China Road

by Rob Gifford

  “First, there is nothing romantic about being a nomad. It’s a very tough life. Second, I think nomads realize there is no future as nomads. That is simply today’s world. The modern world. The globalized world. I’m not sure we can completely blame the Chinese for that.”

  We slurp down our noodles in silence for a moment. It seems as though everything has been reversed. The Han Chinese have forced the settlement and the tethering of the nomadic Tibetans. And now it is the Han Chinese who have, for the first time, become the nomads, untethered from their old, settled ways.

  “What about politics? What about the Dalai Lama? What about Tibetan independence?”

  “I don’t want to talk about politics. I want to stay neutral on the subject of the Dalai Lama. I certainly would never support Tibetan independence.”

  He pauses. I nod my head. We slurp our noodles. It is a tragedy, but it is a slow-burn tragedy. The killings, the destruction of the monasteries, and some of the violence have eased. The main threat of destruction is now for economic and not political reasons. But even in Tibet proper there is a sense of switching gears and focusing on economic development. The number of people being arrested for political crimes (read: opposing Chinese rule) has dropped considerably. It’s as though the focus of hope has shifted. It seems that many people, especially the young and the urban, have accepted that Tibet will never be independent, and that they had better just make the best of a bad situation.

  In the worst-case scenario, Tibetan culture will be so diluted that it will disappear as an identity. Some elements, such as the religion and the ethnicity, might remain, but Tibet will gradually become Sinified, absorbed into the Chinese Empire. Assimilation, though, won’t be accomplished through the power of Chinese culture, or by the power of the Chinese gun, but by the power of the Chinese yuan, the currency that is buying off many of the Tibetan people.

  A slightly more positive scenario is that Tibet (and maybe Xinjiang, the mainly Muslim region in the northwest where I am heading) might become like Scotland within the United Kingdom. The Scots have retained their identity, and they do not like the English at all, but they have been part of a country dominated by the English for so long, and the two have become so integrated in so many ways, that until very recently pro-independence parties enjoyed little support. But that process took three hundred years.

  Either way, it is unavoidable that Tibet and the Tibetan regions around its fringe are being transformed, not just being made more Chinese but being made more global. Undoubtedly there will be economic benefits if the Tibetans, and not just the Han Chinese, can take advantage of the shift. But the danger is that Tibetan culture is already becoming rather like Native American culture. It has the feeling of a theme park, where the superficial elements of the indigenous culture are allowed, encouraged even, but only inasmuch as they fit into the culture of the conquerors. Talks between Beijing and representatives of the aging Dalai Lama, aimed at reaching some kind of settlement that might save more Tibetan culture, seem to be going nowhere. And one day, probably quite soon, he will die, and the Chinese will supervise the selection of the new Dalai Lama, and that will be that.

  I thank Xiao Lin for being so frank, and we say goodbye at the bus station.

  I’m heading back to Lanzhou, to spend a day exploring, and walking the banks of the Yellow River, before I head northwest into the Gobi Desert.

  While I’m waiting for a bus, I notice a group of bus drivers who are sitting having their lunch. They are all Hui Muslims, and they sit laughing, joking, ribbing one another, and then ribbing me when I start chatting with them. Even when the conversation turns, as it inevitably does, to the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq and policies in the Middle East, there is no hostility toward me personally.

  “Your prime minister and that evil Bush president are killing our tongbao in Iraq. They are killing our brothers,” says one of them, a young man with a round face and dirty shoes, who tells me his uncle is working in Baghdad, driving a truck. He gestures for me to lean forward as he pulls a laminated picture of Osama bin Laden out of his pocket under the table.

  “You like Osama?” I ask him.

  “Yes,” he says, smiling. “We like Osama.”

  14. No Longer Relying on Heaven

  In the summer of 1988, as post-Mao China looked out full of hope into the big, wide-open future and wondered what kind of country it was going to become, China Central Television screened a documentary series called He Shang. The title is usually translated into English as River Elegy. The series came out at the end of my year as a language student in Beijing, and it caused a huge stir because of its negative portrayal of Chinese culture. It was a fascinating mix of images and interviews put together to support the main iconoclastic theme, which was that the idea of the Chinese being a wonderful ancient people with a wonderful ancient culture was a big sham, and that the entire culture needed to change.

  River Elegy was an important film and its release a seminal point in China’s post-Mao cultural history. It represented much of what was going on in the minds of young intellectuals just before the demonstrations erupted in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. The film attacked many symbols of Chinese history, from the “cruel and violent” imperial dragon to the Great Wall, which “can only represent an isolationist, conservative, and incompetent defense” for China.

  Perhaps most significant was the critique that gave the series its title, an attack on the Yellow River, which flows through Lanzhou, through the heartland of northern China, and (when it hasn’t been drained completely by overuse) out to the East China Sea. Chinese civilization grew up around the Yellow River, and the river has always symbolized China’s ancient culture. There is an old Chinese saying that “a dipperful of Yellow River water is seven-tenths mud,” and River Elegy took the silt and sediment of the river as a symbol for the weight of Confucian tradition, clogging up the Chinese mind. The elegy of the title was an aspirational one, a hope that the traditional culture of China, which has held the country back for so long, might die and be replaced by a more progressive, Western-style way of thinking.

