Postcards From Tomorrow Square (26 page)

Wen told Lin about his vision of parity with the big cities within ten years for these destitute areas and said that the “Internet village” was the model he had been looking for, since it could leapfrog the long process of industrialization and bring villagers directly into the telecommunications age.

Very soon, Wen had founded and funded a new company and put Lin in charge. Its name in English is “Town and Talent Technologies.” Everything about it reflected Wen’s love for the grand gesture. Had Lin brought the Internet to one village? It should come to a thousand villages. Might it cost $50,000 to equip, operate, and maintain each village’s new computer center? Then Wen should commit $50 million, to cover all thousand villages.

Plus an extra $4 million, for what Wen saw as the crowning touch: a five-star luxury conference center in Yellow Sheep River itself, kind of an Aspen or Jackson Hole without the surrounding rich people. There Chinese visitors from the rich eastern cities could see how their countrymen lived, and so could visitors from around the world. Wen kept adding new specs and features to the resort. A conference room with special acoustic tile and high-end video projectors. A swimming pool with the latest “antiwave” design to prevent needless ripples, plus a gym. Naturally, broadband in all the rooms.

Wen used his connections and pull to interest governmental and industrial groups in the project, and he kept encouraging and funding Lin’s work. Then he dropped dead.

I
n December 2003, as Town and Talent was setting up Internet projects at more than fifty western schools and as the external structure of the resort was being finished, Sayling Wen suddenly suffered a stroke. He’d always been overweight—standing behind him in line for mandatory fitness training back in their first week of college, Kenny Lin had been startled to see Wen weigh in at 99 kilos, 218 pounds, and strain valiantly but be unable to complete a single pull-up. (Lin, in contrast, was and is a physical-fitness fanatic.) But Wen had seemed vigorous and healthy. He was taken to the hospital and within three days had died, at age fifty-five.

Kenny Lin was devastated for his friend, and he was also in trouble. Wen had given him only $1.2 million of the promised $4 million total for the resort. “I had 400 construction workers ready to start on the interior,” he told me. “No one knew where the other $2.8 million was.” Wen had apparently told no one else in the company about his commitment. Lin stalled the workers, telling them that the hotel might become a school. He feared a riot if they knew that the whole project was at risk. Finally, in March 2004, after three months of Lin’s pressure and pleading, one of Sayling Wen’s brothers agreed to provide the missing $2.8 million.

By the end of 2004 the conference center was done, and officials from around China attended a grand-opening ceremony. “But our original business model was lots of conferences, and Mr. Wen, with his connections, was the central part of that model,” Kenny Lin told me. “Now there is no one to invite the people he could bring.”

Lin told me this in the summer of 2007, as my wife and I walked along the echoing marble floors of the conference center, beneath a larger-than-life-size portrait of Sayling Wen on the wall. We had heard about Yellow Sheep River, which has been well publicized in China, and we had gotten in touch with Lin through mutual friends. In the 145-room resort, we appeared to be the only paying guests (the list price is about $100 a night). A full, uniformed staff was on hand—to welcome us to the breakfast buffet, to hand us towels at the pool and exercise room, to greet us when we went in and out the front door.

I have seen deserted resort-palaces before—for example, a ghostly one in the Ilocos area of northern Luzon, which Ferdinand Marcos had built strictly for his daughter’s wedding and which stayed open, empty, for years after he was deposed. But this was different, in retaining an air of hopefulness rather than sheer decadence. And hopeful is how I feel about the several legacies of Sayling Wen’s vision for western China.

The resort itself is of course the most visible of these legacies. When I run my travel agency, I will send every foreign group there I can. By international standards, it is no longer superluxurious. But for foreigners it is comfortable, which cannot be said of many other places where outsiders are a two-minute walk away from village life. Unlike similar “comfortable” lodgings in places like Haiti or West Africa, it creates little sense of surviving behind barricades in a gilded cage. The hotel and conference center are in the middle of ordinary peasant fields but not besieged by desperate local crowds. As in much of China, including some areas of the west, my wife and I walked through the region chatting with farmers and children in basic Mandarin without causing too much stir.

Kenny Lin, who turned over management of the resort to a colleague in 2005, was aiming for a high-end international crowd of visitors. He knew that the surrounding mountainous area would appeal to Western hikers, mountain bikers, and horse riders. The highland scenery is breathtaking, like Wyoming or the Canadian Rockies, with numerous white yaks in place of bison or bears. (Breathtaking literally, too. While my wife rode horses among the yaks with Lin, I foolishly attempted to run along a path in the same meadow, only to stop in my tracks ten seconds later. It turns out that the meadow is at an elevation of 11,000 feet.) The resort’s new manager has decided that the domestic Chinese tourist and conference business, a very rapidly growing market, offers the best prospects, and reportedly has booked enough of them to keep the business running.

A second legacy of Sayling Wen is the Town and Talent company, with its plan to bring the power of the Internet to isolated villages. The strategy behind that plan has also changed significantly since Lin’s first trip to Yellow Sheep River eight years ago. Then, he thought the Internet could best help the young people of Gansu by helping them move away. They could learn what they needed to know to take factory jobs, and then be matched with big employers in the big cities. “Outsourcing labor to factories was a big economic success,” Lin says, “but ethically, we couldn’t be responsible for what happened to the kids. They were country children. They didn’t know how to handle money in the big cities. They didn’t know how to make friends or even cross streets.”

Now Town and Talent’s strategy is the reverse. It still wants to help children leave subsistence farms, on land that was barely farmable even before the drought and has been overused to the point of exhaustion. But instead of speeding their departure to the east and further straining family and social ties, it is trying to use the Internet to create new jobs in western China’s cities. To oversimplify, the plan has similarities to India’s success in creating call-center and tech-support jobs in Bangalore and Hyderabad, except here the idea is to attract jobs that might otherwise end up in Shanghai, Hangzhou, or some other booming eastern Chinese city. Town and Talent has set up programs in more than 150 schools in western China to train students in using computers (which it donates) and the Internet, so they will have a better chance of holding tech jobs or starting companies of their own.

