Riding the Iron Rooster Read online

  These workers earn 100 yuan a month, basic pay—about $40—but there are bonus and incentive schemes for high productivity.

  Mr. Tan, a worker who was showing me around, said, "Workers in higher positions earn more."

  "I thought everyone earned the same."

  "Not anymore. The basic pay might be the same, but one of the reforms in China is the bonuses. They vary according to your position and the kind of work you do, and also to where you live and what prices are like."

  This sliding pay scale was more or less heretical, but it was the way the Chinese economy now operated. I asked Mr. Tan if this reform of the pay structure had been successful.

  He was very open with me. He shrugged and said, "Datong is behind in many ways—say, with regard to pay and conditions. This is an out-of-the-way place. There are many things that can be improved here. Other parts of China are much better off, particularly in the south."

  As we talked, donkey carts carried heavy iron fittings through the factory, the donkeys sniffing the fires of the forges and looking miserable but resigned.

  Mr. Tan gave me more statistics. At best statistics are misleading, but Chinese ones are like hackneyed adjectives—a million of this, two million of that—and ultimately meaningless and improbable.

  "Eighty-six blocks of flats," he said, but so what? The flats are dark and dingy, in bad repair, with coal piles stacked against the kitchen door, and cracked walls, and painted-out slogans, and two beds in every room. The rarest room in China is one that does not contain a bed.

  "This hospital has one hundred and thirty rooms," he said. But the hospital is not a pretty place: it is drafty, and not particularly clean, and it is very noisy.

  The oddest feature of the Datong Locomotive Works is the portrait of Chairman Mao in the visitors' room. There are very few portraits of Mao on view in China, though another grand Chinese statistic is that there were 70 million Mao portaits hanging at the time of his death in 1976. Deng Xiaoping regards all portraits as feudal and instituted a no-portrait policy in 1981 at a Party Congress that summed up the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution.

  "What did you do with your Mao portraits?" I asked Mr. Tan.

  "Threw them away."

  "Why didn't you keep them with your souvenirs?"

  "Because I didn't want to remember."

  The slogans on the banners in the factory were not political. Many were about safety, and others about working together. One said Workers Should Go All Out for the Three Greatest Goals. I asked what these goals were and was told: timing production so that no work was wasted; keeping the right mental attitude; and increasing productivity. Their virtue was their vagueness. In the past—the recent past—factory slogans had been concerned with Mao worship and smashing imperialists and their running dogs.

  It seemed to me that, as this was a machine shop, any machine could be made here. The same technology that produced these boilers and pipes could produce military tanks and cannons.

  'That's true," Mr. Tan said. "But we already have a factory that makes tanks in Datong."

  I did not know whether his telling me this military secret was deliberate candor or simple innocence, but whatever it was I liked him for it; and I asked him more questions.

  Mr. Tan was about thirty, but looked older. The Chinese look young until their mid-twenties and then they begin to look very haggard and beaten. A certain serenity returns to their features when they are in their sixties, and they go on growing more graceful and dignified and become not old, but ageless. Mr. Tan had been through the Cultural Revolution and had been a Red Guard in Datong.

  "But I was a follower, not a leader."

  "Of course."

  "I'm glad it's over. When Mao died, it ended, but then we had a few more years of uncertainty," he said. And then, glancing around the great clanging factory, he added, "But there are people on the Central Committee who would like to take over from Deng and run things their way."

  "Is that bad?"

  "Yes, because they would set themselves up as dictators."

  "Do people write about this in the newspapers?"

  'The papers don't write about democracy. Even the very word 'democracy' is regarded as bad. If you say it you're in trouble."

  "How do you know that?"

  He smiled and said, "I used to write for The Datong Daily. But they changed my articles and turned them into propaganda. It wasn't what I had written, so I stopped being a reporter."

  "How could you stop, just like that?"

  "They stopped me, I mean. I was criticized and given a different job to do with less money. But I don't care. What is the point of writing stories if they are changed when they are published?"

