Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (53 page)

The ethnic forces that tore asunder the Soviet Union do not exist in China. The fault lines are economic. In a frank report, the Chinese Academy of Science predicted a post-Deng power struggle between Beijing and the provinces. It warned that China could disintegrate like a “post-Tito Yugoslavia” unless drastic steps were taken to halt mounting regionalism. Rich provinces like coastal Guangdong have nothing in common with landlocked,
impoverished Gansu. Already, wealthy regions balk at remitting taxes to the central government. Poor regions are voting with their feet. About 110 million peasants, the biggest migration in world history, have flooded the cities in search of work. Unlike in Maoist times, they are under no one’s control, a nightmarish problem for the central government.

Is there a Gorbachev or a Yeltsin waiting in the wings? It is impossible to say. In any dictatorship, the smart players keep their heads down until the coast is clear. But whoever ultimately seizes the reins of power has to confront Deng’s contradictory legacy. Is the solution to abandon Marxist controls — to unleash economic growth? Or clamp down — and stifle the economy? Either way, the Communist Party is in trouble.

I have no idea what is going to happen next in China. Nobody does. Most people agree that in the short term there is a high risk of chaos. The elite is certainly worried, which is why it is frantically transferring its money out. Dynastic change has rarely come smoothly in the Middle Kingdom. In the 1920s, powerful warlords carved China into fiefdoms. In the absence of a strong central power, some think it can happen again, this time with the rich south and coastal areas trying to break free from the impoverished, backward northwest. If the country degenerates into civil war, the military might step in and play king maker. It might even take over for a few years and try to roll back Deng’s economic reforms.

A peasant revolt, the perennial catalyst for dynastic change, is another strong possibility. “In a very short time,” Mao predicted, “in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back … They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves.”

Mao was forecasting peasant unrest in the 1920s, but he could as easily have been sketching a scenario for the next millennium. A critical question is how much longer the peasants in Yuan Village will wait. “We’re not afraid of getting our heads chopped off,” one of them told me. “We have a saying: If I fall in battle, others will follow in my footsteps.” What if the peasants in Yuan Village one day rebel against Party Secretary Shen and, tasting success, decide to
keep on going? The Communists came to victory on the heels of one peasant rebellion. They can go down to defeat in another.

The old Maoist in me would once have cheered an old-fashioned peasant rebellion. But I know now that overthrowing tyrants only repeats the endless cycle of dynastic history. There would be bloodshed and suffering, and eventually a new emperor would sit upon the throne of China, and the rot and corruption would begin anew. My perspective has changed. I am now middle class and middle-aged, and I am beginning to see an alternative revolution, one that is brewing among China’s own up-and-coming middle class.

What impressed me most in my final months was that many Chinese were becoming content, no,
happy
to stay in China. For the first time anyone could remember, they didn’t necessarily want to join the traditional diaspora. After making a fortune in Japan and Hong Kong, Ferrari owner Li Xiaohua chose to return to the country that once tossed him into a labor camp. Driver Liu told me he planned to go into business when his younger brother came
back
from Germany. And Amaranth Wang came home to China after the Great Wall Sheraton sent her for training to Hong Kong and Brussels. (So much for the Canadian visa officer’s assessment.) Life was so good for the Party elite that even when some of its members were down and out, there didn’t seem to be much point in leaving. With its booming economy and alluringly primitive income-tax system, China was the new Land of Opportunity. Two decades after I snitched on people who begged me to help them escape, I couldn’t
beg
Nanny Ma to leave China. For me, it was a stunning change.

Despite the possibility of short-term chaos, my hunch is that the key to China’s future lies with its new middle class. By staying instead of leaving, these people will transform the country. It will not be simple, and it may not be especially tasteful, but it could be fast. China has already telescoped the industrial revolution and a century of development into a couple of decades.

This first generation of entrepreneurs is going on a wild, pent-up spending spree that has Western companies panting, but eventually it will stop bingeing, calm down and accumulate wealth. Then, like its counterparts elsewhere, the new middle class will be
pushed by its own self-interest to invest in the future. Because it needs a free flow of information to do business, it will operate newspapers and television stations. Because it requires a skilled, healthy work force, it will support education and health care. When the masses of Chinese peasants see an economic reason for their children to stay in school, they will. And the more educated people become, the fewer babies they will want. Then, for the first time in history, it may be possible to extricate China from poverty.

My viewpoint might strike the China-watching community as naive. But I am convinced that the strongest proponent of democracy in China today is its middle class. At Tiananmen Square, it was Beijing’s new shopkeepers who deluged the student strikers with free blankets and bread. It was the Flying Tigers, entrepreneurs rich enough to buy motorcycles, who roared around gathering intelligence on troop movements.

There is every indication China’s middle class will continue to grow exponentially. Former peasants now run airline companies, jade-carving factories and fast-food franchises. Dissidents are getting rich by running bars and restaurants. Ex-convicts monopolize the stalls in Silk Alley, the best open-air market in Beijing. Across China, millions of entrepreneurs are opening florists, private schools, book stalls, video stores and beauty salons. Their factories manufacture virtually everything we buy in the West, from silk underwear to steering-wheel locks. I like to think that some of the budding entrepreneurs making Christmas decorations labeled Made in China were among the 400 million viewers watching when my friends and I sang “Jingle Bells” so long ago.

