He looked at me dumbly. "Did Mr. Lu Xun really say that?"
"Of course he did." I spoke with great a.s.surance, to mask my guilty conscience. "Don"t tell me you don"t believe Mr. Lu Xun?"
"No, it"s not that." He waved his hand in alarm. "But why didn"t you say so earlier?"
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, as I improvised madly. "I didn"t know before. I just heard it on the radio this morning."
He hung his head. "If Mr. Lu Xun says this too, it has to mean you"re right and I"m wrong."
It was as simple as that: his position on the distance between the sun and the earth, which he had defended to the hilt for twelve months flat, collapsed in ruins at once before my fict.i.tious Lu Xun. In the days that followed he was pensive and subdued, tasting alone the bitter flavor of defeat.
That was a characteristic of the Cultural Revolution era: no matter whether it was an argument between rebels or between Red Guards or simply a row between housewives, the final victor would always come out with something Mao Zedong had said, so as to crush their opponent and bring the argument to an end. I had originally intended to make up a quotation by Mao but couldn"t quite bring myself to utter such an outrageous lie, and so I ended up by changing "Chairman Mao teaches us" to "Mr. Lu Xun says." This way, if my fiction was ever exposed and I was denounced as a little counterrevolutionary, I would at least be charged with a slightly less heinous crime.
As we entered middle school this cla.s.smate and I embarked on a new argument, one that would become equally prolonged. This time we found ourselves at odds on the nuclear issue. If one tied all the atomic bombs in the world together and detonated them all at once, he said, the resulting explosion would shatter the earth into a thousand pieces. I disagreed profoundly. The earth"s surface, I conceded, would suffer terrible devastation, but the planet itself would suffer no structural damage and would continue to spin on its axis and orbit the sun as it always had.
Discussion evolved into argument, and argument escalated and expanded. In school, throughout the day, we debated for all we were worth, and like election candidates canva.s.sing for votes we each went off to talk others around. Some supported him and some supported me, and the boys in our year were soon divided into two camps: the Earth Destruction School and the Earth Survival School. As time went on everyone else got tired of the argument, leaving just the two of us to carry the torch. Our cla.s.smates would shake their heads in despair, and our two competing earths became a standing joke.
One day our argument resumed in the middle of a game of basketball. By this time we had been arguing for months and both felt a need to wrap it up, so there on the court we agreed to consult the chemistry teacher and accept her judgment as the final authority. Off we went, still arguing so contentiously that my companion forgot he was holding the basketball under his arm. "Hey, hey!" the other boys cried. "Forget about your two earths, just give us the ball back!"
The chemistry teacher was a new arrival at the school, a woman in her thirties who came to us from a city in north China. We thought her very exotic because she spoke perfect standard Mandarin, unlike the other teachers, who in cla.s.s or out spoke only the local dialect. We tracked her down in the staff room, and after patiently listening to both points of view, she announced her verdict. "The peoples of the world are all peace loving," she told us. "How could they ever think of tying atomic bombs together and detonating them all at once?"
It had never crossed our minds that the chemistry teacher would cut the ground out from under us and put such a damper on our long-standing argument. We retreated from the staff room in disarray, exchanging discomfited looks and then unceremoniously dismissing her opinion. "To h.e.l.l with her!" we cursed.
We returned to our argument, as obstinate and determined as ever. Forced to desperate remedies once more, I repeated my earlier ploy. "Mr. Lu Xun has said, even were one to tie all the atom bombs in the world together and detonate them, it would not destroy the earth."
"Mr. Lu Xun said that, too?" He eyed me suspiciously.
"You don"t believe me?" I decided to brazen it out. "Do you really think I would make up something Mr. Lu Xun said?"
My unflinching confidence put him on the defensive. "No, you wouldn"t dare do that," he said, shaking his head. "n.o.body would ever dare make up something Mr. Lu Xun said."
"Of course not," I said, suddenly stricken with misgiving.
He nodded. "That "even were one to" sounds a lot like Mr. Lu Xun."
"What do you mean, "sounds a lot like"?" I retorted, now flushed with victory. "Those are Mr. Lu Xun"s words exactly."
My cla.s.smate slunk off to lick his wounds, confounded by his unfortunate tendency to always get on the wrong side of Mr. Lu Xun. A few months later, however, I had quite a scare when I realized what a glaring anachronism I had committed-Lu Xun having died almost ten years before the first atomic bomb was dropped. After several days of anxiety I decided that preemptive action was required. "Last time I misquoted Mr. Lu Xun," I told my cla.s.smate. "What he was talking about was bombs, not atomic bombs. What he actually said was: "Even were one to tie all the bombs in the world together...." "
The boy"s eyes lit up. "Bombs and atomic bombs are not the same thing at all!" he said, elated.
"Yes, I can see that." Given the necessity to discourage further inquiries, I had no choice but to acknowledge that I was wrong. "I think you"re right. If all the atomic bombs in the world were tied together and detonated, the earth surely would be blown to smithereens."
Our two marathon arguments thus resulted finally in a 11 tie. That, of course, is a matter of little consequence, just as the arguments themselves are of no great interest. The real point that emerges here is what absolute authority the phrase "Lu Xun" enjoyed during the Cultural Revolution era.
