In a way, that made it easier. I took long, unplanned trips, waiting for things to turn up, and sometimes I just wandered around Beijing and found a person or a neighborhood to profile. For a writer, the capital had reached a perfect stage of development—the free-market economy was booming, but it hadn’t yet become completely standardized and large-scale. Micro economies were scattered throughout the city, and each of them was worth a story. One alley in Yabaolu specialized in fur coats for the Russians; Xinjiekou had good bootleg CD and DVD shops. The subway stop at Qianmen was known for its dealers of bogus receipts; they served the corrupt cadres who had arrived from the interior on the Communist Party’s business. The dealers hung around the subway exit, muttering, fapiao, fapiao, fapiao. Receipt, receipt, receipt. The men looked shady, with shifty eyes and hands jammed into their pockets—perverts of the expense report.
The market at Yuting Qiao was devoted entirely to unofficial electronics—used goods, display models, test units, smuggled sets, factory leaks, fakes, jiade. Every product came with a tale that was intended to soothe suspicions: a narrative warranty. One morning, I wandered through the market and talked to a man who sold Taiwanese-made Panasonic stereos; the price was cheap, he explained, because he saved on duties—his friend worked customs down in Xiamen. Another dealer told me that his Yangzi-brand washing machines had come straight from the factory in Anhui province; the only reason they had been rejected was because of minor dents and scuff marks. Nearby, a man sold CR2 Lithium batteries that had been used in display models at high-end department stores. He swore they still carried a half-charge—a bargain at one-sixth retail.
I felt a sense of brotherhood with anybody who peddled stories. Once, while traveling in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province, I wandered through a street market. It was full of typical stuff: watches, lighters, Buddhist charms, handmade inner soles for shoes. Each dealer simply dropped a sheet on the ground and then arranged his goods on top.
A crowd had gathered around one man who sold pamphlets. He was in his early twenties, and you could tell from his appearance—dark skin, dirty collar, cheap blue suit—that he was a migrant. But he spoke beautifully, holding the crowd with his words. The key was tempo: never too fast, never too desperate. The spiel came calmly, as if he had all day, and it didn’t feel over-rehearsed or mechanical. He sold pamphlets not because he needed to, but because the pamphlets deserved to be sold.
They were clearly illegal. On the ground, he had arranged a white cotton sheet with a series of handwritten questions:
Who Was Better, Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping?
An Important Piece of News That Was Never Reported
With the World Changing So Quickly,
Will China Still Be Socialist in Twenty Years?
“You’ll get answers to all of these questions and more,” the man said. “It only costs one yuan.” He glanced up, noticed something unusual about the crowd, but didn’t skip a beat. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a foreigner or a local. The price is the same—only one yuan. I won’t cheat you. All topics are included; you’ll get the answers to all of these questions.”
The pamphlets were cheaply printed, two dozen pages stapled inside a blue paper cover:
Science News and Selected Strange and Secret Treatments
By Zhang Hong (Economist)
Published by the Shenzhou Science News Publishing House
Undoubtedly, the publishing house had never heard of this pamphlet; the economist probably didn’t exist. In a politically charged city like Beijing, the salesman might have been kicked out or hauled to a police station, his goods confiscated. But here in the provinces, one occasionally saw men of this sort, working the margins of the state-controlled media. They dealt in rumors, myths, folktales, conspiracy theories—that little voice in people’s heads. I’ve always wondered about that. One yuan is not very much money. You never see this stuff in the newspaper.
In the pamphlet, twenty-one articles had been arranged according to some mysterious logic. “Why Did Mao Zedong Start the Cultural Revolution?” was followed immediately by “How to Tell If Your Baby Will Be a Boy or a Girl.” “Ten Types of Short-Lived People” came before “Ten Problems That China Needs to Solve Quickly.” One story profiled an imprisoned labor leader of the 1989 protests; another article discussed the wives of Liu Shaoqi, the former vice-secretary of the Communist Party. There were scandals: “The 500 Airline Stewardesses Who Became Pregnant.” There was advice: “How to Cure Baldness and White Hair.” Scams: “How to Cheat at Mah-jongg.” Home remedies: “How to Avoid Getting Pregnant” (use baking soda and cotton); “How to Induce an Abortion” (fermented yeast and millet wine).
