Fresh Air Fiend (36 page)

The prostitutes did not bother Mr. Lu. "If you open a window, you get some flies," he said, and he might have been quoting one of Deng's speeches.

Whenever we saw something decadent or jarring in Shenzhen—I would have been happy for more; I found the big city fairly tame—Mr. Lu said, with the Chinese love of euphemism, "More flies."

 

It seemed that the ancient places and the new places in developing China were interchangeable. It was an effect of the building boom: frugal, hastily erected structures did not age well, and appeared creaky and renovated as soon as they were finished. The Chinese miracle has not so far encompassed graceful or even sturdy architecture, though China has a knack for being able to bury its history in shallow graves. Old Whampoa, on a tributary of the Pearl River, was now a sprawling industrial area. Shenzhen, in under ten years, was not only bursting with commercial intensity but had also quickly mellowed, looking venerable, with the patina of Hong Kong, as though defying anyone to date it. The old port of Shekou, in the Pearl River delta, had been redeveloped, its godowns and shop houses buried under office blocks.

The Chinese have a genius for putting up buildings that are instantly seedy and almost ruinous. The dust clings, the cracks appear as soon as the ribbon is cut. Every building acquires a mid-nineteenth-century look almost overnight.

Zhuhai, a one-hour ferry ride across the wide, tea-colored mouth of the Pearl, was a Special Economic Zone just a few years away from being a village resort, but looked as old and citified as Macau, founded in 1557. Walking from the Gong Bei district of Zhuhai to Macau—it took me an hour, including passing through two sets of immigration officers—is like a stroll from one side to the other of the same city.

I had gone to Zhuhai because I had heard there had been a labor dispute at the Canon camera factory there. Guangdong had seen eighteen strikes in 1993, but they had been small affairs. This was a strike with a difference, because the workers were reasonably well paid, the company was immensely profitable (a $70 million turnover in 1992), and some of the strikers were on the administrative staff.

The ferry from Shekou to Zhuhai, the
Hai Shan,
had four hundred seats, and this being China, all the seats were taken. Each one was numbered and reserved. You would have thought that since everyone had his or her own seat that boarding the ferry would be a relaxed business. This was not the case. It was a physical struggle to walk up the gangway. Whenever a signal is given in China, people jump. It is as if there were a deep racial memory of individuals having gone hungry or got lost or left behind because they hesitated or weren't aggressive enough. Learned from periods of extreme poverty, the habit has now become a Chinese reflex, the instinct to push toward any door, any vehicle, any ticket window; shoving is the only way forward. And so China is an experience of elbows, now more than ever.

This get-it-now instinct has been officially sanctioned, and one of the features of society that old
gweilos
lament is the absence of politeness, real or pretended. I was on half a dozen airplane flights in China, and each time the plane began to descend, people threw off their seat belts, jumped up, and staggered forward to be first off the plane. Flight attendants howled and the passengers retreated, but when the attendants backs were turned, the people were up again, gathering their bags, moving unsteadily down the aisle of the still taxiing plane. Traffic in Chinese cities or on congested roads can be seen to push and compete in the same way, beeping and lane-jumping, darting into any available space.

There was still a standoff at the Canon factory. After a three-day work stoppage, the eight hundred strikers were back on the job while talks continued. Workers know it is a losing battle, however, because there will always be Chinese lining up for jobs at low wages. The government has made it very nearly a duty for its nationals to work uncomplainingly. And foreign companies will continue to bring manufacturing to China.

Yet Zhuhai, on its breezy bay, was one of the pleasanter places I saw. It had beaches and parks and a main drag. In every restaurant and hotel lobby bar, Chinese talked on cellular phones. Five years ago it was almost impossible to make a telephone call from the best hotel. The boom in telecommunications is part of the Chinese miracle, and even prostitutes wear beepers.

