Riding the Iron Rooster (23 page)

I said, "I was here six years ago and went to a huge commune outside Canton. Everyone said it was a model commune. It was a success. Factories. Rice fields. Fruit trees. A canning industry. I went to a woman's house and she had a radio, a television, a refrigerator—"

"She was the only person in the commune who had those things! It was a trick to impress you!"

"I just want to know what's there now," I said.

"It's all been broken up into
geti hu.
"

Single-unit households, that is: every family for itself, or the family business.

"Is it working?"

"Yes, much better than before."

"So if I go out there and ask the people how things are, they'll say, 'Wonderful.'"

'That is correct."

I said, "How will I know they're not trying to impress me? Maybe that's a trick, too."

"No, no, no," this Chinese man said. "Nowadays, people tell you what is in their hearts. They are not afraid anymore."

"But they swore to me that the model commune I saw was running perfectly."

"What did you expect them to say?"

That was a good point. Why should they belittle it to a foreigner, especially when it was such a loss of face to do so?

"That commune was so large," my Chinese friend said, "that a person had to take a train to see the head of the committee."

"Is that a figure of speech?"

"Yes. It is a joke."

For uninteresting reasons I was unable to visit the commune and compare my impressions with what I had seen in 1980. What I remembered best was visiting the woman who had the big dusty television (with a red shawl over it: cloth television covers are still very popular in China), and listening to her spiel about this being a workers' paradise, and then going outside and watching children feeding white ducks in a green creek. But I swore that the first chance I got I would visit a commune and look at it closely for changes.

The changes were obvious in Canton. For one thing it was full of tourists. Some of these people were extremely elderly and infirm. They said they were looking forward to the Great Wall.

"Is there wheelchair access on the Great Wall?" they asked each other. "Is there a ramp? Is there Disabled Parking? Is there a Handicapped Entrance?"

It amazed me that people so frail should have risked being so far from home. But they were confident and curious, and I admired their pluck.

On the other hand, Canton was one of those places in the world where the hotels are so good and so all-encompassing that a guest need never leave: all the shops, events, colorful clothes, rugs, restaurants and everything else are right there in various parts of the air-conditioned building. And it is one of the facts of life in China today that the hotels are as great a tourist attraction as any of the temples or museums.

People went to Canton for many reasons, but the most interesting one I heard was from seven skinny youths who had come from Hong Kong to
go
tenpin bowling.

I didn't laugh. Brainlessly banging cannonballs down a varnished ramp and watching the pins go bopping seemed like fun to me. It was a hot afternoon, and Canton was a big screechy place.

I loitered at the bowling alley but didn't play. I met an American named Barton, an oilman, who was supervising the drilling of wells. Were they offshore? He didn't say; he was rather circumspect, rather Chinese in fact, as if he suspected me of being engaged in industrial espionage.

Barton had been in Canton for four years, and before that had been in the Persian Gulf, which he had hated. But he hated China, too—his test wells had not paid off, though some others had. And the oil price was so low it hardly seemed worthwhile looking. It was certainly proving expensive. He told me several things I had not known—that China was a huge oil producer, that it had a surplus because there were so few motor vehicles in China (and the power plants and most of the trains were fueled by Chinese coal), and that China exported crude oil and gasoline to the United States. (Gasoline and fireworks are China's biggest exports to the U.S.)

The shrinking oil-exploration schemes had meant a cutback in Barton's mode of life, though. His wife and children lived in Hong Kong. The family used to get together twice a month. Now they met only once a month. It was pretty tough, Barton said, but necessary.

"I've got two kids to put through college. I need this job, I need the money—all the
gweilos
here do."

Most of the expatriates used that expression when they referred to themselves. It was south China and Hong Kong self-mockery and meant "foreign devil."

"I was offered a job in Singapore," he said. "It was also oil related. I probably should have taken it, but that place is too strict. I can't stand Lee Kuan Yew. He's a shit. They can have him. I'll take Dung any day."

Barton laughed the phlegmy, fruity laugh of the chain-smoker.

"Know what we call Lee Kuan Yew? Hitler-with-a-heart. Har! Har!"

