This Generation (25 page)

Some people use the Three Gorges Dam to attack some of our leaders, claiming that their mentality is “Once I'm dead, what does it matter if there's a catastrophic flood?” I want these vicious naysayers to know that the leaders actually see things completely the other way around: It's because the leaders were afraid there'd be a catastrophic flood after they were dead that they were so determined to build the Three Gorges Dam. That way, the worst that can happen is that there's flooding above the dam. So long as there's no flood below the dam, there will always be shrimp to eat. Therefore, this claim of theirs is also untenable.

In short, the Three Gorges Dam is all positives and no negatives—who can go on criticizing it now?

June 24, 2011

The other day I came back
from the airport, and with nothing to do in the evening I thought I might as well go out and buy a few videos. It had rained, but the skies were clearing and the air was sweet, so I opened the windows and the moonroof and cruised along in a leisurely way. There wasn't much traffic as I slipped onto the A8 Freeway. These past few years we've got into the habit of calling the Shanghai-Hangzhou Expressway the A8, the Shanghai-Qingpu Expressway the A9, and the ring road the A20, but now they've become the Shanghai-Kunming G60, the Shanghai-Chongqing G50, and the G1501. I managed to drive these roads for two years without registering the change.

Before I got very far on the expressway I was forced off, so that they could do after-midnight maintenance. I dawdled along on surface streets until I got to the elevated expressway above Yan'an Road, where I suddenly got the idea of going to have a look at “Asia's No. 1
Curve.”
³⁸
As I got close to the Bund I activated the camera feature on my phone, followed the original direction of the road—and ended up in a tunnel. It wasn't until I recalled a news item from a few weeks before that I realized that “Asia's No. 1 Curve” is no more. Somehow that reminded me that my old primary school no longer exists either, and I couldn't help feel disconsolate. But when I thought of how a friend of mine's primary school, middle school, high school, kindergarten, old home, paternal grandparents' home, and maternal grandparents' home all no longer exist, I had to cheer up. Shanghai people aren't in a position to miss their native city, someone has remarked. But perhaps that's true of all Chinese people. They leave their native districts in search of a better life, and if they don't succeed they will wander here and there forever, and if they succeed they'll put down roots somewhere else. The ones who hanker to reconnect with their past come back to find that their old homes have vanished, while the people who don't care simply have no interest in going back at all. People who were born in big cities are maybe better off, because their old homes are not in another part of the country, but you find that even the vestiges associated with your growing up are gone. Often a passenger in my car will say, “Hey, my primary school used to be there!” I look out the window, and it turns out to be luxury apartments.

The only way I can console such people is to tell them: “I heard that someone asked a foreigner living in Shanghai, ‘Where are you from?' The guy answered sadly, ‘What was once Yugoslavia.' ”

At least this city hasn't changed its name, so we can be thankful for that.

When I came out of the tunnel, I was relieved to see at least the Bund still standing. A bit farther on, I found Shanghai now has a Waldorf. As long as you're rich, it seems, you'll be happy here. I
crossed Huaihai Road and found myself in Luwan District—only to realize it no longer exists. Although I was born a country boy, I came to have a deep feeling for Luwan District, because I would have meetings there when I came into the city for business, but now it's become Huangpu District. As I approached Xintiandi, I felt a bit uncomfortable.
³⁹
After all, it's said that the site of the Chinese Communist Party's First Congress was here, but if the Party isn't worried about it, then what have we to worry about? We're used to this, anyway—things that should be reformed don't get reformed, and things that shouldn't get reformed do. I had the idea of following Huaihai Road and then Huashan Road down to Xujiahui, but found more roadwork in the way, so I decided instead to head for Gubei, where there's a video store that stays open late.

Gubei is one of Shanghai's most posh residential areas, with a big expatriate population—I guess because it's close to the airport, and if things ever get out of hand the foreigners can get to the airport in double quick time. I pulled over to the side of the road, only to be accosted by a drunken youth: “Who said you could park here? Do you think you can park anywhere you like, just because you have a smart car? Get out of here! Scram!”

The shop I was looking for had already closed, so I did scram, and crossing Xianxia Road I saw three young women, also a bit the worse for drink. They were staggering along the street, clutching each other. When I pulled over to another video shop a few hundred yards farther on, they shouted at me, “You rich people think you're so great, with your fancy cars. You're just trash, the whole lot of you!”

I couldn't help but look back at my car. A standard mid-range black sedan in this city full of big-name automobiles—is it really all that fancy? Perhaps because I normally drive with windows closed,
I just never heard this kind of comment before. I don't know why they were so down in the dumps, but then if I had a difficult life in this city I might need an opportunity to blow off steam, too. Almost immediately a white Lamborghini convertible roared past, with a young woman in her twenties at the wheel. I spun around, fearful to see the girls' reaction, only to find one of them throwing up with one hand on the wall, the other two patting her on the back, so none of them had seen.

