Authors: Tim Clissold
I couldn’t sleep. For several nights, as I twisted about in the sheets and wrestled with jet lag, I felt breathless, as if a heavy weight was pressing on my chest. And the headaches: not
even Mayor Huang’s
baijiu
had made me feel like that. As I lay there in bed, great stupefying depth-charges boomed at the centre of my brain. I tried to kid myself that it was all
caused by the altitude and rolled over, sweating. But on the third night I woke up with a pain in my chest that I could no longer ignore. My hands became clammy as the pain waxed and waned. Slowly,
it grew in intensity and radiated through to my back and down to the fourth finger of my left hand. I sat for an hour on the edge of the bed, vainly attempting to deny the truth, and watched the
first cold fingers of light creep across the sky. I tried an aspirin; but it wasn’t that kind of problem. We called a doctor.
Fifteen minutes later, three men arrived in what looked like firefighters’ outfits. I was confused. They seemed to have brought an oxygen bottle and wanted to carry me out. I insisted on
walking. We drove for ten minutes to a local clinic where a doctor shoved a needle into my arm and strapped monitors to my chest. I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. I was irritated
by all the fuss; if they carried on that way, I’d end up missing the morning’s skiing. So I was in a filthy temper by the time they’d strapped me to a stretcher, dumped me into
the back of an ambulance and driven me down the valley. Fuming silently, I lay on my back in the ambulance, watching the tops of the fir trees at the edge of my vision turning back and forth
against the dull grey sky as the vehicle wound slowly down the mountain road.
The gentle rocking sent me to sleep. I was exhausted. I must have been in a deep sleep when we arrived at the hospital. I remember vaguely someone putting a probe on my chest again and a big
monitor, but nothing else. I found out later that I had been sedated.
I woke up with a start in a room that I didn’t recognize. Gas bottles and monitors crowded in on me. There were charts on the wall. A nurse came in, looking hassled. She leant over the bed
and, with a slight sideways glance, whispered, ‘You’re in intensive care.’
She waited as it slowly seeped in.
And then, ‘You’ve had a heart attack.’
At first I really had no idea what she meant. How could I have had a heart attack? I was thirty-eight and ran three miles a day. They’d got the wrong guy! I thought
briefly about the
baijiu
and the Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes: not enough there to cause problems, surely. So I sank back into a fitful sleep and waited.
I was fitted with all sorts of drips and monitors and oxygen gauges. The nurse told me that they’d put me on heparin, a blood thinner that might give me a headache. If it got too bad, I
should tell them.
The next day was uneventful, but the following morning I woke up with a crashing pain in my head and called the nurse. She adjusted the heparin dose and went away. Gradually, the pain came back
in my chest. I struggled against a rising sense of panic. I felt my heart stopping and restarting again with a great thump inside my ribcage. But much worse than feeling these breaks in my
heartbeat, I could
see
them as well! I stretched my neck sideways and backwards, craning to watch the green point on the monitor screen that registered the heartbeat. As it moved silently
and relentlessly across the screen, there were long depressions in the wave followed by a sudden burst of activity before it flattened out again. The heart rate on the monitor screen fell from
sixty down to fifty-five and through fifty. The pain increased. I felt great stabs through my chest and a dull all-consuming ache in the temples. My head span. Down through forty-five to forty. At
thirty-eight, great squashy blotches appeared in front of my eyes. As I passed out, I remember hearing, as if through a long tunnel, the frightened voice of the nurse calling for a doctor for
‘
le jeune anglais’.
And then all was black.
I woke up feeling like death.
For a long time, I didn’t move. My arm hurt. I looked down and found that my body was covered in repulsive bruises right down to my feet. Great black veins on my arm stood out half an
inch. I had been given an emergency treatment with a powerful drug that turns blood to water, a risky crisis treatment for someone actually having a heart attack. It dawned on me that this might be
for real.
