by Paul Theroux
High art comes and goes in China, but kitsch is indestructible. In a dusty shop of a small town in rural Guangdong I had bought some Mao playing cards and Mao cassettes. Memories of Mao was playing on Mr. Li's tape deck, the tuneful "Dong Fang Hong"
The East is Red!
The sun rises!
China produces Mao Zedong!
We passed two men on a big red 350cc joint-venture Wuyang-Honda motorcycle, and the man on the rear seat was yakking wildly on a cellular phone, making a deal without a helmet at seventy miles an hour. Gunning his engine, Mr. Li was happy. Everywhere I looked, I saw ruined hills and abandoned paddy fields and bamboo scaffolding where just months before there had been bamboo groves. There was nothing notable here, only freshly robbed graves—one of the recent growth industries in rural China; smuggled burial artifacts sell for good prices in Hong Kong—and the odd forlorn pagoda, seemingly flummoxed in its feng shui and almost certainly doomed. Nothing ancient, nothing notable, no "sights," nothing but new brown crumbly factories and tenements rising from the filled-in rice fields.
Mr. Li drove erratically, leaning on his horn, and only hunger made him slow down, which he did at a medium-sized town by the shores of a stagnant lake. And as though guiding himself by his sense of smell, he was soon parked in front of a hotel restaurant, where we were joined by Miss Ma, who was to escort us to a local factory.
"I did not order these ji jao," I said when our dishes began arriving at the table. Two plates of deep-fried chicken feet sat steaming in front of me.
"The driver likes them," Miss Ma said. "And, um—"
She hesitated. She had something more to say and was trying to find words for it; at this stage we hardly knew each other. Then she risked her correction.
"They are not ji jao," she said. "We call them fengjao"
"Phoenix feet?"
"It sounds nicer," she said.
Mr. Li was tonging chicken feet into his mouth and humming snatches of "Dong Fang Hong." As I paid the bill, I was thinking: It's quicker this way! The East is Red! The driver likes them! Phoenix feet!
After snoozing for two hours in his car in the parking lot while I interrogated the factory workers, Mr. Li woke, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and glanced at his watch at the same time. Then he demanded 200 yuan (a month's salary for most factory workers). It was a tip, he said, yawning, for working overtime.
Not long ago it was Red China. For those of us who grew up in the 1950s, it was a forbidden place, like a throwback to the much older China of the Middle Kingdom, ruled by the Celestial Emperor, the Son of Heaven, who demanded the kowtowing of outsiders. These days we are colloquially termed gweilos, "ghost men" (Mr. Li would have used that word when referring to me; "foreign friend" is now just prissy bureaucratese). But in those other, darker days we were serious gweilos. In 1956, the now forgotten American doctor Tom Dooley wrote with feeling from his little hospital in Laos, "I am at the rim of Red Hell." That just about summed up China's image as a nightmarish dictatorship, where persecution and torture and slave labor were commonplace. And Mao—arrogant, ruthless, serene—was the emperor. Mao's various campaigns of the 1950s and early 1960s—Religious Reform, Hundred Flowers (and its aftermath), Anti-Rightist, Great Leap Forward—were seen from the outside as nameless and indiscriminate witchhunts.
To a great extent, witch-hunts are what they were, though it was only after the trauma of the Cultural Revolution that the Chinese bared their souls to the outer world. Now we have extensive proof (but with an inevitable bias) of the convulsions of their Maoist history. Until recently, Chinese life was not so much enigmatic as unknown. We did not have a clear perception of Chinese stubbornness, tenacity, and materialism; the Chinese lack of illusions; their strong sense of family; their powerful survival instinct; their hatred of complainers; their passion for secrecy. More than any people I have ever come across, the Chinese are obsessive about living in the present. They don't look back, because in the strange interplay of light and shadow, splendor and misery, of their history, there is too much to look back upon—and so it is fatal to be sentimental, they seem to say. Chinese life has a kind of peristalsis: it is both active and hesitant, like a creature being pursued, now in motion, now stopped and tremulous, never at rest, always alert.
