More than twenty years have pa.s.sed since the Tiananmen protests of 1989, and from today"s perspective their greatest impact has been the lack of progress in reforming the political system. It"s fair to say that political reform was taking place in the 1980s, even if its pace was slower than that of economic reform. After Tiananmen, however, political reform ground to a halt, while the economy began breakneck development. Because of this paradox we find ourselves in a reality full of contradictions: conservative here, radical there; the concentration of political power on this side, the unfettering of economic interests on that; dogmatism on the one hand, anarchism on the other; toeing the line here, tossing away the rule book there. Over the past twenty years our development has been uneven rather than comprehensive, and this lopsided development is compromising the health of our society.
It seems to me that the emergence-and the unstoppable momentum-of the copycat phenomenon is an inevitable consequence of this lopsided development. The ubiquity and sharpness of social contradictions have provoked a confusion in people"s value systems and worldview, thus giving birth to the copycat effect, when all kinds of social emotions acc.u.mulate over time and find only limited channels of release, trans.m.u.ted constantly into seemingly farcical acts of rebellion that have certain anti-authoritarian, anti-mainstream, and anti-monopoly elements. The force and scale of copycatting demonstrate that the whole nation has taken to it as a form of performance art.
When, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, the Olympic torch arrived in Chinese territory, the cities among which it was relayed were dictated by official fiat, and every torchbearer was chosen meticulously by government officials. The cost may have been exorbitant, but the cities selected felt honored, and every torchbearer chosen felt proud. A small mountain village in Henan"s Hui County clearly did not qualify for such glory, but the locals went ahead and organized for themselves a homegrown version of the relay, pa.s.sing from one person to the next a simple handmade torch. Every villager was qualified to partic.i.p.ate; no government approval was required. They all looked pleased as punch, for their love of China was not in the least inferior to that of the official torchbearers", and when footage of their exploit began to circulate on the Internet, it got a rapturous reception.
Because the West often criticizes China for its degradation of the environment, the Chinese government made a point of declaring the Beijing Olympics a green Olympics. But the official torch relay in China did not give me any sense that the Olympics were green. Led by police cars, the torchbearers would trot slowly along a road lined with crowds, and after the event the city streets were piled with garbage. With the relay in Hui County, on the other hand, I did get a taste of a green Olympics: no car exhaust, no carbon dioxide emissions from overexcited crowds, just villagers with their handmade torches trotting over the spring hills as a mild breeze blew and the sun shone brightly.
Copycat phenomena are everywhere in China today, and even the political arena, so long untouchable, has suffered an invasion. When the National People"s Congress and the National Political Consultative Conference were in session, a man from Yibin in Sichuan, who described himself as a "Copycat Delegate to the National People"s Congress," introduced several motions on the Internet regarding such issues as insurance, old-age pensions for peasants, and personal income tax, hoping for a wide airing of his ideas. His election was laced with black humor, for he explained that he had been the unanimous choice at a family gathering-a sardonic commentary on the government"s practice of carefully vetting potential candidates for election to the NPC and NPCC. Although his election was the outcome only of a family get-together, this copycat delegate actually reflected more of a democratic spirit than those official delegates, for he won votes from relatives sincere in their support, not votes rigged by the authorities.
There are even more brazen and outrageous cases of copycatting: some people have adopted copycat tactics to transfer features of China"s humorless political system to its dissolute s.e.x industry. Last year I read on the Internet a jaw-dropping feature about a highly successful s.e.x business in one of China"s southern cities. The young women employed there were distinguished for their good looks and provided unstinting service to their clients, who unanimously praised the establishment as "top in the nation, first-cla.s.s in the world." Why so? It was all due to excellent managerial practices, apparently. The boss had introduced a system that forged a bond between s.e.x and politics, borrowing from the Chinese Communist Party and Communist Youth League their system of branch organization, his theory being that progressive role models had an important role to play in the purveying of s.e.xual services.
In China, if one wants to enter the Communist Party and the Communist Youth League, one must undergo careful inspection and rigorous procedures. This s.e.x-industry entrepreneur, having no affiliation with either the party or the Youth League, set himself up as a copycat Party Committee secretary and established under his banner both a "party branch" (women well versed in s.e.xual services) and a "youth-league branch" (unseasoned new recruits), with the understanding that once the youth-league members gained more experience and positive endors.e.m.e.nts from their clients, they could be promoted to full-fledged party members. Applying the time-honored methods of Chinese political organizations, he was able to enhance his employees" work ethic and at the same time have them supervise one another"s performance. At regular intervals he would hold "organizational life" retreats for both categories of staff, where they conducted criticism and self-criticism, studied "superior methods" and identified "areas for improvement," learned how to "maximize a.s.sets" and "address deficits," so that the quality of their services could scale even greater heights.
This real-life-s.e.x-entrepreneur/copycat-party-secretary has also imported the Communist Party"s "advanced worker" category into his management structure, electing every month an advanced worker who has distinguished herself in terms of the number of clients serviced and adding her photograph to the array of top earners listed in the honor roll. In conventional honor-roll photographs in China you always see standard poses and healthy, purposeful smiles. In this copycat honor roll, by contrast, the snapshots look much more like the glossy pictures of starlets you see in fashion magazines, every one of the copycat advanced workers vying to attract attention with a simpering smile or a smoldering glance.
The social fabric of China today is shaped by a bizarre mixture of elements, for the beautiful and the ugly, the progressive and the backward, the serious and the ridiculous, are constantly rubbing shoulders with each other. The copycat phenomenon is like this too, revealing society"s progress but also its regression. When health is impaired, inflammation ensues, and the copycat trend is a sign of something awry in China"s social tissue. Inflammation fights infection, but it may also lead to swelling, pustules, ulcers, and rot.
