Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (2 page)

More confounding—for me, in any case—was the scale of Chinese emigration to the islands. When I first alighted upon Suva, the capital of Fiji, in the mid-1990s, Victoria Parade was a venerable, though dilapidated, boulevard of colonial-era buildings. Nothing much happened in Suva except for the occasional coup. A few years later, Victoria Parade had become a veritable Chinatown, an avenue of Chinese shops, restaurants, and nightclubs catering to mainland fishermen and garment workers. Other islands, too, experienced a surge of Chinese immigrants, lured to a region where market competition is nonexistent. Sadly for them, they weren’t particularly welcome. Rampaging mobs in Nuku’alofa, the balmy capital of the Kingdom of Tonga, burned down thirty Chinese-owned shops. In Honiara, the blighted capital of the Solomon Islands, the Chinese navy had to rescue 300 of their citizens after locals set the predominantly Chinese business district ablaze.

Nevertheless, within a short decade, the South Pacific was well on its way to becoming a Chinese lake. The better hotels were often full of official delegations. Some were there to forge commercial links. Others had come with their checkbooks ready, doling out “foreign aid” to receptive governments, who in turn needed to do nothing more than acknowledge that despite appearances otherwise, Taiwan was not a country. By conceding that Taiwan was merely a quarrelsome province within the People’s Republic of China, governments in the South Pacific soon found themselves in the possession of fleets of high-end SUVs, which they drove to their new and considerably more lavish offices, where they could ponder the work being done on their brand-new stadiums. This was foreign aid, Chinese-style, and governments in the South Pacific discovered that they liked it very much.

It was the appearance of Chinese tourists in Fiji, however, that really got me thinking that something was afoot in China.
Chinese tourists? In Fiji?
I first came across some at low tide on a beach on the Coral Coast on the island of Viti Levu, where a group of mainland tourists was happily emptying the reef of its population of luminous starfish. Gently reminded by their tour guide that they could not in fact wander off with forty-some starfish, they deposited them in stacks atop the boulders that jutted above the reef.

“Did you notice that?” I said to my wife, Sylvia, as we set about returning the displaced starfish to the shallow water.

“You mean the interesting approach to wildlife?”

“Yes, that too. But that they were tourists from China. When exactly did tourists from China start coming to the South Pacific?”

I, frankly, had stopped paying attention to China sometime in 1989, that magical year when Communism dissolved elsewhere in the world. Then, in an historical blink of an eye, dissident shipyard workers and philosophers suddenly found themselves transformed into elected presidents. Democracy flourished and the Czechs, bless them, stumbled over themselves to join the Beer Drinkers Party. Borders were opened, and soon Hungarian tourists could be found camping in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, while Westerners, myself included, settled in cities like Prague, where the women were beautiful, the beer cheap, and the times significant. For two generations, Eastern Europe had existed under the gray shroud of totalitarian rule, and suddenly they, too, were free to compete with campy bands from Liechtenstein and punk-monster groups from Finland for the awesome privilege of winning the Euro-vision Song of the Year Competition. This was freedom.

Nineteen eighty-nine played out a little differently in China, of course. When thousands of students converged upon Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand a little democracy—
Hey hey, hey ho, Maosim has got to go
—they were greeted with a decidedly old-school response. Deng Xiaoping, the chain-smoking gnome with the twinkling eyes who then ruled China, simply reached for his totalitarian rulebook, flipped toward the index—
Democracy protesters, suitable response
—and followed directions. He shot them. And that was that.

Except, of course, it wasn’t, and therein lay the dissonance I was feeling about China. Something was clearly happening there. The presence of Chinese tourists blithely frolicking on the beaches of Fiji suggested that China was no longer solely a nation of peasants, factory workers, and clipboard-toting political officers. And yet, as far as I could tell, China remained ruled by the very same clipboard-toting political officers who had brought forth the excitement of the Cultural Revolution, those last years of the Mao era when China went stark raving mad. In the early seventies, one pushed boundaries in the U.S. by lighting up a joint and engaging in a sit-in at Berkeley. For the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, a good day might be spent destroying a Ming-era temple and torturing the teachers and intellectuals accused of possessing revanchist tendencies. When it came to pushing boundaries, the hippies had nothing on the Red Guards. Maybe Charles Manson did. But Charles Manson is in prison. The Red Guards simply faded away.

