Holidays in Heck (15 page)

Mr. Wu had gone to America some years before. “I had a very good impression,” he said, “especially the Twin Towers. When bin Laden hit the towers I said, ‘He's a bad guy.' ”

Mr. Wu saw his first Cadillac in America and said to himself, “I want a car like that.” Then he was in Taiwan at the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, and the tour guide said Chiang loved to ride in Cadillacs.

“We are going for democracy,” Mr. Wu said. “Please send the message. Russia had to go through a revolution. We are moving gradually. The American people should take time to understand. On surface we are socialist. Underneath we are capitalist. During the cold war there were lots of struggles, lots of revolutions. China's was the only successful one. We accept America as a great country. President Washington was a great president and led the country to where it is today. The policy of America is correct. But every country has its
own situation. You can't use your country as a standard for other people. You love the people and peace. This is the right policy.”

Mr. Wu summed up: “You have the patience. We have the confidence.”

I had a headache—Nixon, Deng, Edgar Snow, Chiang Kai-shek's Cadillac, George Washington, and I'm almost certain it's supposed to be the Chinese who are patient and the Americans who are confident. Mr. Wu did, however, have one clear piece of advice: “America shouldn't have too many policies.”

Mr. Wu took us to dinner with his wife, eldest daughter, and son-in-law. As was the case with several other wealthy people I met in China, Mr. Wu seated his driver and his assistants at the table with his family and his guests. They seemed to be expected to join in the conversation and, except the driver, the toasts.

Mr. Wu's son-in-law was an official in the state-run banking system. I asked him about the number of bad loans that Chinese banks are said to be carrying. “It's not a problem now,” he said. “The bad loans were within international standards—only ten percent.” (Of course 10 percent of loans going bad would be more than enough to start the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown a couple of years later.)

Mr. Wu sent Mai and me in his Cadillac to Hangzhou. It's a famous beauty spot on West Lake and, as famous beauty spots go, it's nice enough. Mr. Wu's youngest daughter, Wu Lin, who goes by Linda, has a fashion design company there.

Linda's showroom itself was quite a piece of design, with brutalist concrete stairs, a lit glass disco floor, industrial-chic
wrought-iron tables, and neo-Deco porthole windows. The clothes are, Mai testified, fabulous. Linda gave me an apple-green car coat to take home to my wife, who confirmed the fabulousness.

The designs are by Linda's husband, Mike, the only beer-drinking regular guy women's fashion designer I've ever met. Mike wanted to be an industrial engineer and build textile machinery. But in the wake of the Cultural Revolution China's universities were so corrupt that you had to bribe the professors to get into your chosen field. Mike was broke. “Nobody wanted to go into fashion design,” he said. Considering the Mao suits that everyone was wearing in those days, no wonder. “It was good luck for me,” Mike said.

Linda ran the business side. She was trained as a structural engineer (and would have been an unusually pretty one). “My father wanted me to go into a more serious business,” she said. “But in construction you need many people. In fashion you can do it by yourself. This business is very comfortable—no politics.”

We went to dinner at a pavilion on West Lake and talked about what Katie Holmes could possibly see in Tom Cruise. Katie is from my hometown, Toledo, Ohio. Linda and Mike were suitably impressed by the fact. “I don't understand this Scientology,” Mike said.

I floundered around for an explanation.

“It's American Falun Gong,” said Mai.

I watched CNN on television in the hotel room that night. There were brief, almost random-seeming blackouts of things the Chinese government didn't want seen. A whole segment on U.S. criticism of Hu Jintao's trade policies went missing. But I knew all about it because the government
censors neglected to delete the caption crawling across the bottom of the screen.

Mai and I flew to Xi'an, deep in north-central China. Printed on the airplane's seat backs, in Chinese, was “Empty space for advertising awaiting you.” On our paper coffee cups was “Advertising space available.” We were met at the airport by two assistants to Mr. Tian, a manufacturer of coke fuel for blast furnaces. He'd been the main supplier of the mill Tom had run. The assistants wore identical perfectly tailored banker gray chalk-stripe suits.