The story of Lu Xun and me continued to unfold, and in the following episode only he and I were involved. I have gone through some wild pa.s.sages in my life, and in one of them I put Lu Xun"s short story "A Madman"s Diary" to music.
I was then in my second year of middle school, which would make it 1974, when the Cultural Revolution had entered its final stages and life continued in its straitjacket as everyone"s apathy deepened. I would play basketball during math cla.s.s and stroll about on the playground during chemistry or physics, and there was nothing to stop me. But after getting sick of the cla.s.sroom, I got fed up with the playground, too. I would scowl with frustration at the length of each day. Freedom was simply tiresome, for there was nothing I could do with it. It was at this point I discovered music or, to be more precise, I discovered numbered musical notation, and so in a music cla.s.s that was just as boring as math I found renewed pleasure in life. As pa.s.sion returned I began to write music.
It was not music itself, I should point out, that enchanted me, but its numerical notation. I"m not sure why that was-perhaps it was simply that I knew absolutely nothing about notation. It was quite different from those Chinese or mathematics textbooks I leafed through, which I understood if I could be bothered to try. Musical notation, on the other hand, was a complete mystery to me. All I knew was that this was how those familiar revolutionary songs presented themselves in print, spilling across the paper like a bizarre cipher, dimly relating a story in sound. Ignorance engendered mystery, and mystery became allure, triggering my creative instincts.
Learning the system of numerical notation was not part of my plan. Rather, I began my musical composition-the only music I will ever write in my life, I"m sure-simply utilizing the outward trappings of that system, taking as my theme Lu Xun"s "A Madman"s Diary." First of all I copied Lu Xun"s story onto a new homework notebook; then I inserted notational symbols underneath the text just as the mood took me. I must have written practically the longest song tune in the world, a tune that n.o.body could perform and n.o.body would ever be able to hear.
I expended a great deal of energy on this project over a period of many days, filling up every last line of my notebook and quite wearing myself out in the process. Throughout I remained in total ignorance of the principles underlying numbered notation. Although I was now in possession of a brand-new opus that took up a whole notebook, I had not advanced one step closer to music and had not the slightest idea what kind of sound my score would produce. I simply felt that it looked a lot like a song, and that in itself was a great source of satisfaction.
I will always have a soft spot for that long-lost composition book and its world"s-longest song. My random notation recorded notes higgledy-piggledy, in a meter that was equally chaotic; but it also recorded my existential predicament in the final stages of the Cultural Revolution, a life made up of equal parts stifled instincts, dreary freedom, and hollow verbiage. What made me settle on "A Madman"s Diary"? I have no idea. All I know is, after I had written its score, I was unable to find any other literary materials that lent themselves to musical accompaniment and had no choice but to turn my attention to other genres: mathematical equations and chemical reactions. In the days that followed I filled up another composition book with the scores I wrote for them-equally arbitrary meters and haphazard notes, which, if ever performed, would surely make a noise this world has never heard. In h.e.l.l, I grant you, such sounds may well be part of the ambience, and when I tried to imagine the music I had produced, I tended to hear only the shrieking of ghosts and the howling of wolves. But now and then I would entertain another possibility: that, like a blind cat stumbling on a dead mouse, I had actually struck it lucky, that by some amazing fluke I had written music fit for heaven"s ears.
In retrospect, perhaps it"s not so strange that I chose "A Madman"s Diary" for my compositional experiment, for that t.i.tle is an apt description of my approach to recording a tune.
After the Cultural Revolution I found it curious that Mao Zedong had held Lu Xun in such high esteem. It was as though these two men were connected psychologically by a secret pa.s.sageway, for although distance separated them in life and death, they still seemed to maintain a capacity for intercommunication. Both were men of tenacious purpose and restless urges. Mao Zedong praised Lu Xun for his indomitable spirit, but Mao himself had just as firm a backbone, never giving ground in conflicts with the United States and the Soviet Union, although they were stronger than China. And both men, at the deepest level, were fundamental and extreme in their views, vehemently rejecting the Confucian doctrine of the golden mean.
Every great author needs great readers, and for Lu Xun to have such an influential reader as Mao Zedong may have been his good fortune, or it may have been his bad luck. During the Cultural Revolution Lu Xun changed from an author"s name to a fashionable political catchphrase, and the man"s scintillating and incisive works were submerged under a layer of dogmatic readings. In that era people constantly had "Mr. Lu Xun says" on their lips, in such a familiar tone that you might have thought all Chinese were distantly related to Lu Xun, but very few of them understood him as Mao had. And so, although Lu Xun"s reputation reached its pinnacle during the Cultural Revolution, true readers of his work were few and far between. "Mr. Lu Xun says" was really just a way of jumping on the bandwagon.
After the Cultural Revolution Lu Xun was no longer a sacrosanct term in our vocabulary-he reverted to being an author and returned to controversy. Many continued to honor Lu Xun, but there was no shortage of people who took to bad-mouthing him. Such attacks took a different form from those Lu Xun had faced during his own lifetime, now adding sensational elements to the mix as some showed an avid interest in Lu Xun"s personal affairs: the four women in his life, his poor showing in bed, his abnormal s.e.xual psychology....
