Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (26 page)

For a long time, I had been living inside a real-life propaganda movie. I loved it because I thought it was reality. I felt so lucky to
reside in utopia. I took seriously Boy Scout-like slogans such as Serve the People. I remember squeezing onto buses where young PLA soldiers would spring to their feet and offer their seats to an older comrade or anyone with a child. Only gradually did I realize that the sets were fake and people were just speaking their lines with less and less conviction. After Mao’s death, when everyone stopped play acting, I rarely saw anybody help anyone else, not even to hold a door for someone with a baby.

That August, Deng Xiaoping emerged from his safe haven in Canton to join the new five-member Politburo Standing Committee. Only two men ranked above him. One was his protector, Marshal Ye Jianying, who had no ambition to run the country. The other was Chairman Hua Guofeng, whose claim to power rested on a scribbled note by a doddering Mao. Acutely aware of his vulnerability, Hua stepped up a personality-cult campaign, uttering Mao-like quotations, posing in stuffed armchairs for Mao-style photos and staging Hua-Was-Here exhibits. He even grew out his brush cut and slicked it back to resemble the Great Helmsman.

By now, I was enough of a China watcher to realize that Chairman Hua would not last. Ignoring Hua as irrelevant, Deng concentrated on dismantling the cult of Mao. Overnight, the official media began to portray the Great Helmsman as a man who made mistakes. And the decade-long Cultural Revolution, they said, was one of his biggest.

Deng boldly declared that old-fashioned Marxism no longer met China’s needs. “Engels did not ride on an airplane. Stalin did not wear Dacron,” he remarked as he threw open China’s doors to foreign investment for the first time since the Communist victory. He disbanded Mao’s agricultural communes, reinstated college entrance exams and linked workers’ bonuses to performance. Although Deng had been Mao’s chief hatchet man in the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement, he rehabilitated most of its victims.

All these flip-flops made me feel schizophrenic. What did the Chinese people believe in? And what did
I
believe in, if anything? The political sands were shifting under my feet. After my graduation, I filled in as a script polisher at Radio Beijing, no experience necessary. Each day, I tried to transform turgid Commie-prop
into recognizable English. It was hopeless. When the state-run English-language broadcasting station attempted to give me just half what it paid the white Canadian male I replaced, I fought for and won, equal pay. But I realized I no longer had any desire to shore up a propaganda machine for a bunch of racist, sexist Communists. Instead of Beijing Jan, I wanted to be a real reporter.

That fall, when a start-up magazine in Hong Kong recruited me to be their editor – again, speaking English was the only requirement – I jumped at the chance. Although it was my first trip to the capitalist world in three years, this time the transition was easy. I wasn’t even perturbed when I discovered my next-door neighbors were running a brothel. Culture shock was minimal, I discovered, when you are no longer living in paradise. To be sure, I still felt a comradely, or perhaps a Canadian, urge to thank all the doormen. And I still mistakenly believed I should support China’s fledgling attempts to industrialize. I bought only Chinese-made products — but gave up in disgust after the wheels on my new Golden Monkey suitcase failed to survive their first trip.

Norman faithfully wrote weekly two-line letters. “Dear Jan, How are you? I’m fine. Love, Norman.” In 1977, President Jimmy Carter made good on his campaign pledge to pardon draft dodgers, and Norman was able to obtain a new U.S. passport. He arrived in Hong Kong for a three-month visit in February 1978. Even though he hadn’t been outside China in twelve years, he also suffered little culture shock. We arrived at my apartment lobby in time for a police raid on the brothel.

China’s new open-door policy meant foreigners could now work in fields other than language teaching or propaganda. After Norman returned to Beijing, he was finally transferred out of the propaganda gulag to the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Computing Technology. The Hong Kong magazine I went to work for with such high hopes turned out to be secretly backed by the Beijing government. Although it was less heavy-handed than the stuff churned out by Radio Beijing, I now knew I definitely wasn’t cut out to be a propagandist. Besides, I missed Norman a lot. And with so much happening in China, I decided that Beijing was the place to be.

