TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100289/10028900.003

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 55.4 KB | 1,068 lines

                π                                                              NOSEC, Page 64

A Day in The Life . . .

 . . . Of China

Free to Fly Inside the Cage


A visitor discovers a country still scarred by Tiananmen but
looking beyond the bars

By Michael Kramer


    A beautiful day for a wedding -- crisp, clear and, for
China in midsummer, relatively cool. The latest typhoon's high
winds have swept away the air pollution, and under a brilliant
blue sky the guests are chatting in the hollow of a terraced
field beside a single spindly tree -- symbolic decoration in a
country whose scant arable land continues to disappear. Arranged
neatly alongside the makeshift altar, the gifts intended for the
bride's parents include a new refrigerator, a 24-in. color
television set and a jet black Yamaha motorcycle. The presents
are ogled, but atop the TV a photograph of Margaret Thatcher
creates the greatest buzz, a reaction the bride, and perhaps the
groom too, would undoubtedly have enjoyed. Were they still
alive.

    As the other guests prattle on about the British Prime
Minister, some even in English, the new language of the New
China, I am transfixed by the marriage of the two coffins in
front of me. The groom died in an automobile accident five days
earlier at the age of 23. The body of his bride, dead of cancer
for five months, cost $3 to exhume. They had never met.

    After exhausting their fascination with Margaret Thatcher,
a few of the guests allow as how, yes, one might think that
marrying dead people is bizarre. But as an occasional feature
of life in these parts for longer than anyone can remember,
"ghost marriages" are just another relic of ancient China,
another relatively harmless superstition for a billion people
struggling to jerk themselves toward the 21st century.

    Strange, surely, but about the only truly odd tradition I
encounter during five weeks in China. By plane, train and car,
from the prospering coastal provinces to the country's
heartland, where the agricultural reforms initiated by Deng
Xiaoping ten years ago began a miraculous economic
transformation, to Beijing and a village not far from the
capital that is infinitely poorer than towns a thousand miles
farther inland, I find little that is charming or especially
exotic. Just a mostly drab and dusty country, a perfect backdrop
for the tedious and too often unrewarding nature of daily life.
Still, the people seem energetic, if fitful; a fifth of the
world's population in a cage. Good, hardworking people who
deserve better than the suffocating Communism that limits their
enterprise.

    In the end, the place still looms, as it always has. China
is the stuff of our earliest memories, the faraway land where
children were starving (or so our parents told us when we were
young), so we had better finish our dinners. The place we could
reach by digging deep in our sandboxes; a measure of size ("I
wouldn't do that for all the tea in China"); a country whose
mere name conjured mystery and intrigue.

    Over the past decade, we rooted for a successful conclusion
to China's long march away from a Communism that sometimes
seemed even more menacing than Nikita Khrushchev's -- he of the
take-no-prisoners promise to "bury" us. We suspected that real
success might produce an economic giant capable of dwarfing
even our ally Japan, but we rooted anyway. And of course, since
Tiananmen Square, we have wondered what went so drastically
wrong. How could any regime shoot unarmed citizens in its own
capital, an action violative of a rule of governance so obvious
that not even Machiavelli felt compelled to write it down?

    It is impossible, after just five weeks "inside," to say
what China is like. It is possible only to meet some people,
sketch some scenes, let some voices tell their stories. And if,
up close, childhood impressions fade, enough incongruities and
paradoxes survive to concentrate the mind. Like the newspapers
that urge "bitter struggle" against "bourgeois liberalism" while
trumpeting the pleasures of disco dancing on the same page. Like
the never ending loop of music in the lobby of a hotel in
Sichuan province that alternates between a Rod Stewart oldie
(Sailing) and a socialist goody (Without the Communist Party
There Would Be No New China). Like the young man break-dancing
to a blaring Madonna album amid a few hundred elderly tai chi
practitioners at a Shanghai park. Like the reserve and civility
evident in personal relations that rarely translate to civic
responsibility. Like the more intractable tensions of
incorporating the best of capitalism while preserving socialism
-- tensions that have arisen because of, rather than in spite
of, Deng's economic reforms. Like everything about the ghost
marriage and those who celebrate it. All this and more reflect
the clash of modernity and tradition and the exquisite balancing
acts required when a nation persists in pursuing contradictory
notions of culture, economics and politics at the same time.

    Even the dead bride's Thatcher fixation tells a larger
tale. The young woman, it seems, idolized Thatcher, not because
she shared her politics but because with a single phrase
Thatcher once captured her own world view: "If you want anything
said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman."

    An exchange of business cards at the wedding, as common in
China as saying hello, establishes that one of the guests has
more than a nodding acquaintance with cremation. "Yeah," says
a middle-aged man proudly, "I burn stiffs for a living." Only
I smile. Everyone else knows what's coming, a recitation of the
state's official line against using precious land for burials.
"This is ridiculous," says the man, arcing a wad of spittle
behind him, a small measure of civility indicating that China's
famous antispitting campaign has done little more than improve
the people's aim. "Zhou Enlai once said that China's greatest
contribution to world peace was simply feeding its own people.
To keep doing it we need the land -- all of it, every square
meter. Earth burials are an incredible waste of space. Cremation
is the future."

    "Earth burial honors our ancestors," says a guest.

    "Give me a break," says the man. (My hip translator is a
Berkeley graduate.) "Despite our tradition of filial piety,
most of us treat our elderly relatives like crap when they are
alive. Then, when they die, we feel guilty and build shrines to
their memory and use valuable land to bury them. It's all
nonsense. It's all hypocrisy -- as hypocritical as this
wedding."

