The great Chinese clean-up

President Clinton visits the city of Xian today. He wanted to see the `real' China. So they swept away the dirt. And the hawkers. And the dissidents. And the great unwashed

President Clinton arrives in the western Chinese city of Xian today, and it is just as well the authorities have laid on transport. The city's rickety motor-tricycle taxis have been banned from the freshly- cleaned streets during the visit, despite a public protest earlier this month by drivers furious at not being able to earn any money this week. One driver complained about police behaviour at the demonstration: "They broke the back window of my cab, and ripped the side sheeting," he said, pointing to the damage.

As for the city's four-wheeled taxi-drivers, they are a cantankerous lot at the moment. On two days during the final week of May, several hundred staged protests by parking their cars near one section of the historic Xian city wall and refusing to move. They were complaining about the high level of fees and taxes imposed by the city authorities. "There must be about 50 fees a year now; three kinds of insurance, anti-theft charges, parking fees, one set of charges this month, different charges next month... We've asked lawyers to act for us, but it is difficult to get a result," explained one woman driver.

This is the China which Mr Clinton will not see on his arrival in Xian, the first US President to visit the mainland since the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

After two decades of economic reform, the US President will find some things familiar, like Xian's many Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets and the ubiquitous sound of American pop music. But there are things Peking cannot bear to let the world see - the schisms and stresses of a corrupted, half- reformed Communist society. Neither will Mr Clinton's sanitised and pre- scripted ventures into "real China" give a convincing picture of the progress made by a nation which, 20 years ago, had barely emerged from Chairman Mao's insane Cultural Revolution.

The reality is a place where most people's lives have improved enormously, but which is much more volatile these days than either China's leaders or Mr Clinton want to admit. The much-needed reforms of Zhu Rongji, who took over as prime minister 100 days ago, are throwing tens of millions of people out of work, at a time when the economy is under strain from the Asian financial crisis. The huge number of laid-off workers from bankrupt state factories, the spoilt cadres about to be axed from China's bloated bureaucracy, the ordinary citizens who no longer believe in keeping quiet about their grievances - all these people are creating pockets of social instability in a brittle regime which has lost control of many areas of people's lives but exerts a vice-like grip on political expression.

Xian - once the imperial capital and now a heavily polluted, inland, industrial city - was chosen as the initial stop on the presidential itinerary so that the first television pictures beamed back to American viewers would be of Mr Clinton in a controversy-free environment. He will be met by a torch-lit Tang dynasty ceremony, and tomorrow tour the famous terracotta warriors. But Mr Clinton will be seeing a China which has been spruced up, sometimes to a ludicrous extent.

Out at the warrior site, for instance, the rather jolly street hawkers have been sent away, and by last week the authorities had shut down all the stalls selling animal skins and furs. "Americans don't like that sort of thing," explained one lady selling cold drinks. At the more sinister end of the scene-setting, anyone who possibly counts as a dissident figure in Xian has either been "persuaded" to leave town or is under close surveillance today.

It can be assumed that, as the presidential motorcade sweeps into town today, Mr Clinton will not run into the now frequent protests by the city's increasing number of unemployed and disgruntled workers. At the beginning of this month, it was the turn of about 200 men from the Number One Construction Company, demonstrating because they feared for their pensions if the state factory went bankrupt.

"There have been several protests and demonstrations, this year and last year. It happens in many cities in China, it is very normal," said a Xian businessman, just returned from Peking.

Unemployment is the biggest challenge facing China as it tries to sort out hopelessly inefficient state-owned industries, such as the old chemical and steel factories of Xian. One outgoing government minister admitted recently that half the country's state factory workers - which would mean 37 million workers - were surplus to requirements, and many of them have already been laid off. Others are angry about overdue wages or unpaid pensions. "Officials in Xian are very afraid if some workers sit on the streets during Mr Clinton's visit," said one local.

When Mr Clinton visits a Chinese village tomorrow morning, he will meet smiling farmers boasting of record harvests. He will not venture to the East Gate of old Xian, where on most days about 800 unemployed peasants tout for casual work as carpenters, painters or builders, at a rate of 75p to pounds 1.50 a day. Even China's officials admit to an astonishing 200 million surplus rural labourers.

