Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (51 page)

Mao was right about those capitalist roaders. He had predicted that without continuous class struggle, the “landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and monsters” would all “crawl out,” and “it would not take long, perhaps only several years … before a counter-revolutionary restoration occurred.” In his
Little Red Book of Quotations
, he warned: “To win country-wide victory is only the first step in a long march of ten thousand
li
 … The comrades must be helped to preserve the style of plain living and hard struggle.”

Mao’s drastic antidote, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, had failed to block the rise of a parasitic, privileged new class. By the 1990s, the children of China’s leaders had become the new robber barons. This small group of Red Princelings and Princesses made obscene profits from insider information and monopolies. They ran large state enterprises like fiefdoms. With no shareholders to answer to, they dipped into company coffers for limousines, banquets and trips abroad. Still others got rich through
guan dao
, literally official profiteering, buying scarce commodities like steel at artificially low state prices, then flipping them at a huge mark-up.

The five Deng children constituted the very top layer of an extremely thin upper crust. Fearing the Party might soon be over, Deng’s children concentrated on salting money away for the lean days ahead. They knew what had happened to the Great Helmsman’s offspring: his daughter Li Na, once a deputy Party chief of Beijing, now lived in a humble apartment and shopped herself for oil, salt, rice and other daily needs; one of his grandsons, New World’s cousin, worked as a lowly hotel clerk.

The net worth of Deng & Co. was impossible to calculate. The children worked through layers of holding companies and investment firms, mostly in Hong Kong. And like smart money everywhere, they leaned toward the safety of diversification. Deng Lin, the eldest daughter, was China’s most commercially successful artist. Her husband, a graduate of an obscure mining school, was deputy general manager of China Non-Ferrous Metals Corporation, a huge state-owned conglomerate. Deng Pufang, the paralyzed son, ran China’s cash-rich Welfare Fund for the Disabled. Deng Nan, the third child, was vice-minister of the powerful State Science and Technology Commission and a partner in China Venture Capital, which owned sizable stakes in at least four Hong Kong companies. Deng Maomao was imperial lip reader and her fathers biographer. Her husband was a key player in China’s international arms sales. Deng Zhifang, the youngest, had multi-million-dollar interests in real estate, shipping, investment and construction in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Cynics charged that Deng Lin’s paintings provided a genteel cover for influence peddling. At any rate, her canvases often fetched $45,000. Five of her works were acquired by Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, who had extensive business interests in mainland China and who, according to
Forbes
, was the tenth-richest person in the world. Few insiders were surprised when China subsequently reneged on one of its long-term leases for McDonald’s, at the prime spot in Beijing, after Li Ka-shing made it known that he wanted it.

Perhaps it was because Deng Lin managed her father’s household budget, but foreign investors seemed anxious to curry favor with her. On a recent trip to America, she stayed with an artist I knew in Boston. On the last day, Deng Lin invited her hostess to lunch at
Quincy Market, a local tourist attraction. “When it came time to pay,” my friend recalled, “Deng Lin pulled out a credit card and said, ‘Occidental Petroleum gave this to me.’ ”

In 1992, a one-woman show of Deng Lin’s latest works opened at the Beijing Fine Arts Museum, the biggest ever by a living artist in its history. The black and white silk tapestries, hand-woven to her specifications by a rug factory in coastal Jiangsu province, reminded me of nothing more than giant eyeballs and fishbones. But others apparently loved them. I could hardly fight my way through the thicket of congratulatory bouquets, potted plants and floral stands from art lovers such as the Shenzhen Taxation Bureau.

Local officials knew better than to refuse her brother, Deng Pufang, when he arrived on fund-raising trips, carried sedan-style in his wheelchair by panting aides. (Virtually no buildings in China have handicap access.) A chain-smoker who favored three-piece pinstriped suits and red silk ties, Deng Pufang might well have been heir apparent. But his suicide attempt killed his political career; the Chinese are deeply prejudiced against any kind of disability. Once, during an interview with a Chinese friend, he leaned over in his wheelchair and snapped off the recorder. “If I weren’t paralyzed, there would be no need to train the third generation of leaders.
I
would be the successor.”

As the “donations” poured in to the welfare fund, Deng Pufang shoveled the cash into a shady conglomerate called Kang Hua Development Corp. He named himself chief executive. In 1989, as rumors of corruption grew, the company was disbanded in disgrace. Only his exalted pedigree saved Deng Pufang from being investigated.

Of all the children, Deng Maomao seemed most adept at deciphering her father’s Delphic utterances. So it was not surprising that many people wooed her, too. Although the first volume of her 1995 book,
Deng Xiaoping, My Father
, was a strong contender for the world’s most boring biography, others saw it as a business opportunity. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who was eyeing the Chinese satellite market, snapped up the English rights.

To please Beijing, which preferred that the masses didn’t see stories about dissidents, he had already yanked the BBC World Service
from his
STAR
television broadcasts into China. He flew Maomao to the U.S. on a lavish book tour. In NewYork, accompanied by her personal secretary and her teenaged daughter, she stayed at the Waldorf Astoria. Her daughter went shopping and took in a Broadway show,
Beauty and the Beast
. In Washington, they stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel, where a standard room cost $325. In Beverly Hills, Murdoch invited the first-time author to dinner at his home. No doubt, he was breathlessly awaiting volume two.

