In those days I watched the footage from Beijing over and over again. The flare of tracers across the sky, the soldiers with rifles cocked stalking across the square silhouetted by fire, the goddess of democracy crumbling to the ground, the students leaving Tiananmen in the grey dawn light flashing peace signs and hugging each other, and the terrible footage of the injured being rushed to hospital, the pedal carts that once might have carried spring strawberries speeding down the street laden with the dead and dying.
As before, I found a line of poetry stuck in my head. This time it was Yeats, and his famous poem, ‘Easter 1916’, about the Easter Rising in Ireland against the British. He, too, had seen ordinary people transformed by events:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Two months later Sheng Qi caught the train back to Beijing. He had left the capital before the end of May, his parents’ pleas finally too hard to resist. The news on television had told of a bloody riot in which soldiers had been lynched by an angry mob. People arriving home in Hefei from Beijing told a different tale, of citizens slaughtered on the streets.
On the train were two obvious army types, but they were in mufti. Since Sheng Qi had been a kid he had dreamed of being one of them. As a child he’d even borrowed a uniform from a cousin who was a soldier and had himself photographed in it. He’d loved that photo. And now soldiers were hiding their uniforms away.
Once on the streets of Beijing, evidence of what had happened was all around him—in the bullet-scarred walls along Chang’an Avenue, and in the eyes of the heavily armed soldiers who still patrolled the streets. The soldiers had hatred in their eyes, but also fear. ‘They were too frightened to go into a public toilet alone,’ Sheng Qi told me.
One evening he was riding his bike east along Chang’an Avenue from Xidan and was stopped by soldiers and questioned. ‘They treated me as if I was an enemy. I had dreamed of being one of them and now they were pointing their guns at me. My dream collapsed.’
‘I started to become sceptical about everything. I started to question everything, mistrust everything. I think it was a kind of sickness.
‘It was then,’ he told me, ‘that I really understood Bei Dao’s poem “I do not believe”.’
Sheng Qi drifted through the days. Once he had felt part of a new generation. They were young and had believed they had a shining future. Now all seemed lost. He began an affair with a new girl. It turned out she had been wounded on June 4. She showed him the scars.
He had dreamed of being a soldier, a hero, an artist, but now it all seemed laughable. Five years ago when he had been accepted to college, he had run for joy. Now he felt heavy and old. He wished there was some way he could just cut himself free of the past, to cut time in two.
One day he found himself listening to the radio in the apartment where he was staying. Over the airwaves came the raucous banter of crosstalk, China’s traditional form of comedy. Two comedians were going at each other hammer and tongs, out-punning each other in a rising cacophonic duel of sound. He started to laugh. He couldn’t stop.
Suddenly he seemed to have soared high above himself. He looked down and watched the blood flow from his left hand. In the right he held a knife. He felt released, like his soul had jumped free of his body.
And his blood kept pouring from where in his madness he had cut his little finger clean away from his hand.
Elsewhere in the world the magic year of 1989 delivered on its promise. Two hundred years after the storming of the Bastille, revolution again swept Europe. The Berlin Wall fell and the communist governments of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania were toppled. I watched with joy as the East Germans broke down the wall, and excitement as the Eastern Bloc crumbled. But I was also filled with sadness, and anger.
When the students first went to the square, I—like them—had not longed for the government to fall, but now I raged: how was it possible that all these other communist regimes could fall like ninepins and China’s—which had murdered its own people—hardly seemed disturbed? Twenty years later a Chinese friend confided that it was only by thinking ‘in ten years this gang of murderers will be swept away’ that he had kept himself from going mad in those terrible weeks and months after June 4. In those days I tried to believe the same.
Twenty-five years later I asked Guo Jian what was the most frightening thing he confronted that night of June 3. Was it facing all the dead in the hospital, or trying to rescue wounded from the street?
He told me it was neither. What was scariest, he said, was realising that it could have been him riding into Beijing that day: ‘I saw these young men in uniform, just like I had been, and I saw them shoot at unarmed people. And I thought, if I was still in the army, I would have been expected to do these things. I would have been sent here to kill.
‘And you think, surely you would have resisted, but then you realise you probably would have followed orders, because that’s what soldiers do. That’s the thing that scares me most.
‘Looking at them in uniform, firing and manoeuvring like I had been taught, I realised that up there on the truck was a young soldier, and he was me, and down in the street there was a student, and he was me, too.
‘On that day I was killing myself.’
CHAPTER SIX
NOTHING TO MY NAME
Early in a new decade, a thirteen-year-old boy named Jia Aili went exploring in his gritty north-eastern town. He had discovered a marvellous new playground: factory halls where gigantic machines and intricate industrial equipment stood shrouded in dust, and not a living soul there to challenge him. On one unforgettable day, he made his way into a warehouse full of military aircraft, where half-built engines and disembodied wings waited for assembly crews that would never come. His town felt like paradise to him, but it was an industrial graveyard.
