by Paul Theroux
For this he was paid 200 yuan, or $35, a month. This was not exceptional—in fact, many of the rural people who had come to Huizhou would have settled for that sort of job.
"See that man?" Mel said to me as I was leaving.
A dapper Chinese man in a well-cut suit, his hair fashionably permed, was picking his way across the cobbles of the courtyard in narrow shiny shoes. He was in his thirties, the sort of man I imagined I would be seeing in large numbers when I set off for China, the new executive—little man, big Rolex. After traveling around for a while, I had seen enough of them to realize I had lost interest in such people, because they were the exception. I was more interested in daily life as it was being borne by the majority of people—workers, gardeners, market vendors—and the changing configurations of the landscape.
Still, this man was unavoidable. He was a client from Shanghai, come to sign a contract for an order. When the man was out of earshot, on his tour of the factory, Mel whispered to me, "He has a check in his pocket for me, made out for one million renminbi. That's the down payment. His order is two and a half million."
There was another man in the courtyard, a cripple, and his body was so twisted and misshapen he could move only by occasionally touching the ground with his free hand, straining with his serious face. But he was tidy, and his clothes were clean. He made his way crabwise through the gate to the porcelain factory next door.
"When I think the world's against me and I'm feeling sorry for myself, I look at him and I realize I don't have it so bad," Mel said. "I've been looking at him for four years. I have never heard him complain."
On the Correct Handling of Contradiction Among the People
I happened to be present when an American manager in his company's plant in Guangdong innocently asked an old China hand, "So how do they choose their leaders in China, anyway?"
"You are used to leaders' being chosen from the outside and below" was the reply. "In China they choose them from the inside, from above."
"Oh, I see," the American manager said, and went back to work.
But he did not see anything. A kind of moral blindness afflicts many people who do business with the Chinese, since—along with everything else—China is still a dictatorship of pitiful wages, fairly miserable living conditions, with a brutal legal system, and still practicing such quaint customs as convict labor, child labor, and mass (and often public) executions. Most people engaged in trade with the Chinese are so besotted by their profits that they could not care less about any of this. When the British pharmaceutical firm Glaxo perceived a need for antiasthma medicine, they set up a $10 million factory in a joint venture, choosing an appropriate city, Chongqing, where the air quality is eight times worse than normal. Glaxo produces the world's leading antiasthma medicine, Ventolin, which it sells in a pressurized inhaler in the Chinese domestic market.
"With thirty million asthmatics in China, Chongqing Glaxo will have ready customers for a long while," a company employee explained when I asked why that particular product was being manufactured. In less than two years, the Chinese Glaxo operation has grown larger than the one in Hong Kong.
China is about as far from a democracy as it is possible to be. Many people contend that China's authoritarianism is the reason for its success and its recent wave of prosperity. In other words, that the Chinese government has a firm grip on things. But Chinese authority is actually a loose and baggy monster. More likely it is the absence of government control that has been crucial to success. Chinese workers and entrepreneurs did not need political guidance, they needed permission and—after such a turbulent recent history—especially a firm assurance that they would not be accused of being traitors, class enemies, capitalist roaders, and spies if they made deals with foreign companies. Prosperity was a sure thing, Chinese sources told me, when it became politically safe to transact business.
Even as recently as the mid-1970s, manufacturing foreign merchandise was the moral equivalent of sleeping with the enemy. After all, Mao had envisaged a self-sufficient China with a vast population, a classless society in which money was irrelevant. Ultimately, the whole world would be revolutionized in this way, and from time to time purges would be necessary. These would be very violent, for, as the old man was fond of saying, "a revolution is not a dinner party." In all this, the hard thing for the Chinese has been in knowing when to stop.
China has evolved quite differently from anything that Mao (or anyone else) envisaged. When Mao's widow, Jiang Qing, was on trial she was apoplectic in denouncing the power structure and the direction China had taken. She was given a death sentence, but with true Chinese ambiguity it was changed to life imprisonment. She never stopped howling about betrayal throughout her incarceration, and eventually she died in prison.
Although China accounts for one quarter of the world's population—many voices, you might say—public opinion hardly exists. From 1949 until the present, all the political changes have come about by internal wrangling. No Chinese leader has deliberately tried to please the people, although there have been many instances of famine-by-blunder, natural disasters, and political abuse.
As Americans, we are used to our government caring about us and responding to our frustrations, but the Chinese people are happiest when they are ignored. Left to their own devices, they manage quite well, and of course they are now in the unique position of having every businessman and his brother wooing them. They were watched and manipulated, socially and politically engineered from Liberation onward. They may have needed a degree of unity, but they did not need a lifelong course in Maoist doctrine. Yet even the thorough indoctrination they received did not dehumanize them or make them less fond of their families or less reverent toward their ancestors.
In China all appearances are deceptive.
One of Mao's most interesting essays is called "On the Correct Handling of Contradiction Among the People." It deals with unity and harmony. Mao writes, "As for the imperialistic countries, we should unite with their peoples and strive to coexist peacefully with those countries, do business with them and prevent any possible war, but under no circumstances should we harbor any unrealistic notions about them." A few pages later, he goes on, "We must learn to look at problems all-sidedly, seeing the reverse as well as the obverse side of things. In given conditions, a bad thing can lead to good results, and a good thing to bad results."
