by Linda Jaivin
As Hou had discovered, it wasn’t quite that simple.
TIANANMEN
EVERY Heir of the Dragon knows to beware the Year of the Dragon. When the twelve-year zodiac cycle rolls around to the Chinese king of the beasts, the superstitious expect nothing but calamity and death. The previous dragon year, 1976, commenced with the demise of the popular Premier Zhou Enlai, progressed to the devastation of the Tangshan earthquake (250,000 dead) and culminated in the death of Mao Zedong. The fact that soon after Mao ‘met Marx’, more moderate factions in the party arrested the ‘Gang of Four’ and brought the Cultural Revolution to a close is ignored by those wishing to make a point about the danger of dragon years.
However you explained it, the mood in China in 1988 was one of social, economic and political confusion and instability. Chinese intellectuals even coined a term for it: ‘crisis consciousness’. While the economy had taken off like a rocket, growing at almost 12 per cent a year, so had inflation, which in some cities surged past twenty per cent. The population was spiralling out of control, the gap between rich and poor widening by the minute, corruption had reached epidemic proportions, the education system was falling apart, transport systems and irrigation works were collapsing, and even the army simmered with discontent.
One year after the launch of the anti-bourgelib campaign, the intellectual and cultural scene was also once more truly, madly, deeply out of control. Whereas just a generation earlier, ‘art and literature workers’ had to take very seriously Chairman Mao’s instructions on making art ‘serve the people’, many young artists, writers and musicians now increasingly referred to ideology only to parody it.
When Hou arrived in China in 1983, love was still a controversial topic for literature; by 1988, sex sometimes seemed the only topic at all. And it wasn’t just talk, either. Prostitutes brazenly cruised hotel lobbies and back streets, merrily spreading venereal diseases through a society which had boasted of their total eradication. Even university students wore outfits that would once have scandalised the performers of the Oriental Song and Dance Company. The best-selling novelist Wang Shuo captured the social ambience with his witty, gritty tales of bored youth, conmen, and good girls gone bad.
As if to vindicate the prophets of dragon-year doom, 1988 began with a few spectacular plane and train disasters and the death in Taiwan of President Chiang Ching-kuo. Many mainland intellectuals openly admired Chiang for the way he’d used his power to bring about democratic reform on the island. His death emboldened some to wonder aloud when the mainland might finally enjoy the rule of such an enlightened ‘new authoritarian’.
The ‘old authoritarian’ Chairman Mao, meanwhile, bit the dust. In May 1988, the statue of Mao that had dominated the campus of Beijing University for decades disappeared overnight, demolished without explanation. Mao was still officially revered, but the reinforced concrete ‘great red sun in our hearts’ no longer shone over the symbolic centre of Chinese intellectual life.
By April, dragon-year restlessness had infiltrated the universities. Disgusted by the corruption that had spread through all levels of the Party and government, fed up with the shabby living conditions in the dorms, appalled by the minuscule salaries given to educators, alarmed by the decay of rural education and frustrated by restrictions placed on study abroad, Beijing University students put up posters denouncing government education policies. An acerbic aphorism summed up the mood: ‘As stupid as a PhD, as poor a professor, as bad as a Communist.’
Since the government put so little value on intellectual labour, the students declared they’d be better off shining shoes. In an ironic demonstration, a group set up shoeshine stands in front of the Great Hall of the People, offering to polish the footwear of the deputies to the National People’s Congress. The dictatorship of the proletariat wasn’t famed for its sense of humour. Carting the protesters off, Public Security gave them a few days in gaol to meditate on their crimes.
Hou Dejian himself began 1988 in good form. For the first time since he’d arrived on the mainland, China’s Central Television invited him to appear on their Chinese New Year’s special, the most popular show of the year. It was the year of the dragon after all, and as Hou said to me, ‘they’d already had every other Zhang San and Li Si [Tom, Dick and Harry] from Taiwan on the show.’ In the past, Hou had declared he didn’t want to be a huaping, a vase, or ornament; now, he happily placed himself on the Party’s mantel. Chatting on screen with the show’s presenter, Hou proposed that the reason Chinese people liked dragons so much was that they were the only animal of the zodiac they’d created themselves.