The Chinese clock has a tick unlike any other on earth, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, contracting, expanding, with an alarm that might go off at any moment. We Americans expect tomorrow to be pretty much like today, and perhaps a little better. We find it inexplicable that a people perpetually anticipate disasters. But, then, six thousand years of disasters have made the Chinese skeptical and somewhat mistrustful. These days everyone speaks of the Chinese miracle, but when has the world taken much notice of Chinese catastrophes, of which the Japanese rape and plunder of China before and during World War II and the earthquake (8.2 on the Richter scale) that instantly killed a quarter of a million Chinese in 1976 are but two instances?
Undeluded by the hubris or presumption that burdens European nations or the Third World, the Chinese know that their destiny is in their hands alone. They cannot count on the future, since "future" in Chinese terms might mean a brutal decree or sudden reversal enacted in the dark hours of tomorrow morning. There might be a tomorrow, but they don't bank on it, because what they are doing now was illegal yesterday, and might be proscribed once again. Understanding the uniqueness of the Chinese clock, you begin to get an inkling of Chinese hope, and the attentiveness of Chinese labor. Their sense of survival is not a racial but a political imperative. Chinese life is full of instances of people who lingered and looked back and were lost, overwhelmed and buried by one avalanche or another in their unpredictable history. The Chinese take each day as it comes, and they hope for good times, but they always prepare for the worst. After what has happened to them, who can blame them?
We know that the turbulence of the sixties in the West, which started as a celebration of peace and love, turned into a much uglier revolt a few years later. It is my own feeling that Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, begun in 1966, had an enormous influence worldwide, particularly in Europe and the United States. Its anti-imperialism was a statement against the Vietnam War, and its assault on authority, which gave it its greatest ferocity, was a feeling that was shared outside China. The essence of the Cultural Revolution was outrage. All the canting about the "generation gap" was also Red Guard guff, and it justified and put into words the anger and sense of alienation many of us felt as despised student activists.
Many of the sixties protesters in the United States and Western Europe naively identified with the Red Guards, and like their howling at "the five black categories"—landlords, capitalists, revisionists, counterrevolutionaries, and criminals—the campus foot soldiers and radicals were for the most part pimply students shrieking at teachers and elders.
Mao raised the political consciousness of the world by giving revolution simple slogans and a distinctive style. In East Africa, where I was living in the late sixties, many politicians affected Mao jackets—not just the opposition leader Oginga Odinga of Kenya, but charismatic would-be statesmen such as Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and fairly respectable tyrants such as Milton Obote of Uganda. To a large extent, it was their way of taunting American officials and aid agencies and making them feel insecure.
(Later, in the 1970s, the Chinese officially admitted that the Cultural Revolution had been a mistake. But what no one seems to have ascertained is what an unmitigated disaster it was for the African countries that bought it wholesale. Numerous countries in sub-Saharan Africa organized their political parties and their economies around the slogans "Serve the people," "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," "Reactionaries are paper tigers," and so forth. The Soviet Union always had more client states in Africa than China did, but China tended to get a stronger grip on those countries it patronized. Tanzania was one that went bankrupt, politically and economically, because it had become possessed by China at the time
of the Cultural Revolution.)
I had to wait until 1980 to visit China, but it was an interesting time because of the power struggle going on between Maoists led by Hua Guofeng and reformers led by Deng Xiaoping. Hua was in power, and his portrait was displayed everywhere with that of his benefactor—Hua's cheek by Mao's jowl. China then was all struggle, people in blue suits and cloth slippers, riding bicycles down muddy streets, workers going blind in poorly lighted factories, waiters refusing tips and chanting "Serve the people!" The only bright colors were the ribbons the more daring women and girls wore in their hair.
