China in Ten Words (14 page)

The following day I went to the bookstore and bought a set of
Complete Works of Lu Xun
, in the new edition published after the Cultural Revolution. It made me think back to those books of his under the table in the cultural center, and it seemed to me now that they had been trying to tell me something. When they tripped me up as I went in and out of my office, they were actually dropping a hint, quietly but insistently signaling the presence of a powerful voice within the dusty tomes.

In the month that followed I immersed myself in Lu Xun’s lucid and supple writing. “When confronting reality,” I would later write, “his narrative moves with such momentum it’s like a bullet that penetrates the flesh and goes out the other side, an unstoppable force.”

Let me say something more about the story of Kong Yiji. Its opening, though simple, has profound implications. Lu Xun starts by describing the layout of the taverns in Luzhen: how the poor customers in their workingmen’s outfits drink standing up, while the affluent customers in their long gowns sit down at a table in the restaurant proper, eating and drinking in comfort. Kong Yiji is the only man in a long gown who stands at the bar. Lu Xun’s terse opening announces at the start his character’s anomalous social status.

What’s particularly notable in the story is that Lu Xun initially makes no mention of how Kong Yiji arrives at the tavern; it is only after his legs are broken in a ferocious beating that the point is addressed. This reflects a great writer’s sense of priorities: when Kong Yiji still retains use of both legs, his means of getting around can be left unspecified, but after his legs are broken, the issue becomes paramount. And so we come to the following passage:

Suddenly I heard a voice: “Give me a warm bowl of wine.” The voice was very faint, but it sounded familiar. At first I could not see anyone, but when I stood up and looked more carefully, I found Kong Yiji sitting on the floor, facing the door, his back propped against the counter.

We see him only after we hear him—that in itself is striking. But after “Warming up the wine, I carried the bowl over and set it down on the doorsill” and Kong Yiji pulls out his four coppers in payment, a masterly description follows, in the form of one short sentence: “I saw that his hands were stained with mud and realized he had used them to crawl his way here.”

That evening, for me Lu Xun finally changed from a catchphrase to a writer. Looking back on my schooldays, when I was force-fed Lu Xun, I have a variety of reactions: I feel that Lu Xun is not for children at all but for mature, sensitive readers. At the same time I feel that for a reader to truly encounter an author sometimes depends on finding the right moment.

After the Cultural Revolution ended, I read many books—some great, some indifferent. If I ever got tired of a book, I would simply put it aside so that I didn’t develop a distaste for its author. But during the Cultural Revolution it was impossible to set Lu Xun’s work aside, for I was forced to read him again and again; the result is that Lu Xun is the only author I have ever in my life disliked. When a writer is reduced to a catchphrase, he is bound to be the worse for it.

I
t did not come as a complete surprise, then, when a Norwegian historian came up to me after my talk and said, “I used to dislike Ibsen in just the same way.”

revolution

S
ome Western intellectuals take the view that an economy can enjoy rapid growth only in a society where the political system is fully democratic. They find it astonishing that in a nation where politics is far from transparent the economy can develop at such an impressive pace. But they are overlooking, I think, a crucial point: behind China’s economic miracle there is a pair of powerful hands pushing things along, and their owner’s name is Revolution.
^*

After 1949, when the Communist Party came to power, it steadily maintained its commitment to carry out revolution to the fullest. At that point, of course, revolution no longer meant armed struggle so much as a series of political movements, each hot on the heels of the one before, reaching ultimate extremes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Later, when China reintroduced itself to the world in the guise of a freewheeling, market-driven economy, revolution appeared to have vanished. But in our economic miracle since 1978, revolution never disappeared but simply donned a different costume. To put it another way, within China’s success story one can see both revolutionary movements reminiscent of the Great Leap Forward and revolutionary violence that recalls the Cultural Revolution.

Let me say something first about the echoes of the Great Leap Forward, starting with some statistics showing the rapid growth of steel output in China. In 1978, the first year of the reforms, it was just over 30 million tons. Two years later, in 1980, it reached 37.12 million tons, the fifth largest steel output in the world. By 1996 it had jumped to No. 1 in the world, where it has stayed ever since. In 2008 it exceeded 500 million tons, or 32 percent of the world’s total steel output, more than that of the next seven nations in the world combined. In 2009 China’s steel output reached 600 million tons, outstripping by 30 percent the goal set by the government of 460 million tons.

