Part 6 (1/2)
In the past thirty years, China has developed at a remarkable pace, maintaining an average annual growth rate of 9 percent and in 2009 becoming the second-largest economy in the world. In 2010 China's revenues are set to hit 8 trillion yuan, and we are told proudly that we are on the verge of becoming the second-richest country in the world, trailing only the United States. But behind these dazzling statistics is another, unsettling one: in terms of per capita income China is still languis.h.i.+ng at a low rank, one hundredth in the world. These two economic indicators, which should be similar or in balance, are miles apart in China today, showing that we live in a society that has lost its equilibrium or, as the popular saying has it, in a society where the state is rich but the people are poor.
Unequal lives give rise to unequal dreams. About ten years ago China Central Television interviewed Chinese youngsters on Children's Day, asking them what gift they would most like to receive. A boy in Beijing wanted a Boeing jet of his own, while a girl in the northwest said bashfully, ”I want a pair of sneakers.” Though much the same age, these two children were worlds apart in their dreams, and the girl is probably no more likely to get a pair of sneakers than the boy is to get his own plane. Such is China today: we live amid huge disparities between recent history and contemporary reality, and from one dream to the next. The comment from the student in Vancouver makes me feel these are disparities that Chinese society is perfectly prepared to accept.
I will tell one more true story to end this chapter, an episode set in one of China's southern cities. There, amid the myriad cl.u.s.ters of high-rise buildings and the packed shopping malls, a sixth-grader was kidnapped. The two kidnappers embarked on this crime in desperation, having hardly a penny to their names and no experience whatsoever in kidnapping. After getting nowhere in their search for employment, they decided to take matters into their own hands. Without planning or preparation, they seized a pupil on his way home from primary school one day, clapped their hands over his mouth, and dragged him, struggling, into an unused factory workshop. Then they asked the boy for his mother's mobile number, went to a callbox nearby, and delivered instructions about the ransom. They didn't realize they needed to call from some other place completely, and the authorities, tracing the call, quickly sealed off the area. Before long they were in police custody.
While waiting for the ransom to be delivered, the kidnappers ran out of money, so one of them went out and borrowed just enough to buy two box lunches, gave one to the boy, and shared the other with his accomplice. On his rescue, the boy told the police, ”They're so poor! Just let them go, won't you?”
*chaju.
Lei Feng, killed in a freak accident in 1962, aged twenty-one, was posthumously lionized as a devoted servant of Chinese socialism.
The Long March is the name given to the arduous trek by Communist forces during the mid-1930s, when they escaped from encirclement by Nationalist troops in central China to a safe haven in the northwest.
gra.s.sroots.
Five or six years ago a ritzy development began to go up in a bustling downtown area of one of China's main cities. When completed, it rose more than forty stories; its accommodations included six luxury apartments, each more than twenty thousand square feet in size and lavishly equipped with top-of-the-line kitchen and bathroom fixtures from well-known international brands. These hundred-million-yuan apartments were all snapped up as soon as they came on the market, and the first person to purchase one was not a celebrated real estate agent, financial investor, or information-technology baron but an inconspicuous actor on China's economic stage: an impresario of blood sales or, in common parlance, a blood chief. This wealthy blood chief was such a free spender he purchased the apartment outright with a single payment. It is a good place to begin my story of the gra.s.sroots.*
In my novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, published in 1995, I drew on childhood memories to create a character named Blood Chief Li. At that time ”gra.s.s roots” in Chinese simply meant ”roots of gra.s.s,” but within a few years we imported from English a new meaning, and in China ”gra.s.sroots” has come to be used in a broad sense to denote disadvantaged cla.s.ses that operate at some remove from the mainstream and the orthodox.
I remember as a child seeing a man pay peasants for giving blood at the hospital. He dressed in a white coat just like a doctor, but it was always grubby, with dirty gray stains on its elbows and seat; a cigarette invariably dangled from the corner of his mouth. Among prospective blood vendors he was known simply as Blood Chief, and he exercised unquestioned authority over his empire of blood. Although his status in the hospital was lower than that of the most ordinary nurse, he had a profound grasp of the benefits that accrue from steady, daily acc.u.mulation, and over the pa.s.sage of years he quietly confirmed his standing as a king of the gra.s.sroots. In the eyes of the peasants who, from poverty or from some yet more dire cause, had come forward to sell blood, he was sometimes even seen as a savior.
