Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  Cindy then lectured her mother. She was just being used by other people, she said, to bring the government down. Aunt added that this “superstition” had caused trouble for the rest of the family, what with the police coming and all. Mother listened in silence but then shouted back that if Christianity was just superstition, then how come all the rich countries in the West believed in Jesus? In fact, she continued, they were rich because of their faith. That is why Chinese, too, needed Jesus. First Cindy put her hands to her ears and then she cried, in English, “Stop!” Aunt began to sing a popular Maoist song, about the Chairman rising like the sun. Whereupon Mother, Grandmother, and the bad uncle’s wife, who were all converts, sang a hymn to Yehova. And that was the moment the bad uncle chose to make his unsteady appearance.

  He took one look at me and grinned. Although he could never have been described as handsome, there was a mischievousness about him that was not unattractive. Like most village people of his generation, he was small and wiry. He sat down and smoked a thick tobacco leaf, like a crude cigar. I asked him what life was like for farmers these days. He answered in Sichuanese, which his daughter, the aspiring medical student, translated into standard Chinese. I felt that this embarrassed her. She apologized several times for her father’s lack of education. I shouldn’t take him too seriously, she said.

  Things were bad now, he said. It was different under Mao. At least then all people were treated the same. Educated people couldn’t lord it over the peasants, not if they knew what was good for them. But now things were different. The peasants were either ignored or they were harassed by the authorities. His daughter smiled apologetically and said that her father knew little about the world. I asked him about the Great Leap Forward. Surely Mao had not been so good for the peasants then. True enough, replied the uncle. People were dying of hunger all over the place. Mao had his bad side. People realized that.

  Mother listened with a benevolent smile. Cindy and Aunt were huddled together in a separate conversation. Grandmother said nothing and stared at the wall. Cindy’s cousin looked pained.

  “Mao was sometimes bad,” the uncle continued, “but the current leaders are all rotten.” This elicited nervous titters around the table, as though a naughty child had once again spoken out of turn.

  “You know,” said the uncle, “we had a saying during the war against the Japanese: There were two kinds of officials, corrupt officials and murderous officials. Now we have mostly corrupt officials. They make us pay for this and that, whether we want it or not. . . .” His daughter looked positively ill. “He doesn’t understand taxes,” she said. Her father went on: “They make us pay for roads and all kinds of stuff we never asked for. Why don’t they pay themselves?”

  It was the age-old problem: unwilling peasants being squeezed for money by officials who in turn are pressed by a remote, unelected, authoritarian central government. It was unfair to blame the local officials, who were squeezed for funds by other officials, higher up than they were. Yet I felt sympathy for the uncle, too. Who wants to pay for a non-representative government that uses gangsters to collect its dues? I knew from many newspaper reports that such dissatisfaction often turned into violent anger. Thousands of farmers would suddenly appear in county towns and smash government buildings and assault officials in protest. Sometimes it took the armed police days to put these riots down.

  The uncle said he had a question, too. Did I think Jesus Christ was in favor of democracy? At first I was baffled. I said the concept probably would not have occurred to Jesus, but there was no reason to assume he would have been against it. The uncle nodded and said that Jesus was a simple man, a worker, and, like Mao, he treated everyone equally. In other words, Jesus was a democrat. And after that, much to the relief of his daughter, the uncle said good-bye and made his way back to his room. He’s drinking, said Aunt with a look of disgust. No, said Cindy’s mother. He stopped drinking since he was saved by Jesus.

  I do not know how much the uncle drank, but he had a certain dignity. More dignity, at any rate, than Uncle and Aunt back in town. After we had gotten back there from the village, Cindy and Aunt entertained Uncle with stories of Cindy’s mother and her beliefs. The three of them were shrieking with laughter. Cindy mimicked her mother’s voice and imitated her Christian pieties. Tears of mirth moistened Uncle’s small, red eyes. I asked him why his sister-in-law shouldn’t believe in Jesus if it made her feel happy. Still chortling at the stupidity of his rural relations, he slapped a damp hand on my leg and explained that “Marxism is based on a materialist philosophy and all religion is mere superstition.”