    He has a point, and everyone knows it, even those guests
who admit to having hired geomancers to locate and orient their
homes, or those who keep black fish in aquariums in order to
absorb "bad rays," or those who believe their country's former
greatness was attributable to a national qi (vital energy) that
even now is moving inexorably from the West to Japan on its way
back to China, a shift that will once again confirm the Middle
Kingdom as the center of the world. All these people know that
the man is right because they know that the logic behind
marrying dead people, to ensure them a peaceful afterlife, is
dead wrong. The real if equally fanciful reason is that the
unmarried dead are feared capable of becoming angry spirits who
may disturb their living relatives. "Face it," says the
stiff-burner, gesturing to the coffins now set in a common
grave. "This thing we call a wedding is something we are doing
for us, not for them."

    "Enough!" shouts the mother of the groom. "This is their
wedding day. I don't want to hear anymore. Let us leave
quietly." Then, apropos of nothing more than the increasingly
common disdain many Chinese appear to feel for the army they saw
as their great protector before it marched on Tiananmen, this
small, fine-boned woman with searing brown eyes and a complexion
Margaret Thatcher would compare to a rose recites some lines of
Du Fu, the 8th century poet famous for decrying the gulf between
ruled and ruler in China: "So it is better to abandon a daughter
at birth than to see her later married to a soldier."

    The guests are stunned. Everyone realizes that the
sentiment just expressed -- as well as the wedding itself --
could easily cause this gentle woman's expulsion from the
Communist Party, a "home" she later says she "entered out of
love and idealism" 32 years earlier. The guests glance about
nervously. Has the woman gone too far? Is someone in the crowd
an informer?

    Oblivious to any danger, the woman stands stiffly and
stares at the matching coffins. The silence puts on a little
weight and becomes fat before she stoops to her handbag and
takes out a small transistor radio. She carefully places it on
the pine box of her daughter-in-law, in the grave that is the
dead bride's new home. "What can it hurt?" she says, looking
daggers at the stiff-burner. "Maybe they'll want to listen to
some music."

    Bi is a 32-year-old English teacher in a small town not far
from Shanghai on China's eastern coast. He could have taken
Russian in college but chose English because "there is no one
to talk to in Russian and no one interested in learning it." Bi
speaks English so well that only a careful listener might guess
that it is his second language. He pays particular attention to
his consonants, and the effect is riveting. It seems that
everything he says has been carefully weighed and thought out.

    A strapping six-footer, Bi "got into the weight-lifting
craze about two years ago, when it was big." He still pumps iron
each morning before breakfast, which he takes at a local
restaurant with four colleagues. Eating out is actually cheaper
than cooking at home for Bi, since coal is very expensive.
Besides, Bi is saving for new eyeglasses. He hates his thick
lenses and believes he would not need them if he had grown up
in the West. "Until about five years ago, we didn't have
electricity," he says. "I read by candlelight till then. My eyes
had gone to hell by the time I was eight."

    Bi, his wife and two children live in a spare, two-room
apartment of about 30 sq. yds. provided by his school. The
bathroom is down the hall. In the smaller room the kids share
a bed under a Michael Jackson poster. On the wall above the sink
and the small stove are a calendar and a photo of the New York
City skyline. "It's not much," says Bi, but the subsidized rent
is only $4 a month.

    The place of employment for most Chinese, called a work
unit, or danwei, is usually responsible for providing housing
and other essentials. "We used to get medical care for free
too," says Bi, "but my danwei can't afford it now that the
economic reforms have let doctors' fees rise."

    Bi's seniority entitles him to a salary of about $38 a
month -- less than a factory worker, taxi driver, guide and just
about every other employed Chinese receives. Even so, for the
next four years Bi must get by on $12 less each month. Five
dollars is deducted automatically because the cash-starved
government insists that state employees buy bonds. The other $7
represents a fine for the second child he and his wife had three
years ago -- one child over Beijing's limit.

    None of Bi's personal problems are on his mind this day.
Instead he is incensed about work. "Meiyou," he says once, and
then again. Meiyou (pronounced may-o) means "No, it cannot be
done," or "No, we don't have it" -- a word foreigners learn
quickly. "Too few primers," says Bi. "One hundred eighty-two
students and 15 English books. Bad enough, right? But look at
the books. They're about 40 years old, and boring. We can barely
get by the first story."

    Bi would like to ignore the texts entirely, but the college
entrance exams test the books' content. "They can actually ask
you how exactly Marx learned English," he says. (By writing for
American newspapers, it turns out.) "So we have to go through
them. But we also try to come up with exercises that get to the
real questions of English grammar. Now, which word do you think
belongs in the blank?"

    The sentence on Bi's crumbling blackboard reads, "He has
corn and other things -----------in his fields."

    "O.K.," says Bi, "which word belongs in the blank, grown or
growing?"

    "Growing," I answer.

    "What I said too," says Bi triumphantly to the three other
teachers standing at his side.

    "But what if it's a causative sentence?" asks a student who
has wandered into the room. "What if the man who owns the
fields employs workers so that all he does is give orders? Then
the owner could be causing those crops to be grown in his fields
even though he isn't doing the actual work. Then you could use
the word grown."

    "What?" says one of the teachers.

    "Like in Tiananmen," says the student. "Deng wasn't
actually there, right? He didn't actually kill any of us
himself. But he gave the orders to have us killed. He caused
it."

    After a few moments, Bi breaks the silence. "Don't worry,
we are all friends here," he says, pointing to the school clock.
It says 3:30. This time I am the one who is lost. "We are now
supposed to be on daylight saving time, which is an hour ahead,"
Bi explains. "But we keep to Hong Kong time as a sign of our
sympathies. So you see, in this place you can say what you
want. Just remember to be careful outside." As we leave Bi's
classroom, he turns out the lights and, without even a faint
smile, sets the clock ahead an hour. Like many Chinese, Bi is
expert at concealing his feelings behind a facade of impassivity
and self-control. "You never know who may come by and see the
clock," he says. "It is crucial to go through the motions. Be
subtle even in protest."

