60 People, 60 Stories

Building blocks of a great impression

By Karl Rensch (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-30 08:26

I remember an experience I had many years ago as a high school student in Germany. Our geography teacher used to play an "association game" with us to make lessons more interesting.

"What comes to your mind when I say Egypt?" he would ask. The answer he expected was "Nile". For Brazil, he expected the Amazon river and so on.

One day, he wanted a prompt for "China". Spontaneously, I said "Great Wall". The teacher was irritated and reminded me that this was a geography class. He wanted to hear "Yangtze River" or maybe "Gobi Desert", so he asked me to explain my answer.

I stood up in class and said something like this: "I associate China with the Great Wall, the biggest man-made structure in the world, but, Sir, what I admire more than the building are the people who built it.

"The laborers, who made the bricks from mud, cut the building blocks from rocks, carried on their shoulders the tools and materials into the wastelands, deserts and high mountains. I think of the laborers who lived on a handful of rice, slept rough, got very little remuneration and were separated from their families for years. They were dedicated to a task worth doing, they risked their health, their life."

My teacher looked at me, somewhat surprised, but did not say anything.

Years later, when I stood in awe in front of the Great Wall at Jinshanling, admiring the monumental structure in its daring disregard of the geographical obstacles of ridges, crests, faults and rivers that had to be conquered, I thought again of the workers who had made it all possible. They are all long dead, their names unrecorded and forgotten, but their legacy is very much alive, and so is the ethos of their work.

China's mega-structures of today are quite different from the Great Wall: Highways, bridges, dams, skyscrapers and so on, but without dedicated laborers, the construction work cannot be completed. Who are these people? Many come from the country; modest, hardworking folk, separated from their loved ones for months, earning a pittance ... living frugally to save money for their families back home.

Model workers? There are millions of them in the Middle Kingdom of today, as there were millions of them in the China of the past. The 60th birthday of the New China can be an occasion to remember, acknowledge and honor their extraordinary achievements.

Karl Rensch is a professor at the school of language studies under the faculty of arts at Australian National University.