China in Ten Words (2 page)

introduction

I
n 1978 I got my first job—as a small-town dentist in south China. This mostly involved pulling teeth, but as the youngest staff member I was given another task as well. Every summer, with a straw hat on my head and a medical case on my back, I would shuttle back and forth between the town’s factories and kindergartens, administering vaccinations to workers and children.

China during the Mao era was a poor country, but it had a strong public health network that provided free immunizations to its citizens. That was where I came in. In those days there were no disposable needles and syringes; we had to reuse ours again and again. Sterilization too was primitive: The needles and syringes would be washed, wrapped separately in gauze, and placed in aluminum lunch boxes laid in a large wok on top of a briquette stove. Water was added to the wok, and the needles and syringes were then steamed for two hours, as you would steam buns.

On my first day of giving injections I went to a factory. The workers rolled up their sleeves and waited in line, baring their arms to me one after another—and offering up a tiny piece of red flesh, too. Because the needles had been used multiple times, almost every one of them had a barbed tip. You could stick a needle into someone’s arm easily enough, but when you extracted it, you would pull out a tiny piece of flesh along with it. For the workers the pain was bearable, although they would grit their teeth or perhaps let out a groan or two. I paid them no mind, for the workers had had to put up with barbed needles year after year and should be used to it by now, I thought. But the next day, when I went to a kindergarten to give shots to children from the ages of three through six, it was a different story. Every last one of them burst out weeping and wailing. Because their skin was so tender, the needles would snag bigger shreds of flesh than they had from the workers, and the children’s wounds bled more profusely. I still remember how the children were all sobbing uncontrollably; the ones who had yet to be inoculated were crying even louder than those who had already had their shots. The pain that the children saw others suffering, it seemed to me, affected them even more intensely than the pain they themselves experienced, because it made their fear all the more acute.

This scene left me shocked and shaken. When I got back to the hospital, I did not clean the instruments right away. Instead, I got hold of a grindstone and ground all the needles until they were completely straight and the points were sharp. But these old needles were so prone to metal fatigue that after two or three more uses they would acquire barbs again, so grinding the needles became a regular part of my routine, and the more I sharpened, the shorter they got. That summer it was always dark by the time I left the hospital, with fingers blistered by my labors at the grindstone.

Later, whenever I recalled this episode, I was guilt-stricken that I’d had to see the children’s reaction to realize how much the factory workers must have suffered. If, before I had given shots to others, I had pricked my own arm with a barbed needle and pulled out a blood-stained shred of my own flesh, then I would have known how painful it was long before I heard the children’s wails.

This remorse left a profound mark, and it has stayed with me through all my years as an author. It is when the suffering of others becomes part of my own experience that I truly know what it is to live and what it is to write. Nothing in the world, perhaps, is so likely to forge a connection between people as pain, because the connection that comes from that source comes from deep in the heart. So when in this book I write of China’s pain, I am registering my pain too, because China’s pain is mine.

T
he arrow hits the target, leaving the string,” Dante wrote, and by inverting cause and effect he impresses on us how quickly an action can happen. In China’s breathtaking changes during the past thirty years we likewise find a pattern of development where the relationship between cause and effect is turned on its head. Practically every day we find ourselves surrounded by consequences, but seldom do we trace these outcomes back to their roots. The result is that conflicts and problems—which have sprouted everywhere like weeds during these past decades—are concealed amid the complacency generated by our rapid economic advances. My task here is to reverse normal procedure: to start from the effects that seem so glorious and search for their causes, whatever discomfort that may entail.

“We survive in adversity and perish in ease and comfort.”
^*
Such were the words of the Confucian philosopher Mencius, citing six worthies in antiquity who suffered untold hardship before achieving greatness. Man is bound to make mistakes, he believed, and it is in the unceasing correction of his errors that human progress lies. Viewed in this light, he suggested, adversity has a way of enhancing our endurance, while ease and comfort tend to hasten our demise—whether as individuals or as a nation. When I write in these pages of personal pain and of China’s pain, it is with that same conviction that we survive in adversity. So in this quest to follow things back to their source, we cannot help but stumble upon one misfortune after another.