As someone who had had his own problems with "Harry" Lee, I thought this description was funny and apt. And I was also struck by Barton's seriousness.

I was able to tell Barton my own Chinese oil-drilling story. In 1968, the Chinese embassy in Uganda brought a troupe of Red Guards to Kampala to put on a show. There were acrobats and accordion players and jugglers, all wearing red armbands; but the highlight of the evening was a Red Guard ballet about drilling for oil in one of the coldest and dreariest parts of China—Daqing, in the Manchurian province of Heilongjiang.

In the heat of the Ugandan night, they mimicked frostbite and hypothermia as they danced and drilled through layers of ice and rock. They dropped with exhaustion and were on the point of giving up altogether—no oil.

They were harangued all this time by Red Guards (dancing, chattering, shaking their fists), and at the lowest point, when they had all but abandoned the effort of drilling, one of the Red Guards produced the Little Red Book and began reading Mao's Thoughts. He read from the chapter, "Self-reliance and Arduous Struggle."

He showed his big square teeth and yelled, "What is work? Work is struggle! There are difficulties and problems in those places for us to overcome these difficulties. A good comrade is one who is more eager to go where the difficulties are greater!"

This cheered up the dancers dressed as riggers and drillers (they wore big bandagelike mittens and had rags on their feet). They were stirred by Mao's Thought, and as a chorus chanted, "Great Helmsman ... Reddest of the Red Suns rising in the East," the drillers went back to work and at last struck oil, a great gusher. This was expertly simulated with lights and back-projection, and over all of it a portrait of Chairman Mao shimmered, as the Red Guards cheered. Oil! Mao's Thoughts! Prosperity! Workers serving the people! Overcoming difficulties!

Now all that was over and the oil workers are, typically, harassed Americans, separated from their families, quite well paid and trying to put their kids through college.

At the Trade Exhibition, which is an immense bazaar of Chinese merchandise and the pride of Canton, I met a disgruntled man from Hong Kong, one Mr. Tan, who was visiting his Cantonese relatives. He loved his relatives and was very loyal and dutiful, but he hated the Chinese attitude towards Mao. I had taken Mr. Tan to be an unassuming soul, but he was full of invective.

"Mao kept China in the dark for almost thirty years," he said. 'That's why these goods are substandard."

I said that some of the merchandise looked well made to me—the bicycles, the wrenches, the carpets. And though the electric appliances looked dangerous and ugly, the beaded bags, the screwdrivers, the canned food and the textiles were all great bargains.

"It is not enough to make these things," Mr. Tan said. "These people are in the dark. They think they know the world. They know nothing!"

It was even more mocking the way he said it in his Cantonese accent:
Dey know nutting!

"Mao was a joke. He was so stupid. And they believed him. Ha!"

"Everyone says it's different now," I said.

"It looks different, but it is the same. You know why? Because they are the same."

That cynicism was characteristic of the people the Chinese called "Hong Kong Compatriots," and it was compounded of doubt and fear. It was voiced most strongly in Canton because Canton was the closest equivalent in Chinese terms to Hong Kong. The anxiety was contagious. Most people in Canton wondered—and with reason—What next?

I looked for people who might have a clue. The most knowing was of course an American banker who had been in Canton for about an hour and a half. But he had been there before. His name was Arthur Fliegle, and he had a sort of sales pitch in everything he said that sounded so convincing—at least
he
sounded convinced—that it seemed to reek of insincerity. But he was on the boil, and so I listened.

"Forget the hotels, forget the Friendship Stores and gift shops, forget the restaurants and bowling alleys—all the tourist-related stuff," Fliegle said. "That will go its own way. It earns some money, but it's no big deal."

"But the Chinese are trying to attract tourists," I said.

"Forget it. That's a detail. They want foreign investors. So look at it—look at the rest. The oil. The industry. The joint ventures. Want to hear an interesting statistic? We're dealing with about two hundred joint ventures through my Hong Kong bank. Guess how many of those two hundred are currently operating—I mean, actually off and running?"

I said I couldn't guess.

He raised two fingers. "Two. That's all. And neither of them is making any money."

"But everyone talks about joint ventures."

