River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  But this was a poetic turn of thought, and most people in Fuling couldn’t afford it. They didn’t have the time or interest to visit the White Crane Ridge, and they didn’t worry much about the relationship between man and nature. Often there were no other tourists on the ridge besides me, and the only time I ever saw a big crowd was the day I researched my story about the carvings, which was on a weekend during the Spring Festival holiday in 1998. Most people in Fuling had difficulty reading the inscriptions—the characters were of the traditional sort that had been simplified after Liberation, and all of the carvings followed the formal language that had been used by the Chinese intelligentsia before twentieth-century linguistic reforms. Even educated people often weren’t interested. If you wanted to see local history, it wasn’t necessary to go to the hassle of taking a boat—you could wander into the countryside and stumble upon Qing Dynasty tombs without even searching.

  I was impressed that the city sent so many caretakers out to the ridge, especially since many of these workers were well enough trained to answer almost any question about the carvings’ content and history. This was far more than I would have expected in a city with essentially no outside tourism, and at a historical site where often there weren’t any visitors at all. It wasn’t like America, where an empty and featureless late-Qing Dynasty battlefield might receive millions of dollars in funding, simply because some soldiers had fought and died there during a civil war. There was a great deal of history in China and if you protected all the ancient sites the people would have nowhere to grow their crops.

  The final government decision on the proposed underwater museum hadn’t yet been made, but approval seemed unlikely. The issue was sometimes covered in the Chongqing Evening Times, and this government-run newspaper was always careful to note that officials were also considering another option, which involved preserving the carvings by making a complete set of rubbings before the dam was built. To them, this would undoubtedly be the more practical solution—the region simply didn’t have the sort of resources necessary to build an underwater exhibition chamber, and the White Crane Ridge didn’t mean much to the average Fuling resident. It seemed most likely that the rubbings would be made and sent off to a distant museum, and then the flood would cover the ridge forever. Experts estimated that within ten years of the dam’s completion the silt and sand of the new reservoir would erase all twelve centuries’ worth of carvings.

  It didn’t surprise me that protecting the ridge wasn’t high on the list of local priorities, but it was more striking that people in Fuling seemed just as passive about the dam’s other issues, including resettlement. Apart from the downtown area, where the dike would be constructed, there were still large numbers of people who would be displaced by the new reservoir: the residents of lower East River, the peasants at the base of White Flat Mountain, and the people who lived on the lower slopes of Raise the Flag Mountain. They were called yimin—immigrants—and some of them would be moved to the new apartments that were being constructed behind our campus. This had originally been farmland, and the peasants whose fields had been taken for the construction project were compensated with discount prices on new apartments, as well as the choice between a government job and a cash settlement. The ones I spoke with had been offered six thousand yuan, and all of them had taken the cash—it was a lot of money in Fuling, a year’s wages at a decent salary. They were also provided with a living stipend of seventy yuan a month, and as far as they were concerned it was a sweet package. After all, the last decade had seen plenty of Chinese leave the countryside in search of city jobs, and it didn’t take a great deal of money to persuade a peasant not to be a peasant anymore. Every time I walked through the half-built complex I saw shops full of ex-peasants, playing mah-jongg and smoking Magnificent Sound cigarettes, waiting patiently for the day when the flood would drive their new neighbors up from the river’s banks.

  There were reports of immigrants who had not yet received their compensations, often because of corrupt officials who embezzled funds, which seemed to be a particularly serious problem in downriver cities like Wanxian. But even in these instances the most common reaction seemed to be one of quiet complaint rather than open protest. The truth is that the disruption of the dam, which seems massive to an outsider, is really nothing out of the ordinary when one considers recent history in the local context. Within the last fifty years, China has experienced Liberation, the radical (and disastrous) collectivization of the 1958–1961 Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and Reform and Opening.

  Fuling and the other Yangtze River towns have the additional experience of being a focal point of Mao Zedong’s Third Line Project, which had an especially large influence on the region during the 1960s. The early preparations for this project started in 1950, when Mao sent Deng Xiaoping to the southwest so he could research the feasibility of moving Shanghai’s military industry to remote mountain areas in Sichuan and Guizhou provinces. The American atomic bomb triggered this plan, as Mao became increasingly concerned that China’s heavily concentrated defense industry was too susceptible to a U.S. attack. The Korean War accelerated the project, and eventually three-quarters of China’s nuclear weapons plants were incorporated into the Third Line, as well as more than half of its aeronautics industry. The project was, as Harrison Salisbury describes it in his book The New Emperors, “something like that of picking up the whole of California’s high-tech industry and moving it bodily to the wilds of Montana as they existed, say, in 1880.”

