Riding the Iron Rooster (19 page)

"So you believe in the death penalty?"

"It is a Chinese custom," Comrade Ning said. "If you kill someone you pay with your life. That is simple. And his was the same sort of serious crime."

That leap in logic was characteristic of Chinese thinking, and
lao-dong gaizao
(Rehabilitation Through Labor) had declined in popularity. I specifically wanted to know what Comrade Ning thought about capital punishment since, along with Deng's reforms, in the three years between 1983 and 1986, 10,000 people were executed in China—and not only murderers, but also rapists, arsonists, swindlers and thieves. On August 30, 1983, there was a public execution in Peking of 30 convicted criminals. It was held in a sports stadium, which held a cheering crowd of 60,000 people. Soon after, the list of capital criminals was widened to include pimps, spies, armed robbers, embezzlers and organizers of secret societies. It is easy to calculate the number of Chinese who receive the final solution (their hands are tied, they are forced to kneel before witnesses, and they are dispatched with one bullet to the occiput, where the neck joins the skull). Their photographs are always displayed in whatever town they lived in, often at the railway station or outside the post office. In the rogues' gallery tacked to these bulletin boards, a red mark appears beside the criminals who have been executed.

I said, "Personally I don't believe in the death penalty."

"Why not?" Comrade Ning asked.

"Because it's savage and it doesn't work."

"What would you have done with those terrorists that bombed the dance hall in Berlin a few weeks ago?"

"Not condemned them to death, if that's what you mean," I said. "Anyway, don't you make a distinction between political violence and criminal violence? Let's suppose these men, whoever they are, were Palestinians. That's an army of liberation, isn't it?"

"We would regard what they did in Berlin as terrorism," Comrade Ning said. "That is a crime. Armed struggle," he went on, using the Maoist term for people's war, "is another matter. That is legitimate."

He could not be budged from wishing to execute every pimp and hooligan, along with every strangler and arsonist. He maintained that such drastic action kept the crime rate down. It was Maoism at its most anti-Confucian. Confucius abhorred capital punishment and had always been regarded by Maoists as a dangerous softie for his humane views (as in
Analects
XII, 19). But even a relatively open-minded man like Deng Xiaoping has revealed himself to be an energetic hangman, clinging to the Chinese belief in the efficacy of "killing a chicken to scare the monkeys." In a pep talk to the five-man standing committee of the politburo (and reprinted in a book of his talks and speeches entitled
Fundamental Issues in Present-Day China
), Deng said, "As a matter of fact, execution is the one indispensable means of education."

Returning to the subject of money, Comrade Ning said that he did not think there were financial problems in this new go-ahead money-making economy. The government would control the work force, protect the workers, tax the people getting rich and in general supervise all businesses. He said it seemed to him much more serious that prices were rising, in some cases to double-digit inflation—he used that English term in his Chinese sentence. But salaries were also rising. His wife knew a draftswoman in her native town of Wuxi who earned 300 yuan a month. That was regarded as a high salary, but most of it came from bonuses, because she was productive.

"So, Comrade Ning, you're an optimist."

"Of course!"

"No dangerous social tendencies that you can see?"

"Yes, there are some. But we are trying to deal with them. The government has instituted a program called 'Spiritual Civilization.' Look at the posters and slogans. You'll see a big-character poster near Suzhou Creek..."

The Spiritual Civilization program was a direct response to various types of antisocial behavior that emerged after the relaxation of restrictions—the open door policy. It was started in 1985, and as Chinese dogma is always expressed in clusters, it was made up of The Five Talks and The Four Beauties.

The Five Talks were concerned with communication. They were: Politeness, Civil Behavior, Morality, Attention to Social Relations and Attention to the Hygiene of One's Surroundings. This was all to combat a slob-factor that had become very obnoxious; and the slobs who weren't changed by The Five Talks might be altered by considering The Four Beauties. These were Beautiful Language, Beautiful Behavior, Beautiful Heart and Beautiful Environment.