Once Sylvia and I returned to the United States, this sense of incongruity only deepened. Wading through the thunder and bombast of what passes for news programming today—
Motto: All terror, all the time
—I’d come across little nuggets of information such as the startling fact that IBM Computers is now owned by the Chinese company Lenovo. Clearly, the creators of
2001: A Space Odyssey
miscalled that one; HAL should have been speaking Mandarin. And then, sometime later, as the television news paused for a commercial—
Coming up next: Are we all going to die tomorrow?
—I’d pick up the newspaper and learn that to combat a few cases of rabies, Chinese authorities had decided to club or electrocute, or even bury alive, hundreds of thousands of pet dogs. Even for someone like me, who had long lived in a region where dogs are regarded as either a menacing nuisance or a good choice for lunch, the response seemed a tad barbaric. IBM had long represented the future—the American future—and now that particular future was in the hands of barbarous dog-killers.

Mostly, however, as I refreshed myself in the events of the day, I was struck by the gnawing sense that despite the best efforts of the freedom-hating Islamofascists, the bigger news seemed to be elsewhere. “Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world,” Napoleon had famously remarked. China, clearly, had awoken. For some, this had been evident for some time. For others—say, like those who had spent a good part of the past decade living on remote islands in the South Pacific—it was something of a surprise to learn just how big China had become. Officially, there were 1.3 billion people in China. Unofficially, there were 1.5 billion. It had become the industrial capital of the world. The 200 million migrants who had left the fields for the cities reflected the largest human migration in history. China had managed to achieve an annual economic growth rate of 9.5 percent or more for twenty-eight years straight. It is presently the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and Japan and it is expected to become the second in the foreseeable future. China currently exports more than a trillion dollars’ worth of goods annually and will soon account for nearly 50 percent of world trade. There are more than ninety cities within its borders with populations over one million, most of which, to be perfectly honest, I had never heard of.

And yet, despite China’s having become one of the economic engines of the world, I had no sense of what China actually was. Not since Deng Xiaoping has China had a leader that reflected a personality, a sense of
Chineseness
that foreigners could latch on to. Say what you will about Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, but they are, in their own ways, America writ large. Watching those two, the charmer who exuded empathy and insatiable appetites, and the smirking bully whose very strut is enough to send otherwise reasonable people into an inchoate, apoplectic quiver of rage, it is clear that Bill and George could only be American. Hu Jintao, on the other hand, simply comes across as the guy in the office that you really need to watch out for.

Instead, all I could discern were contrasts. Beijing had been awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics and you’d think, okay, we’re a long way now from the events of June 4, 1989. In preparation, the authorities had decided to finally release the student who had hurled a paint bomb at the giant portrait of Chairman Mao that looms over Tiananmen Square. Well, good, you think. And then it emerges that after eighteen years of what we now soothingly call enhanced interrogation techniques, the student had been shattered, and today is free only to roam through his insanity. Yet many of our most esteemed commentators—and how, exactly, does one become an esteemed commenter?—speak reassuringly about the newfound freedom in China. Maybe, but who wants to unfurl a Falun Gong banner in Tiananmen Square? You first, Mr. Commentator.

Clearly, a quick look at China from the outside invariably turns into a thorough investigation of the
yin
and the
yang.
China had launched men into space, and yet in some western parts of the country people still lived in caves. China produces some of the most lavish and poignant movies of our time, yet its literature remains stunted. China is quickly becoming a manufacturer not only of the cheap, plastic goods that stock the shelves of Wal-Mart, but also of high-tech goods like computers, and yet they haven’t quite managed to ensure that the toothpaste they export doesn’t kill people in Panama. It was all very perplexing to me. What exactly was China?

