Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (50 page)

“It’s Old Xing!” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Old Xing is chairman of the board of
McDonald’s”
Norman said, choking with laughter.

I had seen him talk. I had jotted down a physical description in my notebook. I had even read his biography, supplied by McDonald’s publicists on recycled paper. But never once did it occur to me that he was Old Xing, Joan and Sid’s former Party secretary. When Norman and I used to bike to the Red Star Commune every weekend in the 1970s, he would drop by to chat about wheat yields and dialectics. I just didn’t recognize him without his faded Mao suit. The hand-out said he had worked for “a large state-run company where he devoted himself to administrative management.” I guess that was McDonald-speak for “Communist Party secretary of the Red Star Commune.”

While the new middle class sampled Big Macs, the new rich supped at Maxim’s. On Valentine’s Day 1994, I lolled among the silken cushions at Pierre Cardin’s
luxe
restaurant to watch Beijing’s Beautiful People having an end-of-the-Party party. Soong Huai-kuei, Maxim’s
soignée
manager, jumped up constantly from her plate of poached vegetables to air-kiss guests and snap their photos with a tiny flash camera. Maxim’s lobby was already plastered with celebrity snapshots. One showed the French designer frowning as he fitted Deng Lin, Deng’s roly-poly artist daughter, with a battleship-gray muumuu. It was hard to say whether the sour expression on Cardin’s face was due to a mouthful of pins or because he knew she was going to make his creation look like hell.

A group of fifteen Chinese walked in, creating a stir. Intrigued, I asked a waiter who they were. He patiently pointed out Jiang Wen, the handsome star of
Beijingers in New York
, a hit mini-series about emigre life in the Big Apple, and Xie Yuan, star of the hit movie
I Love You Without Question
. One of the young women, wearing a fur-trimmed jacket, posed prettily for Madame Soong’s camera. And who was she?

“That’s Cheng Fangyuan!” the waiter exclaimed, in the same incredulous tone someone might say “Madonna!” “She emceed last year’s
entire
Lunar New Year show on Central Television.” I tried to look suitably impressed as I sipped my Dragon Seal chardonnay. I didn’t tell him that
I
had hosted the 1980 show.

At 10 p.m., a fourteen-piece orchestra began playing Viennese waltzes. As several couples twirled on the parquet floor, I thought of the languid ballroom scene in Bertolucci’s film
The Last Emperor
. Were they dancing the century away while others starved? I knew rationally that snatching the
foie gras
out of the mouths of the rich wouldn’t solve the problem of mental retardation in Gansu. But a part of the old me felt disheartened by all the extravagance. It was as if the revolution had never happened. In the 1970s, no one would have guessed that Luo Ning, my plain-living classmate, was the daughter of a marshal. In the 1990s, China’s Communist elite was no longer afraid to flaunt its privilege and perks.

In 1992, a friend invited me to lunch to meet the daughter of deposed Party chief Zhao Ziyang. Wang Yannan (Amaranth Wang) arrived late, looking glamorous in a silk print dress and a string of good pearls. At thirty-seven, she was a willowy beauty with ivory skin, a perfect carriage and satin hair caught at the nape of her neck. She had learned English at the prestigious Foreign Languages Institute in Canton while her father was running Guangdong province. Two years of studying hotel management in Hawaii in the mid-1980s had given her an American accent.

My friend had picked a restaurant specializing in Chaozhou-style food, a sprightly offshoot of Cantonese cuisine. We ordered baby oysters in congee, aromatic sautéed chicken with deep-fried parsley, braised hearts of bok choy and duck consommé scented with dried lemons. As I watched Amaranth nibbling on a baby oyster, I was struck by how much China had changed. In the old days, the children of powerful people suffered immensely after their parents’ downfall. But despite the purge of Zhao Ziyang, Amaranth had kept her high-profile job as deputy general manager of the Great Wall Sheraton, where she was chauffeured to work in a Mercedes.

“Do you know where I can get an old typewriter?” she asked me out of the blue. “Or an old phone?”

“I just bought some touch-tone phones for my office. You can have the old black phone the
Globe
has used since the sixties,” I said, a bit puzzled.

“Is it a crank-handled one?” Amaranth asked excitedly.

“Dial,” I said. She looked disappointed. It turned out she collected antique machines as a hobby. She asked about sewing machines.