The wealthy people are not those spivs yakking on cellular phones or sporting designer clothes. The millionaires are invisible. If anything, the cities look worse than they ever did—more crowded and chaotic and far less comfortable than ten or fifteen years ago. The gardens and parks are a mess, people's manners generally are aggressive and their attitudes insufferable. The physical fabric of China (in what one presumes is this transitional stage) is in tatters. Strangely, this is progress.
***
Ever since arriving back in the People's Republic, I had had a sense of this new prosperous, overcrowded, and in-your-face China as being much more like old China than the period dominated by Mao's selfless mottoes of anti-capitalism. "Serve the people" had penetrated daily life so completely that waiters were offended by tips and doors were never locked. In those days people liked wearing old clothes, I was told. There was a fetish for blue boiler suits and work clothes, and patches were like badges of honor. That had lasted roughly thirty years, from Liberation until Deng Xiaoping's last comeback, when he declared his open door policy.
In my mental stereotype old China was an ugly landscape of factories and farms, expatriates and competing crowds, back streets ringing with the hammers of tinsmiths, and vast cities of tycoons, prostitutes, beggars, hawkers, hustlers, and peasants—furious activity, everything for sale, clogged lanes and markets piled high with produce, and an intensely competitive commercial life. Factories turning out crystal goblets and sweatshops making shirts. Except for the occasional intrusion of police, life went on, and politics was a novelty and a nuisance that no one liked but everyone tolerated.
Old China was not a tourist destination. And yet what looked at a distance like the chaos and anarchy of sweatshops, missionaries, compradors, deals, and dirt, was, close up, meticulous order.
I had that impression in many places in south China, the ones that had grown in four or five years from being landing stages on tributaries of the Pearl River, like the East River, to the size of proper towns. These settlements were like ones in the big and bustling old China. That was their appearance, but it was contradicted by a tougher reality. Why be sentimental? seemed to be the Chinese attitude now. Why trust another leader? This was a pushing and shoving China that had learned its Maoist lesson of self-reliance and survival, and rejected the rest of Maoist altruism. Because of the hardships and unpredictable events of the Maoist years, people had developed sharp elbows and an instinct to snatch what they could while the time was right.
In 1989 the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square had demanded the removal of Premier Li Peng. But it was the demonstrators who were removed. Li Peng remains a sloganeer, and the best translation of "Zhua zhu shi!," his exhortation at the National People's Congress in March 1993, is "Seize the day!"
Now he is preaching to the converted. Mao had wanted to create a population of revolutionaries, but his campaigns and purges were more like aversion therapy. What emerged from the age of Mao was a vast army of reactionaries and opportunists. Mao's greatest success, though he may not have realized it, was in turning his people into single-minded materialists. Ideologically speaking, the Long March has taken a right turn down the capitalist road.
Does it matter financially whether China continues to be accorded most-favored-nation status by the Clinton administration? Not in the short term. What the Chinese especially crave—something that is bestowed by MFN status—is an appearance of respectability, because the Chinese hierarchy is eager to host the next Olympic games. To this end, the Chinese have performed political and ideological somersaults such as exchanging ambassadors with Israel, a country it vilified until it discovered a mutually beneficial interest in the international arms trade. It is of no consequence to the Chinese that the Olympics is largely a pantomime world war of nationalistic athletes; the games are worth money in the marketing of TV rights—and the games have more to do with business than sports. They also encourage investment. And in a profound sense any country hosting the Olympics can claim to be upholding the lofty Olympic ideals. The Chinese will do almost anything, it seems, for the sake of respectability, except tolerate dissenters. In this they have the world's connivance, because every country buys Chinese.
There is a high price for the current wave of prosperity in China. It has both human and environmental implications. With the growth in industrial output, factory pollution in China has become horrendous, with the sludgiest rivers and in some cities the worst air quality to be found on earth. Beijing has an annual water crisis. Flooding is commonplace in south China, and with the building boom, the destruction of paddy fields, and deforestation, the problem gets worse every year. Some ecologists have singled out China for its insensitivity in killing and cooking various rare animals.
The Chinese could have written the Endangered Species Cookbook. Certainly, killing tigers for the rejuvenating powers of their blood and bones, slaughtering elephants for their ivory and rhinos for their horns, and stuffing themselves with owls, turtles, herons, snakes, and the celebrated Heilongjiang dish of bear's paw seem diabolical in this green age. These habits have less to do with prosperity than with a tradition that holds that food is pharmacopoeia, and this insensitive gobbling will be modified by—if nothing else—the disappearance of these species. The floods, the droughts, the cutting of old-growth forests, the pollution—these are in the long run more destructive than the eating of monkey brains and moose noses.
Crime—another price the Chinese are paying for their new wealth—is unprecedented. Explicating Chinese punishment, even the paltry statistics that are officially published, reveals that Chinese crime is pervasive and takes all forms.