After the show went to air, Hou received a slew of invitations to perform. ‘Suddenly, I could do anything,’ he told me, ‘arrange concerts, appear on TV, whatever I wanted. If, after a long absence, your name or face appears in the official media, even in the most neutral context, it’s like an official rehabilitation.’
Hou’s ‘rehab’ coincided with a further relaxation of official attitudes towards pop music. A national conference affirmed that pop was not just ‘an inevitable product of contemporary Chinese life’, but an ‘indispensable’ one as well. Its Long March across China could be traced from pop-song contests among the steel workers of Xinjiang to disco competitions held by the coal miners of Sichuan. Madonna truly became a household name and Michael Jackson’s Bad album sold everywhere under the Chinese title Zhen bang!—‘Really Great!’
Hou served as a judge for the first national pop song competition. He awarded scores completely different from those of the other judges. ‘Later, I heard people say there’d been two winners—the official one and mine. Lots of musicians,’ he told me smugly, ‘preferred mine.’ Wang Kun attended the ceremony and observers reported she appeared to find the encounter with Hou awkward.
The next time he and Wang Kun were in the same room together, it was a courtroom. Hou Dejian had decided to make his own contribution to the atmosphere of rebellion. As he told a Hong Kong reporter, ‘I hadn’t come to the mainland to fight the authorities, or sue anyone, or make revolution.’ But enough was enough.
The Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping promoted ‘rule by law, not by men’. The new civil laws of China guaranteed citizens the right to wealth and property acquired by legitimate means. No longer was the state allowed to confiscate private property at will, as in the days of Mao. State-run bookshops even carried manuals with titles like How to Take a Case to Court. Most people, however, remained wary. As the old saying went, ‘the magistrate’s doors are open wide, but if you’ve got more righteousness than money best stay outside’. There had been a growth in litigation, but only between citizens. No one had ever, successfully anyway, sued a ministry.
Hou was going to try. He contended that if the Ministry of Culture believed he owed it money, it ought to have used legal channels to recover it, not secret administrative fiats. He lodged a suit against the Nanhai Acoustics Company for the unlawful appropriation of his royalties. He wanted his money back, plus 36,000 yuan in interest and legal costs. The Foshan City Intermediate People’s Court accepted the case. Foshan, the home of Nanhai, was thirty kilometres from Guangzhou. The Ministry of Culture and the Oriental Song and Dance Company were named as co-defendants.
As one Hong Kong newspaper commented, despite Hou’s privileged lifestyle, he was ‘merely some cultural figure who’d moved to the mainland from Taiwan’. The editorial stated that the ‘social significance of Hou’s case is to have placed government and [state] enterprise under the jurisdiction of the law’.
From the outset, the press in the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan followed the progress of the case avidly. The outside media were particularly fascinated with the question of whether Wang Kun would attempt to influence the outcome.
An open letter to Hou in the Taiwan-backed Hong Kong Times showed that the Nationalists were still capable of making propaganda out of nearly everything he did. Composed in wry, semi-classical style, it commented, ‘That the Chinese Communists’ “Mi
nistry of Culture” hasn’t essayed to lay counter-charges of “bourgeois liberalisation” against you demonstrates that they’re being as magnanimous as they can be! And you still insist on fighting for royalties? You dare to bring a suit into the law courts? Where do you think you are, still in free and law-abiding Taiwan or possibly Hong Kong?’
To Hou Dejian, the issue was cut and dried. He’d signed a contract saying he would earn one yuan for every cassette sold. But the other side argued that at the time he made the album he was a member of the Oriental Song and Dance Company. They had a right to 70 per cent of any outside income of their employees, though they’d given Hou a special deal and only asked for 30. Hou’s agreement with Nanhai was not legally binding.
