Fresh Air Fiend (34 page)

Although China accounts for one quarter of the world's population—many voices, you might say—public opinion hardly exists. From 1949 until the present, all the political changes have come about by internal wrangling. No Chinese leader has deliberately tried to please the people, although there have been many instances of famine-by-blunder, natural disasters, and political abuse.

As Americans, we are used to our government caring about us and responding to our frustrations, but the Chinese people are happiest when they are ignored. Left to their own devices, they manage quite well, and of course they are now in the unique position of having every businessman and his brother wooing them. They were watched and manipulated, socially and politically engineered from Liberation onward. They may have needed a degree of unity, but they did not need a lifelong course in Maoist doctrine. Yet even the thorough indoctrination they received did not dehumanize them or make them less fond of their families or less reverent toward their ancestors.

In China all appearances are deceptive.

One of Mao's most interesting essays is called "On the Correct Handling of Contradiction Among the People." It deals with unity and harmony. Mao writes, "As for the imperialistic countries, we should unite with their peoples and strive to coexist peacefully with those countries, do business with them and prevent any possible war, but under no circumstances should we harbor any unrealistic notions about them." A few pages later, he goes on, "We must learn to look at problems all-sidedly, seeing the reverse as well as the obverse side of things. In given conditions, a bad thing can lead to good results, and a good thing to bad results."

The wealthy people are not those spivs yakking on cellular phones or sporting designer clothes. The millionaires are invisible. If anything, the cities look worse than they ever did—more crowded and chaotic and far less comfortable than ten or fifteen years ago. The gardens and parks are a mess, people's manners generally are aggressive and their attitudes insufferable. The physical fabric of China (in what one presumes is this transitional stage) is in tatters. Strangely, this is progress.

***

Ever since arriving back in the People's Republic, I had had a sense of this new prosperous, overcrowded, and in-your-face China as being much more like old China than the period dominated by Mao's selfless mottoes of anti-capitalism. "Serve the people" had penetrated daily life so completely that waiters were offended by tips and doors were never locked. In those days people liked wearing old clothes, I was told. There was a fetish for blue boiler suits and work clothes, and patches were like badges of honor. That had lasted roughly thirty years, from Liberation until Deng Xiaoping's last comeback, when he declared his open door policy.

In my mental stereotype old China was an ugly landscape of factories and farms, expatriates and competing crowds, back streets ringing with the hammers of tinsmiths, and vast cities of tycoons, prostitutes, beggars, hawkers, hustlers, and peasants—furious activity, everything for sale, clogged lanes and markets piled high with produce, and an intensely competitive commercial life. Factories turning out crystal goblets and sweatshops making shirts. Except for the occasional intrusion of police, life went on, and politics was a novelty and a nuisance that no one liked but everyone tolerated. Old China was not a tourist destination. And yet what looked at a distance like the chaos and anarchy of sweatshops, missionaries, compradors, deals, and dirt, was, close up, meticulous order.

I had that impression in many places in south China, the ones that had grown in four or five years from being landing stages on tributaries of the Pearl River, like the East River, to the size of proper towns. These settlements were like ones in the big and bustling old China. That was their appearance, but it was contradicted by a tougher reality. Why be sentimental? seemed to be the Chinese attitude now. Why trust another leader? This was a pushing and shoving China that had learned its Maoist lesson of self-reliance and survival, and rejected the rest of Maoist altruism. Because of the hardships and unpredictable events of the Maoist years, people had developed sharp elbows and an instinct to snatch what they could while the time was right.

In 1989 the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square had demanded the removal of Premier Li Peng. But it was the demonstrators who were removed. Li Peng remains a sloganeer, and the best translation of "
Zhua zhu shi!,
" his exhortation at the National People's Congress in March 1993, is "Seize the day!"

Now he is preaching to the converted. Mao had wanted to create a population of revolutionaries, but his campaigns and purges were more like aversion therapy. What emerged from the age of Mao was a vast army of reactionaries and opportunists. Mao's greatest success, though he may not have realized it, was in turning his people into single-minded materialists. Ideologically speaking, the Long March has taken a right turn down the capitalist road.

