Riding the Iron Rooster (57 page)

The trouble with the stop in Xuzhou was that it occurred at three in the morning. At that hour the whole of China is asleep. I would be emerging from the train at this ridiculous hour on a winter night, and have six hours to kill before knowing whether it was possible to find a bus or a car to Zhou Enlai's homestead.

I decided to stay in bed.

Alain and Li got off at Bengbu at five in the morning to transfer to a Hefei train. Before we turned in they piled their boxes and suitcases outside in the corridor. The Head of the Train complained about Alain's trunk, but Mr. Li explained that it contained the foreign expert's worldly goods from Belgium.

"Regulations, regulations," the Head said. "You must register it."

They didn't bother. More people knocked on the door in the night to complain about it, but I was asleep at five when they got up. I woke up when one of them sat on my foot, but then they were gone. That was the way with trains—something dreamlike in the way people came and went. By eight there was someone else in Alain's berth, reading a comic book. It was a young woman, with a veil drawn tight over her face because of the dust.

"The Great River," she said, using the Chinese name for the Yangtze.

I decided to piss into it. I went to the toilet. On the door was a long Chinese word, TINGCHESHIQINGWUSHIYONG, which was seven characters run together, meaning, "While the train is stopped, please don't use this room." But it hadn't stopped; it was crossing the long railway bridge over the Yangtze. I entered the room, peered into the open hole and let fly.

Having seen Xinjiang and the northeast and the open spaces of Inner Mongolia, I now knew that this eastern part of classical China was the least interesting to look at. It was brown factories and black canals separated by flat cabbage fields. It had been plowed and fertilized and planted for thousands of years, but it was no miracle that anything at all grew here. The secret is revealed every morning, as men with long-handled dippers scoop human shit out of dark barrels and fertilize the fields. It was the flattest, ugliest and most populous part of China; but its shifters kept it in business. Shanghai residents produced 7 500 tons of human shit a day. It was all used. Farm yields were high, but the place epitomized drudgery. Everyone's energy was expended in simply existing there, and every inch of land had been put to use. Why grow flowers when you can grow spinach? Why plant a tree when you can use the sunshine on your crop? And the untillable soil was perfect for a factory. People praised Wuxi's Lake Tai, but the lake was dead, and Wuxi was simply awful looking, part of the sprawl of Shanghai, although it was seventy-five miles from the Bund.

In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions. Perhaps you were a little hasty in judging the place? Perhaps you saw it in a good month? Something in the weather might have sweetened your disposition? In any case, travel is frequently a matter of seizing a moment. It is personal. Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine. Our accounts of the journeys would be different. You would notice how I provoked people with questions, and how I loitered in the market, and my fear of Chinese water that amounted almost to hydrophobia. I might mention your impatience, or your liking for dumplings, or the way you wilted in the heat. You would write about the kinds of Chinese food, and I about the way they wolfed it. If you spoke about Mao, I would contradict you.

On a second visit to Shanghai I was startled by its crowds and traffic—people and cars vying for the right of way; and by its contrasts of horror and beauty; and by its neurotic energy, a sort of frenzy that was unique to Shanghai.

The Shanghainese have a sense of belonging to the city that resembles the New Yorker's strong identification with New York. It is not chauvinism or civic pride. It is a sense of shared experience, the same headaches and complaints, a sort of it's-awful-but-I-love-it attitude. It is also a sense of being possessed by the place, locked in its embrace and embattled at the same time. Speaking as someone from out of town, I find both Shanghai and New York pretty dreadful. The noise alone is cause enough to regard them as uninhabitable. I grew up in the big-enough city of Boston, and when people talk about New York's (or Shanghai's) vitality, I simply see a lot of frantic pedestrians. And writers who celebrate cities always seem laughable to me, because every city dweller, in order to keep sane and survive, invents his own city. Your New York is not my New York. On the other hand, my Shanghai would probably be yours. It is simple but dense; it is horizontal; and it has remarkably few landmarks. New York is vertical, a city of interiors—and secrets; but Shanghai is its streets. There is not enough room for so many people indoors, and so people work, talk, cook, play and carry on their businesses on the sidewalks. There is no other way for the city to cope with its overpopulation. It is the most visible and obvious of cities, and perhaps therein lies its charm for those who praise it: that its modes of life and work are so apparent to even the casual stroller. There is also a strong sense of old China in the sidewalk life, and such sights seem to give it "atmosphere." But I would rather live in a place where I could walk without incessantly bumping into people, or dodging traffic, or where I could hear myself think.

