Barbarian Lost (10 page)

When I return to the village, I notice how my walk made people uncomfortable, another proof of their foul mood. When in plain sight and accounted for, my presence is slightly discomforting to them, but when I am out wandering the countryside on my own, unaccounted for, I must be downright nerve-racking.

In this dense landscape of people held together in a delicate balance, everything must be measured carefully, right down to the twenty dollars that the butcher may owe the farmer if he is to be charged this year's price of feed corn for last year's corn delivered but still not entirely paid for. New variables that might upset the equilibrium are greeted with apprehension. The persistent lack of rain this year is a source of constant worry. It could upset everything. But the lone westerner may also bring chaos into the fine balance. He may attract unwanted attention from the authorities or disturb something while he passes through.

This is not to say that this countryside is unchanging. Li's hut has a telephone in it. When I return from my walk, he asks whether I have a laptop computer with me. When I tell him that I didn't bring it, he tells me that I could have connected it to the Internet through his phone line. I also notice that my cell phone is getting a signal.

This village is nowhere, really, but it's connected to the rest of China in a whole variety of ways, both wired and wireless. It is home to people a thousand kilometres away, living in dormitories and toiling away in factories, or camping out in makeshift shacks and working on huge construction sites. In its own way, this village is an active part of the whole. It cannot be ignored or neglected. It's important. Called on to provide food and labour to the full extent of its capacities, one child at a time. In turn, China must bring blessings upon this village and its people.

China's accumulation of people has not been a smooth process, a mellow slope of gradual increase through the ages. Historical population numbers are never easy to measure, but those featured in historical records show the population in China as mostly stable for long periods. The living merely replace the
dead. Occasionally, in times of disease, upheaval and famine, the population was in decline and the dead steadily outnumbered new arrivals to life. And sometimes, the living grew legion and the population was in such rapid expansion as to send the counter forward by huge leaps.

But on such a scale, growth can also conceal disastrous singularities. Whole villages can be obliterated by starvation or war while elsewhere in the country children multiply. Family after family can emerge into lives of permanent hardship yet survive long enough to, like those who came before them, procreate profusely. Immense demographic gains can be achieved with five of every ten children perishing of violence, hunger and disease.

In the late Qing dynasty, just over a hundred years ago, much of the Chinese countryside was owned by large landholders who relied on masses of impoverished peasants to farm the land. These peasants' annual salary was little more than a bag of rice and rent on a hut. The peasants who actually owned land were also dismally poor, and whatever meagre surplus they could generate was often entirely owed in taxes. The utterly destitute roamed the land and insecurity was rife. Births were numerous but so were deaths.

Born of a rich peasant father in a territory of abuse and misery, Mao Zedong was acutely sensitive to the pulse of rural China. Unlike the city-born sons of privilege, he was viscerally aware of the rage and endurance of the peasant. His arguments for a peasant revolution were made forcefully in the early meetings of the burgeoning Communist Party of China, but he was chided or ignored by the movement's elite, whose views espoused the Marxist doctrine of a workers' revolution that would first harness the power of the nation and take control of industrial production. For the urbane Communist intellectuals, the fraternity of enlightened
factory workers must have seemed far more solid a foundation for a new society than the depravity of peasants.

But Mao was stubborn. Despite being sidelined through the 1920s, he never relinquished his idea of a peasant revolution. He remained convinced that only the peasant's wretchedness, borne of immense suffering, had the potency to turn the poor and parasite-ridden earth of China and allow a new nation to bloom. He instinctively understood that the revolution had to start in the countryside.

From 1928 to 1933—dark and difficult times for the Communist Party of China—Mao formed a small band of adepts and roamed the hills of the border region of southern Jiangxi, eastern Hunan and western Fujian. In these remote corners of China, he perfected his understanding of rural society and experimented with peasant violence.

Wherever he went it was easy to find malcontents—plenty of people were barely surviving and receiving nothing from the powers above them, treated not as humans but as commodities to be consumed and traded. From among them, men and women could be recruited. Mobs could be assembled rapidly, especially if first allowed to bring violence upon the most immediate sources of injustice: the greedy local trader, the corrupt magistrate or the venal landlord family. Mao would promise the malcontents a new China and a new world, and would encourage them to be bold and decisive, to become a force of justice—a new people's army—and to purge China of her scourges.

He played with the forces of chaos and order. Coming upon communities, he sought to decant their frustrations and unleash waves of violence on what was a semblance of order. Yet at the same time, he attempted to galvanize and unify into a single har
monious force the people's guilt and will to survive and prosper. Once atrocities were committed, the peasants could hardly turn back; they were fully invested in the revolution.

As he fostered this principle across village after village, commune after commune, Mao began to wield an incredible weapon. Although it remained unclear what society might emerge from the destruction, it became more and more certain that Mao and the peasants could destroy all things before them and might well vanquish the Kuomintang and gain control of China.

Peasant violence had its advantages but also its disadvantages. It was crude and messy. Peasants were not skilled soldiers. They were unpredictable. And pulling them from their already-poor farms to be sent into costly battles often resulted in further shortages and an increase of suffering. The violence could also be induced by competing factions and turned on itself in destructive rampages. In the wilderness, rival camps within the Communist Party wielding peasant mobs repeatedly waged vicious purges and campaigns against each other.

Mao was a careful witness to all of this. He began to conclude that discord among the peasants mirrored the larger discord within China itself. Once unified, the nation would be free of contradictions and find balance.

Mao had great faith in the land itself. He believed that if rid of its scourges of greed and decadence, China would provide for its people. If the forces of food production were rationalized and rid of parasitical elements, the people would prosper, food would be plentiful and more sophisticated types of production could be implemented.

