Authors: Tim Clissold
‘Those rules are internal and not to be told to the outside.’
‘What does that mean? If I don’t know what the rules are, how can I obey them?’
‘Our regulations are very clear.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, but that’s not my point,’ I replied. ‘If I don’t know what rules you have, I can’t follow them.’ After a few more rounds, I gave
up. I never did get a copy. I discovered years later that this ‘internal rule’ concept was applied across the board in China, even to things like income tax. It’s hardly
surprising that China’s tax system is so inefficient when no one knows what they’re meant to be paying. At the university, the only thing I ever knew for sure was that it was lights out
at ten-thirty with all the doors locked. If you were caught with a girl after hours, you’d be thrown out of the country.
Vast amounts of time seemed to be taken up by the most mundane tasks. I stood in endless queues at the university canteen, where they served only cabbage and rice for months on end in enamel
bowls shoved through a hatch in a brick wall. I waited an hour and a half for a shower. But as the months rolled on, I settled into a semblance of routine.
The Beijing autumn is very short and after a few weeks of golden leaves and vermilion sunsets, winter howls in from Mongolia. My room, which faced north, was a stark concrete box on the second
floor of a brick dormitory building. It came with an iron bedstead, a forty-watt bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling – and not much else. In winter, the freezing wind blew straight
through the metal-framed windows until I sealed them up with tape. The cold was bad enough, but the cruellest part of the winter was the dryness. Wood cracked, earth dried to powder and skin
creased and aged in the desiccating cold. Every morning, as I scraped a thin layer of ice off the inside of my window, I tried to keep warm with a small electrical stove. Stoves were banned and the
authorities soon found me out. They monitored the electricity on each floor. There was a search but I refused to hand the heater over. Then one day the electrical wire, which was far too thin for
the current, burst into flames, leaving a large black hole in my bedcovers. After a huge row, my stove was confiscated and I took to wearing several layers of clothes.
Cleanliness suffered in the winter. The only hot water came in a green plastic thermos left outside the door each morning, and it was difficult to keep clean. For months on end, I felt grubby,
as if I were on a camping holiday. Clothes became grimy because there was only a stone sink and a bucket for washing. I used to wash my jeans there, but in winter the water was so cold that the
bones in my hands ached unbearably. Wringing out clothes was agony. Afterwards, when I hung them out to dry, they froze solid in minutes. I often carried them back inside clutched under my arm with
the legs sticking straight out in front like a cardboard cut-out.
When I eventually ventured into the Chinese students’ domitories, I felt a lot less sorry for myself. I had never seen anything like it. Seven students crammed into a tiny room in bunk
beds, with inadequate lighting, wire cages over the windows and not much in the way of heat or sanitation; and that for the best scholars in China. The rooms were arranged off a central corridor
and the students threw rubbish out of their rooms on to the floor for collection later on. The walls were blackened to waist height and hadn’t been painted for years. The girls’
dormitories were even worse because they cooked on makeshift electrical stoves perched on top of piles of bricks in the corridors so that the floors were covered in scraps of food, pools of dirty
water and discarded tins. At the end of the corridor, where the toilets were, great piles of used sanitary towels had been tipped out of the wire baskets in each cubicle and swept out over the
floor into the corridor outside. The concrete floor was cracked with potholes, so it was impossible to clean up properly.
Although the dull winter months in Beijing could be dispiriting at times, the planned economy still provided some light relief. Beijingers have a tradition of eating cabbage in the winter. It
resists the cold and doesn’t get damaged by the frost so, in earlier years when food was less plentiful, the Government organized cabbage to be brought into Beijing and distributed free to
the people. Each year, from early November, long convoys of trucks, queued up on the outskirts of the city, waiting until nightfall to rumble in with their vast loads of cabbage into the city.
Thousands and thousands of tonnes of the vegetable were brought in and piled up at the main intersections in the city. Teams of elderly women guarded it by night and handed it out during the day.
The whole process took about a month and the huge mounds on the street corners became a familiar sight. However, in the run-up to that first winter in Beijing, the government set the price too high
and the peasants in the surrounding countryside grew nothing but cabbage. The result was a massive glut. The piles of cabbage grew and grew until they were ten feet high and hundreds of yards long.
