The River at the Centre of the World (25 page)

On that occasion five thousand children and students were swimming too, taking part in a race that Mao's first venture had helped inspire. The cadres were also in the water, in their hundreds. The balloons were arranged in great archways, scores of giant red flags fluttered from flotillas of boats, film cameras rolled to record the event – and for two hours the Chairman floated serenely down his country's greatest and most powerful river, which was in full flood. I remember seeing the blurred newspaper photographs, the strangely impressive images on the television newsreels. At the time I was living in Africa, where Mao had many friends; people would shake their heads in awe. ‘What an amazing man,’ they would say. ‘So strong, so vigorous.’

Mao was at the time returning to centre stage in China after months of a self-imposed exile, when all the world believed him to have vanished. He had gone into retreat behind the compound walls in Beijing, and then he had disappeared completely, except that now we know he travelled south to consort with that special breed of die-hard Communists who worked and thought and theorized down in Shanghai. Over the weeks and months of his absence he had read and reread books on the vicissitudes of Chinese history. He had prepared lists of those who were in favour of a true revolution and those who were against. And he then decided on a course of action so radical that it would shake the world.

He set the stage for it by travelling down to Wuhan and, on that July Saturday afternoon, immersing himself yet again, before all of his people, to see if he could swim the Yangtze once more.

And he triumphed, as he had ten years before. He swam slowly and deliberately and cheerfully and powerfully, managing the first ten miles in just over one hour. I remember so vividly the pictures of the tiny domed head amid the almost limitless waters of the river – the Chairman overwhelming an ancient force that seemed so much more likely to overwhelm him. He arose from the waters finally, alive and smiling, savouring another total triumph.

They said at the time it was all public relations, the giving of reassurance to a nation that thought he might be ailing. But it was so much more than this. Mao had given his people and his supporters and his foes evidence of his physical prowess, true, but he had also given a splendid demonstration of his authority and power. He received the adulation of the masses once again, and with it, as he perceived it, he won the people's mandate to begin something quite extraordinary.

He returned to Beijing with his mind cleared and his decision taken. The Sixteen Points for the Cultural Revolution were published: the Red Guards were born; and a period of madness and cruelty began that shook his country and the continent to its very foundations. Why it is that, thirty years later, the masses in Wuhan still mark and celebrate that swim – or any swim by Chairman Mao – remains, for me, a mystery. For swimming the Yangtze seems not to be so much a display of vigour or noble achievement, as a harbinger of terrible turmoil.

I remarked on this to Lily, as we watched the teams flailing steadily past us.

‘Wuhan people are different,’ she said. ‘I don't like them at all. I don't like the city – a very dirty place, very bad people. But they think they are special. They are very revolutionary. They are very patriotic. They look back on Mao with more reverence than most Chinese do. In Shanghai, and back home in Dalian, we know he made mistakes. We give him his due honour, but we know he was a human. I heard the stories about his girlfriends, things like that.

‘But the Wuhan people turn a blind eye to that sort of thing. They know they have a special place in China's history and they think they must revere their Chairman. So that is why they swim, I think. Besides, I think they know it is good for them. Ordinary people never used to swim this river. But now it is the modern thing to be fit and healthy. Swimming is healthy – at least, in pools it is. No one can doubt that. This is another reason they do it, I'm sure.’

In any case, as I heard on the radio some weeks later, the Great Anniversary Swim of 1995 had to be cancelled, because of the floods. The rehearsals that Sunday, the balloons and the shouting and the watery tumult – all had been in vain.

When Mao first went swimming on the Yangtze in 1956 he did so just a few yards downstream from the piles of a new bridge that was being built across the river. That bridge was duly finished the following year, and until the Yangtze First Bridge, six hundred miles downstream at Nanjing, was completed eleven years later, it was the closest of the Yangtze bridges to the sea. Mao himself declared it open: ‘a rainbow of iron and steel' he called it.