If I were to try to attend to each and every aspect of modern China, there would be no end to this endeavor, and the book would go on longer than
The Thousand and One Nights
. So I limit myself to just ten words. But this tiny lexicon gives me ten pairs of eyes with which to scan the contemporary Chinese scene from different vantage points.

My aim is to stay brief and concise, beginning this narrative journey from the daily life we know so well. Daily life may seem trivial and routine, but in fact it contains a multitude of incidents, at once rich, expansive, and touching. Politics, history, society, and culture, one’s memories and emotions, desires and secrets—all reverberate there. Daily life is a veritable forest and, as the Chinese saying goes, “Where woods grow deep, you’ll find every kind of bird.”

For me, as for a bus driver who drives back and forth along the same route, my starting point is also my last stop. My busload of stories sets off from daily life, pulls over when it reaches junctions with politics, history, society, and culture—or with memories and emotions, desires and secrets—and sometimes it pauses at outlying stops that may not even have a name. Some stories disembark along the way, while others board; and eventually, after all this bustle to and fro, my bus returns to where it started.

My goal, then, is to compress the endless chatter of China today into ten simple words; to bring together observation, analysis, and personal anecdote in a narrative that roams freely across time and space; and finally to clear a path through the social complexities and staggering contrasts of contemporary China.

*
Mencius
, trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 181.

people

A
s I write these characters I have to look a second time to make sure I have them right. That’s the thing about this word: it feels remote, but it’s so familiar, too.

I can’t think of another expression in the modern Chinese language that is such an anomaly—ubiquitous yet somehow invisible. In China today it’s only officials who have “the people”
^*
on their lips every time they open their mouths, for the people themselves seldom use the term—perhaps they hardly recall its existence. We have to give those voluble officials some credit, for we rely on them to demonstrate that the phrase still has some currency.

In the past this was such a weighty phrase. Our country was called the People’s Republic of China. Chairman Mao told us to “serve the people.” The most important paper was the
People’s Daily
. “Since 1949 the people are the masters,” we learned to say.

In my childhood years “the people” was just as marvelous an expression as “Chairman Mao,” and when I first began to read, these were the first words I mastered; I could write them even before I could write my own name or the names of my parents. It was my view then that “the people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people.”

That was during the Cultural Revolution, and I marched about proudly sharing this insight with everyone I met. They responded with dubious looks, apparently finding something problematic about my formulation, although nobody directly contradicted me. In those days people walked on eggshells, fearful that if they said anything wrong, they might be branded a counterrevolutionary, endangering their whole family. My parents, hearing of my discovery, looked equally doubtful. They eyed me warily and told me in a roundabout way that they couldn’t see anything wrong with what I’d said but I still had better not say it again.

But since this was my greatest childhood insight, I couldn’t bear to hush it up and continued sharing it with the world at large. One day I found supporting evidence in a popular saying of the time, “Chairman Mao lives in our hearts.” I took this to its logical conclusion: “Chairman Mao lives in everyone’s heart, so what lives in Chairman Mao’s heart? It has to be the entire people.” Therefore: “The people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people.”

Those doubtful looks among the residents of my little town gradually dissipated. Some people began nodding in approval, and others began to say the same thing—my little playmates first, and then grown-ups, too.

But I felt threatened when lots of people started saying, “The people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people.” In a revolutionary era one cannot claim a patent for anything, and I found my status as inventor was being steadily eroded. “I was the first one to say that,” I would declare. But no adults set any store by my claim of authorship, and in the end even my young companions refused to accept that I deserved credit. Faced with my strenuous arguments or pathetic pleas, they would shake their heads: “No, everybody says that.”

I was upset, regretting bitterly that I had made my discovery public. I should have stored it forever in my own mind, safe from anybody else, keeping it for myself to savor my whole life through.

T
hese days the West is astonished by the speed of China’s makeover. With the flick of a wrist Chinese history has utterly changed its complexion, much the way an actor in Sichuan opera swaps one mask for another. In the short space of thirty years, a China ruled by politics has transformed itself into a China where money is king.

