The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  But for all that, there is no question that by the end of the 1990s China had been transformed. The state had largely completed its retreat from private life. Permission to marry was no longer in the gift of your ‘work unit’, and extramarital sex was no longer illegal. Neither was homosexuality. For those with any money at all to spend, life in the cities was infinitely more comfortable, more colourful and more fun. Creative life may have been less idealistic than in the ’80s but the work of artists, writers and musicians was connecting with their society at a level that was both intense and profound. They were also finding a way to build their careers beyond the control of the state. In 1999 artists such as Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming, who had been arrested for their work in the middle of the decade, found themselves feted at the Venice Biennale thanks to their ability to attract the attention of Western collectors and curators.

  In each year of the 1990s, 25 million people were lifted out of poverty. They may not have been lifted far by Western standards, but it was hard to discount the experience of people like Mr Xiao, the rag picker from Anhui whose home we had visited. Before we left him he had confided his ambition. He was saving up to become a chauffeur. And when he did he planned to save as hard as he could so when his son grew up he would be able to see him through university. The point was not that he had that dream, it was that we couldn’t deny that it was within his grasp.

  In 1999 Zhang Xiaogang moved to Beijing to live, leaving behind his adopted home of Chengdu and his birthplace of Kunming. When he arrived, he told me, he realised what was most essential for him to understand if he was to succeed. ‘If you want a new life you need to forget the past,’ he told me. ‘It may seem like a contradiction to suffer the pain of putting aside your old life in order to experience the pleasure in the new, but you must.’

  During the 1990s the whole Chinese nation seemed to take this advice. In order to go forward they put aside the past and embraced forgetting. The 1980s was dead, a new century was in front of them; they had to go forward and not look back.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BEIJING WELCOMES YOU!

  I called the number on the lamppost and waited on the corner as instructed. It was late autumn but still warm, the scholar trees lining the quiet street heavy with golden leaves. Across the road a man was mending shoes under a red and yellow umbrella. Street traders were still everywhere in Beijing. That was one thing that hadn’t changed.

  One of the many things that had changed was that everyone now had a mobile phone. Mine, which I had just used to set up my street corner assignation, was a pale blue Motorola bought second hand in the market: I was told later that probably meant it was stolen. (Just a few weeks after that a pickpocket lifted it, completing the karmic circle.)

  A motor scooter drove up onto the sidewalk and parked beside me. Two twenty-somethings in padded jackets and tight trousers dismounted and handed me a card. These were the ‘mobile real-estate agents’ I was waiting for. They listened gravely to my wish list and assured me they could find me just what I was after.

  When I arrived in Beijing in the spring of 2004 I had no intention of moving back to China. I had spent the previous four years freelancing out of Europe but had returned home to Australia at the end of 2003 after a family tragedy. My little brother had died in a senseless accident, after which my life abroad seemed pointless. But once I returned home I found I couldn’t settle down there either. A friend in Beijing suggested a holiday in China as a circuit-breaker. Miserable and sceptical, I got on the plane.

  As soon as I touched down in Beijing I knew I wanted to stay. There was a sense of excitement and possibility that I hadn’t felt since the 1980s. So many of the people I knew who had left after 1989 were back in the country, drawn by a burgeoning economy and by the sense that other less tangible things might once again be possible.

  On the first day, my friend told me there was an art opening that we must go to and that on the way he wanted to show me something else—an art district called 798.

  Both parts of the program sounded strange to me. The last time I’d lived in China the only art openings I knew of had either been visited by the police or been held in a private venue, such as a diplomat’s apartment. And the idea of an ‘art district’ sounded unlikely. I knew the artists’ villages, of course, but the word ‘district’ suggested something more solid.

  Discovering the 798 district that day was a revelation. It existed in a region behind the airport expressway, which had once been (literally) off the map. In the 1980s official Chinese maps had showed the district as empty space, but the CIA map of Beijing that American friends liked to hang on their walls identified it as a complex of military factories covering half a square kilometre.

  For more than 30 years the area was home to up to 20,000 workers who laboured over military components in soaring Bauhaus spaces. The factories had been designed in the 1950s by East German architects who were then in thrall to their native modernist style. The arching saw-toothed roofs were set with windows angled perfectly to catch the natural light, even in the darkest days of winter, while simple rib buttresses supported the curving walls, leaving the spaces airy and open.

  Deng’s reforms started closing these factories in the late 1980s. By the time I arrived, the workers had long gone, but revolutionary slogans in huge red characters (‘ten thousand years to Chairman Mao!’) still shrieked out over silent machinery.

  On that rainy spring day in 2004, the district was still being colonised. Sculptors from the Central Academy of Fine Arts had taken over some spaces at its fringes, and a bookstore, Timezone 8, had set up in what had once been a workers’ canteen. At the centre of the district was the 798 factory itself, which was being developed as an art gallery, and tucked in beside it was a café. As it turned out, both the art gallery and the café were projects of an artist whose name I’d heard but was yet to meet—Huang Rui, who had co-founded the Stars a quarter of a century earlier.

