Authors: Tim Clissold
As huge amounts of cash had trickled slowly down to street level the lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese had improved unrecognisably and, probably irreversibly. Everything had
changed in the coastal cities: the appearance and dress of the people living there, their access to information, transport, food and decent living accommodation, their choice in education and
health care. Many families began to send their children overseas to university while back in China the cityscapes had changed so much that I felt like a complete stranger in the country that I had
made my home.
When I went down to Shanghai after a three-year gap, I didn’t recognize the place. I told the taxi driver to keep driving around on the huge elevated roads that sweep across the city so
that I could gape at the vast towers and skyscrapers dominating the skyline; I felt like a child staring out of a car window at the Christmas illuminations. Occasionally I could pick out the odd
familiar building squashed in between the towers, but not often.
I thought back to the time years earlier, in the late 1980s, when I had first gone over to Pudong on the eastern bank of the river in Shanghai. Pudong lies opposite the Bund, the line of
imposing colonial buildings where I had visited the Land Bureau with the pinstriped bankers from New York. Back then, before it was chosen as China’s main development zone in the early 1990s,
I had enjoyed a walk in the country. I remember seeing the occasional water buffalo squelching around in the mud and an ancient temple where women with perfect white hair and faded blue cotton
jackets hobbled across the stone flags to push joss sticks into the huge piles of ash in the three-legged bronze incense burners. Ten years later, the fields had disappeared for ever but the temple
had been preserved and made into a museum. It stood just opposite the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The crush of skyscrapers towered eighty storeys above the temple roofs, the towers of steel and glass
overwhelming the stooping curves of the old temple eves and the cracked glaze on the tiles; no one burns incense there any more.
Further on, the roads through the industrial parks behind the city stretch for miles towards the horizon, past huge car-assembly plants, software institutes and microchip foundries. Shanghai had
been swept up in the same mad dash for growth that had gripped Shenzhen and Zhuhai in the days after Deng’s Southern Tour. But whereas the Pearl Delta down in the south has a population of
maybe a hundred million, the Yangtse River Delta, which spills through the sprawling waterways and oyster beds into the sea near Shanghai, is home to nearly three hundred million people. The river
connects the financial centre to the huge population of the inland provinces: Sichuan alone has a hundred million people, Jiangxi eighty, Hubei another ninety, and so it goes on, each province
bigger than a European nation.
The inexorable industrialization of the Chinese countryside creeps further inland, crawling along the river’s banks, seeping into the mountain villages in its never-ending search for
labour. There is an inevitability about China’s march onwards; those stamping feet have their own relentless rhythm – in a few years the Yangtse basin will be the largest manufacturing
base in the world. It’s only a matter of time, and the changes churned up in its wake will affect the whole world. At its centre, in ten years the Shanghai Stock Exchange had grown from
nothing into one of the largest in Asia; for a well-run Chinese company, raising a hundred million has become almost routine. The Chinese economy has reached a self-sustaining momentum and it seems
as if the explosion that Pat predicted all those years earlier at dinner with the Mayor of Changchun has finally happened. The foreigners helped light the fuse but much of it has been powered by
the Chinese themselves.
It seemed for a while that this new economic growth might spark a second foreign investment wave, a decade after the first; billions were lost by foreign investors, but they still kept coming. I
had been forced to dismantle entirely my assumptions about China and relearn all the basics, but many investors still appeared supremely confident that China would eventually view the world their
way, that it would eventually ‘see reason’ and begin to conform to the familiar business school model. But as China continues to press ahead with opening up to the world at a speed that
can be astounding, my hunch is that it will always retain an intense sense of its own place in world history. It remains more complex, more in tune with its unique ‘Chineseness’ and in
tune with its own past and much less conformist than can be imagined by visitors like Charlene Barshevsky, the US Trade Representative who described the World Telecoms Agreement as ‘a triumph
for the American way.’ We’ll see.
