Barbarian Lost

by Alexandre Trudeau

  We’re brought to a lookout on a hillock above the structure. We can barely make out the full span of concrete crossing the river or the deep man-made canyon of locks leading up through the dam. Then we’re brought to a riverside walkway beneath the giant wall holding back the river. From this vantage, the haze isn’t quite so bad and we can view the whole dam.

  “Intense,” I can’t help but say.

  “Successive Chinese leaders dreamt of this project,” Viv explains. “Sun Zhongshan, whom you probably know as Sun Yat-sen, wrote about damming the Yangtze. The Americans and the Japanese contemplated a dam as well. Mao wrote a poem about it. The project has seemed unavoidable for decades. Then it was finally commenced under Li Peng, the most stodgy and repressive of our recent leaders. You could say it just couldn’t be stopped.”

  “Such a huge project would hardly be possible in any inhabited part of my country,” I tell her. “It would freak people out.”

  “Well, there has been significant opposition to the project,” Viv says, “even at party levels. But this hasn’t stopped it from going forward. Li Peng, remember, was one of the hard-liners, advocating that the Tiananmen protests be crushed with tanks.”

  “I guess the need for electricity in China is just too great to ignore.”

  “Even this is controversial,” Viv explains. “Critics point to the failed hydroelectric projects on the Yellow River. Apparently, all the silt of these great rivers gets in the turbines and causes them to fail. The proponents say the design here is better and the situation on the river is different. But who really knows? We’ll have to see in a few years.”

  “Perhaps electricity from the dam is better than burning dirty coal.”

  “Well, there’s another problem,” she continues. “The numbers don’t add up. The total capacity of the dam will be something like twenty thousand megawatts. Apparently, China uses about a million megawatts of electricity. So all this, everything you see, all this flooding and destruction only answers 2 percent of the country’s current needs. China’s needs are growing faster than that 2 percent. This means more coal plants.”

  “I see your point.”

  “I don’t think the dam is about electricity, really,” she concludes. “It’s about an obsession with building. It’s for the prestige of the leaders who get to marshal all these resources, funnel boatloads of money into so many pockets and, at the end, have a monument to show their power off to the world.”

  “But think also of the massive strategic liability that the dam is for China,” I say. “Think of what a nuclear hit could do to it and the hundreds of millions who live downstream.”

  “Surely not a possibility?” Viv asks with worry.

  “We do live in a violent world full of sinister forces. And China has just given itself one hell of an Achilles heel.”

  “China will just have to learn to be a force of peace in the world,” she counters.

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” I say, laughing.

  One final horror awaits me on our Yangtze journey. Before dropping us off in Yichang, our tour bus makes a stop at a local museum. From the outside, it looks like a rundown research institute, bereft of any decoration that might make it attractive to happy holidayers. The location is impressive enough, though, snuggled as it is up against a steep embankment looking out over the river.

  The museum is as drab inside as it is on the outside. Only one dusty and quite small room with half a dozen or so glass cabinets. A few documents and maps, a diorama. A section on Yangtze ecology catches my eye. There’s a preserved Yangtze River dolphin, the baiji, in a coffin-like cabinet. Its wrinkled skin makes it look decrepit and miserable.

  “Poor thing,” Viv says. “It’s believed to be extinct, you know.”

  “Yes, gone, banished from existence,” I say.

  Its minuscule eye slot confirms the creature was nearly blind, adapted to the silt-laden waters. Its sophisticated sonar allowed it to use the murky waters to its advantage, sneaking up on fish and snatching them with its long, slender snout.

  “I read a report by a marine biologist who conducted surveys along the Yangtze with people who might have last seen the dolphins. He was looking for recent witnesses, attempting to verify the baiji’s extinction. One Yangtze fisherman he interviewed told him that the baiji was a ‘girl fish,’ because it was as shy as a girl at a party and would swim away rapidly if anyone called out to it. Well, the girls are gone and the party’s over,” I joke.