Mao's vision was hardly novel: the virtuous society, free of all vices, had long promised a rich bounty. But Mao was as much
conqueror as philosopher, and like Alexander, Genghis or Napoleon, he embraced and admired catastrophic violence. New orders, he felt, could be forged only in battle, through great destruction and upheavals. But the bold would be rewarded.

In conquest, it's a natural and logical step to embrace the idea of ambitious population growth. A movement finds its ultimate expression of success in a new world full of healthy children, children who grow up to be strong and selfless servants of a harmonious new order. So Mao adamantly encouraged childbirth, and China's population experienced immense growth in the early years of the revolution.

During the Great Leap Forward, starting in the late 1950s, Mao concluded that peasant force alone would not safeguard China from its enemies. He decided that China should be in a position to satisfy on its own the entirety of its various appetites. He thus enacted a series of reforms aimed primarily at the countryside. Mao dreamt that the countryside would become the new centre of industry in China, a diffuse and inexhaustible source of essential products. Farmers were told to build iron smelters.

The Great Leap Forward was born of the sense of urgency to match Western and even Soviet achievements in the nuclear age. But the Leap also had as its foundation Mao's ideal that Communism could not help but bring about vast material improvements and innovations. It was only a question of virtue. And this merely had to be taught to the people.

Mao, however, had grown far from the people. His ideas were increasingly abstract and philosophical. If implemented, they would bring about damaging absurdities. More often, they were never fully implemented. Whole societies chanted them aloud and pretended they were real, but they were not, nor could they be.

Slogans multiplied, and villages across the country were integrated into a national campaign for rapid self-sufficiency and slapped with impossible production quotas. Not only did the rural population fail to produce anything close to the quantity and quality of goods that were necessary for China to assure its position as a modern industrial power but, distracted from their farms, the peasants who fed China began to experience massive food shortages. The Great Leap Forward caused a great famine.

To this day, the party has made it impossible to properly fathom how many people died in the famines caused by the policies of Mao's Great Leap Forward. But the Chinese population still grew under Chairman Mao. Even in error and calamity, he achieved his billionaire kingdom.

But China's ancient measure of success was always much more than a demographic milestone reached by the masses, or a matter of mere numbers. There was something more subtle and grandiose to which Mao and his party needed to answer.

It is said that the emperors of China governed the land by virtue of a heavenly mandate. As such, their authority was sacrosanct. But the mandate also meant that, through the emperor, the people had to be the benefactors of heaven's blessings. The emperor was beyond reproach but only so long as his rule was by and large beneficial. Of course, no single person could decide that the emperor's rule was not a happy one; only China as a whole could conclude that it was not blessed by the heavens under the rule of such and such emperor. This could only mean that the dynasty had lost the heavenly mandate and the emperor had lost his legitimacy. So ended many dynasties in China.

In the few decades immediately after the revolution, the Communist Party was largely embraced by China because it was
perceived to hold the heavenly mandate by which great blessings would be meted out to a long-suffering people. It delivered a wholly Chinese government to China for the first time in centuries. It united China for the first time in a long time and offered a new hope to the poorest class of China: the landless peasants, hundreds of millions strong. It also commanded violence so convincingly that no one dared oppose it.

But by the time of Mao's death in the mid-1970s, too many great experiments had gone desperately wrong. Popular belief in the Communist Party was mostly bankrupt. Although more numerous than ever, the people were tired, unhappy and afraid. They began to sense that the heavenly mandate might be withdrawing.

Still, the dynasty had its quiet protectors. With Mao's increasing withdrawal into senility, Mao's right-hand man, the venerable and wise Zhou Enlai, allowed a reformist movement to survive in the face of fierce opposition within the party. Some even say that Zhou was himself a reformist at heart. But his own life force was waning. He himself would not play an active role in bringing about change but would use his power to protect future champions of change. One such champion was Deng Xiaoping, a diminutive and clever early member of the party.

At the time of Mao's death, an extremist clique known as the Gang of Four (which included the chairman's monstrous widow, former actress Jiang Qing) was poised to take over. But in a quick and unexpected succession of events, the Gang of Four was summarily purged by discreet military leaders still part of the remaining old guard, and Deng Xiaoping was summoned back from the abyss and propelled to the fore. Without Mao above him, Deng would ensure that his pragmatic vision for China would succeed. He became the Communist Party's
dominant figure after Mao Zedong, a second emperor of the Communist dynasty.

Deng was not a man of forceful slogans. His most famous mantras show a flexibility never exhibited by Mao. “Who cares if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice?” was Deng's cry for the triumph of pragmatism in party policy above and beyond rigid ideology. Deng also famously said of Mao that he made mistakes but was right seven-tenths of the time. A strange endorsement considering the sizable divergences of vision between the two and the calamities Deng suffered during the Cultural Revolution. In truth, Deng knew that his own authority and the political stability he needed for reform required the dynastic legitimacy of Mao. So Deng carefully ensured that Mao's party, the Communist Party of China, and Mao's image if not his ideas would oversee the next phase of China's transformation. To this day, Mao's iconic mug graces the Chinese currency and lords over Tiananmen Square.

Deng's most telling saying—“To get rich is glorious”—heralded the advent of a new logic, the pursuit of prosperity. Prosperity has perhaps even eclipsed all other virtues of Communist power in China. For many, prosperity has become the only benchmark for legitimacy. As the memory of wars, diseases and famines grows faint, what else could better motivate the people?

Communist Party rule will be tolerated only so long as it creates widespread wealth in China. So, according to Deng's plan, over the last four decades, the Chinese central government has made itself relevant to the people not by making huge ideological demands on them or even requiring huge leaps in their production capacity but by methodically investing in the infrastructure and means of production while gradually allowing the principles of free trade to return to Chinese society.