 

Does it matter financially whether China continues to be accorded most-favored-nation status by the Clinton administration? Not in the short term. What the Chinese especially crave—something that is bestowed by MFN status—is an appearance of respectability, because the Chinese hierarchy is eager to host the next Olympic games. To this end, the Chinese have performed political and ideological somersaults such as exchanging ambassadors with Israel, a country it vilified until it discovered a mutually beneficial interest in the international arms trade. It is of no consequence to the Chinese that the Olympics is largely a pantomime world war of nationalistic athletes; the games are worth money in the marketing of TV rights—and the games have more to do with business than sports. They also encourage investment. And in a profound sense any country hosting the Olympics can claim to be upholding the lofty Olympic ideals. The Chinese will do almost anything, it seems, for the sake of respectability, except tolerate dissenters. In this they have the world's connivance, because every country buys Chinese.

There is a high price for the current wave of prosperity in China. It has both human and environmental implications. With the growth in industrial output, factory pollution in China has become horrendous, with the sludgiest rivers and in some cities the worst air quality to be found on earth. Beijing has an annual water crisis. Flooding is commonplace in south China, and with the building boom, the destruction of paddy fields, and deforestation, the problem gets worse every year. Some ecologists have singled out China for its insensitivity in killing and cooking various rare animals.

The Chinese could have written the
Endangered Species Cookbook.
Certainly, killing tigers for the rejuvenating powers of their blood and bones, slaughtering elephants for their ivory and rhinos for their horns, and stuffing themselves with owls, turtles, herons, snakes, and the celebrated Heilongjiang dish of bear's paw seem diabolical in this green age. These habits have less to do with prosperity than with a tradition that holds that food is pharmacopoeia, and this insensitive gobbling will be modified by—if nothing else—the disappearance of these species. The floods, the droughts, the cutting of old-growth forests, the pollution—these are in the long run more destructive than the eating of monkey brains and moose noses.

Crime—another price the Chinese are paying for their new wealth—is unprecedented. Explicating Chinese punishment, even the paltry statistics that are officially published, reveals that Chinese crime is pervasive and takes all forms.

Seeing no policemen on duty after five o'clock in the town of Huizhou (as Mel Dickinson had foretold), I asked various people about the crime rate. They all said yes, it's terrible, it's these outsiders, young boys mostly, no respect. I asked elsewhere, but no one liked discussing this subject with a
da bidze
("big nose"), and who could blame them? Two interesting points emerged, though. The people said that many of the thieves carried weapons. This was alarming. Armed robbery was always a capital offense in China. And everyone I spoke to was in favor of the death penalty—for murder, for robbery, for arson, for pimping, you name it. But this was not a topic for idle conversation. With the growth in prosperity and reform, there were more executions than ever, and in some cities crime was out of control, the police often accused of being in cahoots with the criminals.

I had had death-penalty conversations many times before in China. The Chinese response was still unanimous. Give the criminal a bullet in the neck. Let the victim's family watch the death throes, and make the criminal's family pay for the bullet.

One argument for the death penalty is that it deters crime. I happen to think this is a specious argument, and it is manifestly not the case in China, where the number of executions has risen—and so has the crime rate. In May 1993 Amnesty International reported, "Estimates from unofficial sources for the number of executions in 1991 range from 5,000 to 20,000. The escalating use of the death penalty in China since 1989 is apparently continuing: in the month of January, 1992, Amnesty International recorded 334 death sentences including over 200 executions."

When I challenged a more forthcoming Chinese man named Liu, he told me that people stole, and murdered, in spite of the death penalty "because they don't know the law."

"But the government publicizes the executions," I said. "They drive the condemned men around town in the back of a truck with signs around their necks. They put the dead people's pictures up at the railway station. How could they not know?"

"They are ignorant."