As I thought about Old Shi, Chen Haijing and Madame Wu with a clearer perspective once the battles were over, those three characters, for me, gave a picture of China in
transition. Old Shi, the risk-taker, the entrepreneur always running out of time, had escaped from the system. To me, he represented the type of Chinese who took all those experiences of turmoil
and wild reversals under Mao and Deng and learnt to survive by keeping ahead of the game. Completely unbound by convention or regulation, he remained an irrepressible showman with the
short-termism, adaptability and speed needed to run rings around his opposition. Unsurprisingly, his business is thriving down in the valley and he recently set up a new factory in Shanghai. He
started to get export orders from America and every so often he calls me in Beijing and we have lunch.
Chen Haijing has his foot in both camps; he has traces of Shi’s business flair but for some reason he hasn’t made the break. Stuck in some middle ground, halfway between official and
entrepreneur, he has been forced into a constant compromise, endlessly balancing interests within his business and the local government. He represents the entrepreneur within the system, the man
struggling with the basic incompatibility between China’s economic and political systems, the mismatch between Shi’s raw Victorian capitalism and the largely unreconstructed and poorly
paid Communist bureaucracy that still controls the country. In retrospect, it was not surprising that our difficulties in Jingzhou involved land; problems concerning land are common throughout
China. It is a highly valuable asset that is still controlled by officials who earn a miserable wage. It is hardly surprising that there have been so many problems with officials misallocating land
in return for favours.
And Madame Wu. For me, she represents the change-lessness of China. She is the Qianlong Emperor who will argue for months about the
kow-tow,
accept the tribute gifts and then continue
serenely on her path, undeflected by the foreigners who have come before her. In the end, she had survived without needing to compromise. In fact, she came out on top. She had started off with a
Beijing brewery with millions of dollars of bank debt but ended up with the loans paid off by American investors and a new partner, Tsingtao, which was the strongest beer company in China. I had to
admire her for that. And some understanding had sprung up between us. We’re still in touch and every Mid-Autumn Festival she sends me mooncakes, little round pastries stuffed with red
bean-paste. It makes me laugh. I’m sure I told her that I can’t stand mooncakes.
Pat is still there, running his components business. The plan to consolidate the industry has been quietly jettisoned, but he is still on the trail for new capital. Last time I heard, he was
raising more money in the States to invest in the export business. In the earlier years, some of his rivals used to mutter that raising so much money and getting into difficulties after investing
so quickly had ruined the private equity market in China. But that always sounded like sour grapes to me. Out of all the China funds set up in the early 1990s, his was the only one to survive. And
you know, I still admire him; China didn’t work out according to his financier’s equations but at least he had the guts to try.
China had been modernized in a way that I wouldn’t have believed possible ten years earlier, and the Government delivered on its promise of stable growth. The lives of
millions of ordinary Chinese had been improved beyond recognition as the planners began to fade into the past. But I still knew that the coastal region was the showcase and that the inner provinces
remained poor. Whenever I flew west from Beijing, I gazed down over the endless expanse of ‘Yellow Earth’, the great loess plateau that stretches inland beyond the Taihang Mountains at
the western fringes of Beijing. It was there, in Shanxi Province, that Ai had worked with the peasants. I tried to imagine what it would be like down there on the dusty yellow soil, in the
landscape of crumbling earth pitted with ravines. On a flight out westwards, a colleague once told me that she had heard how a group of peasants in Shanxi had won a competition and had been invited
up to Beijing where their hosts had treated them to a banquet. Some of them had cried when they saw the table: so much food, so much waste when back home there was nothing.
I wanted to know what it might have been like for Ai in the fields; I wanted to get some feel of the land. I’d travelled through Shanxi by car and by train, but that was too insulated. I
decided to go by bike. I would go right into the guts of China, unprotected so that I could see what it was really like.
I flew to Xi’an in central China, bought a bike and rode it back to Beijing alone. It was a journey of nearly a thousand miles through some of the poorest parts of China. The first few
days were uneventful as the roads wound through rolling countryside and picturesque villages with neat cave dwellings carved out of the hillsides and vines and gourds growing around the doorways.