    The same don't-make-a-big-thing-of-it, be-subtle manner is
present in Shanghai, one of three Chinese cities directly under
the national government's jurisdiction. There, a lobby notice
in the Hilton hotel duly conforms to official policy: WESTERN
NEWSPAPERS ARE UNAVAILABLE. But upstairs, there they are. The
hotel's televisions air the supposedly banned daily news shows
of ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN -- all broadcasting press conferences
by Chinese dissidents who have escaped Beijing's dragnet.

    Similarly, everyone I speak with who has attended a
"re-education" session designed to promulgate the government's
version of the Tiananmen tragedy professes to have listened
stonily to the government's lies. Those forced to respond claim
to have merely parroted the official line verbatim -- a
transparent but unpunishable form of dissent.

    "A lot is still possible as long as you are careful not to
gloat," says a low-level government official in Beijing.
"That's where I think the students went too far. They forced a
crackdown by causing the leaders to lose face when Gorbachev
visited. Problem is, the students weren't up on their Mao." Had
they been, they might have come upon a 1927 essay in which the
future Chairman identified atrocity as a desirable power-holding
tactic. "To right a wrong," Mao wrote, "it is necessary to
exceed the proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted
without the proper limits being exceeded . . . To put it
bluntly, it is (sometimes) necessary to bring about a brief
reign of terror."

    "I guess the main reason I was surprised that the
demonstrators rubbed the leaders' noses in it," says a professor
of Chinese literature in Guangzhou, "is that their actions were
so uncharacteristic of the way in which most smart Chinese
operate. The emperors and their policies change rapidly in
China. As the old proverb says, `In the morning, welcomed as the
guest of a high official; in the evening, held as a prisoner
under the steps.' To survive in China, you must keep your head
down and be ready to change your allegiances and enthusiasms
quickly -- or at least appear to. The elements are simple
enough. Trust the papers only for sports. In politics, believe
nothing until it is officially denied. Report your own opinions
by saying things like `I heard it on the bus,' or `The rumor is
. . .' Learn to recognize euphemisms."

    As we walk in Guangzhou, the professor notices an old woman
with a broom made of twigs and straw methodically sweeping dirt
from one side of the street to the other. "You see that?" he
says. "That's what it is all about. Is the street really clean?
Of course not. But she is making it look clean, right? That's
the important thing in China. Everything here is appearance.
Everything here is pretend."

    Feigned compliance is the term used by Lucian Pye, a
political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, to describe such self-protective make-believe and
the obedience it spawns. As a trait central to the Chinese
character, feigned compliance has distinct Confucian roots, and
Confucius is very much in vogue in China today. Not for that
part of his philosophy that extols good-heartedness and
broad-mindedness, but for his celebration of authority,
hierarchy and anti-individualism. For the purposes of China's
leaders, what counts is that Confucius presumed the ruler's
right to rule.

    The Chinese believe it is never too early to teach children
that their elders should be respected as models of benevolence
and sobriety. Children are dissuaded from expressing hostile
feelings toward authority of any description. The concept of
self exists only as it is expressed in terms of the other,
usually the group. Even if taught at home, such discipline is
inculcated most strikingly at school.

    The typical Chinese nursery school combines day attendees
and quan tuo (literally "whole care") students. From Monday
through Saturday, with the exception of Wednesday evenings, a
quan tuo student lives at his school around the clock, a
situation no one seems to think the least bit odd. For despite
filial devotion and the supposed centrality of family life, long
separation is common in China. It is not rare for spouses to
work in different cities and see each other infrequently.
Similarly, far from signaling neglect, paying to deposit a
three-year-old in another's care for a week away from home is
often taken as a sign of affluence. In fact, since the economic
reforms have raised the living standards of so many Chinese, a
complaint about quan tuo is that without guanxi -- connections,
a word I was to hear repeatedly -- no amount of wealth can
secure a coveted sleep-away space.

    I visit two schools, one near Guangzhou, the other in
Beijing. At both places, two teachers handle a class of
approximately 40 four-year-olds. Instructive slogans adorn the
walls: THE NAIL THAT STICKS OUT GETS HAMMERED DOWN and THE LONG
POLE GETS SAWED OFF. Creativity, experimentation, even simple
play are discouraged. Handed blocks, the children erect
structures pictured in workbooks; once completed, the buildings
are torn down and put up again and again until the time allotted
for block-building expires. And "No talking, while you're
building," a teacher scolds. Or while you're eating, for that
matter, or while you're going to the bathroom. "Sit upright,
with hands clasped behind your backs," says another teacher.
"That is correct behavior."

    Later, over lunch with a psychologist, I try connecting the
phenomenal spread of television in China with the West's
greatest contribution to childhood education. "What about Sesame
Street?" I ask. "You must be kidding," says the psychologist.
"Sesame Street is about individualism, about accepting
differences. Don't you get it about Communism?"

    I get it, finally, when I chance on a hot seller at a
bookstore in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province, deep in the
heart of China. Buried in A Guide to U.S.A., The Visitor's
Companion, is a section titled "Individualism." A sample
observation: "People in the United States generally consider
self-reliance and independence as ideal personal qualities. As
a consequence, most people see themselves as separate
individuals, not as representatives of a family, community, or
other group . . . Visitors from other countries (read China)
sometimes view this attitude as `selfishness.'"

    I get the point again in Shanghai, the city called the
"Paris of the East" during the Roaring Twenties; a place made
famous forever when, in the 1932 film Shanghai Express, Marlene
Dietrich drawled, "It too-oo-k more than one man to change my
name to Shanghai Lily." Shanghai is no longer trendy, modern or
even cosmopolitan, but its streets are still tops for infant
watching. Sadly, though, the toddlers I see seldom cry or laugh
or even suck their thumbs. Most seem sullen. And in the
beautiful Jing an Park, which used to be a cemetery before the
bodies were exhumed for cremation (the old story about the
land's being too valuable for the dead), the kids ride around
in bumper cars in careful circles and don't wave and don't smile
and stare straight ahead and never once smash into one another
-- which by now even I know is the whole point.

