Part of the problem was the strength of the Chinese economy, which was hard on low-level foreign traders, and it also undermined the black market for U.S. dollars. Whenever Polat talked about currency rates, he emphasized the effect of government controls—a border problem in Shenzhen, or a crackdown on some corrupt Central Asian customs office. From the perspective of the money changer, these were the trends that mattered, but in fact larger economic forces shaped the exchange rates. The Chinese government wanted to maintain control over the economy, ensuring some stability during the transition years, and so they kept their nonconvertible currency pegged to the American dollar—at a bank, you received about 8.26 yuan to the dollar. But the artificial stability meant that a black market naturally flourished, serving as a proxy for other opportunities to earn money in China. When wealthy Chinese had no faith in domestic stocks or real estate, they saved American dollars or used them to invest overseas. But that situation was rapidly changing. Since 1999, property markets in Beijing and other cities had boomed, and people needed Chinese currency in order to invest. When I had arrived in the spring of 1999, I could get nine yuan to the dollar; a year later the street rate had dropped to 8.7. It was a good sign for China’s economy, but that meant nothing to people like Polat. The country’s growing prosperity was killing the black market.
Nevertheless, he still earned a decent living from money changing, and I knew that his language skills were far more useful in China than in the United States. I told him bluntly that, from an economic standpoint, he was better off in Beijing than in America. But he insisted that money had no bearing on his decision about where to live. “I’m not a businessman,” he told me once. “I’m educated, and I used to be a teacher. This isn’t my home, and this isn’t the kind of life I want.”
His detachment from business was remarkable. In China, everybody talked openly about money, and Polat was no different; many of our conversations revolved around exchange rates and wholesale prices. But he seemed to keep part of himself separate from that world. He spoke about his deals with bemusement, as if they had been conducted by a person he hardly knew. When he told me about the fake Nokia batteries, I asked if he worried that the Russians would get angry when they realized how bad the product was. “They know they’re jiade,” he said. “Otherwise, why would they be so cheap? Anyway, the Russians would never get mad at me. I’m just translating; I’m not producing any of this stuff.”
His life was sharply divided between the pragmatic and the idealistic. He earned his living in the commercial environment of Yabaolu, but he spent much of his free time thinking about faraway places and people. His wife was over a thousand miles away; his teaching days in Xinjiang were a distant memory. When we talked about the place, he often referred to it as “East Turkestan,” the name of the independent republic that had been crushed in 1949. And America seemed equally remote. He told me that he liked reading books about American history, especially Abraham Lincoln, because the president had freed an oppressed minority. Polat loved American culture; every summer he scored a worker’s pass to the jazz concert in Ritan Park. He watched the Godfather movies over and over—even in a supporting role, De Ni Luo was fabulous.
Initially, I thought that these dreams were simply an escape from the grim reality of Yabaolu: the point wasn’t actually to go to America, but rather to talk about it. Over time, though, I came to realize the complexity of Polat’s position. The small-mindedness of business truly bothered him, and he could be remarkably snobbish about other Uighur traders. Whenever they met, Polat shook their hands warmly, but afterward he’d tell me frankly that they were uneducated and didn’t understand politics. In Polat’s mind, this was the quality that set him apart: he was an intellectual who had come to Beijing only because of his problems in Xinjiang.
Uighur culture had always been divided along class lines, with intellectuals holding themselves above peasants and traders. Since Reform and Opening, these divisions had become even sharper, and each group had developed its own relationship with the Chinese, who used economic development as a political tool in places like Xinjiang. Uighur peasants, who sometimes benefited from government-funded infrastructure and farming subsidies, could be passive or even amenable to Chinese rule. Uighur traders were also pragmatic, because they relied on access to Chinese goods. But many intellectuals fiercely opposed Beijing’s control, and often they were bitter at what they perceived as the complicity of less-educated Uighurs.
For a man like Polat, who felt compelled to participate in trade, the anger was even more intense. And the opposite intellectual extreme—the point where idealism and faith reached orthodoxy—was equally threatening. As much as he hated the trader’s small-mindedness, Polat was even more disdainful of people who, in his opinion, were obsessed with ideas. In Yabaolu, he was relentlessly critical of two groups. He despised the North Koreans—in his opinion, they were the worst Communists of all time. He also had no patience for the Afghan traders. Sometimes, they’d appear in the Uighur restaurant, usually in groups of three or four. None of the middlemen I knew had ever cut a deal with them; the Afghans didn’t come to Yabaolu to buy Tommy Hilfiger or North Face. The men were bearded, gaunt, and long-robed even in summer; there were rumors that they dealt in gems and drugs. Whenever they walked past, Polat curled his lip in disgust.
“They’re the same as Communists,” he told me once. “There’s no freedom in Afghanistan. You have to believe in something, and you can’t ask questions. That type of Islam and Communism are exactly the same.”