“Several of my friends have treadle ones,” I said, trying to be helpful. Then I remembered they were still using them. China’s Communist elite lived in a world of its own. The gap between Amaranth and the masses was so great that she considered their ordinary household items to be antiques.

I met her several times after our first lunch, usually to trade videos. She lent me an old James Bond movie. I lent her
Cookie
, a comedy about a Mafia boss’s daughter who protects her father during an internal Mob power struggle. I’ll bet ex-Party chief Zhao watched the movie, too, but if he saw any parallels with his own predicament, Amaranth never said.

Although the police had stopped watching her by 1992, she remained understandably wary. One day when we met for afternoon tea in the Sheraton’s atrium, I asked how her father was doing “His health is fine. But he can’t travel,” she said. “His spirits are good, and he hopes to work.” Until Tiananmen, Amaranth had lived with him inside Zhongnanhai, along with her brigadier-general husband and their ten-year-old son. When her father was put under house arrest in a traditional old courtyard home in central Beijing, she moved her family out to join him.

A month after the massacre, Amaranth quietly applied for a visitor’s visa to Canada. Like many Western governments, Ottawa was eager to accept the children of senior officials in order to build up a network of future contacts. Of course, Amaranth lied on the form about who her father was. But even though she arrived for her interview in her Mercedes, an obtuse Canadian visa officer rejected her, noting on the file that she seemed like the type to overstay a visitor’s visa.

You could hardly blame the officer for failing to be impressed by Amaranth’s Mercedes. Beijing’s roads were now clogged with luxury cars as the new rich took a great leap into the driver’s seat. My
neighborhood seafood restaurant acquired a two-tone Rolls to ferry around Premier Li Peng’s son and other favored customers. In 1994 alone, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Ferrari and Rolls-Royce all opened dealerships in Beijing. Business was so brisk that Rolls-Royce adapted its cars to China’s leaded fuel. A company spokesman told me that mainland buyers preferred the Silver Spur, which was four inches longer than the Silver Shadow and cost $250,000.

In 1993, at a solemn ceremony at Beijing’s ancient Temple of Heaven, a former labor-camp convict was handed the keys to the first Ferrari ever sold in China. When I told Driver Liu I was going to meet the famous ex-con, he was so excited that I invited him to sit in on the interview. I began by asking Li Xiaohua when he had first dreamed of owning a car.

“While harvesting wheat in northeast China behind an ‘East Is Red’ tractor,” he said.

“What did you grow?” Driver Liu broke in.

“Wheat and soybeans.”

“Me, too!” said Liu.

It turned out that in 1969 they had both been sent to state farms near the Soviet border. Listening to them compare notes on the Cultural Revolution was like attending a Big Chill reunion of Red Guards. In the late 1970s, they both managed to get back to Beijing. While Driver Liu worked for various state companies, Li became a canteen cook. Then their paths diverged. Li closed a deal on some digital watches. Like the ration-coupon trader at the Number One Machine Tool Factory, he was sent to a labor camp for the crime of
tou ji dao ba
, a Maoist pejorative for buying low and selling high. “Nowadays, you could sell a whole trainload of watches and nobody would blink,” Li said with a sardonic laugh.

He emerged from labor camp at the beginning of Deng’s reforms and assiduously courted a general’s daughter. She threatened to kill herself unless her parents let her marry him. Using his new father-in-law’s clout, Li obtained a duty-free permit to buy a used Toyota from a Libyan diplomat. In 1981, he became one of only twenty Beijingers to own a private car.

Having finally achieved his driving ambition, he smooth-talked his way into becoming the exclusive Japanese distributor
of Formula 101, the baldness tonic created by millionaire Zhao Zhangguang. Li invested the profits in Hong Kong real estate, just as property prices plunged following the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. Two years later, when values bounced back, he became a multi-millionaire at the age of forty.

Li spotted lucrative opportunities in China and returned to Beijing. Flashing a newly acquired Japanese passport, he moved into the Jianguomenwai Diplomatic Compound, where the guards kept his fellow Chinese at bay. “I was sick of everyone pestering me for investments and donations,” he said. “Besides, I needed a place to park my cars.” He owned seven, including a Mazda sportscar, three Mercedes-Benzes and the bright red Ferrari Testarossa. His wife, who stopped by to say hello, reminded me of a Chinese Dolly Parton, with her cascading country-and-western hairdo, generous bosom, snug black dress and high-heeled mules. She even had false eyelashes and a huge diamond solitaire.