  In comparison it seems a small matter to turn the river into a lake. Much of Fuling’s economy had originally come via the Third Line Project, which made the locals accustomed to massive changes. The local Hailing factory, which now produces combustion engines for civilian use, had formerly been a defense industry plant moved from Shanghai. A few miles upstream from Fuling is the Chuan Dong boat factory, which in the old days made parts for nuclear submarines. All of the local Chang’an-brand cabs—the name means Eternal Peace—are made by a Chongqing factory that originally produced firearms for the military.

  Many of the old Third Line factories had been converted in this way since Deng Xiaoping came to power and started dismantling the project in 1980. With China’s foreign relations rapidly improving, the American threat seemed less serious (and, in any case, it was clear that there wasn’t much protection in putting factories in places like Fuling). The Third Line had always been a huge drain on the economy; in some years as much as 50 percent of China’s capital budget was spent on the project. Never before had such a massive country reorganized its economy on such a scale—even Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan couldn’t compare—and according to some estimates, the Third Line did more damage to China’s economy than the Cultural Revolution.

  Despite its enormous scale, the project had been developed and dismantled in remarkable secrecy, as few locals in Fuling and the other Third Line towns ever had a clear notion of what was going on. They knew that commands were coming in from Beijing, and that these commands were bringing factories from Shanghai; and they also knew that all of this had a military sensitivity that required secrecy. It wasn’t something you asked questions about, and after four decades of that it seemed natural enough not to ask questions about the dam. These things just came and went—just as the Chuan Dong factory, which arrived to build nuclear submarines, was subsequently converted to a boat plant, and eventually would disappear forever beneath the waters of the new Yangtze.

  But even with all of this history in mind, I still found the lack of interest and concern about the dam to be remarkable. People were much better educated now than they had been in the past, and to some degree one would expect China’s historical disasters to provide lessons that prevented their blind repetition. Nevertheless, it seemed clear that the dam and the fate of the lowland immigrants were not the concern of the average citizen. Once Teacher Kong and I talked about the dam during class, and I asked if the coming changes worried him.

  “No,” h
e said, and I could see he thought it was a strange question.

  “Well, is anybody worried?”

  He thought for a moment. “If you’re an immigrant,” he said, “then maybe you’d be worried. But for most people it doesn’t make any difference.”

  The longer I lived in Fuling, the more I realized that this was a characteristic response. It was strange, because foreign newspapers routinely printed scathing reports on the project, and there were angry critics in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. But in Fuling, where the dam would affect the people directly, there was no sign of unhappiness. In the two years I lived there, I never heard a single resident complain about the Three Gorges Project, and I heard gripes about virtually every other sensitive subject.

  But there wasn’t a strong sense of community in Fuling, as remarks like Teacher Kong’s illustrated. Recent history had taught the people to be disengaged from public affairs, and this separation was compounded by a simple lack of awareness. Fuling residents didn’t have access to reliable information about important local issues, which, combined with the restrictions on public protest, made it difficult for citizens to be involved in any direct capacity. Most important, they neither expected nor demanded information of this sort.

  In my opinion, this disengagement was so complete that it couldn’t be blamed simply on post-Liberation patterns. The past fifty years had taught the people not to meddle in public affairs, but to some degree Communism merely built on the foundations of traditional Chinese collectivism, which had shaped social patterns for centuries. This characteristic can be difficult to define, especially with regard to its effects. My students often wrote about how the Chinese were collective-minded, which inspired them to help each other through Socialism, while the individualistic Americans followed the selfish road of Capitalism.

  I didn’t agree that our countries’ political differences were so neatly (and morally) explained by these contrasting attitudes toward the individual and the group. But I felt that the stereotype was more accurate with regard to close social networks of families and friends. The families I knew in Fuling were arguably closer than the average in America, because individual members were less self-centered. They were remarkably generous with each other, and often this selflessness extended to good friends, who were also drawn into tight social circles. Collective thought was particularly good for the elderly, who were much better cared for than in America. In Fuling I never saw older people abandoned in retirement homes; they almost always lived with their children, caring for grandchildren and doing what they could to help out around the family farm, business, or home. There was no question that their lives had more of a sense of purpose and routine than I had seen among the elderly at home.

  But such collectivism was limited to small groups, to families and close friends and danwei, or work units, and these tight social circles also acted as boundaries: they were exclusive as well as inclusive, and the average Fuling resident appeared to feel little identification with people outside of his well-known groups. In daily life I saw countless examples of this sort of thought. The most common was the hassle of ticket lines, which weren’t lines so much as piles, great pushing mobs in which every person fought forward with no concern for anybody else. It was a good example of collective thought, but not in the way my students said. Collectively the mobs had one single idea—that tickets must be purchased—but nothing else held them together, and so each individual made every effort to fulfill his personal goal as quickly as possible.

  Another striking example of this brand of collectivism involved the reaction to pickpockets on Fuling’s public buses. Once Adam was on a bus from East River and a shifty-looking passenger stepped off, and the person sitting next to Adam nudged his arm.

