by Rob Schmitz
Old Kang ignored the guard. “The least they can do is to pay my rent. I don’t need a nice house; just a place to live is enough. It doesn’t matter where,” he said. “A ten-square-meter room would be sufficient, where rent is around two thousand yuan a month.”
Old Kang spoke as if I had a say in the matter. Maggie Lane residents had sued the district government, but a local judge had dismissed the suit. They had filed petitions with the government, but those were ignored. The Party controlled the judiciary and the press, so people who had been dealt injustices by the government typically sought out the only people who refused to be influenced by the Party: foreign journalists. Unlike local media, which were strictly censored in their coverage, I was allowed to report whatever I wanted under the protection of a foreign journalist visa. When I first met Old Kang, I wondered how much he told me “truthfully reflected the truth.” Was he embellishing some of the details to attract the government’s attention? Officials had the chance to refute his story when I contacted them, but they didn’t—they refused interview requests. Later, I found police reports that corroborated his story. Plus, the physical evidence was right here, directly above us: a massive hole in his roof in an empty neighborhood of demolished homes.
“I’ve been without a home for more than eight years,” Old Kang said as we hiked over a pile of rubble, walking away. “Do things like this ever happen in your country?”
I thought about the eminent domain cases I had covered back in the United States. “Yes,” I said, “but contractors aren’t allowed to harass people in the process. That’s against the law. And people usually don’t end up homeless.”
“That’s the big difference between your country and mine,” said Old Kang, nodding. “We have laws here, but none of them are enforced. Nobody has rights here. It doesn’t matter how developed China is—the system is what’s important. If they don’t change the system, economic development is useless. The government only seems to care about progress in science and technology or the economy, not in its overall system.”
Old Kang had raised the proverbial question for China’s future, a pivotal issue that scholars have debated for years. Establishing fair legal rights would require an independent judiciary and open the door to lawsuits filed by the people against their government, threatening the Party’s power. For years, many China-watchers assumed an independent legal system would gradually evolve alongside the flourishing of capitalism and the economic development of the country, but it hadn’t happened yet.
We arrived at the burned-out shell of a shikumen home in the center of the lot. We were standing in a vacuum at the center of the world’s fastest-moving city, a void that had been left for dead.
A group of old women emerged from the partially destroyed homes of Maggie Lane to say hello.
“He’s a foreign journalist!” announced Old Kang, proudly.
The security guard shot me a nervous glance. “Don’t talk to them,” he told the women.
“Why not?” asked one of them, sarcastically. “We’d just tell him how happy we are to live here! So happy! And what a dignified life! Just look at this lovely place!”
The women’s cackling laughter embarrassed the guard and he looked away. Old Kang motioned to a man standing behind them to come forward. “That’s Old Chen. He and his wife live in that house over there. He’s leading the fight!”
I shook Chen’s hand. His full name was Chen Zhongdao, but I later came to nickname him Mayor Chen.
The Mayor of Maggie Lane was a thin man in his sixties. His hair was neatly trimmed and he had calm, kind eyes, a large nose, and a gentle smile that revealed two large buckteeth. His house stood near the entrance to the lot. Mayor Chen had obtained police records, court documents, and all sorts of evidence of wrongdoing related to the lane. As a result, demolition crews had largely left his house alone. It was well kept, surrounded by a grove of trees. A weeping willow stood in front of the stone gate entrance. Mayor Chen and I traded phone numbers, and I asked him how he and the others were still allowed to live here.
“Oh, they try to kick us out from time to time,” he said in a thick Shanghainese dialect, “but we keep fighting.”
But their tenacity wasn’t the reason they were allowed to remain here, Mayor Chen explained. It was the double murder.
In the early-morning hours of January 9, 2005, three men from the demolition crew arrived carrying canisters of gasoline. The previous year, the group had threatened and intimidated most of the lane’s residents out of their homes; in the weeks leading up to that evening, they set more than a dozen fires to scare those who remained, but residents had learned to have buckets of water at the ready to put them out.