Turning points in history tend to be marked by some emblematic event, and the Tiananmen Incident of 1989 was one such moment. Stirred by the death that April of the reform-minded Hu Yaobang, college students in Beijing poured out of their campuses to gather in Tiananmen Square, demanding democratic freedoms and denouncing official corruption. Because of the hard line the government took in refusing to engage in a dialogue, in mid-May the students began a hunger strike in the square and the locals marched in the streets to support them. Beijing residents were actually not so interested in “democratic freedoms”—it was the attacks on profiteering by officials that drew them into the movement in such huge numbers. At that time Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy had entered its eleventh year, and although the reforms had triggered price increases, the economy was growing steadily and the standard of living was rising. Peasants had benefited from the changes. Factories had yet to close, and workers were yet to become victims. Contradictions were not as acute then as they are now, when society simmers with rage. All we heard then were grumbles and complaints about the way the children of high officials had made themselves rich on our national resources, and those sentiments found a focus in the protests. Compared with today’s large-scale, multifarious corruption, the diversion of funds by a minority back then didn’t really amount to anything. Since 1990, corruption has grown with the same astounding speed as the economy as a whole.

The mass movement that had begun to sweep across the country quickly subsided amid the gunfire on the morning of June 4. In October of that year, when I visited Peking University, I found myself in a different world, where engagement with affairs of state was nowhere to be found. After nightfall, courting couples appeared by the lakeside and the clatter of mahjong tiles and the drone of English words being memorized were the only sounds that wafted from dorm windows. In the short space of one summer everything had changed so much that it seemed as though nothing at all had happened that spring. Such a huge contrast demonstrated one point: that the political passions that had erupted in Tiananmen—political passions that had accumulated since the Cultural Revolution—had finally expended themselves completely in one fell swoop, to be replaced by a passion for getting rich. When everyone united in the urge to make money, the economic surge of the 1990s was the natural outcome.

After that, new vocabulary started sprouting up everywhere—netizens, stock traders, fund holders, celebrity fans, laid-off workers, migrant laborers, and so on—slicing into smaller pieces the already faded concept that was “the people.” During the Cultural Revolution, the definition of “the people” could not have been simpler, namely “workers, peasants, soldiers, scholars, merchants”—“merchants” meaning not businessmen but, rather, those employed in commercial ventures, like shop clerks. Tiananmen, you could say, marked the watershed between two different conceptions of “the people”; or, to put it another way, it conducted an asset reshuffle, stripping away the original content and replacing it with something new.

In the forty-odd years from the start of the Cultural Revolution to the present, the expression “the people” has been denuded of meaning by Chinese realities. To use a current buzzword, “the people” has become nothing more than a shell company, utilized by different eras to position different products in the marketplace.

B
eijing in the spring of 1989 was anarchist heaven. The police suddenly disappeared from the streets, and students and locals took on police duties in their place. It was a Beijing we are unlikely to see again. A common purpose and shared aspirations put a police-free city in perfect order. As you walked down the street you felt a warm, friendly atmosphere all around you. You could take the subway or a bus for free, and everyone was smiling at one another, barriers down. We no longer witnessed arguments in the street. Hard-nosed street vendors were now handing out free refreshments to the protestors. Retirees would withdraw cash from their meager bank savings and make donations to the hunger strikers in the square. Even pickpockets issued a declaration in the name of the Thieves’ Association: as a show of support for the students, they were calling a moratorium on all forms of theft. Beijing then was a city where, you could say, “all men are brothers.”

If you live in a Chinese city, there’s one feeling you never shake off: what a lot of people there are! But it was only with the mass protests in Tiananmen Square that it really came home to you: China is the world’s most populous nation. Every day the Square was a sea of people. Students who had poured into Beijing from other parts of the country would stand in the square or on a street corner, giving speeches day after day until their throats grew hoarse and they lost their voices. Their audience—whether wizened old men or mothers with babies in their arms—greeted the speakers with respect, nodding repeatedly and applauding warmly, however immature the students’ faces or naive their views.