Hospitals in those days had well-stocked blood banks. From the start he made the most of that circ.u.mstance, planting seeds of uncertainty in the minds of the blood vendors as they journeyed from afar, sparking anxiety as to whether they would be able to find a buyer for the blood flowing in their veins. And he effortlessly cultivated their respect so that it came straight from their hearts, and on that basis he imparted to these simple country folk an understanding of the importance of gifts. Although most of them were illiterate, they knew that interaction is essential to one's relations.h.i.+ps with others. Through him they came to realize that gifts not only are the most vital prerequisite for interaction but actually const.i.tute an alternative language, one predicated on a certain degree of personal loss but also able to communicate such sentiments as favor, homage, and esteem. Thus he made them understand that, before leaving home, they should make a point of picking up a couple of heads of cabbage, or a few tomatoes and a handful of eggs. When they presented to him their cabbages, tomatoes, or eggs, they would be paying him a compliment and addressing him with deference, whereas if they arrived empty-handed, this would be to forfeit language and lose the power of speech.
For decades he managed his kingdom with unstinting devotion. Then times changed: hospital blood banks began to encounter shortages, blood purchasers had to fawn on blood vendors, and the authority of hospital blood chiefs was undermined. But this did not worry him in the least. He was now retired and took advantage of the opportunity to become a real blood chief, no longer affiliated with a hospital in the traditional manner.
This blood chief pa.s.sed away some ten years ago, but before he died, he pulled off an amazing feat. In late 1995 my father, who had just finished reading Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, told me over the phone that the blood chief had found a way to greatly boost his retirement income. As China's market economy began to thrive, the chief discovered that blood prices differed from one region to another, and in short order he organized close to a thousand blood vendors to travel some three hundred miles, through a dozen different counties, all the way from Zhejiang to the county in Jiangsu where he knew blood commanded the highest price. His followers thereby increased their earnings, and his own wallet bulged like a ball that's just been pumped up.
What an epic journey that must have been! I have no idea how he managed to induce this band of misfits, all strangers to one another, to form such a motley gra.s.sroots crew. He surely must have established some code of discipline, emulating a military chain of command and conferring limited powers on a dozen or so members of this untidy rabble, authorizing them to give free rein to their respective talents, whether threats or cajolery, flattery or curses. His officers kept those thousand foot soldiers in line, while he simply needed to oversee his dozen officers.
Their collective enterprise bears some resemblance to the operations of a mobile infantry unit during wartime, or perhaps a religious pilgrimage in full swing, as this dense ma.s.s of humanity clogged up long sections of highway. Men argued and women gossiped, clandestine affairs were conducted, and the unlucky were laid low by sudden illness. No doubt there were touching cases too of mutual support, or true love coming to fruition. You would be hard put to find anywhere a throng of people as colorful and diverse as this ragtag army of gra.s.sroots blood vendors.
If my childhood blood chief had not died so early, he would surely have acc.u.mulated enough wealth to move into a luxury apartment too, although he was not, of course, in the same league as the blood chief in the big city, who exercised even greater authority and is said to have commanded the loyalty of a hundred thousand blood vendors. Such is Chinese reality today: although blood vendors must hand over a percentage of their earnings to their boss, they still make more money than if they were to sell blood independently.
This big blood chief enjoys an opulent lifestyle under an a.s.sumed name, and n.o.body knows just how big a fortune he has. Whenever blood bank reserves run low, all the big hospitals eagerly seek his services, and sometimes he is so heavily booked that it can be impossible to set up a dinner date. To him business is business, and he will make sure that the blood he controls flows in the direction of whichever hospital offers the best price for his product.
Blood selling, which seems such a humble and demeaning profession, turns out to be just the kind of story on which Forbes magazine would love to do a feature: a quintessential rags-to-riches story. Another such tale concerns a trash recycler sometimes known as the Beggar Chief but more often dubbed the Garbage King. Although he is Garbage King in only one district of one munic.i.p.ality, he has managed to ama.s.s a fortune in the many millions. In Chinese cities every residential neighborhood has people who specialize in recycling trash; they buy cheaply items that the residents plan to throw away and, after sorting, sell them at a slightly higher price to bigger recyclers-like the Garbage King. After jacking up the prices, he resells the waste to manufacturers, enabling them to save on raw materials. When this millionaire Garbage King was interviewed, he struck a modest, una.s.suming pose. How had he discovered this business opportunity? the reporter wondered. ”I just did the things n.o.body else was willing to do,” he replied.
