China Road

by Rob Gifford

  To help me navigate around the AIDS villages, I have arranged to meet an AIDS activist named Hu Jia. He is traveling down especially from Beijing to meet me, and to help me avoid being arrested. Hu Jia is one of the new breed of Chinese activists. After the killings in Tiananmen Square, in 1989, many dissidents went into exile or were jailed. When the jailed ones were released in the 1990s, it became clear to them that their cause of political reform was hopeless. Some gave up political activity altogether and threw themselves into business. Younger activists, such as Hu (who is thirty-three) know they would immediately be arrested if they campaigned for political reform, so they have turned to activism on nonpolitical issues. After years campaigning to protect the environment, Hu now works full-time for his own AIDS nongovernmental organization. He has some room to maneuver, because the aims of his organization are largely in line with government policy, but still he treads a fine line.

  Despite the easing of social controls in China, any kind of activism attracts attention from the public security forces, and Hu Jia is under constant surveillance in Beijing. You won’t necessarily be put in jail for being an activist, but you’ll certainly find plenty of people smoking cigarettes and reading newspapers under the streetlamps outside your apartment. Hu’s home and cell-phone numbers are tapped, and every time I want to contact him, I have to text him asking for a safe number. He finds a public telephone and texts me back the number. I write it down, then change the SIM card in my phone to my backup phone number, which the Public Security Bureau doesn’t know about, and call him on the pay phone he is standing next to.

  For several days, I have been messaging Hu Jia using cryptic vocabulary about where to meet and when. We have previously discussed, on a safe phone, the names of a number of HIV-infected towns, so in order to save continually changing SIM cards and finding public phones, I just write messages such as “I can be in S on Sunday around 9am, can you?”

  “Yue zao yue hao. The earlier the better,” he messages back.

  I had walked around Xinyang the night before to find a taxi with smoked glass windows and a driver who was willing to set off early the next morning. Hu Jia says I should wear a hat and sunglasses so I won’t be immediately recognizable as a foreigner when I jump in and out of cars and walk in and out of houses to meet the people who have been infected with HIV as a result of local government policies.

  There are at least thirty AIDS villages in southern Henan, and a cluster of them is located roughly two hours’ drive north of Xinyang on Route 107. That is the north-south equivalent of Route 312, which runs from Beijing to the very south of China. The two roads intersect at Xinyang. The position of Henan as a crossroads in the middle of the country goes some way to explaining the initial AIDS cases. The disease is believed to have been brought by truck drivers from the Golden Triangle area in China’s southwest, near the border with Laos and Burma, who became infected through sex or drug use and then brought the virus up along China’s road system. Once a few people had become infected in Henan, the unhygienic blood-selling program caused the epidemic to explode.

  My taxi driver, when I tell him our destination is Shangcai, is not very happy, even though I say simply that I am going to meet a friend.

  “It’s a bad place,” he says.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “There are just a lot of bad people there,” he says but offers no more.

  Hu Jia has arrived from Beijing the night before, and as we approach Shangcai (pronounced Shang-tsai) at around eight-thirty that morning, he calls and tells my driver where to meet, at a gas station just outside town. A small three-wheel, motorized rickshaw pulls up alongside us, and Hu Jia jumps out, ushering me out of the taxi. The rickshaw is simply a motorcycle pulling a little covered trailer that can squeeze four people in. Hu has strung a piece of cloth across the back of it, so that no one can see in. I tell my taxi driver to meet me back here in three hours.

  There are many police cars on the roads, and Hu Jia firmly holds the tiny flap of cloth that is covering the back of the trailer. At one point, we stop at a traffic light, and I can see through the flimsy curtain that a police car has pulled up behind us, just five yards away. I raise my eyebrows at Hu Jia as he struggles to hold the tiny cloth curtain in place. He grins mischievously.

  The trailer bumps along a dirt track, with us bouncing around in the back, before arriving in a tiny alleyway in a village a few miles outside Shangcai. The driver lifts the wheels over the wooden threshold of a traditional doorway and into a small courtyard, where several children are playing. I insist Hu shoo away the children before I step out. One small child seeing a foreigner and telling his mother can destroy the best-laid plans. Hu shuts the courtyard gate, and there is silence.

  I climb out, shake Hu Jia’s hand, and give him a hearty pat on the back. I always like seeing him. He gives me hope for China. Hu is short and stocky, with a military-style buzz cut, and he wears, unusually for a Chinese man, a pair of shorts, with a large fanny pack around his waist. Inside he has a digital camera, a small video camera, and three cell phones. He is connected to a web of sources around the country, constantly talking to friends and contacts, ducking and diving, sailing much too close to the wind sometimes, occasionally placed under house arrest, but often managing to stay just one step ahead of the forces of darkness.

  Three men emerge from the run-down one-story brick house. They usher us inside, and I sit on one of the filthy couches in the dark, musty room to hear their stories. All three men, and their wives, had sold blood at the mobile blood stations in the mid-1990s.

