Postcards From Tomorrow Square (27 page)

John Flower and his wife, Pamela Leonard, in their late forties, had immersed themselves so deeply in the life of western Sichuan that their fluent spoken Chinese attracted attention in other parts of the country because of its distinct regional accent. It was as if academics from Sweden had studied southern Louisiana so deeply that they sounded like Cajuns when they spoke English. Just before we met, Flower had left a tenured position as a history professor at the University of North Carolina–Charlotte to direct the extensive Chinese studies program at Sidwell Friends School, in Washington. Leonard, who had been an active farmer and anthropologist specializing in rural development, was now mainly raising their five-year-old son, Jack. The little boy, a towhead who also spoke Sichuan-accented Chinese and practiced skillful-looking kung fu moves whenever he was bored by the adults’ discussion, was probably photographed 1,000 times by fascinated Chinese onlookers during the week we traveled with him.

We accompanied the family on their regular route of visits to Sichuan villages where they were well-known and warmly greeted returning figures. Day by day this course took us closer and closer to the center of the earthquake damage.

From the start, the landscape itself revealed the enormity of what had occurred. The mountains of Sichuan are so steep that their North American counterparts could be found only in Alaska. The slopes rise out of river valleys at what look like impossibly sharp angles to elevations of 12,000 feet and more. Usually they are covered in green, especially bamboo. But for more than 100 miles in all directions from the center of the earthquake, the hillsides displayed broad brown gashes, where entire sides of mountains had simply fallen away. Seeing them, I finally could envision how villages had disappeared all at once. They had been engulfed in rock and dirt, as mountain cabins are covered by snow in an avalanche. In the first few days, we saw villages that had escaped such burial and where at most tiles had been shaken off roofs or cement foundations cracked. By the end we saw areas where barely any structures were left.

The course of this journey also revealed a more surprising sequence, which had to do with the highly variable roles of the Chinese state.

Outsiders often discuss the Chinese state—that is, China’s political and governmental system—and the Chinese nation as if they were the same entity. That is the way the Chinese government would prefer it: that the Chinese Communist Party be seen as the vessel of modern China’s independence and of ancient China’s culture, too. The elaborately wrought Olympic opening ceremony was essentially a dramatization of this view. It was meant to trace the unbroken line from imperial China, with its innovations in calligraphy and early science, to today’s hyperproductive system that can do anything, including winning gold medals, on an unmatched scale.

Academics inside and outside China naturally take a more complicated view of the role and power of the state. One standard remark is that today’s China, like all its predecessors, is “a civilization pretending to be a nation-state.” That is, a billion-plus people in mainland China, plus the vast diaspora of overseas Chinese, share strong traditions and some sense of connection. The connection is often felt and sometimes expressed in simple racial terms. Recently I met a Beijing-born woman who now held a U.S. passport. She was trying to get into a Chinese government facility closed to all foreigners. The guard looked at her passport and said, “But you’re still Chinese, right?” and let her in. Yet now, as in most stages of Chinese history, the political system that attempts to govern the sprawl and diversity of China is not fully in control.

In practice, most foreigners encounter this division as an either/or matter. As mentioned in earlier chapters, today’s China is a disorienting combination of the very tightly controlled and the seemingly out-of-control. If you are interested in challenging the Communist Party’s monopoly on power or even creating any organization not subject to state control, you will have problems. If you want to start a new electronics firm or perhaps a for-profit business school, no one in authority will care. Previous chapters have described the parts of Chinese policy where central government decisions are the only things that matter—setting the value of the yuan, determining who can see what on the Internet—and areas where the government is mainly hands-off. In the export-factory zones around Shenzhen, the most visible role of the government is to keep the ports and highways functioning so outbound FedEx and UPS shipments are never delayed.

Outsiders sometimes mention, almost as a footnote, that decisions or goals announced in Beijing can mutate into something quite different when put into effect at the provincial or village level. Usually this is meant as a bad thing, mere sand in the gears, for instance when sweetheart deals between mayors and industrial tycoons prevent environmental cleanups.

I looked at local government in a different way after seeing these villages in Sichuan. Not from the opposite perspective—that local government is always wisest, commissars in Beijing are out of touch—but with a more sober appreciation of how hard and complicated it is to get anything done in China. Here are brief scenes from four of them.

XIAKOU: THE GOOD LIFE

The village of Xiakou was the closest thing the Flower Leonard family had to a home in China. In 1992 and 1993, and for many summers since, they lived with the Wu family in a normal rural house without plumbing, running water, or heat except what emanated from the cooking fire. The area is at high elevation and has heavy winter snows. How do people stay warm? I asked Flower. “They wear a lot of clothes.”

The village is now a success story, but of a different sort from the stories of prosperity through industrialization I had heard in many other parts of China. Fifty years ago, Xiakou, like much of rural China, suffered true catastrophe. In 1958, Mao Zedong introduced his new plan for China to “leap” ahead in industrial production by shifting millions of workers away from the farms and onto doomed projects like small-scale neighborhood steel mills. This was the “Great Leap Forward,” or the “Great Famine,” as it was known in the countryside. The theory was that China would overtake Great Britain in steel output within five years. The reality was that food production plunged and unknown millions of people starved.

Yao Minggao, the patriarch of another local family Flower and Leonard have stayed close to, was a young father at the time. Half the people in his village died. Bad national policy became even more brutal, or slightly less destructive, on a village-by-village basis, depending on the rigidity or flexibility of the commissar applying each new dictate from the party. The more doctrinaire the local leader, the more grain he was likely to seize from farmers in his area for “collective” purposes, and the less he left them to eat. John Flower pointed out to me that from the village center alongside a river, the steep hillsides where farmers grew crops were all within view. The commissar would scan the hills for wisps of smoke, so he could see who was starting an unauthorized fire and cooking food they had somehow found.