  The writers of River Elegy criticized everything about China’s “yellowness,” from the mythical Yellow Emperor of antiquity to the barren yellow earth of the loess plateau. Yellowness symbolized the backwardness of the country and its culture, especially its political culture. This they contrasted with “blueness,” symbolized by clear ocean water, flowing from the West and bringing the much-needed science and democracy of the Ocean People to China. The film ended with the hope that the Yellow River would eventually flow out, mix with the blue ocean, and be transformed.

  The fact that River Elegy was allowed to be shown in the first place, to hundreds of millions of people across China, says much about the freedoms that had developed by 1988, as the country’s leaders allowed intellectuals to explore the best way for the country to go forward. But the series caused a storm because, although it did not openly attack the Communist Party, the script contained plenty of not-so-subtle criticisms of the Chinese imperial tradition and, by extension, of the current political system. Many conservatives objected to it.

  The messages of River Elegy were a crucial part of the intellectual ferment in the years leading up to the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. But when the protests were crushed by government troops, the authors of River Elegy were arrested or escaped into exile, the latest in a long line of soul-searching Chinese intellectuals to fail in their quest to make China into a democratic country. (In a fascinating footnote to the intellectual and spiritual searching of the 1980s, two of the main writers of River Elegy fled to the United States after Tiananmen, where they both became evangelical Christians.)

  Independent intellectuals do not have a great track record in China. The soul-searching of the reformist elite in the late nineteenth century had led to the collapse of China in the revolution of 1912. The soul-searching of the westernized Chinese thinkers of the 1920s had resulted in the emergence of the Communist
Party, which got rid of many old ways of thinking but made no progress in changing the old political model, and ultimately crushed the intellectuals who had initially supported it. And then the soul-searchers of the 1980s were suppressed in their turn. It all makes you feel the Yellow River is still winning, symbolically at least.

  It seems as though every time someone starts to think outside the box politically, either the state collapses or the people doing the thinking are crushed. Many people’s mind-sets about science and progress have been changed, but the government will still not allow people to think about political change.

  And this is the point. The fact that the writers of River Elegy were crushed or banished in June 1989 made the message I’d got in Xi’an, three hundred miles back east, even more clear. That China the concept, China the empire, China the construct of two thousand years of imperial history has never been, and may never be, able to allow independent thinking. The system, whether Confucian or Communist, is simply not built to permit it, because independent thinking will of course lead to questions about China’s political system, and if China is to hold together, questioning like that cannot be tolerated. What Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, said about the Soviet Union applies to the modern Chinese empire too: that it cannot be both an empire and a democracy.

  So what now? Where are the new generations of intellectuals? And could there be a new wave of intellectual soul-searching that could actually succeed? One of the most striking things about urban China these days is the near-complete depoliticization of the younger generation (anyone under the age of about thirty-five). Most older intellectuals have, in order to survive, also shelved their thinking about political change in favor of the economic reforms that have taken place in the twenty years since Tiananmen. Perhaps with greater economic freedom and growth will come more intellectual, political freedom, goes the thinking. But will the intellectuals ever be able to speak out without being crushed, or without the country falling apart? I’m not sure they will.

  There are many brave thinkers in China, some of whom are still trying to do what they can to promote political reform. It is a strangely contradictory environment for them, with all the economic and social change blaring around them yet a complete ban on the publication of any writing that is even vaguely sensitive politically. A few people who tried to set up an independent political party were jailed in the late 1990s, and there are no signs that the Communist Party will relax its stranglehold on political discussion any time soon.

  This bitter reality should, I believe, cause China’s suppressed intellectuals to shift their thinking a little. Many see themselves, the educated elite, as the most important agents of change. But ask them how much Old Hundred Names should be included, and most of them will say the same thing: “You can’t give the vote to the peasants.”

  To my mind, this attitude of the urban intellectuals, that the peasants who make up two-thirds of the population are part of the problem and not part of the solution, is inherently wrong. Chairman Mao, after 1949, was wrong on just about everything, and millions of people paid the price for it. But I think his focus on the peasants was correct, and that is where today’s focus should be as well, because that is what will make the difference in whether China can go forward as a unified country and possibly, just possibly, develop some political checks and balances.

  The intellectuals are being given no space by the state, and I don’t believe this is likely to change in the near future. A policy of stability über alles cannot allow it. If the intellectual elite were given space to explore how to develop grassroots democracy, it might begin to change the way China is governed. But absent this, the focus for the empowerment of the people must be on the peasants: not another Maoist peasant rebellion, but the drip-drip transformation of the Industrial Revolution that enriched Europe and North America and is, however imperfectly, beginning to transform China.

  As I saw back in Anhui, the situation for the peasants if they stay in the countryside is dire. But if the farmers can continue to go out and find work and then return to improve the standard of living in the countryside, it will be they, and not the intellectuals, whose changing lives will slowly transform the country. Then one day perhaps an elegy can be written for the Yellow River and all that it symbolizes.

