by Rob Gifford
The plight of Wu’s family is typical for a rural Chinese family in the early twenty-first century. There has been an almost complete breakdown of government subsidies for essential services in rural China. “If you want to educate your children, you have to pay,” Wu says. “If you need health care, you must pay too.”
The Communist Party now gives almost nothing to the people it claims to represent. The Party only takes. From each according to his ability, to each…nothing. In terms of social welfare, it is fair to say that Chinese society today is less socialist than Europe.
The early reforms of the 1980s, which allowed Wu Faliang to sell some of his produce on the open market, did lift his poverty a little, and that improvement lasted into the 1990s. But in recent years, he says, the situation has become much worse again because prices for his produce have stagnated while the cost of living (especially of education and basic health care) has skyrocketed. Mao’s work report of 1927, in which he predicted that the Chinese peasantry would rise like a hurricane, is starting to look increasingly relevant as the cycle of Chinese history turns once again.
Back in 1989, one of the reasons the Tiananmen Square demonstrations failed to spread beyond the cities, and therefore failed to cause major problems for the Communist Party, was that the peasants were not angry. The protests were an urban movement, of intellectuals joined by some workers. The peasants had emerged from the wreckage of rural Maoism in abject poverty, and in 1989 they were still moving up. Now, though, they are angry again, and the Party knows that hundreds of millions of angry peasants is a much more serious problem than a few thousand angry urban intellectuals. By lowering taxes and trying to rein in corrupt local officials, the Party is doing everything it can to prevent the same kind of rural revolution that it once led.
There are now two main issues for the Communist Party in the countryside. First, can it improve the lot of farmers before they become too angry? Realizing how far their anger toward the Communist Party had progressed, in 2006 Beijing declared rural reform a major goal of its new five-year economic program. As well as the abolition of the hated agricultural tax, it has promised free public school education for rural children and a new rural insurance system to help subsidize medical care for those who are too poor to pay to see a doctor.
And second, can it prevent the farmers who are angry from organizing themselves and linking up with other disillusioned elements of society, such as the disaffected urban intellectuals and the laid-off factory workers? This kind of cooperation is already starting. I have spoken to intellectuals and lawyers heading out to the countryside to advise the farmers in their disputes over land and taxes, and to try to use the law to gain recourse for Old Hundred Names. The state is still strong, but the grass on the prairie is very, very dry.
“What will he do?” I ask Wu, pointing at his grandson. “What kind of China will he live in?”
“He’ll go to the city, of course, to work and to make money,” Wu replies.
“And never come back here?”
“This will always be his ancestral home, his lao jia. But there is no future here.”
For rural Chinese, there is only one real means of empowerment, and one source of hope, and that is escape. They have an exit, along Route 312 to the coast, or increasingly to the inland cities that are starting to boom.
Several days before, I had read in my already dog-eared copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath a section about the Dust Bowl in the U.S. Midwest of the 1930s: “A half million people moving over the country, a million more, restive, ready to move—ten million more, feeling the first nervousness.” Those numbers are too small even to describe the single province of Anhui, and its army of migrants moving, or preparing to move, to the cities. There are twenty-seven provinces and “autonomous regions” in China, and you have to multiply Steinbeck’s numbers for Oklahoma by twenty or thirty or fifty to reach the number on the move in China today. Of course, some of the issues in Anhui are different from those of 1930s Oklahoma, but what Route 66 represented to the Okies would sound mighty familiar to the peasants living beside Route 312.
66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.
Wu Faliang is old. He will never leave his home village now. He has seen everything: the civil war and chaos of the 1940s, when he was a boy; the hope of Communist land reform in the 1950s, dashed by collectivization; the hopes of economic reform in the 1980s, ruined by the corruption and stagnation of the early twenty-first century. His life mirrors the tumult of twentieth-century China, which after a sixty-year cycle has come to rest, in many ways, where it began. People are not starving, and that should not be forgotten, but life as a Chinese peasant is a constant struggle.
Wu’s seven-year-old grandson stands beside him, fiddling with a short piece of rope. His grandpa’s whole life was decided for him by the Party. Now, amid the many problems of rural China, for perhaps the first time in Chinese history, peasant children in fields across China are being untethered from their ancestral homes, and from the day-to-day control of the state, and can decide for themselves what to do when they grow up. The choices are not great, the conditions are basic, but they are something. And perhaps that is the real new revolution, meager and slow though it is.
As I head back to the car, a huge red lozenge of a sun is starting to set, dragging the day behind it. The boy follows at a distance, and after I climb into the car and we drive off, I look out the rear window. Wu Faliang has gone back to plowing his field. But the boy is standing, motionless, watching as we drive away along the dusty road.