Many pundits abroad feel China isn’t ready for democracy and human rights, that the mainland is too poor, too vast, too backward for anything but an iron dictatorship. The Chinese, the classic argument goes, need discipline. They yearn for authority. Democracy is too inherently messy, too chaotic for them. Again, I disagree. The Chinese may not use our terminology, but ask a peasant in Yuan Village if he would like a way to dump Party Secretary Shen, preferably without bloodshed, and you will get a resounding yes.

But can the middle class succeed where the Communist Party failed? Can it end China’s age-old curse of too many people and too little food? By the Party’s own admission, one out of every
fourteen Chinese does not have enough to eat or wear. The World Bank believes the number is more like one in ten. Meanwhile, traditional graves, erosion and sprawling industrial zones shrink the amount of arable land. The Party, which swept to power on a pledge to eradicate poverty and inequality, is obsessed not with these problems but with staying in power. Yet the Chinese Communist Party is terminally ill. In my last five years in China, I scarcely met a soul who was interested in joining. Its death will probably be messy, but it could also be quick and painless.

China has changed more in the past two decades than it has in the preceding two centuries. Perhaps it is crazy to think that in my lifetime I will see the end of Chinese feudalism. It has, after all, persisted for four thousand years and, when I recall the abject poverty of places like Gansu, it’s easy to sink into despair. But my optimism returns when I see how energetic and enterprising the Chinese people can be, how quickly Housekeeper Ma picked herself out of the gutter and paid our bill at Pizza Hut. The Chinese are natural entrepreneurs. They may behave like sloths under socialism, but when they can work for themselves, they make money hand over fist. A generation that has never experienced capitalism somehow knows instinctively about things like profit margins and opportunity costs. When Deng Xiaoping said “To get rich is glorious,” it was only the second time in Chinese history that a leader has given capitalism a fighting chance. The previous time was during the Southern Song dynasty, nearly nine hundred years ago. For the first time in centuries, a growing middle class offers a ray of hope that China may one day become a true Middle Kingdom.

I have to admit that China’s future looks very different from the one I had envisioned in the 1970s. Back then, I thought it was going to be the first country in the world where everyone would be equal, where there would be no unemployment, no exploitation, no crime, no ill will, not even a headache. Now I understand that the future of China may be the West’s past. The Chinese are working very hard, but for their own sakes now, the way people in the West did during the industrial revolution, before they decided they wanted a forty-hour work week, labor unions and a minimum wage. Canadian Senator Richard Doyle, a former managing editor of the
Globe and Mail
, told me how he once had to lead a delegation of
Chinese visitors across a boisterous picket line of
Globe
employees.

“They’re on strike,” Doyle explained.

“Can’t you just send them back to work?” a Chinese official asked in astonishment.

The Western world, especially Canada, is far more socialistic than China has ever been, with its free public education, universal medicare, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions and government funding for television ads against domestic violence. Living in China has made me appreciate my own country, with its tiny, ethnically diverse population of unassuming donut-eaters. I had gone all the way to China to find an idealistic, revolutionary society when I already had it right at home.

Yet I do not regret for a moment that I spent the best years of my life in China. I do not regret that I dug ditches or mixed cement or harvested rice — or that I studied Mao and Lenin and Marx. I
am
glad I never had Mao’s image tattooed on my bicep, the way an admiring Mike Tyson did while serving time for rape in an Indiana prison. I was duped, conned, suckered by Maoism. But I do not feel ashamed or sad or even angry that my youthful devotion was betrayed. To paraphrase Tennyson, ’tis better to have believed and lost than never to have believed at all. Those years taught me about who I am, and what kind of world I want to live in. They taught me about life in a way that would have been impossible had I stayed safely at home. If you tell someone in Toronto that you think freedom and democracy are wonderful, they give you a strange look, as if you are raving about how nice oxygen is.

My disillusion with the workers’ paradise has not made me more cynical, just less patient. Having been there myself, I can no longer tolerate dogma in any form. I’m suspicious of anything that’s too theoretically tidy, too black and white. If I adhere to any creed today, it’s a belief in human dignity and strength. Anything I do believe in today has to stand up to reason — and be explainable to my five-year-old son.

I have had a long time to think my second thoughts. I had once planned to live like the original Maoist missionaries. But in the end I took a different Long March. China had changed, and so had I.

Gu Yue, who specializes in playing Mao Zedong in films
.
Photo: Guo Jianong/
Globe and Mail

I
n the 1990s, I often went to the Mao Mausoleum. I liked lining up among the sunburned peasants from the provinces to eavesdrop on their conversations. I would shuffle through the dimly lit vault, guarded by statue-like PLA soldiers, and catch a quick glimpse of his rouged, waxen face. On the way out, I enjoyed the raucous in-your-face gauntlet of souvenir stands, which I suspected were a ploy by Deng to get Mao to turn over in his crystal sarcophagus. I always bought something — a Mao key chain, some slides of the Helmsman lying in state or a cigarette lighter that played “The East Is Red.”

As the one-hundredth anniversary of the Great Helmsman’s birth approached, organizing officials began to fret. To attack Maoism was tantamount to admitting that the first half of Deng’s own career had been a mistake. But fulsome praise was unseemly, too. Deng could not be eclipsed by his old nemesis. Mao’s centenary had to be marked, but no one should get carried away. In Beijing, the sole commemorative activity on December 26, 1993, was a formal meeting in the Great Hall of the People.

I was among the ten thousand invited guests. Most foreign correspondents considered the anniversary so unnewsworthy that they declined. But my life had been shaped by the Great Helmsman, so
I pinned on a small Mao badge, for old times’ sake, and went an hour early.