Wang Kun claimed that she and the three other singers featured on the album had taken a month off to do the recording and Hou had undertaken to compensate for the loss of income incurred as a result. She also alleged that Hou was supposed to repay the album’s production costs—about 200,000 yuan—and that he’d promised to put in a similar amount towards the Sound of the Orient studio, which, despite his pulling out from the project, they’d gone ahead with. She then threw in the bill for the amount of money that the company had lavished on Hou since his arrival in the mainland, including 50,000 yuan for refurbishing a flat in Beijing’s Tuanjiehu district. The company, in other words, had several separate claims on Hou’s money, none of which addressed the issue of whether they’d taken it from him legally.
Hou refuted each claim. He’d been assured by high Party officials that his after-tax earnings would be his own. If there were special rules for him, someone should have explained them to him from the start. If they’d done so, he’d have—to use one of his favourite expressions— ‘slapped my arse and galloped in the opposite direction’. As for the company’s alleged loss of income, Hou contended that the recording took place over three days during a break in the performing season. The other singers stayed in Hong Kong for fun, and Hou gave them spending money out of his own pocket. He had the receipts proving he’d paid the ministry back for the costs of the album’s production. Besides, the ministry had earned 335,840 yuan (US$92,000) from the album to date. As for his ‘drain’ on company resources, he wondered if Wang Kun considered the benefits he’d brought the company by appearing in its concerts. He’d never wanted, lived in or even seen the Tuanjiehu apartment. The 250 renminbi (US$68) monthly salary wasn’t enough to keep him in cigarettes—and, he pointed out, he’d never collected it.
Hou was particularly annoyed by the allegation that he’d been a drain on public resources. He was the only Taiwan defector to have ever paid back all the money given to him from the public coffers— even the cost of his original plane ticket to Beijing.
As for the promise of 200,000 yuan for the studio, that had been made on the assumption he’d be running the thing. ‘My relationship with the Oriental Song and Dance Company,’ Hou wrote irritably in his diary, ‘was only supposed to be a temporary, transitional one, not life indenture.’
The key legal point on which the case turned was whether the ministry had the right to order Nanhai to hand over the funds. As this involved defining the legal limits of bureaucratic action, it had implications far wider than just this case.
The case also highlighted the problem of artists’ changing relationship with government organisations in the entrepreneurial age. If Hou wasn’t entitled to his outside earnings, then what of film or theatre actors who took advertising contracts on the side, or state-subsidised artists who sold paintings to private collectors, or even teachers who were forced to hawk hard-boiled ‘tea eggs’ in the evenings to supplement their tiny salaries?
The Oriental Song and Dance Company could cite state council documents and Ministry of Culture regulations to support their case. But what was the legal status of such regulations? Government bodies in China weren’t used to the idea that they’d be held accountable to the law—in the Kafka-esque reality of the Communist state, they had always been the law.
Hou, left, in the Foshan courtroom, 27 April 1988. ‘If someone had told me there were special rules for me, I’d have slapped my arse and galloped in the opposite direction.’
The case opened at 9.30 a.m. on 27 April 1988 in Foshan, in a courtroom packed with legal scholars and mainland and Hong Kong journalists. Never before had a civil case attracted so much media and scholarly interest in China.
Hou sat on the left with his lawyer, Ms Huang Huilian. They faced a panel of four judges seated behind another desk, two men, two women, dressed in matching green uniforms and caps. To Hou’s right was the table for the principal defendant and, behind that, smaller ones for the company and ministry’s representatives. Wang Kun was present, but the ministry’s bench was empty.
To a buzz of disappointment, the chief justice announced that because of the co-defendant’s unexplained absence, the court would adjourn for one month. The press scrambled to interview Hou, photographers elbowing television cameramen out of the way, and Hong Kong reporters competing with their mainland colleagues for Hou’s attention.
