Spring 2006
Isn’t China supposed to be moving toward political liberty? I believe the theory is that as an autocratic nation grows more prosperous, a middle class with socioeconomic influence arises. This middle class then exerts its influence on government by convening a Long Parliament, beheading King Charles, having an American Revolution, rolling tumbrels full of aristocrats through the streets of Paris, storming a Winter Palace, and things like that. The result is freedom and democracy for all, albeit with certain delays while the less estimable members of the middle class such as Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao get sorted.
And so it seemed to be going in China, back in 1989 in Tiananmen Square. But then China’s political development took a left turn, or a right turn (depending on your framework of political analysis)—a wrong turn, anyway
Freedom House is a private, nonprofit, bipartisan organization that promotes international freedom and democracy. It was founded in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, the man who’d lost the 1940 presidential election to Eleanor’s husband. Eleanor and Wendell (odd bedfellows though they may have been—though not literally) were concerned by totalitarianism’s growing threats to peace and liberty. Freedom House remains concerned. Me too, especially about China.
China represents a large percentage of the world’s population and an ever-larger percentage of the world’s production of material goods. That’s a big chunk of unfreedom and nondemocracy. One of the main wheels on the planet’s vehicle of liberty is seized up.
Besides promoting freedom and democracy, Freedom House also monitors them. Each year Freedom House publishes Freedom in the World, a thick, scholarly tome surveying political rights and civil liberties in every nation and territory. Scores are given for Political Rights and Civil Liberties on a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being as politically righteous or as civilly liberated as human nature allows and 7 being completely otherwise. China, in the years since the events in Tiananmen Square, has gone from a score of 7 for Political Rights and 6 for Civil Liberties to a score of 7 for Political Rights and 6 for Civil Liberties. Freedom House gives nations and territories one of three overall ratings: “Free,” “Partly Free,” and “Not Free.” China is rated “Not Free.” By measurable standards, freedom in China has changed very little since Freedom House initiated its scores and ratings half a century ago.
Yet Freedom House, although I respect its research and objectivity and served for years on its board, cannot be exactly right. The mere increase in China’s prosperity must mean that more Chinese have greater wherewithal to exercise some aspects of free will. Certainly the Chinese are more free now than they were during the Great Leap Forward, when millions lost all their freedoms by starving to death. And the Chinese are more free to go about their business than they were during the Cultural Revolution, when there was no business to go about.
Measurement of freedom is difficult. A fairly accurate calculation can be made of the degree to which people can speak their minds, practice their religions, organize labor unions, or gather for political protests. People either do or don’t have rights to vote, receive fair trials, and be secure in their homes and their personal lives. How well those rights are honored can be gauged. But once people rise above a subsistence level of economics (a subject about which Freedom House pretends no expertise), and material freedoms come into play, there are suddenly 1.3 billion different wants and needs. Humans are notoriously bad at figuring out what these are, even for themselves. And we are neither very accurate nor very generous when we estimate the wants and needs of others or their freedom to obtain them.
Freedom and democracy are abstract. Quotidian existence is conducted mostly in the world of things and stuff.
I went to China to take a tour of the world of things and stuff. I traveled with old friends, whom I’ll call Tom and Mai. Tom is a Californian who’s lived in Hong Kong for decades, working in the mining and metallurgy business. He was breaking ground on a pelletized iron ore processing plant in Nanjing. Tom seems to know everyone in China who has anything to do with iron, steel, coal, or drinking beer. Tom’s wife, Mai, and her brothers, Hong Kong natives, had owned, until recently, a company that brokered textile machinery. When China began its “open-door” economic policy, Mai had the job of taking mainland clients to Europe (where they’d encounter their first fork, escalator, lingerie shop, etc.) and arranging for them to purchase used spinning, weaving, and dyeing equipment.
Everywhere Tom, Mai, and I went we were involved in the facts of China, not the ideas of China. Although Tom’s and Mai’s friends and business associates shared one idea—to banquet the three of us to death. At one meal in Chongqing there was a communal pot of boiling oil laced with chilies that could be used to commit arson. Raw ingredients were heaped upon our plates, and, using our chopsticks fondue-style, we cooked—I kept a list—two kinds of tripe, quail eggs, eels, chicken stomachs, chicken intestines, some very scary-looking fish, and the kind of sprouts that were about to turn into the beanstalk that Jack climbed.
Mai is fluent in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. With her help I talked to people who worked in private enterprise and people who worked in government and people who worked on furthering cooperation between the two. That is, I talked to the kind of people who are necessary to the advocacy of freedom and democracy but who, so far, don’t seem to be advocating it. They were forthcoming enough about their government, but they didn’t care—or didn’t care to say—much about the political theory of it. In Tom’s opinion, “Their attitude is, ‘Shhh . . . Politics is sleeping; don’t wake it up.’ ” I wanted to know what the Chinese think about politics when politics is not what they’re thinking about. Maybe we should be listening to what they don’t say.
I was in Shanghai in 1997, and it looked like a knockoff of a great city, a sort of made-in-Hong-Kong Hong Kong. Everything had been built yesterday. And they’d built a lot of it—more than they seemed to have any use for. There was a marsh called Pudong on the far side of the Huangpu River where the ground was so low-lying that the water and sewer pipes had to be suspended above the pavement. Pudong was dotted with empty office complexes and buildings full of unrented apartments.
