Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (5 page)

So too did the grain quotas. Superpowers exported grain. Ergo, China must export grain. To achieve this, Mao ordered the death of every sparrow in China. Sparrows ate grain seeds; thus they had to die. This probably looked like a good idea on paper. Who would have thought that the sudden demise of the lowly sparrow would contribute to one of the worst catastrophes to ever befall humanity? Over the next three years, China would starve like no other nation had starved before. There were, of course, scientists and economists and steelmakers and farmers who could have told Mao that these were not particularly good ideas. But no one dared raise their concerns to the Chairman, who had nothing but disdain for experts, those irksome people who possessed something so irritating as knowledge.

Indeed, in 1956, during what came to be known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Mao encouraged dissenting voices to speak up, which they did. So identified, Mao unleashed one of his periodic purges. He ultimately praised the province of Hunan, which had “denounced 100,000, arrested 10,000, and killed 1,000,” and concluded, “the other provinces did the same. So our problems were solved.” In the 1950s alone, as Mao consolidated his power, his purges took the lives of more than 800,000 people. Subsequently, no one dared point out that the steel the peasants were ordered to produce in backyard furnaces was worthless, that the elimination of every sparrow would lead to a plague of locusts, and that the revolutionary changes he had applied to farming were based on nothing more than nonsensical musings. In the ensuing famine, more than 30 million people died. It became the single most devastating famine in human history. Mao, however, remained nonplussed. “Deaths have benefits,” he said. “They can fertilize the ground.” And here’s the real stunner: While China starved, Mao continued to
export
grain.

There were other ideas, of course, that didn’t turn out so well. Mao’s cult of personality found its most intense expression during the Cultural Revolution, a calculated madness in the late sixties and early seventies designed by Mao’s most ferocious supporters to consolidate power and cripple his rivals. Even Deng Xiaoping, who would one day rule China, was sent into exile in distant Jiangxi Province, where he toiled in a tractor factory. But this was no mere power struggle, and the phrase
cultural revolution
doesn’t quite do justice to the terror of that time. It was a war against the “Four Olds”—Old Customs, Old Ideas, Old Habits, and Old Culture—carried out by brainwashed, rampaging teenagers, the so-called Red Guards, bands of youths suddenly given free rein to release their inner sadists. “Be Violent,” Mao had instructed them, and they did their best to comply. The police and soldiers were told to not interfere as the youths set about beating and torturing their teachers and anyone else suspected of having “rightist” tendencies.

“Peking is not violent enough,” Mao said of Beijing, using the name by which the capital was then known, during what came to be known as Red August. “Peking is too civilized.” Nearly 2,000 people would die in Beijing alone that month. Mao abolished school and instructed that his Red Guards be given free travel, and soon all of China trembled at the sight of psychopathic gangs of teenagers in homemade olive uniforms and red armbands. And it is no wonder. In Guangxi Province, not only did the Red Guards torture and kill their teachers, they ate them too. In the lunchroom, no less. “Smash old culture,” Mao commanded. Paintings were destroyed, books set ablaze. Anyone caught with a musical instrument was likely to be tortured and even killed. Thousands of historical monuments were destroyed. China was seized in a paroxysm of terror as Mao sought to obliterate Chinese history.

In the end, the horror of that age only really came to a close with Mao’s death in 1976. Roughly 70 million people are believed to have perished under his reign, a feat that allows him to seriously compete with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin for the title Baddest Person Ever. But what makes contemporary China just a little odd is that even today one can’t escape his porcine face. I think it is fair to say that on the day Hitler killed himself in his bunker, surrounded by a shattered country and a million Soviet troops, most Germans were probably quite ready to move on, to take their leave of Adolf, and indeed that is what they did. Of course, they really didn’t have any say in the matter, but thirty years after his death, there couldn’t have been more than a handful of cretinous skinheads who could muster a
Heil Hitler
with any enthusiasm. When Joseph Stalin, born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (say it fast), died on a gloomy night in 1953, it wasn’t long before he was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev, who proceeded to undertake an intense program of de-Stalinization. Communism lingered on for nearly another forty years, but one would have been hard-pressed to find a statue or portrait of Uncle Joe.