By 1978, all China was in ferment. Thousands who had been wrongfully imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution were set free. Millions of former Red Guards, disgruntled at wasting a decade in the countryside, streamed back to the cities. In Beijing, Big Character posters went up on a dusty expanse of brick wall next to a bus depot. Dubbed Democracy Wall, it quickly became a magnet for crowds to debate politics and read posters. People flocked there in part to ogle — it was the first time since the ill-fated Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1957 that China’s leaders and policies were openly criticized. Some posters demanded to know why there were no jobs. Others blamed Mao for China’s troubles. “Ask yourself: How could Lin Biao reach power without the support of Mao? Ask yourself: Did Mao not know that Jiang Qing (Madame Mao) was a traitor?” One called on China to adopt “Yugoslav-style democracy.” Another advocated adopting the American system. One long-winded poster called on President Carter to support the drive for human rights in China. “The Chinese people do not want to repeat the tragic life of the Soviet people in the Gulag Archipelago,” it said.

At first, Democracy Wall suited Deng Xiaoping’s political agenda. After he called it “a fine thing,” copycat walls sprang up in other cities. In Beijing, the posters became bolder and brasher. I joined crowds jostling for a glimpse of the large sheets of pink, green and yellow paper filled with black brush strokes, which I could now read without difficulty, having lived through so many political campaigns.

On December 5, 1978, a twenty-eight-year-old electrician named Wei Jingsheng put up a long poster titled “The Fifth Modernization — Democracy,” the first to criticize Deng Xiaoping by name. “How excited people were, how inspired, when Vice-Premier Deng finally returned to his leading post. Deng Xiaoping raised the slogans of ‘being pragmatic’ and of ‘seeking truth from facts’ … But regrettably, the hated old political system was not changed. The democracy and freedom they hoped for could not even be mentioned … When people ask for democracy they are only asking for something they rightfully own … So aren’t the people justified in seizing power from the overlords?”

A former Red Guard, Wei earnestly signed his real name and wrote his phone number at the bottom. Several young men contacted him. Together they launched
Exploration
, China’s first samizdat, or Soviet-style underground magazine. “Democracy is our only hope. To reject democracy is as good as shackling one’s own body,” Wei wrote in the inaugural issue, mimeographed in his girlfriend’s apartment. Emboldened by Deng’s silence, other samizdat publications emerged, with such names as
Enlightenment, Today
and
Beijing Spring
. Filled with political essays, poetry and philosophical musings, they constituted the first dissident press in nearly thirty years of Communist rule.

That winter, a ragtag army invaded Beijing. Impoverished peasants, following an ancient tradition of petitioning the emperor for justice, flooded into the capital. It was the first time I had seen true misery in China, and I knew I had to talk to them. As they poured out their tales of woe, I was shocked. The peasants were seeking redress for murders, thefts, rapes. Their oppressors were invariably Communist Party officials.

They camped outside government offices. By January, a shanty-town had mushroomed in southwest Beijing. For the first time, beggar children waited behind my chair in restaurants, lunging for the leftovers the moment I got up. I began ordering extra food. Weren’t beggars part of
Old
China? Wasn’t everyone in New China supposed to be well fed and happy? I remembered, during the struggle session against the ration-coupon dealer, how I had timidly asked Teacher Dai if people had enough to eat, and how she had ignored me. As I watched the ragged petitioners, some on crutches, others with wounds and festering sores, I realized I had no clue what had been happening in the rest of the country. The Cultural Revolution wasn’t a radical-chic game. It had wrought untold suffering.

The petitioners added their posters to Democracy Wall. As I read them, my horror grew. According to one poster, a Communist Party secretary had raped a construction worker named Fu Yuehua. After she dared report him, she was fired from her job. On January 8, 1979, the third anniversary of Zhou Enlai’s death, I watched her lead a ragtag demonstration against “hunger and oppression” through
Tiananmen Square. A rape victim had organized the first protest march in Communist Chinese history. Police arrested Fu at her brother’s home in Beijing ten days later. Her trial that fall was mysteriously recessed. According to one spectator, she startled the court by describing the body of her attacker in intimate detail. Fu Yuehua, the first casualty of China’s fledgling democracy movement, was later imprisoned.