Now Pudong is some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Mai, Tom, and I stopped at a condominium where the sale price was $10,000 per square meter. Despite arriving in a chauffeured car wearing our corporate boardroom clothes, we were turned away at the gate. An attractive but severe young lady in black Prada told us we’d need to make an appointment days in advance.
We had dinner that night with Mr. Liu and Mrs. Sung. (I’ve changed everyone’s name. China does have a rating of 6 for Civil Liberties.) They were two of the principal Pudong developers, quiet, and quietly dressed middle-aged people who had worked in Shanghai’s city planning bureaucracy. With that bureaucracy’s blessing they set out on their own. They were appalled by the American invasion of Iraq. I was jet-lagged and a bit drunk, but I did my best to make a case for U.S. actions, ending, a bit lamely, with “of course it’s too bad to have a war.”
“Not too bad,” said Mrs. Sung.
“Too expensive,” said Mr. Liu.
With Tom and Mai, I took a train west a couple of hours to Wuxi, a city of nearly 5 million people that I’d never heard of. It’s the size of ten Clevelands. And if you wonder what happened to Cleveland, Wuxi is where it went. Industrial parks spread for miles with neat, sleek, enormous buildings set in swaths of lawn and landscaping—manufacturing sites for Volvo, GE, Panasonic, Sony, Westinghouse, Nikon, Bridgestone, Timkin, Bosch, and The Nature Factory (I’d wondered where they made that).
We were given a city tour by Mr. Chen, a manufacturer of fleece and plush fabrics. He was proud of Wuxi and so proud of his own fabrics that, although he’s the CEO of the company, he carries samples in the trunk of his Audi Quattro.
Mr. Chen was born in 1950 and was studying to be an industrial engineer when the Cultural Revolution arrived. He joined the Red Guards.
“Everyone came to their senses when Mao died,” he said. “They realized they had no food or anything else and had been just fighting with each other for nine years.”
Thereupon Mr. Chen (if there was irony in this, he didn’t let on) joined the People’s Liberation Army. During clashes with the Russians along the Amur River, he noticed that the Soviet troops were wearing lighter, warmer synthetic fabrics instead of furs. Although he knew nothing about textiles, he used his friendship with some senior officers to get himself assigned to a small research team. When China entered the world economy, so did Mr. Chen. He had permission, encouragement, and perhaps (though he didn’t say so) financing from the People’s Liberation Army.
Mr. Chen sent us on in his car to Nanjing, to the ground-breaking ceremonies for Tom’s ore plant.
Tom took me to a steel mill he used to run. The company that Tom then worked for bought the mill from the Chinese government for one dollar on the understanding that it would be kept in operation. The mill was eventually sold, for considerably more than one dollar, to Mr. Liu and Mrs. Sung.
The mill’s 150-pound ex-PLA guard dog, Shasha (“Killer”), was extremely glad to see Tom. So were the employees. Although there were some steel mill employees who presumably wouldn’t have been so glad, such as the 200 or 300 “ghost workers” who didn’t exist at all and were on the mill’s payroll when Tom took over, plus the 2,000 or so workers he’d fired because they didn’t do anything. Tom also needed to get rid of the family who had the local “theft rights” to the factory. They once stole a whole railroad train from the mill and would have gotten away with it if trains didn’t have tracks that lead directly to them.
“Here’s where a guy threw a wrench at me,” Tom said as we climbed the tower to the blast furnace.
“What’d you do?”
“I knocked him down the stairs,” Tom said. “Rule of law is the cornerstone of capitalism.”
Tom’s worst problem with the proletariat, however, involved one of his mill hands, who was having an affair with a woman who worked at the chemical factory next door. They conducted their trysts in an electrical equipment closet. Midst throes of passion the mill hand backed into some high-voltage circuitry and fried. (His paramour, with hair a bit more frizzy than is usual in China, survived.) The man’s widow then brought her entire ancestral village to block the steel mill’s gates. As compensation for her husband’s death she demanded his salary in perpetuity, a job for their retarded daughter, a new house, the payment of her husband’s gambling debts, and that her grandmother be flown to the United States to have her glaucoma treated.
“I had to call in the Communist Party officials,” Tom said.
“Did they ship everybody off to prison camp or something?” I asked.
“They didn’t do anything. They said it was my problem. I settled with the widow for a couple hundred bucks.”
Tom had an assistant in Nanjing, Lilly. She and her parents and siblings had bought a small tea farm, which they planned to subdivide. Tea bush plantings are in tidy rows, like vineyards but leafier and less stalky—more in the realm of Demeter than Dionysus. It was a pretty spot, set between woods and ponds, and in the least pretty part of it was the little brick house of the peasant who’d owned the land. If owned is the word. In China all land belongs to the state, though this doesn’t seem to keep anyone from buying and selling it. The house door was ajar, and I walked into the one shabby room. In the middle of the floor were the peasant’s muddy rubber boots—right where he’d left them when he bolted for the fleshpots and business opportunities of Nanjing.
I interviewed a senior Party official responsible for planning and development in the region. He insisted on using his own translator instead of Mai, and I had to submit a list of questions beforehand. I made them as anodyne as possible. “What are the future plans for Nanjing’s deepwater port facilities?” I wanted people to babble away undefensively and without constraint. But I hadn’t counted on this fellow.