Deng Zhifang was the youngest and the richest of the five children. Back in 1981, I had cornered him in a library carrel at the University of Rochester, where he was a doctoral student in quantum optics. I was researching a story for my journalism degree about the first trickle of Chinese students into America. As I approached, I saw him slip a copy of
Newsweek
under his desk. Remembering how the Chinese post office had once confiscated my own copies, I introduced myself and joked, “Did you know you’re reading a counter-revolutionary magazine?”

“I read
Newsweek
to improve my English,” he stammered.

My comment hadn’t been a terrific ice-breaker, and he didn’t want to talk to me. Ten years later, in 1991, he formed a huge real estate firm and teamed up with Li Ka-shing, his sister’s billionaire art fan.

“I am involved with Deng’s son,” Li exulted at an annual shareholders meeting in Hong Kong. “And I will be involved in more partnerships with him.”

The Cultural Revolution had taught the five Deng children that political power was ephemeral. After the Tiananmen Massacre, they especially worried about life after their father’s death. They knew he had given the order to shoot to kill and feared the people might vent their fury on them. Deng Maomao had already persuaded her father to release dissident Wei Jingsheng six months early.

In 1995, she made another conciliatory move, publicly acknowledging that Tiananmen had been a “tragedy.” It was the first important deviation from the official government hard line. To me, and to many ordinary Chinese, it was an intriguing sign that history would be rewritten one day.

Maternity-ward nurse with newborn baby
.
Photo: Jan Wong/
Globe and Mail

Amaranth Wang, daughter of deposed party chief, Zhao Ziyang, on duty at the Great Wall Sheraton, as Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian meets the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates
.

W
hat with the spectacular economy and a country poised on the brink of major political change, it was tempting to stay in China forever. With two young children, it didn’t hurt to have a cook, nanny, housekeeper and driver, either. But six years as a student, followed by six more years as a reporter, were finally enough. Norman had already quit working for Sun Microsystems because he didn’t want to get stuck in the area of pre-sales technical support for the rest of his life. And after the Tiananmen Massacre, he didn’t feel right about working for a Chinese government organization like the Academy of Science, either. My husband had put his career on hold long enough. And I didn’t want my children growing up in an atmosphere of smog and telephone taps.

When my editor told me I should return to Toronto by the summer of 1994, just six months away, I wanted to find out what had happened to the people I had known back in Mao’s time. And to placate my editors, who began asking for a swan song, I also began to think long and hard about where China was headed.

For old times’ sake, I wanted to visit the Number One Machine Tool Factory. I invited Teacher Dai to accompany me, and she readily agreed. As we walked into the same dilapidated red brick gatehouse, memories of struggle meetings and pneumatic drills flooded back. A cadre named Zhao Zirong, who had been a young worker
when I toiled there twenty-one years earlier, ushered us into an air-conditioned reception room. The old Mao portrait was gone, replaced by a rooster-shaped clock composed of tiny seashells glued on black velvet. (I preferred the Mao portrait.) I asked Zhao about the Iron Women’s Team.

“It lasted a few years after you left, but then it was disbanded,” he said. “Women can drill, but not for long. Better to let men do it.” That annoyed me, but so much annoyed me now in China.

The original five-thousand-member work force had shrunk to sixteen hundred. The factory, still the top lathe maker in China, now sold 15 percent of its output to Asia and North America. “Back then, we exported to, uh, you know” — he grinned in embarrassment – “socialist countries.”

In 1973, the factory had virtually been in the farm fields. Now it was prime property, right across from Maxim’s in the glittering World Trade Center, Beijing’s tallest skyscraper. As we walked through the dank workshops where I had spent fifty days trying to reform my thinking, Zhao wanted to talk about real estate, not epistemology. “We’re going to tear down all these buildings and put up skyscrapers,” he said. “The subway will stop right underneath us.”

Several workers chuckled in disbelief when he introduced me as someone who had been there for “open-door schooling.” Zhao mentioned that the workers now averaged 10,000 yuan ($1,200) a year in salary.

“How wonderful!” said Teacher Dai, as upbeat as ever. “I don’t even make half that.”

“Everyone here would rather be teachers,” Zhao said sourly. “These salaries are just middling to low At least you people can moonlight by tutoring.”

I showed Zhao my ten-page “ideological summing-up,” written just after I left Number One. It was the kind of soul-searching confession every Chinese wrote after a long stint of labor, except that I actually meant it. He stared at it as if it were a moon rock. “I hoped that through physical labor,” I had written, “I could change my bourgeois world outlook to that of a proletarian world outlook.”

On one of my last reporting trips, to Hangzhou, I decided to look up my old geisha classmates. Pearl had recently written a long, but very proper, reminiscence about the Chairman, which had been published in the Zhejiang provincial newspaper. But my other classmates warned me that Center, now chairman of the provincial Zither Association, remained hyper-sensitive about her secret relationship with Mao. Alas, both Pearl and Center were out of town at meetings. But I tracked down Center’s husband, who sent her a telegram, and she flew back a day early. That evening, they arrived at my hotel, bearing a tin of Dragon Well tea and a bag of traditional rice dumplings wrapped in fragrant palm leaves.