  I was aware of the danger of feeling superior to the half-educated ways of Uncle and Aunt, and yet could not help detesting them. There was so much anxiety and shame in their ridicule of the village life they had barely left behind. Hearing their laughter, I could understand the powerful attraction of egalitarian beliefs to people who felt the contempt of the educated classes, and it hardly mattered whether the peasant messiah was called Jesus Christ or Mao Zedong.

  Uncle’s faith in political dogma made him feel superior to his village relatives, not only because mastering some of the Marxist jargon marked him as an educated man, just as reciting Confucian texts had for previous generations, but because it sounded scientific and modern, like his giant karaoke machine; and to be “scientific” was to be out of the village, with its age-old superstitions. Perhaps the increasing popularity of many faiths in China is a kind of revenge, against the oppressive dogmas of a morally and politically bankrupt state, but also against the little mandarins who are paid to impose them. It is a case of village China hitting back.

  Chapter 3

  The View from Lhasa

  The first time I visited Tibet, in the fall of 1982, scars of the Maoist years were still plain to see: Buddhist wall paintings in temples and monasteries were scratched out or daubed with revolutionary slogans. Han Chinese from China proper (the “inner land”) were already there, though not in large numbers, almost all of them in military uniform. But the early 1980s was a time of relatively liberal policies. There was little sign of current terror. And the towns still looked entirely Tibetan. Chinese influence was confined mainly to the barracks. Hotels hardly existed, restaurants were few and mostly bad. Even in the main cities of Lhasa, Gyangtse, and Shigatse there was hardly any evidence of a modern economy.

  Things have changed greatly since then. Modernization has replaced class struggle as the official aim of the Chinese government. The Maoist graffiti that disfigured religious places has mostly disappeared, to be replaced by new slogans displayed in Chinese characters on almost every public building, slogans that promise prosperity, education, and the warm embrace of the motherland. Modernization is how many colonial powers before the Chinese justified their imperial rule in Asia. And it is to a large extent how the Communist Party of China justifies its grip on the “outer lands” today. A huge amount of government money is being poured into the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” and Chinese fortune hunters are flocking there in ever larger numbers. Stories I had been hearing, from travelers and reporters, were disturbing and often seemed a little fantastic: gambling casinos, gigantic discotheques, four-story brothels. These are not uncommon establishments in the wild frontier towns of Chinese-style capitalism, but it took some imagination to picture them in front of the Potala palace or the Tashilhunpo monastery.

  The night before I flew into Lhasa from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, I had a drink with two young Chinese who were off to Tibet for a holiday. Both worked for a bank. One of them, Su, was also studying to get into an American university, where he hoped to get a degree in business administration. They were intelligent, well educated, in their twenties, products of the Deng Xiaoping era, with only hazy memories of 1989. Their English was excellent, though neither of them had ever been outside China.

  Tibet was like “a foreign country” to them. The word they used several times was “mysterious.” What made Tibet seem mysterious and attract
ive was the religion. They said that Tibetans had retained something profound that the Han Chinese had lost. For the Chinese people, they believed, were very practical, very clever, very good at making money, but had no feeling for religion.

  I did not wish to argue with them. The evening was balmy, the beer cool. Chengdu can no longer be called a beautiful city, but it still has a lazy southern charm; not all the teahouses are gone, even though the professional storytellers have made way for video and karaoke sets. Su, who was more assertive than his friend, suddenly remarked that the trouble with China was politics. A one-party state was no good. What was needed in politics, just as in business, was competition. Since I could not disagree, I said nothing much. But then Su made another point, which, though familiar, still took me aback. He said: “The most important thing for China is unification.” He was referring, of course, to the inclusion of Taiwan and Tibet. His friend, a thin man named Li, nodded his agreement. I asked why national unification was of such great importance to them personally. Wasn’t freedom of speech, say, a matter of greater concern? Yes, yes, they said, that was important too. But unification was even more important, “because we are all Chinese.”

  What did he mean, all Chinese? What did Chinese in Vancouver or Taipei have in common with people in Lhasa or Chengdu? Li, less hearty, more pensive than Su, mulled this over, shook his head slowly once or twice, and said: “Children of the dragon. We are all children of the dragon.”