It wasn’t uncommon for Uighur intellectuals to be distrustful of Islam. In the past, the ethnic group hadn’t been particularly devout, but that had also changed since Reform and Opening. In the early 1980s, the Chinese government had deliberately encouraged Islam in Xinjiang, funding mosque construction and even paying for Uighur religious leaders to make the Hajj to Mecca. The government hoped that religious growth would defuse unrest, but they were surprised by a series of protests in 1985. Thousands of Uighurs demonstrated in opposition to Han Chinese migration, and they also criticized the Chinese use of desert territories in Xinjiang for nuclear testing. Polat had participated in the protests, and afterward he received his first jail sentence.
The demonstrations had been primarily political, but Chinese leaders were convinced that Islam played a major role. After 1985, the government abruptly changed its strategy, responding to Uighur uprisings by clamping down on religious activities. But Islam continued to grow—many believed that both the government encouragement and the subsequent repression had precisely the same effect. And to Uighur intellectuals such as Polat, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism was almost as threatening as Maoism. He believed that the Uighurs were being driven from one orthodoxy to another.
The Uighur world was relatively small, and within that world there were few people whom Polat trusted. He regularly telephoned a couple of Uighur exiles who lived in the United States, and periodically in Yabaolu he organized dinners of close friends who worked in Beijing. All of them were intellectuals, and most had been compromised in some way—they had fallen to the level of traders, or they taught at local minority colleges, which were controlled tightly by the Communist Party.
One evening in the spring of 2000, Polat invited me to a dinner that he had arranged in honor of a close Uighur friend. In the past, Polat had told me about the man, who sometimes picked up extra cash by playing foreigners in Chinese movies. He had just worked on another film, down in the south, and now he was passing through Beijing on his way home to Xinjiang.
Polat reserved a long table in the Uighur restaurant at the Ritan Hotel, next to Hollywood. There were about a dozen men total, and I felt less out of place than I usually did in China; most of the men, like me, had dark features and long noses. There was only one subtle sign that something was amiss—much of the conversation was in Chinese. I knew that these men didn’t like speaking that language together, and I was touched that they would go out of their way to make me f
eel included.
All of them were Uighurs except for one, a Tatar who had been born within China’s borders. He told me that, of the nation’s fifty-plus minority groups, the Tatars were the only ethnicity that had no native land in the country. They were the descendants of people who had fled across the Soviet border in the first half of the twentieth century, mostly in reaction to Stalin’s policies.
The Tatar was blond, and so was the part-time Uighur actor. “He’s a jia yangguizi,” Polat joked. “A fake foreign devil. You’re the real foreign devil.”
Usually, the phrase described Chinese who slavishly imitated Western things. I asked the man about his film work, and Polat teased him good-naturedly.
“How many times have you been killed by Chinese?” he said.
“A couple,” the man said with a grin.
“That Chinese woman killed you in The Opium War!”
Another Uighur, a professor, spoke up. “They used a lot of students from the Nationalities University for extras in that movie. Somebody got injured on the set—I think a Kazak student.”
One guest remarked that he had played a French imperialist in a propaganda film. “I executed a Chinese revolutionary,” the man said proudly. He was also a professor. “That was a great day for me.”
The others laughed and raised their glasses of vodka. The table filled with Uighur dishes: roast lamb, flat nan bread, skewers of fried meat and vegetables. As the evening progressed, and the men continued drinking, the language shifted away from Chinese, until at last I couldn’t understand a word. I sat in silence, watching and listening. I liked the sound of the Turkic tongue, and the way the men’s faces lit up when they spoke it. At the end of dinner, Polat stood up and slowly walked around the banquet, toasting the others one by one. On that night, at that table, in the heart of Yabaolu, it seemed as if he were at the center of the world.
AFTER A YEAR in the capital, I became more familiar with the rhythms of the city’s calendar. Beijing time wasn’t steady: occasionally, a week seemed to stretch forever, or it would require months to prepare for a single morning, like the National Day anniversary of 1999. There were days that the Party wanted to remember, and days that the Party wanted to forget. There were days when things had to happen, and days when nothing had to happen. And occasionally there were days that created new moments to be commemorated in the future.
Often, the Beijing police made neighborhood sweeps in the prelude to some mark in the calendar. It might be an anniversary of June Fourth, or the birthday of the People’s Republic, or a convocation of the National People’s Congress. Either way, it felt the same—more police in the alleyways, making door-to-door checks for registration. These periods were hard on migrants, who often didn’t have the proper papers, and Uighurs also had trouble. Polat always tried to lay low if an important date was coming up.
But for most people in Beijing, including the police, it was simply a nuisance. The command undoubtedly came from the top: some bureau told a lower-level bureau to be vigilant, and then the word filtered down through the layered bureaucracy. Eventually, it reached the neighborhood cops, who dutifully performed the sweeps. But usually their hearts weren’t in it; they did what was necessary for appearances’ sake and then moved on. Whenever they knocked on my door, I simply kept quiet and didn’t answer. I never registered in the apartments where I lived, because they were technically off-limits to journalists.
Of course, any news reporter became particularly attuned to the city’s calendar. For certain events, there would be preparatory articles, and then the day itself was marked by hours in Tiananmen Square, watching for protests. Most of it was uninteresting, and sometimes unpleasant; occasionally, I felt like the police—compelled to mark these days against my will. It was hard to make sense of events when everything was so scattered: a protest here, an anniversary there. And the fragmentation worked in the Party’s favor. If one person went to the Square to commemorate June Fourth, and another went to mark a crackdown on Falun Gong, the two people never met. The days didn’t overlap; the calendar lurched along without creating any kind of narrative.