'They're whistling in the dark. Most companies have withdrawn their top people. They had highly paid executives in China, but they haven't been making any money. So they pull out their expensive American yuppies and they put in Joe Chen from Hong Kong—you know the guy, middle-aged, brown suit, plastic briefcase. They say 'Go for it, Joe!' and he makes a dive, hits a brick wall and staggers back. 'Go for it, Joe!' they yell again. And he hits the wall again. But so what? He's only costing twenty or thirty thousand a year. That's the kind of guy operating now. The six-figure executive is gone."

To provoke this man Fliegle I said that the Chinese seemed very confident about doing business.

"I'm not talking about them—I'm talking about investor confidence, and that seems to be ebbing away. That's why the next three or four years are so crucial. Already companies have pulled out. They aren't philanthropists or idealists. They want to make money, and if they don't make it they'll leave. At the moment, China's in a big expansionist phase, but so far there hasn't been much of a return—nothing to justify great hopes or big investments. The bubble might burst, and if it does it's going to be hell here. We'll know inside five years whether it's going to work."

I found what this man said interesting because he had no political ideas at all—he was all practical and unsentimental about the quickest way to make a buck. It fascinated me to think that there were many Chinese who were just the same.

Some Chinese had begun to rob graves. One of the commonest and most frequently condemned crimes in south China, where the best graves were, was relic smuggling: digging up armor, weapons, pots, bronzes, silver and ornaments, and bringing them to Hong Kong. In just two years, from 1984 to 1986, over a hundred instances of smuggling had been foiled by the Chinese police—and 20,000 antiques recovered. These were not just family treasures but items filched from Tang and Han Dynasty tombs in Hunan. In some instances, there was a medieval kind of vandalism—farmers trampling on Han lyres and flutes because they had tiger motifs inscribed on them, which the farmers found "inauspicious." Or the sixty tombs in Hengyang County which were destroyed by pig keepers, who used the mausoleum bricks to make pigsties. But the majority of the artifacts uncovered or stolen from tombs became smuggled goods.

Typically, the valuable contraband is hustled to Hong Kong by boat, or in trucks, hidden under loads of Chinese cabbages. The destination is nearly always Hong Kong—none of this stuff is ever sold in China.

There are almost no antiques of any value, or of any real age, for sale in China. It is illegal to sell anything older than 150 years—that is, anything earlier than the corny imitative and degraded late Qing stuff. For Tang celadons, Ming bowls, even ancient terra-cotta and neolithic figures, Hong Kong is the place, and Hong Kong is busier now than it has ever been, because the smuggling is so intense.

"Nowadays, the Chinese know it's valuable," an antique dealer told me. 'They used to sell it to the state, but they don't anymore—the state prices are too low. And it's this new attitude. Everyone's in business. Everyone is digging. They're looking for another Xian, another terra-cotta army—but this one they're going to sneak into Hong Kong. You'll see it in the shops in Hollywood Road and Cat Street. Already I am seeing the most incredible pieces—you wouldn't see them in the Victoria and Albert Museum, I'm not kidding. They are looting tombs, stealing from graves, digging holes. There has never been a period like this."

It was very easy to say what China wasn't. It wasn't a frenzied and fanatical slogan-chanting mob of workers and peasants. It wasn't very political—people rolled their eyes and began to yawn at the mention of Mao. It wasn't particularly well built, and indeed had some of the shoddiest-looking apartment houses I had ever seen. It wasn't a country with lovely cities—and even much of the countryside looked torn apart and scalped. It wasn't very orderly, it wasn't quiet, it wasn't democratic. It wasn't what it had been—particularly here in Canton. That was obvious.

But it was hard to say what China was. Perhaps there was an intimation of hope in its complexity, but it was maddening for me to sit there watching the Cantonese rain come down and not to know what this all meant. And then I got a big dose of people attitudinizing—there was probably more of it in Canton than anywhere else because Canton had more foreign visitors—and I thought: I'll just write it down and keep my own mouth shut, and I'll keep moving through China, going everywhere the train goes, to the highest and lowest places, the hottest, the coldest, the driest, the wettest, the emptiest, the most populous—that is the only way—and afterwards I'll make up my mind.