With the rise of China"s market-based economy Lu Xun"s commercial value keeps being exploited constantly. The characters and places in his stories have been put to work as names for snack foods and alcoholic beverages and tourist destinations; they serve to designate private rooms in nightclubs and karaoke joints, where officials and businessmen, their arms wrapped around young hostesses, sing and dance to their hearts" content.
Some people directly employ Lu Xun as a cheerleader for their products. In the city of Wuhan, for example, a shop specializing in the popular delicacy known as stinky bean curd features Lu Xun in its advertising. The sign at its entrance reproduces a cla.s.sic photograph of Lu Xun smoking, the difference being that the cigarette in his mouth has been digitally erased and replaced with a skewer of stinky bean curd. The proprietor of the shop declares proudly that he and his staff all hail from Lu Xun"s hometown of Shaoxing and explains his advertis.e.m.e.nt as standard practice in China today, drumming up business by exploiting the buzz surrounding celebrity.
The fate of Lu Xun in China-going from being an author to being a catchphrase and then back again-reflects the fate of China itself, and in Lu Xun we can trace the zigzags of history and detect the imprints of our social upheavals.
At the university in Oslo my stories were not quite over. For a time, I told my audience, I was firmly convinced that Lu Xun was a terribly overrated writer whose awesome reputation was nothing more than a by-product of Chinese politics.
In 1984 I was working in the cultural center of a southern town and beginning to write my own stories. In the hallway outside my office stood a large table, under which were stacked works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Lu Xun. With the pa.s.sage of time these once-sacred texts had ended up piled in heaps like wastepaper and coated with a thick layer of dust. Lu Xun"s books were in the outermost stack, and I would often stub my toes on them as I went in and out of the office. Glancing down at the dusty gray volumes on the floor, I couldn"t help but rejoice at their misfortune, thinking to myself, "That guy"s days are over, thank goodness!" On one occasion I stumbled over the books and almost landed flat on my face. "d.a.m.n it!" I cried. "You"re finished, man, but still you try to give me a hard time!"
As the Cultural Revolution ended I had just graduated from high school. In the years that followed I read huge numbers of books but not one word of Lu Xun. When I myself became an author, Chinese critics expressed the view that I was an inheritor of the Lu Xun spirit, a label I found irksome, for I took it as a put-down.
In 1996 I was given an opportunity to reread Lu Xun. A film director was planning to make a movie based on some of his stories and asked me for some ideas on how to approach the adaptation, for a generous fee. Being short of cash at the time, I promptly agreed. Then I realized I didn"t have any of Lu Xun"s works on my shelves, so I went to a bookstore and purchased a copy of his collected short fiction.
That evening I turned on my desk light and began to read these tales that had so frequently been my required reading and from which I had always felt so estranged. The first story was that same "A Madman"s Diary" that I had put to music in my teenage years. Since then I had completely forgotten the plot, and now I reread the story with a fresh eye. Early on, when the madman senses that the whole world is acting abnormally, he makes the following remark: "Otherwise, why would the Zhaos" dog look at me that way?"
This gave me quite a shock. This Lu Xun fellow knew a thing or two, I thought to myself, to be able to capture a man"s lurch into insanity in just one sentence. Other, less talented authors sometimes want a character to lose his senses, but even after they have lavished thirty or forty pages on charting this development, their character still comes across as perfectly sane.
"Kong Yiji" was the third story I read that night. It had appeared over and over again in my Chinese textbooks, but it was not until I was thirty-six years old that I really understood what it was saying. As soon as I finished it, I phoned the director and told him I hoped he would give up on the idea of adapting the stories for the screen. "Don"t spoil things," I told him. "Lu Xun doesn"t deserve that."
The following day I went to the bookstore and bought a set of Complete Works of Lu Xun, in the new edition published after the Cultural Revolution. It made me think back to those books of his under the table in the cultural center, and it seemed to me now that they had been trying to tell me something. When they tripped me up as I went in and out of my office, they were actually dropping a hint, quietly but insistently signaling the presence of a powerful voice within the dusty tomes.
In the month that followed I immersed myself in Lu Xun"s lucid and supple writing. "When confronting reality," I would later write, "his narrative moves with such momentum it"s like a bullet that penetrates the flesh and goes out the other side, an unstoppable force."
Let me say something more about the story of Kong Yiji. Its opening, though simple, has profound implications. Lu Xun starts by describing the layout of the taverns in Luzhen: how the poor customers in their workingmen"s outfits drink standing up, while the affluent customers in their long gowns sit down at a table in the restaurant proper, eating and drinking in comfort. Kong Yiji is the only man in a long gown who stands at the bar. Lu Xun"s terse opening announces at the start his character"s anomalous social status.
What"s particularly notable in the story is that Lu Xun initially makes no mention of how Kong Yiji arrives at the tavern; it is only after his legs are broken in a ferocious beating that the point is addressed. This reflects a great writer"s sense of priorities: when Kong Yiji still retains use of both legs, his means of getting around can be left unspecified, but after his legs are broken, the issue becomes paramount. And so we come to the following pa.s.sage: Suddenly I heard a voice: "Give me a warm bowl of wine." The voice was very faint, but it sounded familiar. At first I could not see anyone, but when I stood up and looked more carefully, I found Kong Yiji sitting on the floor, facing the door, his back propped against the counter.
