Riding the Iron Rooster (10 page)

In the year 1192, a Chinese man jumped from a minaret in Canton (Guangzhou) using a parachute, but the Chinese had been experimenting with parachutes since the second century B.C. Gao Yang (reigned 550–559) tested "man-flying kites"—an early form of hang glider—by throwing condemned prisoners from a tall tower, clinging to bamboo contraptions; one flew for two miles before crash landing. The Chinese were the first sailors in the world to use rudders; Westerners relied on steering oars until they borrowed the rudder from the Chinese in about 1100. Every schoolboy knows that the Chinese invented paper money, fireworks and lacquer. They were also the first people in the world to use wallpaper (French missionaries brought the wallpaper idea to Europe from China in the sixteenth century). They went mad with paper. An excavation in Turfan yielded a paper hat, a paper belt and a paper shoe, from the fifth century A.D. I have already mentioned toilet paper. They also made curtains and military armor of paper—its pleats made it impervious to arrows. Paper was not manufactured until the twelfth century in Europe, about 1200 years after its invention in China. They made the first wheelbarrows, and some of the best Chinese wheelbarrow designs have yet to be used in the West. There is much more. When Professor Needham's
Science and Civilization in China
is complete it will run to twenty-five volumes.

It was the Chinese who came up with the first design of the steam engine in about A.D. 600. And the Datong Locomotive Works is the last factory in the world that still manufactures steam locomotives. China makes big, black choo-choo trains, and not only that—no part of the factory is automated. Everything is handmade, hammered out of iron, from the huge boilers to the little brass whistles. China had always imported its steam locomotives—first from Britain, then from Germany, Japan and Russia. In the late 1950s, with Soviet help, the Chinese built this factory in Datong, and the first locomotive was produced there in 1959. There are now 9000 workers, turning out three or four engines a month, what is essentially a nineteenth-century vehicle, with a few refinements. Like the spittoons, the sewing machines, the washboards, the yokes and the plows, these steam engines are built to last. They are the primary means of power in Chinese railways at the moment, and although there is an official plan to phase them out by the year 2000, the Datong Locomotive Works will remain in business. All over the world, sentimental steam railway enthusiasts are using Chinese steam engines, and in some countries—like Thailand and Pakistan—most trains are hauled by Datong engines. There is nothing Chinese about them, though. They are the same gasping locomotives I saw shunting in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1948, when I stood by the tracks and wished I was on them.

The Datong factory was like a vast blacksmith's shop, the sort of noisy, filthy and dangerous factory that existed in the United States in the 1920s. Because none of it is automated, it is indestructible: if a bomb dropped on it today they could be back at work tomorrow. It is essentially just a complex of sheds, but one that covers a square mile. Men squat in fireboxes, hunched over blowtorches; they crawl in and out of boilers, slam bolts with hammers, drag axles and maneuver giant wheels overhead using pulleys. You have to look at the locomotive works very hard to see that it is an assembly line and not pandemonium. And you have to step carefully: there are gaping holes in the floor, and sharp edges, and hot metal; few of the workers wear hard hats or boots. Mostly it is cloth caps and slippers—thousands of frail but nimble workers scampering among hunks of smoking iron to the tune of "The Anvil Chorus."

These workers earn 100 yuan a month, basic pay—about $40—but there are bonus and incentive schemes for high productivity.

Mr. Tan, a worker who was showing me around, said, "Workers in higher positions earn more."

"I thought everyone earned the same."

"Not anymore. The basic pay might be the same, but one of the reforms in China is the bonuses. They vary according to your position and the kind of work you do, and also to where you live and what prices are like."

This sliding pay scale was more or less heretical, but it was the way the Chinese economy now operated. I asked Mr. Tan if this reform of the pay structure had been successful.

He was very open with me. He shrugged and said, "Datong is behind in many ways—say, with regard to pay and conditions. This is an out-of-the-way place. There are many things that can be improved here. Other parts of China are much better off, particularly in the south."