“With gross metropolitan product of 241.3 billion yuan and 14.2 percent per annum growth, versus provincial 13 percent and 9 percent national, we are seventh-ranked city in economic status, fourteenth in revenue, having 5,000 U.S. dollars per capita income, versus provincial 3,380 and 1,600 national, resulting from Nanjing’s 9,000 different industrial products in utilization of 45 billion U.S. dollars capital investment from ninety countries and additional 26 billion U.S. dollars contracted,” he said, for a start.
I filled eight pages of my reporter’s notebook and he never consulted a note of his own.
“We have forty-eight universities in Nanjing,” he said. I don’t doubt he attended them all. He concluded, at long last, by saying—though I don’t think his interpreter did him justice here—“We want to take this opportunity to make China the world’s manufacturing basement.”
He and I were escorted to a futuristic conference room with built-in microphone modules in front of each high-backed leather and chrome executive swivel chair. There was an air of Intergalactic Council to the setting. Tom, his chief engineers, and, for some reason, myself, were seated on one side. The senior Party official and a number of sophomore and junior Party Officials were on the other. Everyone, including me, had to give a speech about iron ore and progress and friendship and such. I was pleased to be given a seat at the global economic table even if I (like many of globalization’s other guests) didn’t know what I was doing there.
Then we all went to the banquet hall and got drunk. There were more courses than you could shake a stick at—apt chiché, given the eating utensils of China. The Party officials laughed at my ineptitude. Then abalone was served with proper flatware, and I laughed at their knifing and forking.
You don’t sip your drink in China. And after six or eight rounds of Gan bei (“Bottoms up”), language barriers disappear. Mr. Feng, sitting next to me, spoke better English than I do anyway. He went to the London School of Economics. He was full of jokes about the government in Beijing, its muddles, and its meddling. These sent the local Party functionaries into helpless laughter. Mr. Feng proposed Gan bei after Gan bei, pouring and emptying glasses of Scotch. He had the kind of personality—both engaging and disarming—that probably could get you talking to him about anything, if you could get a word in edgewise.
Promptly at ten the Party members left. Tom and Mai and I saw them to the banquet hall door as their drivers, one after another, pulled up in black cars.
“They used to have Mercedes-Benzes,” Tom said. “But then the Central Committee told them they had to use cars made in China.” There was a great deal of head-banging and knee-cracking as the Party members clambered into the backseats of locally produced Volkswagens.
“Who is Mr. Feng?” I asked Tom. I examined the business card Mr. Feng had given me, printed with his vague title at a vaguely named trading firm.
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “But when there’s trouble with Communist Party officials—with regulation, bureaucracy, or courts—you go to him. The problem disappears. I think he’s secret police.”
On Saturday we went to the Nanjing antiques market. “Just walk around,” Lilly told me. “Don’t look interested. Then come back and tell me what you want. I’ll get it—Chinese price.”
Mao posters and buttons were gathering dust along with Little Red Books and other Cultural Revolution memorabilia. These used to be popular with the generation of Chinese young enough to think of Mao as funny. But the next generation doesn’t seem to think of Mao at all.
Mai and I had lunch with Mrs. Ng, whom Mai had known for a dozen years. Mrs. Ng got her start as Mr. Chen’s secretary and now owns a clothing factory. We were in a private room at a resort hotel located in the middle of an industrial park. Bridal couples were getting their pictures taken with the factories in the background. Three flags were flying in front of the hotel: China’s, America’s, and Pepsi’s.
“Congratulations on your MBA,” Mai said to Mrs. Ng. “
You got an MBA?” I said. “But you already own a clothing factory.”
“Most of the students are successful business people,” Mrs. Ng said. “They bring real problems to the seminars. The professors are expected to give practical help.” And there you have the greatest contrast to the American educational system that can be described in three sentences.
“There are forty-eight universities in Nanjing,” Mrs. Ng said.
When we were finishing lunch I mentioned that I didn’t have the slightest idea how clothing was made. Mrs. Ng put her afternoon on hold and showed me. Mrs. Ng’s driver took us to her 20,000-square-meter fleece fabric plant. We started with the bales of acrylic. (Acrylic comes in bales? But what had I thought? That it came in cans and bottles?) Then we went to the dye vats with the workers all tie-dye-splattered as though they’d been through an accidental American 1960s. The acrylic is spun dry in a leviathan Laundromat. The fibers are made soft and manageable with conditioner, like a bad hair day writ large, and carded and braided into thick rope with machinery from closed U.S. factories.
“I went to North Carolina to see the textile mills,” Mrs. Ng said. “But they were all gone.”
The ropes traversed the air above the factory floor—a spiderweb from a spider you don’t want to meet—and were fed into automated looms, computer programmed to produce patterns with up to six colors of yarn.
Mrs. Ng, in fact, has two factories. The other produces the garments themselves and covers 44,000 square meters. All sorts of cutting and stitching were going on at a speed that left me more confused about how clothes are made than I was before I’d seen it done. One thing that I could tell, however, is that in the garment industry, piecework is not “unskilled labor.”
Mrs. Ng’s fleeces and fake furs—in pink mink, disco leopard, shearling from sheep on the moons of Jupiter, and so forth—go out to the youth market in England, Europe, and America. As the father of daughters, the price tags made me pre-ticked-off.
“Ralph Lauren?” said Mai, who’d been talking to Mrs. Ng in incomprehensible female shorthand.
“Not innovative enough,” Mrs. Ng said.
