Fred Frederikse: China, 70 years since the People's Liberation Army took control

COMMENT

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population.

The sub provincial city of Ningpo (population coming up for eight million) is used here as a millisphere lens to look at the People's Republic of China as it celebrates 70 years since the People's Liberation Army (PLA) took control.

Ningbo is one of China's oldest cities and for 2000 years was the Silk Road terminus on the China Sea.

Ningpo was a major port when Shanghai and Hong Kong were still fishing villages and today the five busiest ports in the world are: Shanghai, Singapore, Shenzhen, Ningbo and Hong Kong - and they are all Han Chinese cities.

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Of the 1.3 billion Han, 1.2 billion live in China where they constitute over 90 per cent of the population.

Only in Tibet and Xinjiang are the Han not the majority.

The Han in China are divided into regional groups, differentiated by language and dialect.

The Ningbo Han (8 million) are a subgroup of the Wu Han (80 million).

Before, and after, the 1949 revolution Ningbo Han went to Hong Kong and prospered. Many of the shipping magnates of Hong Kong are Ningpo Han.

One of the features of Chinese capitalism is the concept of guangxi - your obligation to your family and your clan and there are strong links between Hong Kong and Ningbo.

One Ningbo Han who went to seek his fortune in Hong Kong was Gui Minhai.

Born in Ningbo in 1964, Gui got a BA in Beijing, completed a PhD in Gothenburg, Sweden in '96 and returned to Ningbo in '99.

In 2003 Gui was convicted of drunk driving (110 km/h) in Ningbo, after killing a 23-year-old woman crossing the road.

Gui received a two year suspended jail term but slipped out of the country and then reappeared in Hong Kong publishing salacious and poorly sourced books about the Chinese party leadership.

Books that mainland Chinese were hungry to read.

In 2015 Gui and four other directors of Hong Kong's Causeway Books were snatched and Gui reappeared in Ningbo, where he is on permanent loss of freedom to travel and permanent loss of face, probably at the behest of Ningbo Communist Party Secretary, Wang Huizhong, who outranks all officials there.

Cellist Yo Yo Ma, the founder of the Silk Road Ensemble, is another Ningbo Han.

Born in Paris and brought up in New York, China still considers him one of the 100 million "Chinese who are out of the country".

Before Portuguese pirates and the Christian sailing empires arrived in Ningbo there were ghettos at the port there for Arab and Jewish traders.

When we went to Shanghai for the expo in 2010 I was told that the difference between Eastern and Western capitalism was that "China has never let the Jews in".

During the expo, the Shanghai synagogue was allowed to reopen - only to be closed again when the expo ended.

Judaism is not one of the five sanctioned religions of China.

They are: Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism (with a Han pope), Protestantism and Islam.

There has always been a small Jewish community in Hong Kong and the Far Eastern Economic Review was founded by a Hong Kong Jew.

A decade ago the Economic Review closed down after losing the battle for readers to the Economist.

It's final editorial, entitled "the black and the red" was about the links between the triads and the Communist party; about the party using thugs as enforcers.

The ways that China has devised to control the people of Tibet and Xinjiang is making the people of Hong Kong worry about ending up living in a cyber-surveilled prison-factory.

In the past 70 years the Chinese Communist Party has lifted millions of Chinese out of abject poverty at a rate unparalleled in history.

Seventy years ago, China's CO2 emissions were insignificant; today it has surpassed the USA to become the world's number one emitter.

Seventy years ago China had no navy; today its navy is second only to the USA in tonnage (although China has more sailors) and Ningpo is home to the PLAN (PLA Navy) East Sea Fleet, projecting out towards Taiwan - and the Pacific.