China in Ten Words (16 page)

Violent evictions are all too common in China today, provoking many acts of collective resistance. In November 2009, in a city in the southwest, dozens of men carrying steel pipes and crowbars burst into the homes of nine families whose houses were earmarked for demolition. The men stuck duct tape over the mouths of some thirteen residents and hustled them into waiting vehicles; four of the homeowners were injured in the struggle. Then two earthmoving machines revved their engines and demolished twenty-six houses within a matter of minutes. Yet more violent confrontation ensued after daybreak, when the outraged evictees and their friends and relatives—some thirty people or more—blocked the nearby intersection with red cotton strips and more than forty liquefied gas canisters, demanding an apology from the local government. On the ground that the roadblock was disrupting the social order, police dispersed them and detained four instigators on charges of fomenting a disturbance and obstructing traffic.

In the same month a woman’s house was forcibly demolished by the local government because she refused to sign a resettlement agreement that stipulated compensation at what was obviously below-market value. As the bulldozer knocked open the front door and began to ram the outer walls, and her house began to rupture and collapse, she drank a large glass of whiskey to bolster her courage; then, aided by her husband, she stood on her fourth-floor balcony and tossed Molotov cocktails at the earthmover and the demolition crew, who retaliated by throwing stones at her. Despite her stubborn resistance, after several hours her apartment too was flattened; later the couple was found guilty of obstructing public works and her husband was sentenced to eight months in prison.

Also that same month, on November 11 in Chengdu, a woman named Tang Fuzhen took things one step further. After attacking a demolition crew with Molotov cocktails and putting up resistance for more than three hours, she doused herself with gasoline and ignited it with a cigarette lighter, burning herself to death. This incident finally triggered a furor in the Chinese media, and although the local government classified her self-immolation as violent resistance to the law, public opinion sided with Tang Fuzhen. People began to question the legality of the Regulation Governing House Demolition and Resettlement in Urban Areas, and five professors at Peking University Law School sent a proposal to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress recommending that the regulation be revised, pointing out that it conflicts with both the Constitution and the Property Rights Law.

In the past few years social contradictions triggered by forced demolitions have become more and more common, and social conflicts have become more intense. Tang Fuzhen’s suicide triggered resentments that had long been building up, and in the face of strong public pressure the State Council indicated that it would revise the Regulation Governing House Demolition and Resettlement in Urban Areas. But just as many people were expecting a crackdown on forced demolition and resettlement, reality has exposed their naivety, for such incidents, far from diminishing, have if anything become even more grave.

Late on the night of March 26, 2011, twenty mechanical diggers and several hundred men armed with pickaxes suddenly descended on a residential compound affiliated with Changchun Film Studio in Jilin Province. Fourteen buildings were razed to the ground in a matter of just five hours. Not only were there forcible evictions, but some residents were carried out and dumped like garbage outside their homes. A fifty-year-old woman named Liu Shuxiang, trapped in her room, was crushed under fallen masonry and had died by the time police finally came to investigate, two days later.

There are bizarre cases as well. In one locality, forty-odd state employees found their jobs threatened because their relatives would not agree to demolition and resettlement. A district administrator informed his subordinates that if they failed to persuade their kinfolk, thus delaying relocation, they would all be fired. In the villages where the recalcitrant relatives lived, the public address system reverted to Cultural Revolution routine, continually broadcasting demolition-and-resettlement ultimatums from eight in the morning till six in the evening. “The government is fully committed to this project,” the loudspeakers blared. “Nothing will be permitted to stand in its way.”

These episodes, old and new, remind me of something Mao Zedong once said. Mao offered a memorable definition of what revolution means, and during the Cultural Revolution we could recite it backward. It went like this:

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence.
^†

I
n the early summer of 1972 several boys slipped quietly out of their classes at Bright Sky Primary School and headed off in the sunshine toward Haiyan Secondary School. To get there, they had to cross a river, by way of a newly constructed concrete bridge. Workmen had laid straw sacks across the road and were spraying them with rubber hoses to keep the fresh concrete damp and prevent cracks. The wet straw squelched under my feet until I reached the other side—it was my first time playing truant. My classmates and I could hardly contain our curiosity on this walk to the school we would be entering that autumn, for there was one thing we were very eager to find out: what is revolution?

At this point, having experienced six years of Cultural Revolution, we had seen and heard of many revolutionary incidents, but we had never actually taken part. Although we had often parroted that phrase of Mao’s “To rebel is justified,” this idea had always been confined to the level of speech and had never been put into action. Boys who were a year or two older treated us with condescension. “You don’t know shit,” they would say. “You lot need to wait till you’re in middle school to know what revolution is.”

This was a big blow to my self-esteem, because before this I had always assumed that my life was firmly grounded in revolution. For a street urchin like me the experience of growing up consisted of streets full of red flags and big-character posters: I had observed countless demonstrations and acts of violence, and trailing along behind grown-ups, I had gone to watch innumerable struggle meetings.

At that time the people I most admired were boys ten years older than me, for they had been able to participate in the nationwide “networking” by Red Guards that had begun in October 1966. Schools canceled classes so that everyone could take part in revolutionary activities, and Red Guards embarked on ambitious journeys designed to “develop connections” and “exchange experiences.” China then was dotted with Red Guard Reception Stations, which arranged room and board, disbursed travel expenses, catered to the young activists’ material needs, and lined up transportation to ferry them back and forth. The Red Guards from our town had only small change to their name—a yuan or two at most—but with an officially stamped networking letter of introduction they were able to roam the whole country from east to west and north to south—no need to fork out money for train tickets or hotels or even pay for their meals. No wonder they looked so enraptured later, when they recalled their networking adventures.