On that January night, the three men sprayed gasoline throughout the ground level of an elderly couple’s home. Zhu Shuikang and his wife Li Xingzhi were in their seventies and had lived in Maggie Lane for more than sixty years. Zhu was a retired veteran who had fought with the People’s Liberation Army in the Korean War. According to court documents, at one o’clock in the morning, the men ignited the gasoline. Within minutes, flames consumed the house. Zhu’s and Li’s charred bodies were found in what was left of their bed the following morning.
Months later at trial, Zhu and Li’s daughter-in-law told the judge through tears that her father-in-law had survived a war, yet he and his wife, aged and defenseless, were murdered on the orders of corrupt local officials. The judge found the three men, all employees of Chengkai Group, guilty. Wang Changkun and Yang Sunqin received reprieved death sentences and Lu Peide was sentenced to life in prison.
This sentence was handed down the same year Shanghai officials published and distributed How to Be a Lovely Shanghainese to residents as part of the city’s “civilization” campaign. The term is defined on page 75:
It refers to the state and extent of social progress when human society has rid itself of ignorance, brutality, and backwardness. It is the hallmark of a country, a nation’s advancement and enlightenment. It includes material civilization, political civilization and spiritual civilization. It shows a new type of interpersonal relationship that reflects an equal, united society marked by mutual help and amicableness.
THE MAGGIE LANE MURDERS came at a vulnerable time for Shanghai. The city was preparing for the world’s spotlight, and it couldn’t afford bad press about a burned-out, partially demolished neighborhood—the site of a grisly murder at the hands of a developer—in the very center of the city. Xuhui District officials purchased the land back from the developer at a loss and promptly fenced it in with cream-colored stucco that stood ten feet tall. China’s leaders had always been good at building walls, and this one prevented passersby from witnessing the carnage.
Mayor Chen, his wife, and four other families continued living inside their partially demolished houses, refusing to budge until the district met their demands: new homes in the same neighborhood. The district government had restored water, gas, and electricity to the lot, and now the only complaint Chen had was about his leaky roof. (An excavator damaged it years ago, but it wasn’t anything a properly placed pail couldn’t handle.) Much as it was decades ago, Maggie Lane was a quiet place to live, and residents could come and go as they pleased through a locked gate guarded twenty-four hours a day by a rotating shift of police officers. The lane’s remaining residents had even built their own community garden in a sun-drenched expanse in front of what was left of Zhu and Li’s home that included onions, chili peppers, and zucchini. I often watched them work from my window above. It was a collective farm in the middle of China’s biggest city.
On a sunny day later that autumn, I took a walk around the perimeter of the wall with Rainey. It was October 2010, and the world’s fair was wrapping up. Rainey trailed me with a rope in his hand along Peaceful Happiness Road, pulling his favorite toy behind him, a white wooden duck with clicking wheels.
As we kicked through the fallen yellow leaves of the plane trees, the clicking abruptly stopped. I turned to see h
im pointing to the wall, smiling.
“Haibao! Haibao!” he screamed.
The wall was covered with the same posters we had seen when we first arrived here: the blue, smiling, rubbery figure vacantly staring into the distance as he floated atop Shanghai’s skyline. Underneath him, in giant red letters, there it was: “Better City, Better Life.” The phrase appeared on posters every ten feet as we strolled alongside the wall: Better City, Better Life…Better City, Better Life…Better City, Better Life…
It was a repeated chorus backed by the steady rhythm of Rainey’s clicking duck as he ran ahead, chasing one Haibao after another, ecstatic at each appearance, unaware of the blackened corpse of a neighborhood that lay on the other side.
I met Zhao Shiling while looking for a place to buy flowers for my wife. Zhao’s flower shop is at the eastern end of the Street of Eternal Happiness, right before it turns into Golden Hill Road and continues east to the Bund, a raised walkway along the Huangpu River fronted by a row of colonial-style buildings that were built by the European powers in the nineteenth century. Zhao’s corner shop is well located—a block from the city’s congested North–South Elevated expressway—and I sometimes biked past it on my way home from work.
