China Road

by Rob Gifford

  “How is life? How is life? Life is not good. Do you know why? Because the officials have sealed up our well. The well that has given water to Xingxingxia for centuries has been sealed up with concrete.”

  He looks up from his blackened wok, then splashes soy sauce into the stir-fry, which sizzles as he tosses it. “The officials here are so evil, so incredibly immoral, it almost defies belief.”

  “But why on earth would they want to do that?” I ask him.

  “Because…” He pauses again and steps back from the stove, wok in hand, to look at me. “Because they run the local water company, and they want to force everyone to buy their water.”

  Even when you think you know something of the venality of Chinese officials, stories like this can still take your breath away. Lao Zhang says that he remonstrated with them, but they would not listen. He says they used the classic post-9/11 argument of government officials in Xinjiang, a region with a high population of Muslims. “They said that if I kept on protesting, they would arrest me as a terrorist.” And when you are arrested as a terrorist in China, you have no recourse, no lawyer, no protection. So Lao Zhang had to shut up. But he refuses to buy their water.

  The food is ready. He swirls it into a dish and disappears behind the dirty curtain to deliver it to the two truck drivers. He comes back, wipes his hands on an even dirtier towel, and stands looking at me, as though really sizing me up for the first time.

  He makes me a bowl of noodles, then comes out and sits with me in the shabby little dining area.

  Lao Zhang has a fire in his eyes that you seldom see in China. He doesn’t seem like a normal café owner. In a different era, I imagine he could have been a revolutionary. But here he is, in the middle of the desert, trying to make a living for himself and his wife and child. “My daughter wants to be a policewoman when she grows up,” he says, “so she can control the corrupt officials.”

  The two truck drivers finish their lunch and leave. Lao Zhang and I talk for half an hour. The little café is baking hot. Lao Zhang is hotter. He has more stories of official corruption, more anger at the local officials, more tales of abuse of power, tales that you will hear in every truck stop, in every village, in every town across China. He waves his arms and fumes, seeming glad to get it all off his chest.

  “So is there nothing you can do about it?” I ask him finally.

  He stares at me intensely, beads of sweat rolling slowly down his temples. Then he holds up two fingers. “There is only one thing to do, and I can tell you what it is in two characters.”

  From the fire in his eyes, and the barely restrained fury in his voice, I honestly think that he is going to say “Ge ming.” Revolution.

  But he doesn’t.

  “Ren shou,” he says, spitting the words out between his teeth. “Endure. That is all we can do. Ren shou. We can and must endure. That is all we have ever been able to do.”

  I stare at him and slowly shake my head. He has just summed up thousands of years of Chinese history. Endure is all that Old Hundred Names have ever been able to do. For all the progress in the wealthier parts of China, endure is all that hundreds of millions of common people in the poorer countryside and the western regions ever see themselves doing in future.

  At certain crisis points in history, the endurance has become too much, the pressure has built up, and the volcano has erupted. Revolutions have started and have overthrown the ruling dynasty. But they have not led to a change in system. They have simply replaced one emperor with another, and with a new dynasty that ends up being just as corrupt as the last. There has never been any separation of powers, any linear narrative of change, any Magna Carta. Just power concentrated in the hands of a few officials, trapped in an unending cycle of history.

  Months later, I found a passage in Mildred Cable and Francesca French’s book Through Jade Gate and Central Asia. It is written as the missionary trio are delayed at Starry Gorge in the 1920s on their way to Urumqi. The soldiers garrisoned there are preventing everyone from passing through, and several youths are being detained at the same inn as the Trio. These young men had been press-ganged into the military, and half a dozen of them had been flogged, apparently for desertion. “A spirit of blank hopelessness dominated the place,” write Cable and French. They then step back and look at the big picture of China, based on thirty years of experience.

  The Chinese are a long-suffering people; they bear the tyrannies of their oppressors, and the dominion of rapacious officialdom, with a pathetic resignation, but the hour is at hand when they will rise and avenge the wrongs of generations. In such an hour, no violence is regarded as an excess, and they will deal with their oppressors in their own way.

  That was in 1926. Their prophecy was fulfilled in the first years of Communist Party rule, in the 1950s, when landlords and “ruling classes” were mercilessly put to death by the new peasant leaders. Is there a new uprising coming? People like Lao Zhang are getting by, just about. Everyone can put up with corruption if his own lot is improving each year, however slightly. But if the economy stalls, there are plenty of very angry people now, right across China, ready to avenge the wrongs of rapacious officialdom. Mao’s words from 1927 keep coming back to me: “A single spark can light a prairie fire.” The grass on this and many parts of the prairie is very, very dry.

  The fire in Lao Zhang’s eyes has blazed until this moment. Now that he has exploded, he shakes his head, his eyes seem to glaze over a little, and I wonder how much longer that fire will be there.

  I pay him for my bowl of noodles and ask if I can see the well. He leads me outside to a little culvert down a slope underneath Route 312 as it rolls into town. It has a massive cap of concrete sealed over the top. I look at it, shaking my head in disbelief. He scoffs through his teeth and turns away. Then I say goodbye and wander up to the road, to look for a ride onward to the next big town, Hami.

