China in Ten Words (18 page)

We did, however, fight one epic battle against a strongly built young peasant. He was a good head taller than any of us, and his chest was as broad as two of us put together. When we threw ourselves on him, he fought back stubbornly. He clenched his right hand tightly into a fist but dared not actually punch us, for he knew that would simply aggravate his offense; all he did was shove us aside with his left hand and make a run for it. This was the fiercest resistance we had ever encountered, and he might have gotten away had we not had numbers on our side, to hem him in from all directions. It helped too that some classmates were armed with bricks, with which they banged him over the head, and soon we had him pinned down on the ground. Even so, he still had his right hand curled in a fist and still tried with his left hand to push us away. We knew he had to have coupons in his right hand, but we could not pry his fingers apart, no matter how hard we tried. Two boys pinned his arm tightly to the ground while another pounded his fist with a brick until it was bathed in blood. Finally he unclenched his hand, revealing a bunch of blood-soaked oil coupons; counting them, we found a pound’s worth altogether. After we had marched him to the anti-speculation office, a thorough search revealed that he had an additional eleven pounds of coupons hidden away in his clothes.

A full twelve pounds of oil coupons—this was our biggest bust ever. Under questioning, as he mopped his blood-stained face, the young man confessed to speculation. In order to pay for his wedding, he had borrowed nine pounds’ worth of coupons from friends and relatives, and the other three pounds were the result of his family’s scrimping and saving: his parents and brothers and sisters had gone for half a year without eating a drop of oil, making do with vegetables boiled in salted water.

That morning thirty-odd years ago retains a grim, appalling clarity in my memory today. While we celebrated our triumph with laughter all around, our victim recounted his simple story with a grimace. Since he was a first offender, his punishment took the form of confiscating his twelve pounds’ worth of coupons and making him write a pledge that he would never again engage in such nefarious activity. As he wrote the pledge, his injured right hand trembled—whether from pain or from grief, I do not know. His fingers dripped crimson, and the pledge of good behavior became a letter written in blood.

So he was released, but we were not ready to let him off so easily. We dogged and harangued him as he went on his way, eager to show off in front of curious onlookers. To them we would tirelessly relate the details of our twelve-pound coupon haul, eliciting gratifying whistles of surprise. He walked on amid our jeers, weeping openly without any trace of embarrassment; sometimes he raised his right hand to wipe away his tears, wincing with pain as he did so. We didn’t stop until we had walked right to the edge of town; there we directed some last words of abuse at him and watched as he gradually disappeared in the distance along a country path. Clutching his injured hand to his chest, with a dazed and hopeless look on his face, he set out on the long road home that morning long ago.

It is with a heavy heart and a feeling of shame that I recall this episode now. I have no idea whether this decent young man went on to marry as he had planned, or how he managed to pay back those nine pounds’ worth of coupons he had borrowed. What I remember most vividly is how, when we were beating him on the head, he controlled his rage and never fought back, just pushed us away with the palm of his hand.

Now, after all the dramatic changes in Chinese society, yesterday’s profiteers have become today’s small tradesmen. Urban unemployed and landless peasants, for their own survival, set out stalls in the city or ply their wares along the street. In Beijing alone, such people number in the tens of thousands. Unlicensed, they are highly mobile, and the local government is unable to levy revenue from them. At the same time, in the eyes of municipal officials, the appearance everywhere of these hawkers damages the city’s image and detracts from “harmonious society.” In response there has been created a Bureau of City Administration and Law Enforcement, whose intimidating officers fan out in all directions. If you walk along a street or cross a pedestrian bridge in Beijing, you will often find it lined with vendors squatting on the ground, hawking their cheap wares, and as soon as someone yells, “Here come the Admin!” you will see them hastily sweep up their merchandise and scuttle away.