  “You should be careful,” he said. “That was a pickpocket.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before he got off?” Adam asked, but there was no answer other than a shrug. I saw the same thing happen a number of times, with people gesturing that I should watch my wallet, but never did they confront the thief. When I asked my students about this, they said that everybody knew there were pickpockets who worked the buses, but nobody did anything about it. According to my students, the people were afraid to resist, but it seemed there was more to it than that. As long as a pickpocket did not affect you personally, or affect somebody in your family, it was not your business. You might quietly alert the waiguoren, because he was a foreign guest, but even here you didn’t take any risks. Sometimes it was safest to warn him after the pickpocket had already left the bus.

  This same instinct led to the mobs that gathered around accident victims, staring passively but doing nothing to help. Crowds often formed in Fuling, but I rarely saw them act as a group motivated by any sort of moral sense. I had witnessed that far more often in individualistic America, where people wanted a community that served the individual, and as a result they sometimes looked at a victim and thought: I can imagine what that feels like, and so I will help. Certainly there is rubbernecking in America as well, but it was nothing compared to what I saw Fuling, where the average citizen seemed to react to a person in trouble by thinking: That is not my brother, or my friend, or anybody I know, and it is interesting to watch him suffer. When there were serious car accidents, people would rush over, shouting eagerly as they ran, “Sile meiyou? Sile meiyou?”—Is anybody dead? Is anybody dead?

  In the end, the divide between crowd and mob was extremely fragile in Fuling. Something would happen—an accident, or, more likely, a public argument—and a crowd would appear, gathering its own momentum, swollen by people with one simple reason for being there: something was happening. And occasionally the sheer weight of a mass of people behind this single idea was indeed enough to make something happen; an argument would escalate, driven by the audience, or somebody from the crowd would start to participate and spur the action on.

  I was both disturbed and fascinated by Fuling crowds, partly because they so often gathered around me. If I stumbled upon an argument or any other public event that had attracted a crowd, I invariably stopped to watch. But usually I watched the faces of the crowd rather than the actors themselves, and in their expressions it was hard to recognize anything other than that single eager observation: something was happening.

  FULING IS NOT THE ONLY PLACE IN CHINA where crowds have an edge, and countless writers, both Chinese and foreign, have remarked this tendency. Lu Xun, probably the greatest Chinese literary figure of the twentieth century, wrote with intense feeling and frustration about the pre-Communist tendency of the Chinese to ignore their fellow men in times of need. I recognized this same frustration in the writing of my own students, especially when they created stories about Robin Hood coming to China. Many of their tales featured Robin stealing from corrupt officials, but another common theme involved Robin acting in situations where the crowd was passive. One student wrote:

  One day, haunting the street, he [Robin Hood] espied a pickpocketer reaching for money. At the same time he noticed that people around the woman saw the pickpocketer’s deed, but what disappointed him was that no one stood out and prevented the young man. They pretended to see nothing….

  I was struck by how many stories described scenes of this sort, and always they continued with Robin coming to the aid of a person who was abandoned by the crowd—a victim of thieves, or somebody publicly beaten by bullies, or a person drowning in a river while the mob watched. To my students, this was the quintessential vision of true heroism, to act while the crowd did nothing, and their holding it up as the ideal suggested that it rarely happened in real life.

  I sensed that this was a small part of what contributed to the passivity with regard to the Three Gorges Project in Fuling. The vast majority of the people would not be directly affected by the coming changes, and so they weren’t concerned. Despite having large sections of the city scheduled to be flooded within the next decade, it wasn’t really a community issue, because there wasn’t a community as one would generall
y define it. There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland. And you could manipulate this fear and ignorance by telling people that the dam, even though it might destroy the river and the town, was of great importance to China.

  The dam was an issue for the people who were unfortunate enough to live along the banks, but even they weren’t likely to cause trouble. Like most Chinese, they had been toughened by their history, and this was especially true in a remote place like Fuling. All of the big changes that had ever touched the city came from somewhere else—the Taiping warriors had wandered in from the east, and the Kuomintang had come from Nanjing, and the Communist land reforms had been initiated in the north before working their way south to the river valley. The Third Line Project had come and gone, sweeping everything in its wake. In recent years, fancy new products had started making their way down the Yangtze from Chongqing, along with the legal changes that allowed the new free-market economics. Even waiguoren were now starting to appear on the streets of downtown Fuling. You accepted all of these developments and adjusted to them, because they weren’t under your control. It was like the Yangtze itself, which came from another place and went somewhere else. Someday in the future it would rise 130 feet, and you would cope with that as well. Once I asked a friend if there would be any problems associated with the river’s future rise, and, like Teacher Kong, he seemed surprised at the question. “Well,” he said at last, “the boats will all float, so they’ll be fine.”