The articles were short; the sentences were simple and clear. Everything made sense in the end. There were three reasons why Mao had started the Cultural Revolution: he felt threatened by Liu Shaoqi; he wanted to continue class struggle; and he hoped to fully develop Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Communism. If a pregnant woman’s right nipple is darker than the left, she’s going to have a boy. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping were equally good. If you exercise regularly, you won’t go bald. China will still be socialist in twenty years. It’s a girl if the left nipple is darker.
IN MARCH OF 2000, I was commissioned to write a story about starch. A Dutch company called Dorr-Oliver was publishing an in-house magazine, and they wanted some publicity material about their work in the northeast, the part of the country that used to be known as Manchuria. Dorr-Oliver supplied centrifuges to two of the region’s first corn milling factories, Yellow Dragon and Dacheng, and my assignment was to publicize the success of these operations. The Chinese word for “publicity” is xuanchuan, which is also defined in the dictionary as “propaganda.” There isn’t any distinction between the two meanings. In 1997, the government’s Central Committee changed the official English translation of its Xuanchuan Bu from “Propaganda Department” to “Publicity Department.” But the Chinese name remained exactly the same.
Dorr-Oliver paid me nine hundred dollars to write the story. They offered a thousand to my friend Mark Leong, a freelance photographer; he got more money because he guaranteed that he would shoot something suitable for the magazine’s cover. The night before we left, Dorr-Oliver sent me a draft of another in-house magazine article, for background. The article had been written in Special English and it began with the sentence: “There are few raw materials as versatile as starch.” The story continued to say that starch is used for everything from lipstick to paper to dried soup. A total of fifty-five to sixty million tons of starch are produced worldwide every year. A lot of it is used for sweeteners. This trend started back in the Napoleonic Wars, when the British blockade cut off sugar imports and the French were forced to manufacture sweeteners from starch. The French might have lost those wars, but they sure got the ball rolling for starch. Another sentence read: “Fast-food restaurants like Burger King are using starch to make their French fries crunchier.”
I was interested in learning more. The next morning, Mark and I flew to Manchuria.
FROM THE AIR, you could see little yellow piles of corn sprinkled throughout Changchun. In the 1930s, the city had been the capital of Manchukuo, the puppet state established by the Japanese during their invasion of China. In the center of Changchun, there was still a palace that the Japanese had built for Puyi, the former Qing emperor. The Japanese had installed Puyi as a figurehead—a jiade emperor. It was possible to tour the fake imperial palace, but Mark and I wouldn’t have time. Our handlers made it clear that the story was going to occupy us fully for the next eight hours.
The complications began immediately upon our arrival. It turned out that we could not tour both Yellow Dragon and Dacheng, although my original assignment had been to write about the two factories and how their close relationship was helping China produce more starch. One of our handlers said that I’d simply have to find another theme; we couldn’t go to Yellow Dragon. He didn’t explain why.
Once
we arrived at Dacheng, we realized that the factory had purchased centrifuges from both Dorr-Oliver and Westfalia, which is the German competition. Both brands of centrifuge operated side by side, mano a mano, and this made things difficult for Mark. He had to find a way to photograph the Dorr-Oliver machines without including the Westfalia equipment in the background. The Westfalia machines were beige and the Dorr-Oliver machines were blue. Dorr-Oliver loaded the corn matter from the bottom and Westfalia loaded from the top. Both of them made a lot of noise. The factory smelled like malt. Workers wore tan jumpsuits with Communist-style red stars on the chest.