The next day Tom had to go back to work in Hong Kong. Mai and I went on to Huzhou, to the southeast, halfway between Nanjing and the sea. Mr. Wu, who runs a woolen mill there, sent a car 230 kilometers to pick us up. And a wonderful car it was, a perfectly restored 1958 Cadillac limousine. We traveled on a new turnpike with rest stops indistinguishable form those in the United States, except for the police walking around the parking lots writing down license plate numbers.
At the border between Jiansu and Zhejiang provinces there was a long line of trucks on the shoulder. “They are waiting for the weigh station officials to take a nap,” said our driver.
We toured Mr. Wu’s woolen mill, which looks like the nineteenth-century New England woolen mill in the photograph that’s always trotted out when the subject of child labor is mentioned—the picture of the thin, sad, patched little girl handling spindles. But in Mr. Wu’s mill the little girl is plump, smiling, neatly dressed, and a grown woman. Also, there’s fluorescent lighting.
Then we met with Mr. Wu, a formidably undislikable man who’s almost as voluble as the Nanjing senior Party official, though with ideas instead of numbers. He took us to his showroom, as modern and stark as any in Milan. The wool coats of the next season were on display. We promised secrecy. But now it can be told. The “must” color of 2007 is burnt ocher.
Then we went to Mr. Wu’s conference room, as modern and stark as any in Milan. “China was very smart to follow Mr. Deng,” Mr. Wu said. I expected a paean to Deng Xiaoping’s combination of Marxist discipline and capitalist growth, but I’m not sure that’s what I got. “Because, now,” Mr. Wu continued, “whatever Italians can produce, we can produce. Please write that these products are not a threat to the United States. They are a threat to Italians.”
Mr. Wu said he was glad to be talking to an author. He had wanted to be an author himself. But he didn’t get into the university, because of the Cultural Revolution. He was sent to repair diesel engines on farm equipment instead. He said he believed a good author could be both a good entrepreneur and a good politician.
When the open-door policy began, Mr. Wu got a job as a worker in this very mill. He was promoted to supervisor, then to deputy manager, then general manager, deputy director, and now president and CEO.
“My position in textiles is a bit like yours in writing,” Mr. Wu said. This was serious flattery. I think. “Yours is like a boutique product,” he continued.
Mr. Wu said that he believed American authors write very fine articles. He’d read one article when he was young that quoted Richard Nixon. “Nixon said something that influenced me a lot. Nixon went to Moscow and gave a speech at the airport that was very good. Nixon said, ‘I understand the USSR is a very great country. I come to visit by means of peace. I understand that other means do not work.’ ”
Mr. Wu said that when he heard that I was an author, he thought of how many things there are to tell the American people. “Tell them,” he said, “that of the whole world’s GDP, the U.S. has one-third.* Send a message to President Bush that China is not dumping things on people. America’s policy is leading China to follow the same path as America. U.S. is like a tour guide.
“A lot of things we can learn from America,” Mr. Wu said. “Overall we have a lot of people, but our foundation is not quite steady yet. The way we are fighting with America worries me. We need your help. We need your help to solve the problem in Taiwan.
“At the moment,” he went on, “China is very stable. The people are happy with their life.” He cited Deng Xiaoping’s slogan: Growth is the only reason. “People support this policy. We have no reason to fight the U.S. We have our own internal problems to work out. For the time being we sell you a lot of products. We want to buy your high-tech products. But you won’t sell. And it’s damn expensive.”
Mr. Wu said to me, “You have a responsibility. Not all of Americans can come to China to find out what China is all about. Edgar Snow was the first guy to tell the world about the communist military and the U.S. help in the war against Japan. Maybe you can be the twenty-first-century Edgar Snow and change the opinion of the American people about the Chinese.”
Mr. Wu had gone to America some years before. “I had a very good impression,” he said, “especially the Twin Towers. When bin Laden hit the towers I said, ‘He’s a bad guy.’ ”
Mr. Wu saw his first Cadillac in America and said to himself, “I want a car like that.” Then he was in Taiwan at the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, and the tour guide said Chiang loved to ride in Cadillacs.
“We are going for democracy,” Mr. Wu said. “Please send the message. Russia had to go through a revolution. We are moving gradually. The American people should take time to understand. On surface we are socialist. Underneath we are capitalist. During the cold war there were lots of struggles, lots of revolutions. China’s was the only successful one. We accept America as a great country. President Washington was a great president and led the country to where it is today. The policy of America is correct. But every country has its own situation. You can’t use your country as a standard for other people. You love the people and peace. This is the right policy.”
Mr. Wu summed up: “You have the patience. We have the confidence.”
I had a headache—Nixon, Deng, Edgar Snow, Chiang Kai-shek’s Cadillac, George Washington, and I’m almost certain it’s supposed to be the Chinese who are patient and the Americans who are confident. Mr. Wu did, however, have one clear piece of advice: “America shouldn’t have too many policies.”
Mr. Wu took us to dinner with his wife, eldest daughter, and son-in-law. As was the case with several other wealthy people I met in China, Mr. Wu seated his driver and his assistants at the table with his family and his guests. They seemed to be expected to join in the conversation and, except the driver, the toasts.
Mr. Wu’s son-in-law was an official in the state-run banking system. I asked him about the number of bad loans that Chinese banks are said to be carrying. “It’s not a problem now,” he said. “The bad loans were within international standards—only ten percent.” (Of course 10 percent of loans going bad would be more than enough to start the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown a couple of years later.)
