China in Ten Words (15 page)

Let’s now consider how the revolutionary violence of the Cultural Revolution has continued to rear its head in the course of China’s economic success story of the past thirty years. Here it helps to know something about official seals. Round wooden seals less than two inches in diameter, they weigh no more than a pack of cigarettes, but in our sixty years under communism these insubstantial-looking accessories have often been the concrete emblems of immense political and economic power. Documents of appointment require an official seal, contracts between companies require a seal, and seals also provide verification of whether one possesses legal status: work ID, student ID, birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, and so forth all require authentication with an official seal. In China official seals are needed everywhere, all the time.

In January 1967 the rebel faction in Shanghai launched an assault on the city government, snatching away the government’s official seal and announcing the successful seizure of power. This was the celebrated “January Revolution.” Similar movements then convulsed the entire country as rebel factions and Red Guards everywhere launched attacks on their government organs, on factories and schools, and on People’s Communes. These nationwide power seizures amounted, in a sense, to a movement to seize official seals. Like robbers or bandits, rebels and Red Guards smashed open the doors and windows of government buildings and factories and schools, rushed in exultantly, and broke into desks and cabinets, ransacking offices in their search for these symbols of authority.

Whoever seized the official seal would be the possessor of true power; they could issue orders right and left and allocate funds with supreme confidence, destroy the lives of people they disliked, and use public money to bankroll their expenses. Any and all actions would be instantly legitimized, so long as they were recorded on a piece of paper and stamped with the official seal.

As a result, deadly struggles developed between different rebel factions and Red Guard organizations, with both sides intent on seizing official seals. Sometimes several organizations would launch simultaneous attacks on government offices, all eager to be first to seize the seal. They would scale walls and jump through windows—whatever it took to get the jump on their rivals. It sometimes looked a lot like a game of American football, for as one group tried to break into the offices, another group would fearlessly hurl themselves at them, tugging on their jackets and wrestling them to the ground so as to enable their comrades to enter the building first. Sometimes a rebel faction had just managed to seize the government seal, only to discover that other rebel organizations already had them surrounded.

I witnessed one such scene myself when I was seven years old. Standing under a willow tree, I watched, transfixed, as a revolutionary power seizure took place on the other side of the river. A dozen or more rebels had rushed inside the three-story building that housed the local government offices. They had just given a whoop of delight to celebrate their seizure of the seal when a different group of rebels arrived on the scene. There were forty or fifty of them, armed with clubs, and they soon had the offices completely surrounded. Their commander picked up a megaphone and barked out an instruction to the rebels inside, telling them to hand over the seal without further delay. And if they refused? “You may have gone in on your own two legs,” he threatened, “but they’ll have to bring you out on stretchers.”

The defenders had a megaphone of their own. “You’ve got to be joking!” they fired back. They followed this with a chorus of “Long Live Chairman Mao!”

The besiegers responded with their own “Long Live Chairman Mao!” and charged inside, waving their clubs. Amid cries of “Long Live Chairman Mao!” and “Defend Great Leader Chairman Mao to the Death!” the two groups of combatants clashed in a frantic melee. From my side of the river I could dimly make out the sounds of glass shattering, clubs and chairs breaking, and howls of pain. The occupiers, vastly outnumbered, were forced to give ground, finally evacuating to the flat concrete roof. Two of their wounded had to be dragged up the stairs; they lay motionless on the roof, just barely alive. Soon the other rebels launched their final assault, clubs flailing, and three of the defenders were knocked right off the roof. One of them was clutching the seal in his hand, and just before he fell he threw it as far as he could into the river below.

The attackers had won the battle, only to see their most valuable prize now floating off downstream. They rushed out of the building, yelling wildly. One of the rebels raced ahead to a wooden bridge; there he stripped off his clothes and slipped out of his cotton shoes, then threw himself into the chilly waters. Amid the cheers of his comrades on the bank, he splashed his way into the middle of the current and grabbed the seal before it sank below the surface.

Afterward the town’s new power holders conducted a victory parade. The intrepid swimmer, still soaking wet, led the way, clutching the seal in his right hand. His comrades followed close behind, some with blood on their faces, others hobbling along, living proof of how fierce the fighting had been. In between yells of “Long Live Chairman Mao!” they announced that the “January Revolution” in our town had now achieved total victory. The man who had risked his life to recover the seal was now a local hero. In the days that followed, more than once I saw him come to an abrupt stop as he walked down the street, give an enormous sneeze, then continue on his way.

Chinese society now is radically different from what it was during the Cultural Revolution, but the status of official seals has not changed in the slightest: they remain the symbol of political and economic power. So seizures of official seals continue to take place in China today.

Owing to tensions among shareholders, some privately run companies have seen farcical to-and-fro tussles where the company’s seal keeps changing hands. Shareholders may look so proper in their suits and leather shoes, but if they want to grab control of the company, they will seize the official seal with as little delicacy as underworld thugs. They punch and kick, spit and curse, smash chairs and break cups, quite indifferent to the impression they give the employees. This kind of episode has also been known to occur in law offices, when lawyers who pride themselves on their legal knowledge vie for possession of the company seal just as fiercely as bandits in the old days competed to abduct women. Even in state-run enterprises, seizures of seals sometimes happen. Such companies are nominally led by a board of trustees, but their traditional party committee structure remains entrenched. In 2007 the party secretary of one state-run enterprise, at loggerheads with the chairman of the board, dismissed him in the name of the party committee—despite the fact that legally only a board of trustees has the power to take such action. Then the party secretary brought in dozens of toughs to smash open the door of the chairman’s office with sledgehammers and pry open his cabinet, carrying off the company seal.