We see him only after we hear him-that in itself is striking. But after "Warming up the wine, I carried the bowl over and set it down on the doorsill" and Kong Yiji pulls out his four coppers in payment, a masterly description follows, in the form of one short sentence: "I saw that his hands were stained with mud and realized he had used them to crawl his way here."
That evening, for me Lu Xun finally changed from a catchphrase to a writer. Looking back on my schooldays, when I was force-fed Lu Xun, I have a variety of reactions: I feel that Lu Xun is not for children at all but for mature, sensitive readers. At the same time I feel that for a reader to truly encounter an author sometimes depends on finding the right moment.
After the Cultural Revolution ended, I read many books-some great, some indifferent. If I ever got tired of a book, I would simply put it aside so that I didn"t develop a distaste for its author. But during the Cultural Revolution it was impossible to set Lu Xun"s work aside, for I was forced to read him again and again; the result is that Lu Xun is the only author I have ever in my life disliked. When a writer is reduced to a catchphrase, he is bound to be the worse for it.
It did not come as a complete surprise, then, when a Norwegian historian came up to me after my talk and said, "I used to dislike Ibsen in just the same way."
revolution.
Some Western intellectuals take the view that an economy can enjoy rapid growth only in a society where the political system is fully democratic. They find it astonishing that in a nation where politics is far from transparent the economy can develop at such an impressive pace. But they are overlooking, I think, a crucial point: behind China"s economic miracle there is a pair of powerful hands pushing things along, and their owner"s name is Revolution.*
After 1949, when the Communist Party came to power, it steadily maintained its commitment to carry out revolution to the fullest. At that point, of course, revolution no longer meant armed struggle so much as a series of political movements, each hot on the heels of the one before, reaching ultimate extremes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Later, when China reintroduced itself to the world in the guise of a freewheeling, market-driven economy, revolution appeared to have vanished. But in our economic miracle since 1978, revolution never disappeared but simply donned a different costume. To put it another way, within China"s success story one can see both revolutionary movements reminiscent of the Great Leap Forward and revolutionary violence that recalls the Cultural Revolution.
Let me say something first about the echoes of the Great Leap Forward, starting with some statistics showing the rapid growth of steel output in China. In 1978, the first year of the reforms, it was just over 30 million tons. Two years later, in 1980, it reached 37.12 million tons, the fifth largest steel output in the world. By 1996 it had jumped to No. 1 in the world, where it has stayed ever since. In 2008 it exceeded 500 million tons, or 32 percent of the world"s total steel output, more than that of the next seven nations in the world combined. In 2009 China"s steel output reached 600 million tons, outstripping by 30 percent the goal set by the government of 460 million tons.
On the positive side, these figures reflect the rapid pace of China"s economic growth, but behind them another story is hidden. In 2008 the country"s steel capacity reached 660 million tons, of which 460 million tons were consumed in construction and manufacturing, leaving an excess capacity of 200 million tons. One fact about China"s steel industry over the past thirty years cannot be glossed over: the speed of the growth in output has clearly outstripped the expansion of the economy. The same kind of frenzied steel production that we saw during the Great Leap Forward has taken place once more on Chinese soil.
During the Great Leap Forward of 1958, under the slogan "Surpa.s.s the UK, catch up with the USA," the Chinese people were mobilized to smelt steel. Backyard furnaces filled courtyards in Chinese cities and towns and dotted the Chinese countryside; fires burned everywhere, and smoke billowed across the Chinese sky. Peasants abandoned agriculture for ore extraction and steel production while crops ripened and rotted in the fields. Those employed in the urban sector-workers in pharmaceutical plants and textile mills, department store clerks and cashiers, teachers and students, doctors and nurses-put aside their regular jobs and went off to smelt steel. In that era people were anxious not to be labeled "pa.s.sive resisters of the Great Leap Forward"; partic.i.p.ation in the steel drive was the only route to glory. You can"t make steel without ore, so the country people smashed their woks and city people tore down the metal window frames and duct pipes from their work units and homes and tossed them into the backyard furnaces-with results you can imagine. That year China"s total steel output was 10.7 million tons, twice the figure of 1957, but at least a third of it was useless sc.r.a.p. People carried on regardless, smelting steel as the raging fires turned the sky red. They toiled in front of blazing furnaces, sweat streaming down their backs, and as they worked they recited a jingle that captured the spirit of the time, "Let"s Compare": You"re all heroes and we"re all champs, By the furnace here let"s compare our stats. Good for you, you"ve smelted a ton-But a ton and a half is what we"ve done! Right, you go off and fly your jet-Now watch as we launch our rocket! Your arrow can pierce the sky-But ours has gone into orbit!
In the 1990s, as the tide of economic development swept over China, a similar situation began to reappear. In the fields surrounding one large steel plant in eastern China, backyard furnaces went up and in the blink of an eye peasants became sweat-stained steelworkers. After melting the iron ore, they poured it immediately into a specially designed tanker. The driver would stamp his foot on the accelerator and drive the tanker full tilt into the steel plant, where the liquid iron was dumped into a standard industrial furnace for further processing. Under normal circ.u.mstances a large furnace produces steel about fourteen times in a twenty-four-hour period, but with the peasants first melting ore in their own furnaces, plants were able to increase production to thirty times a day. Of course, this time what the peasants made in their homegrown furnaces was not useless pig iron, and they were making steel not for some empty political agenda but to put money in their own pockets. Given this frantic effort to make more steel, it"s no wonder that China"s output has grown so rapidly. Because the tankers carrying liquid iron shuttled back and forth incessantly between the furnaces in the fields and the furnaces in the plants, they discharged so much heat that it roasted road surfaces and converted the leafy trees lining the highways into dry skeletons.