Today’s City Administration officials show little signs of progress in their ways of dealing with petty tradesmen, confiscating property as freely as we vigilantes did in the 1970s. Their spoils, of course, include items we could never have imagined back then. A few years ago, when I lived in an apartment near a Beijing subway station, I would often see unlicensed pedicab drivers picking people up or letting them off outside the station—and City Administration trucks loaded with confiscated pedicabs as well. I saw crushed looks on the faces of the dispossessed drivers, who had used all their savings and borrowed right and left to buy a pedicab, then pedaled the streets day and night, dripping with sweat in summer and winter alike, to support their families and pay for their children’s schooling. When the pedicabs they depended on for their livelihood were confiscated, their futures were confiscated, too.

In recent years, as pedicabs, flatbed carts, and merchandise are regularly hauled away, relations between hawkers and city officials have become more and more hostile, sometimes leading to violent conflict. This never attracted much attention from society until a vendor named Cui Yingjie stabbed and killed a City Administration enforcer. With all the media coverage of the case, people began to realize that the crude confiscation of carts and merchandise is in effect a denial of the hawkers’ right to a livelihood. As Cui Yingjie himself put it at his trial, after expressing remorse for what had happened, “All I wanted to do was to set up my own stall and try to change my life for the better.”

After the stabbing, protective equipment became more sophisticated: City Administration officers were fitted out with smartphones, knife-proof vests, helmets, slash-resistant gloves, high-intensity flashlights, and so forth. Military police have been hired as instructors, to train the City Administration enforcers in practical techniques: how to seize a knife, how to extricate oneself when grabbed by the collar or the hair, how to dislodge a hand clamped around one’s throat or waist.

Why did yesterday’s profiteers and today’s hawkers react so differently when their possessions were taken away from them? As times change and social mechanisms evolve, it seems to me, different survival instincts come into play. In social terms the Cultural Revolution was a simple era, whereas today’s society is complex and chaotic. One of Mao Zedong’s remarks sums up a basic characteristic of the Cultural Revolution. “We should support whatever the enemy opposes,” he said, “and oppose whatever the enemy supports.” The Cultural Revolution was an era when everything was painted in black and white, when the enemy was always wrong and we were always right; nobody had the courage to suggest that the enemy might sometimes be right and we might sometimes be wrong. Deng Xiaoping, in turn, said something that captures the zeitgeist of our current age: “A cat that catches the mouse is a good cat, no matter whether it’s black or white.” In so saying, he overturned Mao’s system of values and pointed out a fact long evident in Chinese society: right and wrong often coexist in a single phenomenon and interact in a dynamic of mutual displacement. At the same time, his comment put an end to the argument about where socialism and capitalism belong in China’s economic development.

So China moved from Mao Zedong’s monochrome era of politics-in-command to Deng Xiaoping’s polychrome era of economics above all. “Better a socialist weed than a capitalist seedling,” we used to say in the Cultural Revolution. Today we can’t tell the difference between what is capitalist and what is socialist—weeds and seedlings come from one and the same plant.

Sometimes a word’s meaning moves from simple to complex and in so doing reveals a social change. “Disparity”
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is just such a word.

In the 1970s, as far as city and town dwellers went, there were no obvious social disparities in China, but that didn’t stop us from talking about disparity every day, denouncing hollow disparities in empty rituals. Everyone scrutinized his own thinking for inequalities, for gaps between himself and progressive individuals like the exemplary soldier Lei Feng.
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“Study advanced models, note disparities”—such was the catchphrase of the day. Like novice monks reciting sutras, we would talk mechanically every day about “disparity,” spinning our wheels in endless, hackneyed verbiage. In our compositions from elementary school through high school we would write over and over again how, under the guidance of the Lei Feng spirit, we were reducing ideological disparities, helping the old lady next door by bringing her water from the well. By my second year of high school our teacher of Chinese had taken as much as he could take. “You’ve all been fetching water for the old lady next door for ten years already,” he said, rapping on the pile of essays stacked on his desk. “Why don’t you change your example once in a while? How about fetching a sack of rice for the old man next door?”