As a product of China"s uneven development, the copycat phenomenon has as many negative implications as it has positive aspects. The moral bankruptcy and confusion of right and wrong in China today, for example, find vivid expression in copycatting. As the copycat concept has gained acceptance, plagiarism, piracy, burlesque, parody, slander, and other actions originally seen as vulgar or illegal have been given a reason to exist; and in social psychology and public opinion they have gradually acquired respectability. No wonder that "copycat" has become one of the words most commonly used in China today. All of this serves to demonstrate the truth of the old Chinese saying: "The soil decides the crop, and the vine shapes the gourd."
Four years ago I saw a pirated edition of Brothers for sale on the pedestrian bridge that crosses the street outside my apartment; it was lying there in a stack of other pirated books. When the vendor noticed me running my eyes over his stock, he handed me a copy of my novel, recommending it as a good read. A quick flip through and I could tell at once that it was pirated. "No, it"s not a pirated edition," he corrected me earnestly. "It"s a copycat."
That"s not the only time something like this has happened. In China today, in some spheres there is still a lack of freedom, while in others there is so much freedom it"s hard to believe. More than twenty years ago I could say whatever came into my head when I was interviewed by a journalist, but the interview would undergo strict review and be drastically edited before publication; ten years ago I began to be more circ.u.mspect in interviews, because I discovered that newspapers would report everything I said, even my swear words; and now I am often amazed to read interviews I have never given-remarks that the reporter has simply concocted, a gushing stream of drivel attributed to me. Once I ran into a reporter who had fabricated just such an interview and I told him firmly, "I have never been interviewed by you, ever."
He responded just as firmly: "That was a copycat interview."
I was speechless. But that is our reality today: you may have done something illegal or unconscionable, but as long as you justify yourself with some kind of copycat explanation, your action becomes legitimate and aboveboard in the courtroom of public opinion. There"s nothing I can do about it, except pray that in the future, when people make up conversations with me, they don"t make me talk too much nonsense. If somebody has me say something clever, I"m even prepared to say thank you.
Last October I went on a quick tour of several European countries, sleeping in a different bed practically every single night, and when I got back to Beijing at the end of the month, I felt completely drained. What with jetlag as well, I was in quite a wobbly state for a couple of days, often imagining I was still in Europe. At one point I turned on my computer and did a little surfing on the Internet; soon I came across a copycat news item, one that announced the pregnancy of Prof. C. N. Yang"s wife.
Chen-Ning Yang, a n.o.bel laureate in physics, has been a staple of copycat news reports ever since 2004, when at the age of eighty-two he married Weng Fan, then twenty-eight. Now copycat correspondents had concocted this story of his wife being pregnant, a development allegedly revealed by Yang in an interview. Many of the remarks attributed to him were quite absurd-like his saying with a smile that the unborn child had already been proven to be his. That is exactly the kind of fanciful invention I know so well, because in copycat interviews I often say equally ridiculous things.
For me this spurious report served a useful purpose, for after two days in a trance I was suddenly clearheaded once more, in no doubt at all that I was back in China.
If we conceptualize the copycat phenomenon as a form of revolutionary action initiated by the weak against the strong, then this kind of revolution has happened before in China-in the Cultural Revolution forty-four years ago.
When in 1966 Mao Zedong proclaimed, "To rebel is justified," it triggered a release of revolutionary instincts among the weaker segments of society, and they rebelled with a pa.s.sion. Everywhere they rose up against those in positions of authority. Traditional Communist Party committees and state organizations totally collapsed, and copycat leadership bodies sprouted up all over the place. All you needed to do was to get some people to back you, and overnight you could establish a rebel headquarters and proclaim yourself its commander-in-chief. Soon there were too many copycat organizations and too little power to go around, triggering violent struggles between the various rebel headquarters. In Shanghai the struggle involved guns and live ammunition; but the rebels there were outdone by the ones in Wuhan, who used artillery pieces to a.s.sail each other"s positions. In efforts to expand their power bases, copycat leaders fought incessantly in conflicts that differed little from the tangled warfare between bandits that was once so common in China. Eventually the victors would incorporate the remnants of the vanquished and emerge with enhanced authority. Once the traditional bases of party and state control had been eliminated, revolutionary committees-representing the new power structure-were soon established, and those copycat commanders who had triumphed in the chaotic factional struggle all of a sudden transformed themselves into the revolutionary committees" official heads.
Why, when discussing China today, do I always return to the Cultural Revolution? That"s because these two eras are so interrelated: even though the state of society now is very different from then, some psychological elements remain strikingly similar. After partic.i.p.ating in one ma.s.s movement during the Cultural Revolution, for example, we are now engaged in another: economic development.
What I want to emphasize here is the parallel between the sudden appearance of myriad rebel headquarters at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and the rapid emergence of the private economy: in the 1980s, Chinese people replaced their pa.s.sion for revolution with a pa.s.sion for making money, and all at once there was an abundance of private businesses. Just as the copycat challenges the standard, so too the private sector a.s.sailed the monopoly status of the state-owned economy. Innumerable businesses soon went belly-up, only for countless others to take their places, just like the constant setbacks and dynamic comebacks a.s.sociated with revolution, or like Bai Juyi"s lines about the gra.s.sland: "Though burned by wildfire, it"s never destroyed/When the spring winds blow it grows again." China"s economic miracle was launched in just this way. Through its continual cycles of ruin and rebirth the private sector demonstrated its enormous capacity for survival, at the same time forcing ossified, conservative state enterprises to adapt to the cutthroat compet.i.tion of the marketplace.
