Mr. China (9 page)

It started off, as it always does, with a fight about the seating arrangements. At these events there is a strict hierarchical order to the places at the table and there is always a prolonged
argument amongst the middle-ranking Chinese officials about where they should sit, with plenty of jostling and pushing, each person protesting loudly that the others should take the more senior
places. Once everyone had settled, during the small talk little glass cups appeared beside each guest’s place and were silently filled with
baijiu
by waitresses who moved noiselessly
through a concealed door in the panelling.

Baijiu
looks like gin but it tastes much stronger. It is distilled from grain and sorghum and there are many famous brands of the drink in China.
Wuliang ye
or ‘five-grain
liquid’ comes from Yibin in Sichuan, and
maotai,
the most famous in China, comes from Guizhou, further south. At the lower end of the market, there is
er guo tou
or ‘the
top of the second wok’, which is distilled in Beijing. A really good bottle of
maotai
can cost the equivalent of several months’ salary.
Baijiu
is always taken neat but,
thankfully, in small doses. The idea is to knock it back in one go with a cry of ‘
Gan bei’, ‘
Dry the cup!’ The problem is that drinking
baijiu
at a Chinese
banquet is compulsory; it is slightly viscous, has a smell like exhaust fumes mixed with a trace of chocolate and seems both fiery and sickly at the same time. It burns the inside of your mouth and
throat and leaves you with a sensation rather than a taste. There is an immediate feeling of heat and tingling that creeps up the back of the neck and radiates out all over the scalp. I already
knew that these formal banquets entailed elaborate drinking rituals designed to get the guests hopelessly drunk, so I braced myself for the deluge.

Baijiu
loosens tongues almost immediately although I’ve never met anybody, even at the heights of alcoholic derangement, prepared to admit that they actually liked the taste. After
drinking it, most people screw up their faces in an involuntary expression of pain and some even yell out. But there were plenty of people who liked the sensation and the atmosphere that a couple
of bottles of
baijiu
produced at a dinner. It created the best parties and the worst hangovers imaginable and the smell seemed to seep out through my pores the following day. A German friend
once summed up the experience perfectly. She said, in her perfect
Hochdeutsch,
that when her husband had been out drinking with his Chinese colleagues and had hit the
baijiu,
it was
as if she had ‘woken up the following morning next to an oily rag that had been soaked in diesel’.

The Mayor was obviously pleased that we had had a good day. He was anxious for foreign investment in Changchun. Although I knew that bringing substantial foreign investment to Changchun would be
good for his career, I still felt that he was genuine in his desire to see the city develop and improve the lives of the people there. So the
baijiu
flowed freely and the atmosphere relaxed.
Nevertheless, as the waitresses started bringing in the plates, I eyed the food with deep suspicion.

The starters were served cold. First, there was a dish of duck webs in a thick yellow sauce. It turned out to be the strongest mustard that I had ever tasted. It sent a searing pain up the back
of my nose and brought tears to my eyes. Next came ‘husband and wife’ lung slices. Mayor Huang roared with laughter as it was translated and poured some more
baijiu.
He told us
that it was a Sichuan speciality: cow’s lung soaked in chilli sauce. The lungs were followed by goose stomachs, a couple of dishes of pickled vegetables, a plate of steamed lotus root and a
chicken that looked as if it had been attacked by a madman with a machete: its bones stuck out at all angles. Then onwards to the hot dishes.

It seemed as if the cooks had entered a contest to serve up the strangest parts of animals in the weirdest combinations. The pile of stacked plates grew on the table in front of us: fish lips
with celery, monkey-head mushrooms, goats’ feet tendons in wheat noodles, ox’s forehead, roasted razor-blade fish and finally a tortoise in a casserole. There was one dish that looked
like a bowl of ribbon pasta served up plain and without the sauce, but it was crunchy and almost tasteless. It couldn’t be pasta, so I asked what it was. ‘A Shandong speciality,’
said the Mayor. ‘Steamed rabbits’ ears.’

Halfway through the main dishes, the conversation, by then well-oiled with
baijiu,
was flowing freely. Mayor Huang was telling us about Changchun’s ambitions to be China’s
Hollywood. There were several large film studios in the town and he wanted to set up an international film festival. The Mayor said that obviously they’d never be able to compete with
Hollywood.

‘Your America is so much more developed than our China,’ he said. But Pat replied that, from everything he had seen, it looked like China was catching up fast.

‘You see, China’s exactly like the States was in the late 1800s,’ said Pat.

This remark was greeted with a faint smile from the Mayor and a polite gesture with his chopsticks towards a plate of duck’s tongues.

Pat went on. ‘Yeah, thanks. Y’see, China’s standing right on the verge of a huge expansion, just like the States in the late 1800s. Everything changed in the thirty years from
about 1870 to 1900. The same’s gonna happen here,’ he enthused, ‘but this time it’ll be bigger ‘n’ quicker.’

Once this had been translated, it was obvious that the Mayor was warming up. Pat now had his full attention. How could any Chinese official fail to be flattered and excited by this comparison
with the world’s greatest economic superpower? The idea waxed in his mind. It was clearly time for another toast.

‘Y’see, it’s like this,’ Pat went on. ‘America and China are the only two countries in the world that are big enough to support big companies with just their own
domestic market.’ Another
gan bei. ‘
That gives you economies of scale in your own market. No one else can match that. China’s the last market on earth that has that
potential. A billion-plus people out there working their asses off for a better life. Just like the States a hundred years ago!’ With the slightest pause to gauge the reaction, Pat raised his
glass and ended with a flourish, ‘So, you see, we’re really just the same!’