It was the bridge from which I had first seen the night-time Yangtze on my railway journey from London ten years before. Now I was seeing it from below: the piles were being buffeted and washed by waves of floodwater, and the great chunk of engineering looked solid and unmoving, a memorial to the Russians who designed and donated it, and to the Chinese who had welded and wrenched it all together.

Today a still newer bridge crosses the river at Wuhan. We had sailed beneath it while we were watching the swimmers a soaring tracery of bright steel, delicate where the old bridge had been massive, athletic where its predecessor had been ponderous. It had been opened the week before, someone said; the design was quite beautiful, like some of the new bridges in Korea and Japan, though a man I asked said happily that on this one the Chinese had done all the work, including the design.

It seemed to me that while the two spans, a couple of miles apart, obviously reflected the changes wrought by forty years of bridge engineering, they also seemed to stand for something more significant. There was the stolid and unimaginative and joylessly Stalinist construction on one side, a gift from fellow ideologues at a time when the Cold War was at its coldest and when all on the Marxist side needed to give one another comfort and friendship. And there was this slender and graceful piece of art on the other, glittering proudly in the morning sun.

The one bridge spoke of conformity and obedience, of rigidity and a lack of imagination. The other was suggestive of freedom, of an engineer being given his head, of an idea taking flight. And anchored between them, still smoky in the sunlight of a Sunday morning, lay the city they call China's Chicago.

The three cities, in fact – Wuchang, on the Yangtze's right bank; Hanyang, away on the left bank, on the far side of a huge tributary stream called the Han Shui; and here, where our steamer was now edging in towards the dock, Hankou. Four million people live here, at the Yangtze's most important mid-stream junction point. This is the city of the new China's heart, beating between the two symbols of the new China's history – on the one hand an image of the strictness of the old, and on the other, an image suggesting the half-free and only too beguiling open-mindedness of the new. More than appropriate, considering that in simple historical terms, this city is – or should be – the most important and revered in all China.

*

Wuhan's importance is not at all apparent when you arrive there by boat. It has an anonymous, forgettable aspect. On this morning we could have been coming in to almost any big industrial city set down between Manchuria and the Burmese frontier. It looked ugly, dirty, dishevelled, crowded and only the slightest bit coloured by romance. I was in no hurry to disembark when, with a clang and bump and the screech of chains and hawsers, we docked.

The lower-deck passengers streamed out into the new and soaring concrete terminal building, and I could see them humping their bundles into waiting lines of cycle-rickshaws. The taxis would wait for the upper decks to clear, a few minutes later. I clambered up to the bridge to say good-bye to the captain. He was a kindly man who had spent much of the morning showing me his charts, even though they were stamped ‘Top Secret' – in vermilion – and he had offered suggestions for where we might stay in town.

For a while I stood looking out from the bridge wing, over to the Hankou Bund, alongside which we were tied up. This was where the old foreign concessions had been. There was a ramshackle collection of grimy buildings from which the foreign
hongs
, the trading houses, had once operated, but they could hardly rival their sister structures back in Shanghai.

It had been a very short bund, and the foreigners had been crammed into it in small parcels. The British had the biggest sector, closest to the government offices, because they had been the first outsiders allowed here, courtesy of their triumph in what has been called the Second Opium War. But even this spoil of battle had been a fairly mean allotment of land: my old map showed the inevitable consulate at one end, the offices of Jardines and Swires and British-American Tobacco dispersed at the other, and a few scrawny lanes between, with small buildings of a very faded elegance.

There had once been seven hulks permanently moored off the British Concession and used as floating docks: the clipper ships that raced to London with their cases of China tea all began their voyages here. A cannon was fired to set them on their way, and they raced down to the Woosung Bar in less than two days if the wind was fair and the current strong. London was twelve weeks away, if every shred of canvas was employed and every breath of wind was caught.

Next to the British, downstream, had been the Russians. They were not much involved in Yangtze shipping, but they did a brisk overland trade in brick tea – the compressed dust from the tea factories up in the hills nearby. But I could not recognize the buildings of Litvinoff & Company, which had then dominated the business – indeed, the site on the map now seemed to be occupied by a new skyscraper hotel, the very one in which the captain had suggested we might stay.