On the positive side, these figures reflect the rapid pace of China’s economic growth, but behind them another story is hidden. In 2008 the country’s steel capacity reached 660 million tons, of which 460 million tons were consumed in construction and manufacturing, leaving an excess capacity of 200 million tons. One fact about China’s steel industry over the past thirty years cannot be glossed over: the speed of the growth in output has clearly outstripped the expansion of the economy. The same kind of frenzied steel production that we saw during the Great Leap Forward has taken place once more on Chinese soil.

During the Great Leap Forward of 1958, under the slogan “Surpass the UK, catch up with the USA,” the Chinese people were mobilized to smelt steel. Backyard furnaces filled courtyards in Chinese cities and towns and dotted the Chinese countryside; fires burned everywhere, and smoke billowed across the Chinese sky. Peasants abandoned agriculture for ore extraction and steel production while crops ripened and rotted in the fields. Those employed in the urban sector—workers in pharmaceutical plants and textile mills, department store clerks and cashiers, teachers and students, doctors and nurses—put aside their regular jobs and went off to smelt steel. In that era people were anxious not to be labeled “passive resisters of the Great Leap Forward”; participation in the steel drive was the only route to glory. You can’t make steel without ore, so the country people smashed their woks and city people tore down the metal window frames and duct pipes from their work units and homes and tossed them into the backyard furnaces—with results you can imagine. That year China’s total steel output was 10.7 million tons, twice the figure of 1957, but at least a third of it was useless scrap. People carried on regardless, smelting steel as the raging fires turned the sky red. They toiled in front of blazing furnaces, sweat streaming down their backs, and as they worked they recited a jingle that captured the spirit of the time, “Let’s Compare”:

You’re all heroes and we’re all champs, By the furnace here let’s compare our stats. Good for you, you’ve smelted a ton—But a ton and a half is what we’ve done! Right, you go off and fly your jet—Now watch as we launch our rocket! Your arrow can pierce the sky—But ours has gone into orbit!

In the 1990s, as the tide of economic development swept over China, a similar situation began to reappear. In the fields surrounding one large steel plant in eastern China, backyard furnaces went up and in the blink of an eye peasants became sweat-stained steelworkers. After melting the iron ore, they poured it immediately into a specially designed tanker. The driver would stamp his foot on the accelerator and drive the tanker full tilt into the steel plant, where the liquid iron was dumped into a standard industrial furnace for further processing. Under normal circumstances a large furnace produces steel about fourteen times in a twenty-four-hour period, but with the peasants first melting ore in their own furnaces, plants were able to increase production to thirty times a day. Of course, this time what the peasants made in their homegrown furnaces was not useless pig iron, and they were making steel not for some empty political agenda but to put money in their own pockets. Given this frantic effort to make more steel, it’s no wonder that China’s output has grown so rapidly. Because the tankers carrying liquid iron shuttled back and forth incessantly between the furnaces in the fields and the furnaces in the plants, they discharged so much heat that it roasted road surfaces and converted the leafy trees lining the highways into dry skeletons.

The Great Leap Forward of 1958 began, in a sense, as a comedy—a romantic and absurd comedy. Fakery, exaggeration, and bombast were the order of the day. Even the most productive rice fields at the time could produce only about one and a half tons per acre, but under the slogan “The more boldly a man dares, the more richly his land bears” districts all over the country claimed that per-acre production had topped five tons. On September 18, 1958, for example, the
People’s Daily
published a special news report: “Rice production in Huanjiang County, Guangxi, reaches six and a half tons per acre.” These bogus reports were fabricated to a high level of detail. Pigs, it was said, now topped the scales at more than eleven hundred pounds; their heads were the size of large wicker baskets, and there was as much meat on them as on three pigs in the old days; a pot three feet tall and three feet wide was not big enough to cook one of these jumbo-sized porkers—why, even with a pot six feet across you could cook only half a pig! Pumpkins had been induced to grow so big that children could play games inside them.

A folk rhyme called “A Sweet Potato Rolling Off the Slope” was all the rage. It went like this:

Through our commune fine a stream flows deep
,

By the riverside the hill climbs steep
.

We pick sweet potatoes on its lee
,

Laughing and joking, merry as can be
.

Then, a sudden splash—a huge fountain of spray
,

“Oh, no!” I cry, and jump up in dismay
.

“Who fell in? I hope they can swim!”

Everyone chuckles, thinking me dim:

“Don’t worry, no need to throw in a rope—

That was just a sweet potato rolling off the slope!”