There were comical moments, too. One afternoon I took my place in a dimly lit conference room in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for a meeting of the Capital Intellectual Coalition, a newly formed association of liberal intellectuals in Beijing. As we awaited the arrival of a prominent political scientist named Yan Jiaqi I noticed that some people were taking a newspaper editor to task. His paper had just published a statement by the coalition, and these people were unhappy because their names were low on the list of signatories, beneath the names of less well-known individuals. Why had these nobodies been given a higher ranking? The hapless editor said it wasn’t his fault but apologized anyway, nevertheless failing to mollify his critics. This farcical episode came to an end only with the arrival of Yan Jiaqi.

I remember the moment clearly; it was the first and last time I saw him. This distinguished scholar—a close associate of Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Communist Party, who favored a conciliatory line toward the demonstrators—walked in with a somber expression on his face. People quieted down as he delivered a piece of bad news. “Ziyang is in the hospital,” he said in a low voice.

In the political context of 1989, for a government leader to be hospitalized could mean only that he had lost power or that he had gone into hiding. Everyone immediately understood the implications. Some began to slip away quietly, and soon they had scattered far and wide, like falling leaves in an autumn gale.

After Tiananmen Zhao Ziyang disappeared from view, and nothing more was heard of him until his death in 2005. Only then did the New China News Agency issue a brief statement: “Comrade Zhao had long suffered from multiple diseases affecting his respiratory and cardiovascular systems, and had been hospitalized for medical treatment on multiple occasions. In recent days his condition deteriorated, and efforts to revive him proved unsuccessful. He died in Beijing on January 17, aged 85.”

In China, even if it’s just a retired minister who dies, the official announcement will usually be a lot more detailed than this. The statement said nothing about the career of a man who had once been leader of the party and the nation, nor did it mention the date of his memorial service. But word leaked out to a group of petitioners—or “judicial refugees,” as they have come to be known—who lived in Beijing South Station. I have no idea through what channels these most disadvantaged of all “people” in China got hold of this information, but they organized themselves and went off to pay their final respects to Zhao Ziyang. They were not authorized to attend, so the police naturally blocked them from entering, but they unfurled a commemorative inscription all the same.

These petitioners had sought legal redress for injustice and oppression in their home districts, only to find themselves stymied at every turn by bias and corruption in the judicial system. China’s extralegal appeals procedure—a remnant of its hallowed tradition of humane government—offers a slender hope that some honest official might dispense justice where law has failed. Petitioners exhaust all their resources as they roam from place to place in search of a fair-minded administrator, and ultimately they make their way to Beijing in the hope that someone in the central government will respond to their pleas. In 2004 the official total of such cases reached 10 million. Their desperate plight almost defies imagination: fighting hunger, they sleep in the streets, only to be harried by the police, driven like beggars hither and yon, and written off by some well-heeled intellectuals as mentally deranged. It was precisely such “people” who went to bid farewell to Zhao Ziyang in January 2005. They felt that he was “the biggest fall guy in China,” a bigger victim of injustice than even they themselves. However much they had suffered, they at least had a chance to petition, but Zhao Ziyang, they said, “had nowhere to take his complaint.”

I made a trip back to my home in Zhejiang at the end of May 1989, and after I’d attended to family affairs, I boarded the train back to Beijing on the afternoon of June 3. I lay on my bunk listening to the rumble of the wheels on the tracks; when lights came on in the compartment, I knew that night was falling. At that moment the student protests seemed as long and protracted as a marathon, and I could not imagine when they would end. But when I woke in the early morning, the train was approaching Beijing and the news was coming over the radio that the army was now in Tiananmen Square.

After the gunfire on June 4, the students—from Beijing and from out of town—began to abandon the city. I vividly recall the surging throngs filling the station that morning: just as people were fleeing the capital in droves, I was making an ill-timed reentry. With my bag over my shoulder I stumbled, dazed, into the station plaza. As I collided with people swarming in from the other direction, I realized I would soon be doing exactly the same thing.