  We talked about the rich and the poor—people who stayed in good hotels and people who lived in caves (Shanxi and Gansu provinces were full of cave dwellers). Mr. Tan said there was a big gap, but that you would not necessarily be respected merely because you had money.

  "These Chinese people who have money we call 'secondhand sellers.'" He meant hustlers, peddlers, junk dealers. "They don't read or go to museums or temples. They have money, that's all."

  I taught Mr. Tan the word "philistine."

  I went to the Yungang Caves outside Datong, where travelers used to draw chalk circles on the beautiful frescoes and Chinese workmen would hack them off the wall and wrap them up; and where another lively business was the beheading of Buddhas. Even so, there are plenty of Buddhas left—and several in the larger caves are as tall as a three-story building. But there is something predictable about Chinese sight-seeing, and even the best attractions—which these Buddhist caves were—have been renovated and repainted until all the art is lost. What travelers had begun to destroy by snatching and plundering, the Red Guards finished in the Cultural Revolution, and the only reason the Red Guards were not totally successful in wiping out the sculptures in the Yungang Caves was that there were too many of them. So they survived, but they were not quite the same afterward.

  The same was true of the Hanging Temple, the "midair monastery," an odd Wei Dynasty structure of steep stairs and balconies built against the vertical side of a ravine at Hengshan, about forty miles south of Datong. The Chinese flock to it; tourists are encouraged to visit. But it too had been wrecked by Red Guards, and it too had been rebuilt, and a great deal had been lost in the restoration. It looked garish and clumsy and patched.

  Sight-seeing is one of the more doubtful aspects of travel, and in China it is one of the least rewarding things a traveler can do—primarily a distraction and seldom even an amusement. It has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits.

  Much more interesting to me on this visit to the Hanging Temple was the Valley of the Lings, a great dry gorge in which most of the Lings lived in caves. They had hollowed out parts of the steep walls where there were ledges, and scooped out passageways and chopped windows into them. A few lived in mud huts on the floor of the valley, but the rest inhabited the terraces of cave dwellings with their crudely cut doors and windows in the reddish rock. The place looked very strange and primitive, but walking around, I could see that life was going on as normal—the people tended vegetable gardens, they fished, they did their laundry and cooked and aired their mattresses and ran a few shops and had a school and a brickworks. And they were located in a dramatic cleft in the mountains and must have known how lucky they were to have this space and this good air.

  One of the weirder Chinese statistics is that 35 million Chinese people still live in caves. There is no government program to remove these troglodytes and put them into tenements, but there is a scheme to give them better caves. The China Daily (19 May 1986) described how a farsighted architect, Ren Zhenying, had designed "an improved cave" by making the caverns larger and adding bigger windows and doors and ventilators. One model cave had forty-two rooms, and a number of three-bedroom apartments. He was quoted as saying, "It stays cool in summer and warm in winter and saves energy and land that
could be used for farming."

  It seemed to me a kind of lateral thinking. Why rehouse or resettle these cave dwellers? The logical solution was to improve the caves. That was very Chinese.

  It was a bit like steam locomotives—those brand-new antiques that they turned out year after year. The design was not bad—it just looked old-fashioned, and in a coal-producing country, the steam locomotive was very economical.

  If this was a time warp it was a very reassuring one. My hotel bedroom had a spittoon and a chamber pot. The armchairs had slipcovers and antimacassars, and the varnished desk was covered by an embroidered cloth, and it held a water jug, a propped-up calendar and a vase of plastic flowers. In the drawer was a small bottle of ink, and a penholder with a steel nib. None of it could be called modern, but most of it was unbreakable.

  It seems comic and perhaps absurd to most Westerners; but it is not a joke—not in a society where they fish in rivers using nets designed 2000 years ago. China has suffered more cataclysms than any other country on earth. And yet it endures and even prospers. I began to think that long after the computers had exploded and the satellites had burned out and all the jumbo jets had crashed and we had awakened from the hi-tech dream, the Chinese would be chugging along in choo-choo trains, and plowing the ancient terraces, and living contentedly in caves, and dunking quill pens in bottles of ink and writing their history.