    Most Chinese nursery schools display a mural of young,
cherubic children riding a dragon. The dragon represents China;
the well-fed kids symbolize a prosperous future. But outside a
primary school in Kai Kong, a factory town in Guangdong
province, the traditional mural is decidedly modern. There isn't
anything special about the dragon, but the fat children are
carrying cameras, videocassette recorders and boom boxes.

    As a metaphor for Xinhua (New China), the Kai Kong mural is
perfect. And no area in New China has taken more readily to
Deng's economic freedoms than Guangdong, the province on the
southeastern coast that borders Hong Kong. Famous for being
shrewd businessmen, Guangdong's residents also have a long
tradition of ignoring imperial edicts. Even today the province
negotiates its tax remittances to Beijing, in part because the
national government's ability to control various localities
differs greatly depending on an area's wealth, strategic
significance and the personal connections and acumen of its
leaders.

    In a sense, Guangdong can be viewed like the Soviet Union's
Baltic states, the province's relative wealth representing a
willingness to stretch the rules to fit whatever works rather
than restrain expansion to fit the rules. Left alone, which it
may not be, Guangdong will continue to provide the nation with
both hard currency and an example of entrepreneurship at full
throttle.

    Not surprisingly, Guangdong's success has produced severe
envy, what the Chinese call "red eye" disease. The neighboring
province of Hunan feels particularly aggrieved by what it sees
as Guangdong's economic warlordism. Faced with the migration of
millions of its residents to Guangdong, Hunan on occasion has
even gone so far as to establish border roadblocks to stem the
flow of materials and people.

    Although Beijing has declared that the economic reforms and
the opening to the outside world will continue despite its
political crackdown, the capital appears torn between leveling
the playing field and letting the laws of supply and demand run
their course. Not that there is much evidence yet that a
province like Guangdong would salute if Beijing insisted that
it slow its rush to prosperity. As a Guangdong official says,
"When the belly is fat, the emperor is far away." Which is not
to say that Guangdong doesn't understand feigned compliance. A
visiting Beijing big shot might not be accorded the kind of
reception Rob Lowe would get in the girls' locker room of an
American high school, but as this Guangdong cadre says, "When
the leaders come, we are very careful to treat them very well."

    The Lun Feng stuffed-toy factory is one of about 1,000
Guangdong manufacturing operations that together employ more
than 2 million people. As one of approximately 10,000 joint
ventures established since 1979, most along the coast, Lun Feng
represents both the promise and the problems that have
accompanied Deng's economic reforms.

    To upgrade Lun Feng for state-of-the-art stuffed-toy
manufacture, which really means little more than loading an
empty building with sewing machines, Lun Feng's Hong Kong
joint-venture partner lent the factory's nominal owner, the town
of Kai Kong, more than $1 million. (The national government got
its cut by charging a fee for converting the Hong Kong dollars
into Chinese currency.) Since then, Lun Feng has been on its
own. Much of the fabric used by the factory comes from Taiwan.
"No problem," says Lun Feng's operations manager, who happens
to belong to the Communist Party. "This is business, not
politics."

    It is possible for a non-Communist to be a factory manager
in China, but most managers are still card-carrying party
members. Even so, there is always a party secretary to enforce
Communist discipline. Before Deng's reforms, there was no
question that the Communist secretary dominated, even if he was
functionally illiterate in basic business precepts. Since 1984,
though, Beijing has directed that party secretaries leave
operations to the factories' designated managers -- a direct
slap at Leninist ideology, which holds that since the party is
the only body capable of enforcing the will of the workers,
factories must be under party control.

    On the ground, however, where nothing is ever simple, the
power relationship varies from place to place. "It is nothing
more than a normal battle for control," admits a factory party
secretary in Jinan. "I don't know much about what my factory
actually does, but that doesn't mean I don't want to be the
boss." At Lun Feng, Deng's system works fairly well. Only after
Tiananmen did the secretary actively meddle, but then just to
direct that the radio be tuned to a mainland station rather than
one in Hong Kong. The music the workers listen to all day is the
same, but the news is different.

    There seem to be three keys to Lun Feng's success. The
first is its location on the Kai Kong River, which allows the
factory to ship its goods by sea and not by the country's
notoriously awful roads. Even in Guangdong, many of the paved
highways are narrow, and virtually impassable when travelers
stop to shop at roadside stands.

    Lun Feng's second ace is electricity. Across China,
electric power is in such short supply that even favored
state-owned operations must routinely shut down for two or three
days a week. Lun Feng beat the power problem with money. For
about $3 million, the factory installed five auxiliary diesel
generators. With eleven workers maintaining the equipment 24
hours a day, eight seconds is the longest Lun Feng has been
without electric power.

    Then there are "the girls," about 3,000 of them, who work
from 7:30 in the morning until 11 at night six days a week. None
I speak with are over 19. Almost all are from Hunan province.
Most stay no more than two years and then return home to marry.
They earn close to $200 a month, an almost unheard-of wage in
China.

    As troublesome as it can sometimes be to have a mercurial
government as one's business partner, greater problems often
arise from a mismatch of position and personnel. Most jobs are
assigned by the government, often with little regard for a
person's qualifications or preferences.

    At a Guangdong electronics factory, the quality-control
officer concedes his own ineptitude. "I graduated in English
from Fudan University (in Shanghai) and was immediately assigned
here," he says. "I don't know anything about the work here, so
I can't judge product quality very well. I wish I could go
somewhere else, but I may be stuck here for the rest of my life.
I could learn the job, but moving up is almost impossible
without guanxi" -- that word again -- "which I don't have. If
I had it, I maybe could have arranged it so I wasn't sent here
in the first place."