In August 1958 administrative units at the township level were abolished and replaced in one fell swoop with People’s Communes. Then, at one more fell swoop, communal dining halls were established: peasants no longer ate in their own homes but went to the dining halls to feast. “Stuff yourselves full, then redouble production” was the slogan of the hour. Communal dining halls consumed grain without any kind of planning and recklessly wasted resources, sometimes promoting eating contests. In their efforts to win the Top Trencherman award peasants were known to get so bloated they had to be carted off to the hospital.

Within a few months grain depots everywhere were empty. The curtain fell on that absurd romantic comedy, and in its place the stage was set for a cruel and all too realistic tragedy. Famine ruthlessly enveloped China. Because regions had falsely reported the size of their harvests, the state’s grain procurement was vastly greater than actual output. Local officials had inflated their production figures to impress their superiors, and now it was the peasants who paid the price, for their grain ration, seed grain, and feed grain were all requisitioned by the state. Some localities, in the name of the revolution, began a savage campaign to ferret out those engaged in “concealment of produce and private distribution,” and officials in communes and production brigades were ordered to establish “grain-inspection shock teams” that conducted house-by-house searches, turning the occupants’ possessions upside down, rooting around in their yards, and searching inside walls. If the teams were unable to find grain to confiscate, they would take it out on the hapless peasants. In one such campaign by Xiaoxihe Commune in Anhui’s Fengyang County, more than three thousand people were beaten; of these one hundred suffered crippling injuries and thirty or more perished while undergoing “reform through labor” imposed by the commune. At this point, hunger came roaring in like a hurricane and death tightened its grip on one province after another. According to official figures released later, during the Great Leap Forward, in Sichuan Province alone, more than eight million people died of hunger—one in every nine residents.

Even after so many years, while people still reflect on the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, that same type of development keeps rearing its head in our economic life. One sees signs of it in the frenzy to construct airports, harbors, highways, and other such large-scale public works. These projects in theory must first win approval from the central government, but in reality many local governments first launch their project and only later submit it for approval. Thus impractical, extravagant, and duplicate initiatives are common, and they are pursued as vigorously as a revolutionary campaign. Take port construction as an example. Along the four hundred miles of coast in Hebei and Tianjin there are no fewer than four major ports: Qinhuangdao, Jingtang, Tianjin, and Huanghua. In 2003, although all four ports were underutilized, this did not stop them from constantly increasing investment and expanding their facilities.

With the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, some of the more forward-looking Great Leap Forward–type construction projects have progressed quickly from being undernourished to having indigestion. But other such projects remain in a state of persistent neglect. Some expressways, like the Shi-Huang Highway in Hebei and the Tai-Jing Highway in Jiangxi, have been in service for more than ten years but rarely see more traffic than just a few cars and tour buses. The Internet is rife with jokes about how you could hold a Formula One Grand Prix on one of these highways any day of the week, or that they would be great places to go for a nice quiet honeymoon.

In 1999 the Ministry of Education decided to greatly expand enrollments in higher education, and China’s educational Great Leap Forward began. In 2006 institutions of higher education recruited 5.4 million new students, five times as many as in 1998; the total number of those enrolled was 25 million. The ministry proudly declared:

In the scale of its higher education, China has overtaken Russia, then India, and now the United States, to become No. 1 in the world. In just a few short years of assiduous effort, under conditions where per capita GDP is just US $1,000, higher education in China has achieved the shift from elite to widespread education, completing a process that other countries have needed forty or fifty years—or even longer—to complete.

Behind all the glorious statistics in China today, crises tend to lurk. The loans that Chinese universities have relied on to fund their enrollment expansion already exceed 200 billion yuan. This staggering debt is likely to become another fiasco for China’s commercial banks, because Chinese universities lack the wherewithal to repay their loans. At the same time, university tuition in the past ten or fifteen years has risen enormously, to twenty-five or even fifty times as much as it used to be, ten times the rate of income growth. Supporting a college student today is estimated to require the equivalent of 4.2 years of an urban net income or 13.6 years of a rural net income. The Great Leap Forward type of enrollment growth has created immense difficulties in the job market: every year we are adding more than 1 million college graduates who cannot find work. Many low-income parents are prepared to bankrupt themselves and take on enormous debt to put their children through college; but after graduation those children join the army of unemployed, and their parents can only sink deeper into financial hardship. Given this harsh reality, some children are forced to abandon their dreams: as soon as they graduate from high school they put a bedroll on their backs and become migrant laborers instead. In 2009, after thirty-two years of increases, there was actually a drop in the number of high school students taking the university entrance examination.