“China is today’s Wild West,” said my friend Greg. I had first met Greg in graduate school in Washington, D.C. This was in the early 1990s, and as I pursued my studies on Eastern Europe, I always felt a little sorry for those who focused on China. The poor, misguided fools, I thought. Didn’t they know that Moldova was the future? In the years that followed, Greg, a fluent speaker of Chinese and Japanese, eventually left the world of finance and became a high school history teacher in San Jose. I was on the road one summer, and after a reading in San Francisco, I caught up with Greg at a bar near Union Square. He had just returned from a yearlong sabbatical in Shanghai, where he had taught English, and he spoke effusively about the country.

“It’s where it’s all happening now,” he said with his California drawl. “I’ve spent most of my life chasing the next new thing. And now the next new thing is China. The center of gravity has moved east—business, finance, manufacturing, everything revolves around China. For the first time in their history, the average Chinese has an opportunity to get rich. They know that opportunity might close at any time. So they’re going after it with everything they have. It’s just crazy over there.”

The China he spoke of seemed so vastly at odds with the China I had grown up with. Where were the May Day parades, the ominous displays of military might, the calls to revolution? Where were the workers in the jaunty Mao jackets?

“That China is gone,” Greg said. “You need to go and see for yourself. And you definitely need to teach your kids Mandarin. When they grow up, they’ll be working for Chinese companies. If I were you, I’d move to China for a few years, because you’re not going to understand this world if you don’t understand China.”

This seemed like an excellent idea. Of course, lots of ideas look good after a few beers. Nevertheless, I had been looking to make a change anyway. Once again, Sylvia had led me to one of the more exotic corners of the world—Sacramento. Every morning, I’d wake up and think, What events in space and time have brought me to this strange place? Don’t get me wrong. Sacramento is a lovely place, particularly for those with a fondness for methamphetamines. For the meth-addled, Sacramento had conveniently placed a Greyhound bus station just yards from the statehouse where Austria’s finest was sworn in as governor of the great state of California. Around the corner, the budget-conscious speed freak can find a half-dozen $5-a-night flophouses that will happily overlook their need to bounce off walls. And should a meth addict have a disagreeable experience with law enforcement, downtown Sacramento offered a plethora of bail bondsmen only too happy to assist.

We even had meth addicts for neighbors, which made for some very lively evenings. Our neighborhood, a standard California burb of stucco and tile, had been overtaken by America’s latest, greatest search for free money—the housing bubble. Working on my laptop in cafés, I listened to the yammering of mortgage brokers, all pushing the zero-down, introductory teaser rate, interest-only, optional payment, adjustable rate, here’s-a-half-million-if-you-can-fog-a-mirror kind of mortgages that fueled the exhilaration of collective financial madness. Within three years, houses had doubled in value. Within six, they had tripled. Speculators were buying houses a dozen at a time. Homebuilders reacted by building thousands of new homes and people bought them as investments because, of course, real estate only goes up in California. Everyone wants to live here, even in Sacramento, a little corner of Oklahoma that got lost and found itself on the other side of the Sierra Nevada. Our neighbor’s house was one such “investment,” and while the owner applauded herself for her financial acumen, her renters happily used her property to conduct a brisk business in stolen cars and crystal meth. The couple who lived there had three children. For simplicity’s sake, each was apparently named Motherfucker, as in
Motherfucker, turn the fucking TV down,
followed by
Motherfucker, you woke motherfucker up, motherfucker.

We could see where this was going, and the last thing my wife and I wanted was to endure the inevitable housing bust as our kids clamored to go next door because they wanted to play pharmacist with their good friend Motherfucker. We sold our house, briefly contemplated buying a new one, and then decided that buying a hyperinflated house with a time bomb of a mortgage was one of the more uninteresting ways to commit financial ruin. And so, for the foreseeable future, we would become renters, a state of affairs that we soon regarded as liberating. Leaking faucets and busted air conditioners would no longer be my problem. The burden of keeping grass alive would fall to someone else. Then, once our second son was born and Sylvia quit her job in favor of consulting, we suddenly found ourselves with no good reason to remain in Sacramento. And without a reason to be in Sacramento, we were ready to fly.