This straightforward answer reveals a secret about China's economic miracle. Chinese people today, inspired by a fearless gra.s.sroots spirit, have propelled the economy forward by seizing every possible opportunity. So it is that our economic life is full of kings: the Paper Napkin King, the Socks King, the Cigarette Lighter King, and so on. In Zhejiang there is a b.u.t.ton King who oversees a b.u.t.ton range so extensive it boggles the mind. The profit on a single b.u.t.ton may be minuscule, but so long as people go on wearing clothes, there'll be a demand for his b.u.t.tons everywhere in the world. The same goes for paper napkins, socks, and cigarette lighters: however humble such products may be, the minute they claim a significant market share, they are perfectly capable of becoming an empire of wealth.
A man I know runs a BMW dealers.h.i.+p in the city of Yiwu. One day he was visited by an old man from the countryside, with a dozen or more children and grandchildren cl.u.s.tered around him. They all tumbled out of a van and bustled their way into the dealers.h.i.+p, and the younger members of the family began to select a car for the well-heeled patriarch. A BMW 760Li with a sticker price of more than 2 million yuan caught his eye. ”Why is this car so expensive?” he asked. But when the dealer listed all its advanced features and technological refinements, the old man just shook his head and said he couldn't understand a word. Finally the dealer pointed at the driver's seat. ”It took two cows to make this,” he said. ”The leather is cut only from the finest part of the hide.”
The old peasant, who as a boy had tended cattle long before he struck it rich, was won over right away. ”If two cowhides were used just for one seat, this has to be a top-of-the-line vehicle!” he marveled. He bought the 760Li for himself and a.s.signed cars in the BMW 5 series to his sons and daughters-in-law and cars in the 3 series to the youngest generation. When it came time to pay for their purchases, his family toted in several large cardboard boxes from the van, each filled to the brim with cash. The paterfamilias had no confidence in checks and credit cards; for him only currency notes counted as proper money.
On the basis of his life experience and simple, down-to-earth way of thinking, the old man immediately understood why the BMW 760Li was so expensive. Some Chinese gra.s.sroots may get involved in business without any knowledge of economics or any management experience, but they are perfectly capable of getting rich quick, thanks to their distinctive personal outlook on things. Just as the old man had his way of appreciating the 760Li, the gra.s.sroots way of thinking-even if it seems a lot like that of a country b.u.mpkin-can enable one to get to the heart of the matter in no time at all.
With all the changes since 1978, there's no end to such stories. China's economic miracle of the past thirty years, it's fair to say, is an agglomeration of countless individual miracles created at the gra.s.sroots level. China's gra.s.sroots dare to think and dare to act; in the tide of economic development they will adopt any method that suits their purposes, and they are bold enough to try things that are illegal or even criminal. At the same time China's legal system has developed only slowly, leaving plenty of loopholes for the gra.s.sroots to exploit and putting all kinds of profits within their reach. Add to that their dauntless courage, which comes from their having nothing to lose, since they began with nothing at all. ”The barefoot do not fear the shod,” the Chinese say, or as Marx put it, ”The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, and they have a world to win.”
If you look at the names that appear on the recent wealth rankings in China, almost all of these multimillionaires have come up from the gra.s.s roots. These honor rolls tell stories of sudden upswings-of empty-handed paupers transformed overnight into multimillionaires, of the glory and wealth that partner fame and fortune. At the same time they recount tales of sudden ruin, showing how disgrace follows glory and how wealth can vanish in the blink of an eye. Judging by the Hurun Rich List, during the past ten years there have been no fewer than forty-nine gra.s.sroots tyc.o.o.ns who either have been arrested or have fled to avoid arrest. Their crimes come in all shapes and sizes: misappropriation of funds, conspiracy to rob, conspiracy to swindle, corporate bribery, fabrication of financial bonds, illegal diversion of public funds, irregular seizure of agricultural land, contract fraud, credit certificate fraud, and so on. No wonder the Rich List is popularly known as the Pigs-for-Slaughter List. In China there's a saying, ”People fear getting famous just as pigs fear getting fat,” reflecting the observation that fame invites a fall just as a fattened pig invites the butcher. On the other hand, as Rupert Hoogewerf (aka Hu Run), the creator of the Rich List, has noted, ”Pigs that deserve to die will die, whether or not they make it onto the rich list.”
