The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World (6 page)

Chapter 3

STABILITY IS THE KEY TO HAPPINESS

HOW CHINA’S GOVERNMENT THINKS AND WHY IT ACTS THE WAY IT DOES

The first time I met Lili Li one sweltering Beijing day in 2001, I was nervous. She was no longer the movie star and sex symbol who ruled the Chinese box office along with Ruan Lingyu and Butterfly Wu in the 1930s and 1940s, but an elderly woman in her eighties, decades past her time in the limelight. I was nervous not because I had taught about her films when I was instructing undergraduates as a Harvard Teaching Fellow, but because she was about to become my grandmother-in-law, and I wanted to make a good first impression.

The Beijing traffic was terrible that day, as it is most days, and my fiancée Jessica and I were two hours late to our meeting. Not a way to make a good first impression, I thought. Neither were the streaks of sludge on the bottom of my khakis that must have wiped off from the car door as I got out.

I entered a sparsely decorated home and was led to the living room, where Lili Li waited for us. The only indications that we were in the home of a movie star were the dozens of oil paintings by famed painter Ai Zhongxin, Lili Li’s second husband, lining the walls. A copy of Ai’s famous revolutionary piece, depicting the torment of China’s countryside in the pre-Communist era, hung next to one detailing the tribulations of the Long March. My favorite was of a young Lili Li in her heyday as a movie actress, with her famous large, doe-like eyes and long, flowing, jet-black hair.

Sitting on a wooden chair drinking tea as I entered the room was Lili Li. Her hair had turned a grayish white, and she wore a simple floral shirt. As I walked over to sit next to her, she met me with a warm smile and a hug. Although she was no longer movie-star beautiful, she still had that star quality that lights up a room.

Within minutes, Lili Li had taken me by surprise. Rather than talk pleasantries, as I had expected, she immediately started to tell me about the pain of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and her searing hatred for Jiang Qing, known to the Western world as Madame Mao, leader of the dreaded Gang of Four. Lili Li welcomed me into the family by teaching me about what it had suffered for standing against tyranny.

The pain of the Cultural Revolution was not easily forgotten for Lili Li. Until that day, I had mostly read about the Cultural Revolution in textbooks, heard about it from Western professors, or seen snippets of the turmoil in Western movies, but Lili Li brought the pain and horror to life.

She began by telling me about Luo Jingyu, her first husband, a famed filmmaker and head of the China Film Studio, who had received an award from President Franklin D. Roosevelt for resisting Japanese aggression during World War II. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards, the radical and violent student groups, hounded her husband as they did many elites. Wielding the Red Guards as an instrument of terror, the Gang of Four sought personal power under the cloak of advancing socialism and class struggle. Elites throughout the country were tortured, jailed, or murdered during the tumult. Universities were shut down for a decade, and the country lost decades of progress.

Red Guards tortured Lili Li’s husband until he could bear the pain no more and committed suicide. His body was never found. Only his eyeglasses were returned to her.

Lili Li had also suffered personal torture and public humiliation. Red Guards shaved her hair in front of a seething mob, and hung posters denouncing her in large characters around the country’s capital. They harassed her whole family. Due to malnourishment and stress, my mother-in-law gave birth to my wife and her identical twin sister several months early. My wife remains beautiful but petite, a subtle reminder of China’s dark past and its ongoing ramifications.

Hearing Lili Li speak of the horror of the Cultural Revolution, I kept asking myself: What could she have done to warrant such suffering? Why was she singled out? How many others suffered because of evil politicians? Lili Li’s story, as it turns out, sheds light on the Gang of Four; it explains the harsh past of many of China’s current leaders, how it makes them act the way they do, and why so many Chinese are optimistic about their futures.

The story starts 80 years earlier, when Bette Davis and Betty Grable ruled Hollywood’s silver screen and Yankee greats Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio dominated the baseball diamond. Lili Li was China’s marquee actress and led a Hollywood lifestyle, counting international megastars like Charlie Chaplin as close friends.