Hou talking to the press after the case’s adjournment: never had Foshan seen so much excitement.
Suddenly a representative of the provincial Journalists Association rushed in, clapped for attention and announced that Wang Kun was holding a press conference at the local cultural centre. The herd of hacks stampeded out of the door. A local remarked that Foshan had never seen so much excitement.
At Wang’s press conference, a reporter asked why she hadn’t gone through legal channels to solve the problem. ‘We’ve already got the 200,000 yuan,’ she replied candidly. ‘Why bother?’ The assistant company director added that the reporters seemed to ‘think that every problem must have a legal resolution. But in this China of ours, not everything can be resolved through legal channels.’
Hou was enormously pleased with himself for having created such a stir. ‘I’m a bit of a troublemaker,’ he told reporters, ‘so I’m bound to have setbacks. Compared with what most Chinese intellectuals have been through these past thirty years, of course, it’s nothing. I like the situation I’m in at the moment. My feet are planted firmly in reality and I’m experiencing life with everyone else.’
With everyone else, perhaps, but not exactly like everyone else.
While waiting for the next session, Hou crossed the border to Hong Kong to pick up a few things. His shopping list included high-heeled shoes, a jacket and stage outfits for Cheng Lin, new glasses for himself, guitars, picks and strings—and a HK$250,000 (US$37,700) custom-fitted Mercedes Benz. The ‘pajett red’ 230E sedan with soft leather interiors the colour of caffe latte was to be an anniversary gift to Cheng Lin.
‘“Poor” singer comes shopping here for a Mercedes’ read the mocking headline in the English-language Hong Kong Standard.
Visiting the pair in Guangzhou soon afterwards, Geremie reported, ‘Cheng’s spending all of her time arranging the dozens of documents required for it to move to Peking…It’s not a bright red—“That would make it look like a taxi!” she cried—but a burgundy. Very elegant. She can barely see over the dash, & loves playing with the gadgets: automatic headrests, seats, etc, etc.’
In recent years, high officials in Beijing had infamously traded in their home-made Red Flag limos for Benzes, usually black models with tinted windows, like those of gangsters. When Hou shipped his flash model up to Beijing, he became the first private individual to own and drive a brand-new Benz in the capital (Huang Zhicheng’s was, after all, second hand). It was for him an act of glorious, in-your-face consumption.
The judges announced another delay. China’s Supreme People’s Court had ordered that all the documents be sent to Beijing for their perusal; the court officials were to go north as well to discuss the case with the judges of the higher court. When the Shenzhen Legal News tried to report on this, the editor received a phone call from ‘higher authorities’ warning him not to follow it up. Defiantly, the paper published a stor
y quoting a county judge as saying, ‘The facts of this case are very straightforward, and the legal aspects extremely clear. The amount of money in question is not particularly large. It is, therefore, a very ordinary and simple case. But the people involved are not ordinary or simple at all, and therefore the whole thing has become very complicated.’
On 20 June 1988, Wang Kun lodged a countersuit against Hou. She claimed that she had a recording of a conversation with him from three years earlier in which he’d affirmed that he owed the company 200,000 yuan. She required Hou to make up the final 4000 yuan and, if he refused, demanded that 70 per cent of future royalties from New Shoes, Old Shoes go to the company. She also wanted legal costs.
Hou composed a four-page, respectfully worded letter to Politburo member Qiao Shi, in which he expressed bewilderment at the court’s apparent reluctance to press on with the case. He quoted one of the judges as saying, ‘People at the highest levels have expressed interest in this case. There are times in China when power is greater than law.’ Hou knew how to play the game by now. He concluded his letter by saying, ‘I trust that as an overseas wanderer who has returned to the motherland, I will be looked after by the Party, and as one whose legal rights have been violated, I can count on your personal concern. I have faith that this matter will be solved in accord with both reason and the law.’
