This country, which includes Hong Kong, has come a long way — even after Mao’s ill-considered five-year plans, including the infamous Great Leap Forward.

I was thinking about this, anew, while reading “The Faces of War” by Martha Gellhorn, a woman who spent about 60 years as a war correspondent. (She started with the Spanish Civil War, and lasted all the way through Nicaragua, in the 1980s; she died in 1998.)

She was in China, and Hong Kong, in the spring of 1941. The British still held Hong Kong because Japan had not yet attacked Pearl Harbor and declared war on half of Europe. But Japan and China were going at it hammer and tongs in a really ugly (well, uglier than usual) and particularly cruel war with lots of racial overtones to it. Japan held Canton (modern Guangzhou) already, and Manchuria and other broad swaths of the country.

Anyway, Martha Gellhorn hated China. Was disgusted by it. By its poverty and illiteracy and monstrous backwardness. She was easily rousted to loathing and disgust, but this was rather over the top, even for her.

And here is a passage from her book (written in, I believe, the mid-1960s) about a China that … doesn’t seem to exist anymore. And one that changed in a time frame much shorter than she could have imagined.

She had met with Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, who were running most of China back then (Mao and the communists were in the hills, generally,  running from the Generalissimo as well as the Japanese), and she went off on how China was not a democracy then. (As now.) And how it probably never would be.

She wrote:

“The notion that China was a democracy under the Generalissimo is the sort of joke politicians invent and journalists perpetuate. The local men-in-office, whenever the absence of democracy became embarrassing, explained these conditions by saying that any country, in the midst of a long, terrible war, must abandon some of its domestic liberties; and this is a sad fact as we can all testify. But I do not believe China ever was a democracy, or will be, in our lifetime. How could it be? For democracy or a pretense of democracy, you need a fair percentage of literacy among the population, free communication — not only by speech and print but by road and rail, and enough time out, from struggling desperately for survival, to vote.

“I thought a good six-point program for China during the next hundred years would be: clean drinking water — at least at stated places; sewage disposal everywhere; a government-issued birth-control pill; and an agricultural scheme which would guarantee the bare minimum of rice required to prevent the death by starvation of any Chinese. With these matters attended to, they could begin on a universal health service, attacking cholera, typhoid, typhus, leprosy, amoebic dysentery, malaria (malignant and benign), and all the other ills the flesh is heir to, but more heir to in China than in any other country I know. After that, it would be time to build schools and fill them. And then, finally, but how far in the future, the moment might have come to say a word about democracy.

“I felt that it was pure doom to be Chinese; no worse luck could befall a human being than to be born and live there, unless by some golden chance you happened to be born one of the .00000099 percent who had power, money, privilege (and even then, even then).  I pitied them all, I saw no tolerable future for them, and I longed to escape away from what I had escaped into: the age-old misery, filth, hopelessness and my own claustrophobia inside the enormous country.”

Well.

The point here being that a woman who had been around and seen a lot of places and a lot of things held out no hope for China for at least a century.

And that was 40 years ago.

The China I have seen this year, in Beijing and Hong Kong is prosperous, reasonably healthy (as healthy as we are in the States, it would seem), industrious and extremely optimistic that things will get even better.

They have accomplished all six of the points in her plan, at least in the main. And they’ve got the schools thing taken care of, too.

Democracy? Well, that may not be anywhere to hand. The socialist bureaucrats who run China show no signs of loosening up in any matters other than semi-private enterprise. And the Chinse populace seems so grateful to be heading north, in lifestyle, that it is almost impossible to imagine any sort of pro-democracy revolution.

I am led to believe hundreds of millions of Chinese still live in awful conditions. Maybe 700 million … 800 million? But far more than .00000099 percent of them seem to be doing just fine, and only 40 years later. It might be something like 33 percent now, who are reasonably fed and clothed and housed. And something like 98 percent in Hong Kong — which, by the way, had the world’s longest life expectancy for men (78 years) and second-longest for women (83.9 years), as of 2000.

I attribute most of the climb in living standards to what seems to be the nearly infinite energy of the people I have seen, and their willingness to work as long as it takes. I suppose that was always there,  under the surface, in China, but it had gone centuries without even a vaguely interested and competent (or even non-corrupt) government.

Perhaps we can hope that Hong Kong, which isn’t quite a democracy but at least has some of its trappings, can be a model to the rest of China, as it has been in so many other ways, commercially, and lifestyle-related. Maybe some of the pluralism here will bleed back into the mother country, just as mass transit and a functioning infrastructure have.

But what I take from Gellhorn’s hopeless rant is that China has come much farther and much faster than any reasonably informed person could have imagined.  And it will go ever further.

And perhaps this suggests that any situation, no matter how dire (Sudan? Zimbabwe? Bangladesh?), can be reversed anywhere on the planet. Maybe not in one generation or even two. But in less than 100 years. Far less.