In their colorful history during these past thirty years, the gra.s.sroots have performed feats unimaginable to us in the past, doing things their own way, through different channels. In Western terms, "all roads lead to Rome," and in Chinese terms, "when the eight immortals cross the sea, each displays his special talent." Their roads to success were highly unconventional, and so too were their roads to failure; the social fabric they have created is equally peculiar. Just as the reveille wakens soldiers from sleep, so too, as "copycat" took on a rich new range of meanings, it has suddenly brought into view all manner of things that have been churning below the surface during these years of hectic development. The awesome spectacle that has ensued is rather akin to what would happen if, in a crowded square, someone yells "Copycat!" in an effort to catch a friend"s attention and everybody in the square comes dashing over, because that is the name they have all adopted.
As miracles multiply, desire swells. Tiananmen Gate, the symbol of Chinese power, and the White House, the symbol of American power, have naturally become the structures most vigorously emulated by copycat architects all across China. There is a difference, however. Mock Tiananmens tend to be erected by local officials in the countryside: newly prosperous villages convert their local government offices to miniature Tiananmens so that when the lowest-level officials in the Chinese bureaucracy are ensconced inside, they can savor the beautiful illusion of being masters of the nation. Imitation White Houses, on the other hand, supply office s.p.a.ce for the rich and also meet their living needs. By day a company executive sits at his desk in a copycat version of the Oval Office, directing the activities of his employees by telephone; by night he takes his pretty secretary by the hand and leads her into the copycat Lincoln Bedroom.
In the course of China"s thirty-year economic miracle many poor people from the gra.s.sroots have acquired wealth and power and have begun to hanker after a Western-style aristocratic life; moving into s.p.a.cious villas, traveling in luxury sedans, drinking expensive wines, wearing designer brands, and saying a few words of English in an atrocious accent. As copycat aristocrats proliferate, so too do the social inst.i.tutions catering to their needs: aristocratic schools and aristocratic kindergartens, aristocratic stores and aristocratic restaurants, aristocratic apartments and aristocratic furniture, aristocratic entertainments and aristocratic magazines.... In China there is no end of things claiming an a.s.sociation with aristocracy.
Here"s a true little anecdote about one such copycat aristocrat. He built himself a luxury villa complete with swimming pool even though he couldn"t swim, his theory being that no rich man"s villa would be complete without a pool. At the same time he wasn"t happy seeing the pool going to waste, so he used it to raise fish, which-steamed, braised, or fried-could be served up on his dinner table each day. It then occurred to him that five-star hotels have a particular name for their most elegant and extravagantly appointed rooms. So soon a bronze plaque appeared on the door of the master bedroom, inscribed complacently with the words "Presidential Suite." Such is the lifestyle of China"s nouveau riche.
Finally I need to relate my own copycat story.
In China in the olden days, dentists were in much the same line of work as itinerant street performers and more or less on a par with barbers or cobblers. In some bustling neighborhood they would unfurl an oilskin umbrella and spread out on a table their forceps, mallets, and other tools of their trade, along with a row of teeth they had extracted, as a way of attracting customers. Dentists in those days operated as one-man bands and needed no helper. Like traveling cobblers, they would wander from place to place, shouldering their load on a carrying pole.
I, for a time, was their successor. Although I worked in a state-run clinic, my most senior colleagues had all simply switched from plying their trade under an umbrella to being employed in a two-story building; not one of them had attended medical school. The clinic staff numbered not much more than twenty, and tooth extractions were the main order of business. Our patients, mostly peasants from the surrounding countryside, did not think of our clinic as a health-care facility but simply called it the "tooth shop." This name was actually quite accurate, for our small-town clinic was very much like a shop. I entered as an apprentice, and for me extracting teeth, treating teeth, capping teeth, and fitting false teeth were simply a continuous series of learning tasks. The older dentists we all referred to as "gaffers," for there were no professors or unit heads such as you would find in a full-blown hospital. Compared with the career of a dental physician, now such a highly educated profession, my job in the "tooth shop" was that of a shop-worker, plain and simple.
My training was overseen by Gaffer Shen, a retired dentist from Shanghai who had come to our clinic to make a bit of extra money-or "bask in residual heat," as we used to say. Gaffer Shen was in his sixties, a short and rather portly man who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and kept his spa.r.s.e hair neatly combed.
The first time I saw my mentor-to-be, he was extracting a patient"s tooth; but because he was getting old and had to strain with all his might to tug on the forceps, he was grimacing so painfully you might have thought he was trying to pull his own tooth out. The clinic director introduced me as the new arrival. Gaffer Shen nodded guardedly, then told me to stand next to him and watch as he used a cotton swab to daub the next patient"s jaw with iodine and injected a dose of Novocain. Then he plopped himself down in a chair and lit a cigarette. When he had smoked it down to the b.u.t.t, he turned to the patient and asked offhandedly, "Is your tongue big yet?"
The patient mumbled something in the affirmative. Gaffer Shen rose slowly to his feet, picked a pair of forceps out of his tray, and set to work on the diseased tooth. He had me observe a couple of extractions. Then he sat down in his chair and showed no sign of planning to get up again. "I"ll leave the next ones to you," he said.
I was a bundle of nerves, for I still had only a rudimentary understanding of how to extract a tooth, and here I was suddenly at center stage. But I remembered at least the first two steps with the iodine and the Novocain, so I awkwardly instructed the patient to open his mouth wide and managed clumsily to complete the procedure. The patient watched me with a look of complete terror, as though one-on-one with a crocodile, which made my hands shake all the more.