The Great Leap Forward of 1958 began, in a sense, as a comedy-a romantic and absurd comedy. Fakery, exaggeration, and bombast were the order of the day. Even the most productive rice fields at the time could produce only about one and a half tons per acre, but under the slogan "The more boldly a man dares, the more richly his land bears" districts all over the country claimed that per-acre production had topped five tons. On September 18, 1958, for example, the People"s Daily published a special news report: "Rice production in Huanjiang County, Guangxi, reaches six and a half tons per acre." These bogus reports were fabricated to a high level of detail. Pigs, it was said, now topped the scales at more than eleven hundred pounds; their heads were the size of large wicker baskets, and there was as much meat on them as on three pigs in the old days; a pot three feet tall and three feet wide was not big enough to cook one of these jumbo-sized porkers-why, even with a pot six feet across you could cook only half a pig! Pumpkins had been induced to grow so big that children could play games inside them.
A folk rhyme called "A Sweet Potato Rolling Off the Slope" was all the rage. It went like this: Through our commune fine a stream flows deep, By the riverside the hill climbs steep.
We pick sweet potatoes on its lee, Laughing and joking, merry as can be.
Then, a sudden splash-a huge fountain of spray, "Oh, no!" I cry, and jump up in dismay.
"Who fell in? I hope they can swim!"
Everyone chuckles, thinking me dim: "Don"t worry, no need to throw in a rope- That was just a sweet potato rolling off the slope!"
In August 1958 administrative units at the township level were abolished and replaced in one fell swoop with People"s Communes. Then, at one more fell swoop, communal dining halls were established: peasants no longer ate in their own homes but went to the dining halls to feast. "Stuff yourselves full, then redouble production" was the slogan of the hour. Communal dining halls consumed grain without any kind of planning and recklessly wasted resources, sometimes promoting eating contests. In their efforts to win the Top Trencherman award peasants were known to get so bloated they had to be carted off to the hospital.
Within a few months grain depots everywhere were empty. The curtain fell on that absurd romantic comedy, and in its place the stage was set for a cruel and all too realistic tragedy. Famine ruthlessly enveloped China. Because regions had falsely reported the size of their harvests, the state"s grain procurement was vastly greater than actual output. Local officials had inflated their production figures to impress their superiors, and now it was the peasants who paid the price, for their grain ration, seed grain, and feed grain were all requisitioned by the state. Some localities, in the name of the revolution, began a savage campaign to ferret out those engaged in "concealment of produce and private distribution," and officials in communes and production brigades were ordered to establish "grain-inspection shock teams" that conducted house-by-house searches, turning the occupants" possessions upside down, rooting around in their yards, and searching inside walls. If the teams were unable to find grain to confiscate, they would take it out on the hapless peasants. In one such campaign by Xiaoxihe Commune in Anhui"s Fengyang County, more than three thousand people were beaten; of these one hundred suffered crippling injuries and thirty or more perished while undergoing "reform through labor" imposed by the commune. At this point, hunger came roaring in like a hurricane and death tightened its grip on one province after another. According to official figures released later, during the Great Leap Forward, in Sichuan Province alone, more than eight million people died of hunger-one in every nine residents.
Even after so many years, while people still reflect on the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, that same type of development keeps rearing its head in our economic life. One sees signs of it in the frenzy to construct airports, harbors, highways, and other such large-scale public works. These projects in theory must first win approval from the central government, but in reality many local governments first launch their project and only later submit it for approval. Thus impractical, extravagant, and duplicate initiatives are common, and they are pursued as vigorously as a revolutionary campaign. Take port construction as an example. Along the four hundred miles of coast in Hebei and Tianjin there are no fewer than four major ports: Qinhuangdao, Jingtang, Tianjin, and Huanghua. In 2003, although all four ports were underutilized, this did not stop them from constantly increasing investment and expanding their facilities.
With the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, some of the more forward-looking Great Leap Forwardtype construction projects have progressed quickly from being undernourished to having indigestion. But other such projects remain in a state of persistent neglect. Some expressways, like the Shi-Huang Highway in Hebei and the Tai-Jing Highway in Jiangxi, have been in service for more than ten years but rarely see more traffic than just a few cars and tour buses. The Internet is rife with jokes about how you could hold a Formula One Grand Prix on one of these highways any day of the week, or that they would be great places to go for a nice quiet honeymoon.
In 1999 the Ministry of Education decided to greatly expand enrollments in higher education, and China"s educational Great Leap Forward began. In 2006 inst.i.tutions of higher education recruited 5.4 million new students, five times as many as in 1998; the total number of those enrolled was 25 million. The ministry proudly declared: In the scale of its higher education, China has overtaken Russia, then India, and now the United States, to become No. 1 in the world. In just a few short years of a.s.siduous effort, under conditions where per capita GDP is just US $1,000, higher education in China has achieved the shift from elite to widespread education, completing a process that other countries have needed forty or fifty years-or even longer-to complete.
