Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  “I understand,” the minister said. The Maoist’s cell phone rang—it played “The Internationale.” He cut it off before the part about “the damned of the earth.”

  “We need to do something different in Namje,” Rajeev said. “Something unusual.”

  The minister promised to keep an eye on the project, and everybody shook hands. Rajeev and I went outside and caught a cab. He still had the three request letters, undelivered, and I asked if Tanka and the others would be upset.

  “They know me,” he said. “Tanka Sir is amused by things like this. It will be a story for him to tell: ‘We sent Rajeev in there with all these letters and he turned it around on us!’ ” The cabbie honked; we swerved through traffic, and Rajeev laughed: “He’s the one who says that politics is the dirty game.”

  Beach Summit

  My trouble with the police started at Lin Biao’s former mansion. It didn’t feel like a risky spot—the house was empty, and officially nothing was happening in Beidaihe. But everybody knew that the government had come to town. Beidaihe is a beach resort on the Bo Hai Sea, about two hundred miles east of Beijing, and officials had always gone there for vacation. Sometimes they went for work—each summer, the top Communist leaders met in Beidaihe and held secret conferences that helped determine the country’s direction. The domestic press never reported on these meetings until they were over, but I could see signs that important people were in town. Haitan Road, where a number of powerful cadres had summer villas, was closed to traffic. Police stood on virtually every street corner. Periodically, a group of black Mercedes sedans roared across town, escorted by cops with blaring sirens; the convoy swept through and left the streets quiet in its wake, like a sudden summer squall.

  It was 2002, and the meetings had started earlier than usual, in late July instead of August. Some analysts believed that this was significant—because so little about Beidaihe was made public, there was a tendency to search for meaning in every obscure detail. And there was no question that the stakes were higher than usual that summer. Jiang Zemin, the nation’s leader, was expected to give up at least one of the three spots he held: general secretary of the party, head of the armed forces, and president of the People’s Republic. But there were reports that Jiang and other members of the Old Guard were resisting retirement, and experts said that the Beidaihe meetings would be the first battleground of the political transition. Communist China had never had an orderly succession—for half a century, every transfer of power had involved coups or power struggles.

  Lin Biao’s mansion sat at the top of Lianfeng Mountain Park, like a monument to the hazards of power in China. During the early years of the Cultural Revolution, in the 1960s, Marshal Lin Biao was Mao Zedong’s anointed successor, and his summer retreat reflected his status; it was famous for having a heated indoor swimming pool. But in September of 1971, after allegedly organizing a failed coup, Lin tried to flee China. In desperation, he drove out of Beidaihe—a soldier fired at the limousine as it left—and boarded a military plane in the nearby town of Shanhaiguan. Supposedly Lin Biao was en route to the Soviet Union when the plane crashed in Mongolia, although many details of this story remain unclear. In the years since his death, Lin has been portrayed as China’s worst traitor, and also as a very strange man. According to Mao’s personal physician, Li Zhishui, Lin Biao was terrified of wind, light, and water. He refused to drink anything; his wife dipped his steamed rolls in water to prevent him from getting dehydrated. That detail made me wonder about the heated swimming pool. The doctor also reported that Lin could move his bowels only if he placed a pan atop his bed, squatted above that, and covered himself with a tentlike blanket. Everybody I met in Beidaihe told me that I should take a look at Lin Biao’s former home.

  The sprawling gray brick mansion was in bad shape. Lianfeng was a public park, but the house was surrounded by an eight-foot-high wall, and visitors weren’t allowed inside. Red paint peeled from around the windows and the sun had bleached the roof tiles to the color of sand. Two lightning rods poked above the surrounding pines. While I was there, a Chinese tour group passed by. Their guide was talking about the heated pool, too.

  On the way back down the hill, I stopped to rest in a shaded spot, where I jotted a few sentences in my notebook. A young man in his early twenties walked past and asked what I was writing.

  “Just my diary,” I said.