  “My wife got sick in January 2002 and died in August the same year,” says thirty-two-year-old Li Zhengda.

  Li has a mop of black hair, a mustache, and a tiny growth of stubble on his chin. He did not even get himself tested until August 2004. “I didn’t want to know,” he said, even though in his heart, he said, he knew he would be HIV-positive.

  He now takes a cocktail of drugs that is being provided by the local government, following pressure from Western NGOs in Beijing. “I take the medicine, but it has very bad side effects that make me feel sick,” he tells us.

  “Eighty percent of the farmers don’t take their drugs on time, because they make them feel so sick,” interjects Hu. “It’s a real problem.”

  Sitting beside him is Li Yonglong, who is forty-three. (He is no relation to Li Zhengda. There are more than 90 million people in China whose family name is Li.) He says he and his wife sold blood only three or four times in the mid-1990s, but they are both HIV-positive.

  “They gave us forty-five yuan [nearly $6] each time we sold blood,” he says. “That’s a lot of money.”

  The third man, Zhang Hongda, has a similar story.

  When I ask about the local government, all three men just sit and say nothing. There is nothing for them to say. Li Yonglong shakes his head slowly. “The government has now been forced to give us something,” he says finally. “They give us these drugs, and they give ten yuan [$1.20] every month as a kind of silence money.”

  “The main reason we sold our blood is pinqiong,” says Li Yonglong, his rural Henan accent spread thick across his vowels. “Poverty. That’s the reason. And the main reason for our poverty is that local taxes are too high. Local officials tax everything. All they want to do is make money.”

  “For local officials, everything is seen as a way to make money,” Hu Jia explains. “It’s the Chinese tradition. You become an official, you make money. Officials get fat, the people get thin.”

  Here in Henan, the problem is AIDS and HIV. Elsewhere in China, there are other deadly (or less deadly) issues. Everywhere, though, the underlying problem is the same: corrupt local officials creating a cauldron of hardship and anger in the countryside.

  Li Yonglong says it’s the same with every area of a farmer’s life. Family planning, for instance. Many rural people want more than one child, he says, and are prepared to break the one-child policy. “But if your wife does get pregnant again,
and they find out, they will force her to have an abortion. If you escape the family-planning officials and give birth to the child, you will be massively fined. When my second child was born, I had no money to give them, so they took my tractor, which was worth several years’ wages.”

  The other two men simply sit with their heads bowed.

  “Is there anything you can do to reason with the government, to make them answerable for what they have done here?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” says Zhang. “If you oppose them on anything, they simply put you in jail.”

  I have to ask them one more question, even though I’m sure I know the answer.

  “The central government is starting to talk about rule of law. It says it wants to encourage it. How about if you went and hired a lawyer?”

  “There is not a single lawyer in the whole county,” says Li Zhengda. “And even if there were, they wouldn’t speak up for the ordinary people. They would just be hand in glove with the officials.”

  Hu Jia tells me there are more people he wants me to meet, which means crossing town, so I climb into the back of the motor rickshaw with him, not knowing exactly how to take leave of three men who may be dead within a year.

  We head over to another peasant home, where Hu jumps out again and checks that the coast is clear. Here there is a whole roomful of AIDS sufferers. It is a shocking sight. About fifteen of them, sitting there, in silence. Ordinary farmers who are under a death sentence because of official corruption, and now official negligence. Hu introduces me to Deng Xiaoming, a thirty-four-year-old man whose wife died of AIDS in 2000. He too is infected. His six-year-old daughter died the previous week, and he is completely disconsolate. He says his daughter was very sick with AIDS. One night she began to vomit, and he took her to the hospital. On her second night there, she died.

  Deng confronted the hospital authorities, and in an act of desperation and anger at the destruction of his family, he blamed them for his daughter’s death. He says he placed her body in the lobby for all to see. The hospital told him to remove the body or he would be arrested. He summoned family and friends as reinforcements, but later that evening, he says, fifty police came to take her body away—to cremate it, they said. Hu Jia says there was a virtual tug-of-war over the corpse of the little girl.

  Deng is too disturbed by the experience even to be emotional anymore. Hu has to complete the story. The local government is simply waiting for them to die, Hu says, so that they will stop causing problems and making Shangcai look bad.

  I sit there hating China and everything about it, and I ask Hu if we should just go to the hospital to confront the authorities, but he advises me we would get nowhere. The farmers we are visiting would be immediately arrested, he says, and we would end up spending the night in some police station. All the other people in the room have horror stories of run-ins with officials, never mind their anger at how they were infected in the first place.

  “None of us can find work, so we have no money for our children’s education,” says a middle-aged man named Huang.

  “Even then, when our children go out to look for work, it’s difficult,” says a forty-something woman named Zhang. “When employers hear they come from Shangcai, they never want to hire them, so they have to lie about their hometown.”