As a program and prescription it seemed rather twee, but it was a great deal better than the brutishness that was called for in Smashing The Four Olds (burning churches, turning monasteries into shoe factories, and so forth), or observing The Eight Antis—persecuting intellectuals, burning books, and making teachers wear dunce caps and having them recite "I am a cow demon" all day in front of a mocking classroom.

It was Comrade Ning who explained the Spiritual Civilization program to me. I liked him, and I was impressed by him. He knew what the world news was and he was hospitable to a total stranger. His tolerance was of course a willing suspension of disbelief—at heart he clung to Mao's Thoughts—but he was without greed or envy, and he didn't have the slightest trace of vanity. He wasn't a bully either, and I respected him for arguing with me.

But afterwards, I heard that his wife had been rather cross with him. She had been listening the whole time.

She said to him, "If we have any criticisms or doubts about the current policies we should keep them to ourselves and not talk to foreigners about them."

There is a Chinese conundrum. If a place has a reputation for being beautiful, the Chinese flock to it, and its beauty is disfigured by the crowd. If a train is very fast, like the Shanghai Express from Peking, everyone tries to take it, and it is impossible to get a seat. The same is true for restaurants: the good ones are jammed. And hotels. Reservations are unthinkable, and the worst of it is that you are sometimes laughed at for ever believing that you had a chance: the Chinese can be extremely rude in turning you away—the Chinese elbow is very sharp.

This conundrum is constant in Shanghai. For example, Shanghai is known to be a city of sidewalks—wonderful for pedestrians, an excellent city for perambulating. Therefore, everyone walks; and the mobs are impenetrable.

None the less, if you push—as the Chinese do—it is possible to walk around Shanghai. Long ago, the Chinese overcame the natural human horror of being touched. The crowd reduces your progress to a shuffle, but it seemed to me that anything was preferable to a Shanghai bus.

Following Comrade Ning's suggestion I walked to Suzhou Creek and looked at the Spiritual Civilization sign—
Cling to The Four Beauties.
Then I walked farther, to the docks, a tangled, greasy, busy place of warehouses and the storerooms that the Chinese call godowns, and little indoor factories of tinsmiths and lock-makers and box-assemblers and rope-twisters. I came to the Shanghai Seamen's Club, a venerable building with teak-wood paneling and art-deco lamps and fluted cornices and a serviceable billiard room. It was a big old building and covered with soot, but it was attractive in a gloomy and indestructible way.

Inside, among the souvenirs and seamen's necessities like gloves and twine and sunglasses and slippers, there was political crap and propaganda about Chinese soldiers fighting in Vietnam, but masked as "Frontier Guards in South China." I noted down the captions.
Comrade Hu Yaohang was wielding his writing brush
[photo of Politburo member posing with big writing brush]
to write a few words calling on the officers and fighters of the frontier guards "to be able to wield both the pen and the gun to make our country and people rich"-,
and under a different photograph, showing five soldiers squinting at some bushes,
All officers and fighters of the "Heroic Hard Sixth Company" rendering battle achievement in defending Laoshan battle.

I had a beer and kept walking and thought: These people were giving us a hard time over Vietnam? They were still fighting the Vietnamese—and probably getting their asses kicked, because nothing is more indicative of a war going badly than valiant propaganda like this. If a country shouted that it would fight to the last drop of blood that usually meant that it was ready to surrender; and in China, as a general rule, you could regard nothing as true until it had been denied. Anything officially denied was probably a fact.

I continued walking, across the metal bridge in front of what had once been Broadway Mansions, and over the creek to Huangpu Park, on the Bund, where the rest of the 1920s buildings still stood. I fantasized that there were certain cities in the world that could only succeed by becoming gross parodies of what they were—or of what people expected them to be (like a tall person who has no choice but to learn basketball), and that Shanghai was one of them.

The sign on the gate of the park gave a historical note:
This park
was guarded by police of the International Settlement and Chinese wen refused admittance. To add insult to injury the imperialists in 1885 put up at the gate a board with the words "No Admittance to Dogs and Chinese." This aroused among Chinese people popular indignation and disgust which finally compelled the imperialists to remove the board.

