Somehow Guo Jian was singled out for better things. At the end of three months, he had been chosen for training as a signals officer. This meant promotion, of course; but better still, signals officers got to work the camp’s radio.
He was told the radio was strictly for military use, but how, he reasoned to himself, was he going to learn how it worked if he didn’t do a little channel surfing? Soon he was up half the night chasing frequencies, smoking local tobacco from a Yunnan pipe, too excited to sleep.
His other duty was regimental secretary, storing the gear of men who were being sent to the front. Each of them would write a letter to their families before they went and he filed them carefully away. Every week they were leaving but it seemed like they never came back. One day a really gung-ho type, a guy he’d met on the first day he’d arrived in camp, turned up full of heroic tales of the fighting he’d seen, invalided back to base with just a small wound to his leg. It was a relief to have someone return, as Guo Jian had started to feel like no one ever would, or if they did their wounds would be too terrible to look at. A few days later the military police came to get the wounded returnee. It turned out he had shot himself in the leg, desperate to escape the front.
They started to issue all the soldiers with a form, which they were told to fill out with their name, their parents’ names and their home address, and then in the space provided just a few words about how they were ready to die for their country and how proud they were. The army had decided it was better to get these ready from the start, rather than leave it up to the soldiers to write letters themselves. Guo Jian filed these away, too.
When he could he would draw, mostly portraits of the other soldiers. By the time he left the army he had drawn almost every soldier he knew. Later he would reflect that this period provided more valuable artistic training than anything he was to pick up at university. His superiors began to notice his talent and he was given a sideline duty of painting propaganda posters for the troops. A new Chinese year was dawning: 1980, Year of the Monkey, a year for the brave, the clever and the quick. A year that would suit Guo Jian well.
He kept on listening to the radio when he could, ‘to keep his skills up’, as he put it. And he did have a feel for it: he could chase a frequency through the air and once he found it, hold on to it.
One day he heard a woman’s voice coming over the radio, sweeter and lovelier than anything he had ever heard. She was singing in Mandarin, a song he would later discover was called ‘Small Town Story’. Her voice was so clear, yet soft, that it made him long for home like he never had before.
That night he picked up the ‘yellow novel’ he had been reading. A piece of soft pornography posing as a romantic tale, the book had been passed from hand to hand among the recruits. It was contraband, but all the more titillating for that. Guo Jian had been gripped by it, but now as he tried to read it again it seemed empty. There was no romance or passion here: he had heard that instead in the voice, and once heard it was unforgettable.
The name of the singer was Deng Lijun, although most people round the world knew her as Teresa Teng. She was a Taiwanese performer whose exquisite voice and achingly romantic delivery made her a megastar in the Chinese diaspora in the 1970s and ’80s. Her music was never played on the radio in China because her Taiwanese background made her politically radioactive, but when cassette players became an affordable item in markets around the country, bootleg Deng Lijun tapes would make her a household name there.
Years later Guo Jian’s generation would coin a joke based on the similarity of Deng Lijun’s family name to Deng Xiaoping’s: ‘Was it Deng Xiaoping who had transformed China at the end of the twentieth century? Not Deng Xiaoping, it was Deng Lijun.’ It was a joke with an edge of truth. Thirty years after he first heard her voice, China’s leading dissident and Nobel Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo would reflect on the way the singer had changed his generation. Deng Lijun’s songs, he wrote, ‘took a generation of Chinese youth by storm, reawakening the soft centres of our beings. They dismantled the cast-iron framework of our “revolutionary wills” and caused these to collapse . . . and they revived sexual desires that we had long repressed into the darkest recesses of our beings.’ No doubt it was for these reasons more than her Taiwanese background that the Chinese government would try to ban Deng Lijun’s music repeatedly from the late 1970s till her tragic death in 1995.
Out on the border with Vietnam in 1979, Guo Jian knew nothing of this. He only knew that he was desperate to hear her again, and from then on he spent night after night chasing her up and down the frequencies as her unforgettable voice faded in and out.
It wasn’t long before he realised that the strongest signal broadcasting Deng Lijun came from a country that he had barely heard of—Australia. In those years Radio Australia’s transmitters beamed its signal from a flat plain near the farming community of Shepparton, Victoria, all the way north to China, where it was heard loud and clear from Yunnan, where Guo Jian was based, to the far western provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet, north to Inner Mongolia and Beijing and east to Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Radio Australia’s Chinese service loved Deng Lijun. She performed in Mandarin, Cantonese and English and her Mandarin delivery was regarded as the most perfect in the world, with a clarity that was unsurpassed. And so they played her every hour and Guo Jian soon learned when to listen for her. It became his guiltiest pleasure, and when the officers weren’t within earshot he would share it with his comrades in arms, holding fast to the frequency, chasing it when needs be, smoking his Yunnan pipe and watching the smoke drifting up into the sky.