But on the third day the landscape changed.
Over the course of the morning the countryside became rockier and steeper. The road became narrower and more congested as I climbed up through a valley. I suddenly noticed a couple of coal mines
over on the other side. I knew that up in Datong where Chang Longwei had spent all those years in a gearbox factory there was a big coal-mining region, but that was several hundred miles to the
north. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would need to go through a coal-mining area so far south, but I pressed on.
By midday the entire landscape was black. The valley narrowed down to a few hundred yards across and the craggy sides towered over me. I realized that I was in a ‘third front’ area
where Mao had hidden all the military facilities in the 1960s. Huge factories were tucked up in side valleys under great clouds of yellow smog. The smell of sulphur hung in the air.
I’d never seen such pollution: the soil was black, the air was thick with diesel fumes and factory smoke. The rivers had run completely dry, their beds a mass of smashed rock and thorn
bushes. Every few miles I saw slag heaps and the towers with the wheels on top that lowered down the miners in their cages. Even from a distance these coal mines looked badly managed and much too
small to be economically viable. Local village committees ran them, but they had no access to cash or resources to put in proper safety measures.
Everywhere was black and the whole valley was filthy: the rocks were black, the soil was black, clothes and faces were black, and there were no trees. Coal dust was in my eyes and in my lungs,
its smell was in my nose and the taste was in my mouth. By the time that I struggled to the head of the valley, I was filthy and exhausted. I stopped for a rest.
As I sat by the roadside to catch my breath, I looked up and my heart sank. A few hundred yards ahead the road disappeared into a tunnel. I hadn’t thought of that particular hazard so I
took out my maps. Avoiding it would involve a thirty-mile detour. I just didn’t have the strength for that; I’d done nearly eighty miles and had to travel another forty to the next big
town and it was already early afternoon.
I looked into the darkness, past the hulking trucks and through the thick fumes, and I could make out the vague shape of the tunnel’s exit at the far end in a yellowy light. So I plunged
in. But halfway through I was in pitch darkness. Trapped next to a wall I couldn’t see, with huge trucks rumbling past next to me, I was choked with filthy diesel fumes and deafened by the
air horns blasting in my ears. Suddenly I ran into something sticky on the road’s surface and I felt my wheels twitch sideways. Eventually I got out, with my nerve almost broken, black from
head to foot. That was the only time in China when I remember being really frightened.
As I came out of the tunnel and into the sunlight, I saw that an oncoming truck speeding towards me was shedding its load. The driver hadn’t noticed and carried on as huge thick logs ten
feet long bounced along the road towards me like matchsticks. I managed to avoid them but the near miss completely shattered my nerve. I threw myself on the ground and lay in the dirt and rubbish
at the side of the road, my chest pounding.
I often think of that valley in Shanxi. Every day, mine workers go through that tunnel. Every day, they breathe the polluted air and the diesel fumes and scrape the coal dust
from their eyes. There’s nowhere else to go; no other employment. Many have to serve a life sentence in those horrible mines. When I got back to Beijing, I saw in the papers that fifty-two
miners had been killed in an underground explosion the day after I had been there.
The vast majority of rural Chinese, like those miners in Shanxi, are still yoked to the land, mired down in the daily struggle, stuck out on the yellow earth. Their lives are also improving, but
slowly, too slowly. And the others, the ones who have just emerged from that five-thousand-year tunnel to face the oncoming logs, the people with their mobiles in the smart restaurants along the
coast, they know that they’re just one step ahead. That’s why they fight so hard for what they’ve got. To understand that context – the ancient country with its archaic but
beautiful writing system, its burden of five thousand years of history where for hundreds of millions of ordinary people the iron tree might finally blossom – to understand all that is to see
the Chinese for what they are. Then the Shis and the Chens, the Changs, the Ais and the Lis become people just fighting for a better life. The illusion is broken and our differences melt away.