The yellow trade was brisk in Zhuhai. The city's somewhat steamy reputation no doubt derived from its proximity to Macau, as Shenzhen's derived from Hong Kong. But the present concern with manufacturing and the downplaying of tourism has meant that the vice business is mainly for locals or visiting provincials. A foreign tourist industry would have produced much larger numbers of massage parlors and call girls, more vicious practices, much higher prices. The narrow lanes in Gong Bei were the haunt of skinny hookers in shorts and high heels, and they circulated among the outdoor restaurants and sidewalk cafés and the men selling live snakes —
xiao long,
little dragons—out of baskets (500 yuan each, for the thick ones they called "Cross Mountain Blacks"). Fengboshan Park was popular among transients and seniors, and in a vice raid while I was in Zhuhai ten men were arrested, the eldest seventy-two. After the madam blabbed, her rates were published. Full sexual intercourse cost up to 60 yuan (around $10), bosom-touching was 10, and "nude peeks" were 5. As in other parts of China, barbershops and hairdressers were the cover for "relaxation services"—masturbation at 50 yuan.

In Zhuhai I was able to verify the rumor about expensive brandy. I found some likely bottles at the Zhuhai Merchandise Fair and asked to examine them. They were crystal decanters of Rémy Martin Louis XIII Grande Champagne Cognac, more than $1,000 a bottle.

"Do you sell many of these?" I asked.

"About four a month."

"Any to
gweilos
?"

"No. All to Chinese."

Later that day I marveled about this to a Chinese woman, who said to me, "When Americans first came to China, we thought they were rich. Now we are rich."

This remark developed into a discussion about envy among a number of Chinese. Several of them maintained that there was very little envy in the new, prosperous China.

"If a person gets rich, the attitude is, good luck to him," one said. "If I work hard, I'll get rich too."

"You don't burn a man's house down because he has a better one than you," another Chinese said. "There is even a sense that the rich man might help you."

Just as confidently, this view was contradicted by a man who described
hong yen bing,
or "red eye disease," a chronic condition in China whereby the envious person stared greedily at anyone who had more than he did.

Most of the speakers agreed that the wealthiest people in China were hidden. They were not the ones talking on cellular phones or buying expensive brandy and wearing Rolexes. They were perhaps living as they always had, except that they were squirreling their money away, preferably in hard currency (currency dealers thronged every sidewalk in these economic zones, pestering passersby and offering twice the bank rate for Hong Kong dollars). People with disposable income bought gold, TVs, appliances. Some bought land. Many invested in the Shenzhen stock market. The $1,000-a-bottle brandy story was colorful but misleading. Many people saved to send their children abroad (there are now eighty thousand Chinese studying in the United States, the largest number from any single foreign nation).

Meanwhile, posters and radio lectures exhorted The Four Adheres:

 

Adhere to Marxist Leninism
Adhere to the Socialist Road
Adhere to Proletarian Dictatorship
Adhere to Party Leadership

 

"Do people repeat these things?" I asked a man in Xiamen.

I liked his answer: "Yes. Like the Bible."

I thought,
Exactly,
because that clearly reminded me of all the cant and hypocrisy that goes under the name of Christianity. And it was no different for the Chinese, who were able to parrot Party slogans while at the same time hustling on the black market or trying, as one man did, to run me down in his BMW while he talked on his cellular phone.

Xiamen was the third of the three Special Economic Zones, and in its way the prettiest, the least ruined, with more open space than the others. Modernity elsewhere in China had seemed slightly ridiculous and imitative, looking out of place and foolish. Much of Xiamen was unmodernized, and consequently retained its dignity. It had shop houses and hawkers, beggars, hookers, Buddhist nuns, rickshaws, and general confusion, as well as chugging ferries in the harbor. The old town remained—I had thought of it when I went there the first time as being one of the most attractive in China, with a busy waterfront and a lovely island, Gulangyu, just offshore, where venerable mansions of returned Chinese had been preserved and cars were forbidden. The island was marred only by its billboards (for Coca-Cola, Marlboro, and eighteen other products). These days even Chinese flocked to see it, to take the ferry and climb its ancient hill.

Xiamen was now five times bigger, both in area and population, than it had been five years ago, when I had first passed through. It had a McDonald's now, and while this fast-food place and a Hamburger City were just across the road from the traditional Fujianese restaurants that had menageries out front (live snakes, lizards, eels, frogs, and rabbits trapped in cages, waiting for diners to single them out to have their throats cut before they were skinned and cooked), the dull fact was that the mass of people did not eat either snakes or Big Macs. They went to bun and dumpling shops, to noodle stalls; they stuffed themselves with cheap candy and boiled rice and crackers; they slurped stewed vegetables at home, with their elbows on wobbly wooden tables.

