Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (30 page)

As an ex-Maoist, I couldn’t help but note that the gap between rich and poor was widening. The poorest peasants lived in adobe homes and rarely ate meat. The richest man in the village, who owned the Dacron-thread factory, feasted daily on pork, shrimp and crabs and lived in an eleven-room house with air-conditioning, a breakfast nook, a formal dining room and an indoor fish pond. He even had two bathrooms with Western-style toilets. And it would not be long before he would be able to flush them, too. By year’s end, North Marsh planned to install running water.

None of the many books I had read about China talked honestly about what might be delicately called the toilet problem. The Chinese themselves were self-conscious about the disgusting state of their privies because they felt it reflected badly on their image as a civilized country. In 1994, Beijing even ran a contest to find “the best blueprint for a public toilet.”

To be sure, Westerners and Chinese approached toilets differently. Once, after a couple of peasants left my apartment in Beijing, I noticed footprints on the toilet seat. I’m sure they thought Western-style toilets were stupidly, dangerously high.
I
was puzzled when the Bean Flower Restaurant, which had the best Sichuanese cuisine in Beijing, posted a sign in the bathroom that warned, “Those who defecate will be fined ten yuan.” I never learned why they had a rule like that, or how they knew when anyone broke it.

Traveling through the Chinese countryside was an exercise in bladder control. An enterprising peasant who wanted extra fertilizer might sometimes build a roadside privy. Most of the time, there was nothing. Overpopulation and ankle-high crops meant the bush option didn’t exist. My personal desperation method for rural roadside relief was to ask the driver to pull over and leave for a couple of minutes, which he always did with alacrity once I told him my
plan. Then I’d open both doors on the side closest to the road’s edge, creating my own three-sided latrine.

While hotels in Beijing catering to foreigners had spotless washrooms with fresh flowers, crisp linen finger towels and obsequious attendants who did everything but zip up your fly, the average Chinese toilet wasn’t made for lingering. In Bengbu, a city of 700,000 on the mighty Huai River in Anhui province, I was interviewing a dissident in a small restaurant when nature called. I asked a waitress where the ladies’ room was. She looked me over.

“Poo or pee?” she asked.

“Well, pee, actually,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster.

She took me back toward the kitchen and motioned to a room. There was no door, just a grimy cotton sheet tacked over the entrance, and it was pitch black inside. When my eyes adjusted, I realized I was in the coal-storage room. The floor was packed earth. I looked around.

“There’s no toilet,” I yelled to the waitress, who was hovering outside.

“You said it’s just pee, right?” she yelled back, so the entire restaurant could hear. “Just use the floor!”

So I did.

Although toilets weren’t improving much, life in general was getting better for many, many people. Just as I had assumed people were happy in the 1970s, I thought people were content under Deng’s reforms. I was wrong. That point was driven home to me when I visited my old roommate Scarlet. She had two refrigerators, a freezer, a washing machine, a fan, a toaster oven, a stereo, embossed wallpaper, blue-and-white linoleum floors, a microwave, a big color television and a Panasonic cordless phone. On her dining-room table was a pair of candelabra with dripping white candles.

“Everyone has so many appliances in this building that we keep blowing the fuses,” she explained.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a contraption I didn’t recognize.

“A machine to sterilize dishes.”

I remembered the days when Scarlet didn’t even have a plastic bag. To my surprise, she couldn’t stop complaining, about her daughter’s minuscule chances of getting into university, her own dead-end job, her low wages. Deng Xiaoping had thrown a lot of rice and bikes at people, but expectations kept outstripping economic growth. The old demands he had crushed a decade earlier at Democracy Wall were beginning to bubble up all over again.

The first rumblings began in late 1988. I bumped into Ren Wanding, an activist I had known at Democracy Wall a decade earlier. When he had made speeches back then, I noticed people eagerly gathered around, then drifted away as he entangled himself in his own convoluted train of thought. Ren, who was arrested during Deng’s 1979 crackdown, had emerged from jail in 1983, a rebel without a cause. By 1988, authorities didn’t seem to consider him much of a threat. When Ren wrote a letter to the
International Herald Tribune
calling on other nations to withhold aid and investment until China’s human rights record improved, the government responded, not with cattle prods or handcuffs, but by writing its own boring letter to the editor.

To be sure, China in 1988 wasn’t a bastion of liberal democracy. The police still detained and tortured dissidents. But the atmosphere had relaxed considerably. On a trip to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in southwest China, a police chief burst out laughing when I asked if he had arrested any counter-revolutionaries lately. “The only people we arrest now are pickpockets and prostitutes,” he said.

Ren Wanding ignored the pleas of his nervous wife, who was afraid he would be jailed again, and made the rounds of Western reporters. When I didn’t call him, he called me. He was then forty-four, a delicate-boned man with a bad haircut and glasses that slipped down his nose, giving him a distracted air. Torn between a mania for secrecy and a desire for publicity, he passed out business cards but insisted I turn up the stereo while we talked to thwart electronic bugs. He missed the heady days of Democracy Wall and gloomily admitted that the government wasn’t the only one ignoring him. “I don’t think many people support me,” he said. It seemed that the China Human Rights
League he founded in 1979 hadn’t expanded much beyond its original membership of one.