  “Depressing,” Vivien says, then adds, “Now there is a bleak subject for your phenomenology: extinction.”

  “Yeah, right, let’s see . . . a dolphin’s experience of its own annihilation: I see fishnets, motorboat propellers, pollution, disease, great loneliness, starvation and then the flood. Its last thoughts: Oh monkey, what have you done?”

  “Terrible,” Viv says, shaking her head at me.

  Looking at the shrivelled creature and its squinty closed eyes, we grow silent and can’t help but feel sympathy for this strange but intelligent animal, now disappeared.

  “We should be saying a prayer for it,” Viv says.

  “Yes, we should.”

  As if the dolphin were some kind of messenger from the gods in the mountains. We should be praying that we haven’t forgotten them. But in truth we have. The world has moved on. We don’t even know how to pray. And along with their envoy, the baiji, the immortals too are now dead.

  CHAPTER 6

  Shanghai

  Knowledge and action are together. Contrast this with a person who has eyes to see but no legs to walk. Or legs to walk but no eyes to see.

  —Zhu Xi, Song dynasty Confucian scholar

  It’s Thursday, and Viv and I are heading from the interior to Shanghai. Making the bus connections from up the Yangtze entails a bit of a roundabout journey. We spend long hours on a variety of buses.

  Although it’s part of the all-important central region of China, Shanghai was never a capital. Shanghai is not a figure of unity. It does not represent any great locus of tradition to which the Chinese owe part of themselves. It stands alone, and it’s new; anything that happened in Shanghai happened in the last two centuries. Yet the last two centuries have been important and transformative ones for the world and for China.

  “Viv, we’re going to a wedding in Shanghai,” I tell her.

  “Who’s getting married?”

  “An Englishman. He’s a close friend of Deryk’s. He’s marrying a Chinese girl.”

  “Uh-oh!” she says, laughing. “Girls from Shanghai are famous for being demanding and spoiled wives.”

  “Well, I think the bride actually spent her teenage years in Kashgar.”

  “Oh, then I’m sure she’s different. Kashgar’s the opposite of Shanghai.”

  Kashgar is China’s most westerly major city, a high, hot, dusty town of central Asia, the traditional territory of Turkic tribes. In the new China, it’s a rambling boomtown.

  “I’ve noticed the Chinese giving Shanghai and its people a hard time. Is it out of jealousy for being such a rich and successful place?”

  “Yes, maybe,” Viv concedes. “But also the native people of Shanghai have the reputation for being arrogant, materialistic and superficial.”

  We laugh and agree that we should make an effort to put prejudices aside. With some twenty-four million inhabitants, Shanghai is one of the world’s most populated urban centres and has the planet’s greatest port. Only fools would approach it lightly.

  As we pass through Nanjing, a city worthy of much reflection, we don’t stop; Shanghai is already commanding our attention. On the radio, important news is being conveyed: Shanghai’s Communist Party leader, its highest official, has been charged with corruption and dishonourable behaviour toward his party and toward his nation and its people. He’s now under arrest.

  “That’s notable,” Viv remarks, “though hardly unprecedented. You must imagine what power this man had mere hours ago.”

  “And now?”

>   “Well . . . he’ll probably never be heard from again,” she says. “Officially, it’ll be like he never existed.”

  “Will he be killed?”

  “He might be executed. More likely, he’ll be put where they put all the disgraced party leaders.”

  “Will there be a trial?”

  “A trial!? Here, when you are charged, you’re already deemed guilty. There’ll be a hearing, but the results are predetermined.”

  “So the public won’t know exactly what he did?”

  “Nothing beyond the most distant facts. In a way, everyone’s expected to already know how guilty he is.”

  “What kind of corruption might he have engaged in?”

  “The same kind of behaviour all party leaders have shown in all big cities in China.” Viv goes on to explain that in Shanghai, the temptations and rewards are bigger than anywhere else. She describes how the party leader has the final say on everything that happens there.