As we talked, donkey carts carried heavy iron fittings through the factory, the donkeys sniffing the fires of the forges and looking miserable but resigned.

Mr. Tan gave me more statistics. At best statistics are misleading, but Chinese ones are like hackneyed adjectives—a million of this, two million of that—and ultimately meaningless and improbable.

"Eighty-six blocks of flats," he said, but so what? The flats are dark and dingy, in bad repair, with coal piles stacked against the kitchen door, and cracked walls, and painted-out slogans, and two beds in every room. The rarest room in China is one that does not contain a bed.

"This hospital has one hundred and thirty rooms," he said. But the hospital is not a pretty place: it is drafty, and not particularly clean, and it is very noisy.

The oddest feature of the Datong Locomotive Works is the portrait of Chairman Mao in the visitors' room. There are very few portraits of Mao on view in China, though another grand Chinese statistic is that there were 70 million Mao portaits hanging at the time of his death in 1976. Deng Xiaoping regards all portraits as feudal and instituted a no-portrait policy in 1981 at a Party Congress that summed up the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution.

"What did you do with your Mao portraits?" I asked Mr. Tan.

"Threw them away."

"Why didn't you keep them with your souvenirs?"

"Because I didn't want to remember."

The slogans on the banners in the factory were not political. Many were about safety, and others about working together. One said
Workers Should Go All Out for the Three Greatest Goals.
I asked what these goals were and was told: timing production so that no work was wasted; keeping the right mental attitude; and increasing productivity. Their virtue was their vagueness. In the past—the recent past—factory slogans had been concerned with Mao worship and smashing imperialists and their running dogs.

It seemed to me that, as this was a machine shop, any machine could be made here. The same technology that produced these boilers and pipes could produce military tanks and cannons.

'That's true," Mr. Tan said. "But we already have a factory that makes tanks in Datong."

I did not know whether his telling me this military secret was deliberate candor or simple innocence, but whatever it was I liked him for it; and I asked him more questions.

Mr. Tan was about thirty, but looked older. The Chinese look young until their mid-twenties and then they begin to look very haggard and beaten. A certain serenity returns to their features when they are in their sixties, and they go on growing more graceful and dignified and become not old, but ageless. Mr. Tan had been through the Cultural Revolution and had been a Red Guard in Datong.

"But I was a follower, not a leader."

"Of course."

"I'm glad it's over. When Mao died, it ended, but then we had a few more years of uncertainty," he said. And then, glancing around the great clanging factory, he added, "But there are people on the Central Committee who would like to take over from Deng and run things their way."

"Is that bad?"

"Yes, because they would set themselves up as dictators."

"Do people write about this in the newspapers?"

'The papers don't write about democracy. Even the very word 'democracy' is regarded as bad. If you say it you're in trouble."

"How do you know that?"

He smiled and said, "I used to write for
The Datong Daily.
But they changed my articles and turned them into propaganda. It wasn't what I had written, so I stopped being a reporter."

"How could you stop, just like that?"

"They stopped me, I mean. I was criticized and given a different job to do with less money. But I don't care. What is the point of writing stories if they are changed when they are published?"

We talked about the rich and the poor—people who stayed in good hotels and people who lived in caves (Shanxi and Gansu provinces were full of cave dwellers). Mr. Tan said there was a big gap, but that you would not necessarily be respected merely because you had money.

"These Chinese people who have money we call 'secondhand sellers.'" He meant hustlers, peddlers, junk dealers. "They don't read or go to museums or temples. They have money, that's all."

I taught Mr. Tan the word "philistine."

I went to the Yungang Caves outside Datong, where travelers used to draw chalk circles on the beautiful frescoes and Chinese workmen would hack them off the wall and wrap them up; and where another lively business was the beheading of Buddhas. Even so, there are plenty of Buddhas left—and several in the larger caves are as tall as a three-story building. But there is something predictable about Chinese sight-seeing, and even the best attractions—which these Buddhist caves were—have been renovated and repainted until all the art is lost. What travelers had begun to destroy by snatching and plundering, the Red Guards finished in the Cultural Revolution, and the only reason the Red Guards were not totally successful in wiping out the sculptures in the Yungang Caves was that there were too many of them. So they survived, but they were not quite the same afterward.