    In part because of similar complaints, Beijing announced
plans last year to scuttle the job-allocation system this
November. But on April 13 the State Council rescinded the
scheduled reform. The decision was understandable. Rather than
work in state-run enterprises, which need talented help
desperately, most college graduates would opt for private-sector
jobs that offer more money, greater opportunities for
advancement and the chance to travel abroad. But the
government's about-face last April, combined with the death two
days later of Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded Communist Party
Chairman ousted in early 1987, contributed to the student
demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre on
June 4.

    Not far from the Lun Feng factory, on the main road to
Guangzhou, is an example of how economic freedom can energize
a population. Shops full of sofas, chairs and beds stretch as
far as the eye can see. "Furniture Mile" began several years ago
when a few local farmers decided that after meeting their
government- mandated crop quotas, they would rather augment
their income by making furniture than by growing more
vegetables. Soon, farmers throughout the area followed suit.
Today anyone with wheels stops to load as much furniture as he
can carry, then resells his wares later in whatever market he
can find.

    Individuals are not the only ones eager to earn extra
money. Under Deng's reforms, most state-run businesses and
government agencies are expected to turn a profit. An aircraft
factory in Xi'an runs a marriage-introduction center that does
a booming business serving the needs of hundreds of
well-educated women who by their late 20s are desperate for
husbands because men with less schooling are reluctant to marry
them. In Chengdu the Xinhua bookstore owns a flower shop, a hair
salon and a clothing boutique whose manager gets his goods from
"a guy in Shanghai who has good guanxi." In Shanghai itself the
city's world-famous acrobats attract bigger audiences by
sponsoring fashion shows between tumbles. A university in
Guangdong has branched out to invest in a three-story bar in
Shanghai whose top floor, called Lovers' World, features 15
banquettes where couples can smooch in privacy. Even the
People's Liberation Army has got into the act. Knowing that
swank hotels are truly the country's most exotic tourist
attractions, the P.L.A. is a co-owner of Beijing's poshest, the
Palace, where two gold-colored Rolls-Royce Corniches are
available for special guests.

    But the tensions generated by the scramble for money are
never far from the surface. Orthodox executives of China's
state-run enterprises are very much like the Soviet Union's
permanent bureaucracy, the nomenklatura. They have coasted for
years under the old system, and they dislike Deng's perestroika
because it asks them to compete like capitalists, and capitalism
has losers. "Keeping their jobs is their No. 1 priority," says
Sinclair Choy, a marine engineer from Hong Kong, who in
partnership with a coastal town on the mainland runs a fishing
boat-repair business. "Order, stability, calm," says Choy.
"That's what these Chinese officials want. Anything that
threatens to upset the applecart sets them off."

    Choy and I are speaking on the ferry from Hong Kong to the
mainland, where he hopes finally to convince his Chinese
partners that the incentive system should be introduced at their
business. "Everyone is paid the same at our place, even though
many are willing to work harder for more money," says Choy. "But
my Chinese government partners don't want to upset those who are
lazy by allocating bonuses according to merit. They have their
own version of the iron rice bowl, and they don't care if
incentives will result in greater productivity and more profit.
To a businessman their attitude is insane. But they are happy
if they turn just a little profit, because they know that that
will satisfy their higher-ups and that everyone will then be
covered. Probably the only thing left for me to try is straight
corruption."

    Which is exactly the conclusion reached long ago by many
other joint-venture businessmen. Perhaps the most typical piece
of underhanded dealing involves the corruption of customs agents
by hotels. "The law says customs can take up to 10% of an
imported shipment of perishable items to test for disease," says
a Chinese American who co-owns a Sichuan province hotel. To beat
the delay and spoilage that can result from complying with such
rules, hotel owners regularly pay off customs officials with
"free samples."

    "You think it's not the same everywhere? Of course it is.
Corruption is endemic. It's bad in China, sure, but I still say
the mainland people are like Chinese everywhere else in the
world: turn 'em loose and they'll earn trillions." A
capitalist's faith expressed by a true capitalist. The speaker
is Tommy Quan, 55, a millionaire Chinese American from Seattle
known as the "orange king" of Guangdong's Taishan County.

    Taishan bills itself accurately as the "home of the
overseas Chinese." The county's 960,000 residents have about 1.2
million relatives living abroad, and much as American Jews send
money to Israel in lieu of actually moving there, Taishan's
"overseas compatriots" have sent millions home. Since 1982
foreign funds have built 500 new schools, 50 hospitals and an
indoor soccer stadium.

    Rather than send money, Tommy Quan decided to send himself.
Until the Communists took over in 1949, Quan lived in a small
village of 160 people not far from the Taishan County seat.
Then at age 15, Quan and his family immigrated to Seattle.
Eventually, Quan owned two thriving restaurants, a ski resort
and "more real estate than I can keep track of."

    Leaving behind a wife and four children, two of whom are
Seattle cops, Quan returned in 1982 to "do something for China
-- and myself." But certainly not because of any romantic
longing for his roots. "You know what they say about the good
old days," he says. "They are the product of bad memory."

    Short and powerfully built, Quan can outswear a gale of
wind -- and outtalk even the most talkative Chinese. He reminds
me of Robert Strauss, the former Democratic national chairman;
Quan too, I am convinced, could talk a hungry dog out of a pork
chop.

    On his way back to China, Quan stopped in California to
pick up some orange-tree saplings. "You know the Chinese were
the first to grow orange trees," he says. "But like a good deal
else that the Chinese invented first, they had forgotten how to
do it." Today almost all the villages around Quan's 300-acre
farm, which may be the largest private landholding in China, are
growing oranges.