The final legacy is outright philanthropy, the current version of Sayling Wen’s obviously impossible dream of modernizing the west within ten years. The Town and Talent company devotes 10 percent of its efforts to a project whose English name is “West China Story” and whose goal is to connect students in remote villages with the outside world.

In this program, middle school and high school students in distant areas apply for a kind of work study grant. The standard amount, about $115, covers most of their yearly school expenses and so can keep them enrolled even when times are bad. (In many of the schools I’ve seen, the students sleep in cramped concrete dorm rooms on weeknights, because their homes are too far away for daily travel by bus or on foot. Part of the fee is to cover their food at school.) In exchange they must, essentially, become bloggers. At least ten times per year, they are required to research, write, illustrate, and post on the Web a report on some aspect of their lives in the countryside. The idea is to remind them that they are earning their way, not being given a favor, while at the same time teaching them modern Web site design skills. In addition, teams of students put up elaborate multipage Web sites—on the prospects for wind turbines in perpetually gusty western areas, on the history of irrigation systems in the Yellow River basin of Ningxia—some of which have won prizes in international high school “cyber-fairs.”

The essays are available at
WestChinaStory.com
; they are in Chinese, but the students correspond with site visitors in simple English as part of their training. Many of the pictures are eloquent, regardless of language. (Town and Talent gives each school one digital camera, which the students share.) One middle school student writes about the “moment of joy” when the family wheat crop is ready for harvest. A high school boy tells about how great it was when his school got a basketball to play with outside. Another, about learning Tibetan dance. Another, what is hard but satisfying about herding sheep. It might sound maudlin, but having met some of these children, I take their accounts as alive, hopeful, human.

Some 2,200 rural students now earn their keep through this kind of blogging, supported by half a million dollars in donations mainly from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the United States, and a few businesses in mainland China. My wife and I signed up to “hire” a number of blogging students from the school that welcomed us. (On the site, you can not only see all of the students’ essays in Chinese and their pictures but also choose students to sponsor at 800 RMB, or about $115, per year.) I’d like to know what becomes of them.

“The children in these villages have so many disadvantages,” Ted Wen, Sayling’s son, told me when I met him in Taipei. “They do not have a fair chance.” For instance: Chinese universities reverse the logic of U.S. affirmative action programs. Rich and poor students alike take the gaokao, the nationwide admissions test. But to get into the famous, career-making universities, a poor student from the hinterland must score higher than a rich kid from an elite urban school. (This is the practical effect of a system whose stated bias is in favor of students from each university’s own geographical area, and where the best universities are in the biggest, richest cities.)

Ted Wen is a suave figure in his early thirties who studied computer science in Japan and California before returning to Taiwan after his father’s death to “get involved in my father’s unfinished business,” as he wrote to me in an e-mail. He said that his father’s vision for western China was in part purely practical: If Taiwanese businesses did good things for mainland China, maybe people on the mainland would look favorably on Taiwan. But it also had a moral core. “I think it was important to my father to give children in the west a fairer chance to compete.”

That effort might be doomed. The children might still have no hope. The west of China may still be poor ten years from now, and a hundred. But in a big, bustling country where many people are thinking mainly about what’s profitable, it’s worth noticing the ones who are thinking about what’s fair.

AFTER THE
EARTHQUAKE

C
hinese officials and most of the Chinese public assumed that the year 2008 would be a major turning point for the country. They were right, but not for the reason they expected. Before the year began, expectations naturally focused on the Beijing Olympics, to be held in August. For all of the pageantry, expense, and overall success of the Olympic Games, the more important event of the year was the catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan province that occurred on May 12, followed by hundreds of aftershocks that themselves would count as major earthquakes in most countries.

The Wenchuan earthquake, as it was generally known in China after the small city where it was centered, may have killed 100,000 people directly and put many millions out of their homes. For more than two months, until the opening of the Olympics, reaction to the earthquake eclipsed other concerns in China. The date 5/12 on posters and magazine covers became as ubiquitous and significant as 9/11 had been in the United States. What had previously seemed an urgent national problem—the disruptions and protests as the Olympic torch relay moved through Western countries—virtually disappeared from the news.

The emergency changed China’s internal sense of charity and mutual help. Volunteers took buses and trains from the big eastern cities toward Sichuan to volunteer to help. China does not have a long tradition of philanthropy, but donation boxes appeared everywhere—in office buildings, on street corners, in grocery stores—and were stuffed with RMB bills. It also changed the outside world’s view. As a means of showing China’s “true face” to the world, the unplanned and heartfelt response from Chinese citizens and institutions did more good than the carefully choreographed effort to astonish world viewers during the Games.

The crisis even portrayed the government in a positive light. China rapidly opened itself to international assistance, in unmistakable contrast to the shocking indifference of the Burmese junta at the same time. Nothing involving Chinese media treatment of a Chinese leader is ever unscripted. But Premier Wen Jiabao came close to an appearance of spontaneity in the weeks after the earthquake—flying to Sichuan within hours of the first news; slipping in the mud as he walked through the ruins; lecturing soldiers and rescue workers on the need to keep trying as long as there was the slightest chance that even one more survivor could be saved.

T
en weeks after the quake, in early August, when the nation’s attention had shifted back to the impending Olympics, my wife and I traveled for a week through villages around the earthquake zone in western Sichuan. We were in the company of outsiders with long experience in this area, two scholars from the United States who had lived with Sichuan farmers and continually revisited them starting in 1992.