Mr. Wu sent Mai and me in his Cadillac to Hangzhou. It’s a famous beauty spot on West Lake and, as famous beauty spots go, it’s nice enough. Mr. Wu’s youngest daughter, Wu Lin, who goes by Linda, has a fashion design company there.
Linda’s showroom itself was quite a piece of design, with brutalist concrete stairs, a lit glass disco floor, industrial-chic wrought-iron tables, and neo-Deco porthole windows. The clothes are, Mai testified, fabulous. Linda gave me an apple-green car coat to take home to my wife, who confirmed the fabulousness.
The designs are by Linda’s husband, Mike, the only beer-drinking regular guy women’s fashion designer I’ve ever met. Mike wanted to be an industrial engineer and build textile machinery. But in the wake of the Cultural Revolution China’s universities were so corrupt that you had to bribe the professors to get into your chosen field. Mike was broke. “Nobody wanted to go into fashion design,” he said. Considering the Mao suits that everyone was wearing in those days, no wonder. “It was good luck for me,” Mike said.
Linda ran the business side. She was trained as a structural engineer (and would have been an unusually pretty one). “My father wanted me to go into a more serious business,” she said. “But in construction you need many people. In fashion you can do it by yourself. This business is very comfortable—no politics.”
We went to dinner at a pavilion on West Lake and talked about what Katie Holmes could possibly see in Tom Cruise. Katie is from my hometown, Toledo, Ohio. Linda and Mike were suitably impressed by the fact. “I don’t understand this Scientology,” Mike said.
I floundered around for an explanation.
“It’s American Falun Gong,” said Mai.
I watched CNN on television in the hotel room that night. There were brief, almost random-seeming blackouts of things the Chinese government didn’t want seen. A whole segment on U.S. criticism of Hu Jintao’s trade policies went missing. But I knew all about it because the government censors neglected to delete the caption crawling across the bottom of the screen.
Mai and I flew to Xi’an, deep in north-central China. Printed on the airplane’s seat backs, in Chinese, was “Empty space for advertising awaiting you.” On our paper coffee cups was “Advertising space available.” We were met at the airport by two assistants to Mr. Tian, a manufacturer of coke fuel for blast furnaces. He’d been the main supplier of the mill Tom had run. The assistants wore identical perfectly tailored banker gray chalk-stripe suits.
We were taken to a long, large, and hilarious lunch that went on until there was only an hour’s respite before a long, large, and hilarious dinner. The Chinese like beer, wine, whiskey, and their throat-searing maotai sorghum brandy. And they serve all of them at once.
The next morning, a little shaky, we went to see the terra-cotta warriors guarding the tomb of the Emperor Qinshihung. Seven or eight thousand of them have been discovered so far. It’s said that no two of them are alike, but I wouldn’t swear to that in court. What these clay soldiers were all supposed to be doing makes the tomb one of the world’s great monuments to “Huh?”
Less mysterious was the peasant who stumbled into the tomb chamber while digging a well in 1974. He was sitting in the gift shop signing copies of the book written about his find—a prosperous-looking old man.
This emperor is revered for uniting China, never mind his policy errors such as purges, massacres, and book burnings, not to mention the expense to taxpayers of having 8,000 terra-cotta warriors made to order.
Mr. Tian was as mildly interested in these as I was. “How much bituminous coal do you use to make your coke, and how much anthracite?” I asked him. (Toledo is not only the birthplace of Katie Holmes; it’s also the world’s largest soft coal port. When I was a boy an east wind would carry the tarry stink of coke furnaces all over town.)
“Ah,” said Mr. Tian, “‘fat coal’ and ‘thin coal,’ mixed at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit.” The moment I showed an interest in coal, Mr. Tian told his driver to take us hundreds of kilometers up the Yellow River valley into northern Shaanxi province to see his new coke plant.
We were getting toward Inner Mongolia and the Great Wall. In the hills and canyons of this part of China, the “open door” has barely creaked. Except for the occasional high-tension wires and the pavement beneath our wheels we saw what Marco Polo saw. And how poor the Italy of the thirteenth century must have been that Marco was impressed. The land was terraced to a fare-thee-well. Only on perfectly vertical surfaces had the farmers despaired of cultivation. Crops ran up to the very gravestones. The power from the power lines didn’t reach the tiny villages; nor did the pavement or any water pipes. I saw very few animals—no wild ones or any wilderness in which they could live, and not many sheep, goats, pigs, or cows, either. Average annual income here is $415. When the peasants leave to go work in the cities they’re called “foreign labor.”
This is where Mr. Tian came from. He was born in 1964, the youngest of six children. When he was still a teenager he had an idea to import new kinds of vegetables that could be grown for bigger profits. But he was ahead of his time and was made to study electrical engineering. Although “electrical engineering” is more what Mao, rather than an American, would call being taught to run a movie projector. Anyway, Mr. Tian worked as a movie projectionist and waited for opportunity. After the Open Door came into effect, he started a business trading steel.
“The policy at that time,” Mr. Tian said, “was a ‘Dual Rail System.’ ” If you wanted to do something commercial privately, you had to have something to back you up, owned by the government, on the industrial side. The government encouraged contracting with government factories. This didn’t work. Government factories didn’t produce according to the market. Instead of contracting with a government factory I decided to build my own factory.”
