Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (46 page)

The Xiaogang villagers had no way of knowing that farmers all around China were trying to get away with similar plans. But Anhui Province was a bit different. The food situation there was so dire that some officials were willing to turn a blind eye to what the farmers were doing
¹⁷
—even while others persisted with obstruction, denying fertilizers to the experimenters.
¹⁸
The new party chief in Anhui, another victim of the Cultural Revolution, had his own ideas. Wan Li had assumed the leadership of the province in 1977, just before Deng’s comeback, and he soon realized that the comeback of household contracting was the only way to make sure that people avoided starvation. He gave his official blessing to the Xiaogang experiment, as well as allowing other places to try out similar measures (always under the proviso that the peasants involved were in particularly desperate straits). Farmers were allowed to divide up the land of the commune into household plots. They were required to provide a set quota of grain to the state. The rest could be sold off in private markets.

The effects were dramatic. Grain output in Xiaogang rose sixfold in the course of the year. The per capita income of the villages went from twenty-two yuan to four hundred.
¹⁹
This was a trend that would be exceedingly hard to stop. “
Baochan daohu
[“contracting by the household”] is like a chicken pest,” one peasant said. “When one family’s chicken catches the disease, the whole village catches it. When one village has it, the whole country will be infected.”
²⁰
In 1979, by one estimate, 10 percent of Anhui Province was practicing the household-responsibility system. In June 1979, after paying a visit to Fengyang County to see the results for himself, Wan Li approved the expansion of the program to the entire province.
²¹
In the countryside, at least, the party was beginning to release its grip.

Zhao Ziyang, Wan’s counterpart in Sichuan Province, took note. He had already been conducting experiments of his own, allowing state-owned enterprises to produce some goods in response to market demand and to use the resulting profits as they saw fit. Many of his own farmers still labored under threat of starvation, so he, too, began to allow them to deviate from the collective pattern. In 1978 he had begun allowing the communes to subdivide their production teams into smaller
groups. He justified what he was doing as a way of “bringing individual initiative into full play.” He may have actually regarded the measure as an intermediate step on the way toward full-scale revival of the household-responsibility system. In 1979 he then allowed some production teams in the province to break work groups down into individual families. The measures sparked political resistance from conservatives. (The Maoists had not vanished completely, after all.) “But Mr. Zhao is ready to risk it,” wrote a group of visiting British journalists. “He endorsed setting family quotas for certain tasks such as raising silkworms, pigs and fish, on condition that the animal remain the property of the collective.” That was his way of ensuring that the radicals couldn’t accuse him of completely betraying the principle of collective ownership.
²²

Private interest, as it emerged, was about to prove a more powerful force than the Maoists’ invocations of revolutionary purity. In August 1979, encouraged by Zhao’s permissiveness, farmers in Sichuan decided to take an even more daring step. They set about dismantling Xiangyang People’s Commune in Guanghan, a town about forty miles from the provincial capital of Chengdu. This effectively rejected the collectivization policies behind the Great Leap Forward, a dramatic rejection of one of Mao’s signature policies. The move was so sensitive that they kept it secret, and it became publicly known only the following year.
²³
Zhao Ziyang and other Sichuan officials provided them with discreet political cover.

The dissolution of the first commune was a step of far-reaching implications. The Guanghan farmers divided the assets of the commune into subunits, some of them economic (having to do with agricultural production), some of them purely administrative. This set an important precedent for a nationwide abolition of communes that would change the face of China in the next few years. In the same year that the commune in Guanghan was abolished, a Sichuan newspaper declared that the “unity of economics and politics” that lay at the heart of the People’s Communes was not good and that “all unfavorable situations must be changed.”
²⁴
Decades later, the former head of the commune explained to an interviewer why the communes had become untenable. They were bureaucratically inflexible, with higher-ranking planners often ordering the commune to plant crops that were contrary to local conditions. They promoted excessive egalitarianism. And they suppressed initiative by giving the same amount of reward to each member of the commune regardless of the amount worked—what the locals referred to as “eating from one rice bowl.”
²⁵

The success of the experiments conducted by Zhao and Wan propelled them both to the top of the career pyramid. Having won Deng’s favor with his reforming zeal, Zhao became prime minister, and he played a crucial role in directing the
economy during the early reform period. As for Wan Li, the peasants of Anhui immortalized him with a saying: “If you want to eat rice, look for Wan Li.” Wan had the extra advantage of sharing Deng’s favorite pastime. When he arrived in Beijing upon his promotion to the Politburo, Wan soon became a regular participant in Deng’s biweekly bridge parties, held at his house every Wednesday and Saturday evening. The power of bridge in Deng’s life was not to be underestimated. It was a game that played to his personal strengths: patience, strategic focus, and a prodigious memory.

The transformation of agriculture in 1978 and 1979 proceeded with little instigation from the top. The peasants sensed the opportunities provided by the loosening of the party’s political control and pushed ahead. It was a process marked by wide regional variation; there seem to have been as many different names for agricultural reform experiments during this period as there are counties in China. It was also very much a matter of trial and error. When the politicians learned what the peasants were up to, they usually waited for evidence of success before they committed themselves unambiguously. Wan Li and Zhao Ziyang could claim credit for letting the farmers do what came naturally. When the experiments of the peasants bore fruit, Deng publicized their success, recognizing a good thing when he saw it. But he certainly could not take credit for giving farmers the idea.