The same was true of the Hanging Temple, the "midair monastery," an odd Wei Dynasty structure of steep stairs and balconies built against the vertical side of a ravine at Hengshan, about forty miles south of Datong. The Chinese flock to it; tourists are encouraged to visit. But it too had been wrecked by Red Guards, and it too had been rebuilt, and a great deal had been lost in the restoration. It looked garish and clumsy and patched.

Sight-seeing is one of the more doubtful aspects of travel, and in China it is one of the least rewarding things a traveler can do—primarily a distraction and seldom even an amusement. It has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits.

Much more interesting to me on this visit to the Hanging Temple was the Valley of the Lings, a great dry gorge in which most of the Lings lived in caves. They had hollowed out parts of the steep walls where there were ledges, and scooped out passageways and chopped windows into them. A few lived in mud huts on the floor of the valley, but the rest inhabited the terraces of cave dwellings with their crudely cut doors and windows in the reddish rock. The place looked very strange and primitive, but walking around, I could see that life was going on as normal—the people tended vegetable gardens, they fished, they did their laundry and cooked and aired their mattresses and ran a few shops and had a school and a brickworks. And they were located in a dramatic cleft in the mountains and must have known how lucky they were to have this space and this good air.

One of the weirder Chinese statistics is that 35 million Chinese people still live in caves. There is no government program to remove these troglodytes and put them into tenements, but there is a scheme to give them better caves. The
China Daily
(19 May 1986) described how a farsighted architect, Ren Zhenying, had designed "an improved cave" by making the caverns larger and adding bigger windows and doors and ventilators. One model cave had forty-two rooms, and a number of three-bedroom apartments. He was quoted as saying, "It stays cool in summer and warm in winter and saves energy and land that could be used for farming."

It seemed to me a kind of lateral thinking. Why rehouse or resettle these cave dwellers? The logical solution was to improve the caves. That was very Chinese.

It was a bit like steam locomotives—those brand-new antiques that they turned out year after year. The design was not bad—it just looked old-fashioned, and in a coal-producing country, the steam locomotive was very economical.

If this was a time warp it was a very reassuring one. My hotel bedroom had a spittoon and a chamber pot. The armchairs had slipcovers and antimacassars, and the varnished desk was covered by an embroidered cloth, and it held a water jug, a propped-up calendar and a vase of plastic flowers. In the drawer was a small bottle of ink, and a penholder with a steel nib. None of it could be called modern, but most of it was unbreakable.

It seems comic and perhaps absurd to most Westerners; but it is not a joke—not in a society where they fish in rivers using nets designed 2000 years ago. China has suffered more cataclysms than any other country on earth. And yet it endures and even prospers. I began to think that long after the computers had exploded and the satellites had burned out and all the jumbo jets had crashed and we had awakened from the hi-tech dream, the Chinese would be chugging along in choo-choo trains, and plowing the ancient terraces, and living contentedly in caves, and dunking quill pens in bottles of ink and writing their history.

Never mind that their uniforms don't fit, that their caps slip sideways and their toes stick out of their sandals; what most Chinese officials illustrate is how bad-tempered and unbending Chinese bureaucracy is. They are in great contrast to the average person who doesn't wear a uniform, who is fairly flexible and who will probably be willing to make a deal. Such hustlers are found in the Free Market—as the new bazaars are called—and not on Chinese railways.

The glowering and barking woman at the gate at Datong Station at midnight was exactly like Cerberus. Three minutes before the Lanzhou train pulled out she slammed the entry gate and padlocked it, leaving a group of soldiers and many other latecomers clinging to the bars and making them miss their train. As a further indignity she switched off the overhead lights of the ticket barrier and left us all in the dark. She would not let me through until the Peking train pulled in. And then she slammed the gate again and made more latecomers watch while I boarded. It is not merely unbending; there is often a lot of sadism in bureaucracy.