Competing stores along the street also offer roses, lilies, and tulips, but I prefer Zhao’s because her corner is so lively. Shops along this part of the street are tiny. They take up, at most, fifteen-foot-wide sections of the block, and go back only ten feet, like a row of walk-in closets. Shop owners and their wares are forced to spill out onto the sidewalk. I often found Zhao sitting in a lawn chair under her shop’s awning, fanning herself while watching a toddler whose parents ran a store a few doors down. In between Zhao and that shop was a clothing boutique run by a woman from Anhui and a motorcycle repairman from Jiangsu who was usually hunched over a dismembered scooter, its parts scattered all over the sidewalk. The three would trade neighborhood gossip in loud bursts of rural dialect while each of them did what they could to prevent the toddler from falling over sharp scooter parts or wandering down the sidewalk beyond their stores, gently nudging the child between them like a pinball as shoppers scurried by.
The Chinese have a name for the warm bustle of a street corner like this: renao, literally “hot and noisy.” And for urban Chinese, life is an eternal quest for more hot and noisy.
I had grown up surrounded by the opposite of renao. Few places were colder and quieter than rural Minnesota. But after living in China for years, even I had come to seek places that were hot and noisy. There was something else that drew me to the intersection at Zhao’s, though. She had a countryside sensibility that reminded me of the Sichuan students I had taught. She laughed easily and spoke loudly and confidently. She poked fun at others but mostly she made fun of herself, something the status-conscious Shanghainese rarely did. The only wrinkles on her face laid a gentle path from the edge of her eyes toward her forehead—a face shaped by smiling.
Zhao had two grown sons, a fact everyone learned within a minute of meeting her. Both were named Sun. Big Sun was tall, like his mother. He was thin and handsome, and he had tranquil, almond-shaped eyes and a long, slender nose. Little Sun stood shorter than his brother, his eyes were narrower, and he was built like a bull. Her regular customers knew everything about these young men—how proud Zhao was of Big Sun’s intelligence, how guilty she felt about his path in life. Her customers knew she worried about Little Sun’s business smarts and whether he would make it in the big city. At least Little Sun had produced a grandson for her, Zhao would chuckle; Little Sun was good for something. Everything inside this shop—the roses, the lilies, the special-order bouquets—was here to provide better lives for her two Suns.
Zhao didn’t slouch. Standing on the hot and noisy corner outside her shop, her sturdy frame towered over the lithe, petite local women who passed by, tiny purses clutched to their fragile bodies. However, Zhao had lived in cosmopolitan Shanghai long enough to have gained a fashion sense. On the rare occasion when she dressed up and let her hair down, she was a pretty, middle-aged lady who carried the confidence of one who had conquered the hardships of the country. We often spent afternoons whiling away the time on stools in her shop’s doorway, eating sliced fruit, deep in conversation, immersed in the hot and noisy rhythms of the big city.
YEARS AGO, inside a concrete block apartment at the edge of a coal mine, Zhao daydreamed about Shanghai. Growing up seven hundred miles away, she knew only two things about the city: its legendary wealth and its evocative name. The Chinese characters for Shanghai, , mean “on the sea.” The city center is actually dozens of miles away from the coast. It’s built along a bend of the Huangpu River, one of the many narrow tributaries of the Yangtze that, from an airplane, look like capillaries branching off a bulging, muddy mother artery.
Zhao hadn’t flown over Shanghai before. She had never boarded a plane. She used her imagination instead. She visualized waves pounding Shanghai’s beaches. Beyond the white sand, she imagined rows of glass and steel rising from the city like the towering stalks of corn at the height of summer near her hometown. One day in 1995, her curiosity overpowered her. She packed a plastic tarp bag with her belongings, said goodbye to her husband and two young sons, and boarded an overnight train.