But, just as Mr Clinton will not see the instability of modern China, nor will he appreciate the aspects of Chinese life which leave one feeling optimistic. Needless to say, they are not always developments which the Chinese Communist Party endorses.

It is refreshing that many Chinese now feel more free to voice their complaints. (Free speech has not evolved enough, however, for this article to publish the names of some of the interviewees.) At the Famous Quality Snack Market, a government re-employment project which opened in December, laid-off workers get priority in renting small restaurant units.

But they are up in arms at the moment, after putting up 36,000 yuan (pounds 3,000) each for a year's rent, only to find that the buildings are badly constructed, have no air-condtioning, and that no-one can make a profit. A group petition signed by 30 restaurant owners is demanding a rebate .

"We are in negotiations, but if they don't agree, in three days time we will pull down the shutters and hold a protest. I mean it," said one. These are people who are trying to take control of their lives.

China's emerging urban middle class already has done so to a great extent. Mr Clinton is unlikely to call by for a hamburger at "Bob and Bettey's", a 500-seat Sino-foreign joint-venture fast-food restaurant in downtown Xian, frequented by the city's pager-decked twentysomethings. So he will not meet people like Cui Guangzhen, the 39-year-old manageress, and her husband, who has set up a company manufacturing bank cards.

Their aspirations are instantly recognisable. "My family's living conditions have improved a lot in terms of income, my daughter's schooling, working conditions, and even our electrical appliances." Their home boasts a colour television, computer, VCD and video recorder, she said.

Under Zhu Rongji's housing reforms, she and her husband have purchased their apartment from the former state work unit, paying 20,000 yuan (pounds 1,500) for a flat which is now worth about 300,000 yuan (pounds 23,000) at market values. "We are pleased to own our home. We would now like to buy a motorbike, which would be very convenient," she said.

Lu Bingyin, a 21-year-old English language student at Xian Foreign Languages University, is another face of "new China". "I am in the last year of university students who will be assigned jobs by the government, but actually we are free to find our own jobs if we want to," she said. Ms Lu, with fluent English, has got herself hired by a Sino-Belgian pharmaceuticals joint venture company in Xian.

She described the Xian of her youth: "The streets were quite narrow, and there were none of these new buildings. Ten years ago we had an 18 square metre apartment for a family with three members; now we have 40 square metres. And I think salaries in the past 10 years have doubled."

Mr Clinton will probably stay at the Hyatt hotel, but will have no opportunity to wander the night market just around the corner, a one-kilometre stretch of road lined with food stalls and downmarket outdoor restaurants still busy at 10pm.

Here, for 5 yuan (40p), one can be serenaded with a song from a guitar- strumming peasant girl from central Anhui province, some 900 kilometres to the east. She rolled up in Xian with a group of friends a fortnight ago and business was good, she said. These are some of China's estimated 100 million-strong army of rural migrant workers who have embraced Norman Tebbit's "on yer bike" work ethic with the invention born of necessity.

It is a world away from when I first visited China in 1985, when the farmers were not free to move from the countryside, and I left Xian ahead of schedule because it was impossible to find anything bearable to eat.

In those days, many people in Xian were still wearing Mao suits. Now, at the "Margaret Photo Studio", Xian women pay at least 666 yuan (pounds 50) to get dressed up in extravagant ballgowns, their faces made up and hair coiled into exotic shapes, to have an album of photographs taken.

To applaud the outbreak of ordinary human vanity is not to minimise the question of China's human rights record. Indeed, it is the very normality of so much of everyday Chinese life which makes the human rights abuses so appalling. According to Human Rights Watch, for instance, more than 150 Peking citizens are still in prison in connection with the June 1989 protests. Those who irritate the state can still be sent for three years' "re-education through labour" without so much as a trial.

The uncertainty is whether China can ease or contain the pressures which are building up. Will a politically unreformed system decide to accommodate people's growing demands for greater freedom of expression? After all, it is much easier to clamp down on a few hundred dissidents than to pacify millions of embittered unemployed workers.

The Clinton state visit has been deemed by China's leaders to be a crucial test of their legitimacy. If it goes well, the momentum for positive change could be boosted. But if the trip degenerates into a propaganda humiliation for Peking, this is not a government which will retire quietly to lick its wounds. The resulting political backlash could be very ugly indeed.