  “Can I see it?” he said, more urgently, and now I recognized something familiar about his manner. I put the notebook in my pocket. “It’s nothing,” I said. “I was just resting for a moment. I’m leaving now.”

  I made it fifty feet before he pulled out a badge—plainclothes cop.

  “Let me see your notebook,” he said.

  “This is a public park,” I said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. My visa’s fine.”

  I showed him my passport and then walked toward the exit. I was angry at myself—I knew better than to take notes in a sensitive place. But I had never had police trouble in a public park, and seeing the tour group had made me drop my guard. Now the cop followed close, talking on his cell phone. I kept my head down and walked out the gate; I heard the sound of people running to my left, and then three uniformed soldiers appeared and blocked my way. We stood facing each other in the parking lot. The soldiers were skinny men in their early twenties, and they looked nervous about the prospect of dealing with a foreigner. Three more jogged over from across the parking lot and cut off my retreat. Another plainclothes cop joined the first.

  “We need to see your notebook,” he said again.

  “I’m not going to give it to you,” I said. “There’s no reason you need to see it.” The book contained nothing sensitive, but I’d written down the contact information for some Chinese I’d met earlier in the day. They weren’t involved in anything that could get them in trouble, but I knew the police might track them down and frighten them with a lot of questions.

  Within ten minutes, three officials from the local foreign affairs department had arrived in a black Chinese-made Audi with tinted windows. The leader flashed his ID. I handed him my passport, and he recognized the “J” on the visa, which meant that I was a registered journalist. I told the officer that this was a public park and I hadn’t broken any laws.

  “We’re not arresting you,” he said. “We’re just asking you to wait a minute.”

  “If you want to search me, then you’ll have to arrest me,” I said. “And I’ll call the U.S. embassy to report the arrest of an American citizen.”

  I took out my cell phone. It was a bluff; I didn’t know anybody at the embassy, and in any case my notebook wouldn’t be a high priority for the State Department. The officials stood thirty feet away, talking in low voices. A couple of them made phone calls. After a few minutes, the head foreign affairs officer walked over.

  “It’s your choice,” he said. “They just want to look at your notebook. It’s no big deal. You can show it to them or you can refuse.”

  I told him I was keeping the notebook.

  “Well,” he said. “Then you can leave now.”

  I walked away without looking back. I figured I’d see them again.

  Beidaihe seemed like a peaceful town. The sea was gray and calm, shimmering in the flat northern light, and the streets were lined with willows and plum trees. Westward along the coast, the beaches were bureaucratically divided: one strip was reserved for vacationing soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army; another section belonged to the State Council; a third was the private beach of the Diplomatic Services Bureau. After that came a wedge of sand that was open to anybody who paid a dollar’s admission, and then there was the bustle of the free public beach: photograph vendors, drink sellers, and people who rented out shaded bamboo beach chairs. Women in skirted swimsuits waded tentatively into the water; men tucked cigarette packages into the waistbands of their Speedo-style trunks. The public beach stretched for half a mile and then ended abruptly at a roped-off border patrolled by uniformed
guards.

  Beyond the rope and the guards, the sand was reserved for the government leaders. In the mornings, I would wander over to see if anything was happening, but that beach always looked empty. The first indication of the leadership’s presence came during the last week of July, when newspapers reported that Li Peng, the legislative chief, had been in Beidaihe when he received the speaker of the Maltese House of Representatives. But the reports said nothing about whether Li Peng was in town for the annual summer meetings. They noted only that Chinese-Maltese bilateral ties were stronger than ever.

  Over a century ago, foreigners had started the tradition of using Beidaihe as a summer resort, building the first beach houses in town. After the Communists came to power in 1949, they converted Beidaihe into a party-run vacation spot. From the beginning it was intended to serve both government officials and the average employees of state work units. This followed the core theory of the revolution, which hoped to minimize the distance between a cadre and a worker. For decades, model employees were rewarded with free trips to Beidaihe—a week in the sun for a lathe operator or a ditch digger. Nowadays, most of the town’s two million annual visitors were independent vacationers, but the coast was still home to government-run spas whose names had the ring of an earlier age: the Tianjin Teachers’ Sanatorium, the Railways Cadre Resort.

