaded on to shallow-draft boats for transporting into town. Family members and villagers are mobilized to the task of bringing the harvest from the fields to the riverbank for loading into the boats. Lacking a boat dock, farmers wade out into the stream with their baskets of pineapple. Climate, crops, housing and lifestyle in this area blend together the Southeast Asian and Chinese cultures. In this era (1980s), there were no facilities for post-harvest storage so there was a great rush to get a harvest to market. An American professor of food science at UC Davis estimated that almost half of ChinaÕs perishable crops at this time were lost for want of proper storage facilities.

Xishuang Banna is in Yunnan Province where it borders on Burma and Laos. The harvested pineapple crop is being hand-loaded on to shallow-draft boats for transporting into town. Family members and villagers are mobilized to the task of bringing the harvest from the fields to the riverbank for loading into the boats. Lacking a boat dock, farmers wade out into the stream with their baskets of pineapple. Climate, crops, housing and lifestyle in this area blend together the Southeast Asian and Chinese cultures. In this era (1980s), there were no facilities for post-harvest storage so there was a great rush to get a harvest to market. An American professor of food science at UC Davis estimated that almost half of ChinaÕs perishable crops at this time were lost for want of proper storage facilities.

Xishuang Banna is in Yunnan Province where it borders on Burma and Laos. The harvested pineapple crop is being hand-loaded on to shallow-draft boats for transporting into town. Family members and villagers are mobilized to the task of bringing the harvest from the fields to the riverbank for loading into the boats. Lacking a boat dock, farmers wade out into the stream with their baskets of pineapple. Climate, crops, housing and lifestyle in this area blend together the Southeast Asian and Chinese cultures. In this era (1980s), there were no facilities for post-harvest storage so there was a great rush to get a harvest to market. An American professor of food science at UC Davis estimated that almost half of China’s perishable crops at this time were lost for want of proper storage facilities.

A long string of barges are towed around a bend in the canal town of Suzhou while two stinky barges convey night soil from the town to the outlying farms. This is part of the Grand Canal that began in 600 CE and which is now the world’s longest man-made waterway. Needing to cross many rivers of varying levels, the solution was to develop water locks many centuries before their appearance in Europe.

Mao created the slogan, Òwomen hold up half the skyÓÑa slogan meant to impress on a society that historically saw women as less valuable than men that women were every bit as valuable and essential as men. Even so, in general, while women were, indeed, ÒliberatedÓ to hold paying jobs, they continued to bear most of the child rearing, most of the shopping and cooking. There was much strife over the issue, during the commune period that was just ending when I took this photo, of women doing equal work but earning fewer work points than men. For those who worked within the state system there would be a pension and housing after retirement, but for those outside, such as this woman, there would be a need to work until they canÕt work any more and then to depend on their own savings an on their children. Thus, the need to have children was very strong, and more children meant more security.Ê

Mao Zedong famously said, “Women hold up half the sky.” Certainly in China they also hold up a good share of the loads as well. This woman is bringing fuel home for the cooking fire. Around the time this photo was taken a cancer map conducted in Yunnan Province showed a high incidence of lung cancer among only women. Researchers puzzled over this for some time before realizing it was smoke from cooking fires made from a certain botanical material in the area was the cause.