As the extraordinary year of 1979 drew to a close, China was at the beginning of a decade that in many ways was more free than any before or since in the history of the People’s Republic. The 1980s took China from the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s great reform and opening up to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square, along the way fuelling the most extravagant dreams of what China could be.
The story of China’s transformation would not belong simply to the men within the red walls of Zhongnanhai. It would be told in the traditional rice basket provinces of Sichuan and Anhui, where impoverished farmers returned to tilling their own fields, growing new crops and developing side industries, pioneering the reforms that would power China’s development through the 1980s. Told, too, by workers moving to the city, taking a chance in places like the sleepy fishing village of Shenzhen, which had just been declared a Special Economic Zone and would become one of the richest cities in China. And told in thousands of factories across the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas, which would light an economic blaze through south China that would stun the world. And told by young people setting courses in life that just a few years earlier would have seemed impossible.
The beginning of the 1980s found me deep in a dried out summer, a student of history at the Australian National University in Canberra. I was tuning into the radio, too, but not to Deng Lijun. The sound of the year for me was the Clash. I had no thought of young men fighting in a war I’d never heard of, listening in to a sound that would change their lives.
For me, China was a blank then, a place of unpronounceable names and incomprehensible history. The Iceland of the Vikings was more real to me. I had read all the sagas, dreamt of their ships. The decision of some of my friends to enrol in Asian studies I regarded as eccentric, and the choice of Chinese by others was simply mystifying. There was only a handful of the latter that I could identify on campus. One of them was the older, bookish, bespectacled and, as it turned out later, ambitious future Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd.
It wasn’t that I was uninterested in the world but it was the war in Afghanistan that was obsessing us in the summer of 1979–80. It was the war we tend to forget now, the Soviet invasion at Christmas 1979 to shore up a friendly government.
Democracy Wall in Beijing lived and died without my knowing. By the time the Soviets entered Kabul, the wall had been closed down forever. In December 1979 the Chinese
government finally brought it to an end, just over a year since it had first begun to be a focus for dissent. They announced a new wall would be established in a far off park, where people could post their thoughts any time they wished, as long as they applied for a permit. Over the old wall they built a floodlit advertising billboard.
In 1981, having graduated from university, I boarded a plane for Europe for the first time. As it happened, my journey took me via Taiwan. I walked the streets of Taipei in confusion; it was a polluted and depressing place then, still under martial law, not at all the vibrant city it is today. Yet in those few days I started to feel the stirrings of the fascination that would eventually fuel my three-decade-long relationship with China. In the National Palace Museum I stood in awe in front of the Song dynasty (960–1279) hanging scroll Travelers among Mountains and Streams, seeing in that ancient painting how much more of the world there might be out there to know.
A few days later on a beach in the far south of Taiwan, near the port of Kaohsiung, I came across some Chinese characters that someone had scrawled in the sand with a stick. I stood looking for a while, as if staring for long enough might unlock their meaning. Suddenly I realised it didn’t matter. I was there myself, and so I carved my name on this foreign beach with the end of a piece of driftwood and looked out across the Taiwan Strait towards mainland China where—for all I knew—there was someone standing on a beach right now writing in the sand like me.
As I stood on that beach the 1980s were underway. Huang Rui, and many like him, had already put behind him events more powerful than I would experience in my whole lifetime.
And as the sun went down over an army camp near the border with Vietnam, a young man my age was tuning in to Australia on the radio, blowing smoke rings into the sky and hearing the voice of Deng Lijun singing to him as if from another world.
CHAPTER FOUR
VERY HEAVEN
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!
William Wordsworth, ‘The French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement’
On a sweltering summer day in 1984, in a provincial capital far from Beijing, a young man was running fast across the dusty ground of the compound where he lived. His face was beading with sweat under his cropped hair and behind his thick-rimmed glasses. But no one was chasing him and no one was running away. He was running for pure joy. His name was Sheng Qi.
He was only nineteen but in his semi-uniform of neat pants and a crisp white short-sleeved shirt he seemed even younger. Looking at him you would never guess that he had just pulled off his first act of studied defiance of his loving, hardworking parents. They were both engineers, anxious, earnest servants of the People’s Republic, and he was their only son. They had hoped he would follow in their footsteps, but it was from that very aspiration that he was running. In his hand he held a letter that would release him. He was going to Beijing to study art.
It’s not that his parents didn’t know how to dream. His father had grown up in the countryside and had studied hard for a chance to forge a new destiny through university. His mother had grown up in Shanghai and in that city’s faded glamour had glimpsed something of what the world might hold. Together his parents had been pioneers in this city of Hefei, the capital of the rural province of Anhui where Sheng Qi had been born. They had helped build the new government buildings, the sports stadium, and the main theatre.