6. Silicon Valley
There are nine cities in the United States with more than one million inhabitants. In China there are forty-nine. You can be traveling across China, arrive in a city that is twice the size of Houston, and think, I’ve never even heard of this place. That is how it is for many foreign visitors to Hefei (population 4.2 million). I have been traveling to China for nearly twenty years and had visited here for the first time only the previous year. There had never really been any reason to come. But as in so many cities in China, the local government is trying to change that. After centuries of inland poverty, Hefei (pronounced Huh-fay), like all Chinese cities, is opening up to the world.
Like dye dripped upon a piece of cloth, a moderate level of wealth is seeping to cities inland. The new Route 312 has been a part of the change, dramatically cutting the journey time for people and goods going to Nanjing, Shanghai, and the coast. The spread of factories and companies inland in search of lower costs has helped too, as have the remittances from migrants working near the coast. This growing wealth in turn is changing some of the patterns of inland migration. Shanghai is still the Promised Land for migrant peasants, but there are now more mini Promised Lands around the country, regional capitals such as Hefei, other cities farther inland, such as Xi’an and Lanzhou, to which people are traveling to find work simply because there is now work available. For the first time, some factories on the coast say they have a labor shortage, and one reason is that people can now find jobs (albeit not so well paid) in China’s interior.
This emergence of the inland cities is actually a reemergence. The countryside has always been poor, but for centuries Chinese cities were far more prosperous than their counterparts elsewhere in the world.
The government is doing everything to encourage it. In recent years it has introduced an old Confucian concept into its propaganda. The word it uses is xiaokang (pronounced shao-kang), and it means “moderate prosperity.” It’s hard to imagine tens of thousands of Red Guards marching through Tiananmen Square chanting “moderate prosperity.” But that�
��s the point. The old revolutionary slogans are dead. The new slogans promoting xiaokang are everywhere, another sign of the metamorphosis of the Communist Party from persecutor of the bourgeoisie to its ardent promoter. Economists say we should not refer to what is going on in China as “capitalism” and that a more appropriate term for it is “Leninist corporatism.” It is not a true market economy, they say, but still very much guided and managed by the Communist Party. Either way, the Party in Hefei, as throughout China, knows that the market economy, however much a work in progress, could be its salvation. But the Party also knows that the inequalities of the emerging market economy could be its downfall too.
The demise of cradle-to-grave health care, education, and employment has created large groups of losers as well as winners in reform-era China, from the peasants I have just met to the workers laid off from the factories of China’s cities. So alongside the campaign promoting “moderate prosperity,” another campaign has been launched, promoting something called hexie (pronounced huh-shyeh), which translates into English as “harmony.” Signs encouraging citizens to build a more harmonious society have sprung up all over Hefei and most other Chinese cities, sometimes just yards away from signs promoting “moderate prosperity,” the contradiction in their aims apparently lost in the maelstrom of development.
Located just 250 miles west of Shanghai, Hefei is the first city of any size that you hit as you enter the rural heartland of China. In the 1930s it had a population of just thirty thousand, but in 1949 the Communist Party made it the capital of Anhui province. The city became part of the Communist attempt at high-speed industrialization in the late 1950s, which has left it with a none-too-inviting industrial feel.
Hefei gained a degree of notoriety in 1986 as one of the first sites of post-Mao student unrest. The demonstrations in favor of more political change would spread to other cities before being (peacefully) stopped by the Party, but they presaged the bigger protests of 1989, which were brutally put down by the government with the loss of hundreds of lives. The demonstrations of 1986 had been encouraged by the vice president of Hefei’s top seat of learning, the University of Science and Technology, an astrophysicist and well-known political liberal named Fang Lizhi. After the crushing of the Tiananmen protests three years later, Fang took refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing and eventually gained asylum in America.
Neither political reform nor political protest has come back on the agenda, in Hefei or anywhere else, since China switched its focus to the economy. Hefei has traditionally been so far off the pace of change that it didn’t even benefit from the 1990s boom. “What a dump,” said an acquaintance of mine who had lived there as a teacher in the early nineties. “Terrible place,” said another friend, who had traveled there to adopt a baby girl in 1996.
Now, though, things are looking up a little. After the three-hour journey from Nanjing across a sea of rural poverty, it feels as if you have climbed onto another island of moderate prosperity when you reach Hefei. The British giant Unilever recently moved its entire manufacturing base here from Shanghai. The city government is trying to persuade other companies to do the same. The rhythm of life is picking up. There are building sites all over, the shops are full of all kinds of consumer goods, and some of the wealthier citizens have begun to buy cars. Undoubtedly most ambitious of all, the Hefei government says it is trying to turn this unknown city in central China into a major center for global high-tech companies.
The next day, I am met in the lobby of my hotel by Mr. Wang and Miss Zhu from the Foreign Affairs Office of the Hefei government.