I had been told that the large town of Shishi ("Stone Lion"), in the hinterland, was the center of the Fujianese yellow trade—not only prostitutes but contraband. I spent a whole day getting there, and it did seem odd for this large, prosperous place to be in the middle of nowhere. That was the point: Shishi flourished because it was off the map. You could buy anything in Shishi's markets, and its bars were far more louche than their counterparts in Xiamen. But what I remembered afterward was the long drive there: the pretty preserved town of Jimei with its handsome buildings, the brand-new walled-in eighteen-hole golf course surrounded by rice fields, vegetable gardens, and barefoot peasants. Every five miles or so we passed a school or college. Perhaps fifty miles into the countryside we came to strange junk villages, one village piled high with glass bottles, another with scrap iron, another with paper, another with rubber tires—a whole province of scrap, awaiting recycling. Then Shishi, and the realization that it simply had not existed a few years ago except as a wide place in the road.

Outside Xiamen I found my first sweatshop, the Rubber and Plastic Shoes Making Factory, a nightmare of squatting women and toxic fumes and bad light, where no one earned more than 200 yuan a month. I failed in my attempt to find convict or child labor, but people swore they existed and did not see much wrong with employing ten-year-olds or convicted criminals.

The Huli Industrial Zone was one of many outside Xiamen, where joint ventures flourished. One factory produced cigarettes. It was a huge success, an R. J. Reynolds partnership, with work for 1,100 and an annual profit of $33 million, making Camels as well as Youyi and Haima "peppermint type filtertip" cigarettes. Other factories were Pirelli Tires, Golden Dragon Auto Body, and United Clothing. This zone comprised about six square miles of factories, with two luxury hotels, on a grid of streets. Every factory was booming. Dynasty Optical, for example, contracted to make designer frames and sunglasses under license. The workers got the standard 400 yuan a month, and the frames were shipped to America and Europe, where they retailed (because of the quality and the famous label) for hundreds of dollars. I kept thinking of the Italian man at the Canton Trade Fair: China is the manufacturer for the world. How had it happened that the Chinese had taken over? Simple, perhaps. Foreign investment was invited. Factories got built. The Chinese workers showed up on time. They accepted the lowest wages. They didn't protest. They were not religious. Because of their peculiar political indoctrination, they were totally materialistic.

China's cityscapes reminded me of those of my childhood—just as busy, just as fully employed and go-ahead, just as ugly and confusing. There had been a time when all American cities looked like Xiamen's industrial zones, with street after street of factory buildings. They are lighted, working versions of the mills in Massachusetts that fell into dereliction after World War II. Fall River had them, so did New Bedford, Lawrence, and Brockton; they still have them—the structures have been revived now as factory outlets, selling designer-label Chinese-made goods. South China's cities would be familiar to anyone who has lived in an urban area in Europe or America, where the factories are now empty and the machines are stopped. Not just Boston and Chicago, but Bradford and Manchester in England, and Derry in Northern Ireland, and so many others. China is doing it now, for everyone.

In the 1950s Raytheon was the great patron and employer of high school graduates in Boston and its suburbs. Raytheon manufactured electronics equipment. I often heard it said, approvingly, of people I knew, "He's got a job at Raytheon. He's pulling down good money. He'll be all right." In Xiamen, in the Huli Industrial Zone, one of the booming factories bore the sign
Raytheon.

China has succeeded because China is at work. The world has put it to work and has invested in it, and the world has received a return on its investment. Most people reading this are wearing a Chinese-made shirt, or sweater, or trousers, or pair of shoes. Traditional Nantucket baskets are Chinese. Carved Christmas decorations are Chinese. Our do-it-yourself tools are Chinese. Our children's toys are Chinese. Our bikes. High-fashion beaded dresses are Chinese. Ninja Turtles are Chinese. The tires on our cars are Chinese. Many Japanese electronic goods are assembled in China.