Contrast this with China. Whenever I opened my wallet, I was greeted by Mao Zedong, looking serene and confident as his visage graced every paper yuan. Nearly every city of consequence has a Renmin Guangchang, or People’s Square, and the vast majority are still dominated by a colossal statue of Mao, looking proud and heroic. An enormous portrait of the Great Helmsman dominates Tiananmen Square, and more creepy still, his gaze is directed toward his mausoleum, where even today he accepts visitors. This pleased me, because it’s not every day that one gets to meet one of history’s greatest villains. And so early one morning, I set off to have a look.

But first I had to get there. My hotel, which appeared to be very popular with package tourists from Eastern Europe, was located within walking distance of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. I stepped out and watched the doorman do his morning ritual, which consisted of purging an immense, glutinous loogie from somewhere deep within his innards, followed by the expulsion of a dribble of snot from first one nostril and then the other, and then, apparently satisfied with this ousting of liquids, lighting up a cigarette. And good morning to you, I thought, as I made my way through the acrid smoke, delicately stepping around a millpond of phlegm and mucus that had gathered at the hotel’s entrance. I couldn’t decide what was more disturbing—the splattering loogie or the dribbling snot—but as I wandered through the early-morning haze toward the mausoleum, it soon became apparent that somehow I’d have to come to terms with the interesting methods the Chinese use for expelling the contents of their noses and lungs. The Chinese have invented many things, but the handkerchief is not among them. I walked on and watched the residents of Beijing, young and old, male and even a few elderly women, greet the new day with an immense hawk and a resonant splatter, and then, just as I thought the streets of Beijing could not be further befouled, I came across a man who squatted beside the curb. He was holding a toddler in split pants over the gutter so that the boy could take a shit here in downtown Beijing, inches from passing bicycles and sputtering mopeds. Interesting, I thought as I pondered the diseases that might be lurking in China this year—SARS, Avian Flu, dysentery. They have a happy home in China.

It was after crossing a street that I came to my second observation about life in Beijing: Do not play chicken with Chinese drivers. Even if they see you, they will not slow down. Even if the pedestrian light is green, they will not slow down. So do not play chicken with Chinese drivers. Or you will die.

A moment later, I made my third observation about life in Beijing:
Do not play chicken with Chinese cyclists. See observation 2. Same applies. You will die.

And most of Beijing hadn’t even woken up yet.

Never before had I felt so fearful as a pedestrian as I did on that early morning. After dodging the loogies that came whistling past, I’d find myself at an intersection. I would dutifully wait for the pedestrian light, the flashing man, to turn green, and then, assured that I had the right of way, I would confidently take my foot off the curb, only to nearly lose it a moment later as a car hurtled past, sending me sputtering back toward the sidewalk. A moment later, while the little man still flashed green, I’d spy an opening in the traffic and again set forth, only to find myself dangerously entangled amid a dozen cyclists, who may or may not have been cursing at me. I couldn’t say for sure.
Chinese for Dummies
didn’t cover colloquial cussing.

How, I wondered, was one expected to cross a four-lane road in China, a road shared by cars lined six abreast, with another two lanes carved by a sea of bicycles and mopeds? How does one navigate through the mayhem that is a Chinese city? Very, very carefully, I deduced. Crossing a street was no straightforward wander from curb to curb. It was a problem to be broken down into six parts. First, I’d dart through the mass of bicycles and mopeds that hugged the road near the curb. From there, I’d cross the street one lane at a time as cars whished by just inches from my being, and I’d try very hard to not linger on the noteworthy fact that China has the world’s highest per capita rate of vehicular fatalities. And so I moved, a quick leap at a time, as fleets of cars zoomed around me, driven by people who, it occurred to me, probably hadn’t been driving for all that long.