Up until Hefei, I have been flying completely beneath the radar as far as Chinese officialdom is concerned. I have neither sought out nor been troubled by officials of any sort. It’s very easy to do that in China these days. Just take off, and talk to whom you want along the way. Here in Hefei, however, because I am hoping to visit a high-profile government project, I have contacted the government in advance.
Every province, every city, every town in China has a so-called Foreign Affairs Office, known as a waiban (pronounced why-ban), and visitors, especially foreign journalists, are supposed to contact the waiban if they visit. Few people ever do, though. I travel around China all the time talking with all sorts of people and rarely contact the waiban unless I want official interviews. There’s no guarantee you won’t run into problems if the police catch you, but the birdcage for foreign correspondents has also become an aviary.
Mr. Wang, or Section Head Wang as I’m careful to call him, is probably in his late forties and speaks no English. He is an affable guy, not at all like the kiss-up, kick-down types who are so common in the Chinese government hierarchy. Miss Zhu is probably in her late twenties and speaks English very well. They are both typical waiban officials in a provincial capital, a little cautious in what they say but friendly and helpful. They both respectfully call me Journalist Qi, using the Chinese family name given to me long ago by my first Chinese teacher (pronounced Chee). Foreigners have many identities in China. I am respectfully called Lao Qi (Old Qi) by Chinese friends who are younger than me. I am affectionately called Xiao Qi (Little Qi) by Chinese friends who are older than me. And I am called Qi Dixiong (Brother Qi) by my friends within the Chinese church. The Chinese for “Journalist Qi” is Qi Jizhe, which means “The One Who Writes Things Down Whose Name Is Qi.” It’s a moniker that I like very much.
Section Head Wang has set up an itinerary to show visitors how his city is going to take over the world technologically. Technology is the new religion of urban China, and no longer just in the coastal cities. Having wasted decades, centuries almost, overcoming traditional objections to progress, and then wasted thirty years convulsing to a Maoist revolutionary tune, the Chinese have finally gotten themselves into a position where they can develop technology and begin to take on the world. Everywhere you see signs that say REVIVE THE NATION THROUGH SCIENCE AND EDUCATION.
Whether it is space travel, computer software, or medical research, scientific progress is a national obsession. Many Chinese-born scientists have returned from abroad to continue their research, not just out of patriotism but because Chinese research facilities have become so cutting-edge. The Communist revolution’s annihilation of traditional thinking has also made for an astonishingly free approach to areas such as medical research; scientists can try things that are banned in the West by strict ethics laws. (I would not be surprised if the first cloned human being is already lurking somewhere along the banks of the Yangtze River.)
Hefei’s focus, though, is nothing quite so controversial. The city is simply aiming to become a center for high-tech companies. Mr. Wang and Miss Zhu take me first to an industrial park where the city government has been offering free office space to high-tech start-up companies, of which there are now dozens. We visit a company developing voice recognition software, and another one doing online conferencing. The second was set up in the United States by a Chinese graduate student. When he returned to China, he chose not Shanghai, not Beijing, but Hefei as the location of his Chinese headquarters. Costs are much lower, there are plenty of very well-trained engineers graduating from the University of Science and Technology and other universities here, and the Internet means it doesn’t matter where they are actually sitting. The building is shiny and modern, the open-plan office humming quietly with the gentle sound given off by a roomful of software engineers.
I am not a techie by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it is all I can do to get online and check my e-mail. But walking through that office in a town in central China that no one in the West has ever heard of, I was struck by the uneasy feeling you sometimes get in China. I felt for a moment that I could see the future. Here are three hundred software engineers, all probably just as good as their counterparts in the United States, but earning perhaps twenty or thirty times less.
This is not to say that Hefei will immediately achieve its aims. It still has a long, long way to go, and wishful thinking and hot air are attac
hed in equal measures to the government’s efforts at turning it into the new Bangalore. But things are moving here at a rather startling pace, and the aspirations of some of these regional governments are incredible.
Section Head Wang suggests that I haven’t seen anything yet, and after a brief lunch, we head out to the west side of Hefei. On the edge of the city, right on Route 312 as it rolls out of town, is a development known as Science City, another good example of a massive state investment. The site will eventually cover twenty square miles, and planners are hoping it will become one of the biggest high-tech parks in China, attracting Chinese and international companies. Part of the area being bulldozed to make way for the first buildings was formerly a government-owned pig farm, but it will now incubate high-tech firms, not piglets. We all have a good laugh about that.
Here I get a full PowerPoint presentation, with a dazzling array of maps, figures, and plans. “We want Hefei to become the Silicon Valley of China,” says an appropriately youthful manager named Jin Rui. “Through hard work over the next fifteen years, we think we can do it. The project has already attracted two billion dollars of government investment.”
I’m not kidding. That is the figure he gives. And he gives it in U.S. dollars. He has many more—so many statistics and superlatives, in fact, that I have trouble keeping up.