    Quan spends most evenings in his new two-story home
"drinking beer and watching my Rambo tapes, because it's so damn
boring here." Many of those who remember Quan and his family
from before the revolution think he was crazy to return, despite
his roots in Taishan. "Most of my friends here thought I was on
the lam when I showed up." Others thought Quan could not
possibly have anything to offer. "The Chinese have an incredible
superiority complex," he says. "They're backward as hell, but
they still believe the world revolves around China. They take
great pride in their civilization simply because it is old. It
is almost impossible to teach them anything. You have to do what
I have done. You show by example, and they pick it up as if they
were the ones who had the idea all along. You can't even get
them thinking about why, if China was so far ahead of the rest
of the world 2,000 years ago, it is so far behind today."

    Quan has another claim to local fame: in the middle of his
orange groves he has erected a 6-ft. shrine to Zhao Ziyang, the
Communist Party leader whose tacit support of the student
protesters in Tiananmen Square contributed to his ouster in
late June. Near the top of the tiled column is a photograph of
Zhao -- with Tommy Quan standing at his side in his Seattle
Seahawks cap. "Zhao made it all possible," says Quan. "He showed
people that incentives can turn China around. Now that he is out
of favor, my friends think I should tear my monument down. No
way. I am keeping the faith. Eventually, Zhao will be
vindicated. There's no turning back over the long run. The
emperors in Beijing won't change the label. They'll still call
China Communist. They'll have to do that to keep themselves in
power. But we're heading toward capitalism, no matter what they
will call it, because finally China is going to opt for what
works."

    Quan's admiration for Zhao may be a bit too public, but
many of the Chinese I meet seem to share it. About 1,000 miles
from Quan's farm, in Guanxian, a group of excited Chinese
tourists is visiting the Dujiangyan irrigation system -- another
marvel of China's ancient genius -- built 2,200 years ago. On
a misty morning the tourists can barely make out an aging,
abandoned hydroelectric plant about a mile upstream. Like much
of what was built by the Soviets during the heyday of
Sino-Soviet cooperation in the 1950s, this power station too is
crumbling. In fact, the plant had been little used; the Soviet
advisers had sited it improperly.

    "Zhao would have done it right," says one.

    "Great man," says another.

    "Quiet," says a retired railroad conductor. "Someone might
hear us. Hush up."

    "You hush," says an elderly woman. "Zhao will return.
You'll see."

    Everywhere I go in China, most of the people I encounter,
including those aware of what happened in Tiananmen Square,
express perfectly understandable human sentiments grounded in
fatalism. "As the old proverb goes," says a middle-level
government official in Guangdong who holds a master's in
political science from an American college, `Happiness and
sorrow flow along the same river.' Do we deplore what the army
did in Tiananmen? Of course. Do we wish the government were
different, more democratic, more humane? Of course. But what
would you have us do? Take to the streets? For what? We have had
ten relatively good years of economic growth and domestic
tranquillity. Yes, there is some retrenchment now. But consider
the previous ten years, the time of the Cultural Revolution,
when everything was at its worst. Do we want to return to that?
Take to the streets against those with the guns and risk all
that we've gained? Who but the hotheads can honestly say such an
action would be worth it?"

    Three hundred miles south of Beijing, the view from Zouping
County is different. Not all Zouping's citizens are true
believers, but they appear to revere the army and seemingly
remain loyal to the government. Zouping has come far in the Deng
era -- it even has a local beer, Hupo, that someday may rival
the popularity of Tsingtao in the U.S. (The word on the street
has Tsingtao's springwater supply running out in the early
1990s.)

    But for all its progress, Zouping represents what can be
called an altered sequence of development. Like much of the rest
of the country, Zouping is experiencing the telecommunications
and electronics revolution before agricultural mechanization.
It is possible to stand in a field in Zouping and watch wheat
harvested exactly as it was 2,000 years ago, by sickle, and then
to look up and see the giant satellite dish that links the town
with Beijing's Central Television -- as incongruous a sight as
that of Chinese businessmen furiously pedaling their bikes
through the capital as they speak on cellular phones.

    In the midst of Zouping is a village of 1,100 where Wu
Baohua, 57, has been Communist Party secretary for 25 years. Wu
is soft-spoken and polite, and his face expresses a sanguine
dignity without a trace of self-importance. Then there are his
teeth, big strong Jimmy Carter teeth. Separately, each one could
win a prize. Taken together, the effect is electric. You could
read fine print at the bottom of a well by his grin.

    Unlike Guangdong, where Deng's injunction to "seek truth
from facts" has led provincial officials to cite "unique local
conditions" as a way of drifting as far from Communism as
Beijing can tolerate, Wu's village represents the opposite
tendency. In many ways it is still a collectivist town. The
village employs doctors and covers all medical costs -- a
practice no longer common in China, where many must pay for
health care out of their own pockets. Land is privately owned,
but much of its cultivation is accomplished by group effort.

    The neighborhood committees that exist almost everywhere in
China -- watchdog groups that keep an eye on everyone and
everything -- are unnecessary in Wu's village. In tone and in
fact, he controls almost every aspect of village life -- and
the villagers have prospered thanks to his wisdom. When income
from the local ice-cream factory fell short of projections, Wu
converted the plant to a successful cotton-fabric operation in
six months. When this summer's drought threatened to devastate
the village's wheat and vegetable crops, Wu proposed that water
from the Yellow River -- unused previously because it was so
muddy -- be tapped immediately. Within 36 hours, 4,000 Chinese,
including Wu, were digging a new irrigation ditch two miles
long. The entire job was completed in twelve hours.

    On the wall of one of the newest buildings in Wu's village
is a saying widely heard during the Cultural Revolution two
decades ago: PREPARE FOR WAR, PREPARE FOR NATURAL DISASTERS,
SERVE THE PEOPLE. Wu makes no apologies. "Of course I know the
slogan's origins," he says. "But there is nothing wrong with
those words. We should use more of what Mao taught. His themes
were self-reliance and sacrifice. I say to our leaders, more of
that and less riding around in fancy cars.