  I didn’t really know how to respond to this, and in the event, I didn’t have to, for Su brought up the “Taiwan problem.” I said there wasn’t a Taiwan problem, only a mainland problem. No, said Li, it was a problem for all Chinese, for if Taiwan were torn from China, it would hurt the feelings of all Chinese, including Chinese in Taiwan. My argument that most people in Taiwan felt they were Taiwanese and saw no advantage in reunification was dismissed as ignorance. No, no, the Taiwanese only wanted to be independent for materialist reasons, because they were more developed. But their emotions were different. I should understand that all Chinese were like one family. Indeed, he said, all Asians felt that way about their countries. In Asia, he said with great conviction, your own people are like your blood relations.

  All right, I said, so what were those feelings shared by all Chinese? Ah, Li said, it was “the Chinese spirit.” I see. And what was that spirit, exactly? Well, the spirit of hard work, and wanting “to make China great after two hundred years of humiliation.” Su added gravely that Chinese civilization had lasted for five thousand years.

  It was depressing to hear these textbook clichés from people who were otherwise so intelligent, reasonable, and well educated. Perhaps they said these things because I was a foreigner, though Chinese returning from overseas tend to run into the same slogans. It is also possible that these “Chinese feelings” are actually the products of higher education. Romantic nationalism is an intellectual affliction, which comes more readily to educated minds than it does to people preoccupied with daily survival. In any case, as long as the humiliation of two hundred years lingers, the borders of the old Qing empire, which included Tibet and Taiwan, will not be negotiated away. Chinese colonization of Tibet cannot be separated from the colonial practices of European powers in nineteenth-century China. Lhasa in this sense is a late victim of the Opium War.

  And yet neither Li nor Su could pretend that Tibetans were part of the Chinese family. Tibet, after all, felt like a foreign country. So in China’s neocolonial rhetoric, Li’s argument about Taiwan has to be turned upside down. If the Taiwanese want to be independent for materialist reasons, Tibet has to be part of China for materialist reasons—because Tibet needs to be modernized, developed, enriched.

  I did not see a gambling casino in front of the Potala palace, but the road into Lhasa was lined with shabby little bordellos masquerading as karaoke bars. That same road passes by a large, hideous sculpture of two golden yaks, which stands where the old West Gate of the city used to be until it was smashed by Red Guards in the 1960s. The golden yaks were a gift from the Chinese government to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of “peaceful liberation.”

  Much of the dilapidated charm of the old Tibetan city I had seen in 1982 has gone. Lhasa looks more like the market towns one finds around the borders of Thailand or in southern China, the East Asian versions of Dodge City in the Wild West, teeming with Chinese carpetbaggers, hucksters, hookers, gamblers, hoodlums, corrupt officials, and other desperadoes lusting after quick cash. At the same time, as though from another planet, there are the Tibetan pilgrims, fingering their beads, spinning their prayer wheels, and moving their lips to endless mantras, and the nomads, carrying silver daggers and with their long hair tied up in red silk, and the countrywomen in long skirts and striped aprons, and the monks dressed in saffron and red. There is the constant din of Chinese and Hindi pop songs, market salesmen pitching their wares, and rattling machine-gun fire from the video arcades (a group of young monks stared in rapture at Tom Hanks stopping a tank in Saving Private Ryan). Weaving their way through all this hurly-burly with an air of imperial swagger are riot police in green uniforms and regular police in white, country boys with almost unlimited power, speeding along in jeeps or cruising very slowly in unmarked Chinese-built Volkswagens.

  One quickly gets a sketchy idea of the general divisions of labor. The shops, restaurants, and most other forms of commercial enterprise are in the hands of Han Chinese—mostly from Sichuan, to judge from their accents and the preponderance of Sichuanese food. Petty traders, market salesmen, money changers, and so on are often Muslims from the poor western provinces, such as Qinghai. They wear white caps and you see them hanging around the central market, huddled in small groups, offering you this or that. Tibetans tend to fall into two categories, country folk in traditional dress, who have come to the city to visit the holy places, and middle-ranking government employees, who sit around the Chinese fast-food restaurants wolfing down plates of rice or noodles. Like many colonial people dependent on government jobs, they tend to run to fat.