  The river still runs, of course, through the heart of Lanzhou, oblivious to the blame that is cast into its quiet, muddy waters. It broods, sulking almost, through the city.

  I spend a lazy afternoon in the smoggy, sweltering streets around the Yellow River, eating at a noisy noodle bar, wandering through the crowded markets, and I go down to the river itself just to look at it, so symbolic, so controversial.

  In ancient times, it was said that the time when the Yellow River runs clear will be the time of the great sage ruler. “When the Yellow River runs clear” entered the Chinese language as an idiom of impossibility, something like “when hell freezes over” in English. The river is not likely to run clear anytime soon. The supposed “blueness” of Western-style industrialization is adding man-made pollution to the silt that has caused a thousand floods. The Yellow River is now symbolic not just of the longevity of China’s ancient civilization, but also of the ecological perils of the path to modernity that the country has taken.

  If half of China’s problems in recent centuries have been cultural, the other half have been geographical. Geography dealt Europe an easy hand. No deserts, some mountains but plenty of coastlines too, and nowhere very far from the sea. The geography of China, in its splendid continental isolation, was a different matter.

  In earlier centuries, being isolated was not such a problem. China was a self-sufficient continent, but it still developed a glorious civilization long before the West. In recent centuries, though, the explosion of invention and exploration that followed the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment transformed European society. Chinese inventions, transmitted through the Arab world, were also a major factor in Europe’s emergence, which occurred just as the glories of China were starting to stagnate. Europeans were neighbors, rivals, competitors, fighting one another too much for sure, but also progressing through competition. What China most lacked was competitors. The problems brought about by its geographical isolation were compounded by the conquest of the western regions by the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century, which added still more difficult terrain to govern.

  Lanzhou marks the start of this more difficult terrain, a stretch of land that has always been known as the Hexi Corridor. Hexi (pronounced Huh-shee) means “west of the river” (as in the Yellow River), and the narrow corridor of habitable land that stretches northwest from Lanzhou to the last fort of the Great Wall, at Jiayuguan, 350 miles to the northwest, has historically been known as “the neck of China.” It was the only way for things to flow in and out along the Silk Road from the northwest in ancient times, and the Chinese did everything possible to keep a stranglehold on it. The fort at Jiayuguan (pronounced Jah-you-gwan), known as the “mouth of China,” was the Chinese equivalent of the Khyber Pass, which guarded entry into British India from the northwest.

  Soon the Qilian (Chee-lyen) Mountains will rise on the southern side of the road, pushed up from the Tibetan Plateau as though by two divine tectonic hands establishing a natural southern barrier against the galloping Gobi. To the north of the road soon begins the desert proper, which stretches north for more than five hundred miles.

  History and progress race each other northwest along the Hexi Corridor. The Lanzhou to Urumqi railroad, completed in 1963, runs in places alongside the remains of the Great Wall of China. Route 312 lies to the south of the railroad and the wall, a sort of live third rail, also heading northwest. The oasis towns along its path dot the road like beads, hanging loose on a necklace along the southern perimeter of the desert.

  Until Lanzhou, Route 312 has been an anonymous projection of asphalt, a Communist-era road that no one outside China has ever heard of. Now there are two
Routes 312 that emerge from the outskirts of Lanzhou, and two bridges that carry them across the Yellow River. There is the old ramshackle road, which has served as the main route into the northwest since the 1950s, for the few goods or people that didn’t travel by rail. And then there is the new Route 312, a four-lane highway that now takes the growing volume of long-distance road traffic up into the desert.

  Both roads find it hard, though, to wear the mantle that history has laid upon them. For this is now the Old Silk Road, the skein of trade routes that in ancient times stretched like golden threads across the Gobi Desert, linking China to Central Asia, Persia, and eventually Europe. Historians say it starts in Xi’an, because Chang’an (as it was then known) was the capital of China at the height of the Silk Road, in the seventh and eighth centuries, and the starting point and final destination of everything that flowed along it. But in my mind, the Silk Road has always begun in Lanzhou, because it is only here that it really starts to feel like the Silk Road. There is desert, there are oases, and there are camels.

  For the first few hours out of Lanzhou, the scenery is forgettable. The desert starts with the ragged, anonymous hills that stifle the road with their yellowness. Before Lanzhou, the yellow of the loess plateau had begun to seep into everything, but there was still greenery beside the roads, and fields of crops. Here most efforts at cultivation have been abandoned, and the low hills rise and fall in their yellow waves as though chlorophyll had never been invented.

  Apart from the color, it is the emptiness that you notice. It’s easy to feel claustrophobic in Han China, which is so saturated with settlement and the history of settlement. There is barely a square mile of land, rural or urban, that is not crammed with thousands of people. Here, occasional villages cling to the yellow hillsides, but the land is largely uninhabited. There is a feeling of intense liberation as the road stretches its legs out into the desert. I write in my notebook: “You are now leaving Chinese airspace.”