Another round of toasts, howls of laughter and invitations to have more tortoise. By this time, the table seemed to be creaking under the weight of stacked-up plates and the waitress arrived
with another clay pot.

‘Eels,’ said the Mayor.

‘Great!’ we all replied.

‘In the States, y’see, it all started with the railroads. But you know what, in China, it’s gonna be auto!’ he said, fixing the Mayor with a jubilant stare.
‘Trucks, buses, cars, limos, tractors, the lot, millions of ‘em – and that, Mr Mayor,’ he said, ‘is why we are here today.’

I could see, through rapidly thickening clouds of cigarette smoke, that Mayor Huang was starting to enjoy himself. But I was struggling. I had been taken on by two of the officials from the
Investment Bureau who were alternately toasting me at every opportunity. I was beginning to feel that familiar queasiness rising up in my stomach, but I was forced into trying another Chinese
cigarette whilst Pat worked his magic with the Mayor. Protestations that I didn’t smoke were brushed aside as entirely irrelevant and another box of Red Pagoda Mountain, China’s best,
arrived on the table.

Pat was in the midst of convincing the Mayor that it had been a stroke of destiny that he had ended up in charge of industry in this northern city of Changchun. What might have seemed to the
Mayor like an exile to the desolate northern rust belt could now be turned into a chance of glory. His was to be a role at the centre of an economic supernova that was about to be detonated by this
Wall Street banker.

‘All you have to do is give us a few good factories and we’ll light the blue touchpaper. It’s gonna be an economic explosion that’ll go down in world history!’

It was all getting a little out of hand. Another round of toasts followed, with speeches, general agreement on how much Chinese and Americans all had in common and several more glasses of
baijiu.
Pat ploughed on.

‘Back in the 1870s, there were thousands of small-scale businesses all over the States, “Mom V Pop shops”. But they couldn’t survive. The smart guys built operations on a
scale where the smaller ones couldn’t compete, and then they just took ‘em out.’

‘Took them out?’

‘Yep, crushed them or bought them up. They built markets right across the country. And the railroads were key to all that. If you couldn’t shift goods around the country, you’d
never grow a national market.’

‘But in our China, the iron roads indeed have limits. With the tall blue-green mountains and the endless yellow plains, our China is vast and rather unsuitable for this new
machinery.’

A sideways glance at the translator. ‘What? Er, yeah, right,’ Pat said recovering quickly. ‘But anyway, here it’s the
roads
that matter. Everywhere I’ve
been, the government’s building highways. Just imagine the thousands of trucks needed to move all this stuff around China. People like Vanderbilt, back in the last century, they just bought
up all the small railroad companies in America and joined ‘em together. Then you had a national railroad system that no one could rival. We can do that here with auto.’

More toasts.

‘The railroads in the States, they needed steel, millions of tons of it. So then they started building huge steel plants. Pittsburgh was the centre of steel for years.’

A toast to Pittsburgh.

‘Then Carnegie brought in new technology. By the end of the 1890s, the mills in Pittsburgh could produce a thousand tons of steel a day with only a handful of workers.’

A toast to a thousand tons a day with only a handful of workers.

At this point there was a minor distraction from the story as a plate of black scorpions arrived. The Mayor explained that you eat them whole with a couple of pieces of shredded radish and
popped in a few to show us. I said I thought they were poisonous but he said reassuringly, ‘Not if they’re cooked properly.’

‘But the really interesting thing didn’t happen until all these businesses, you know, the railroads and steel mills, got capital. That’s where Junius Pierpont Morgan came in.
J.P Morgan, the biggest kick-ass financier in history. Morgan figured that if he bought up lots of different companies all in the same industry, forced ‘em to work together rather than
against each other, then he could take out the competition in the market. That way, one plus one equals three! Yeah! So his idea was to build up something big that dominates a market, and sell it
on for more than he paid for each piece! Morgan did that with US Steel. After Carnegie sold out to him, Morgan just bought up all the competition. We can do that here.’

At this point, the soup arrived. Despite the fact that it looked like a bowl of lukewarm pond water with a few weeds floating about, it was good news since it signaled that we were nearing the
end of the meal.

‘So, Mr Mayor, Changchun’s gonna become the Detroit of China. The assemblers are already here and what you need is components. We’re gonna buy up factories, pump in a few
hundred million and build the biggest components company in China.’

‘The biggest components company in China!’ The Mayor just loved it. ‘Just like J.P. Morgan!’

He raised his glass. ‘To the J.P. Morgan of China!’

More toasts, cheers, hoots of laughter and the grand finale arrived.

‘Deer’s whip!’ said the Mayor.

A waitress had brought in a flat white oval dish and placed it centre stage. In the middle, chopped up neatly into sections and then meticulously reassembled, surrounded by carefully arranged
pieces of broccoli and carrot and with just the faintest traces of steam rising up from the edges, was unmistakably an enormous penis.

‘Deer’s dick! Oh, Lord, how horrible!’

The Mayor, smiling broadly, leaned forward, picked up a piece with his chopsticks and placed it on my plate. The tip, so it seemed, was the best part.

I don’t quite remember how we got out, but I do remember the freezing air hitting me as we stumbled towards the cars. And I also remember noticing the steady and
purposeful stride of the Mayor as he walked over to a waiting group of officials to discuss our itinerary for the next day. It left me with a vague suspicion that whilst our cups had been filled
with
baijiu,
his might have contained just the mineral water that I had noticed earlier on the sideboard. But, as the cars drove off, I put my mind more to controlling the waves of nausea
welling up in the pit of my stomach.