“And this was more efficient?” I asked.
Mr. Tian looked at me as if, despite my interest in coal and coke, I might be an idiot after all. “Of course,” he said.
When he’d been contracting with government factories he’d learned a lot—by negative example—about how to run a factory. Then he set out to learn about economics. While he was running a trading business and building a factory he was also, like Mrs. Ng in Nanjing, going to college. “There are more than fifty universities in Xi’an,” Mr. Tian said. Evenings and weekends he attended what he called “training classes,” not only in economics but in basic accounting, marketing, and management. “The cost was a few thousand yuan,” he said—about $400. “All the students were businessmen,” Mr. Tian said.
The demand for steel was strong, but Mr. Tian shifted his business to coke. Shaanxi province has no iron ore, and Xi’an’s steel industry is not well developed, but the region is full of coal to make coke to make steel.
Mr. Tian’s coke plant was near China’s principal coal mines. The mines look every bit as dangerous as they sound in the continual news reports of death and disaster inside them. Between two of these ominous holes in the ground sat the coke furnace. It was hell’s own house trailer, a hot, black, smoking oblong the length of a football field and as tall as the top of the goalposts.
Coke is to coal as charcoal is to wood. Great piles of coal were being fed into the furnace on conveyor belts. There, over the course of twelve hours, the heat of the burning coal itself will turn the coal to coke.
Personally, I considered the coke furnace to be a thrilling piece of machinery. Mr. Tian and his construction crew had built it themselves from scratch. And it smelled like home. The men handling the coal hoppers and balancing precariously on the tailgates of the enormous dump trucks looked pleased with themselves. It made me want to grab a hard hat and get the kind of job where I could throw wrenches at people.
Mr. Tian and I went back to the office and talked with his foreman about coal. Going by the expression of catatonic boredom on Mai’s face as she translated, I’ll spare the reader.
On the way back to Xi’an I asked Mr. Tian how he’d gotten capital to go into business in the first place. “I needed a guarantor,” he said, “someone who was in private enterprise. I had a friend with a company. But, to be honest, at that time it wasn’t too difficult to get a loan.”
“So it’s harder to get started now,” I said.
“Yes,” Mr. Tian said. “Banks are more straight with loans.” A nice turn of phrase, which Mai said she translated literally. But a certain amount of bending had been worthwhile with Mr. Tian. Perhaps Mr. Wu’s son-in-law was wiser than I thought in his sangfroid about China’s state bank loans.
Mr. Tian said his family had not been affected by the Cultural Revolution, because his father was a peasant and a Party member.
I had been under an impression that the Cultural Revolution had ruined everyone’s life. Of course in a nation of a billion people, this can’t have been exactly right, any more than Freedom House can be exactly right about China’s static freedoms. Mr. Tian thought that some damage had been done by the Cultural Revolution but that the Red Guards were not 100 percent wrong. “During that time,” he said, “the people who got criticized were not good people. They were lazy people, people who did wrong to people, right-wingers.”
I wondered what he meant by that last term. Mr. Tian was himself a “capitalist roader” and from all I could see he was committed to his route.
“There were factions of Red Guards fighting in Xi’an,” he continued. “During the development of the country at that time, it was needed—Red Guards criticizing each other. Criticism was needed. Development wasn’t getting far. We were under the pressure from foreign control.”
Again I couldn’t tell what he meant. American control? Russian control? The control of foreign Marxist thought? “Foreign” is a broad term in China. But I didn’t want to interrupt. I’d never heard the Cultural Revolution defended before.
“The country was poor as hell,” Mr. Tian said. “We had to come out from this prospect.”
Mai and I flew south to Yichang on the Yangtze. Here we’d take a break from my commerce and industry tour and go on a four-day river cruise through the Three Gorges to Chongqing. A friend of Mai’s, Mrs. Han, drove us upriver in her Mitsubishi SUV, to the dock by the Three Gorges Dam where the cruise boat was moored.
Mrs. Han was an executive at the government-owned electric company. She said she didn’t want to take a chance on working for a private firm. Government jobs are more stable, though the wages are lower. But her young son was lonely, and if she had another kid she’d lose her job because of the government’s one-child policy.
Mr. Tian has several children and five siblings, and Tom’s assistant Lilly is one of four. I’d asked Lilly if her parents had gotten in trouble for violating the birth control laws. She giggled and said, “Oh, you know . . .”
“Oh, you know” in China means, “Who you know.”
I asked Mrs. Han if the Three Gorges Dam was the ecological disaster that the ecological types say it is, even though the dam’s hydroelectric turbines are supposed to produce all sorts of electricity and no greenhouse gases.
Mrs. Han said, “The economy is helped a lot by the dam’s infrastructure. But one million people had to move. The farmers are reassigned to be factory workers, and it is not their background. They are living worse than before. But the flooding used to be terrible. There are advantages and disadvantages. It is changing animal life. A lot of historical sites are gone. The farmers are losing good soil by the river.”
Mrs. Han was not exactly a spokesperson for central planning.
There are more than 30 million people in Chongqing (or Chungking, as it used to be)—a whole Canada in the space of a Los Angeles. China provides a lot of material for such statistical tropes, which are supposed to say something meaningful about China, until we try to figure out what that meaning is.