Behind all the glorious statistics in China today, crises tend to lurk. The loans that Chinese universities have relied on to fund their enrollment expansion already exceed 200 billion yuan. This staggering debt is likely to become another fiasco for China"s commercial banks, because Chinese universities lack the wherewithal to repay their loans. At the same time, university tuition in the past ten or fifteen years has risen enormously, to twenty-five or even fifty times as much as it used to be, ten times the rate of income growth. Supporting a college student today is estimated to require the equivalent of 4.2 years of an urban net income or 13.6 years of a rural net income. The Great Leap Forward type of enrollment growth has created immense difficulties in the job market: every year we are adding more than 1 million college graduates who cannot find work. Many low-income parents are prepared to bankrupt themselves and take on enormous debt to put their children through college; but after graduation those children join the army of unemployed, and their parents can only sink deeper into financial hardship. Given this harsh reality, some children are forced to abandon their dreams: as soon as they graduate from high school they put a bedroll on their backs and become migrant laborers instead. In 2009, after thirty-two years of increases, there was actually a drop in the number of high school students taking the university entrance examination.
Let"s now consider how the revolutionary violence of the Cultural Revolution has continued to rear its head in the course of China"s economic success story of the past thirty years. Here it helps to know something about official seals. Round wooden seals less than two inches in diameter, they weigh no more than a pack of cigarettes, but in our sixty years under communism these insubstantial-looking accessories have often been the concrete emblems of immense political and economic power. Doc.u.ments of appointment require an official seal, contracts between companies require a seal, and seals also provide verification of whether one possesses legal status: work ID, student ID, birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, and so forth all require authentication with an official seal. In China official seals are needed everywhere, all the time.
In January 1967 the rebel faction in Shanghai launched an a.s.sault on the city government, s.n.a.t.c.hing away the government"s official seal and announcing the successful seizure of power. This was the celebrated "January Revolution." Similar movements then convulsed the entire country as rebel factions and Red Guards everywhere launched attacks on their government organs, on factories and schools, and on People"s Communes. These nationwide power seizures amounted, in a sense, to a movement to seize official seals. Like robbers or bandits, rebels and Red Guards smashed open the doors and windows of government buildings and factories and schools, rushed in exultantly, and broke into desks and cabinets, ransacking offices in their search for these symbols of authority.
Whoever seized the official seal would be the possessor of true power; they could issue orders right and left and allocate funds with supreme confidence, destroy the lives of people they disliked, and use public money to bankroll their expenses. Any and all actions would be instantly legitimized, so long as they were recorded on a piece of paper and stamped with the official seal.
As a result, deadly struggles developed between different rebel factions and Red Guard organizations, with both sides intent on seizing official seals. Sometimes several organizations would launch simultaneous attacks on government offices, all eager to be first to seize the seal. They would scale walls and jump through windows-whatever it took to get the jump on their rivals. It sometimes looked a lot like a game of American football, for as one group tried to break into the offices, another group would fearlessly hurl themselves at them, tugging on their jackets and wrestling them to the ground so as to enable their comrades to enter the building first. Sometimes a rebel faction had just managed to seize the government seal, only to discover that other rebel organizations already had them surrounded.
I witnessed one such scene myself when I was seven years old. Standing under a willow tree, I watched, transfixed, as a revolutionary power seizure took place on the other side of the river. A dozen or more rebels had rushed inside the three-story building that housed the local government offices. They had just given a whoop of delight to celebrate their seizure of the seal when a different group of rebels arrived on the scene. There were forty or fifty of them, armed with clubs, and they soon had the offices completely surrounded. Their commander picked up a megaphone and barked out an instruction to the rebels inside, telling them to hand over the seal without further delay. And if they refused? "You may have gone in on your own two legs," he threatened, "but they"ll have to bring you out on stretchers."
The defenders had a megaphone of their own. "You"ve got to be joking!" they fired back. They followed this with a chorus of "Long Live Chairman Mao!"
The besiegers responded with their own "Long Live Chairman Mao!" and charged inside, waving their clubs. Amid cries of "Long Live Chairman Mao!" and "Defend Great Leader Chairman Mao to the Death!" the two groups of combatants clashed in a frantic melee. From my side of the river I could dimly make out the sounds of gla.s.s shattering, clubs and chairs breaking, and howls of pain. The occupiers, vastly outnumbered, were forced to give ground, finally evacuating to the flat concrete roof. Two of their wounded had to be dragged up the stairs; they lay motionless on the roof, just barely alive. Soon the other rebels launched their final a.s.sault, clubs flailing, and three of the defenders were knocked right off the roof. One of them was clutching the seal in his hand, and just before he fell he threw it as far as he could into the river below.
The attackers had won the battle, only to see their most valuable prize now floating off downstream. They rushed out of the building, yelling wildly. One of the rebels raced ahead to a wooden bridge; there he stripped off his clothes and slipped out of his cotton shoes, then threw himself into the chilly waters. Amid the cheers of his comrades on the bank, he splashed his way into the middle of the current and grabbed the seal before it sank below the surface.