As I waited for the anesthetic to take effect, I didn"t know quite what to do with myself. But Gaffer Shen handed me a cigarette and suddenly became quite genial, asking me what my parents did and how many siblings I had. All too soon my cigarette was finished and the conversation was over. Thank goodness I was able to recall the next line of the script, and in my best imitation of Gaffer Shen I turned to the patient and asked, "Is your tongue big yet?" When he said yes, I was struck with horror at the prospect of what now lay ahead, and a chill ran down my spine. There was no way to get out of extracting that unlucky tooth, and I also had to put on a show of knowing exactly what I was doing and avoid making the patient any more suspicious.
That first extraction is something I will never forget. I had the patient open his mouth wide and fixed my eyes on the tooth that had to be pulled. But when I glanced into the tray and saw a whole line of forceps, all of different sizes and shapes, I was struck dumb, clueless as to which one I should use. I hesitated, then slunk back to Gaffer Shen with my tail between my legs. "Which forceps?" I asked in a low voice.
He got up, shuffled forward a couple of steps, and peered inside the patient"s gaping mouth. "Which tooth?" he asked. At that point I was still vague about the names for the various teeth, so I just pointed with my finger. Gaffer Shen took a squint, pointed at a pair of forceps, then plopped himself back down in his chair and picked up his newspaper.
At that moment I had an intense sensation of being locked in a lonely, daunting struggle, without allies or sympathizers. I didn"t dare look into the patient"s staring eyes, for I was even more petrified than he was. I picked up the forceps, inserted them into his mouth, maneuvered them into position, and took a firm hold of the tooth. By a stroke of good fortune, it was already quite loose; all I needed to do was grip the forceps tightly and rock the tooth back and forth a couple of times, and it came straight out.
The real difficulty came when I was working on the third patient, for part of a root broke off inside his jaw. Gaffer Shen had no choice but to remove his foot from his knee and let the newspaper slip from his hand, rise from his chair, and come personally to attend to it. To clean out a root is much more trouble than a simple extraction, and Gaffer Shen was dripping with sweat by the end of it all. It was only later, when I knew how to deal with this kind of complication, that he could begin to enjoy a true life of leisure.
Our office had two dental chairs. I would usually call in two patients at once, have them sit down in the chairs, and then, as though dispensing equal favors to two trust beneficiaries, smear some tincture of iodine in their mouths and inject them both with a dose of anesthetic. In the dead time that followed I would take a nicotine break, and when my cigarette was finished, I would ask, "Is your tongue big yet?"
Often both patients would answer at the same time, "Yes, it"s big." As though enforcing further terms of the trust, I would pull out their teeth one after another and then move on to the next two cases.
In those days Gaffer Shen and I coordinated seamlessly. I made myself responsible for calling in the patients and attending to their diseased teeth, while my mentor stayed put in his chair, making notations in their medical records and writing out prescriptions; only if I ran into trouble would he personally take to the field. As my skills in tooth extraction grew more accomplished, Gaffer Shen was called to the front line less and less often.
Many years later I became an author. Western journalists were always curious about my dentist past, astonished that with only a high-school graduation certificate and having had no medical education whatsoever I had proceeded directly to tooth extractions. I groped around for an explanation that would make some kind of sense. "I used to be a barefoot doctor," I would tell them.
Barefoot doctors were an invention of the Mao era: peasants with a smattering of education were shown how to perform routine medical procedures and then sent back home with a medical kit on their backs. Why were they called barefoot doctors? Because for them practicing medicine was just a sideline activity; their basic work remained going out to the fields and laboring in their bare feet. When peasants around them came down with some minor injury or illness, they would be in a position to provide basic treatment on the spot, or if the case was serious, they would see the patient off to the hospital.
I knew it wasn"t really correct to say I"d been a "barefoot doctor," for though I couldn"t claim to have received much more training than those peasant doctors, I had at least been engaged in dentistry full-time. The problem was that for many years I couldn"t find the right word to describe my first job, and it"s only with the emergence of new vocabulary in China today that I can finally give Western reporters a more accurate picture of my situation. "I used to be a copycat dentist," I tell them now.
*shanzhai.
bamboozle.
What is ?* Originally it meant "to sway unsteadily"-like fishing boats bobbing on the waves, for example, or leaves shaking in the wind. Later it developed a new life as an idiom particularly popular in northeast China, derived from another phrase that sounds almost the same: -"to mislead." Just as variant strains of the flu virus keep constantly appearing, has in its lexical career diversified itself into a dazzling range of meanings. Hyping things up and laying it on thick-that"s . Playing a con trick and ripping somebody off-that"s , too. In the first sense, the word has connotations of bragging, as well as enticement and entrapment; in the second sense, it carries shades of dishonesty, misrepresentation, and fraud. "Bamboozle," perhaps, is the closest English equivalent.
In China today, "bamboozle" is a new star in the lexical firmament, fully the equal of "copycat" in its charlatan status. Both count as linguistic nouveau riche, but their rises to glory took somewhat different courses. The copycat phenomenon emerged in collectivist fashion, like bamboo shoots springing up after spring rain, whereas "bamboozle" had its source in an individual act of heroism-the hero in question being China"s most influential comedian, a northeasterner named Zhao Benshan. In a legendary skit performed a few years ago, Zhao Benshan gave "bamboozling" its grand launch, announcing to the world: I can bamboozle the tough into acting tame, Bamboozle the gent into dumping the dame, Bamboozle the innocent into taking the blame, Bamboozle the winner into conceding the game.
I"m selling crutches today, so this is my aim: I"ll bamboozle a man into thinking he"s lame.
