People stroll through downtown Beijing. (Louis Deguise/CBC)

Senior Correspondent Joe Schlesinger was based in Hong Kong for CBC Television in the early 1970's when he was suddenly invited to Beijing to cover a table-tennis tournament in April of 1971.

That event would become known the world over as "ping-pong diplomacy." (View Joe's original TV report here.) It was the first of many stories Schlesinger filed from China in the following years.

This past June, Schlesinger returned to China for the first time in over three decades. His feature report will air on CBC Television's The National during the Beijing Olympics in August.

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Coming back to Beijing 35 years after I had last been here, the city is all but unrecognizable. Except for places such as the 500-year-old Forbidden City, just about everything is new. Huge, elaborate new buildings everywhere in a town where, in the seventies, the only new structures used to be statues of Mao Zedong.

Joe Schlesinger is shown in Tiananmen Square in June 2008. (Louis Deguise/CBC)

A crush of cars where once there were only hordes of bicycles. The hustle and bustle of people in colourful "Western" clothes rushing in all directions, which is a far cry from the old days they marched in baggy unisex uniforms to revolutionary tunes that blared from loudspeakers on every street corner.

Nowadays, there is a Starbucks café at the Great Wall of China and a McDonald's outlet just off Tiananmen Square.

And where, before, the town was full of so-called honey wagons collecting the night's organic fertilizer harvest from outhouses, squat toilets and chamber pots, this time around, the toilet in my hotel room has a heated seat and push buttons that control a jet of cleansing water that can be adjusted in direction, intensity and temperature.

Talk about counter-revolutionary bourgeois decadence!

'We want to get rich'

It's all been too much for the eye and the mind. And for my sore feet, as well. So when I spotted a sign saying, "Foot Massage," I went for it. As my translator and I sat while two young women kneaded our feet and pummelled our calf muscles, we talked to them.

They are both from small towns and have undergone a one-month massage course. They say they make 2,000 Yuan a month (roughly $300 Cdn), an average salary in Beijing, and live two-to-a-room to save money.

What do they want from life? Marriage, a family ? They both giggled. No time for romance, they said. "We work 12 hours a day and only have two days off a month." So what's their goal in life? No hesitation there: "We want to get rich."

Deng's motto

Deng Xiaoping, the late communist party leader who turned Mao's Marxist China upside down, would have greeted that sentiment with a smile of satisfaction.

"To get rich is glorious" was the slogan he coined for the transformation of the country from the dead hand of communism to what is now in essence a capitalist society with an authoritarian government.

Schlesinger and his crew interview people in China in June 2008. (Louis Deguise/CBC)

It is China's motto still. Not just of our two masseuses but of the nation as a whole. And most of all, of its leaders.

But being rich is, like everything else in the universe, a relative concept.

When you grew up having survived the insanity of Mao's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in which tens of millions died of starvation and hundreds of millions suffered other deprivations and humiliation, being assured of a full bowl of rice and a sense of stability may make you feel rich.

But if you grew up, as the younger generations have, with a full food bowl, relative personal security plus a cellphone and perhaps even a computer to boot, you will expect and insist on more.

And more does not necessarily mean just money.

Subtle changes

Progress and prosperity often depend on the small things in life.

The freedom to choose how you dress may not sound like much. But getting rid of the straitjacket of anonymity of the drab uniform dress of the Mao era gives people a sense of individuality and self-expression.

Add to that the freedom to display private feelings in public, which is now common in China these days — including couples holding hands and necking in the streets.

That was a strict no-no under the priggish Maoist code. Today, it is another element that restores the human spirit to the public sphere.

The firm hand

Put it all together and what you have is a nation of subservient drones transformed into a vibrant and creative society.

But the nature of such societies encourages people to be skeptical, even critical, of authority and to look for outlets to express their opinions.

And that's where the rub comes in for the regime: How does it keep the creative juices of a burgeoning economy flowing, without losing political control?

It's a constant balancing act. Whenever the government feels its authority is being threatened, as it did recently in Tibet and, of course, in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, it reacts with a violent crackdown.

In between, the struggle is played out on the internet.

On the one hand, the government tries hard to cleanse the internet of what it sees as subversion.

On the other, it not only keeps the internet going, because it realizes it is an indispensable tool of any modern society, but also uses it as a safety valve for the public to air its grievances.

When a wave of outrage hits the blogs — about a particular egregious example of corruption by officials, let's say — authorities sometimes even take action.

Starbucks faux pas

This action, however, is all arbitrary, driven not by any set of rules but rather by inconsistent bureaucratic fumbling.

When bloggers raised a fuss about McDonald's Golden Arches intruding on the sanctity of Tiananmen Square, for example, the chain pulled down its arches but was allowed to keep its outlet open.

Starbucks was not so lucky. When an online campaign last summer drew 500,000 signatures denouncing the coffee shop the company had opened in the Forbidden City, removing its famous sign was not enough. Seen as having insulted Chinese culture, the chain was forced to shut the store down.

In the end, money may not be everything for the Chinese. But it sure beats politics as a subject of fascination.

'I am rich'

Back in the foot-massage parlour, an elderly woman in the chair next to us jumped into our conversation. "I am rich," she announced proudly. "So rich, I have a villa."

She also had glittering knuckle-duster rings on her fingers so big they deserve to be registered as dangerous weapons.

As she explained how she became so wealthy — I wish I could tell you how but can't because it was lost in translation — my masseuse didn't even look at my feet as she rubbed some greasy gook into them. She was too busy gazing attentively at the rich lady and taking in her every word.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if one day, my masseuse managed to parlay her small earnings — my modest tip included — into a fortune. It's the new Chinese way.