  I had checked in for a week at the Sanatorium for Chinese Coal Miners. The resort opened in 1950 to provide both treatment and vacation accommodation for miners, who were heroes of the proletariat. Half a century later, they were still coming—every morning, I watched packs of men wander out from the sanatorium and stare wide-eyed at the sea; most of them came from mining towns deep in the interior. There were also private guests from other occupations who were paying for treatment at the sanatorium hospital, which specialized in necrosis of the hip joint. These patients included a tax bureau official from the northern province of Heilongjiang, a couple of oil-field workers from Daqing, and a woman journalist from the Shanghai bureau of the People’s Daily. A retired postal worker told me that he had fought in Lin Biao’s Thirty-ninth Army during the Korean War. He said that in 1950, not far from the Yalu River, they had sustained heavy casualties but held firm against MacArthur’s troops. He told me the same thing I’d heard from other Chinese veterans of that war: “Americans can’t eat bitter. They aren’t as tough as Chinese.”

  I liked listening to the patients chat in the late afternoon. They sat in the shade in front of the clinic, enjoying the ocean breeze, their crutches propped nearby. Conversations drifted idly, as rhythmic as the hum of the cicadas in the plum trees. Occasionally they discussed politics; once, I asked about the meetings across town. “When it’s done, they’ll have reports in the paper,” the tax bureau official said. “But until then it’s not our business.”

  On my first day at the sanatorium, I met a seventy-two-year-old ethnic Russian named Sergei, who had suffered a stroke and was receiving therapy. His left side was partly paralyzed—his hand was strapped to a paddle to prevent the fist from clenching. He was in a wheelchair. He told me that his family had fled Siberia in 1938, and since then he had never left China. He spoke perfect Chinese and he had been a member of the Communist Party for fifty-two years. When I asked him why he had left Russia, he sighed. “That’s a long story,” he said, and then he slipped into silence.

  A couple of days later, another patient asked Sergei the same question, but this time he was more forthcoming. He said that in the 1920s and 1930s the Japanese had sent secret agents to Siberia, and Stalin had ordered the expulsion of all Asians in the region. Sergei’s parents were poor Russian farmers, but they had befriended some Chinese who were doing trade in Siberia. In 1938, during the actions against foreigners, the Chinese persuaded Sergei’s family to move south with them, because conditions in Siberia had become so bad. “Stalin had some successes, but he also made some mistakes,” Sergei explained.

  “Like Mao Zedong,” said the People’s Daily reporter.

  “Lenin was better than Stalin,” somebody else said. “Lenin didn’t make big mistakes.”

  “Wasn’t Lenin a Jew?” a third person asked.

  “Lenin was Russian. He wasn’t a Jew.”

  “Why is it that Russian women are pretty when they’re young, but then they get so fat?”

  “I thought Lenin was a Jew.”

  “It’s the way they eat.”

  “They eat soup before dinner instead of after.”

  “Russian women get fat because they don’t care,” Sergei said authoritatively. He was six feet tall and thin as a birch branch. His wife was Chinese; before they met, she had been in a dance troupe that entertained soldiers near the front lines during the Korean War. An explosion during a battle had left her partly deaf. “Russian women just don’t worry about getting fat,” Sergei said.

  After the incident with the plainclothes cop, I had lunch at a noodle restaurant not far from Lin Biao’s mansion. I took my time with the meal, hoping that the trouble would blow over, but after a while I noticed a young man watching me from across the street. When I walked outside, he stood up immediately and made a call on his cell phone. I thought about taking a cab far across town, to make it hard for anybody to follow me, but then I realized that it probably wasn’t necessary. I had registered with the front desk when I arrived at the hotel, so they knew that I was a journalist, and all Chinese hotels were required to report foreign guests to the local police. It was almost certain that the officer I’d met at the park already knew where I was staying.