Near Canton, I visited a Maoist model commune called Da Li. It was like a good-natured prison of reluctant sloganeers and suppressed ambitions—seventy-one thousand people working the land (six thousand acres of rice fields) and making Whistling Cicada Brand firecrackers. Da Li seemed at once appalling and wonderful for its unity and its innocence. Every job was carried out with crude tools and a great spirit. It was a society of intimidating and ingenious frugality where everything was mended—shoes, clothes, vehicles. The Chinese were poor but their cleverness made them seem indestructible. I wrote in my notebook, "This is the highest stage of poverty."
I found it admirable, but also sad and strange, and that month in China killed my desire to see anything more. Meanwhile, my brother Eugene, a Washington lawyer, was doing business in China, and the deals were growing larger and less affected by ideology. In the mid-seventies, the Chinese had refused to make Muhammad Ali boxing gloves, because the boxer's signature and the company name smacked of (they used the word) imperialism. Nor would they make shoes with foreign labels. It was a matter of ideology as well as pride. "Flying Pigeon Brand" was all right, but not "Wilson." Within a few years they had signed a joint-venture agreement to make Reeboks, and soon were themselves wearing—not Reeboks, but (a sign of things to come) a knockoff variety of sport shoes. Blue cotton quilted jackets gave way to nylon parkas and sneakers. Appearances are important in China, especially when they assert individuality, and this new eighties way of dressing—women had begun to wear skirts, some men wore ties—looked like defiance. My brother said that the country was becoming prosperous. This I found hard to believe.
And so in the spring of 1986 I made another visit to China, taking the train from London through West and East Germany, socialist Poland, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of Mongolia—all of them gone now. Astonished by the changes and new attitudes—the communes either closed or transformed (that charade over), the rice fields buried, the people turned loose to find employment at large—I decided to stay in China and write about it. Later that year, student demonstrations erupted in most of the large Chinese cities. Shanghai was shut down for two days. No one outside China took any notice. It is wonderful to travel in an unknown and changing land, and even better to write about it.
"We had no idea this was going to happen," an American diplomat said to me in 1987. "And so we have no idea of what is coming next."
Greater prosperity came next, a looser economy, more free markets and foreign teachers and wider travel by Chinese, then more demonstrations in 1986, peaceful ones, and finally the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
That was the end of student protest and the death of public idealism or any altruism. Tiananmen was the last hoarse cry of "Serve the people." It was also the beginning of a sort of stubborn, intense, but highly personal industry. Now it was every man for himself—everyone worked either to save money and live better or else to emigrate.
Considering another trip to China, to verify these changes, I spoke to a lawyer in Hong Kong.
"It's a feeding frenzy," he said, with what seemed real emotion.
If so, it was something I did not want to miss, because I knew that it would be years before I would read about it in a book.
In my travels around the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, I saw that roads are being built so fast, in so many new directions, no maps are accurate. The guidebooks cannot keep up with the hotels and restaurants that have opened—every guidebook is out-of-date. So are telephone directories and company listings. The Special Economic Zones have exploded—Shenzhen has grown in ten years from a village of three thousand people to a city of three million. So have other towns, little ones I saw in remote places, townships and industrial areas, all of them under construction—kindly jump that ditch, watch that manhole, take your shoes off and wade to the sidewalk, ignore the film of dirt, pay no attention to those cruel policemen and that truckload of men being paraded around Guangzhou prior to their execution, turn your back on those choruses from The Sound of Mucus...
This turbulence—unfinished China, grubby prosperity—makes it terra incognita, and there is no better place for a traveler than a land outside the ken of guidebooks, beyond the reach of maps, where only local knowledge matters, and word of mouth is everything.
The old cycle of Cathay is traditionally sixty years, but that is too generous a figure. China seems to experience a serious and sudden convulsion every ten years or so, during which it reinvents itself. For the past fifty years, books have appeared with the words "The New China" in a title or subtitle. In fact, China is too vast, too changeable a world to be summed up. It needs to be explored.