Seeing no policemen on duty after five o'clock in the town of Huizhou (as Mel Dickinson had foretold), I asked various people about the crime rate. They all said yes, it's terrible, it's these outsiders, young boys mostly, no respect. I asked elsewhere, but no one liked discussing this subject with a da bidze ("big nose"), and who could blame them? Two interesting points emerged, though. The people said that many of the thieves carried weapons. This was alarming. Armed robbery was always a capital offense in China. And everyone I spoke to was in favor of the death penalty—for murder, for robbery, for arson, for pimping, you name it. But this was not a topic for idle conversation. With the growth in prosperity and reform, there were more executions than ever, and in some cities crime was out of control, the police often accused of being in cahoots with the criminals.
I had had death-penalty conversations many times before in China. The Chinese response was still unanimous. Give the criminal a bullet in the neck. Let the victim's family watch the death throes, and make the criminal's family pay for the bullet.
One argument for the death penalty is that it deters crime. I happen to think this is a specious argument, and it is manifestly not the case in China, where the number of executions has risen—and so has the crime rate. In May 1993 Amnesty International reported, "Estimates from unofficial sources for the number of executions in 1991 range from 5,000 to 20,000. The escalating use of the death penalty in China since 1989 is apparently continuing: in the month of January, 1992, Amnesty International recorded 334 death sentences including over 200 executions."
When I challenged a more forthcoming Chinese man named Liu, he told me that people stole, and murdered, in spite of the death penalty "because they don't know the law."
"But the government publicizes the executions," I said. "They drive the condemned men around town in the back of a truck with signs around their necks. They put the dead people's pictures up at the railway station. How could they not know?"
"They are ignorant."
"But everyone in China knows that they will be executed for committing certain crimes," I said.
Mr. Liu said, "Some people feel it won't apply to them—that they will get off with a prison sentence."
Some time later, a young woman named Miss Ma said to me, "Many people in China do not value their lives. They don't regard their lives as precious, and therefore they're willing to take risks."
Hearing us talking, Mr. Li, the driver, said, "People must die if they break the law"—an odd sentiment from someone who, like my other drivers, spent most of his driving time on the wrong side of the road.
They both scoffed at the argument that executions ought to reduce crime. It was a good thing if that happened, but that was not the purpose.
"Not as a deterrent," Miss Ma said. "As a punishment. If you kill someone, you have no right to live."
What about the large numbers? I asked. Was it a matter of the Chinese adage "In order to correct a wrong, it is necessary to exceed the limits"?
"Perhaps."
Iran, China, and the United States were the countries most wedded to the idea of capital punishment, I said, and they had the highest body count. Also, a case could be made for the death penalty's making a country more savage, increasing the number of violent crimes.
The next day Mr. Li, who had clearly been thinking about this during the night, said, "You asked me why people go on committing crimes in China in spite of the death penalty."
"Yes, I don't get it."
"Tell me, then," he said, smirking, "why do Americans go on getting AIDS in spite of knowing that it will kill them?"
We were on the road to Shenzhen. Was it true, as I had heard—I asked Mr. Li—that the "yellow trade" (prostitution, gambling, pornography) flourished in Dongguan?
Mr. Li's answer was perfect: "All developed countries have such things."
I went to the market in Shenzhen with a friend of a friend, Mr. Lu, who told me, "I would much rather live here than in Hong Kong. I have
a larger apartment here than I would have in Hong Kong. Shenzhen is cleaner and better organized."
When I asked Mr. Lu about his family, he said, "They were very Red"—they had had power but no money, had never been landowners, and were Party members. So that meant their credentials were unassailable during the Cultural Revolution? Mr. Lu said this was true. I asked him whether he had been active himself—he was forty-eight, just the right age. He said yes. Had he been a Red Guard? He said yes.
"What was your unit?"
"Revolutionary Revolt—the Reddest," he said, and smiled, as though having been a member of this fanatical ultra-leftist unit had been a youthful indiscretion.
Mr. Lu had been teaching English in 1966, but after being subjected to intense self-criticism (essays, confessions, recitations), he had become a Red Guard. His unit fought regularly against other units, mostly chair throwing. The dispute: which unit was the truest guardian of Mao's thought. In 1969, Mr. Lu was chosen as a model Red Guard, having worked for a year at a milling machine—a lathe making parts for machine tools—in a factory in the countryside. Machine tools during the day, Marxist-Leninist study at night. He was selected to be a propagandist, traveling the country, galvanizing Red Guard units, and leading political pep rallies from Mongolia to Shanghai.
In his spare time he studied revolutions around the world. Then, when foreign visitors began arriving in the early seventies, Mr. Lu, whose English was now an asset, was appointed to take them around. Many were well known. John Kenneth Galbraith was one.
Time passed. Mao died in 1976, "of disappointment," Mr. Lu said, "because he had been betrayed by Lin Biao." Just after Deng took control, Mr. Lu was sent to study in the United States and Canada, and that experience, the sight of prosperity, transformed him. "It was the way people lived," he said. "I wanted that for us." Mr. Lu became a passionate reformer. In June 1989 he was at the barricades in Tiananmen Square.