Afterward the town"s new power holders conducted a victory parade. The intrepid swimmer, still soaking wet, led the way, clutching the seal in his right hand. His comrades followed close behind, some with blood on their faces, others hobbling along, living proof of how fierce the fighting had been. In between yells of "Long Live Chairman Mao!" they announced that the "January Revolution" in our town had now achieved total victory. The man who had risked his life to recover the seal was now a local hero. In the days that followed, more than once I saw him come to an abrupt stop as he walked down the street, give an enormous sneeze, then continue on his way.
Chinese society now is radically different from what it was during the Cultural Revolution, but the status of official seals has not changed in the slightest: they remain the symbol of political and economic power. So seizures of official seals continue to take place in China today.
Owing to tensions among shareholders, some privately run companies have seen farcical to-and-fro tussles where the company"s seal keeps changing hands. Shareholders may look so proper in their suits and leather shoes, but if they want to grab control of the company, they will seize the official seal with as little delicacy as underworld thugs. They punch and kick, spit and curse, smash chairs and break cups, quite indifferent to the impression they give the employees. This kind of episode has also been known to occur in law offices, when lawyers who pride themselves on their legal knowledge vie for possession of the company seal just as fiercely as bandits in the old days competed to abduct women. Even in state-run enterprises, seizures of seals sometimes happen. Such companies are nominally led by a board of trustees, but their traditional party committee structure remains entrenched. In 2007 the party secretary of one state-run enterprise, at loggerheads with the chairman of the board, dismissed him in the name of the party committee-despite the fact that legally only a board of trustees has the power to take such action. Then the party secretary brought in dozens of toughs to smash open the door of the chairman"s office with sledgehammers and pry open his cabinet, carrying off the company seal.
Such incidents happen not only internally within enterprises; they often take place between companies, and even between government ent.i.ties. In one case, for example, a company in south China lost a lawsuit because its rival had produced testimony from a third company that served to discredit it. The defendant appealed the ruling and, before the appeal was heard, fabricated a different doc.u.ment ascribed to this third company, going to extreme lengths to make it appear authentic. Several of the defendant"s enforcers pushed their way into the third company"s offices-the staff were so intimidated that they hid in a bathroom-and then broke into a filing cabinet, took out the company seal, and stamped the doctored doc.u.ments. When the case was heard, the defendant proudly brought out the doc.u.ments in support of its case, rejecting all claims that the doc.u.ments were fake and the seal was invalid.
In another case, one government agency seized another"s seal. Ten acres of land under a village"s jurisdiction had been requisitioned by higher authorities in the adjacent city, but the village and the city had not been able to reach agreement on the selling price. The city tried to force the village committee into compliance, but under pressure from rank-and-file villagers the village committee refused to ratify the proposed agreement. The city government, exasperated, sent people into the village to s.n.a.t.c.h away the seal, then stamped the agreement in the village committee"s name.
From the Cultural Revolution to the present, there are countless such examples; sometimes there are striking similarities between things that happened then and things that are happening now. A friend told me that during the power-seizure phase of the Cultural Revolution a factory in the town where he lived had two separate rebel organizations. They were of equal strength, and their commanders understood that they would suffer serious casualties if they were to fight over the seal. So they negotiated a power-sharing agreement: the factory seal would be cut into two, and each faction would retain half. When both commanders agreed on a particular course of action, they would produce their half-seals and press them together on a letter or directive, then pocket them once more. In the stamp on the finished doc.u.ments a crack could clearly be seen.
Years later, in the reform era, another story of a cracked seal is linked to a private entrepreneur"s rise to glory. Today he leads a large enterprise, but to start with he was just the deputy manager of a small company. Like a rebel activist in the Cultural Revolution, he gathered a group of like-minded people around him. First he frightened the manager into vacating his position, and then he threatened to break the legs of the chairman of the board, forcing him out, too. Now he was chairman of the board and manager combined.
The original chairman took the company seal away with him when he fled, and without the seal the company could not conduct normal business. But the new boss man wasn"t going to let such a petty detail stand in his way. In Chinese cities you can find tucked away in every neighborhood small businesses that will make you an official seal on the quiet, so he told an underling to go out and get a new seal carved. This was illegal, since official seals require a letter of authorization from the relevant government department, but for a man with entrepreneur"s ambitions legal niceties counted for nothing. Having a seal of his own did not entirely resolve the issue, however, because the existence of the other seal could still hamstring the company"s operations; the original chairman of the board might use it to sign contracts, for example, sowing all kinds of confusion.
But to the businessman, that was a minor detail, too. When his aide arrived with the newly carved seal, he told him to go out again and buy an axe. The a.s.sistant could make no sense of that but did his bidding all the same, then watched in astonishment as his new boss put the seal on his desk, raised the axe, and cleaved the seal neatly in two. Finally, he confirmed his authority with an announcement that, henceforth, contracts approved by the company would need to have a cracked stamp to be genuine; those with an unblemished stamp would be fakes.
Such acts of intimidation are common among some Chinese entrepreneurs, who not only rely on beatings to seize control but will even hire people to kill their rivals, putting the mafiosi in Hollywood movies completely in the shade.