While Mark was photographing, I interviewed a worker who had been selected by our handlers. We sat in a factory conference room, and I asked him what the difference was between the Dorr-Oliver and the Westfalia machines.
“Dorr-Oliver loads from the bottom and Westfalia loads from the top,” he said.
This was something that I had already noticed. I asked him if there were any differences in quality.
“They’re basically the same,” he said. “But the Westfalia machines are a little better.”
Mr. Wang, the Dorr-Oliver chief representative in China, a former member of the Chinese State Economic Commission, and the main coordinator of our publicity mission, was sitting at the other end of the table. He was talking on his cell phone and I hoped that he couldn’t hear us. I leaned forward and dropped my voice: “Why do you think that the Westfalia machines are better?”
“They just are,” the worker said with a shrug. He was twenty-five years old, with short black hair and the barest shadow of a mustache. He made $125 a month. “The Dorr-Oliver machines are a little too complicated,” he said. “It’s easier to operate the Westfalia machines. The Dorr-Oliver ones require more watching.”
I could see that we weren’t acquiring good propaganda, and I worried about what might happen to the worker if Mr. Wang got off his cell phone. Changing my line of questioning, I asked the worker about his wife, who was employed in quality control at the factory, and about his daughter, who was ten months old. He spoke much more enthusiastically about his daughter than he did about the Dorr-Oliver centrifuges. He expected her to start walking soon.
MY SECOND INTERVIEW was with Mr. Guo, who was a vice-chief engineer with the Jilin Petrochemical Design and Research Institute. In 1957, the organization had been founded as the Local Industry Technology Institute, and its purpose originally had been to research the refining of sugar from beets. But that was a period of great change in China, and it wasn’t long before the institute shifted to the study of nylon thread production. Then the Cultural Revolution happened, and folks like Mr. Guo took more than five years off. He didn’t say anything specific about how he had spent those years. He only made it clear that during that period he was no longer involved with the nylon thread industry.
In the early 1970s, as the Cultural Revolution cooled down, the institute changed its name to the Jilin Petrochemical Design and Research Institute. That was around the same time that it began working to improve cigarette filters. This was yet another new direction for Mr. Guo, but he embraced it wholeheartedly. In 1979, as Reform and Opening began, the institute’s research focus changed again, this time to cornstarch. Nobody could give me a good reason why it was still called the Jilin Petrochemical Design and Research Institute.
Mr. Guo was sixty-seven years old, and he was one of those gentle, soft-spoken Chinese men who giggle whenever an uncomfortable subject comes up. Mr. Guo giggled when he mentioned the Cultural Revolution, and he giggled when talking about the poverty of Changchun during his childhood. He giggled when describing the six years that he had spent developing cigarette filters. Mr. Guo was one of the few nonsmoking men I met in Changchun.
He seemed slightly overwhelmed by being interviewed by a foreign propagandist in the restaurant of Changchun’s five-star Shangri-La Hotel, and this also contributed to the giggling. But he was clearly intelligent, and he knew much more about cornstarch than you would expect for somebody who had found his true calling so late in life. All of the numbers came straight off the top of his head. He told me that since 1980, the production of Chinese cornstarch had increased by 1,150 percent. In China, 40 percent of the cornstarch was used to make MSG, whereas in the United States, 60 percent of the cornstarch was used to make artificial sweeteners. Those statistics seemed to say something profound about the differences between the two nations.
In the middle of the interview, Mark called from his cell phone. He was photographing outside the factory.
“There’s this enormous pile of corn,” he said. “You should check it out.”
“I’m at the hotel,” I said. “I’m interviewing a cornstarch expert. I’ll be back later.”
“It’s like fifty feet high, and all of these peasants are bringing in their corn,” Mark said. “I’ve never seen so much corn in my life. They have those big machines piling it up. You know what I’m talking about—are they called backhoes?”
“I think so.”
“You should check it out,” Mark said. Like many photographers, he was often mesmerized by the way the world appeared through a one-inch viewfinder.