Yao Minggao, the family elder, said that the easiest way to tell city people from country people was by what they thought was the major disaster in modern Chinese history. If they said the Cultural Revolution, it meant they were from the city and viewed losing their careers and being sent to the farms as the ultimate hardship. If they said the Great Famine, it meant they were country people who had seen many of their neighbors starve.

In the 1960s, the collective-farm plots around Xiakou became productive again. When the fields were privatized in the 1980s, output soared. But more intensive and profitable agriculture soon created its own complications. Starting in the river valleys, farmers clear-cut their way up the steep mountainsides, planting corn and wheat in narrow terraces they had hacked out of previously forested area. These mountains in Sichuan were part of the wild habitat of the giant panda, and terraced agriculture dramatically shrank the pandas’ range. Without tree cover, the torrential Sichuan rains caused severe erosion. In 1998, the uncontrolled runoff led to floods of the Yangtze River, which killed some 2,000 people.

In response, the central government issued perhaps its first significant environmental edict: the “grain to green” plan,
tuigeng huanlin
in Chinese, under which farmers would be paid to replace the terraced plots on hillsides with stands of bamboo and trees. This is the plan that transformed Xiakou. On the two-hour drive into the village, along a rising path from the provincial capital of Chengdu, John Flower pointed out the terraced and eroded cornfields in areas not yet subject to grain-to-green. The houses in Xiakou were surrounded by lush stands of bamboo and local softwood trees.

Families in the village now make their living from grain-to-green subsidies, by cutting bamboo and selling it to pulp mills, by part-time labor, and by the numerous small trades that characterize any Chinese town. The subsidies are scheduled to run out in 2016; by then, the farmers are supposed to have come up with other sources of income—so they don’t immediately go back to clearing terraces and growing corn. One man we visited had formerly been a “rural butcher,” slaughtering pigs for his neighbors and dressing the meat. Government health authorities had cracked down on rural butchers. Now he drove a motorbike late each night into Chengdu, filled 50-gallon plastic tubs with restaurant waste, and drove the tottering load home to feed his own pigs. With the profits from selling two of their pigs, he and his wife had begun renovating their house and installing a toilet.

Although John Flower did not put it this way, as he talked with his contacts and reported their views, it sounded as if they were reflecting on the purposes of prosperity. By urban standards they were very poor, but looking after forests simply took less time than farming previously had. The main agent of local government, a village official in his thirties named Wu Wenlong, known as Long Long, whom Flower and Leonard had met when he was in his teens, told them about efforts to build the spirit and coherence of the village, so that young people would want to stay and enjoy a better-rounded life than was available as factory workers in the big cities, far from their families.

“In many ways this new project echoed previous policies of the socialist period and built on latent appreciation for the best of what socialism had given these people in earlier times,” Flower and Leonard wrote in a paper about the attempt to revive Xiakou village. “One young man told us how much fun it had been when the first big distribution of [grain-to-green] seedlings came, for not since collective times had the fields been so filled with all the people of the village working together in a common task.”

On a cool August evening in the mountains, Long Long had arranged for a traveling “courtyard projector” team to come in from the city and show Chinese movies against a big white sheet hung outside a house. Two dozen families came from nearby houses to watch first a kung fu battle epic and then a movie about Chinese basketball. Long Long told Flower that it was a way to help them become a community, rather than letting each family sit at home watching TV. The national government had set the conditions for the shift in the village’s economic base—but local officials were trying hard to shape the way the village responded.

YAOJI: DISLOCATION

Xiakou’s people were trying to combine national policy with local initiative to make their village both economically and culturally viable. Neighboring areas were trying to survive the shattering effect of policy changes from Beijing and from the nearby county administrators.

The policy in question was, like grain-to-green, pro-environmental—in a sense. China’s demand for electric power is voracious, and understandably so. Villagers who don’t have lights at night want to have them, and then TVs. City dwellers want computers, and refrigerators, and air conditioners, like city people everywhere else. The main ways for China to generate more power are all bad: coal, oil, nuclear energy. It has the world’s fastest-growing solar energy industry, plus big wind-turbine farms, but it needs more.

By comparison, hydroelectric power looks attractive. With its heavy rainfall, narrow valleys, and steeply descending rivers, Sichuan is a logical site to build hydropower dams. New ones are going up across the province—more than 350 generating plants are being put in along one river alone, the Dadu—and the low-lying flatlands along the river that their new lakes will submerge are where large numbers of farmers already live.

This means forced relocation—a national policy, but one that has been administered in quite different ways by county and city governments. In the village of Xiali, not far from Xiakou, Leonard and Flower showed us the results of a notoriously botched relocation. The largest dam project in Sichuan province dislocated more than 100,000 people when construction began in 2004. Some 50,000 farmers staged a protest in Hanyuan County, on land that would be flooded. They claimed that local officials were embezzling the money set aside for resettlement; according to Chinese newspaper reports, women cried when they saw the bleak new terrain that would be their future homes. Still they had to move.

Four years later, we saw some of these exiles. They were living in an area that resembled a factory yard, with long featureless concrete barracks partitioned into quarters for each family. As Flower and Leonard walked on a pathway between the buildings they asked families how they were doing and received a steady litany of complaints. The old land was fertile enough to handle several crops per year; the new land yielded only half as much. On the old land they had fruit trees; when they left, the compensation was a mere 20 RMB per tree, about $2.50. They were naturally not welcome among their new neighbors, since the new land that had been allotted was taken from someone else. Who was to blame? The farmers directed their wrath not at the national leaders who decided to build dams but at the local officials who, in their view, kept them in the dark about the plans, shortchanged them on compensation, and refused to listen to their complaints.