Hundreds of articles have been written about China's new prosperity. I have read some of them; they were obsolete by the time they had been printed. This place simply did not exist before. Phenomenal is the perfect word for it.
The Man Who Came Back from the Dead
In a simplified history, China's prosperity may be charted by the rise of Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao had long ago sniffed out as a "capitalist roader." Later, Deng was described with more elaborate scorn as "an arch unrepentent capitalist roader and harbinger of the right deviationist wind."
Yet this early comrade-in-arms of Mao's is someone who, politically speaking, came back from the dead—and not once but three times. Born in Sichuan in 1904, the son of well-to-do landlords, Deng left school in 1920 and at a fairly tender age went to Paris. For the next six years he studied, debated the future of China, and made such important friends as Zhou Enlai, himself from a privileged background. This friendship lasted until Zhou's death. Returning to the chaotic China of warlords and factionalism of the 1920s, Deng joined the Communist Party and was a fellow sufferer with Mao and others on the Long March (1934–35). Deng's intellectual alliance with Zhou, who remained his apologist on the Politburo, distanced him from Mao, who held Deng and Zhou in the contempt he reserved for dilettantes or those he did not regard as Red enough. In any case, China in the thirties and forties needed mass organizers and military strategists, and so in the early stages of the Chinese revolution Mao was more inclined toward comrades such as Lin Biao, whose military tactics against the Japanese had proven ingenious and successful.
Yet there is a parallel, behind-the-scenes history of modern China in which the leader in the people's hearts is not Mao but Zhou Enlai. In this secret history, a conniving Deng and Liu Shaoqi are important subsidiary figures, while in the foreground Mao, Lin Biao, and the people we know as the Gang of Four think of ways to get rid of them. Zhou put forward his idea of the Four Modernizations (National Defense, Science and Technology, Industry, Agriculture) in 1964, but this accomplished little except to alienate him from Mao. Distrusting Deng and Liu Shaoqi for their criticism of the various radical campaigns of the fifties, Mao chose Lin Biao as his successor. It was Lin who compiled and published in the millions the Little Red Book of Mao's sayings.
One of the many goals of the Cultural Revolution was to rusticate the bureaucrats and "class traitors," sweep aside such bourgeois notions as modernizing, and take the starch out of the people who had become known as revisionists and capitalist roaders. Deng was put under house arrest, Zhou too was in seclusion, Liu was imprisoned (he later died under torture), and Liu's wife, Wang Guangmei, was put on trial and "struggled" by Red Guards (one of her crimes was putting on makeup and wearing a pretty dress). One of Deng's sons
, Deng Pufeng, was "airplaned"—held hand and foot and chucked out of a window (he is still in a wheelchair). At the end of the Cultural Revolution, Deng might have looked dead, but he was only sleeping.
After the death of Zhou Enlai in 1976, an event that provoked greater grief and more intense emotion in China than the death of Mao earlier that same year, Deng was purged by the Gang of Four. But he was to have his revenge, for a month after Mao's death the Gang of Four were arrested for conspiracy. They were blamed for, among many other things, the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, and Deng was reinstated in the Party and given back all his posts by the Eleventh National Party Congress in 1977. In order to get his way, Deng had somehow to overcome the old "leftists" and hard-line Maoists in the Party. First he rehabilitated the victims of the Cultural Revolution, and one of the more celebrated ones was Liu Shaoqi. From the shadows (because he made a virtue of being invisible), Deng then dealt with Hua Guofeng, Mao's chosen successor. ("With you in command, I am at peace," the old man is said to have written to Hua.) Deng eroded Hua's influence and promoted the program that Zhou had put forward in 1964 and 1975, the Four Modernizations, at this point political shorthand for "the capitalist road." In 1979 and 1980 Deng consolidated his power, even as Hua's portrait was hanging all over China. He put his friends and like-minded associates, his bridge partners and hatchet men, in key posts.