One of those roaming Red Guards was the older brother of a classmate of mine. By this time the brother had been relocated to a rural village, where he endured a life of back-breaking toil. Every couple of months he would walk five or six hours to get back to our town, and a few days later walk another five or six hours back to a village where the only nighttime lighting came from kerosene lamps. His home visits were holiday occasions for us younger children, and listening to his stories on those summer evenings was a cherished pleasure.

As the heat receded at the end of the day, he would sit back in a rattan chair, his right foot resting on his left knee and a palm-leaf fan in his hand. Soon a dozen or more admirers would park themselves on the ground in front of him, and he would travel back in time to that morning when he and his comrades had raised their red banners and marched majestically out of our little town, their Red Guard armbands gleaming. They planned to march five hundred miles to Shaoshan, in Hunan, where they would pay homage at Mao Zedong’s ancestral home, then march another five hundred miles to Mao’s earliest revolutionary base area, the Jinggang Mountains of Jiangxi. But they wore themselves out just on the first day’s march, so instead they flagged a truck down and rode in the back as far as Shanghai, fifty miles away. After touring Shanghai for a good ten days or so, they took a train to Beijing, where they did more sightseeing, and then divided into two groups, one boarding the train to Qingdao, the other traveling south to Wuhan. Over time their numbers dwindled, and in the end my classmate’s brother constituted a team of one. He traveled by himself to Guangzhou, where he ran into Red Guards from Shenyang, in the northeast, and in their company crossed the strait to Hainan Island. Six months later, he and his Red Guard associates, like soldiers separated in battle, straggled back to our town one by one. Exchanging notes about their respective networking activities, they realized that not one of them had made it to Shaoshan or the Jinggang Mountains. They had gone only to major cities and famous tourist destinations, and in the name of the revolution had accomplished the longest and most enjoyable sightseeing excursion of their entire lives. The story always ended with a stirring refrain: “Ah, our beautiful rivers and mountains—I saw them all, you know!”

By that time the Red Guard veterans from our town had been banished to the countryside and were living in wretched conditions. After the chaos and turmoil of the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong was confronted by a harsh reality: for three years after 1966, high schools and universities had admitted no new students, creating a backlog of more than 16 million middle school and high school graduates awaiting further education or employment. Although society had become relatively more stable, China’s economy was on the verge of bankruptcy and could offer no new openings for urban employment. Mao’s Red Guards had shown their mettle in large-scale fighting and property confiscations and were all too accustomed to beating people, smashing things up, and stealing. Unless they had something to keep them busy, 16 million Red Guards and urban youth were in danger of becoming a destabilizing force in society.

Mao Zedong saw that something needed to be done. “Let educated youth go to the countryside,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “There they can receive further education from the poor and lower-middle peasants.”

Countless families were affected, and many tragedies ensued. Children said good-bye to their tearful parents and left home with a simple bedroll on their backs, heading off for border regions and rural villages. Transplanted into China’s poorest areas, they began a life of deprivation, of sad partings and all too short reunions. Of the high school graduates in our town who “went up to the mountains and down to the villages,” some were sent to Heilongjiang, a thousand miles away, and others were relocated to hinterland areas in their home province. These former Red Guards were now pessimistic and despondent about their future prospects. Every time they came home on a few days’ furlough, they waxed nostalgic about their networking during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution and loved to regale us with vivid accounts of their adventures. But somehow it was their reports of what happened at the train stations that I remember best.

As they networked, Red Guards crammed into all the trains running on Chinese tracks. Some managed to stretch out underneath the seats, and some squeezed themselves onto the luggage racks overhead, but most had to settle for standing hour after hour as their train wended its way slowly from one stop to the next. The toilets were even more congested than they would be on my train out of Beijing twenty years later, so it was utterly impossible to use the facilities. As soon as the train pulled into a station, the Red Guards would pour out of doors and windows like toothpaste squirting endlessly from a tube; boys would boldly unbuckle their belts and urinate and defecate right there on the platform, while girls would huddle in circles, taking turns to squat down and do their business within this human shield, hidden from the prying gaze of boys with wicked notions. Then the Red Guards, boys and girls alike, would squeeze back into the carriages and the train would pull away, leaving the platform dotted with foul-smelling piles and puddles.

My classmate’s older brother was for a time the symbol of revolution in my eyes, because he loved to tell stories about his experiences as a Red Guard traveling the country. Later, however, after a bamboo flute appeared in his hand, he no longer talked about his splendid adventures and instead became silent and subdued. Each time he returned from the countryside, he arrived wearing mud-stained old sneakers, carrying an old canvas duffel bag in his right hand and the flute in his left. It would be much the same picture when he headed back a few days later, except that by then his mother would have washed his shoes. During his time at home he would sit by the window playing his flute—fitful, fragmentary snatches of revolutionary anthems that, as performed by him, lost their impassioned energy and took on a decadent lassitude. Sometimes he would simply sit at the window, a blank look on his face, and if we went up and said hello, he made no effort to acknowledge us.

Once so communicative, he had become a different person, taciturn and glum. Perhaps his flute had replaced speech, giving expression to the complex of emotions that he could never put into words. During those two years, any time I heard the trill of a bamboo flute as I was walking down our lane, I knew that he had come home. The only flute music ever heard in our alley, it served to signal his existence. Now and again he would play the tune of a peddler hawking pear-syrup candy, which would induce us younger kids to come running in his direction, eager for a treat. Seeing our chagrin at having been duped, he would chortle with amusement, then revert to his customary silence.