  Huang Rui had moved into the district two years before and with a group of other artists had developed a manifesto for what they wanted to create there. The document rang with all of the idealism of the original Stars: ‘Here the ideal of the avant-garde will coexist with the flavour of the past, the notion of experimentation will be emphasised together with social responsibility, and spiritual and financial pursuits will prevail simultaneously.’

  When he moved into 798 in 2002 Huang Rui had only recently been allowed to return to China. He had attempted a homecoming in the early 1990s but had soon attracted the attention of the police. The artistic performances he designed around essential elements like fire and water were considered provocations by the authorities, their very subtlety suspect. To the authorities, Huang Rui and his work were a dangerous throwback to pre-1989 China. In 1995 he had been deported back to Japan and barred from returning until the new century.

  Now he was determined to create what he later described to me as a ‘safe zone’ for artists in the capital. He believed the key was to make 798 renowned both for its creativity and its commercial success. This would become his great project in the early years of the century, for which he spearheaded a battle to save the district from the wrecking ball in a city where the developers were now king.

  Today 798 is a celebrated part of Beijing’s cultural landscape and a template for similar districts across the country. Since 1979, contemporary art had survived in the half-light of grudging official tolerance. What won its security was commercial success.

  In the first decade of the twenty-first century the Western art market embraced Chinese contemporary art, and by 2006 was delivering million-dollar prices for works that had been created in the dark period post-1989. China’s cultural authorities sat up and took notice.

  But that was still a couple of years in the future when I wandered with my friend through the half-deserted factory buildings of 798 in 2004. In fact, there wasn’t a lot of art to see. Outside the café stood a kind of rocket ship made of bathroom fittings, and inside were
some silkscreen prints which punned on the fact that the English word ‘China’ sounds like the Chinese phrase for ‘demolish that’.

  On a corner of one alley, though, we discovered a sculpture that remains for me the icon of the 798 district. It is a bronze of a model worker, legs akimbo, arm thrust forward in a traditional propaganda pose. But the extended fist, instead of wielding a hammer, brandishes an artist’s paintbrush. The sculpture (which still stands in 798 today) seemed to me a perfect ‘up yours!’ to the dead ideals of Maoist art. I took it as a sign that the China I loved was alive and well. Having seen it I couldn’t resist being part of it.

  As a base for my second sojourn in China, I applied to work with China Radio International (CRI), part of the country’s extensive state-controlled media. As a foreign journalist, I had spent a lot of time tunnelling under China’s protective propaganda wall, and I was intrigued by the idea of seeing how things worked on the other side. Apart from that I was interested in the chance to work with young Chinese journalists, which I was told was a major part of the job.

  I assumed that as soon as they ran the usual police check on my application the job would be off the table. Over the years of reporting and producing stories from China I had had my fair share of brushes with the police and had built up a healthy file with them. But the job offer came through and by October 2004 I was armed with a work visa and on my way back to China. Two months later my husband joined me.

  When I’d lived in China in the 1980s there’d been no question of foreigners renting privately. We were all corralled in compounds of one sort or another, like the diplomatic quarters or the Friendship Hotel. Private apartments didn’t really exist, as most urban housing was controlled by the ‘work units’ to which all city dwellers were supposed to be assigned. But that had all changed in the 1990s with the state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms and the privatisation of urban housing. It wasn’t long before enterprising property owners started to tap the expat market.

  When I arrived at CRI, the management was just beginning to experiment with the idea of their foreign experts renting privately. The Friendship Hotel—where they’d been used to housing them—had begun charging market rates and it was clear CRI could save money by giving us an accommodation allowance instead that would cover the rent on a modest apartment.

  I decided to look for a place in Beijing’s western suburbs, not too far from the centre of town but on a subway line that would take me to the CRI headquarters. As this was not a fashionable part of the city for foreigners, the local English language listing magazines were no help in finding a place, which is why I found myself peering at lampposts in my target neighbourhood, copying down the numbers of people who were offering likely accommodation.

  My ‘mobile real-estate agents’ had no office. What they had were contacts, mobile phones, a motor scooter and chutzpah. They charged a month’s rent as a fee, to be split between the landlord and the tenant. They showed me a handful of places, all, as I would learn later, owned by employees (or former employees) of the Department of Railways.

  I finally settled on a tiny one-bedroom place in a nine-storey block on a leafy street. My landlord still worked for the railways. He had bought his assigned apartment when he got the chance, and had a separate home elsewhere, courtesy of his wife. Along with most of his neighbourhood he had transformed himself from ordinary worker into landlord, thanks to the SOE reforms.

  The place was bare-bones accommodation by Western standards—the kitchen was a gas ring beside a tiny sink—but it was sunny and quiet. My landlord explained that I would get excellent phone, internet and television reception, and that proved to be the case. It was only some months later that I realised this was courtesy of the western districts army base located nearby. The army, naturally enough, put a premium on efficient communications.