After a month, cabbage leaves were everywhere: on the pavements, on the roads, inside buildings, stacked up on window ledges. The leaves soon mashed down into a thick, slippery green slime on the
ground. Bicycles collided, cars bumped gracefully into each other and people spent half their time picking themselves up off the floor and scraping cabbage sludge off their trousers. It got so bad
that the Mayor of Beijing went on the radio and made a speech during which he said that it was everyone’s ‘patriotic duty’ to eat cabbage. Although all the political sloganeering
over the years had dulled the Beijingers’ senses, the Mayor’s remark provoked howls of derision and, to this day, long-leafed cabbages are still known in northern China as
‘Patriotic Cabbage’. As winter changed to spring, there was an almost tangible relaxation as the ripples from Tiananmen receded together with the cold. Even the political campaigns on
campus became half-hearted. I heard that there were still compulsory Marxism lessons on Tuesdays, but the students generally sat around reading novels. The teachers were bored senseless, just like
the students, so they made no attempt to impose discipline. Gradually, the flavour of life changed. As the spring came round, the cherry trees blossomed and the regimen as well as the weather
seemed to thaw out.
Between the lighter moments provided by the planned economy and the restaurant menus, living in China was much harder than I had expected. All the same, I felt that I was peeling back the layers
to find out what was at the core. I made slow but steady progress with the language and after a year or so I could enjoy a simple conversation with a stranger. Although I knew that life in China
could be tough, I felt I was slowly mastering it, but from time to time I came across small incidents where I felt a hardness that I had never known at home and which would set me back a few weeks.
I remember once seeing an old man, dazed on a sidewalk, who’d been knocked off his bicycle and concussed. He was sitting unattended in the broken pieces of a pot of pickled vegetable roots
that he had been carrying, surrounded by pedestrians all arguing about whose fault it was. Occasions like that would shake me. Another time I met a leper sitting on the pavement not far from
Tiananmen Square. His skin was terribly sore, red and messy, and his hands were all distorted. I went to get a carton of milk and fitted a straw into it for him. I passed by the same place about
half an hour later and found some people in uniform questioning him sharply, wanting to know where he had found the milk. A truck arrived. They threw him in the back like a sack of potatoes. I
screamed at them, but it was as if I wasn’t there. I was an embarrassment. As they drove off, he looked at me out of the back of the truck and smiled Mao Zedong’s smile, serene but
expressionless. I’ll never know quite what it meant but I was starting to sense a sort of protective detachment that some Chinese people needed in order to survive.
At the same time, of course, there were many kindnesses, small acts of charity that meant so much to me as I struggled in unfamiliar surroundings. They showed the human side of China.
These experiences made me feel as if the rigidity of the regime in China magnified each side of human nature: the good and the bad; the pettiness and the generosity. But what would it make out
of me? I felt under stress dealing with such a foreign environment, and if the pressure really built, which way would I turn?
After a year at the university I was rapidly running out of cash. I had been studying full time and had quickly got through everything I’d saved in Hong Kong so I found a
job writing up books in my shaky Mandarin in an office down the road. I used to get there on my bike each day, about half an hour if the wind was with me.
A sandstorm blasted through Beijing one day in April 1992 and caught me on my way to work. The dust storms in northern China in the late spring are often so dense that at times they blot out the
sun and the light fades into dusky sepia colours. It took me an hour straining against the wind before I got to the office and when I arrived I was filthy. After I’d rubbed the grit out of my
eyes, I found on my desk a letter from England. A friend had sent me a copy of a job advertisement from the
Financial Times
in London. ‘Mandarin Speaker Needed by Large Financial
Services Company.’ It looked interesting. They needed someone to help them advise investors how to get into China. My mind’s eye instantly flew back to the short interview in London and
that awful uncluttered desk. I could have written that job spec three years earlier when I’d gone to see Old Roy back in London.
I cobbled together a CV and sent it off. When I called the number later in the week, the voice at the other end of the line was chuckling. ‘You won’t believe who it is,’ I
heard him say through the crackles from London. ‘It’s your old firm. Andersen!’