In November 2008 Huang Guangyu, who rose from humble beginnings in a small Guangdong village to become known as the wealthiest man in China, was arrested by Public Security on a charge of gross financial misconduct. After the launch of Guomei Electronics in 1987, within ten years he had developed it into the country's largest household appliance retailer. In 2008 he was listed as the richest man in China for the third time, with personal wealth of 43 billion yuan. In May 2010 a court found him guilty of ”illegal operations,” insider trading, and bribery and sentenced him to a fourteen-year prison term. Several years ago, when Huang Guangyu topped the Rich List for the first time, he was asked by a journalist, ”This Richest Man t.i.tle of yours-did you have to pay for it?”
”Hu Run p.i.s.ses me off,” Huang replied. ”Why would I give him money? That list of his is like an arrest warrant-whoever's on it ends up in big trouble!”
The Rich List-or the Pigs-for-Slaughter List, if you prefer-is just the tip of the iceberg in China today. Off the list, in the ubiquitous battle for economic advantage, many more gra.s.sroots are performing their own dramatic rises and staggering falls. Or, as Chinese bloggers like to say, most pigs get slaughtered even before they're fattened up. And on today's stage, which lurches so unpredictably from comedy to tragedy, none of us has any idea when our end will come.
When we look back at the Cultural Revolution and all the political infighting it involved, there's no end to the stories of those who rose swiftly from the gra.s.sroots, only to drop like a stone afterward.
In August 1973 something unexpected happened at the Tenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. It was no surprise that Mao Zedong sat in the central chair on the presiding bench or that Premier Zhou Enlai sat on his right, but everyone was amazed to see a mere thirty-eight-year-old sitting on Mao's left. After Mao announced the opening of the congress and Zhou read the political report, this newcomer calmly began to read the ”Report on the Revision of the Party Const.i.tution.”
His name was w.a.n.g Hongwen, and at the start of the Cultural Revolution he had been simply a security guard at a Shanghai textile mill. In November 1966 he and a few other workers set up what soon became a famous militant organization, Shanghai Workers' Revolutionary Rebel Headquarters. After that he enjoyed a meteoric rise, and in less than seven years he was elevated from a night watchman to a vice premier in the Politburo, No. 3 in the hierarchy after Mao and Zhou.
But good times don't last long, and just three years later-after Mao died and as the Cultural Revolution ended-he became a prisoner along with the other members of the so-called Gang of Four: Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan. In their show trial in December 1980 this celebrated revolutionary rebel was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes that included ”organizing and leading a counterrevolutionary clique.”
In China's overheated political campaigns, revolution was just a short step away from counterrevolution. In popular idiom it was a matter of ”flipping pancakes”: everyone was just a pancake sizzling on the griddle, flipped from side to side by the hand of fate. Yesterday's revolutionary became today's counterrevolutionary, just as today's counterrevolutionary would become tomorrow's revolutionary.
After that w.a.n.g Hongwen was gradually forgotten. Left to stew alone in his prison cell, he could only sigh and moan at the thought of his fleeting days of glory. Wracked by liver cancer, he came to a desolate end; when he died, in August 1992 at the age of fifty-seven, only his wife and brother attended his cremation.
How many stories of rebels' topsy-turvy careers did the Cultural Revolution tell? Too many to count, and way too many to mention. If all these stories were laid out one after another, they would stretch as endlessly as a highway and be as hard to tally as the trees in a forest.
This makes one think of Liu Shaoqi, who died wretchedly in the early Cultural Revolution. After many months of humiliation and abuse at the hands of militants, this former head of state died in November 1969, at the age of seventy-one. So much time had pa.s.sed since his last haircut that his white locks dangled down to his shoulders, and his naked corpse was covered only with a single sheet. In the ledger recording the storage of his ashes his occupation was given as ”Unemployed.”
During the Cultural Revolution, as I moved from childhood to adolescence, the grim reaper twice made special visits to our town. The first was right at the beginning, when Communist Party officials, once so awesome, were denounced as capitalist-roaders and some chose death rather than subject themselves to further mistreatment. The second was when the Cultural Revolution ended: the rebels who had ruled the roost for ten years suddenly became followers of the Gang of Four, and it was their turn to be purged. Some felt the end of the world was nigh and, like the capitalist-roaders ten years earlier, took their own lives by this means or that.
One of the leading militants in our county during the Cultural Revolution, having risen precipitously from the gra.s.sroots, threw his weight around every chance he could. When I was young, I would often see him at struggle sessions; and when his voice blasted from the loudspeakers, it sounded like two or three voices overlaid on top of each other. As he read out his denunciations, he would keep an eagle eye on the row of capitalist-roaders, with their heads bowed, and if one of them made the slightest movement, he would break off his tirade and kick the unlucky victim fiercely in the back of the legs to bring him to his knees. When Mao Zedong set up ”three-in-one” revolutionary committees with a mix of veteran cadres, military men, and Red Guard militants, this activist secured a place on the county revolutionary committee and was soon promoted to the rank of deputy chief, confirming his legitimacy in the new order. When he walked the streets of our town, everyone vied to claim acquaintance with him and hailed him with a warm, respectful greeting; but he would respond simply with a perfunctory nod, a reserved expression on his face. If we children hailed him with a cheery ”Chief,” however, he would wave to us in a friendly way.