Li rarely drove his Ferrari, for which he had paid $134,888 (eight is a lucky number in Chinese because it rhymes with wealth). Alas, the car was too high-strung and too low-slung for Beijing’s bumpy roads, not to mention that he ran a high risk of uninsured peasants smashing into him when their brakes failed. A rough-edged man with eyes that absorbed everything at a glance, Li proudly showed us a photo of himself in Ferrari’s glossy yearbook. He was the only mainland Chinese in it and, surely, the only former labor-camp convict among dozens of European princes and Arab sheiks. As he passed us a copy of
Car Fan
, a new Chinese magazine, which had put him and his Ferrari on the cover, neither Driver Liu nor I could miss the flash of his solid-gold Rolex watch. Its entire face was encrusted with diamonds and rubies. Liu and I had recently priced a similar one at $40,000 in a local department store.

My driver was starting to sweat. I could see the beads forming on his scalp through his short-cropped brush cut. I knew he was upset. As I was winding down the interview, Li suddenly turned to my driver. “You know, I could use a guy like you. I have ten thousand people working for me, but I’m not strong on management. After all, I used to be a canteen cook. Maybe you should work for me.”

Driver Liu was speechless. So was I. Raiding my prize employee right under my nose? Li took his silence for assent. “You could manage the other drivers. Think about it. We’ll talk.” Liu managed to croak, “Okay. Fine.”

On the way home, he was strangely silent. I didn’t want to lose Driver Liu, but I also didn’t want him to lose the opportunity of a lifetime. “If you want to work for Li Xiaohua, feel free,” I said finally. “You must do what you want.”

Driver Liu glanced at me, and narrowly missed an errant cyclist. Maybe, I thought to myself, we should discuss his career back at the office. But he wanted to talk. To my surprise, he was disgusted by Li. “Things aren’t very fair,” he said vehemently. “Some people become billionaires. Some people work their whole lives for nothing.” As we pulled into Pagoda Garden, he cut the engine, got out and slammed the door. “I don’t want to work for someone like that,” he said. “He got where he is by using his wife’s connections, by doing shady stuff. It would be risky to work for him.”

Anger at corruption and privilege had helped spark the massive Tiananmen demonstrations. The subsequent military crackdown had silenced the complaints but did nothing to reassure people like Driver Liu that anything was being done about the problems. When I had left Beijing in 1980, China had been an unrelentingly pure country. Government officials had refused to take even a chocolate bar from a foreigner. But a decade later, cadres were demanding bribes of cash, fancy cars and college tuition overseas for their children.

A Dutch businessman who ran an import-export company in China said it was now virtually impossible to do business without paying off Chinese officials. “The normal kickback is 0.5 percent to 1.5 percent of the deal. In one recent case, a white-haired gentle grandmother-type walked in and asked for a 4 percent commission. She dressed very simply, very ordinarily, just like the grandmothers you see on the street. She was a former section chief at the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade.”

He said he was in the midst of his worst case of bribery. A well-connected man in his twenties was demanding a 25 percent kickback, or $200,000 in cash, in exchange for brokering an $800,000
deal being financed by the World Bank. The businessman shrugged as if to say he had no choice but to acquiesce. “China ultimately pays. But because the loan has very low interest, it means that taxpayers in the U.S., Canada and Europe are subsidizing the loan.”

If you had told me back in the 1970s that little old ladies would one day be demanding bribes, or that Old Xing would be chairman of McDonalds, or that the daughter of a deposed Party chief would go to work in a Mercedes, or that a former labor-camp convict would be the first Chinese to buy a Ferrari, I would have accused you of having had too many cups of
maotai
. It seemed bewildering that all these changes were taking place before, not after, the collapse of communism. Even more remarkable, the man presiding over all these changes was one of the original Long Marchers, the ancient patriarch of communism himself, Comrade Deng Xiaoping, an ailing leader now entering his tenth decade. And some of the biggest wheeler-dealers in the new economy were his own five children. To me and the other one billion ex-Maoists, the high-flying Deng children were the ultimate outrage.