  The railways department still dominated the area in many small ways. At 7 a.m. they would broadcast a jaunty tune aimed at getting us out of bed and exercising before the day began. They ran various public education programs, on issues such as drugs or AIDS, and organised blood drives. The railways theatre troupe was also hanging on in the neighbourhood, still treading the boards of the dedicated theatre for which my street was named. It was called the February 7th Theatre, commemorating the date of an historic rail strike in 1923 which had been violently put down.

  Rivalling the patriotically named theatre as a local landmark was the new Eternal Peace Shopping Centre, which sold everything from German whitegoods to Australian wine and which teemed with shoppers day and night.

  Once I was settled in and had got to know the neighbourhood, I went—as instructed by CRI—to register with the police at the local Public Security Bureau (PSB). It didn’t go well.

  The policewoman on the registration counter looked at my passport with alarm. I had been in the country for almost three weeks! There was no question of processing my registration. I was asked to wait. An hour ticked past, then two. I watched a steady trickle of miscreants being hustled through the front door and into the basement. I started to wonder whether I would soon be heading down there myself. Through the glass entrance, I watched carefree citizens strolling in the sunlight. Freedom was metres away, but the police had my passport. So I waited.

  Finally the front door swung open to admit a 30-something man in a crumpled raincoat who reminded me of the eponymous detective played by Peter Falk in Columbo. This helped me relax. So did the interview room, which was on an upper floor and not in the basement.

  My Detective Columbo was the ‘foreigners’ liaison officer’ brought in from PSB headquarters to handle my case. He explained to me the law in relation to foreigners and the various ways in which I had broken it, most notably by failing to report to the PSB within 48 hours of my arrival in Beijing. I tried to pass the buck to CRI, who clearly hadn’t grasped how important it was for foreigners to register promptly, but he explained that this was my responsibility. He presented me with a copy in English of the relevant law and asked me to read it aloud. My voice started to falter as I came to the part about the applicable fine of RMB200 for every day that I was late in registering. Quick mental arithmetic told me that my first month’s salary at CRI was going straight back to the government.

  Again I pleaded ignorance, but he checkmated me easily: ‘Just like in your country, ignorance of the law is no excuse.’ But he then went on to explain that there was another way to handle things. If I would consent to write a sincere self-criticism the fine might be waived.

  I was familiar with self-criticisms. A favoured remedy for wrongdoing in the People’s Republic, it requires you to put down on paper all the ways in which you have transgressed and to beg the forgiveness of the authorities. I had written a few of them during my time as a journalist in China: the key to success is not to hold back.

  I sat down to write under Columbo’s watchful eye. I acknowledged that ignorance of the law was no excuse and stated that I understood how much I had let down the People’s Republic and its laws by my carelessness. I sincerely apologised. He read it over and suggested a few additions and finally declared himself satisfied. My contrition was noted, the self-criticism would be put on my file and there would be no fine applied. I was effusive (and genuine) in my thanks.

  Accompanying me back to the registration desk, he suddenly stopped. He had neglected something terribly important, he told me, and rubbed his forehead in annoyance at his forgetfulness. This was always the moment in Columbo where the trap would snap shut, so my heart started to pound. He reached into his pocket, removed a black plastic wallet, and flipped it open to show me. It was his police badge.

  My friends told me later that it had been a requirement for years that police show their ID before questioning anyone, but they very rarely did. There was something about this officer’s fidelity to the regulations and the earnest way he had asked me to study the text of the relevant laws that seemed significant. Could it be that even the police were responding to the new mood of the times?


  The idea of China as a nation governed by the rule of law had been part of the rhetoric of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms since the beginning. But it was only in the late 1990s that the rhetoric began to take shape in the real world. In 1996 the Lawyers Law was passed which established that lawyers were no longer to be considered servants of the state but independent professionals. In the late 1990s a number of cases focusing on individuals’ rights were taken up by these newly independent practitioners, who drew particularly on the Administrative Procedure Law passed in 1989, which for the first time allowed people to sue state agencies over their decisions, and also on a consumer rights law that was passed in 1993. In 1999 and then again in 2004 the Chinese constitution was amended, first to enshrine the rule of law and later the protection of human rights.

  By the time I arrived back in China in 2004 a new breed of what were called ‘rights lawyers’ had come into being, professionals who focused on key cases where the rights of an individual or group had been infringed. They generally worked pro bono, supporting themselves with other paid work within their practice or as members of a university faculty.

  The rights lawyers did not shrink from the most difficult or unpopular of clients and cases. Within weeks of my arrival, I heard of lawyers defending members of the outlawed Falun Gong sect and farmers who had been dispossessed of their land. Others were taking on the cause of investigative journalists, or workers who were alleging exploitation by their employers.

  Some of these lawyers used the media, both local and international, to publicise their cases, or organised small-scale protests, while others were more low key. Meanwhile, the role of the internet in taking cases to the court of public opinion was growing.

  A quarter century of reform had created multiple stresses across Chinese society. Breakneck development had revealed an underlying weakness in the gains that had been made by China’s farmers and the new urban middle class.