Decades later we still talk endlessly about disparities, but no longer are they vacuous ideological disparities. Today they are real, down-to-earth social disparities; gaps between rich and poor, city and village; differences between regions; inequalities in development, income level, and allocation; and so on. Huge social disparities are bound to trigger mass protests and individual acts of resistance. When we beat that young peasant with bricks, he never once struck back with his fist; now when an official—without using any violence, just doing his job, enforcing regulations—simply confiscates a bicycle cart and the things on it, he is stabbed to death by the hawker. Why is this? I think it is because when “disparity” moves from narrow to broad, from empty to real, it demonstrates how widespread are China’s problems, how intense its contradictions.

D
uring the socialist advances of the Mao era, although development was slow and economic returns were meager, social inequalities did genuinely contract. What Mao was never able to resolve was the gap between city and country. After thirty years of Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy, economic output has rapidly expanded: GNP has grown from 364.5 billion yuan in 1978 to more than 33 trillion yuan in 2009—almost a hundredfold increase. But the gap between city and country has not diminished; on the contrary, it has increased. According to official figures, the disparity between urban and rural residents’ income has grown to a ratio of 3.33:1 or, in absolute numbers, by 9,646 yuan, the largest such gap since economic reforms began. The figures for 2009 have yet to be released, and official sources issue only vague acknowledgments that the gap is continuing to widen.

In May 2006, my friend Cui Yongyuan, an anchorman on China Central Television, began to retrace the route of the Red Army’s Long March,
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along with his film crew and twenty-six other people from different walks of life. It took them 250 days to travel the 3,800 miles, battling the elements through all four seasons, across snow-clad mountains and through endless grasslands, until their triumphant return to Beijing in January 2007. Cui Yongyuan came home with many tales, both happy and sad, and one day when we were together, he shared some with me. This is one of them:

By the summer of that year, just when the soccer World Cup finals were taking place in Germany, Cui’s miniature Long March expedition arrived at an impoverished area in China’s southwest, and there he had a sudden inspiration: to organize a soccer match for the local primary school children. Even if it was a far cry from the passions in Berlin, he thought, at least it would create a little ripple of World Cup excitement in this backward hinterland county.

He immediately encountered two problems. The first was that no soccer ball could be found in the stores of the county town, so he had to send two fellow Long Marchers off in a car to a bigger city to buy one. The second was that the local primary school children not only had never seen a soccer match; they had never even heard that such a game existed.

Cui Yongyuan located a large field—fields were one thing they did have there—and had a designer in his film crew put up a goalpost. A thousand children sat on the grass and watched attentively as Cui launched his crash course in elementary soccer. He began the lesson by demonstrating the penalty kick, placing the brand-new soccer ball on the penalty spot and proudly introducing his cameraman, the crew member with the most soccer experience.

The cameraman was used to playing without a referee and without an audience, so with the eyes of so many spectators upon him he naturally tensed up. Although he managed to strike a dashing enough figure in his run-up, he betrayed his amateur status in the delivery. The ball ballooned over the bar like a shell fired from a howitzer, painted a rainbow-like arc in the air, then hit the ground with a resounding thump and rolled into the middle of a cow pie.

Bowing his head in chagrin, the cameraman trotted over and retrieved the ball from the sticky pile of dung, carried it over to a pond nearby, gave it a good wash, then returned it to its place on the penalty spot. Cui Yongyuan now had the schoolchildren line up to practice taking penalties. An unforgettable scene ensued as each child kicked the ball, ran after it, waited till it stopped moving, picked it up, scampered over to the pond to give it a cleaning, then put it back on the penalty spot. Washing the soccer ball, they understood, was one of the basic rules of the game.

This—a true story—took place in the summer of 2006, when more than a hundred million Chinese watched the World Cup on television. World Cup matches were first broadcast in China back in 1978, the year when our soccer league was officially inaugurated. In the 2002 World Cup tournament, hosted jointly by Japan and Korea, the group match between China and Brazil was seen by 200 million Chinese. So in many parts of China today children have long been familiar with such brands as Nike and Adidas. Wearing school uniforms as they do, today’s youngsters have little scope for making fashion statements, so—a Beijing schoolteacher informs me—they compete in showing off their footwear instead. If they are all wearing Nike basketball shoes, say, then it will come down to who is wearing which generation of Jordans or Kobes. Meanwhile, in southwest China, there are children who have never even heard of soccer.