We were taken to a long, large, and hilarious lunch that went on until there was only an hour's respite before a long, large, and hilarious dinner. The Chinese like beer, wine, whiskey, and their throat-searing
maotai
sorghum brandy. And they serve all of them at once.

The next morning, a little shaky, we went to see the terra-cotta warriors guarding the tomb of the Emperor Qinshihung. Seven or eight thousand of them have been discovered so far. It's said that no two of them are alike, but I wouldn't swear to that in court. What these clay soldiers were all supposed to be doing makes the tomb one of the world's great monuments to “Huh?”

Less mysterious was the peasant who stumbled into the tomb chamber while digging a well in 1974. He was sitting in the gift shop signing copies of the book written about his find—a prosperous-looking old man.

This emperor is revered for uniting China, never mind his policy errors such as purges, massacres, and book burnings, not to mention the expense to taxpayers of having 8,000 terra-cotta warriors made to order.

Mr. Tian was as mildly interested in these as I was. “How much bituminous coal do you use to make your coke, and how much anthracite?” I asked him. (Toledo is not only the birthplace of Katie Holmes; it's also the world's largest soft coal port. When I was a boy an east wind would carry the tarry stink of coke furnaces all over town.)

“Ah,” said Mr. Tian, “‘fat coal' and ‘thin coal,' mixed at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit.” The moment I showed an interest in coal, Mr. Tian told his driver to take us hundreds of kilometers up the Yellow River valley into northern Shaanxi province to see his new coke plant.

We were getting toward Inner Mongolia and the Great Wall. In the hills and canyons of this part of China, the “open door” has barely creaked. Except for the occasional high-tension wires and the pavement beneath our wheels we saw what Marco Polo saw. And how poor the Italy of the thirteenth century must have been that Marco was impressed. The land was terraced to a fare-thee-well. Only on perfectly vertical surfaces had the farmers despaired of cultivation. Crops ran up to the very gravestones. The power from the power lines didn't reach the tiny villages; nor did the pavement or any water pipes. I saw very few animals—no wild ones or any wilderness in which they could live, and not many sheep, goats, pigs, or cows, either. Average annual income here is $415. When the peasants leave to go work in the cities they're called “foreign labor.”

This is where Mr. Tian came from. He was born in 1964, the youngest of six children. When he was still a teenager he had an idea to import new kinds of vegetables that could be grown for bigger profits. But he was ahead of his time and was made to study electrical engineering. Although “electrical engineering” is more what Mao, rather than an American,
would call being taught to run a movie projector. Anyway, Mr. Tian worked as a movie projectionist and waited for opportunity. After the Open Door came into effect, he started a business trading steel.

“The policy at that time,” Mr. Tian said, “was a ‘Dual Rail System.' ” If you wanted to do something commercial privately, you had to have something to back you up, owned by the government, on the industrial side. The government encouraged contracting with government factories. This didn't work. Government factories didn't produce according to the market. Instead of contracting with a government factory I decided to build my own factory.”

“And this was more efficient?” I asked.

Mr. Tian looked at me as if, despite my interest in coal and coke, I might be an idiot after all. “Of course,” he said.

When he'd been contracting with government factories he'd learned a lot—by negative example—about how to run a factory. Then he set out to learn about economics. While he was running a trading business and building a factory he was also, like Mrs. Ng in Nanjing, going to college. “There are more than fifty universities in Xi'an,” Mr. Tian said. Evenings and weekends he attended what he called “training classes,” not only in economics but in basic accounting, marketing, and management. “The cost was a few thousand yuan,” he said—about $400. “All the students were businessmen,” Mr. Tian said.

The demand for steel was strong, but Mr. Tian shifted his business to coke. Shaanxi province has no iron ore, and Xi'an's steel industry is not well developed, but the region is full of coal to make coke to make steel.

Mr. Tian's coke plant was near China's principal coal mines. The mines look every bit as dangerous as they sound
in the continual news reports of death and disaster inside them. Between two of these ominous holes in the ground sat the coke furnace. It was hell's own house trailer, a hot, black, smoking oblong the length of a football field and as tall as the top of the goalposts.