They were proud of their work, but they also saw how dangerous it could be if your ambitions led you away from the strictly utilitarian. There was too much politics in China, they told the young Sheng Qi. Study hard at your mathematics. In a country where the most innocent cultural pursuits could get you into trouble, it was safest to be a technician. During the Cultural Revolution, even engineers like his parents had to endure endless political meetings that stretched far into the night, while at home Sheng Qi and his young sister hid lonely and frightened under the bed covers.
His father had tried to sell to his son on the romance of engineering. When Sheng Qi was a young boy in the late 1960s he had been taken to see the newly completed Nanjing Bridge. This was an engineering triumph of the times, a road–rail span stretching thousands of metres across the Yangtze River, making possible the long-held dream of a Beijing–Shanghai train link. Sheng Qi still remembers his father ushering him into an elevator, which would, he breathlessly explained to his son, transport them to the summit of the bridge’s tallest pylon. But at the top, passengers were prohibited from getting out, so Sheng Qi’s engineering adventure was nothing more than a stint in a metal box that took him back to where he had started from.
Sheng Qi received his acceptance letter to art school in Beijing in 1984, six years into the reform and opening up of China under Deng Xiaoping. In year zero of that experiment—1978—Sheng Qi’s family had still been writing down every cent they spent into a small lined book each day, exerting painstaking control against the fear of running out of money before the end of the month.
Despite their tight budget, they had, in fact, been relatively secure, with both parents in professional city jobs. Out in the countryside things had been much tougher in those years. Anhui had traditionally been one of the food baskets of China but in the late 1970s it was mired in poverty. Decades of communal farming, disastrous irrigation projects and the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward had devastated rural life.
The scars of the Great Leap ran particularly deep there. Around China between 36 and 45 million people died between 1958 and 1962, sacrificed to Mao’s fantasy of a Great Leap Forward in agricultural and industrial production, symbolised by his demand that China overtake Britain in steel output within just fifteen years. Agricultural production broke down under the pressure of forced collectivisation and the diversion of farmers to steel production. The result was not a Great Leap Forward but a Great Famine, the greatest tragedy the country had ever suffered.
In one district, Fuyang, to the north-west of Hefei, some 2.4 million people died out of a population of eight million in the three years from 1958. Throughout the province many more died of starvation or disease, and in the violence that welled up amid the chaos. At the end of those years the trees stood like skeletons, their leaves and bark stripped for food by people who, at the end, would eat the earth itself to staunch their hunger.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that it was in desperately poor Anhui that a group of farmers first took the risk of throwing off the communal system and taking individual responsibility again for the land.
In December 1978, in a small village called Xiaogang to the east of Hefei, eighteen farmers gathered one night to sign a secret pact. After years of pitiful harvests that had turned the villagers into beggars, they had decided to divide their communal land into family farms again. They would farm their plots separately, and although each farmer would still reserve a set amount of grain for the collective and the state, anything above that they would keep for themselves. The land would remain in state ownership, as it still does today, but the farmers would once again guide its destiny.
One by one, each dipped his index finger into red ink and made a mark beside his name. They vowed that if any of them was to be arrested and punished, the others would take care of their family. The document still exists, preserved today in the National Museum in Beijing, the red fingerprints like bloodstains on the fragile page.
By the next harvest the village’s output had soared and their secret was out. It had been a desperate gamble to stare down the party’s ideologues, but the farmers were on the right side of history. In Beijing, Deng Xiaoping had secured his grip on power the same month the Xiaogang farmers made their secret pact, and his pragmatic leadership favoured the loosening of government controls to drive enterprise and productivity. By the time Sheng Qi ripped open the envelope to his acceptance letter from Beijing in the summer of 1984, almost 100 per cent of China’s farmers had followed the lead of the villagers of Xiaogang and taken control of the land a
gain.
The breakup of the communes would lead not just to bigger harvests and the fading of the spectre of hunger, but also to experimentation with new crops and side enterprises in manufacturing and services, driving an extraordinary transformation in the lives of the 80 per cent of China’s population that then lived in the countryside. In the 1980s more than 150 million people in China would be lifted out of poverty, a phrase which fails to convey the real truth—that the farmers lifted themselves out of poverty, through the passion with which they pursued new opportunities and their creativity in finding new ways to exploit their resources.
It was a revolution that would change the whole of China beyond recognition. It would transform the countryside and the cities, as surplus farmers left the fields to seek their fortune far from their rural homes. They would go not just to feed the exploding demand for labour, as China transformed itself into a major manufacturing and trading power, but also to start their own businesses. By the time Sheng Qi took his own journey to the capital, the urbanisation of China was well underway.
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