In February, Deng Xiaoping became the first Chinese Communist leader to visit the States. As he wowed Americans by donning a ten-gallon cowboy hat at a Texas rodeo, security police stepped up surveillance at Democracy Wall. China’s paramount leader returned from his triumphant American tour to find that Democracy Wall had become a hotbed of dissent – against him. Fu Yuehua’s daring demonstration had sparked others. One group of unemployed youths even tried to storm the gates of Zhongnanhai, the home of the Central Committee. An angry Deng ordered the arrests of Wei Jingsheng and other activists. On March 25, in an emergency edition of
Exploration
, Wei published his now-famous denunciation of Deng. Entitled “Democracy or a New Dictatorship,” it branded Deng “a fascist dictator.” A few days later, he and thirty other dissidents were rounded up. The crackdown had begun.

As I made the transition from true believer to objective observer, I decided to see if I could get a real news job. I had once regarded the Western media as running dogs of imperialism. Now I brashly wrote letters to the Beijing bureaus of the
L.A. Times
, the
New York Times
, the Associated Press and the
Washington Post
. It turned out they all wanted to hire me, but the
New York Times
replied first. It wasn’t that I was brilliant. I didn’t even have any journalism experience. But I was a scarce commodity — a foreigner who spoke Chinese, who looked Chinese and who had lived there longer than any of the American correspondents.

I got a flat tire on my way to the
New York Times
interview. After repairing it and pedaling hard to make up for lost time, I arrived, wild-eyed and sweaty. Ignoring my Red Guard demeanor, the correspondent, Fox Butterfield, suggested we stroll across the street to
the Beijing Municipal Revolutionary Committee, where some petitioners were staging a sit-in. I began talking to a young woman. When I realized we were gathering a crowd, I slipped her Fox’s business card and told her to contact us if she could. Fox was delighted that it was so easy for me to approach ordinary Chinese. As we went up the elevator to his office in the Beijing Hotel, he began giving me more assignments.

“Are you going to hire me?” I asked timidly.

“Of course,” he said. “How much do you want?”

I was ecstatic. The
New York Times
! Who cared about getting paid? “Money,” I said, like a Maoist idiot, “is secondary. I just want to learn how to be a reporter.”

Fox took me at my word and paid me $800 a month, a salary the
Times
foreign editor, whom I later met in New York, apologized was “coolie wages.” (It was about one-fourth what
Times
assistants were paid in NewYork, but in China, it was a small fortune as long as you lived like a native, as I did.) At the time, I honestly didn’t care. And Fox kept his side of the bargain. He was an excellent teacher. He taught me to “answer all the questions” so readers wouldn’t be left dangling. And he showed me the value of capturing the telling detail. In a taxi on the way back from an interview, I watched in awe as he scribbled a story long-hand on a sheet of paper. Deep down, I felt I could do the same.

In those days, it was hard for foreign journalists to learn the most basic information. Officials didn’t grant interviews. Press conferences didn’t exist. Except for the Party mouthpiece, the
People’s Daily
, most Chinese newspapers were still classified as secret. When a Western reporter asked an innocuous question, the Old Hundred Surnames, as the Chinese called themselves, froze or fled. Fox once went up to a queue and, in fluent Chinese, asked what everyone was waiting for. They stared silently back at him. I went over and repeated his question. “We’re waiting in line to buy televisions,” a woman said.

I scrupulously warned people I interviewed that I worked for the
New York Times
. Few believed me. After six years of living in China, I had perfected the local baggy look, a passable accent and the slow, foot-scraping waddle. Once, when I identified myself to
some students at Tiananmen Square, a smart aleck in the crowd jeered, “Sure, and I work for the
Times
of London.” Even when they believed me, they still assumed I was Fox’s government interpreter and that it was all right to talk to me.

I was especially modest when foreigners complimented me on my English. One morning in October 1979, the entire foreign press corps was staking out the courthouse at Wei Jingsheng’s closed-door, one-day trial. Naturally, everyone was desperate for the obligatory man-in-the-street comment. Naturally, no sane man-in-the-street was there. Aline Mosby, a veteran UPI reporter whom I had met on several occasions, rushed up to me. I was about to say “Hi” when I realized she didn’t remember me at all. Aline, who spoke no Chinese, was thrilled to discover I spoke decent English. She began firing questions. Wickedly, I answered as best as I could, commenting on the effect Wei’s trial would have, admitting I’d heard his speeches at Democracy Wall and predicting the courts would find him guilty. I hated to disappoint her at the end when she finally asked me my name and work unit.