Jia Aili was born in Dandong in Liaoning province, a region once celebrated by Mao Zedong for its economic contribution as the ‘eldest son of the nation’. Liaoning had industrialised early; rich in natural resources, it had been built up under Japanese occupation and in the early decades of the People’s Republic it became the centre of China’s heavy manufacturing. Under the communist system of state ownership and central planning Liaoning’s factories had at one time supplied more than 70 per cent of the nation’s iron and 60 per cent of its steel, and by the dawn of Deng Xiaoping’s era of reform, 10 per cent of China’s medium and large state-owned enterprises were located in the province. These entities dominated life for the people of the region, supporting them from cradle to grave with work, housing, healthcare, retirement pensions, employment opportunities for their children, and even entertainment.
Employees in the north-east were the aristocracy of the workers’ state, toiling for the grandest of the nation’s central plans. But from the moment that China embraced Deng Xiaoping’s new reform blueprint in 1978, the workers’ influence waned. No longer was China focused on self-sufficiency and the nation’s basic needs but on a new vision where the country would be the factory of the world, catering to the appetite of the West for consumer goods. These would not be produced in the old industrial towns of the north-east but in the newly tooled factories of the rising south.
By the end of the ’90s millions would be thrown out of work in Liaoning province, among them Jia Aili’s parents. Many of them found themselves without adequate pensions or much prospect of finding meaningful work, reduced to watching powerlessly while enterprises they had once considered their own were bankrupted and their assets transferred into the hands of those with power or influence—a new aristocracy which the workers had little chance of joining.
Tucked up in the region once known as Manchuria, bordering North Korea to the east and with Russia to the north and Mongolia to the west, the towns of Liaoning province could only dream of the opportunities opening up for China’s southern coastal cities whose close neighbours were the booming economies of Hong Kong and Taiwan and whose ports
looked towards Southeast Asia and beyond. It was there that Deng Xiaoping created the special economic zones, and it was to there that rural workers flocked from the communes in search of a new life.
Meanwhile, Jia Aili wandered in shuttered factories where dust danced in the shafts of light that fell on disused turbines and forgotten flying machines. Years later, crashed planes and ruined machinery would appear again like ghosts on the giant canvases that would make his name.
Three thousand kilometres south of Jia Aili’s home, in the summer of 1992, five girls were involved in an intricate game in a garden. They jumped! They ran! They smiled! They stopped. Then they started all over again.
The girls weren’t really playing, though they were pretending. In fact they were acting, and the older sister of one of them was directing. She had just done something daring. After a year studying in a hard-won place at university, she had dropped out to join China’s infant advertising industry. Today she was shooting her first ad. It was for acne cream, and wasn’t that enough to make any teen jump for joy?
Her little sister was delighted, but not by the prospect of clearer skin. For a few years now in her home in Guangzhou, she had been watching the advertisements broadcast from Hong Kong 120 kilometres away. Now she was learning how those ads were made, how to create, and how to fake. Her name was Cao Fei, and like Jia Aili she was destined to be an artist.
Cao Fei was born in 1978 and Jia Aili in 1979. They are both children of the era of reform and opening up. They have no direct memory of a time before Deng Xiaoping, no memory of Mao, no baggage from the Cultural Revolution. Their lives were shaped by the new revolution that started when they were born.
And yet, they did feel the echoes of the earlier era. Cao Fei felt it in the way her parents embraced new opportunities with such hunger. Her mother had spent the Cultural Revolution restoring propaganda films frame by frame so they could be sent out on tours to ‘educate the masses’. Her father, a sculptor, had focused his talent on a single subject, Chairman Mao, so that the Great Helmsman could stand in yet another city square, at one more factory gate, in one more commune.
Now Cao Fei’s parents were restored to their original occupations as teachers, and they were also free to take work beyond the doors of the academy. Her father took commissions for portraits of a vast new cast of characters: local heroes, pre-revolutionary historical figures, even an influential foreigner with a curious name—Juan Antonio Samaranch—whom Cao Fei’s father cast in bronze as part of China’s campaign to win the favour of the International Olympic Committee.
Cao Fei’s mother, in her spare time, began to create delicate prints depicting a kind of private life that just a few years before had been derided and condemned. She rejoiced in works that had no revolutionary meaning at all, dwelling on imagined pleasures as simple as a woman playing with a cat. Meanwhile, both parents buried themselves in the avalanche of new reading that suddenly became available—books about artists like Rodin, Monet and Picasso.
For Jia Aili the echoes of the past were more poignant. The new era made his parents redundant, and the grand economic plans for which they had toiled were gone. As Cao Fei’s south boomed, Jia Aili’s north was rusting away; as Cao Fei’s parents saw new horizons opening up, Jia Aili’s saw the things that gave their life meaning shuttered away in deserted factories. And yet the new era brought Jia Aili an opportunity that no one in his family had ever had before. At the end of the decade he would find himself at university, having sat the open exam that had been re-established by Deng Xiaoping in the early days of the reforms.
Cao Fei and Jia Aili were destined to be part of an ‘in-between’ generation, young enough to have escaped the dark experiences of the Cultural Revolution, but old enough not to take the shiny new China of today at face value. They would understand it had not been achieved without loss and pain. It is this subtlety of perception that marks these 30-somethings, and makes them, as Cao Fei remarked to me one day, neither natural optimists nor pessimists. ‘We are always leguan beiguan—always optimism and pessimism together,’ she said.