  “Nothing big’s built, no great fortunes are made, without his approval,” she tells me. “The central body of the party constantly has to do this in the centres of wealth. The local leaders get too powerful. They stop listening to orders; they constitute a threat to unity. His fate is a warning to other powerful regional leaders.”

  Of course, his arrest would change nothing for the people. There would be no public reaction. Beyond his initial smile, our driver, for instance, seemed hardly to care. Nothing would be learnt from this event. Corruption would not cease. The cards will only have been shuffled and the venal grip momentarily loosened. This was just part of a cycle that goes on and on, almost harmoniously. That which is big and strong is made small and weak.

  It’s a well-known pattern in China: Shanghai, at the centre, grows too strong and Beijing must strike to re-exert its dominion. In so many ways, Beijing is the outlier. The capital and its northern reaches can seem distant and irrelevant in the luxuriant Yangtze delta. The north is cold, dry and coarse. It’s also vulnerable. Traditionally, it was China’s flank, open to the steppe and beyond to vast untamed forests. The north, the realm of horses and great armies, was prone to vigorous change.

  In the centre, rice growing reigned supreme. Through ever more advanced water-management techniques, the production of rice sustained China’s greatest growth. By the resplendent Tang dynasty, late in the first millennium, the Grand Canal and an intricate network of waterways allowed grain to be moved throughout the land to feed subjects and soldiers, to control, colonize and conquer. The Yangtze and Yellow river cultures formed one unified people.

  In its day, Tang China had it all: art and technology. It cast its armies and fleets wide and brought into its orbit, and its knowledge, distant lands. The Tang traded and communicated with the Indians and the Arabs. Grand new ideas were pondered at court and soon found resonance all across China. It was an age of power and of light.

  In Tang China, water management meant food management, and this meant power. A civilization that learns to move food around in quantity soon also develops a sophisticated commodity economy. But harmony is as perennial as the seasons, and all orders eventually break. During the Tang dynasty, the world had also grown smaller. Mountains no longer provided the protection they had before. Chinese wealth was talked about in barbarian courts. Covetous thoughts would soon tempt China’s neighbours to test China’s strength, and it would be found increasingly lacking. In this dynamic, the centre offered refuge. The sheer numbers of Chinese and the enormous bounty of grain they produced in the Yangtze basin made assimilation unlikely.

  The Song dynasty emerged from the brief period of chaos that followed the collapse of the House of Tang. The Song claim on the heavenly mandate was not so much founded on such base things as military supremacy but on cultural refinement. Although it carried forth the Tang dedication to technology, manufacture and invention, the Song period was one of inevitable contraction. The centre was losing control of the northern reaches as its forces struggled against foreign powers that roamed there.

  The Song Chinese would occasionally muster their armies and send them out to meet the enemy, who invariably came in on horses, but this was always a risky tactic. Faster than the Chinese armies, the hostile cavalries could merely retreat to a battlefield of their choosing and then counterattack. The Chinese lines would be forced to mount a quick defence on unfavourable terrain. The armoured riders would harass the foot soldiers with their arrows, hoping to force them to break rank and open the field. Then the horsemen could run through the great armies, sowing disarray, felling them piece by piece.

  The Song mostly chose to retreat behind city walls. A valiant commander who had maintained the battlements might hold off the horsemen long enough to force them to abandon their quarry and be compelled to return to far pastures to tend to families and herds. But the Song elites cared little for military service, and many of their cities had outgrown their crumbling old walls. The populations were more inclined to feasts and festivals than to enduring battles.

  So when the Song could not impose a peace, they had to purchase it from the encroaching tribes to the north. But these arrangements didn’t last long. The Song paid no increased attention to matters military, and they struggled to show the various horse confederacies any respect. The Song also proved treacherous patrons, trying to play clients against each other. When the Song capital, Kaifeng, finally fell to the Jurchens, erstwhile vassals who’d finally had enough of Song machinations and mounted a bold attack on the empire, the sack of the city was brutal.