“I think we’re going back soon,” I said. “But I have to finish interviewing this cornstarch expert first.”
“Have him come here after you’re finished,” Mark said. “We might need a picture of him, too.”
Mark hung up and I continued the interview with Mr. Guo. He provided more statistics: the per capita sugar consumption in the United States was fifty kilograms a year, whereas in China it was less than eight. With regard to worldwide starch production rankings, America was Number One and China was Number Two. The price of corn in China was dropping. In 1997, it cost almost two hundred dollars for a ton of corn, and now the price had plummeted to eighty-five dollars. Mr. Guo giggled. He had exhausted his starch numbers.
There was a lull, and I tried to think of a new propaganda question. Finally, I asked if he ever ate corn, and Mr. Guo giggled again.
“In the past, most of the corn was used for food,” he said. “All through my childhood, we ate corn. It was like that all the way into the 1970s. But if I eat it nowadays, it’s only if some restaurant happens to have a special dish. I’d never eat it at home. Nobody does; people have more money now.”
Mr. Guo had ordered a fruit shake from the restaurant at the Shangri-La Hotel, but he was too shy to take food from the buffet. I kept inviting him to eat, but he only shook his head and giggled. He liked that shake, though.
IN NORTHEASTERN CHINA, the composition of corn is between 32 and 38 percent moisture. In central China, it’s only 14 percent. That’s why it takes so long for corn to dry in Changchun.
Mr. Wang told me this fact while we were driving back to the Dacheng factory. I wrote it down.
MY FINAL INTERVIEW was with Mr. Xu, the general director of the Changchun Corn Industry Development Zone. Back in the 1980s, he had founded the Yellow Dragon factory, which was the first cornstarch processing facility in China. It took five years for Mr. Xu to collect all of the necessary government approvals, but after those hassles were cleared away he made a profit of more than seven million dollars in his first year of production. Later he started the Dacheng factory. He was essentially the father of modern Chinese cornstarch. I waited in his office while the man finished a meeting.
I was accompanied by Mr. Wang, the main Dorr-Oliver handler, and two Dutch representatives who were visiting China. Mark was still outside. Occasionally, he called to check if Mr. Xu had arrived, because he was Mark’s best prospect for a cover shot. Mark really wanted that cover. In the meantime, however, he was obsessed with the pile of corn. The Dutch men were named Wim and Kees. They didn’t talk much.
Mr. Wang and I chatted, and he told me about his background. At the age of fifteen, he had entered the Chinese Navy Submarine Academy, where he spent seven years. In 1976, he got out of the submarine corps and took a job with the Foreign Language Press. He studied English a
nd eventually was placed in charge of distributing Communist publicity in Scandinavia. Later, he joined the State Economic Commission. He didn’t explain what he had done for them.
After leaving the government, Mr. Wang took a job with Dorr-Oliver, selling centrifuges and other equipment in China. Like Mr. Guo, and like many other middle-aged and older intellectuals whom I met in China, Mr. Wang didn’t perceive his career as a narrative. Instead, it consisted of a series of mostly unrelated vignettes. He spoke of these vignettes with bemusement, as if each had belonged to a different person, and as if now those people were gone, their traces fading with time.
He was most interested in the man who had once worked for the State Economic Commission.
“I could have become a minister,” he said. “If I had stayed, that probably would have happened.”
“How long would it have taken?” I asked.
“That depends on how well you play the politics.”
He used Mr. Xu as an example of what happens when you involve yourself in politics. In the early 1990s, after the great success of the Yellow Dragon plant, Mr. Xu prepared to open the second location at Dacheng. He intended to name it Dragon Junior, and the two plants would represent the heart of China’s cornstarch industy. Everything went according to plan—but then there was a sudden political shakeout and Mr. Xu was essentially run out of Yellow Dragon. He lost control of the factory that he had worked so hard to establish.
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