“Shanghai wasn’t what I had imagined,” says Zhao, giggling.
Shanghai was crowded with soaring office buildings and noisy traffic. Everywhere you looked, there was construction. Cranes filled the horizon, and there was a ring of smelly factories around the city, polluting its skies.
Zhao had been Shanghaied.
She had saved money for an outfit to wear her first day there: red dress, red socks, and a red hat with a big plastic flower stapled to its front. “I figured that’s how they dressed in the city,” Zhao once told me with a laugh.
Zhao had envisioned dipping her toes in the ocean when she arrived. “I walked past a bridge and asked a few factory workers, ‘Is that the sea?’”
The workers took one look at her and then at the narrow river full of garbage and had a good laugh.
When it came time for her to take the subway, she thought it was a long tractor. “I had never seen a subway before and tractors were all I knew,” she said.
Zhao didn’t have family in Shanghai, only a handful of friends who had made the journey from her village in Shandong province. They were too busy to send her a detailed description of the city. They all worked at the same factory—Beishang Electronics—a company that assembled televisions for Sony in an industrial Shanghai suburb. Like many migrants back then, Zhao arrived with a vague promise of assembly line work secured through the oldest known system in China: guanxi—relationships. In the belt of factories surrounding Shanghai, hometown guanxi was the door to a coveted job making foreign products, earning a salary several times more than what you could make back home. Each assembly line at Beishang Electronics was staffed with workers from the same hometown speaking dialects unintelligible to the next line over.
Zhao was twenty-nine years old—nearly a decade her coworkers’ senior, and the eldest arrival from her hometown. Back home, her departure was the talk of the Zaozhuang Coal Mining Bureau, her husband’s work unit. What kind of man would allow his wife to up and leave him and his children for the big city? Zhao’s husband had the habit of squinting when he listened to others, his mouth slightly agape—a face that looked perpetually confused. He was a short man of few words who had married a tall woman of many. He didn’t have an answer for his jocular comrades in the mine, nor could he muster an objection when his wife sat him down one day and, with a booming voice cultivated by yelling across fields of sorghum as a girl, lectured him on the facts: China was changing, people were now allowed to make money, and she was going to go and make some before others made it first. After all, how would their children survive in this fast-changing China merely on the fifty dollars a month he was making at the mine? Zhao remembers her husband answering with his enigmatic squint, silently puzzled at her r
estlessness.
Their village was luohou, backwards, she said. It was a term I often heard while teaching in Sichuan in the ’90s. While biking in the countryside, I would stop to talk to villagers and I would comment on how pretty the terraced rice paddies were. Inevitably I would receive a “luohou” in response. Backwards. “In your country, does anyone live like this?” a villager once asked me, defending his word choice.
I looked around: a child sat cross-legged on a dirt courtyard, barefoot, doing his homework, his clothes stained with the manure he had just spread in the fields. Chickens and piglets wandered in and out of the house, while a shit-stained duck quacked incessantly. “Not much, anymore,” I said slowly, fumbling nervously with my bike helmet.
“Exactly,” the man said, spitting on the ground. “We’re luohou.”
It wasn’t their fault. When I first arrived in China in the mid-’90s, the country was emerging from four decades of luohou economic policies. It didn’t take much to resurrect it. “To get rich is glorious,” announced Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in the early 1990s. To this day, historians quibble over whether Deng actually coined the phrase, but it didn’t matter: The masses attributed it to their diminutive and feisty leader, nobody in the Party appeared to refute it, and the phrase stuck. In 1992, Deng boarded a train for a monthlong journey through Southern China. At each stop, the leader encouraged workers to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, promising that the government would get out of their way. After decades of being forced to follow one harebrained campaign after another, the Chinese could finally make some money. “Gaige Kaifang” was the term Deng repeated: “Reform and Opening.” Reform our economy, Deng pronounced, and open the country up to the outside world. China’s Communist Party called this “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” Others called it capitalism.