Mrs. Xia, who runs a franchise business to set people up in the garment trades, sent her car and driver through this mob to the boat docks. Mai and I took the car to the villa that had been General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s HQ when Chungking was the Kuomintang capital during World War II. A huge photo of Chiang Kai-shek graced the front hall. I expressed my surprise to the docent. “We have to respect history,” she said.
We went to dinner with Mrs. Xia and her husband and Mr. Kang, who runs what is in effect a Chinese Wal-Mart, a combined department store and supermarket that does 6.4 billion yuan in annual business and produces over 1 billion yuan in after-tax profits. Mr. Xia is an important something (I didn’t quite catch what and maybe wasn’t meant to) in the Chongqing Communist Party.
Mrs. Xia was fashion-forward, her colors and patterns and makeup merrily clashing away. Mr. Xia was in an anonymous gray suit. And Mr. Kang had muscles bulging out of his sport clothes. He looked like a younger Jackie Chan.
Mr. Kang gave me a management lecture straight from the New York Times’ “Business, How-To, and Miscellaneous” best-seller list. He told me it was important that information and understanding be shared by all levels of employees in a company. “And,” he added, “that goes for countries, too.
“We are proud of ourselves nowadays,” Mr. Kang said. “I think America believes China is a worthy competitor.” He said that clothing, food, shelter, and transportation are well taken care of in China. Now everyone wants to travel. He urged the United States to open its travel market. But he said it was no longer so important for kids to study abroad. Mr. Xia said that Chinese industrial ownership was “thirty percent private, thirty percent government, thirty percent overseas, and ten percent by the people.”
Mr. Kang, like Mao, was from Hunan. He studied business and, after graduating from college, he was sent to Chongqing as a government department store manager. “I missed my family,” he said. “I could have gone back to live under the shelter of my parents. But here if I succeeded it would be my own accomplishment. I wanted to prove I could do it. For ten years life was very simple, nothing exciting. I kept looking for new things, kept learning. Life is very fair to everybody. If you fail, don’t get upset. If you succeed, don’t be proud. Character and goal are very important, and persistence. You have to look to details and you will get to big business later. Once you achieve that you should look for something higher. You should be a responsible person.”
I managed to interrupt and ask him how he got started. Business was bad at the government department store, so Mr. Kang and two of the other managers went to the government and said that they thought they could do a better job themselves. The government agreed to let them try. They opened their own branch of the government store and made 7 million yuan the first year. Now they run the whole chain and own 30 percent of it.
“Does the department store have more competition these days?” I asked.
“Very big competition,” said Mr. Kang. “Competition is good. No competition, no growth. I love competition. It makes me excited to go for the fight.”
Mr. Xia said, “He’s full of confidence.”
Mr. Kang said that he hoped by the time he retired his stores would be everywhere in China.
“Even the central government,” Mr. Xia said, “is emphasizing that people are the most important.”
“I have full confidence in China,” said Mr. Kang. “We have to be patriotic.” Then, making a leap I didn’t really follow, he said, “I support George Bush. He is very frank. Very sincere. But I would ask Bush one thing—to solve the Taiwan problem.”
Mrs. Xia started as a seamstress. But she always admired entrepreurs. “After I’d had a baby,” she said, “I thought I should follow my goal to do achievement in life.” She took a job as a salesperson at a clothing store even though this paid less than being a garment worker. She wanted to see how the business worked. She borrowed 20,000 yuan (about $2,500) and on this slim capital started her own clothing line. By the end of the second year it had almost 4 million yuan in sales volume. Then she began franchising her business.
“The government is very supportive of what I’m doing,” she said. “They gave me a 300,000-yuan bonus for helping to solve their unemployment problems.” Now she’s organizing an “industrial city” for garment manufacturing.
“I have a very great achievement feeling,” Mrs. Xia said. “But I have also lost things. I slept two or three hours a night. I lost my husband because I wasn’t spending enough time with him. I took my child and had nothing. Then, while I was experiencing my toughest times, I met Mr. Xia. He gave me great support. He was a university lecturer who got promoted to the Chongqing Committee. I have gone through my problems. I have proved myself. I was selected to the provincial assembly and am giving back to society. Also, I got the support and approval of government. But my corporation is all myself. Because of my high achievement I make my family very happy.”
We took a stroll through the center of the city so that Ms. Xia could show me the Party’s aptly named Big Hall, built in Bolshevik baroque in 1956 and one of the ten largest buildings in Asia.
“We are learning from American marketing culture,” Ms. Xia said. “But we can’t learn everything, because the culture is different.”
Across from the Big Hall was a monument to the Three Gorges Dam. In a contrast of style with its neighbor this monument consisted of piles of ten-foot-high pyramidal concrete anchors used to keep eroding soil from washing away, interspersed with enormous tires from earth-moving equipment.
“The water won’t actually rise much in Chongqing,” Mr. Xia said.
Between the monument and the Big Hall was a square almost as expansive as Tiananmen in Beijing. When Mai and I were back in Hong Kong, I mentioned to Tom that the whole time we’d been on the mainland I’d hardly heard the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 mentioned.
