Barbarian Lost (4 page)

The café's front door is discreet; it leads to a dirty staircase, at the bottom of which sits a bald-headed old man smiling a toothless grin.

“I love this place,” Viv tells me as we climb the stairs.

Landing on the second floor, I notice that the atmosphere has changed: the walls are painted black. The café is on one side; the All Sages Bookstore, the other. We turn toward the café. We pass a few display cabinets and I see Chinese titles for Jared Diamond, Milton Friedman and Edward Said.

The café is stylish and moody. It's obviously popular with young intellectuals. We head to a table by the window to wait for Professor Hé. Viv is excited to see him again and briefs me on his biography. Hé specializes in constitutional law. He has been particularly involved in cases of discrimination arising from China's dual residency system, known as the
hukou
system. He has become a critic of the government and was one of a few legal academics to write an open letter criticizing the central government.

“There was a famous case a few years ago of a student dying in police custody,” Viv explains. “This student was out one night without his papers. If you are from the countryside, you must have written authorization to live in the city. If you don't, you can be fined by the local authorities. If you can't pay the fine immediately, they can force you to work. The authorities farm out this indentured labour to local contractors. In this case, the student was unable to prove on the spot that he was in fact a student. The police took him in as a potential labourer. Some people say that the student was lippy with the police when they interrogated him.
He died in police custody twenty-four hours later. Professor Hé came out against the measure that led to this unnecessary death.”

Hé arrives. He's in his mid- to late fifties. He's at once professorial, weathered and elegant. After preliminaries and several cigarettes, he begins to tell me about the Chinese constitution.

“I'm devoted to the constitution, but my government isn't. The fundamental political philosophy of the Communist Party is Marxism. Marx advocated no laws. As such, constitutionalism was never of much interest or relevance to the party. A constitution sets out to define a certain number of rights and rules. But regardless of the constitution, the party always presents all rights and rules as it sees fit at any given moment.”

Hé then explains that, in practical terms, this means there is no legitimate avenue for social activism and no acceptable way to implement new models of society, whether democracy, freedom of speech, human rights or even trade unions.

Hé has staked out an interesting stand for himself. He believes in rule-making and the law. It's important, he thinks, to create laws that represent the best interests of present and future society and that society can follow without too much difficulty. The constitution thus has to both frame existing laws and enshrine a law-making process that gently leads society forward.

Hé is strategically opposed to his government. He's not arguing against the Chinese government's laws. Quite the contrary: he is arguing that the government must respect the rules and laws that it gives itself, whatever they might be. He's thus not making a moral argument against his government but a practical one in support of it. He's arguing for consistency, not righteousness. In this sense, one can argue that Professor Hé is helping the government follow its own logic.

Hé believes that law can transform society. China may no longer be commanded from the Forbidden City. But the model of government it represents continues. Power remains opaque and inaccessible. This must change. By forcing the empire to bow its head to the law, power will be returned to a place where it can be witnessed, participated in and transformed.

The professor then takes me through the
hukou
system. He explains that at the beginning of the People's Republic, in its first constitution of 1954, freedom of movement was guaranteed to the people. But that constitution was never properly implemented. And from the beginning, the People's Republic of China was involved in managing and restraining the rural population. It needed that population for defence, and for food and industrial production.

This increased after the failed industrial policies of Mao's Great Leap Forward, when millions of peasants were forced out of the fields and into haphazard industrial production. Having abandoned their crops, the peasants began to starve. Many left the countryside and the famines worsened. The free flow of people had to be restricted.

The later constitutions eventually reflected the need to restrain the movement of rural populations. Over the last thirty years, the trend has been moving the other way. The growth of the manufacturing sector in the cities requires a constant influx of labour from the countryside. The limits on free movement have been lifted to allow the cities to attract this workforce. But this workforce is highly volatile and has to be managed carefully. Not everybody can be allowed to settle in the cities. The movement of people is tolerated, but legal status is not easily granted. So the workforce remains transient and cheap.

“The best friends of the party are now capitalist entrepreneurs who profit from the cheap labour,” the professor explains. “This alliance makes for little interest in the bargaining power of the workers.”

“But this alliance has also helped China secure its position in the world economy,” I point out.

“Yes, it's the reason China has become the world's factory. But without any proper legal environment, there's no real stability in the long run. The next twenty years are crucial,” he concludes with a sigh.

“Do you think China can implement a liberal democracy any time soon?” I ask.

“Well, one thing is sure: we need change. We need something different while there is still latitude for change. Even for our economy, we need judicial independence.”

“Did an old party leader not say that good things take time?”

“Well, I say to that old leader, no good things can come through institutions that don't answer to the people. I see no other alternative for us than democracy. Western-style democracy.”

“So many people participating in so great a project?”

“I cannot say it'll be easy,” he says with a gentle smile.

“Has it started?”

“It has for some.”

Another of Vivien's teachers, Professor Wang Yue, taught her documentary filmmaking and is now a television producer for CCTV, China's national television network, which broadcasts on dozens of channels. Wang produces a show on channel 10, the state documentary channel, called
Great Masters
. Vivien tells me
it is one of the best shows on Chinese state television and that she likes to watch it. It airs at 10 p.m. every weeknight.

Viv and I arrange to meet in front of the CCTV buildings, in the eastern part of town. She tells me to wait at the front gate near Professor Wang's office building. “You'll see soldiers guarding it,” she adds.

Indeed, the CCTV offices are guarded by the People's Liberation Army. I imagine the CBC offices being on a Canadian military base.