At that time, a C-list actress called Lan Ping entered Lili Li’s sphere. She appeared in several movies alongside Lili Li in lesser parts. Lan Ping was good-looking enough to make it into movies, but not memorable enough to capture the hearts of audiences. Known for her fiery temper, Lan Ping battled everyone around her, directors and fellow stars alike, jockeying for better parts and more money. She rarely got her way. Perhaps it was because she lacked talent, or maybe it was just because audiences could sense ice in her heart, but she never became famous until decades later.

Driven by clawing ambition and a willingness to step on others, Lan Ping scored her largest role as the fourth wife of Mao Zedong and the cornerstone of the Gang of Four. She changed her name to Jiang Qing, and began using violence to gain power and exact personal vendettas.

Jiang Qing hated Lili Li and her family personally. She blamed Lili Li and her husband Luo for preventing her rise to stardom. She also hated Lili Li because she came from a heavyweight political background that could limit her power.

Lili Li’s father, Qian Zhuangfei, was an early hero of the Chinese Communist Party, which he had joined in 1925. Unlike many of the early members, Qian came from a wealthy background and gave up a life of comfort to help the masses. He traced his lineage back to Zhang Tingyu, a powerful premier for several decades during the Qing Dynasty under Qing emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Qian also had been close friends with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, whom Jiang Qing despised. Many predicted Qian would become the future prime minister because of his belief in Communism and broad-based support.

Qian became a double agent for the Communists during the bitter Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) between the Nationalists and Communists. Under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, he was in charge of rooting out Communists. Few thought someone with such a gilded background as Qian would turn to his back on riches to become Communist and help the masses.

After ruthlessly torturing a Communist Party member, Chiang Kai-shek discovered Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai’s hiding place. In order to warn the two prominent Communist leaders that they were about to be caught, Qian had to blow his cover. He became a personal target of Chiang Kai-shek and a hero of the Communist cause. Qian died during the Long March, a decisive but tortuous 8,000-mile trek the Communists undertook while being pursued and attacked by the Nationalists, before regrouping at Yan’an in Shaanxi province.

The Party proclaimed Qian a martyr for his sacrifice on the people’s behalf. Monuments have been erected around the country, and schoolchildren still learn about his exploits and sacrifice for the masses. The Chinese Communist Party recently named Qian one of the 50 most important party members in history, despite having been killed over a decade before the official founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Out of friendship and gratitude to Qian for saving his life, Zhou Enlai went out of his way to care for Qian’s daughter, Lili Li.

During the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing sought to eradicate threats to her dominance and exact revenge for petty offenses. She attacked Lili Li’s family with a vengeance reserved for her most bitter enemies and rivals. As Lili Li continued to relate the pain her family had endured to create a better life for everyday Chinese, her eyes turned sad.

In the years before she passed away in 2005, Lili Li continued to tell me more about the evil that Jiang Qing perpetrated, and how it is the duty of a people blessed with so much to do what is right—even in the face of tyranny. She reinforced the importance of standing up to evil and sacrificing for the country. She had even told my wife, Jessica, when she went to America for graduate studies in finance at Boston College, that it was her duty to return to China to help reform the financial system and help make it strong. A life that did not help the country wasted all the sacrifices of previous generations.

What most surprised me about our conversations was when Lili Li told me that, overall, she liked Mao Zedong. She mostly blamed Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four for the tyranny and suffering they had caused the nation. Sure, Mao made mistakes, she said, especially as he aged, but overall he did good things for China.

For me, whose view of Mao until then had been mostly shaped by Western professors and media, I was surprised that she had anything nice to say about the former supreme leader. Westerners portrayed him as evil, on par with Hitler or Stalin, who killed his own people to maintain power. I thought anyone who liked Mao likewise must have been evil, or brainwashed by Chinese propaganda. But Lili Li was not easily swayed by propaganda, cowed by fear, or complicit with the horrors of the Gang of Four. She was someone who personally knew Mao and other leaders, and who had suffered terribly during the Cultural Revolution for standing up to tyranny.