In another place the popularity of the park was remarked on:
Admissions total over 5 million a year. On holidays it sometimes has a sight-seer density of 3 persons to the square meter.
In Chinese terms this crowd-praise was wonderful: in the West, people are stifled by a crowd, but in China they feel propped up, and only the worthiest attractions have millions of visitors.

But that was not for me. I walked on and took shelter in a cool building beyond the Bund that had stained-glass windows—not a church, but a bank or counting house, because the windows showing Burne-Jones-like maidens were labeled
Truth
and
Wisdom
and
Prudence.
The foyer had a dome and a vaulted ceiling and onyx pillars, and a black marble floor. I thought: This is just the sort of place that would have had the shit kicked out of it during the Cultural Revolution.

To test my suspicion I asked a man—Mr. Lan Hongquan—who worked there. It was now a government office.

I said, "Isn't it amazing that this place survived the Cultural Revolution."

"It almost didn't," Mr. Lan said. "In 1967, the Red Guards burst in and splashed paint everywhere. They completely covered the windows and these marble walls with paint—it was black paint. You couldn't see anything of these decorations. The job was so big and expensive that it took ten years to clean up. It was only finished last year."

Quite a way up that street I came to the Shanghai Municipal Foreign Affairs Office, where I had an appointment with the chief of the Propaganda Division—such was his title—Mr. Wang Hou-kang, and his assistant, Miss Zhong.

"A very nice house," I said, in the palm court of this mansion.

"It belonged to a former capitalist."

He then told me that there were 164 joint ventures with 20 countries. I expressed surprise, but didn't ask any more questions, because I had been told by wiser minds that most of these joint ventures were still in the discussion stage; and it would have been embarrassing to Mr. Wang if I had asked him how many had borne fruit—the number of joint ventures in operation was very small.

Because I had been bucking the traffic all day, I said, "Do you think that Chinese people will ever own their own cars?"

"Very few will. And not for pleasure but business. What we want to do is make cars and sell them to other countries. The export market—that's what interests us."

I asked him what changes had struck him since Deng Xiaoping's reforms had taken effect.

"Magazines are more colorful—more open. More picturesque, I can say. And there is the writing."

"About politics?"

"No, about sex. Before, people never wrote about sex, and now they do."

Miss Zhong said, "Sometimes it is very embarrassing."

"People dare to express themselves through stories," Mr. Wang said. 'That is new. And people can engage in discussions without being labeled 'rightist' or 'counterrevolutionary' or 'bourgeois' if they said certain things."

"So no one calls anyone a paper tiger anymore?"

'There are still paper tigers. Paper tiger is more a philosophical concept," Mr. Wang said.

We talked about money after that. He said, 'Things have certainly changed. Take me for example. I earned ninety-two yuan a month in 1954 and did not get a salary increase until 1979."

"But did prices rise in the years when your salary didn't change?"

He laughed. I had not said anything funny. But there are many Chinese laughs. His was the one that meant:
You are asking too many questions.

The subject of clothes was not contentious.

Mr. Wang said, "After Liberation, people cherished simple clothing. They identified the blue suits and the blue cap with revolution. People wore them and felt like revolutionaries. They were sturdy clothes and they were cheap—people felt thrifty wearing them. They made people equal."

"Why have they stopped wearing them?"

"By and by, some people wanted to wear more colorful clothes. But they were afraid. There was an idea prevailing that if people wore colorful clothes they would be part of the bourgeoisie." He laughed. His laugh meant:
I don't believe that myself.
"They remembered the Red Guards who used to go out with scissors. They cut your cuffs if they were too wide or too narrow. They cut your hair if it was too long."

"Do you think that will come again?"

And I saw the marching Red Guards, with their long scissors and their fiendish grins, marching down Nanjing Road, on the lookout for flapping cuffs or flowing locks. They raised their long scissors and went,
Snip-snip! Snip-snip!
I realized that a passionate and crazed teenager with a pair of scissors is much scarier than a soldier with a rifle.