    "What we have today is a lot of talk about ending
corruption and nepotism," Wu continues. "Just like we've heard
before. But unless we finally get serious about such things, we
will never build our New China. We will watch Chinese on the
outside rise in even white societies because of their industry
and intellect. We will never catch up."

    If Beijing is not serious about its anticorruption campaign
-- and given the regime's track record, there is little reason
to believe it is -- it means only that, like leaders
everywhere, China's rulers reflect their culture's values. So,
just as the people engage in pretense when dealing with the
government, the leadership in turn expends considerable time and
energy of its own in going through the motions.

    The Cultural Revolution's aftermath makes the point. Very
little effort has ever been spent investigating the question of
why so many followed so dastardly a design. Personal accounts
of the period's horrors have been written ("scar literature" it
is called). But unlike the Germans, who have collectively
wrestled with the Holocaust's blackest implications for 40
years, the Chinese appear content to let the past rest.

    Perhaps because the Chinese are historically indifferent to
introspection (as befits a culture where family rather than
self is the core of an individual's identity), I never hear a
coherent analysis of the Cultural Revolution, an event that so
inverted the natural order that parents were shamed, beaten and
in some instances even killed by their own children. All I pick
up is a line or two about the traditional absence of
psychological study in totalitarian societies, and some bits and
pieces, mostly about the worship of Mao as a semidivine figure,
and tales of the Chairman's senility.

    No matter why Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution, what
is most interesting today is that the Chairman's successors
appear totally uninterested in the question. For the party's
present leaders, so expert at rewriting history that they
regularly crop from official photographs whoever is currently
out of favor, it has been enough to blame a few scapegoats for
a decade of chaos and leave it at that.

    Those eager to delve further have been rebuffed. When some
Shanghai writers proposed a Cultural Revolution museum in 1986,
Beijing said no. The leadership apparently fears that any
thorough investigation would quickly run to criticism of the
current regime and so must be prohibited. The outer boundaries
of permissible complaint in China have been set. Anything may
be criticized except that which really matters: the right of the
party to rule. To today's leaders, the experience of the past
demands a straitjacket on political dissent and helps explain
why Deng so feared accepting the Tiananmen demonstrators' demand
for free expression.

    Since bureaucratic sadism is familiar to everyone
everywhere, I was somewhat prepared for the denial of a simple
request during the 600-mile, 18-hour train trip to Beijing. But
I was not prepared for the sheer delight visible on the
conductor's face when she said, "Meiyou, the rule does not
permit turning on the lights before 7 p.m. and it's only 6:30.
You will just have to wait 30 minutes."

    "But it's storming outside, it's dark, and it's hard to
read."

    It is impossible to describe the complete pleasure her
smile conveyed. Perhaps she gets a bonus for being a
particularly petty bureaucrat. Perhaps she resents foreigners
and their privileges. A Chinese train's best accommodations, the
"soft sleeper" compartment, in which two bunk beds actually
sport linen, are reserved for foreigners and high party and
government officials. I could understand her hating such
preferential treatment, but then again, she and her colleagues
do pretty well because of it. For notwithstanding my status as
a foreigner, the "soft sleeper" car was "sold out" until a kind
official laid a carton of cigarettes and a small cash "bonus"
on the ticket agent. "Funny to you, isn't it?" said the
official. "Here I am from one bureau of the government, and I
have to help you pay off another bureau to get what the
regulations say is yours by right."

    Funny? Maybe. But not unexpected. By now, even I understand
the role of guanxi in China. I only wonder how the whole system
works nearer the throne.

    Despite its vast gray Soviet-style tenements and the
absence of the imposing wall that enclosed it for a thousand
years, Beijing strikes me as China's prettiest and most livable
large city. Staggered work shifts are common, and vehicles from
outside the city are banned during the day. The avenues are
broader, the streets are cleaner. There are even more trees.

    To me, Beijing appears normal, not only in the sense that
people go about their business apparently oblivious of the
martial-law troops who stand at rigid attention under the cover
of multicolored beach umbrellas, but because Beijing too
exhibits the limits of governmental control. For example, China
has strict residency rules. Identity documents guarantee that
a person who receives permission to move from his hometown to
a new location is still eligible for ration coupons, housing
allowances and other subsidies. But even without permission,
people have been drawn by the economic reforms to the major
cities, and the financial opportunities they have found there
more than compensate for their lost stipends. In central Beijing
it is estimated that a fifth of the 6 million residents are
illegal transients.

    It is in the bookstores that one can best see how daily
life has outgrown the political system's controls, how the
campaign against "spiritual pollution," so rhetorically fierce,
is flouted with such abandon. While elsewhere in China,
government booklets like The True Story of Tiananmen Square are
prominently displayed alongside issues of Vogue, Elle and
Glamour, you have to hunt for the lies at Wangfujing, Beijing's
largest bookstore. The section labeled "Ideology and Political
Education" actually displays books titled Modern Woman, Smart
Woman, Handbook on Love and Life and dozens of how-to monographs
like Eighty-Eight Points on Developing Public Relations. In
other cities the regime appears successful at banishing books
and periodicals dealing with "pornography, bourgeois liberalism
and feudal superstition." Here one can buy steamy romances,
political biographies of discredited leaders -- and seemingly
anything ever written by or about Richard Nixon, pro or con.

    On the surface, then, totalitarianism in Beijing seems no
more oppressive than a constant low-grade fever. Underneath,
though, the town seethes. Even the silence is telling. Herded
by their supervisors to the military museum's "True Story of
Tiananmen Square" exhibit, those I see viewing it are
stone-faced. Politically reliable cadres are everywhere, but so
are wry smiles, especially when people see a giant blowup
photograph of the man who defied a column of tanks, with a
caption saying he had been spared because of the army's
humanity.

