The Other Side of China’s Capitalist Coin : Capitalists may savor the thought of 1.1 billion new customers, but Carrel thinks of it as “that mystical, and I think mythical, Chinese market.”

We are wearing our white smocks, our hair nets, our plastic goggles. We are ready, then, to enter the production facilities of 3M Pharmaceuticals in Northridge.

There are about 30 of us in all. I’m one of the few Americans, having been invited to the 3M facility to join a group of businessmen from the Quangdong Province of the People’s Republic of China who have come to the United States to learn more about capitalist ways as China lurches into the global market economy.

Quangdong Province, next door to Hong Kong, is booming, I’m told. Before dropping in on 3M on Monday, these Chinese executives had already made the requisite visits to Disneyland and Hong Kong, plus an overnighter to Las Vegas. “They didn’t want to leave,” Peter Chow, president of the US/China Entrepreneurs Exchange Assn., said with a laugh.

Today, Chow declares, a lot of “smart people” who once had “empty hands” are now millionaires. Now, he says, Quangdong Province is a lot like Hong Kong. If you’re educated, knowledgeable and work hard, “you can be rich very easily.”

When the 3M tour was over, something was bugging me.

The press release suggested I write this kind of story: “As California and the U.S. struggle with their bleakest business climate in decades, there still are companies such as 3M Corporation ‘doing it right’ and successfully remaining--and growing--in California.” The visiting Chinese, you see, are proof of that. The Valley meets the Pacific Rim and all that.

Bully for 3M. But what I wanted to know is why, as China awakens to the glories of capitalism, boats loaded with an illegal cargo of Chinese immigrants are detained en route to U.S. shores? Why is it that, as Chinese execs take junkets to the U.S., so many ordinary Chinese will put a couple thousand dollars down and promise smugglers up to $30,000 for a dangerous passage to find menial work in the United States?

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Mr. Chow, meet Todd Carrel. The former Beijing bureau chief for ABC News has his doubts about China being portrayed as a new land of opportunity.

To hear Chow tell it, Chinese leave because “they think the U.S. is a piece of gold.” The “snakeheads”--the smugglers--persuade them with false promises of waiting jobs and legal U.S. residency, and a glowing depiction of life here based more on myth than reality.

Carrel suggests that Chinese are departing because they know all too well what they are leaving behind. For the average Chinese, there isn’t much hope in a nation of more than 1.1 billion people and an extreme inequality between the haves and have nots.

“What causes people to want to go abroad is the opportunity factor, because there is none in China. There’s not a whole lot of opportunity in China, period. People who are young, savvy, industrious, adventuresome--they want to get out of the place. There is not a bright tomorrow for many people.”

Certainly, Carrel allows, some Chinese have prospered amid the more open, free-market society. Some Chinese have gotten rich, and some have traveled to the southern provinces to find work. But with such an enormous labor pool, many have returned to the countryside, frustrated in the knowledge that prosperity seems reserved for the few who, typically, were cozy with the governing classes in the first place.

But for many, the prosperity has just allowed them to make a down payment for a trip to the U.S.

When I asked Chow about the allegations that China was exporting goods produced by “slave laborers” in prison factories, he assured me that such goods are sold only within China’s borders.

When I asked Carrel the same question, he responded with a knowing chuckle. He’d talked with many political prisoners in his eight years in Beijing, he explained, and they’d much prefer working in a factory to such alternatives as solitary confinement and torture.

Carrel knows of what he speaks. On June 3, 1992, he and some other journalists were in Tian An Men Square preparing a routine story on the third anniversary of the massacre. A lone protester was planning to unfurl a banner when government goons beat the journalists and took them into custody. Carrel later was beaten again by uniformed police.

The attacks were savage, the injuries serious. More than a year later, Carrel lives in San Francisco, still recuperating from neurological damage. “I still have trouble walking. I walk like an old man,” says Carrel, who is 42.

And while Chow would portray illegal Chinese immigrants as victims of crime syndicates, Carrel suggests that they are, at least to some degree, escapees.

“As a motif, if you look at all China as a prison camp, you’re closer to the reality.”

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William Saroyan wrote a short story that described Fresno’s raisin growers’ lust for marketing their crop in China. If they could put just one raisin in every bowl of rice in China, they’d all get rich.

Some of the same thinking no doubt applies as 3M and other multinational corporations open sales offices and factories in China. 3M, in 1984, became the first company to negotiate an agreement with the Chinese to set up independent operations. Previously, China had demanded a 51% stake in all such ventures sponsored by foreign corporations. This year, 3M plans to expand operations.

It’s a global economy, all right. Chow says there’s no stopping capitalism now.

But, Carrel warns, China remains a special case. Capitalists may savor the thought of 1.1 billion new customers, but Carrel thinks of it as “that mystical, and I think mythical, Chinese market.”

Unless China’s ruling class allows real opportunity to flourish, unless workers share the wealth, who could afford the raisins?