  The Jurchens chose to cleanse Kaifeng of its ruling classes. In their wrath, they must have felt the Song to be soft and corrupt and decided that they should be marched deep into the Jurchen homelands, where they would be shown the Jurchen way. Noblemen, scholars, concubines and their children were driven north from the capital on foot, carrying their treasures and finery. Those that survived were welcomed to the Jurchen court in the fashion of the hunter: naked except for pelts.

  The remainder of the Song elite fled south across the Yangtze. They set up court with a Song relative as emperor in Hangzhou, at the southern end of the Grand Canal. Diminished but still immensely prosperous, the Southern Song dynasty proved an ebullient period for art and ideas for another century and half. Throughout this time, however, there was constant menace.

  Mongol tribes were experiencing an age of unification and expansion, and exerting themselves more and more effectively across the Eurasian continent on the great steppe that nearly connected the Amur to the Danube, a veritable highway of conquest. It wasn’t long until the Mongol hordes began descending upon the northern frontier. Their terms were simple: complete submission or total annihilation. The great armies would not stop in the north—the lucrative Song centres of the Yangtze basin were too tempting to ignore. Here too the endless surge of hordes proved irresistible, and the Song fell to the Mongols in 1279.

  Like previous mounted harassers of China, the Mongols were deemed uncouth outsiders by the Chinese. But there was no escaping their armies: they subjugated all of China, took the centre and interrupted the ancient cycle of Han rule over China.

  The Mongols first established their capital in the north at Yanjing, which they called Dadu—that familiar outpost on the northern fringe of traditional China that is now the Middle Kingdom’s great capital, Beijing. But like the horse princes before and after them, the conquering Mongol chiefs, once exposed to Chinese culture, quickly came under the influence of Chinese ways. They relied increasingly on Chinese labour and grain for nourishment and came to prefer living in the centre at Hangzhou, the Song capital, close to the food source and far from the fringe.

  By the third generation of residence, the great khans spoke and wrote primarily in Chinese. As the Yuan dynasty, they sponsored Chinese institutions and became preachers of Chinese cultural superiority—a discourse that undermined their authority among both the Chinese and their Mongol cousins of the great steppes. Although the Mongol holdings were larger than any empire
the world had ever seen, the Mongols remained a people of the horse. The dry pastures of central Eurasia were ill-suited to Chinese customs and came increasingly under the influence of Islam.

  Neither quite Chinese nor Mongol, the descendants of Genghis and Kublai Khan—the emperors of the Yuan dynasty—became more and more detached from worldly affairs. Their governments became increasingly incapable of guaranteeing harmony and prosperity. When the prosperous central regions began to suffer calamities, the Chinese people everywhere became hardened and angry. And so it was that a Han peasant leader from middle China, Zhu Yuanzhang, led a revolt against the Yuan and brought an end to Mongol rule in China.

  The Ming dynasty that Zhu founded marked the beginning of a new expansion of Chinese culture; the traditions of the centre once more blossomed out into a vast empire. To mark this expansion, the first Ming seat of power in Nanjing, on the banks of the Yangtze, was eventually moved to Beijing. It stood on top of the old Mongol capital, Dadu, where the Jurchen capital of Zhongdu had once replaced the Tang fortress of Yanjing. By building this new north capital, the Ming erased much evidence of foreign command in China. Although relics of Ming-era China can still be witnessed all over the land, to get a sense of Yuan glories—or those of the Song before them—one has to return to the centre.

  Viv and I are still hours away from Shanghai. The mountains of the central Yangtze region give way to the coastal plain, a territory made rich by forty-five million years of minerals that have slowly been deposited here. The land is wet and fertile. The climate is also conducive to agriculture: hot, humid summers and mild winters.

  The last days of September, I remind myself as I scan the horizon. But nothing indicates that it’s autumn already. Now the great city is making itself felt. We’re on a major highway, passing excessively cultivated areas, flat, rich plains. Village life has perhaps not disappeared but been transformed. Concrete is everywhere, and more and more factories and housing complexes are repeated along the edges of the highway. The traffic is thick and fast. We’re in the pull of something big and strong.