As China"s economy has raced forward, violence reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution has taken place not only on the popular level but also with official backing. Just consider how urbanization has been pursued, with huge swathes of old housing razed in no time at all and replaced in short order by high-rise buildings. These large-scale demolitions can make Chinese cities look as though they have been targets of a bombing raid. In a joke once popular among urban residents, the CIA was said to have traced Osama bin Laden to a hideout in their city. A spy plane enters the airs.p.a.ce overhead, only to discover a scene of utter devastation. "I don"t know who ordered the bombing," the American pilot reports back to headquarters, "but there"s no way bin Laden could have survived this."
Behind the situation is a developmental model saturated with revolutionary violence of the Cultural Revolution type. To suppress popular discontent and resistance, some local governments send in large numbers of police to haul away any residents who refuse to budge. Then a dozen or more giant bulldozers will advance in formation, knocking down a blockful of old houses in no time at all. When the residents are finally released, they find only rubble where their homes once stood. Vagrants now, they have no option but to bow to reality and accept the housing offered.
In a typical case, back in 2007, a family of five was unable to reach agreement with the local authorities on compensation for the loss of their house and found themselves forcibly evicted. One night as they were sleeping, a gang of men in hard hats threw ladders up against the outside wall, smashed the windows with hammers and clubs, and jumped inside. The family woke to find themselves surrounded by dozens of intruders. Before they were fully aware of what was happening, they were dragged from their beds like criminals and rushed downstairs without being allowed to dress or collect any personal effects; any resistance was met with a punch in the jaw. They were shoved into a van and taken off to an empty house. There they sat, huddled in their bedcovers, on a cold concrete floor, guarded by a couple of dozen policemen, until noon that day, when an official came in and informed them that their house had been razed and their property inventoried and moved to a new address. Given the fait accompli, they had no choice but to move into the house a.s.signed them. When they talked about the incident afterward, it seemed more like a scene in a movie than real life, for it had all happened so suddenly. "Even in a war, you give your enemy some time to surrender," they moaned.
Our economic miracle-or should we say, the economic gain in which we so revel-relies to a significant extent on the absolute authority of local governments, for an administrative order on a piece of paper is all that"s required to implement drastic change. The method may be simple and crude, but the results in terms of economic development are instantaneous. That is why I say it is the lack of political transparency that has facilitated China"s breakneck growth.
Violent evictions are all too common in China today, provoking many acts of collective resistance. In November 2009, in a city in the southwest, dozens of men carrying steel pipes and crowbars burst into the homes of nine families whose houses were earmarked for demolition. The men stuck duct tape over the mouths of some thirteen residents and hustled them into waiting vehicles; four of the homeowners were injured in the struggle. Then two earthmoving machines revved their engines and demolished twenty-six houses within a matter of minutes. Yet more violent confrontation ensued after daybreak, when the outraged evictees and their friends and relatives-some thirty people or more-blocked the nearby intersection with red cotton strips and more than forty liquefied gas canisters, demanding an apology from the local government. On the ground that the roadblock was disrupting the social order, police dispersed them and detained four instigators on charges of fomenting a disturbance and obstructing traffic.
In the same month a woman"s house was forcibly demolished by the local government because she refused to sign a resettlement agreement that stipulated compensation at what was obviously below-market value. As the bulldozer knocked open the front door and began to ram the outer walls, and her house began to rupture and collapse, she drank a large gla.s.s of whiskey to bolster her courage; then, aided by her husband, she stood on her fourth-floor balcony and tossed Molotov c.o.c.ktails at the earthmover and the demolition crew, who retaliated by throwing stones at her. Despite her stubborn resistance, after several hours her apartment too was flattened; later the couple was found guilty of obstructing public works and her husband was sentenced to eight months in prison.
Also that same month, on November 11 in Chengdu, a woman named Tang Fuzhen took things one step further. After attacking a demolition crew with Molotov c.o.c.ktails and putting up resistance for more than three hours, she doused herself with gasoline and ignited it with a cigarette lighter, burning herself to death. This incident finally triggered a furor in the Chinese media, and although the local government cla.s.sified her self-immolation as violent resistance to the law, public opinion sided with Tang Fuzhen. People began to question the legality of the Regulation Governing House Demolition and Resettlement in Urban Areas, and five professors at Peking University Law School sent a proposal to the Standing Committee of the National People"s Congress recommending that the regulation be revised, pointing out that it conflicts with both the Const.i.tution and the Property Rights Law.
In the past few years social contradictions triggered by forced demolitions have become more and more common, and social conflicts have become more intense. Tang Fuzhen"s suicide triggered resentments that had long been building up, and in the face of strong public pressure the State Council indicated that it would revise the Regulation Governing House Demolition and Resettlement in Urban Areas. But just as many people were expecting a crackdown on forced demolition and resettlement, reality has exposed their naivety, for such incidents, far from diminishing, have if anything become even more grave.
Late on the night of March 26, 2011, twenty mechanical diggers and several hundred men armed with pickaxes suddenly descended on a residential compound affiliated with Changchun Film Studio in Jilin Province. Fourteen buildings were razed to the ground in a matter of just five hours. Not only were there forcible evictions, but some residents were carried out and dumped like garbage outside their homes. A fifty-year-old woman named Liu Shuxiang, trapped in her room, was crushed under fallen masonry and had died by the time police finally came to investigate, two days later.