But a handful of other dissidents had emerged during the years I had been away. One of the most prominent was Fang Lizhi, a distinguished astrophysicist. Two years earlier, as vice-president of the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, Fang had supported some student demonstrations. Enraged, Deng expelled him from the Communist Party and dismissed him from the university.

I first met Professor Fang on the dance floor at a 1988 Christmas bash thrown by the Beijing Foreign Correspondents Club. A few weeks later, when I rang his doorbell it played a full verse of “Happy Birthday to You.” I remarked to him that it didn’t seem like he dreaded a midnight knock.

“If they don’t let me out for a long time, it becomes
their
problem,” he said, bursting into his trademark laugh that started with a gentle chuckle, escalated to a high-pitched whinny and ended with an infectious roar. He felt free after his expulsion from the Party. “Now I can say exactly what I think,” he said, a short, rumpled man of fifty-two in horn-rims and a tan windbreaker.

“The other dissidents must look up to you,” I said. “Are you in touch with any of them?” In fact, he was, but denied it to avoid the charge that he was organizing an opposition group to the Communist Party. “I’m not looking for its downfall,” he insisted. “I would just like it to be more democratic. Why is the Party so corrupt? Because it answers to nobody. We should have freedom of speech, an independent press. A multi-party system is the final step.”

Professor Fang had recently attacked a vice-mayor of Beijing for usurping a precious slot on a scientific delegation to New York. “I just want to ask him what he knows about synchrotrons,” he said coyly at the time. “Is he willing to take a test?” The vice-mayor was not amused. A former construction worker who had never gone to college, he retaliated by canceling a trip Professor Fang had been planning to make abroad.

“Ten years ago, maybe even two years ago, we couldn’t even mention human rights. Now it’s not such a sensitive subject. More and more people are concerned about human rights.” Dubbed
China’s Sakharov, Professor Fang was the third most productive scientist in China, measured by the number of scientific papers published a year. He rose at seven, breakfasted on a boiled egg and a cup of coffee, then biked five minutes to the Beijing Observatory, where he taught graduate students. At home in the afternoon and evening, he did his research and answered letters. He and his wife lived in two adjoining flats cobbled into one, a luxurious amount of space by Chinese standards.

I asked Professor Fang why the government treated him so well. He laughed his trademark chuckle again. “They’re getting smarter,” he said. Noting that 1989 was the tenth year of Wei Jingsheng’s incarceration, he had just sent an open letter to Deng, calling for the release of all political prisoners. The letter would soon galvanize other intellectuals and university students and help spark the biggest demonstrations in modern Chinese history. “In my opinion, Deng Xiaoping belongs to Mao’s generation,” he said. “He allows some change in the economy, but he’s just like Mao in terms of ideology.”

In February 1989, China announced that Deng would hold a summit with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, capping the end of nearly three decades of hostility between the two Communist superpowers. Given the golden opportunity for international attention and the relatively liberal atmosphere in China, many dissidents felt the time was ripe to push for improved human rights. Like Professor Fang, they began circulating petitions and holding meetings.

That same month, President George Bush held a glittering state dinner at the Great Wall Sheraton. Among the five hundred guests he invited were Professor Fang and his wife. But the Chinese police and plainclothes agents refused to let the couple near the hotel, and tailed them on foot for several hours, even preventing them from boarding a bus or hailing a taxi. When we reporters realized Fang was missing, we ditched the banquet and ran off trying to find him. His son finally announced his father would hold a press conference at the temporary White House press center on the other side of town. Professor Fang finally arrived at 1:30 a.m. to pandemonium.

“From this incident we can see what the human rights situation is like here in China,” he said, blinking owlishly under the harsh
television lights. That night, he was interviewed by the three U.S. networks and made the front page of every major paper.
Time
magazine put him on its cover with the headline “Guess Who Isn’t Coming to Dinner?”

After months of permissiveness and inaction and writing letters to the editor, China had unsheathed its claws. The invitation to Fang was made “without consultation,” the Foreign Ministry snapped, and “the Chinese side resented this.” The Chinese were so angry at what they saw as U.S. meddling in its internal affairs that they were willing to embarrass the American president, a sycophantic friend of China. Deng was signaling he would brook no more dissent.

Four months after I spoke to Professor Fang, authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. Fleeing for their lives after the massacre at Tiananmen Square, he and his wife became the first — and only — Chinese dissidents to obtain asylum in the U.S. Embassy. Their exact location in the embassy, which was divided among three separate sites, was a secret from all but a handful of American diplomats. With gun-toting Chinese soldiers pacing outside the embassy walls, the Americans were afraid the Chinese might stage a commando-style raid to seize Professor Fang. For a year, the couple hid in the embassy clinic and ate meals smuggled inside a diplomat’s briefcase. Beijing finally permitted them to leave China for “health reasons” in 1990.

Student protester at Tiananmen Square with a caricature of a bloodthirsty Li Peng, after the Chinese premier declared martial law
.
Photo: Jan Wong

The giant portrait of Mao Zedong which overlooks Tiananmen Square after three men splattered it with paint during pro-democracy demonstrations. They were later sentenced to life, twenty years and sixteen years, some of the harshest sentences meted out during the subsequent crackdown
.
Photo: AP/Mark Avery