In "Selling Crutches" he proceeds with infinite guile, trapping the fall guy in one psychological snare after another, exquisitely employing deception and hoax to lead him down the garden path until in the end a man whose legs are perfectly normal is convinced he"s a cripple and purchases-at great expense-a shoddy pair of crutches.
When this very funny routine was performed in CCTV"s Spring Festival gala-the most-watched television program in China-the word "bamboozle" immediately took the nation by storm. Like a rock stirring up a tidal wave it triggered a tsunami-style reaction as phenomena long existent in Chinese society-boasting and exaggerating, puffery and bl.u.s.ter, mendacity and casuistry, flippancy and mischief-acquired greater energy and rose to new heights in bamboozle"s capacious ocean. At the same time a social propensity toward chicanery, pranks, and other shenanigans drew further inspiration from it. Once these words with negative connotations took shelter under bamboozlement"s wing, they suddenly acquired a neutral status.
Zhao Benshan put "bamboozle" on the lips of people all over the country, male and female, young and old. The word slipped off their tongues as smoothly as saliva and shot from their mouths as freely as spittle. Politics, history, economics, society, culture, memory, emotion, and desire-all these and more find a s.p.a.cious home in the land of bamboozlement. It has become a lexical master key: in the palace of words it opens all kinds of doors.
Bamboozlement, of course, does not always have negative connotations. When one is in a nostalgic mood, "bamboozle" can serve to purge the word "trick" of its pejorative meaning. My mother is a case in point.
In an effort to eradicate snail fever in the late 1950s, Mao Zedong organized doctors and nurses in cities and towns into medical teams known as epidemic prevention brigades. They were sent to impoverished areas that lacked health care, where they treated snail-fever patients for free. My father was then living in the beautiful city of Hangzhou, where he had a job in the provincial-level epidemic prevention station. In his whole life my father spent only six years in school, three under the instruction of a traditional private tutor and three at a university; he acquired the rest of his education when studying on his own as a medic in the Communist armed forces. He laid claim to a dictionary as a trophy of war, and as the army marched south, he memorized new vocabulary on the go. His unit fought its way down to the southeastern province of Fujian, and afterward he made his way back to Hangzhou, where he transferred to the local hospital. There he met a nurse-later my mother. She urged him to study mathematics, physics, and chemistry; through a.s.siduous effort he gained admission into Zhejiang Medical School, where he completed his three years" formal training. After graduation he had no desire to continue working at the epidemic prevention station, for his dream was to be a surgeon. But he had no authority to choose his own career, and when the leadership a.s.signed him to the epidemic prevention station, he had no choice but to go.
It was in this context that my father joined the epidemic prevention brigade, which he saw as his first step to becoming a surgeon. Fired by this burning ambition, he thought it a necessary sacrifice to pursue his career away from Hangzhou. Arriving as brigade leader in Jiaxing, fifty miles northeast of Hangzhou, he hoped to transfer to the local hospital, but the Jiaxing authorities proposed instead to make him dean of their nursing school. He refused and headed instead for a smaller town on the coast, Haiyan. There a county hospital had just been built, and it needed a surgeon. At last his dream could come true.
In Haiyan Hospital my father"s talents were given free rein, and he was kept busy removing infected spleens from victims of snail fever. This was a major operation: in city hospitals it was always the job of abdominal surgery specialists, and the grueling procedure could take up to seven or eight hours. In Haiyan my father would remove four or five spleens a day, and as he became more adept, he could do the job in just three or four hours. Meanwhile my mother continued to live with me and my brother in Hangzhou. She worked in the refined environment of Zhejiang Hospital and had no wish to leave Hangzhou and its lovely West Lake.
Every day, once he"d got a few spleens out of the way, my father would sit down in the little office adjoining the surgery and write to my mother on prescription stationery, extolling the beauties of Haiyan as though it were heaven itself. I never had the chance to read this correspondence, but after I made my home in Beijing and began to receive letters from my father, I discovered he had quite a way with words. No doubt he employed all his rhetorical skills when writing to my mother, singing Haiyan"s praises in the hyperbolic language so often used to describe Hangzhou. She was completely taken in by the honeyed words and bewitching images with which he regaled her. Mistaking the tiny, ramshackle town of Haiyan for a miniature Hangzhou, she decided to forsake life in the provincial capital and reunite us with our father. It must have taken enormous courage to do that, for in that bygone era China"s harsh household registration system permitted you to live and work only in a single place, and death alone could free you; you were like a nail that"s hammered into a wall, staying there till it rusts and snaps. My mother renounced her Hangzhou residence permit-and Hua Xu"s and mine as well-which in those days meant Hangzhou would be lost to us forever. With her two sons in tow she boarded a long-haul bus and traveled down a road of no return.
I was three years old that year, and I am sure that when my mother came out of the bus station in Haiyan, one hand in mine and the other in my brother"s, the shock must have been overwhelming. Suddenly she was confronted by the real Haiyan, a very different place from the one she had read about in my father"s letters. Later she would often sum up in this way her first reaction to Haiyan"s primitive living standards: "You didn"t see even a single bicycle!"
Sometimes my mother would wistfully share with us little vignettes from our life in Hangzhou; when she talked of the house where we used to live and the scenery a short walk away, a blissful expression would appear on her face. Such moments would plunge me into endless reverie. Though that brief, idyllic stay in Hangzhou had been erased from my young memory, my mother"s reconstruction of it brought it back to life, and during my childhood years it occupied the most beautiful place in my imagination. After every such reminiscence my mother could never stop herself from raising her hand and pointing an accusing finger at my father: "It was you who tricked us into coming to Haiyan!"