"But everyone in China knows that they will be executed for committing certain crimes," I said.

Mr. Liu said, "Some people feel it won't apply to them—that they will get off with a prison sentence."

Some time later, a young woman named Miss Ma said to me, "Many people in China do not value their lives. They don't regard their lives as precious, and therefore they're willing to take risks."

Hearing us talking, Mr. Li, the driver, said, "People must die if they break the law"—an odd sentiment from someone who, like my other drivers, spent most of his driving time on the wrong side of the road.

They both scoffed at the argument that executions ought to reduce crime. It was a good thing if that happened, but that was not the purpose.

"Not as a deterrent," Miss Ma said. "As a punishment. If you kill someone, you have no right to live."

What about the large numbers? I asked. Was it a matter of the Chinese adage "In order to correct a wrong, it is necessary to exceed the limits"?

"Perhaps."

Iran, China, and the United States were the countries most wedded to the idea of capital punishment, I said, and they had the highest body count. Also, a case could be made for the death penalty's making a country more savage, increasing the number of violent crimes.

The next day Mr. Li, who had clearly been thinking about this during the night, said, "You asked me why people go on committing crimes in China in spite of the death penalty."

"Yes, I don't get it."

"Tell me, then," he said, smirking, "why do Americans go on getting AIDS in spite of knowing that it will kill them?"

We were on the road to Shenzhen. Was it true, as I had heard—I asked Mr. Li—that the "yellow trade" (prostitution, gambling, pornography) flourished in Dongguan?

Mr. Li's answer was perfect: "All developed countries have such things."

 

I went to the market in Shenzhen with a friend of a friend, Mr. Lu, who told me, "I would much rather live here than in Hong Kong. I have a larger apartment here than I would have in Hong Kong. Shenzhen is cleaner and better organized."

When I asked Mr. Lu about his family, he said, "They were very Red"—they had had power but no money, had never been landowners, and were Party members. So that meant their credentials were unassailable during the Cultural Revolution? Mr. Lu said this was true. I asked him whether he had been active himself—he was forty-eight, just the right age. He said yes. Had he been a Red Guard? He said yes.

"What was your unit?"

"Revolutionary Revolt—the Reddest," he said, and smiled, as though having been a member of this fanatical ultra-leftist unit had been a youthful indiscretion.

Mr. Lu had been teaching English in 1966, but after being subjected to intense self-criticism (essays, confessions, recitations), he had become a Red Guard. His unit fought regularly against other units, mostly chair throwing. The dispute: which unit was the truest guardian of Mao's thought. In 1969, Mr. Lu was chosen as a model Red Guard, having worked for a year at a milling machine—a lathe making parts for machine tools—in a factory in the countryside. Machine tools during the day, Marxist-Leninist study at night. He was selected to be a propagandist, traveling the country, galvanizing Red Guard units, and leading political pep rallies from Mongolia to Shanghai.

In his spare time he studied revolutions around the world. Then, when foreign visitors began arriving in the early seventies, Mr. Lu, whose English was now an asset, was appointed to take them around. Many were well known. John Kenneth Galbraith was one.

Time passed. Mao died in 1976, "of disappointment," Mr. Lu said, "because he had been betrayed by Lin Biao." Just after Deng took control, Mr. Lu was sent to study in the United States and Canada, and that experience, the sight of prosperity, transformed him. "It was the way people lived," he said. "I wanted that for us." Mr. Lu became a passionate reformer. In June 1989 he was at the barricades in Tiananmen Square.

"It was too bad that some students died," he said, obviously chastened by the violence. "But that is the past. We have to be optimistic."

I asked him about the man whose speeches had incited the students, Fang Lizhe, now a teacher in the United States.

"The great number of Chinese people don't care about his ideas. He is better off in America anyway. He is more American than Chinese."

Mr. Lu seemed the right person to walk around Shenzhen with. He was small and slight of build, but he said that having been through the Cultural Revolution, he was not daunted by any adversity, whether it was walking a long distance or carrying a heavy load.