  3. Night Train Number 90 to Peking

  Never mind that their uniforms don't fit, that their caps slip sideways and their toes stick out of their sandals; what most Chinese officials illustrate is how bad-tempered and unbending Chinese bureaucracy is. They are in great contrast to the average person who doesn't wear a uniform, who is fairly flexible and who will probably be willing to make a deal. Such hustlers are found in the Free Market—as the new bazaars are called—and not on Chinese railways.

  The glowering and barking woman at the gate at Datong Station at midnight was exactly like Cerberus. Three minutes before the Lanzhou train pulled out she slammed the entry gate and padlocked it, leaving a group of soldiers and many other latecomers clinging to the bars and making them miss their train. As a further indignity she switched off the overhead lights of the ticket barrier and left us all in the dark. She would not let me through until the Peking train pulled in. And then she slammed the gate again and made more latecomers watch while I boarded. It is not merely unbending; there is often a lot of sadism in bureaucracy.

  It was almost midnight. I found my berth in the sleeping car and, ignoring the other occupants (was one a woman?), went to bed. At 5:30 in the morning, Chinese bureaucracy rose up again and flung the door open, switched on the lights and demanded the blankets and sheets. I turned over, trying to return to my dream—tacking in a light breeze across Lewis Bay. The sleeping-car attendant in a white pastrycook's hat and apron dug her fingers into my hip and yelled at me to get up.

  "The train doesn't arrive until seven-fifteen!"

  "Get up and give me the bedding!"

  "Let me sleep!"

  A young man sitting on the berth opposite said to me, "They want you to get out of bed. They are folding the sheets."

  "What's the hurry? We won't arrive for almost two hours. I want to sleep."

  The sleeping-car attendant took hold of the blankets, and I knew she was going to do the Mongolian trick of snapping the bedding off me in one stroke.

  My Chinese was functional and unsubtle. I said to the young man, "Do me a favor. Translate this. If they're eager to do a good job, tell them to go clean the toilet. It was so disgusting last night I couldn't use it. The floor's dirty. The windows are dirty. There's no hot water in the thermos jug. What's so important about the blankets?"

  He shook his head. He wouldn't translate. He knew—and so did I—that if the blankets and sheets were folded the sleeping-car attendants could go straight home as soon as we arrived in Peking Central Station. They were not paid overtime for folding laundry.

  Shhlloooppp: she whipped the bedding off me and left me shivering in my blue pajamas in the predawn darkness.

  "I couldn't tell them," the young man said. "They wouldn't listen."

  He meant they would lose face. After all, they were only doing their job. His name was Mr. Peng. He was reading Huckleberry Finn to improve his English. I always softened to people I saw reading books, but I told him that one would not do much for his English. He was twenty-seven, a native of Datong. He was married. His wife was a secretary. He said she was a simple girl—that was what had attracted him to her. They had no children. "We are only allowed to have one, so we're waiting a little while."

  Dawn came up on Peking. It was immediately apparent that this sprawling and countrified capital was turning into a vertical city. It was thick with tall cranes, the heavy twenty-story variety that are shaped like an upside-down L. I counted sixty of them before we reached Peking Central Station. They were building new apartment blocks, towers, hotels, office buildings. There were overpasses and new tunnels, and most of the roads looked recent. The traffic choked some of these streets. The city was bigger, noisier, brighter, more prosperous—it amazed me, because I had seen it in thinner times. And of course I was thinking also of the Russian gloom and Mongolian deprivation and Polish anger; the self-denial and rapacity, the food shortages, the banged-up cars. Peking was being transformed, as if someone had simply sent out a decree saying, "Build this city." In a way, that was exactly what had happened. This new mood, this boom, was less than five years old. In Chinese history that is no more than an eye-blink, but it was clear that the city was rising.