These days when my mother recalls the past she puts it differently; time has softened that disappointment and provided a more precise word for the wrong she suffered. "It was you who bamboozled us into coming here," she says now.
The word "bamboozle," then, has rapidly gained acceptance in China. Just as "copycat" gives imitation and piracy a new range of connotations, "bamboozle" throws a cloak of respectability over deception and manufactured rumor.
In 2008, just a couple of weeks before the opening of the Beijing Olympics, a local newspaper dropped a bombsh.e.l.l. It began: Beijing this August will be the most exciting place in the world. Not only will the most outstanding athletes in the world gather here; the rich and powerful of the world believe that visiting Beijing for the Olympics is the ultimate in fashion and have made their bookings months in advance. They include Bill Gates, the world"s richest man. However, this software giant-who has already given away billions of dollars to charity-will not be staying at a hotel in Beijing this time. Rather, he has chosen a penthouse apartment less than two hundred yards from the Water Cube. If he opens the windows and looks out, he will get a perfect view of the crystal-blue Water Cube Aquatics Center and the stunning Bird"s Nest Stadium.
Bill Gates, we were told, had sh.e.l.led out a hundred million yuan on his penthouse lease. The report went on: The apartment is on two floors and has about 7,500 square feet of s.p.a.ce. However, even if you are as rich as Bill Gates, you won"t be able to buy it, for these properties are for lease only. Bill Gates has it only on a one-year term, though that will cost a hundred million yuan. "We don"t do short-term rentals," sales a.s.sociate Miss Yi explained.
The article took the form of an interview with this saleslady. After gleefully reporting what a big spender Bill Gates was, Miss Yi waxed even more lyrical as she enthused about the grace and luxury of this new residential complex: "The whole structure resembles a huge jade dragon with head raised and wings extended, its posture magnificent, its spirit lively, and all in perfect accordance with the principles of feng shui." The report added a mysterious touch: apparently it was only "under the guidance of a master" that the building design was elevated to such a high level, with such rich symbolic significance.
"By all accounts, many clients of substance have already put their names down," the article continued to bamboozle.
"Bill Gates has paid his lease," Miss Yi told us, "and others-I can"t reveal their names-have already moved in." Miss Yi, normally so discreet, revealed inadvertently that not all the units had been spoken for. "Some are still unclaimed, and if you want to take out a lease, there is still a chance." When a reporter asked whether one could lease an apartment next to Bill Gates, Miss Yi replied, "It"s possible. But first you need to fax over your details and get things verified before we can set up a tour. As to whether or not you can be Mr. Gates" neighbor, you need to complete the first steps before we can discuss that."
As soon as the news got out, China"s mainstream and not-so-mainstream media circulated the report, and I think at a minimum more than a hundred million people must have learned about this new residential complex in Beijing. Soon the news spread to the United States, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation issued a formal denial. A few days later Zheng Yaqin, director of Microsoft"s China operations, suggested at a press conference that it was simply promotional hype cooked up by a property developer, using the Olympics and Bill Gates to get attention.
When pressed by journalists, the developer denied all responsibility for the article, claiming that it was a fiction concocted by the media. The first media outlet to report the news countered that they got the story directly from the sales a.s.sociate, Miss Yi. As the pot called the kettle black, people soon stopped caring about where the rumor originated. Even though the media continued to report it as genuine news, none of it made any sense: if Bill Gates spent a hundred million yuan to lease this penthouse, then each square foot would have to cost 13,000 yuan-an absurd figure, for if one were to flat-out purchase the apartment, 5,000 yuan per square foot would be about the going rate. Once people worked this out, the media quickly changed their story, hailing the whole episode as "the supreme bamboozle of 2008."
The media in China today are full of fake stories like this, because there are seldom any legal repercussions. To circulate this kind of story is a kind of fraud, but in China people just shrug it off as bamboozle. In this particular case "bamboozle" implied both deception and hype, but it also contained a certain element of entertainment. That being so, n.o.body was inclined to regard it as a serious issue.
One thing we did learn, however, was just how much leverage a bamboozle can exert: by playing the Beijing Olympics and Bill Gates for all they were worth, it was able overnight to convert an obscure housing development into an apartment complex famous all over the country. In economic terms, leverage is a monetary policy, confined to profit-and-loss risk management issues; in capital markets it simply makes it possible to clinch large deals with a relatively small outlay-as the Chinese expression goes, "using four ounces to shift a thousand pounds," or as Archimedes said, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the world." But now we clever Chinese have found a place for leverage in common and everyday bamboozling. Bamboozling is everywhere, and so leverage is everywhere, too.
Chinese authors and publishers, for example, like to use Hollywood as leverage to bamboozle readers and the media. A few years ago one Chinese novel was no sooner published than it was hyped to the skies in the Chinese media. Although the English edition had yet to appear, it was widely touted that Hollywood was going to make a movie out of it, at a price tag of $300 million. As I was puzzling over this, thinking I"d never heard of a Hollywood movie costing so much, the bamboozle industry was upping the ante to $800 million. Aided by this kind of hype, two Chinese novels have indeed become best sellers in recent years, each claiming to be bound for Hollywood at a cost of $800 million. The novel that claimed to be worth a measly $300 million did not sell so well, I think perhaps because it did not employ bamboozle leverage to best effect and failed to "use four ounces to shift a thousand pounds"-its four ounces shifted only four hundred pounds. If you"re going to bamboozle at all, then clearly the bigger the better. As we Chinese say, you don"t have to pay tax on bulls.h.i.t. That being so, why not bulls.h.i.t to the max?