Coke is to coal as charcoal is to wood. Great piles of coal were being fed into the furnace on conveyor belts. There, over the course of twelve hours, the heat of the burning coal itself will turn the coal to coke.

Personally, I considered the coke furnace to be a thrilling piece of machinery. Mr. Tian and his construction crew had built it themselves from scratch. And it smelled like home. The men handling the coal hoppers and balancing precariously on the tailgates of the enormous dump trucks looked pleased with themselves. It made me want to grab a hard hat and get the kind of job where I could throw wrenches at people.

Mr. Tian and I went back to the office and talked with his foreman about coal. Going by the expression of catatonic boredom on Mai's face as she translated, I'll spare the reader.

On the way back to Xi'an I asked Mr. Tian how he'd gotten capital to go into business in the first place. “I needed a guarantor,” he said, “someone who was in private enterprise. I had a friend with a company. But, to be honest, at that time it wasn't too difficult to get a loan.”

“So it's harder to get started now,” I said.

“Yes,” Mr. Tian said. “Banks are more straight with loans.” A nice turn of phrase, which Mai said she translated literally. But a certain amount of bending had been worthwhile with Mr. Tian. Perhaps Mr. Wu's son-in-law was wiser than I thought in his sangfroid about China's state bank loans.

Mr. Tian said his family had not been affected by the Cultural Revolution, because his father was a peasant and a Party member.

I had been under an impression that the Cultural Revolution had ruined everyone's life. Of course in a nation of a billion people, this can't have been exactly right, any more than Freedom House can be exactly right about China's static freedoms. Mr. Tian thought that some damage had been done by the Cultural Revolution but that the Red Guards were not 100 percent wrong. “During that time,” he said, “the people who got criticized were not good people. They were lazy people, people who did wrong to people, right-wingers.”

I wondered what he meant by that last term. Mr. Tian was himself a “capitalist roader” and from all I could see he was committed to his route.

“There were factions of Red Guards fighting in Xi'an,” he continued. “During the development of the country at that time, it was needed—Red Guards criticizing each other. Criticism was needed. Development wasn't getting far. We were under the pressure from foreign control.”

Again I couldn't tell what he meant. American control? Russian control? The control of foreign Marxist thought? “Foreign” is a broad term in China. But I didn't want to interrupt. I'd never heard the Cultural Revolution defended before.

“The country was poor as hell,” Mr. Tian said. “We had to come out from this prospect.”

Mai and I flew south to Yichang on the Yangtze. Here we'd take a break from my commerce and industry tour and go on a four-day river cruise through the Three Gorges to
Chongqing. A friend of Mai's, Mrs. Han, drove us upriver in her Mitsubishi SUV, to the dock by the Three Gorges Dam where the cruise boat was moored.

Mrs. Han was an executive at the government-owned electric company. She said she didn't want to take a chance on working for a private firm. Government jobs are more stable, though the wages are lower. But her young son was lonely, and if she had another kid she'd lose her job because of the government's one-child policy.

Mr. Tian has several children and five siblings, and Tom's assistant Lilly is one of four. I'd asked Lilly if her parents had gotten in trouble for violating the birth control laws. She giggled and said, “Oh, you know . . .”

“Oh, you know” in China means, “Who you know.”

I asked Mrs. Han if the Three Gorges Dam was the ecological disaster that the ecological types say it is, even though the dam's hydroelectric turbines are supposed to produce all sorts of electricity and no greenhouse gases.

Mrs. Han said, “The economy is helped a lot by the dam's infrastructure. But one million people had to move. The farmers are reassigned to be factory workers, and it is not their background. They are living worse than before. But the flooding used to be terrible. There are advantages and disadvantages. It is changing animal life. A lot of historical sites are gone. The farmers are losing good soil by the river.”

Mrs. Han was not exactly a spokesperson for central planning.

There are more than 30 million people in Chongqing (or Chungking, as it used to be)—a whole Canada in the space of a Los Angeles. China provides a lot of material for such
statistical tropes, which are supposed to say something meaningful about China, until we try to figure out what that meaning is.