  That was my first impression—of newness: new taxis, new buildings, clean streets, bright clothes, billboards. It was not a lived-in looking city, but rather one for visitors—tourists and businessmen. There were nine new hotels going up, and more restaurants and department stores. No new theaters or parks. The new schools specialized in languages and offered courses in tourism; and one of the larger new schools did nothing but train taxi drivers. Some movie houses had reopened, but there were no new orchestras. Peking had stopped being an imperial city and had begun to be a tourist attraction. The most disturbing sign of its transformation was that it was full of foreign bankers and accountants.

  It is probably true to say that any nation that is passionate about putting up new buildings is equally passionate about pulling old ones down. For a thousand years or more Peking was surrounded by a high and elaborate wall, with vast pillars and gates, that had made the city into a fortress. In 1963, to make room for some hideous tenements, the wall was knocked down. Its absence has not been particularly lamented. The traditional Chinese compounds they call yards (siheyuan), with the wall, the circular moon gate and screen behind it, and the rambling house—these made up the residential sections of Peking. They too are mostly gone—again sacrificed to the tower blocks. The little inns and guest houses are going or gone, and huge hotels have taken their place—the Holiday Inn and the Sheraton Great Wall are but two of the thirty high-priced hotels. The part of Peking that has not changed at all is the Forbidden City, for even the Chinese know that if they were to pull that down, there would be no reason for anyone to visit Peking. And any sentiment the Chinese may have about Tiananmen Square is contradicted by the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet they have recently installed in the southwest corner, not far from Chairman Mao Memorial Hall.

  That Chinese history is layer upon layer, the present half-obliterating the past, is dramatically evident in the big-character slogans of Chairman Mao's thoughts that have been painted over with Toyota ads or turned into billboards for toothpaste and watches. Just beneath the new car or the computer or the brand name it is often possible to read All Reactionaries Are Paper Tigers! or We Should Support Whatever the Enemy Opposes! As in Datong, there are far too many of these and they are far too boldly inscribed for anyone to do anything but paint over them—and even then there is usually a reminding remnant that is legible. Perhaps the reason there are so many billboards and printed slog
ans of a commercial nature in Peking is not that these are in themselves valuable but that they are useful in covering up the Mao worship in six-foot Chinese characters that were known as Highest Instruction (zuigao zhishi)—the phrase pertains only to Mao.

  I asked Mr. Peng why the slogans were crossed out.

  'They were just political."

  "Is that bad?"

  "They weren't practical."

  But in 1985 a victory celebration after a football game turned into a xenophobic riot in which foreigners were attacked and car windows broken. And billboards advertising Japanese goods were the focus for some of the violence. Subsequently, some of the billboards were quietly removed or modified. On a previous occasion, another football victory (China beat Bulgaria) caused a crowd of several thousand Chinese fans to gather late one night in front of the Peking Hotel and chant "We beat you! We beat you!" Then, only foreigners stayed in that hotel, which was why it was the focus of the mob's gloating. But now the phrase "foreign friends" is on everyone's lips. The poet Yen-shi Chiu-t'u wrote a century ago:

  Last year we called him the Foreign Devil,

  Now we call him "Mr. Foreigner, Sir!"

  We weep over the departed but smile when

  a new wife takes her place.

  Ah, the affairs of the world are like

  the turning of a wheel.

  Because of a prior arrangement, and because foreign travelers are assigned to hotels, I was at the Yan Xiang Hotel, paying 160 yuan ($53) a night. Mr. Peng was in what he called a Chinese hotel—it didn't have a name, it had a number—for which he paid 3 yuan (75 cents) a night. This was not unusual. There are Chinese prices and foreigner's prices, a double standard that is applied in restaurants and shops; to entrance fees to museums and exhibitions; on buses, in taxis, planes and trains. On the average, a foreigner is required to pay three or four times more than a Chinese person. An American of Chinese extraction who has lived in Boston since birth and speaks no Mandarin is not classified as a foreigner: overseas Chinese are another category. Businessmen and official visitors are yet another class, with certain privileges.