After the Cultural Revolution he was placed in solitary confinement during the campaign to purge followers of the Gang of Four. My cla.s.smates and I had just graduated from high school then; feeling at loose ends, our curiosity piqued, a few of us went to observe his interrogation. We knew he had been shut up in a little room behind the department store warehouse, so we clambered up on top of the wall just outside and sat there with our legs dangling. Through an open window we could see him sitting on a stool, facing two questioners on the other side of a table. They banged the table and harangued him just as mercilessly as the rebels had interrogated capitalist-roaders. This militant, once so intimidating, was now a broken man, abjectly confessing all the crimes he had committed as a lackey of the Gang of Four. He started crying at one point, breaking off from the recitation of his misdeeds to mention that his mother had died just a few days earlier. It upset him terribly that he could not attend the wake, and suddenly he wailed as loudly as a child, ”My mom was spitting blood! She filled up a whole washbasin with it!”
This simply provoked his interrogator further. ”Don't talk nonsense!” he barked, rapping the table. ”How could your mom have so much blood?”
One morning when the guard was in the toilet, the man made good his escape, fleeing along the seawall for a good five miles before he finally came to a stop. There he stood, gazing blankly at the boundless sea, oblivious to the waves cras.h.i.+ng on the sh.o.r.e. Head bowed, he walked over to a corner shop, stood at the counter for a minute, and emptied all the cash out of his pockets. He bought two packs of cigarettes and a box of matches, then returned to the seawall.
Peasants who were working in the fields nearby noticed how he lingered there, chain-smoking steadily. When he had finished both packs, he watched in a daze as they went about their jobs, then turned, scrambled down the embankment, and threw himself into the seething waves. By the time his captors closed in on his location, there was no sign of him, just a heap of cigarette stubs on the seawall. It wasn't until several days later that his body washed up on a beach farther along the coast. His corpse was so swollen, I heard, that it was hardly recognizable. He was still wearing s.h.i.+rt and trousers, but shoes and socks had been scoured away.
The Cultural Revolution induced gra.s.sroots from society's underbelly to throw caution to the winds, and in a revolution where ”to rebel was justified” they gained opportunities to soar. Completely ordinary people enjoyed such rapid vertical elevation that they were said to have ”taken off in a helicopter.” With the end of the Cultural Revolution these people slipped from their lofty perches and found themselves in free fall, plunging through the gra.s.sroots layer to the level below, where only jailbirds roosted. ”What goes up comes down even quicker” was the new line used to mock these rebels on the slide.
Of course there were even more people whose rises and falls followed a less dramatic trajectory. In the town where I lived there were a number of such cases, and I will now introduce one of them.
After the January Revolution of 1967 swept across China and government seals everywhere exchanged hands, rebels and Red Guard organizations that had failed to s.n.a.t.c.h control of official seals were not reduced to total despair, for it occurred to them that they could simply carve their own. Thus self-appointed gra.s.sroots power structures popped up everywhere in dazzling array, like the Tang poet's evocation of the scene after a snowstorm: ”Spring seems to stretch as far as the eye can see/Pear blossoms bloom white on tree after tree.”
It was against this backdrop that our hero rose to prominence, establis.h.i.+ng an Invincible Mao Zedong Thought Publicity Team, with himself as its self-proclaimed leader. He must have been about forty years old then. In the past he had been a timorous creature and a man of few words. He was not the sort who swaggered along in the middle of the street; rather, he kept his eyes cast down as he walked and tended to hug the wall. Even children could push him around.
At first it was the older boys in the alley who would give him a hard time, just to show off. As he walked past, a boy would veer into his path and deliver a stinging body check. His reaction was simply to stand still, scowl at the boy who knocked into him, and then walk off without a word. I admired those older boys for being so bold as to bully a grown-up, and later on we preschoolers worked up the courage to hara.s.s him too, tossing pieces of gravel at him as he pa.s.sed. He would turn and throw us a dirty look, then walk on without saying a word. This made us feel on top of the world, and we reveled in our newfound power.