"The more boldly a man dares, the more richly his land bears"-that famous Great Leap Forward mantra-turns out to be an apt description of bamboozlement"s essential nature. Its logic is confirmed by another Chinese homily: "The timid die of hunger, the bold of overeating."
Let"s now review another case, one in which an entrepreneur used CCTV as leverage to bamboozle others into making him rich. This episode dates back almost twenty years, to a time when China had yet to enter the Internet age but was already a nation overflowing with advertis.e.m.e.nts. Today, of course, TV commercials and newspaper ads are even more abundant and of infinite variety-imported and domestic, refined and vulgar, violent and erotic. Established companies hawk their wares in neon lights and on expressway billboards; shady, underground businesses paste flyers on utility poles and the steps of pedestrian bridges. Advertising is now so ubiquitous and ostentatious that the big-character posters of the Cultural Revolution years seem tame by comparison.
At the time of this episode, the most expensive advertising spot was a five-second placement before CCTV"s Network News at seven o"clock each evening. CCTV had begun selling the spot off to the highest bidder, but it was all still in an experimental stage, before the network started to check the financial resources of the bidders. In those days, if a beggar were to dress up in a suit and put a millionaire"s smile on his face, there would have been nothing to stop him from going in and making an offer. Whatever company made the highest bid would immediately be hailed as the Bidding King by media outlets big and small, and all this publicity would be even more effective than the five-second commercial itself.
Our entrepreneur had only limited financial resources, and he felt that if he simply continued to do business on a modest scale, he could never hope to be more than a small-timer, even if he pulled out all the stops. Now he saw his opportunity. Like so many other gra.s.sroots entrepreneurs in China, once he had set his sights on his goal, he would stop at nothing to reach it. He traveled alone to Beijing and adopted a low-key stance as he entered the CCTV commercial Bidding King auction room, which was thronged with millionaire entrepreneurs and powerful managers of state-owned enterprises. He found a chair in the back row; when the auction began, he sat with head bowed and eyes half closed, as though about to nod off, but every time he heard a bid, he would lift his right hand and make a better offer. As the price rose higher and higher and other companies gradually withdrew from the compet.i.tion, he kept raising his hand, as cool as a cuc.u.mber. In the end he claimed the CCTV Bidding King"s crown with an astronomical offer of 80 million yuan.
With this t.i.tle under his belt our hero returned to his home base and made an appointment to meet with the mayor and the party secretary of the munic.i.p.al committee. "I"ve brought back the 80 million yuan Bidding King t.i.tle for our city," he told them with a winning smile, "but my own a.s.sets are just a tiny fraction of that. What shall we do? If you back me up, then our city will have produced an entrepreneur famous throughout the nation. If you let me down, then our city will have produced the biggest trickster in the whole country." He left them with a parting shot of "Do whatever you think is best."
Local officials were then single-mindedly pursuing GDP growth, hoping that the areas under their jurisdiction would produce a nationally known entrepreneur-an achievement they could bandy about as a way of boosting their own chances of promotion. If the most brazen swindler in China were to emerge on their watch, conversely, this would have grim implications for their career prospects. An emergency meeting was called, and after much soul-searching the mayor and the party secretary decided to instruct the local commercial bank to give the Bidding King a loan of 200 million yuan-a loan rich in Chinese flavor, for commercial banks were often then at the beck and call of the local government.
That was how this small-time businessman twice bamboozled his way to success, first by exploiting the leverage offered by CCTV"s Bidding King t.i.tle, then by making the most of Chinese officials" vanity to end up with a nice little haul of 200 million yuan. But his bamboozling wasn"t over, for he would then bamboozle himself a reputation as a nationally known entrepreneur.
Stories of this kind keep coming so thick and fast I need to tell a few more: first, two about how people bamboozle the government, then two about how the government bamboozles the people.
Average Chinese citizens have no ambition to be famous and powerful, nor do they dream of making their fortunes overnight; for them contentment brings happiness. So when they bamboozle the government, the leverage effect is that of four ounces lifting four pounds; as long as they enjoy a fair degree of success, they feel pleased with a job well done. Whatever bamboozling leverage they have tends to be found close to home: lacking friends or relatives in high places, lacking access to a wide social network, all they really have in life is family and marriage, so these provide the only real leverage, as the first two stories will show.
Three or four years ago, a city education bureau announced a new measure to raise the quality of local teachers and enable graduating high school seniors to be more compet.i.tive in the university entrance examination. All high school teachers were to take part in an examination that would test their credentials. Those who pa.s.sed could continue teaching; those who failed would have their jobs terminated. At the same time, out of humanitarian considerations, the education bureau noted that some teachers were raising children alone after divorce or the loss of a spouse and might be suffering hardship through the combination of workload and child-care responsibilities, so they issued an additional proviso that the requirement would be waived for teachers who were raising children single-handedly.
It is only since my own son entered middle school that I have realized the crushing weight of examinations in China"s educational system. Practically every day he has to prepare for an exam, whether it is a daily exercise or review quiz, or a test, monthly exam, midterm exam, or final exam. There are all manner of tests in Chinese high schools, and from the day they enter the school gates, students are trained to become test-taking machines. But those teachers who were used to testing students daily found a test suddenly staring them in the face, and it made them quake.
The teachers in this small-scale city thereupon began a large-scale bamboozle. The ruling that widowed and divorced teachers with children would be excused from taking the examination gave them just the leverage they needed. Off they rushed to the registry office and filed for divorce. Observing this flood of divorces (and subsequent flood of remarriages), the townsfolk found much to admire. "That"s the wisdom of the ma.s.ses in action," they would tell one another.
