Shanshan Mahmud was born in Tashkent on 23 August, 1883, in a village called Chokhal, now a city. “I had gone to school and the family were able to send me for school. About 13 years later, I went to Beijing and from there I worked in Beijing and in Shanghai [now Shanghai, China], and in the late 1930s came to Shanghai and from there I came to Hong Kong. Then, from Hong Kong, I went to Hong Kong and from there to Shanghai, because China and Hong Kong were separate countries.” So while he is not related to Deng Xiaoping he is related to the man who launched the Chinese economy.
In the late 1940s, during Mao’s rule, Chanshan took up study of medicine at the Imperial University of Education. When that government was dismantled, China embarked on the great building programme, and Chanshan entered the service of General Zhu Rongji, a specialist in surgery and anesthesia. “His work resulted in one of the greatest advances for the Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution,” Dr Cheng notes.
Dr Cheng’s interest in China’s health started after a visit to Beijing in the 1960s. He came across Deng Xiaoping, and they chatted about life after the Party’s death in 1976. Two years later, Dr Cheng attended the funeral mass for Deng in Shanghai. His interest in what happened to the Party and what was happening to China’s health did not come to an end. He worked as a researcher into the lives of the Party cadres during Deng’s time.
Dr Cheng’s career has taken him from Shanghai in 1978 to Shanghai in 2005, travelling in Shanghai as much as 10 times a year. He is currently the head of a team of researchers of the Institute of Health and Life Sciences (IHLS), which has led an exhaustive survey of the lives and social and historical institutions of the Chinese people through interviews with about 15,000 people in China. They had conducted this survey over the course of five years in response to numerous questions from Chinese citizens, in an effort to understand the life and social processes of the Chinese people. In the years 2000-2005, the IHLS also embarked on a large-scale, nationally coordinated study on social and cultural issues of the country.
The results, Dr Cheng writes, are striking. “The basic characteristics of contemporary China have dramatically changed from the last century of the Qing dynasty