But it felt different if you saw an event and then its echo. In that situation, a single thread stretched across the years, connecting two points in time. For me, the first day to happen twice was April 25.
April 25, 1999
The city is still new to me. In the mornings, I often ride my bicycle aimlessly, trying to get a feel for the streets. I am near the center of downtown when my pager goes off. I find a public phone and call the number: Ian Johnson, my boss at the Journal. He asks me to swing by Zhongnanhai, the central government compound next to the Forbidden City. There is a rumor that some people are protesting.
I head west on Wenjin Street, past Beihai Park, and then I see the crowd lined along the sidewalk, three and four people deep. Most seem to be middle-aged, and they wear simple clothes—provincials. My first instinct is to estimate the numbers: one hundred, five hundred, a thousand, two. Along that street alone, I guess five thousand, and there are more on Fuyou Street.
For a spell, I’m so wrapped up in the numbers that I notice nothing else, but then the silence strikes me. Nobody is shouting slogans; nobody is chanting; nobody is singing. No banners, no signs. The people simply stand there, staring calmly out at the street.
Passersby are confused. A few Beijing locals stop their bicycles and ask the protestors why they are there. No response. One man becomes angry. “You know what will happen,” he says. “This is only going to cause trouble for everybody. Why are you doing this?”
Silence. I dismount and walk through the crowd, hoping to find somebody who will talk. I try to speak to a middle-aged woman: silence. An elderly man. Silence. A man, a woman, a man. Silence, silence, silence. Finally, a woman in her forties answers. She is better dressed than the others, and she speaks Mandarin with an accent that I cannot place. I sense that she is some sort of leader. “We practice Falun Gong,” she tells me. “All we want is official recognition. People criticize us and misunderstand us, and they won’t stop until the government recognizes us as a good group.”
We talk briefly, and then a black sedan pulls up to the curb. The windows are heavily tinted; one of them rolls down. Somebody signals from within. The woman hurries over; a door opens, and she gets in. A couple of minutes later, she steps out and the car pulls away. But when I approach her again, she simply shakes her head. Without a word, she disappears into the silent crowd of protestors.
AFTER THAT INITIAL Falun Gong demonstration, time accelerated. In a sense, it already had: since the Communist Party came to power in 1949, there had been massive changes in China’s religious climate. Initially, the Communists were critical of religion, and then they became deliberately destructive during the Cultural Revolution. Maoism was a faith that left room for nothing else—but Mao died in 1976, and the Cultural Revolution ended. Two years later, Deng Xiaoping initiated the reform period, and once more China was faced with the spiritual vacuum that had tormented the nation since the nineteenth century.
Nowadays, many Chinese seemed inspired by two semi-faiths: materialism and nationalism. But traditional religions also recovered; churches found new converts, and temples and mosques were rebuilt. Such faiths, however, were strictly limited, because the Communist Party recognized only five legal religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism.
In the 1980s, a number of Chinese also became fascinated by qigong, exercises that involve traditional breathing exercises and meditation. These systems were never described as “religious”—any attempt to declare a new faith would have been tantamount to challenging the Party. Instead, qigong practitioners registered their systems as exercise and health routines. In the 1990s, a man from the northeast named Li Hongzhi started a new form of qigong that he called Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa. Like other systems, it featured meditation and exercise routines, but Falun Gong was clearly different. It had a charismatic leader; its books outlined points of faith
as well as exercise; and many of Falun Gong’s symbols and terminology were Buddhist or Taoist in origin. Regardless of how it was registered, it felt like a religion.
And it spread like one. Falun Gong outlined three basic principles—truthfulness, benevolence, tolerance—and this simple morality appealed to many average Chinese who were coping with the changes of Reform and Opening. During the 1990s, Falun Gong gained millions of believers, many of whom practiced together in morning sessions at public parks. When I had lived in Fuling, a group of Falun Gong practitioners had tried to recruit me after meeting in a teahouse. They gave me copies of Li Hongzhi’s books, and they telephoned my apartment at all hours. The men impressed me as harmless fanatics—I was annoyed by the early-morning phone calls, but the believers were always polite. There was no question about their sincerity; the practice of Falun Gong gave structure to their lives.
In the late 1990s, skeptics in the Chinese media began to criticize Falun Gong as superstitious and unhealthy. A pattern emerged: if an article was unflattering, Falun Gong practitioners would organize a peaceful protest at the media outlet and demand a retraction. Many of the publications were lower-level ones, and they found it easier to back down rather than risk being blamed for stirring up trouble. In May of 1998, after Beijing Television broadcast an interview in which a professor criticized Falun Gong, more than two thousand protestors appeared at the station. This happened to occur during one of those sensitive moments in the Beijing calendar—June Fourth was approaching—and the station quickly aired another program that was sympathetic to Falun Gong. The demonstrators dispersed.
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