I lay there for six days, drugged and drifting in and out of sleep. On the sixth day, I was loaded into a tiny jet and flown back to Oxford. I had been given a letter to take with me. It was in
French and I had it translated afterwards. It described all the symptoms and the diagnosis, concluding that my problem was an ‘inferior subendiocardial infarct in a young man with no risk
factors except stress.’ From where I was lying that meant trouble.
I had an angiogram at the hospital. I was frightened before I went in. They had told me that it wouldn’t hurt but that they needed to push a tube up through a vein in my thigh into my
heart while I was still awake. They promised to knock me out a bit while they were doing it; ‘gin and tonic’ said the surgeon. Luckily it was stronger than that. I don’t remember
much except that my feet were very cold; I discovered afterwards that while they were doing the procedure the fire alarm had gone off and I had been wheeled out into the car park for ten minutes
until it was safe to go back inside.
That afternoon the surgeon came in with a smile on his face. ‘Good news,’ he said. ‘Your pipes are as clean as a whistle.’ The diagnosis had been wrong so he sent me home
with an aspirin.
I was completely shattered. How could all this have happened? How could everything have gone so bizarrely wrong? For me personally the whole experience had been an utter
disaster.
My nerve had held during the crisis. I had been too confused to think that I would die there and then, but as soon as it was over I collapsed completely. Thoughts of my children tore at me; my
little one was only four months old. For days afterwards I wept silently and alone.
At first the doctors didn’t know what had happened so they gave me test after test. Once they called me on the phone and told me rather lethargically that the problem might be a cracked
aorta, but I replied that I thought that I’d be dead if that was the case. They seemed to agree and promised to look for something else. The tests eventually showed that I had suffered some
weird viral attack that had inundated my heart and liver and had got into my joints. They said that a combination of my body’s ‘depleted batteries’ and the altitude in France
might have contributed, but that now the trouble was gone and I should rest for a few months and not worry about China.
I didn’t think about China for a long time, but gradually my thoughts drifted back to the other side of the world. My first instinct was just to forget the whole thing.
The problems appeared overwhelming. We were losing nearly twenty million a year while the factory directors careered off in every direction and we argued among ourselves about what to do. With this
new blow to the solar plexus, I thought that the personal cost of continuing was just too high. I decided to quit.
But then, throughout the early spring in England – days, unusually, of sunshine – I thought more and more about what had gone wrong. Strangely, as time passed, the shock had had a
calming effect. It put the business difficulties into perspective and, as the months rolled by, I felt that I could view things more objectively from England.
As I sat in the sunshine, listening vaguely to the birds in the hedges and thinking, I started to have my first doubts about just jacking the whole lot in. China seemed to have worked itself
into my bones. It wasn’t going to be easy to leave all that behind. And what about the people who had given us all that money? Didn’t I owe it to the investors to at least try and sort
out the mess? And the Chinese: for every Pang Yuanweng, there was an eager translator up in the hills, desperate to expand his horizons and embrace the outside world. For every Wang who had stolen
millions from our joint venture in Zhuhai, there was a Mayor Huang and an Ironman Jiang and a Li Wei. What about the people who really believed in what we were trying to accomplish? Or Ai Jian
who’d had the guts to leave the security of his job? No, here was something worth fighting for. I realized that I couldn’t just run away.
And there was another, much bigger reason for wanting to go back. China was in a state of supreme upheaval as it fought to adapt. The pessimists gleefully predicted from the
sidelines that the crisis was so deep that it might destroy China’s existence as a unitary state. I didn’t see it like that. But I knew that when Deng had opened up the gates he had
unleashed centrifugal forces that sent millions reeling; billions and billions of dollars had poured into China along the coast in a great splurge whilst the neglected hinterland remained
destitute. A confused tidal wave of people rose up from the country villages sending a hundred million itinerant labourers swirling towards the sea.