Listening to Lili Li, I began to question my preconceptions about China’s government. If Lili Li, a hero for fighting tyranny and her sacrifice for the country, felt Mao Zedong was not pure evil and had actually done good for the people, what else could the Western media and academia have gotten wrong about China’s leaders and the country overall?

As I spent more time meeting senior officials over the years in informal gatherings, my understanding of the leadership and how they acted started to change. I found the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were fresh and raw wounds for them, not a long-forgotten stage in history. Many Chinese look at contemporary problems through the lens of the suffering they experienced firsthand.

Being from America, where free speech is bedrock, censorship to me was the hallmark of a brutish yet frightened bureaucracy keeping a viselike grip on power. As I learned more, I realized my lens, having been directed by Western media, had analyzed China too naively.

Perhaps government actions that seem thuggish to Western observers are actually protective measures to ensure that the country never faces instability again, and that tyrants like Jiang Qing are prevented from rising. Chinese in general are happy because they compare their current lives with the past, and the progress is obvious to them. They look to freer societies like America as a different path; or perhaps the same one, but at a different stage of the journey.

Criticism of Chinese government actions by Western observers often stems from the misconception that the current leadership led the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. The opposite is most likely true, as many current leaders and their families suffered the most.

Lili Li’s son Luo Dan, my father-in-law, eventually married the daughter of Marshal Ye Jianying, Ye Xiangzhen, sometimes known as Lingzi. Marshal Ye was ranked number three in the Party hierarchy during the Cultural Revolution, behind only Mao himself and Wang Hongwen one of the members of the Gang of Four. Despite Marshal Ye’s power, or perhaps because of it, his children were jailed during the Cultural Revolution, some in solitary confinement.

As soon as Mao died, Marshal Ye led the arrest of the Gang of Four. He acted as the president of the country in the 1980s when he was Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, China’s highest governing body. Deng Xiaoping was another leader at the time; he ranked behind Marshal Ye in the Party chain of command and had also suffered at the hands of tyranny. His son, Deng Pufang, was paralyzed after the Red Guards threw him out of a three-story window at Peking University during the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards denied him medical treatment, which doctors later said might have saved his ability to walk, because his father had been denounced as a capitalist.

Together, Marshal Ye and Deng took charge of China and set the nation on its path towards reform, by creating stability and implementing broad-ranging market reforms that gave rise to today’s economic growth. These two prominent political and military figures both suffered during the Cultural Revolution. As with Lili Li, this personal horror shaped their worldview and influenced their families. Ye’s son, Ye Xuanping, who had also been jailed, became the governor of Guangdong and vice chairman of the People’s Political Consultative Congress. One of Ye’s daughters married Zou Jiahua, who became a vice premier. Another daughter married the former chairman of CITIC bank, the state-owned investment giant.

Xi Jinping, presumed to be China’s next president, also suffered during the Cultural Revolution. He was sent to the countryside for a decade. His father, a former deputy prime minister, was removed from his position and jailed for 16 years. Tragedy also befell Bo Xilai, the current Party secretary of the western municipality of Chongqing and a rising star in the Party. His father, Bo Yibo, was one of the Party’s Eight Immortals, a group of senior officials who held top positions of power in the 1980s and 1990s. Bo Yibo’s entire family, including Bo Xilai, was jailed and shunted off to a labor camp for a decade. Yet Western analysts absurdly portray Bo Xilai as somehow wanting to return to the chaotic and violent days of the Cultural Revolution because of a “Red” patriotic campaign he is promoting in Chongqing.

Personal tragedy during the Cultural Revolution influences the worldview of China’s leaders and citizens. Understanding China’s recent history sheds light on people’s day-to-day choices and optimism, and on government actions. Many Western analysts do not understand or underestimate the effects of recent history on contemporary society.

In his recent book
On China
, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger analyzes Imperial China to provide a framework for understanding the nation and how America needs to deal with a returning superpower. Others try to use an outdated Confucian framework or a Sun Tzu–based military philosophy to explain the country today. Analyzing the Cultural Revolution, and the personal tragedies suffered during the tumult, is a more useful framework for understanding China’s rise.