Wherever they met, whether in the street or in the school, the teachers soon got in the habit of greeting each other in a new way: "Divorced yet?" Before long, that became a standard greeting all over town. In the end fewer than 30 percent of the teachers took the examination, and most of those were unmarried or married without children; naturally there were a few others too who were confident enough about pa.s.sing to actually sit for the exam. With the crisis over, remarriages commenced and greetings were revised accordingly: "Remarried yet?"
In the second story, people again leveraged marriage to bamboozle the government, but this time in the countryside-an increasingly common practice there since urbanization quickened its pace. China"s long-standing household registration system strictly regulates urban and rural registration. With the rapid growth of China"s cities since the 1980s, huge swathes of land surrounding the cities have been requisitioned by the government, with the result that peasant registrations are recla.s.sified, the so-called rural-to-urban shift. Peasants lose their ancestral homes as well as their land, and in compensation the government moves the displaced peasants into newly built urban housing. Just how much square footage each transferred peasants should get involves a complex computation that takes into account the size of their original house and the number of their family members, but marital status is the most crucial element. Marriage and divorce, remarriage and redivorce, thus become the instruments of deception and subterfuge.
A few years ago, when the land of peasants in a township in southwest China was requisitioned, in order to gain maximum advantage and claim the largest possible compensation when new housing was allocated, almost 95 percent of households went through the motions of divorce and then set themselves up with bogus new marriage partners. The marriage registration office was swamped with applications and had to deal with more paperwork in the s.p.a.ce of a few months than it would normally handle in years.
Bizarre turns of event added spice to this collective con. An old lady no longer steady on her feet suddenly hit the romantic jackpot, carried off to the registry office on the shoulders of three different young men, to pick up three different marriage licenses. One man went through with the fake divorce quite happily but then balked at the prospect of remarrying his ex-wife. After much stalling and procrastination, he finally told her the truth. "I wanted to end our marriage ages ago," he said, "and now at last I had the chance to bamboozle you into divorce." An old granddad had a phony marriage with a much younger wife and later refused to divorce her. No matter how she wept and pleaded, and even though she promised a severance package, he remained obdurate. Family and friends tried to talk sense into him. "It"s just a charade," they reminded him. "How can you take it as real?"
His response was heartfelt: "But for me it was love at first sight!"
As the people con the government, so the government cons the people. As China has trans.m.u.ted itself from a command economy to a market economy during the past thirty years, some local governments have demonstrated their allegiance to the new order by vigorously promoting auction sales of one kind or another. For instance, they might hold a public auction to sell off the rights to name roads, bridges, squares, residential communities, and high-rise buildings, and whichever company made the highest offer would be free to name a place as it saw fit. In 2006, when one city decided to put up place-names for auction, the announcement elicited some furious reactions from the locals.
"If place-names are up for grabs," some said, "how will people keep track of what"s what and where"s where?"
"Is our housing complex going to be renamed Ladies" Soother Estates?" others asked sarcastically, referring to the leading brand of v.a.g.i.n.al cream.
"When I want to send a letter to my friend, will I have to write the address as Brain Ambrosia Boulevard?" another inquired, alluding to a well-known herbal tonic.
Some took things to their logical extreme, suggesting they might as well put the name of the city itself up for sale-that way they might be able to strike a deal with the Coca-Cola Company and rename the city Coca-Colaville.
Officials rushed to backpedal: "Paid use of place-names is just an idea, and it has yet to be implemented; residents have no cause for alarm. Even if such a system is introduced in the future, it will comply with relevant laws; naming of places will be carefully regulated."
Given the pressure of public opinion, the place-name auction never got off the ground. But when local officials mention this initiative, they applaud it heartily, declaring that now is the era of the market economy and so things should be done according to market principles; marketable operations are the way to go. These past few years, "marketable operation" has become the mantra of local government officials; sometimes it has given local governments leverage to bamboozle the people. The following two stories are examples of this trend.
The first story took place in Sichuan Province, in the city of Neijiang. There the city management bureau was keen to strengthen its oversight of itinerant vendors, with a view, no doubt, to increasing its revenues, so it announced it would auction off its sidewalks. Now, sidewalks are originally designed to provide foot pa.s.sage; if they are auctioned off to vendors, they will simply end up carpeted with merchandise, and where will that leave pedestrians? Are pedestrians just going to have to take their lives in their hands and try their luck among the throngs of cars and trucks and buses? When I indignantly reported this development to an official, he shrugged off my concern and told me I was overreacting. He saw nothing absurd about what they were doing. "You"ll find lots of places where sidewalks are being auctioned off," he told me.
The second story comes to us from the city of Xiangtan, in Hunan. There the munic.i.p.al government announced that street numbers could be purchased. Chinese people have a superst.i.tious faith in certain numbers, believing that the number six, for example, promises a happy outcome and that eight signifies fortune and prosperity. Residents eagerly splurged on numbers such as 6, 66, 666, and 6666 and 8, 88, 888, and 8888; as a result, street numbering in some neighborhoods went haywire as regular sequences of numbers broke down. In a street that originally had odd numbers on the left and even numbers on the right, when one walked down the left-hand side of the street, one might no longer find No. 5 between No. 3 and No. 7, but No. 8888. Or when one proceeded along the right-hand side, one might very well find No. 6 sandwiched between No. 792 and No. 796. If I were to walk along that street, I wouldn"t know whether to laugh or cry.
When sidewalks were auctioned off and auspicious street numbers were sold to the highest bidder, the people of Neijiang and Xiangtan may have cursed for all they were worth, but the local officials just went on talking big, bamboozling them with that regular refrain, "This is how marketable operation works."