    At cinemas, free tickets are distributed for Baise
Uprising, a new film extolling Deng's early military career, but
even those who attend -- and most of the theaters are half empty
-- talk through the movie or read. At work, employees protest
by increasing their sick leave and slowing their production. At
school, the results of an essay competition glorifying the
army's role in Tiananmen are supposed to have been made public
weeks ago. Perhaps too many entries reflect the view of an
eleven-year-old girl whose grandparents I meet. Her short,
three-page paper, reflecting the unpopularity of China's
conservative Premier, has Li Peng resigning because he is "too
stinking." Most significant of all, perhaps, few people seem to
have become informers in spite of a well-advertised Ratters
Anonymous network.

    While stories like these are everywhere in China, few
people but the most emotional predict the regime's imminent
collapse -- or even want it. Most who do so live in Beijing, but
in this respect at least, the capital seems as representative
of China as Manhattan is of the U.S.

    The most famous man in China this summer seems to be Xiao
Bing, the "rumormonger" who was sentenced to ten years in prison
for "exaggerating" the Tiananmen death toll in an interview with
ABC News (he said 20,000 had died). Absolutely everyone knows
the tale of Xiao. "Xiao Bing makes a point about the future,"
says an economics professor in Chengdu. "The people in Beijing
were there -- and so may be very willing to take to the streets
again. But we elsewhere are more cautious. It's not that the
propaganda campaign is working. Most of us know full well what
went on -- if not the details, then the essence. It is that we
have seen how far even Deng, who we thought was a good guy, will
go to keep power. It may seem strange -- we are used to
executions -- but ten years in jail just for talking sends a
powerful signal."

    But maybe not powerful enough. My conversation with the
professor takes place more or less publicly at a table for
twelve in a teahouse in Chengdu, a drab city where the sun
rarely shines more than 60 days a year. Instead of smoking and
no-smoking sections -- almost everyone in China smokes -- this
teahouse sets aside tables for those who want coffee.
Unfortunately, we are at one of them. Drinking Chinese coffee
is like drinking hot water with a distant memory of caffeine;
there is an atavistic link somewhere, but it is not coffee.

    While the professor talks about the government's propaganda
efforts, his face becomes heavy. His brooding eyes are cast
downward, his mouth grows sulky. But not because of the coffee,
which he insists is "quite good." What causes the professor to
lower his voice to a drone is the presence, at the next table,
of a local Communist official. "They say he is honest," says
the professor. "They say that he doesn't have a crooked bone in
his body. Maybe so, but I am certain those bones are held
together by crooked fat."

    Nonetheless, the professor wants to make one final point.
What resonates for most Chinese, he says, "is when Deng and the
others argue that permitting Tiananmen to run its course could
have led to chaos and disorder, to another Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution is the benchmark against which
everything looks better, the one thing above all that we do not
want again."

    He is describing a social contract, abhorrent to an
American but understandable, even comforting, to many Chinese.
In exchange for letting the rulers rule, the subjects will be
permitted by the regime to continue the economic progress they
have enjoyed for ten years.

    But how exactly will the balance be struck? What is a
controlled expression of opinion that does not threaten the
party's authority? Thousands believed their criticism within
bounds when Mao urged freethinking in the mid-1950s campaign
known as "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom." Then Deng, whom Mao had
once described as "a needle wrapped in cotton," orchestrated a
crackdown that sent many to prison for merely following the
Great Helmsman's invitation to criticize.

    Most of those I meet seem to believe that despite the
current retrenchment, China's economy is evolving into one not
unlike South Korea's or Taiwan's. And while neither of those
nations offers the political freedoms available in the West,
both are light-years ahead of China economically. Is that really
where China is going, or will the new resemble the old, a return
to the Stalinist economic system that even Mikhail Gorbachev is
trying to abandon? Will Deng succeed in anointing party chief
Jiang Zemin as his successor, and would Jiang, in power, affirm
continued economic liberalism?

    "If the retrenchment worsens and if the economy fails, if
Premier Li stops Jiang's succession, then all bets are off for
Deng and his cronies," says the Chengdu professor. "Deng got the
point that Communism doesn't work, that it tries to change human
nature. He got the point about incentive. The problem is that
many of the other old guys don't like his views and never have.
And right now they are trying to force a serious turn back, and
they're using the ammunition of a faltering economy. Well, the
macroeconomic numbers are indeed bad, but most people have
conveniences they have never had and never dreamed they would
have. The stores are full of goods, and you still see many
people buying. But most want more, and having now been exposed
to the outside world, they know very well what more means."

    Forty years ago this Sunday, Mao Zedong stood on a balcony
overlooking Tiananmen Square and said, "The Chinese people have
stood up, and the future of our nation is infinitely brighter."
Infinitely messier is closer to the mark today. The economy's
course is uncertain. Provincial and municipal governments will
surely pursue their own interests despite efforts to restrain
them. The party, with its ideology bankrupt, offers only order
and is begging for faith -- and not getting it. How long can a
government like that retain control and stay in power? "A regime
that . . . is forced to fire on the young, who protest in the
name of liberty," said French President Francois Mitterrand
after Tiananmen, "has no future."

    Yes, but how long, exactly? The Chinese live in a cage.
Some farsighted policies have expanded the cage beyond what
anyone would have imagined a decade ago. But it is still a cage,
and even if it continues to expand, how long will an
increasingly modern nation be content to live behind bars?

    "I don't know," said an 88-year-old man in a Beijing park.
It was early morning, and along with a score of others, the old
man was exercising his birds -- by illusion. The men walked
about and swung their birdcages. The movement is said to
convince the birds inside that they are free. "We trick them,
you know," he said. "How long can they stay fooled? Who knows?
Maybe they hope. Like us. We hope. I hope. But you know, in
China it is dangerous to hope. Your heart is always being
broken." I said I knew.