But the sense of urban solidarity that characterizes Shanghai had a marked effect on the student demonstrations. It was the only city where factory workers linked arms with students. And the numbers were so great (they varied from 100,000 to 200,000) that the city came to a halt—no buses, no taxis, and no one was able to work.

I went out to Fudan University on the outskirts—and wretched-looking outskirts at that—where I talked with students about the demonstrations.

One student told me, "We held meetings, but we wanted to disassociate ourself from the Party, so we insisted that student cadres had to leave the hall. These cadres are appointed by the Party—we didn't want them."

"Did the cadres join the march?"

"No," the student said. "We put their names on our posters, but we printed their names upside down or in slanted characters."

"What was the point of that?"

"It is disrespectful to print someone's name upside down."

True, a Chinese person's name is everything to him. It represents himself, his parents, his extended family and even his village. The worst, most insulting curse anyone can utter in China against a Chinese person is
Cao ni de xing!
"Fuck your name!"

The student said that the term
running dogs
was used in the demonstrations, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. And big-character posters were another artifact from that time that had been pressed into service, but they now read
More Freedom
and
We Want Democracy.
Rising prices, low salaries, poor public transportation, byzantine election procedures, and difficult rules governing studying abroad were other grievances.

I carefully noted these down, and then a young man named Mr. Hong said, "You know about the Jan and Dean concert?"

Jan and Dean? "Baby Talk," "Surf City" and "Ride the Wild Surf"? The early sixties, Southern California, totally tubular surfer duo?
That
Jan and Dean? I had been under the impression that after Jan wrapped his car around a tree in 1966, suffering paralysis and brain damage, this group was no longer operational.

But I was wrong. This American group, which outdated the Beach Boys (who were their sometime collaborators), had undergone a recrudescence and were yapping to beat the band, actually singing "Surf City" in Shanghai, twenty-nine years after they had released their first record. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. After all, Mr. Tian had sung me a Neil Sedaka song in the Langxiang wilderness only a month before.

Mr. Hong said, "We liked Jan and Dean very much. The students were excited. Jan and Dean invited some students onto the stage to dance. They were dancing and enjoying themselves. But afterwards those students were accused by the police of being disruptive."

"What happened to them?"

"They were taken into custody. They were beaten."

This also fueled the students' enthusiasm for a demonstration. But there was a feeling that the students had been led into a trap, since the conservatives used the demonstrations as an excuse to call for a limiting of the reforms.

Everyone agreed that what was happening in China indicated a power struggle in the inner Party, between the reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping and the eight or ten so-called leftists, who were antireformers, led by Peng Zhen (chairman of the National People's Congress). In spite of his dogmatic Maoist views, Peng had never been purged. These puritanical old troopers, many of whom had shared the privations of the Long March, were outraged by students who were making demands. Their American counterparts might be the VFW, who also hated student protests. The problem was that there were also people in the inner Party who were pushing harder for reform.

I paid a call on Mr. Brooks, the American consul-general, who had impressed me so much a few months before by telling me that he didn't have the slightest idea of what would happen next in China.

"The Chinese will go on doing business," he said. "Foreign investors aren't concerned with student demonstrations. What would worry them is a return to Stalinism."

We then talked about Deng's successor. Would it be Hu Yaobang, Deng's bridge partner? Deng himself had indicated this.

Mr. Brooks said that Deng had hoped to step down, but that he wanted to make sure his policies would continue. When Deng went he wanted to take all the doubtful people with him.

"The trouble is," Mr. Brooks said, "Mr. Hu has disappeared from view. A foreign minister told a visiting Japanese delegation, 'He's tired.' In Chinese terms that means he can't do the work."