In front of the video store was a stretch of grass where a young man was picking up discarded plastic water bottles and stuffing them into two sacks. He turned around as I walked past and I noticed he was wearing a cap and a face mask, the cap pushed down low over his eyes. Clearly he didn't want to do this during the day, and didn't want to be seen.
He and those other young people,
I thought,
perhaps belong to that huge class of disadvantaged who text their families and say, “I have a good life here in Shanghai.”
When I entered the video store, a young guy behind the desk greeted me. “Hey there, handsome. Have you seen
The Consolidation of the Party
?”
⁴⁰

“Oh, yes,” I told him. “I watch it all the time.”

July 26, 2011

On July 23, 2011, two high-speed trains collided near Wenzhou, in Zhejiang Province, killing dozens of passengers and injuring many more. The authorities brought rescue operations to a rapid halt, burying the derailed carriages, and attempted to restrict media coverage.

You never stop asking: Why
do they always have to misrepresent the facts? But they feel they could hardly be more candid and fair.

You never stop asking: Why do they always have to shield the offender? But they feel they've let their buddy down.

You never stop asking: Why do they always have to cover up the truth? But they feel they could hardly be more transparent and open.

You never stop asking: Why do they always have to lead such corrupt lives? But they feel they could hardly live in a more simple, spartan way.

You never stop asking: Why do they always have to be so overbearing and arrogant? But they feel they could hardly have a more humble attitude.

You feel aggrieved, but they feel aggrieved, too. Under the Qing government a hundred years ago, they recall, the common people never got to see television at all, whereas now everyone has a television—what a big step forward this is!

We built this, they think, and we built that. You don't need to concern yourselves with what happened in the process or whose palms were greased—you got to enjoy it, didn't you? It used to take a day and a night to get from Shanghai to Beijing, and now—so long as the train's not struck by lightning—you can make the trip in five hours. Why aren't you grateful? Why do you raise so many questions?

Why can't our country progress? It's because so many of our officials consistently judge themselves by the standard of the Mao or the Stalin era, and so they always feel aggrieved: In their eyes, they're so enlightened, so just, so generous, so unassuming—and that's a tremendous achievement! It's not that technological advances are pushing society forward, they think—no, it's all because of their conscious decision to open things up. So the more you criticize them, the more they long for absolute power, the more you mock, the more they want to be Mao.

“You're just never satisfied,” an official told me. “A literary type like you—if you'd been around forty years ago, you'd have been shot. That's a sign of progress, no?”

“You're the ones who're never satisfied,” I said. “If you'd expressed that kind of view ninety years ago, you'd have been laughed off the streets.” Are we really seeing progress here?

Yes, an accident did happen, they concede, but the top leadership expressed its concern. We also sent someone to answer you reporters' questions. The original compensation was set at one hundred seventy thousand yuan, and now it has been raised to five hundred thousand, and we even sacked one of our best buddies. We really went the extra mile, so why do you keep harping on about little details, why don't you lighten up a bit? How come you've lost
your sense of the big picture? Why do you want us to apologize? We have committed no crime—an accident like this is just the price you pay when you develop. Disposing of the bodies so rapidly—well, that's just standard operating procedure; early signing-off on the death certificate leads to a bigger bonus, late signing-off leads to less compensation—that's the method our sister department found so effective when conducting forcible demolition and resettlement. To bury the train carriages was a poor decision, yes, but it came from higher up, because they wanted any potential source of trouble hidden on the spot. The mistake we made was to do the job in broad daylight and make too big a hole, and we didn't communicate adequately with the propaganda department or fully control the photographers in the area, so our preparatory work was a bit rushed. The biggest lesson we learned from this accident is that in the future when burying things we need to take their size into account and also the secrecy of the work. These things we underestimated.

But generally speaking, they feel, the rescue operation was successful and timely. Deployment of resources was reasonable, the overall plan was normal, and the handling of the aftermath was satisfactory. The only unfortunate aspect was that public opinion got a bit out of control. But that's not our responsibility, they feel—public opinion is not under our control.

If you look at the big things, they think, we held the Olympics, we eliminated taxes on farmers, but you don't give us credit for all that stuff, you're always picking on little details here and there—just what are you getting at? We could easily have been more repressive politically than North Korea, more impoverished economically than Sudan, more ruthless organizationally than the Khmer Rouge, because we have a bigger army than all of them put together, but we didn't do things that way. Not only are you not grateful, but you want us to apologize. We feel so misused.

In this nation of ours, everybody feels aggrieved—the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless alike. In a nation where
everyone feels aggrieved, the various strata of society all become disconnected from each other and every component part of this huge country just keeps coasting on, carried along by its inbuilt momentum. Without reform, we'll find that disconnection is not our biggest problem—it's going off the rails that we need to worry about.