‘What?’ I said as it slowly sank in.
‘Yeah, it’s Arthur Andersen!’
‘Yes!’ I shouted punching the air. The interview was a walkover and, two years after I left them in London, I went back to rejoin the firm in Hong Kong that summer.
During my time in Beijing, I had started to figure out that China was ruled by complex and ceaselessly shifting alliances within a group of very old men, known as the
‘Eight Immortals’. I never made any serious attempt to understand how it all worked, but at the centre of these fluid coalitions was a man called Deng Xiaoping.
Deng had been a senior member of the Red Army prior to Liberation and for years afterwards he was a key figure at the top levels of power. His reputation was that of an able, pragmatic
politician who was more interested in getting the job done than in worrying about political dogma. After the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, he rose through the ranks and ended up as
the Number Two to China’s President Liu Shaoqi. But in 1966 both Liu and Deng fell from power during the Cultural Revolution.
Mao and Liu were old political rivals, and Liu had gained the upper hand when the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s mad dash for economic growth, ended in famine. Liu tried to put China on to a
path of stable growth based more on sound economics than politics. But it didn’t last long; Mao hit back in 1966 when he launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution by encouraging
young men and women to break all forms of social convention by attacking ‘bad elements’ in society and waging ‘perpetual revolution’.
The country rapidly descended into chaos. Schools and universities stopped functioning when the more radical students became Red Guards. They started to attack anyone suspected of being
Mao’s political opponent, labelling them ‘Rightists’ or ‘Capitalist Roaders’ and parading them through the streets in dunces’ caps. Factories ceased production
as the Red Guards formed ‘Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams’ and demanded that the workers spend hours a day in study sessions. Rival factions of Red Guards set up speakers in the
streets that blared out propaganda until the early hours, and festooned walls and gateways with posters criticizing each other. Mao personally pasted a ‘big character poster’ on to the
doors of the Great Hall of the People calling for the masses to ‘bombard the headquarters’, and held a series of massive rallies, one of which was nearly a million people strong, in
Tiananmen Square.
With Mao’s implicit support, the Red Guards began to target senior figures in the Government, ransacking their homes and arresting family members. Social order collapsed completely. No one
attended to the normal functioning of the State; everything revolved around politics. Government ministries stopped functioning because officials were too frightened to go to work, and large crowds
of Red Guards besieged foreign embassies. A huge notice was erected on the front of Beijing station that summed up the nonsensical politicization of the times: ‘Better a socialist train
that’s late than a capitalist train on time.’
Liu Shaoqi, China’s President and Mao’s principal rival, and Deng, as Liu’s Number Two, rapidly became targets. There is a photograph of Liu standing in the Central Government
compound, Zhongnanhai, being denounced by a large crowd of thugs wearing Red Guard uniforms. One can almost smell the fear coming out of the picture. Liu died a year later on the floor of a jail in
Kaifeng.
But while many around him perished, Deng survived. From 1967 to 1974, stripped of all power, it seems that he spent most of his time working in a tractor factory in Jiangsu. His son
‘fell’ out of an upstairs window in Beijing University where he had been studying physics and has been paralysed from the waist down ever since. After Mao died in 1976, there was a
protracted power struggle before Deng emerged triumphant three years later. Paradoxically, he succeeded by resigning. It forced his opponents to resign as well, whilst he continued to manipulate
real power from behind the scenes. One of his first steps was to start to rehabilitate many of the people who were unjustly attacked during the Cultural Revolution and insist on the trial of the
Gang of Four, the chief protagonists of the chaos, led by Jiang Qing, Mao’s third wife. There was a televised trial lasting several weeks where Madame Mao repeatedly shouted down the judges
and refused to recognize their right to try her. She claimed that she was acting on Mao’s orders and that the court had no authority to question him: ‘I was Mao’s dog,’ she
said. ‘What he said “bite”, I bit.’ She was sentenced to death ‘suspended for two years to see if she would behave’ and spent the next twelve years in jail,
making cloth dolls, until she committed suicide in 1991.