  And that is how I come to be standing in Starry Gorge, talking to the truck drivers at the gas station. We chat while we wait for the police car to move from its position just up the road. They tell me about the game of cat and mouse that they play with the police all the way along Route 312. Several of them have come from Shanghai; some from Guangzhou, in the very south of China; one from Beijing.

  There is an official sign beside the gas station that says, CLAMP DOWN ON THE THREE RANDOMS.

  “What are the Three Randoms?” I ask.

  “Bu yao luan shou fei, luan she gang, luan fa kuan. No random tolls, no random roadblocks, no random fines,” one of them replies, saying that it’s a campaign against corrupt police and local officials, who impose all three.

  “That’s rather ironic,” I reply, “that the police car would be sitting waiting to randomly fine you a few hundred yards from an official government sign that says he shouldn’t.”

  The trucker smiles the weary smile of every Chinese person. The smile that says simply, “You are a foreigner, and this is China.”

  Then the word comes through that the police car has moved on, the drivers scatter to their vehicles, and Liu Qiang offers me a ride in his big blue East Wind truck with the huge industrial filter on the back.

  “We need a multiparty system,” Liu says, picking up the conversation about local corruption. “We need checks and balances on the government. It’s just too corrupt.”

  His words of hatred for local officials echo those of Lao Zhang at the café. Liu tells me more stories of corrupt police along the road in every province across China, a litany of official abuses of power that, to be fair, go on in most developing countries. But in contrast to much of the developing world, Liu and many Chinese retain an age-old Confucian belief that central government leaders are good, and it is just the local officials who are corrupt. The respect of the central government and mistrust of the local officials seem to be the exact opposite of the American mind-set.

  Driver Liu is not only frank about politics but very open about his private life. I ask him if he visits the prostitutes who ar
e available at every truck stop, and he says he does.

  “Of course, this isn’t a very good phenomenon,” he says, making it sound as though he’s talking about someone else. “But I’m a guy, so it’s in my nature, right?”

  When you hit the desert driving west in the United States, you know at least there is the shining sea of the Pacific Ocean on the other side. Here in Xinjiang, the desert never seems to end. Nor, it seems, does Route 312. We travel for hours through the middle of the emptiness, talking about everything and nothing, becoming firm friends, even though we’ll never meet again. We stop briefly at a small, dusty village named Luotuo Quanzi, which means “Camel Corral.” You can tell you are in the Wild West by the names of the towns and villages. Camel Corral is like Starry Gorge, lined with grimy little cafés, but here there is more choice of food. Each truck stop specializes in food from a particular province. The signs outside proclaim HENAN FOOD, SHAANXI FOOD, ANHUI FOOD, and so on. Every driver wants food from his own province, Liu explains, and here they can catch up on news from home over their favorite dish.

  After another hour of open desert, we approach the exit off Route 312 for Hami, and I prepare to get out. Over years of living in China, I have spoken to dozens of Chinese professors and experts, intellectuals and urbanites who give the impression of having their fingers on the pulse of the nation and an ability to interpret it for foreigners. Sometimes they do it very well, but if you really want to know about China, real China, there are few better ways to find out than a long conversation with an ordinary long-distance truck driver, barreling across the Gobi Desert.

  20. The Great Wall of the Mind

  There are few more wonderfully artistic or mesmerically beautiful writing systems in the world than the characters of the Chinese language. Chinese has no alphabet but is made up of 214 different “radicals,” which are combined to make characters. The radicals are not the characters we are all used to seeing on Chinese restaurant signs; they are the constituent parts of those characters. There is a radical for “water,” which is just three little lines; there is a radical for “man,” which looks like a man with two legs; there is a radical for “animal”; and so on. Every character is made up of a mixture of radicals, with some radicals being used to hint at the meaning of the character and some radicals used to give clues to the character’s phonetic pronunciation. So any character to do with water (river, sea, canal) contains the “water” radical plus another radical or two. Most characters that have something to do with wood (tree, forest, table, chair) contain the “wood” radical plus others. And so on.

  Some Chinese characters are made up of interesting combinations of radicals. A “pig” radical underneath a “roof” radical is the character for “home.” A “woman” radical together with a “son” radical is the character for “good.”

  Once characters have been formed, you can put different characters together to make more complex words. In general, new characters cannot be created (though a famous Chinese linguist named Zhao Yuanren did once translate Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” into Chinese, using invented characters to capture the slithy toves that gyred and gimbled in the wabe of Carroll’s original). So if a new concept appears, it is described by putting existing characters together.

  The system is very logical. For instance, when the Chinese first came across the giraffe, they did not reach back into the roots of some ancient mother language such as Latin or Greek to create a new word, they used characters that already existed. The Chinese word for a giraffe is chang jing lu, which literally means “long neck deer.” The word for computer is dian nao, which means “electric brain.” Even words that are not new are often wonderful combinations of existing characters. A lobster is long xia, which means “dragon shrimp,” and my own particular favorite, the word for “womb,” is zi gong, which translates literally as “child palace.”