I listened to the radio that night and heard a news report that Hu Yaobang had been forced to resign after a session of self-criticism in which he said he had "made many mistakes."

So, just like that, Mr. Hu was gone, and Deng didn't have a successor.

Dr. Xie Xide, the president of Fudan University, was a member of the Central Committee. I saw her the following day and asked her how she had found out about Mr. Hu's resignation.

"I heard it on the Voice of America," she said. "But I was not surprised. He tended to make decisions without consulting anyone. For example, once he was on an official visit to Japan. He was very enthusiastic. He invited three thousand Japanese students to visit China."

"To study?"

"No. Just for a visit," Dr. Xie said. "But we are a poor country. We can't afford that sort of thing."

Mr. Hu had often had his foot in his mouth. He had begun to wear Western suits, and although he had been designated a sort of official greeter of Eastern Bloc delegations (the nine Poles in porkpie hats, the Rumanian wrestlers, the representatives of the Hungarian joint venture in making paprika), Mr. Hu's sympathies were with the Western capitalists. He became very excited at one stage about contagious diseases and he advocated the abandonment of chopsticks in favor of knives and forks. And why not have individual portions, he exclaimed, instead of the Chinese common dish in the middle of the table, and everyone shoving his chopsticks in? He had recently gone to Tibet and suggested that the Han people should leave the region forthwith and let the Tibetans run it themselves. (In itself it was a bold thought, but it would have set a disastrous example to other autonomous regions, like Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.) He had also said, rather tactlessly (considering his past as Party Secretary), "Marxism cannot solve China's problems."

The official version of Mr. Hu's departure was that at "an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China's Central Committee, Hu Yaobang made a self-criticism of his mistakes on major issues of political principles in violation of the Party's principle of collective leadership." This was reported by China's official mouthpiece, the Xinhua News Agency. Mr. Hu was further accused of having caused "a slackening of ideological control."

In a word, Mr. Hu was being blamed for the student protests. He was spineless, weepy, ideologically unsound. In the pantheon of modern Chinese goblins and enemies, which included a running dog, a paper tiger, a snake spirit and a cow demon, Mr. Hu had become one of the slimiest and least trustworthy, a bourgeois liberal. The Maoist view still stood: a liberal was a dangerous hypocrite.

He was not the only one to go. A day or so later, the writer Wang Ruowang was expelled from the Communist Party. Was this interesting, and did anyone care about such boring political ambushes? My feeling was that I would much rather have been bird-watching in Heilongjiang, yet these political events were not without their amusing ironies. For example, this man Wang had had his problems before. In 1957 he had been labeled "a rightist" in Mao's Anti-Rightist Campaign, a witch-hunt that had followed the Hundred Flowers Campaign (when the rightists had been suckered into making public criticisms of the Party). And then, in 1966, Mr. Wang had fallen again. He was "struggled" and finally charged with being "a cow demon." This he had to live with for ten years. He was then rehabilitated and made a council member of the Chinese Writers' Association and of the Shanghai Writers' Association. His crime (so Xinhua said) was that he "advocated bourgeois liberalization," and criticized the Party saying, "you [the Party] have nothing left to do now that the people have the freedom to write and to pick whatever theatrical performances they like."

Shanghai had just seen a Chinese run of the torrid O'Neill play
Desire Under the Elms,
so there was a grain of truth in that (it had been banned until recently). In a sense, the only heresy that Mr. Wang committed was that he said what everyone knew to be true.

It was very obvious that many people behaved like capitalists and petit-bourgeois traders. They had family businesses. They owned shops. Just the day before Wang fell, I had a ride in a privately owned taxi. "I own this car," the man said. It was a jalopy, but it was all his. People were changing jobs, making dresses, peddling their own wares, and selling their vegetables off their own pushcarts. But it was a great mistake for anyone to call this capitalism. You had to call it The Chinese Way. And it was an error for anyone to draw attention to the new freedoms. Hypocrisy was necessary. The government did not want to appear soft; and the Party preferred to live with the illusion that it was more repressive than it actually was.