“That’s no surprise,” Tom said. “Tiananmen Square is where the abdication of the last emperor was proclaimed in 1912. It’s where the student demonstrations, which led to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party, were held in 1919. It’s where the Japanese occupation government announced its East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, where Mao declared victory over the Kuomintang in 1949, and where a million Red Guards swore loyalty to Mao during the Cultural Revolution. When the Chinese see a bunch of people gathering in Tiananmen Square, they don’t get all warm and fuzzy the way we do. The Chinese think, ‘Here we go again.’ ”
Mai and I flew to Guangzhou (Canton, as it was known for centuries). We stayed with Mai’s friend Qing and her husband, Phillip. Phillip had been a museum curator in the United States. He moved to China to restore the antique furniture that had been wrecked and neglected by the communists and to build reproductions using the original types of wood, tools, and finishes. He showed me through his workshop, where he also runs a training program for young Chinese cabinetmakers.
“After a couple of generations when no one cared about craftsmanship,” Phillip said, “the craftsmanship is stunning.” I watched a young man making an intricate dovetail with a hatchet—the kind of hatchet that was featured in 1940s movie serials about Tong Wars.
Phillip said, “There is, however, a Chinese tendency to do things the hard way.”
Qing’s father, Mr. Zhao, is one of the last surviving veterans of the Long March of 1934–1935, when the communists escaped encirclement by Kuomintang forces and regrouped to fight both Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese.
Mr. and Mrs. Zhao came to lunch at their daughter’s house. They were full of a rare good cheer of old age. When Qing introduced me as an American, Mr. Zhao laughed and said, “Bush is thinking too much—about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea. He should think less!”
Mr. Zhao was familiar with the costs of excess theory. He and his wife had been upper-level Party officials in Guangzhou. When Qing was a girl the Cultural Revolution had come. She’d told me how everything had gone away—her parents’ jobs; the family’s house; their food, clothes, and privileges. Mr. and Mrs. Zhao had been subjected to “criticism,” as it was so coyly called. “But,” Qing had said, “like a kid, I kind of enjoyed the excitement—all of us living in one room and the fighting in the streets.”
Mr. Zhao had joined the revolution in 1932, when he was twelve. He belonged to a Communist Party Boy Scout–like organization. He was sixteen when the Long March began. He was one of the “Little Red Devils” who accompanied the troops. He went with the Fourth Red Army led by Zhang Guotao, Mao’s more sensible rival for Party leadership. Mr. Zhao did not seem bitter that Mao had won out, or about the Red Guards, or even at Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang troops. “We tried to go to Yunnan to fight the Japanese,” he said, “but had to fight the Kuomintang first to get there.” Then the Kuomintang sent them material for the war against Japan. “And,” Mr. Zhao laughed, “we used it to fight the Kuomintang later.”
He was, however, still mad at the Japanese. “They had the ‘Three Policies,’ ” he said. ‘“Burn everything. Rob everything. Kill everything.’ Totally unhuman.”
“The Japanese people are good people, but their leaders are not,” said Mrs. Zhao, soothingly.
Mr. Zhao started out with the Fourth Army taking care of the horses, but was promoted to radio operator. He fought the Japanese for eight years. The Fourth Army crossed the measureless grasslands of western Szechwan three times. The plateau is so full of mire and free of landmarks that the only way they could keep their units together was to spread sideways from horizon to horizon and go forward in a single rank. Even mounted soldiers sank, sometimes horse and all. They starved until they ate their leather belts. When they finally found some potatoes, one potato filled them so much they were sick. The Fourth Army started the Long March 100,000 strong. Only 25,000 were left at the end. And when they’d reached a mountain fastness—not far form where Mr. Tian’s coke furnace is today—they were surrounded by the Japanese. They escaped thanks to the leadership of Peng Dehuai, the best of the Long March military commanders. Some of the women cadres were pregnant and made it down the mountain by holding onto the tails of horses. Other women crawled into baskets and rolled down. Mr. Zhao was assigned to take care of Peng’s wife. He was given two bullets: one for himself, because he knew the radio codes; and one for Mrs. Peng. “People like us could not be caught,” Mr. Zhao said.
Peng Dehuai would lead the Chinese troops in the Korean War and then be purged by Mao and beaten by the Red Guards, 130 times, until he died.
“Dad,” said Qing, “A lot of this stuff I’ve never heard you talk about before.”
Mr. Zhao smiled with the pleasure of being an octogenarian and still able to surprise. Deng Xiaoping had restored Mr. and Mrs. Zhao to their Party posts, but they’d retired in the middle 1980s. “I consider myself very lucky to have survived,” Mr. Zhao said. “After the fight with the Kuomintang, when the Communist Party was in charge, I got a lot of benefits from the Communist Party, the opportunity to study.” He met Mrs. Zhao at the Party School in Beijing in 1950.
Mr. Zhao was not quite sure what he thought about all the economic development. “He has opened his mind a little bit about money,” said Mrs. Zhao. “This is good for his physical and mental health. He’s not sure if things are good or bad, but he doesn’t talk too much—doesn’t argue or criticize.”
“I get good Party benefits,” Mr. Zhao said. “The organization gives me care and concern. The family is more or less not a big problem.” He winked at Phillip. “ I feel I have accomplished my wishes. All the children are fifty years old, so I don’t have to worry. Now I’m eighty-six. It’s wonderful. After that it doesn’t matter how long I live. There is a government resort we go to every year. We’ve built strong relationships there. Right now I have no other wish. If I want to have another meal I go ahead and have it. My only worry is if my wife falls or gets ill. Then she can’t take care of me! I am slightly selfish!”
* Well, not quite, but one takes Mr. Wu’s point.