  All of this made the introduction of the typewriter into China rather difficult, the introduction of Scrabble even more so. To write on a computer in Chinese, you must write the character’s transliteration in the Western alphabet (qiu, xia, zhao, meng, or whatever—all of which have multiple characters that make the same sound), hit Return, and a choice of the characters romanized that way comes up. You then choose the one you want. Learning their ABCs has become a crucial part of Chinese children’s learning their characters and pronunciations.

  The Chinese language, in many ways like Chinese civilization itself, has always been self-contained and difficult to get into. That is still true for the outsider. In addition to the radicals and then the characters, there are the arpeggios of the language’s four tones (the flat first tone, the rising second tone, the falling-then-rising third tone, and the falling fourth tone). Characters that are spelled exactly the same way in our alphabet have completely different meanings depending on their tone, the most famous being mai, which when used with the third tone means “to buy” and when used with the fourth tone means “to sell.” (This may explain why the Chinese stock market is in such turmoil.) How you write the characters is important too. A man with poor calligraphy is seen by educated Chinese in the same way that educated Westerners might view a man wearing a cheap suit.

  However, getting into the language (learning how to read, write, and pronounce characters) is by far the most difficult part of learning Chinese. Once you are inside, it is much simpler than English and most Western languages. Grammar is extremely simple. There are no tenses, no declensions, no plurals, because Chinese characters cannot change. They simply are.

  The simplicity of the language has a flip side, though. The fact that characters cannot change gives the whole language an inflexibility that even Chinese scholars admit can stunt originality. Chinese school-children still must learn characters by rote, and critics say the way they learn is bound to affect the way they think.

  I’m not sure if it is quantifiable (or if one is even permitted to speculate without being accused of gross Orientalism), but I wonder how close the link is between the unassailable fortress of the written Chinese character and the unassailable fortress of the imperial (and then Communist Party) state. Words in alphabetical languages are fluid and malleable. They are able to change and evolve, and it doesn’t seem entirely coincidental to me that the political systems of their countries can too.

  The great Chinese iconoclast of the early twentieth century, Lu Xun, whose grave I had visited in Shanghai, thought deeply about this. He said that China could never become a great country if it did not ditch its way of writing completely: “If we are to go on living, Chinese characters cannot…. The characters are a precious legacy handed down by our ancestors, I know. But we can sacrifice our inheritance or ourselves: which is it to be?”

  My reason for raising all this here is not to debate whether the Chinese character system needs to be scrapped—that doesn’t look likely at present—but to discuss a specific linguistic twist that says much about the part of China I am now traveling through. It also says a lot about the historic relations between Chinese rulers in Beijing and the Muslims of what is now Xinjiang.

  Until the eighteenth century, the Chinese character hui (pronounced hway) was used in imperial edicts to describe the Muslims of northwest China. One of the constituent radicals of the character was the “dog” radical. China, the fount of all civilization, stretched as far as the last fort of the Great Wall at Jiayuguan. Beyond that were the barbarians, who were no better than dogs, and the character used to describe them reflected that. (This attitude toward non-Chinese was true with regard not just to the Muslims of the northwest but also to the Ocean People. In the nineteenth century, one of the early British interpreters, Thomas Taylor Meadows, wrote that the Chinese “were always surprised, not to say astonished, to learn that we have surnames, and understand the family distinctions of father, brother, wife, sister, etc.; in short that we live otherwise than as a herd of cattle.”)

  Then, in 1760, something fascinating happened. The Qianlong Emperor (wh
o more than thirty years later would humiliate and send home the British envoy Lord Macartney) had just conquered Chinese Turkestan, the huge swathe of territory that I’m traveling through, which begins at Starry Gorge and is now called Xinjiang. The “mouth” of China at Jiayuguan Fort was no longer the mouth. The Chinese Empire had been expanded, taking away the necessity of the Great Wall—indeed, from that time on, the Great Wall fell into disrepair because the empire now extended beyond it. The Qianlong Emperor thus, for the first time in a thousand years, territorially if not culturally, claimed to have brought the Muslims of Turkestan into the Chinese Empire.

  As if to mark this change, the imperial court issued an edict in February 1760. It said that official documents should no longer employ the “dog” radical in the Chinese character used to describe the Muslims of Turkestan. It was to be done away with altogether, and starting that spring, scholars of the imperial archives note that none of the imperial documents use the “dog” radical when writing the character hui to refer to the Muslims of the region.

  Never before can a few strokes of a brush on a page have symbolized such a hoped-for psychological shift. The change indicated that the emperor in Beijing no longer saw these barbarians as barbarians, that they were being brought into the imperial family, being made part of the Chinese Empire, and that they had consequently been elevated above the status of animals. In short, they were no longer “them.” They could now be considered part of “us.”

  There was just one slight problem. “They” were happy being “them.” “They” didn’t want to become part of “us.” And the same is true today.

  The Chinese have ventured into Turkestan three times in their history.

  The initial instance was in the second century B.C., during the Han dynasty, and lasted on and off for more than three hundred years. The period was characterized by a tug-of-war between the Han Chinese and the “barbarian” Xiongnu tribes to the northwest. When the Han dynasty collapsed, though, in A.D. 220, so did China, and along with it Chinese influence in Central Asia.