  We talk for a little longer, and then I leave the village the way I arrived, in the back of a covered rickshaw, which pulls up alongside my waiting taxi driver on the outskirts of Shangcai. I jump in quickly to avoid being seen but roll down the window just enough to reach out and grasp Hu Jia’s hand. He smiles at me, a conspiratorial grin, full of fire and compassion. Then he jumps back into the rickshaw and is gone.

  Just in case, I take the minidisk containing my interviews out of the recorder and slip it down my briefs, replacing it with the dummy disk. Then, once out of Shangcai and beyond the local capital, I text-message Hu that I am safely out. He replies that he is heading north to the provincial capital, Zhengzhou, to catch a train back to Beijing. A few days later, Hu e-mails me to say the local public security heard about our visit after we had left and went to interrogate the people we had met. But no one owned up to meeting us, so the police were unable to take any action.

  I ride back to Xinyang, still fuming. The taxi driver is complaining again about how backward the area is. “The roads are bad, there are no modern buildings,” he grumbles.

  Certainly I never thought I’d be glad to get back to Xinyang. As Route 107 hits Route 312 at its age-old intersection, there is a sign that reads pathetically:

  Preventing AIDS is everyone’s responsibility.

  And then, a little farther on, the ultimate insult. The new consumer-friendly Communist Party slogan:

  Yi Ren Wei Ben. Put the People First.

  9. Power

  On June 15, in the year 1215, a group of twenty-five barons gathered in a field in southern England. They were some of the most senior representatives of England’s feudal classes, men given power to rule over regions of the country in return for their allegiance to the king, and their commitment to levy taxes on his behalf. The barons had come to force John, the King of England, to sign a document that would place legal constraints upon his power as monarch.

  The king was in trouble. In the years before, he had picked a fight with the Pope and been excommunicated. He had lost great swathes of formerly English land in France and was in dire need of funds that could be raised only through the barons. But they were angry, and for what it was worth, many of the common people supported them. Broke and almost broken, the king knew he had no option, if only to buy himself time, but to place his seal upon the charter drawn up by the barons.

  The name of that field in southern England was Runnymede, and the document King John signed that fateful June day was, of course, Magna Carta.

  Although it meant less to the serfs and villeins of thirteenth-century England than it would to men and women of later times, Magna Carta has rightly been called the cornerstone of the freedoms and democracy enjoyed in the Anglo-Saxon world and beyond. There were other important elements of European life that contributed to checking the absolute power of the king, notably the very considerable power of the church, but Magna Carta became a rallying point against monarchical oppression. Many laws in the United Kingdom and the United States, implemented centuries later, that protect our freedoms as individuals, have emerged directly from clauses in Magna Carta. If you want to trace the origins of the human rights eventually enjoyed in the West, the origins of the jury system and the idea that a monarch could be bound by law, it is no exaggeration to say that all roads lead through Runnymede.

  So the question that has always troubled me is this: If China was so developed and so civilized and so advanced before its time (which it was), why was there no Chinese Runnymede? I raise this question not in order to criticize or condemn Chinese tradition, or to ask arrogantly why other cultures can’t be like ours. There are many ways in which China was far ahead of Europe, in terms of technological development and prosperity. But for some reason, their system never developed any real checks on state power, and since in the West these checks did emerge, it has become a point of real contention between the two sides. The subject of human rights, which overshadows much of China’s dealing with the West, at the heart of it comes down to the unrestrained power of the Chinese state.

  As far as I can work out, the reasons for this continuing political setup are threefold: one reason is political, one ideological, and one social, and all of them have their roots in the ancient capital of China, Chang’an, which is now known as Xi’an.

  During the Tang dynasty, in the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., when Europe was a fractious mess of feuding kings and princes, Chang’an (whose name meant “perpetual peace”) was the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the world, with a population of more than a million people. Even at the height of the Renaissance, six hundred years later, major European cities such as Venice contained no more than about 180,000 people.
During the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), after China’s capital had been moved east, the city was renamed Xi’an, which means “western peace.” Recently, looking to appeal to the tourist dollar, Xi’an’s local government has taken a leaf out of the Roman playbook and started calling itself the Eternal City. When you look around at the legacy of 1950s city planning, it feels as though that might be stretching it a little. But historically, politically, philosophically, and artistically, for a thousand years, until about the tenth century, Chang’an was Athens and Rome combined.

  I’d arrived at the Xi’an bus station late the night before, after a nine-hour ride from southern Henan. That’s about as long as you want to spend on a crowded Chinese bus, especially when the driver is trying to break the land speed record. In the dark. On winding roads.

  The section of Route 312 between southern Henan province and Xi’an is the first time the road has encountered hills of any sort. Nothing too mountainous, but hilly enough for the first rice terraces to be seen on either side. After leaving the buzz of the coast behind, the road through China’s agricultural heartland had been a sober, solid, almost boring companion across a landscape of matching temperament. On this leg of the journey it had become a little more adventurous and gained some character as it climbed into the hills of southeastern Shaanxi province, heading toward the ancient capital.