The irony, as American anthropologist Stephen Mosher realized, was that Western scholars at the time regarded the Chinese as incorrigible collectivists. “Group thinking” was considered an indelible part of traditional culture that predisposed the Chinese to Communist ways. As a result, Mosher had come to the countryside expecting to discover evidence that the peasants were fundamentally satisfied with the stability and predictability furnished by the regime. According to scholarly reasoning, the Communist Party had taken power in 1949 largely due to the support of the country dwellers. It had promised to improve the lot of the peasantry, and in this it had surely succeeded. After all, hadn’t the Communists brought schools and basic health care to even some of the most remote villages? Hadn’t they eliminated the corruption and tyranny of the old landlords? Upon his arrival, Mosher carefully noted all the characteristics of a traditional society that skewed visibly to collective ways of doing things.

The rampant cynicism and apathy that he encountered in China’s real-existing countryside thus came as something of a shock, and his account provides a fascinating chronicle of how a preconceived view can disintegrate upon contact with reality. But amid the ruins of Mao’s utopian edifice, Mosher also discovered intriguing evidence of a powerful source of transformative energy: individual initiative. Though
they were far from the places where the most important experiments were under way, the people in Mosher’s remote Guangdong village had already picked up on the spread of the household-responsibility system, and he succeeded in capturing a nice snapshot of the spirit that, once unleashed, would soon lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The old entrepreneurial mind-set of the Chinese “flared anew once opportunity presented itself,” Mosher noted. When one woman heard that the party might soon allow a return to household farming, she immediately began making plans to start cultivating her own mulberry patch, planting the bushes between the rows of trees on the farm. “You can’t do that now because people are careless when they work,” she explained to the American. “They would step on them when they are spreading mud [as fertilizer] or picking mulberry leaves. But I’ll be careful because they’ll be mine.”
²⁶

I
n May 1979, Tom Gorman, a Hong Kong-based American businessman, set off on another one of his trips to the Canton Trade Fair. As part of his job with a Hong Kong publisher of trade magazines, he had already made the trip to the fair several times, so he knew the routine. In the 1970s, foreigners who wanted to do business with the world’s most populous country had to follow a peculiar procedure. They could enter the People’s Republic only at one point, from Hong Kong. There they boarded a train at Tsim Sha Tsui Station in Kowloon, across the harbor from Hong Kong Island, marked by its splendid colonial clock tower, and headed north through lush, green, semitropical countryside to the border crossing at Lo Wu. There they disembarked and walked across the ironically named Friendship Bridge, a rudimentary wooden structure that spanned the slow-flowing Shumchun River, carrying their baggage with them. On the other side, the visitors were greeted by scowling border guards wearing uniforms adorned with the emblems of the People’s Republic of China, who examined the proffered visas and granted the privilege of entry.

And so it went in that spring of 1979. Just as every time before, the guards directed Gorman to a customs waiting room where he filled out an enormous number of forms documenting every item in his possession. Officials checked the vaccination records he had brought with him. (If you didn’t have all the shots required, they would administer them on the spot, so it was good to be prepared.) By now it was midday, and the next stop for Gorman and his fellow travelers was the special border-crossing restaurant, which offered a remarkably sumptuous lunch, supplemented with Qingdao beer. Lunch was followed by an obligatory nap period, in a waiting room equipped with spittoons and armchairs adorned with antimacassars.
There was little alternative. Southern China is sweltering in the summers, and there was no air-conditioning in the People’s Republic. And the train from Shumchun Station to Guangzhou departed only at infrequent intervals. Looking back years later, Gorman would compare the move from frenetic Hong Kong to the sleepy post-Mao mainland “like the transition from snorkeling to wearing a diving bell.” You were no longer your own master. The powers that be would let you know when you were needed.

Gorman arrived at his hotel in Guangzhou to find the familiar routine in place. At that time, the only way to do business in China was to establish contacts with one of the fourteen ministries that controlled each of the country’s industrial sectors (chemicals, steel, light industry, and so on). This was easier said than done. Chinese officials were still strikingly stingy with information, another legacy of the Cultural Revolution, when association with foreigners could cost you a stint in a labor camp or worse. You could always go to the trade-fair building and seek out the people you wanted to meet (assuming that you already knew who they were), but that was no guarantee of success. Still, there was little choice. You certainly couldn’t expect them to come to you.

All this explains why Gorman and the handful of other Americans at the fair sat up and took notice when the Chinese approached them with an offer: Would the Americans be interested in taking a look at an investment opportunity? It was not too far away from Guangzhou; it would require an overnight trip. The Americans said yes.

On the appointed day, they set off from Guangzhou in a van that jolted down hideous dirt roads for hours. At one point it broke down, and everyone had to get out and walk to a spot where the Chinese hosts were able to arrange for another ride. The walk was not a total loss; the little group passed by a rural private market where local farmers were hawking all manner of produce, something that none of the Americans in the group could ever remember having seen before.

Finally, after a full day’s journey in the intense heat, they arrived at their destination. It turned out to be just across the border from Hong Kong—not far from the Lo Wu crossing where all foreigners made their entry into mainland China. The bewildered Americans followed their hosts to the top of a dike, where the Chinese hosts gestured at the vista spread before them. It was not clear what they were meant to look at. All that the Americans could see was the usual South China landscape: there were rice paddies, worked by peasants and their water buffalo in the time-honored manner, and duck ponds. There were few trees and here and there a modest peasant dwelling. What the Chinese were describing seemed to bear no relationship to the observable reality. This, they told the Americans, was the location
of something called the Baoan Foreign Trade Base. The party had designated it as a special location for foreign investment. According to the plans under consideration, it would soon be the site of chemical factories and textile mills and manufacturing plants. And, oh yes, there would also be plenty of hotels for the foreign businessmen. It was going to be a wonderful chance to make money.

The Americans thought that the Chinese were crazy. “It stretched everybody’s imagination,” Gorman said. “I don’t think there was one of us who listened to the briefing and thought, ‘Yeah that sounds feasible.’ It was, emphatically, ‘Come on, what are you smoking?’”