After the Russian Concession had come the French, which once sported the city's best hotel, the Terminus; then came the German Concession, and finally the Japanese, a tiny settlement with little to tempt and containing only a barracks and a match factory. Thus were all Hankou's foreigners accommodated, crammed neatly into a flood-prone couple of miles between the railway and river.

The railway and the river! In Wuhan it seems that everything revolves around the existence and the conjunction of the railway and the river. From where I stood scores of feet above river level, the railways were plainly audible. Whenever the wind changed direction and the car horns quieted for a moment, I could hear the background orchestra – the shunting of faraway railway wagons, the yelp of steam engines, the rattle of trains rushing over the points, the rumble of an express passing over the bridge.

The air, thick with industrial smoke, had a familiar edge to it too, the rotten-egg-like smell of sulphur and coke and steam coal – a railway smell, the good old unhealthy smell of coal-driven steam trains, of the railways before they switched to oil. Wuhan is still very much a railway town, sooty and tarry, a terminus town, a junction city of roundhouses and repair shops and signal works. And all set down beside the wharves and the piers, the cranes and the gantries, the mud and the rising and falling waters of the river to whose vast valley the railways had come.

It was the building of the railways that gave Wuhan her peculiar and unforgettable place in Chinese history. This is a long way, both in time and geography, from the Jardines' attempt to build their little line back between Woosung and Shanghai – this was forty years later, and nearly a thousand miles upstream, and central China was now brimming with permanent ways. There was, however, one underlying problem – a problem that had much in common with the proposed Jardines line, and one that rankled with almost all the Chinese.

The main line between Beijing and the Hankou terminal on the north side of the river here had been built in 1905, financed by the French and British, its building directed by a Belgian. (Its terminus station had been put up conveniently behind the French Concession, between the Bund and the racecourse.) And in this way it was typical: it had been built and paid for by foreigners, and such profits as it made went into the pockets of foreign shareholders. Most of the new great through routes in China, all built at much the same time, were the same. The Mukden Railway was built by a Briton. The railways in Shandong were German. Those in Manchuria, Russian. The Manchu Court – then run by regents for the infant Emperor Pu Yi – had for years been gaily handing out contracts to foreign banks and companies that were slicing across the Empire with thousands of miles of track. Why, a growing number of Chinese began to ask, were the Chinese not building the railways, and why were they not making profits from the railway, themselves?

The first questions concerned, specifically, the Beijing to Hankou line that ended here. Towards the end of the new century's first decade, as the questions swelled ever louder and started to evolve into demonstrations and protests, so still more contracts were being handed out by the Court, and that also involved Hankou – the line from Hankou south to Canton, for example, and another line east from Hankou to Shanghai. Hankou, this dirty, clanking, steam-swirled coke town, had from the beginning been at the epicentre of the entire dispute.

In 1910, by which time China had some 5000 miles of railways built and 2000 more a-building, this single issue erupted into a passionate and violent display of nationalism, one that the Manchus could neither comprehend nor control. In every province, groups were formed to protest at the way the courtiers far away in the Forbidden City were giving away to outsiders what seemed to be China's birthright – her transportation routes. Serious demonstrations broke out all across the Empire – the Railway Protection Movement, as the organizing body was called, staged rallies, strikes and boycotts. Even more significant, elements of the newly reorganized Chinese Army were seen to side with the railway protesters. Within just a few months during 1910 and 1911, railways became a focus for all of the long-felt dissatisfactions – ranging over matters as far removed as taxation and foot-binding – that millions of ordinary Chinese felt for the performance of the Court. The protesters demanded a change of government – an end, in other words, to the doddering and non-Chinese theocracy, the heaven-directed Manchu Court, which still clung to power in the distant capital. ‘We must avenge the national disgrace,’ was a rallying cry. ‘We must restore China to the Chinese.’