  The pilgrims, nomads, and country people walked the same streets as the Chinese hustlers and traders, but they might as well have been in another country. They were also in a minority. More than half the people in Lhasa are Chinese, even though few of them stay there for very long and almost none speak Tibetan. This coming and going of fortune hunters is what gives Lhasa the impermanent, feverish atmosphere of a typical cowboy town. What makes it look more and more Chinese, apart from the people, is the new architecture, much of it gimcrack, most of it ugly, but all of the same type you see all over the modern Chinese empire: squat white-tiled buildings with blue-tinted windows, topped here and there with kitsch Chinese-style roofs. In Shigatse, the second city of Tibet, I saw a huge billboard in the center of town featuring a picture of Zhuhai, the new seaside town in the Pearl River delta that faces the gambling casinos of Macau. It had palm trees, “international hotels,” discos, a golf course, and wide boulevards. This, the display seemed to say, was the glorious future.

  The old Tibetan economy, before “liberation,” had been, like so much else in Tibet, an integral part of religious life, for the monasteries were more than spiritual institutions: They managed real estate, acted as brokers and moneylenders, and ran schools and other public services. These functions have been taken over by government institutions. There was once a Tibetan merchant class, too, trading mostly with India and Nepal, but I was told it had pretty much disappeared. Trade with India has been blocked by the Sino-Indian border problems and by the government’s successful policy of making Tibet dependent on China. Merchant families either fled abroad or found jobs in the government.

  In one of the Tibetan restaurants near the seventh-century Jokhang temple, where pilgrims and tourists mingle with hawkers of incense, jewelry, and religious objects (“hello, look look, cheap cheap!”), I met two Tibetan men, both in their twenties, like Su and Li. Also like my Chengdu acquaintances, they worked for Chinese financial institutions. They
spoke Tibetan the way well-educated Indians speak Hindi or Hong Kong Chinese speak Cantonese—larding their native language with words, or even entire sentences, from the language of the colonial power. Chinese is the language of their education, their workplace, and some of their social life. Both were doing well. One rode a fine Japanese motorcycle. They said it was people like themselves who benefited most from Chinese education, for it had opened up a wider world—of technology, economics, politics, and even Western ideas. Tibetans in the countryside, they said, still led traditional lives, getting by on very little, and deriving no benefit at all from China.

  One of the men ordered a pizza; the other had Chinese noodles. Then, what had begun as a quiet conversation about the economy turned into an argument, in which I was merely a bystander. Perhaps for my sake, out of courtesy, they spoke Chinese, but with more and more Tibetan words thrown in. They disagreed about religion. The more studious of the two friends believed that religion was important. Without it, he said, the human spirit withers. He explained that without religion, most Tibetans would never have survived the harsh conditions of life in arid, icy highlands, with little more to eat than dried yak meat and clumps of flattened barley. But affluence, he said, creates a thirst for religion too; you cannot live on materialism alone. I thought of Richard Gere and the other Hollywood Buddhists. But then his friend took the opposite, more conventional Chinese Communist line: Religion was out-of-date; contemporary problems could be solved only by science. Science, in his view, had replaced religion.

  There was more to this argument than a straightforward clash between a man of faith and an atheist. The “atheist” was from a Muslim family. His grandfather on his mother’s side had come from India. His father was Tibetan. Although he didn’t believe in religion himself, he still stuck to many of his family traditions. He did not eat pork, and said he would marry a Muslim girl, if only to please his parents. He even said he might go on a pilgrimage to Mecca one day, as his parents had done. But although he felt entirely Tibetan, religion to him did not carry the same meaning it did for his Buddhist friend. He told me that Muslims had sometimes been persecuted in the past by Tibetans who wanted to keep Tibet “pure,” that is, purely Buddhist. Buddhism, to a Tibetan, cannot be separated from nationalism—to be Tibetan is to be Buddhist—which is why the Chinese government wishes to control it and why those from religious minorities view it with a sense of unease.