More than any other generation they represent the polarities of today’s China, and even in their work they reflect the contrasting experiences of a single generation. As Jia Aili presents his melancholy vision of China in the time-honoured materials of oil on canvas, Cao Fei creates her works on video, and on the internet, sending out her avatars to explore alternative worlds.
The 1990s—when Cao Fei and Jia Aili entered their teens—was destined to be the most wrenching of the decades since 1978, the most rapid period of change that China had ever experienced. Millions of people’s lives would be transformed for better or for worse. As a way of life passed away in the north, a new one would open up in the south. Fortunes would be made that would open a gap between rich and poor that today yawns wider than ever. A middle class would begin to form, and a new, unspoken contract would be made between rulers and ruled. The terms were clear: ‘We can make you richer than you’ve ever been. But political power must rest with the party alone.’ China’s security today still rests on maintaining the stability of that grand bargain struck a quarter of a century ago.
Cao Fei’s home town of Guangzhou was to play a leading role in the transformation of China. Today the city leads a southern Chinese economy, based on the Pearl River delta, which accounts for almost 40 per cent of China’s trade and 20 per cent of its GDP.
But during the 1980s Guangzhou itself developed only slowly, as a matter of deliberate policy. In the 1980s Zhao Ziyang had promoted the use of special economic zones as safe spaces in which China could experiment. In these zones foreign investment, private enterprise, and the creation of new export-oriented industries could be pioneered without risking the positions of the traditional leaders of China’s industrial economy.
By the end of the 1980s the experiment had already proved an extraordinary success, attracting substantial foreign investment and local entrepreneurship. The leading special economic zone was Shenzhen. It had been barely more than a fishing village in 1980, but when declared a special economic zone it became a magnet for workers from around the country. Located just across the border from Hong Kong, Shenzhen became a kind of annex to the still British-administered territory. Hong Kong businesses relocated en masse to Shenzhen in pursuit of cheaper land and labour, and the once ubiquitous ‘made in Hong Kong’ label would be overtaken by one reading ‘made in China’. Shenzhen became known for its freewheeling atmosphere, while its venerable older brother Guangzhou, just 100 kilometres away, remained relatively staid and unmoved.
Then in the early 1990s Deng turned his attention to Guangzhou and to Shanghai, looking to these historically important port cities to help drag China out of the slump that had followed the events of 1989.
It might have been thought that Deng’s ruthless actions in 1989 would have enhanced his position as the dominant figure in Chinese politics, but in the months following the crackdown he found himself instead on the defensive as his treasured economic reforms came under threat. Party hardliners who had long been suspicious of opening the economy and who hankered for the days of central planning argued that it was the speed and scope of Deng’s reforms that had provoked the Tiananmen protests. They argued for a slower pace of growth, increased central control and stricter ideological purity.
The toppling of Zhao Ziyang and the purge of reformist voices inside and outside government left Deng all the more exposed, and a conservative low-growth strategy was accordingly endorsed. Arguments even began to be made that special economic zones should be abolished altogether.
These were frightening years for communist regimes. The toppling of the Eastern Bloc governments in 1989 was a grim warning of what might have happened in China, and the resignation of Gorbachev in 1991, followed by the break-up of the Soviet Union, was deeply shocking. In the new decade the world seemed to be tilting on its axis towards the capitalist West.
But Deng believed there was more to fear from low grow
th than economic reform. Only rapid growth, he believed, would help China escape the drag of its huge population and underdevelopment. No doubt he also saw that only by delivering a better life could the Communist Party’s legitimacy be maintained. China had no choice but to ride the tiger.
Finally, in January 1992, he fixed on a plan to use his personal influence and charisma to go over the heads of the leadership in Beijing to re-start his reforms. He announced a ‘southern inspection tour’, travelling to Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen in order to assess their development.
The term ‘southern inspection tour’ (nanxun) was chosen carefully. It was used by the great Qing Emperor Kangxi to describe his six expeditions to the southern reaches of his empire in the middle years of his reign (1661–1722). With this echo of a lost era of Chinese glory, Deng was signalling the importance of his own journey. He aimed to draw attention to the success of Shenzhen and finally give his blessing to the long-dampened ambitions of Shanghai and Guangzhou to regain their historical positions as powerhouses of China.
At first the Chinese media ignored Deng’s tour, reflecting the disapproval of the hardliners in Beijing, but before long his travels and his comments were being widely reported. As he travelled, he reiterated his view that development required that ‘some should be able to get rich first’ and observed sharply that ‘ideology cannot supply rice’. Only reform and rapid development could save China from ruin, he declared. The low-growth policies being pursued in Beijing could only lead to stagnation.
The province of Guangdong, home to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, should, he said, move rapidly to take up its place alongside the four ‘little dragons’ of Asia—Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. In pursuing this goal, Deng directed, the achievements of Shenzhen should be taken as a model.
The Phoenix Years Page 16