Viv's stuck in traffic, so Wang comes out to meet me at the gate and usher me through the military checkpoint. He apologizes for the nature of his workplace. “Television stations are not like this in your country,” he says as we climb a grimy staircase in an old concrete office building. He is fairly young and fit.

“Actually, CCTV has a huge new fortress for all its channels,” he continues, “a modern and expensive building that I'm sure you have seen. But I keep an office in this less assuming setting.”

Wang's office is cramped—and empty except for his brand-new computer. I'm not quite sure what to talk about, so I begin throwing him technical questions about his channel, his program and the individual documentaries.

I learn that his program produces portrait documentaries. He has only recently become its producer. He's in charge of half a dozen directors and a dozen post-production personnel. He was a director on the show before being promoted.

“Who are your documentaries about?” I ask.

“Famous people—movie stars, filmmakers, artists, some business people.”

“Politicians?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

“Your show's powerful.”

“It can be,” he happily acknowledges.

“Who tells you what to do?”

“No one tells me what to do. They only tell me what not to do.”

“Who are
they
?” I inquire.

“The CCTV 10 producers,” he says. “I produce
Great Masters
. They are in charge of the whole channel's programming.” Then he adds curiously, “My job is very hard,” and waits for me to probe.

“Why's that?”

“Because a lot of people think they know whom I should make documentaries about. Sometimes people come to me with gifts.”

“I see.”

He nods, grinning, then continues: “I refuse them, of course. But managing this is not easy.”

Wang's show is broadcast throughout China. Virtually every television set in the country gets the signal. Canadian producers are proud when a million people watch their documentaries. Wang's show gets tens of millions of viewers every night. A main vein, one might say. From his bare office on the third floor of building E, Wang has a say over the Chinese people's values, a say over celebrity in China, the new cult of personality.

“Movie stars are always a safe bet,” he says. “Very popular.”

Wang explains that this is because they can be worshipped without consequence. Business people are easy as well, he admits, because their agenda is clear and simple: they want to sell stuff. Artists and musicians are typically more difficult—it can be more difficult to control the message. Politicians are more sensitive still. Political power is a delicate affair in China. Wang tells me that he walks a thin line when dealing with certain types of people.

“What makes a good documentary filmmaker, Professor?” Viv asks, once she arrives.

“I look for people who have lived a lot,” Wang says. “People who have suffered. People who have had many crazy love affairs, who have been divorced, who have been flat broke and have moved around a lot. People who have known upsets and instability. They always have the most empathy and understanding for human nature.”

Beijing is built on a great plain surrounded on all sides by mountains. To the north of the city is the Great Wall, charting its way across an extremely rugged stretch of mountains. A visit to the wall or to those mountains will reveal how arid the territory is. Beijing is a city at the edge of a desert. Beyond the mountains toward the west is a vast wasteland of dusty, rocky landscapes and shifting sands. When the wind kicks up in the west, the capital of China is engulfed in dust.

Like Los Angeles or Mexico City, the Chinese capital is in a valley, trapped by the surrounding mountains. When no wind blows, a pocket of air forms above the valley that fills up with the fumes of automobiles and the acrid smoke of industry. In Beijing, eyes are constantly irritated and bloodshot. Respiratory troubles are rife among children. The city's air can sometimes be a serious assault on the body. With hundreds if not thousands of new cars out on the road every day, the air quality is not likely to improve.

But the capital has even more serious concerns than its air quality: water. The provinces around the capital have been experiencing an unprecedented drought over the past decade. There's simply less water in the region; meanwhile, the city needs more and more.

In the old neighbourhoods within the second ring, many of the
hutong
dwellings were without flush toilets. Several dozen families shared a single public latrine. But with so many of these old lodgings now demolished to make room for modern buildings, and the new high-rises equipped with all the modern amenities, including flush toilets, water mains into the city are multiplying.

The city's water comes from reservoirs in the same dry mountains where the dust clouds originate. Sometimes when the dust gets unbearable, public works brigades shoot rockets into the sky to release silver iodide crystals into the atmosphere. These crystals soak up the moisture and release it upon the capital in the form of rain, dampening the dust. But this bizarre method comes at a cost: wicked from the atmosphere, less moisture reaches the mountains and the western barrens, further drying them and thus taxing Beijing water sources and exasperating the erosion and dust problems.

Where this cycle is leading is anybody's guess. One thing is for sure: bigger water and air problems are ahead for the capital. Vivien and I are keen to make a trip to one of the city's main reservoirs, so we charter a car and head north.

Viv has repeatedly told me about how reluctant average people might be to talk to us. “Your average Chinese person is guarded around foreigners,” she says.

I have never been good at making first contact. Viv's pessimistic outlook doesn't make it any less daunting for me. I emphasize that she needs to be the one to make contact with people. I tell her I will act like I'm completely out of it—bored, distracted or simple-minded. “Like I'm hardly even present,” I say. “Like a tourist inadvertently following you around on some detailed tour of China.”

“Hard to imagine, really,” she counters, “but we'll try.”

The city sprawls almost to the mountains. Smog makes them invisible until we are very close. At their foot, the urban areas give way to the countryside, sprinkled with a few apple and peach orchards. The Ming emperors are buried in these foothills. Their tombs remain an attraction for tourists on their way to the Great Wall.

Tombs are important to the Chinese. They are stone reminders of our fleeting presence on earth. Chinese civilization was built on the memory of ancestors; its continuity cemented by ancestor rituals. Imperial tombs are that much more important. They're relics of an era. But our journey leads us to other ghosts.