Such incidents happen not only internally within enterprises; they often take place between companies, and even between government entities. In one case, for example, a company in south China lost a lawsuit because its rival had produced testimony from a third company that served to discredit it. The defendant appealed the ruling and, before the appeal was heard, fabricated a different document ascribed to this third company, going to extreme lengths to make it appear authentic. Several of the defendant’s enforcers pushed their way into the third company’s offices—the staff were so intimidated that they hid in a bathroom—and then broke into a filing cabinet, took out the company seal, and stamped the doctored documents. When the case was heard, the defendant proudly brought out the documents in support of its case, rejecting all claims that the documents were fake and the seal was invalid.

In another case, one government agency seized another’s seal. Ten acres of land under a village’s jurisdiction had been requisitioned by higher authorities in the adjacent city, but the village and the city had not been able to reach agreement on the selling price. The city tried to force the village committee into compliance, but under pressure from rank-and-file villagers the village committee refused to ratify the proposed agreement. The city government, exasperated, sent people into the village to snatch away the seal, then stamped the agreement in the village committee’s name.

From the Cultural Revolution to the present, there are countless such examples; sometimes there are striking similarities between things that happened then and things that are happening now. A friend told me that during the power-seizure phase of the Cultural Revolution a factory in the town where he lived had two separate rebel organizations. They were of equal strength, and their commanders understood that they would suffer serious casualties if they were to fight over the seal. So they negotiated a power-sharing agreement: the factory seal would be cut into two, and each faction would retain half. When both commanders agreed on a particular course of action, they would produce their half-seals and press them together on a letter or directive, then pocket them once more. In the stamp on the finished documents a crack could clearly be seen.

Years later, in the reform era, another story of a cracked seal is linked to a private entrepreneur’s rise to glory. Today he leads a large enterprise, but to start with he was just the deputy manager of a small company. Like a rebel activist in the Cultural Revolution, he gathered a group of like-minded people around him. First he frightened the manager into vacating his position, and then he threatened to break the legs of the chairman of the board, forcing him out, too. Now he was chairman of the board and manager combined.

The original chairman took the company seal away with him when he fled, and without the seal the company could not conduct normal business. But the new boss man wasn’t going to let such a petty detail stand in his way. In Chinese cities you can find tucked away in every neighborhood small businesses that will make you an official seal on the quiet, so he told an underling to go out and get a new seal carved. This was illegal, since official seals require a letter of authorization from the relevant government department, but for a man with entrepreneur’s ambitions legal niceties counted for nothing. Having a seal of his own did not entirely resolve the issue, however, because the existence of the other seal could still hamstring the company’s operations; the original chairman of the board might use it to sign contracts, for example, sowing all kinds of confusion.

But to the businessman, that was a minor detail, too. When his aide arrived with the newly carved seal, he told him to go out again and buy an axe. The assistant could make no sense of that but did his bidding all the same, then watched in astonishment as his new boss put the seal on his desk, raised the axe, and cleaved the seal neatly in two. Finally, he confirmed his authority with an announcement that, henceforth, contracts approved by the company would need to have a cracked stamp to be genuine; those with an unblemished stamp would be fakes.

Such acts of intimidation are common among some Chinese entrepreneurs, who not only rely on beatings to seize control but will even hire people to kill their rivals, putting the mafiosi in Hollywood movies completely in the shade.

As China’s economy has raced forward, violence reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution has taken place not only on the popular level but also with official backing. Just consider how urbanization has been pursued, with huge swathes of old housing razed in no time at all and replaced in short order by high-rise buildings. These large-scale demolitions can make Chinese cities look as though they have been targets of a bombing raid. In a joke once popular among urban residents, the CIA was said to have traced Osama bin Laden to a hideout in their city. A spy plane enters the airspace overhead, only to discover a scene of utter devastation. “I don’t know who ordered the bombing,” the American pilot reports back to headquarters, “but there’s no way bin Laden could have survived this.”

Behind the situation is a developmental model saturated with revolutionary violence of the Cultural Revolution type. To suppress popular discontent and resistance, some local governments send in large numbers of police to haul away any residents who refuse to budge. Then a dozen or more giant bulldozers will advance in formation, knocking down a blockful of old houses in no time at all. When the residents are finally released, they find only rubble where their homes once stood. Vagrants now, they have no option but to bow to reality and accept the housing offered.

In a typical case, back in 2007, a family of five was unable to reach agreement with the local authorities on compensation for the loss of their house and found themselves forcibly evicted. One night as they were sleeping, a gang of men in hard hats threw ladders up against the outside wall, smashed the windows with hammers and clubs, and jumped inside. The family woke to find themselves surrounded by dozens of intruders. Before they were fully aware of what was happening, they were dragged from their beds like criminals and rushed downstairs without being allowed to dress or collect any personal effects; any resistance was met with a punch in the jaw. They were shoved into a van and taken off to an empty house. There they sat, huddled in their bedcovers, on a cold concrete floor, guarded by a couple of dozen policemen, until noon that day, when an official came in and informed them that their house had been razed and their property inventoried and moved to a new address. Given the fait accompli, they had no choice but to move into the house assigned them. When they talked about the incident afterward, it seemed more like a scene in a movie than real life, for it had all happened so suddenly. “Even in a war, you give your enemy some time to surrender,” they moaned.

Our economic miracle—or should we say, the economic gain in which we so revel—relies to a significant extent on the absolute authority of local governments, for an administrative order on a piece of paper is all that’s required to implement drastic change. The method may be simple and crude, but the results in terms of economic development are instantaneous. That is why I say it is the lack of political transparency that has facilitated China’s breakneck growth.