  I waved down a cab and returned to the hotel. The Sanatorium for Chinese Coal Miners was a large, wooded complex with more than two dozen buildings, and I was staying in the old VIP quarters. They had opened it up to foreigners a few years earlier, and a suite cost about forty dollars a night, with breakfast included. But I never saw any other Western guests; the cavernous building was mostly empty. Out in front, there was a weed-filled lawn with old marble goats that had been stained gray by the weather and the sea breeze. As I approached, I noticed a man standing near one of the goats. He took out his cell phone when I came into view, and then he walked into the lobby ahead of me.

  My room was on the second floor. On the way to the stairs, I turned and caught another glimpse of him: crew cut, dark polyester slacks. He talked quietly into his phone, staring at me.

  I waited in my room. Whenever I had trouble in a Chinese city, it was only a matter of time before a foreign affairs officer came to kick me out. Technically, a foreign journalist was supposed to apply in advance before going anywhere, but in practice nobody obeyed those rules anymore, and usually I traveled undisturbed. On the rare occasions when I attracted police attention, though, the response was typically swift. There would be a knock at the door, and an official with a tight smile would tell me politely that he would be happy to have me visit again in the future, provided that I apply to his office. In the meantime I should return to Beijing.

  My two-room suite had a musty smell, but the light was good and there was a balcony. Next to the telephone, a “Services Offered” manual listed damage fines for practically every object in the room. Ashtrays cost 12 cents each. A teacup was 61 cents, and a towel was $1.82. Ruined carpet went for $6.05 per square meter. If I smashed the mirror, I’d have to pay $12.11. The most expensive thing in the room was the toilet, which cost $60.53.

  After thirty minutes of waiting for the knock on the door, I fell asleep. The confrontation over the notebook had left me exhausted, and I slept for more than an hour. I awoke disoriented, and then I remembered where I was: the $3.63 pillow, the $4.84 sheet. For some reason there wasn’t a price for the bed. I went downstairs and the crew-cut man was still in the lobby, cooling himself with a bamboo fan. He saw me and froze, the fan directly in front of his face.

  There wasn’t much talk in Beidaihe about the succession. A couple of times, I had a conversation with an educated person who mentioned Hu Jintao, the current vice president. Most experts believed that
Hu was the most likely candidate to succeed Jiang Zemin if the older man actually retired. But it was rare to hear anybody in Beidaihe say much about it. The subject didn’t make them nervous or wary; they simply felt that it wasn’t their business, and they didn’t expect that a change in the leadership would affect their lives. When they did talk about it, they tended to do so metaphorically, as if this made the issue more relevant. Sergei compared the transfer of national power to what happens in a family. “Say the father gets old and puts the eldest son in charge,” he said. “It’s not right for the younger sons to resist him. Unless he makes some major mistake, he should remain in charge.” Sergei had been a low-level cadre—he’d served for three years in the People’s Party Congress in the western city of Urumqi—and he said that China should learn from the mistakes that Russia had made during perestroika. “Gorbachev was too much in a hurry,” he said. “They should have reformed the economy first and gone slower with the politics.”

  Other than Sergei, the most outgoing patients in the sanatorium were Yao Yongjun and Zou Yunjun. They came from the oil city of Daqing, in northeastern China, and they both had bad hips. In the 1960s, Daqing was a national model for Chinese industry, but the transition to the private economy had been rough in that part of the country. Recently, there had been big layoffs in the state-owned oil company, and some of the workers had demonstrated. Yao and Zou said that their work units hadn’t been affected yet. Each of them still earned roughly two hundred dollars a month, a good wage, and they told me that they liked their jobs. Yao was a fat thirty-two-year-old with a quick laugh; he had nearly finished his two-month treatment, which involved a combination of traditional Chinese medicine, injections, and ultrasound. He told me that necrosis of the hip can be caused by three factors: hormone imbalances, excessive drinking, and trauma. He believed that the first two had brought about his hip problem.