It was with some surprise, then, that I suddenly found myself on the vast expanse that is Tiananmen Square. I was excited to be there, not merely because I had crossed a dozen intersections to get there and managed to live, but because Tiananmen Square is one of those iconic places that I had always wanted to see. It was gratifyingly familiar in that Communist theme park sort of way. Here was Red China—the lustrous portrait of Mao hanging in its place of honor above the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the fluttering red flags, the immense Great Hall of the People, the towering Monument to the People’s Heroes, and of course, the Workers Cultural Palace, because no celebration of all things red is complete without a Workers Palace. Vehicles are forbidden on the square, though exceptions are made for tanks, and in the early, hazy morning, only a scattering of Chinese tour groups were beginning to assemble there. With so few people, its massiveness was laid bare. More than a million people could fit comfortably within its dimensions. Now and then, Mao had enjoyed rallying his Red Guards, and as I strolled about my spine tingled at the thought of Mao’s call and response with a million homicidal teenagers.
Be violent! Destroy old culture!

But today there were Chinese tourists. They were easy to identify. Each group was given a distinctive baseball cap. There was the red group and the green group and the baby blue group, and each was tightly gathered around a guide holding an umbrella. As I wandered around, happily gawking, I played an exciting game of spot the secret policeman, and by the time I reached the Chairman Mao Mausoleum, I figured I’d counted more than twenty, though I may have been mistaken. It is entirely possible that the tough-looking men wandering about in their Members Only jackets were conventioneers and not government goons. Still, it seemed imprudent to let out a lusty
“Free Tibet Now”
—Tiananmen Square, of course, being one of the better places in the world to get beat up for protesting.

I absorbed this celebration of Socialist Realism, the architectural style that glorifies the proletariat by making a mere individual seem very, very small. As I neared the entrance to the mausoleum, I was approached by a young man in a honey-colored Members Only jacket.

“You cannot take a bag here,” he said in English, pointing to my daypack.

“Can I leave it someplace?” I asked.

“I will take you,” he offered.

I had no idea whether he was a policeman, an employee of the mausoleum, a hustler, or just a helpful fellow looking to assist a befuddled foreigner. I followed him, and suppressing the dread I felt as he directed me through six lanes of traffic, I became his shadow, which was okay because, as I’d already discovered, the Chinese are very accommodating when it comes to infringing their personal space. He led me toward a building where I could drop off my bag.

“Xie xie,”
I said, mangling the word for “thank you.”

“You have money?” he said after we had darted back across the road.

“Yes, I kept my wallet. Thanks for asking.”

“Twenty yuan,” he said with a hopeful smile.

I gave him ten, which was far more than his service required, but I was new to China and hadn’t yet acquired the flinty-eyed determination to haggle for the Chinese price. I took my place in line; it was still early, before 9
A.M.
, and by Chinese standards the line remained relatively short. Perhaps 500 of us waited for a chance to gaze upon the Chairman. Meanwhile, over a loudspeaker we listened to a recounting of the life and times of Mao Zedong while waiting for the grim-faced guards in crisp blue uniforms and white gloves to let us in. Actually, I had no idea what they were talking about over the loudspeaker. Perhaps the voice was informing us that there was a blue-tag special on Mao watches in aisle three of the gift shop. Who could say? Certainly not me.

A flower vendor sold fake roses, and a fair portion of the waiting crowd purchased them. I guessed that most of the visitors were from somewhere in the far hinterlands of China. Having lived in Sacramento, I can recognize a fellow yokel anywhere.

Finally, we surged up the steps and entered. Inside, we were greeted by a white statue of the Great Helmsman, and it was here that visitors deposited their roses, bowing deeply as they did so. Mao as Buddha. I wondered what happened to the daily pile of plastic flowers. I guessed they were probably swept up and sold to the next group. Dillydallying wasn’t encouraged, and the crowd shuffled forward, carried by its own momentum. In the adjoining room lay Mao himself, tucked under a cozy red flag featuring the hammer and sickle.