At the same time, with its resources exhausted, the government began wearily removing the props from the old state-owned factories. Staggering under the weight of bloated payrolls, these old
factories began collapsing as though in a great domino pile, dragging down banks and savings cooperatives with them and toppling millions more out onto the streets. And – almost as a side
issue – the newspapers routinely reported the execution of officials caught looting state coffers of millions of dollars and bank managers who lent astronomical sums of money to their
relatives. In just one case, the Bank of China admitted that in their branch in Kaiping, a medium-sized town in Henan Province, they had lost $483 million dollars when five officials fled in
‘a well-organized escape plan involving dozens of fake passports’. Meanwhile a cowed peasantry of nine hundred million toiled on the land while images of unattainable affluence beamed
into the villages from outside.
The contortions required of the Chinese leadership in this immense social and economic balancing act were scarcely comprehensible. For certain, China had to change in order to progress and the
Government had to relax its grip to let that happen. But if central authority should collapse, the population movement would affect the whole world. So, for me, this was a chance of a ringside seat
at a spectacle of massive historical importance. There wasn’t a choice. I felt that I had to go back.
So what had I learnt? From my eight years at the coalface in China, I knew that I was dealing with a society that had no rules – or, more accurately, plenty of rules that
were seldom enforced. China seemed to be run by masterful showmen: appearances mattered more than substance, rules were there to be distorted and success came through outfacing an opponent. The
irony was that the entire nation seemed to be shadow-boxing with itself. Whereas to most foreigners China seemed too centralized, with an all-controlling Party brooding at the hub of a vast
monolithic State, everywhere I had looked there had seemed to be a kind of institutionalized confusion.
I’d realized during the dispute in Harbin that there were two completely separate power structures in China: the Government and the Party. The idea was to provide checks and balances. But
every senior official in the Government was also a senior Party member. Most senior Party members had held top Government positions. They constantly switched jobs between Party and Government so
that real power ended up in the hands of the individual rather than the office. Responsibilities overlapped, which resulted in protracted and pointless power struggles, but elsewhere the system
left no one in control. Ministries fought over territory whilst the army expanded into commercial activities such as manufacturing medicines or investing in hotels. I remember hearing that the
police in Guangzhou were running a chain of cake shops.
The result was a society with some areas of rigid control where the Party delved deep into narrow vertical sections. But these sections seemed roped off from each other, leaving great voids in
between. That was where the Chinese entrepreneur learnt the ropes, where officials routinely manipulated badly written rules: a place of writs and freezing orders, fake letters of credit, judges
who did not understand a case but passed judgement anyway, officials from an Anti-Corruption Bureau who asked for cars and bags of money. One thing was for sure: if you played by the rules you were
finished. I realized that if I was going to go back, I would have to unlearn everything.
I knew that we would have to find a Chinese solution to a Chinese problem. As I thought through what had happened and tried to anticipate the battles ahead, one remark kept coming up again and
again. It went round and round in my mind. It had been made when Pang Yuanweng had told the managers up in Harbin that they had to choose between ‘the factory or the foreigners’.
The factory or the foreigners. That didn’t sound good.
I had sensed early on that Chinese people understandably had exceptionally negative feelings about the country’s colonial history. Conversations often came up about the nineteenth-century
Englishmen who arrived with their gun-ships and their Indian opium. I knew that Chinese people had not forgotten that long period of national humiliation. It was too much part of their heritage:
part and parcel of Mao’s audacious promise that his new People’s Republic would ‘reverse the reversal of history’; the reason why Deng was never going to let Hong Kong
remain British.
I turned Pang’s remark over and over in my mind. But, as I thought about what had happened up in Harbin, I still couldn’t characterize it neatly as a straight fight between Chinese
and foreigners. Despite the slogans and ‘the factory or the foreigners’ remark, I still hadn’t felt any real racism creeping in. Even when the fight was at its most intense, I
hadn’t seen the closed-mindedness, the chauvinism or the essential lack of self-confidence that fuels true racism. When anger spilt over, as it did in 1999 when NATO bombed the Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade and demonstrators threw rocks at the US Embassy in Beijing, it seemed natural that these emotions should have found direction most easily along nationalistic lines.