Holidays in Heck

by P. J. O'Rourke

  The next morning, a little shaky, we went to see the terra-cotta warriors guarding the tomb of the Emperor Qinshihung. Seven or eight thousand of them have been discovered so far. It’s said that no two of them are alike, but I wouldn’t swear to that in court. What these clay soldiers were all supposed to be doing makes the tomb one of the world’s great monuments to “Huh?”

  Less mysterious was the peasant who stumbled into the tomb chamber while digging a well in 1974. He was sitting in the gift shop signing copies of the book written about his find—a prosperous-looking old man.

  This emperor is revered for uniting China, never mind his policy errors such as purges, massacres, and book burnings, not to mention the expense to taxpayers of having 8,000 terra-cotta warriors made to order.

  Mr. Tian was as mildly interested in these as I was. “How much bituminous coal do you use to make your coke, and how much anthracite?” I asked him. (Toledo is not only the birthplace of Katie Holmes; it’s also the world’s largest soft coal port. When I was a boy an east wind would carry the tarry stink of coke furnaces all over town.)

  “Ah,” said Mr. Tian, “‘fat coal’ and ‘thin coal,’ mixed at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit.” The moment I showed an interest in coal, Mr. Tian told his driver to take us hundreds of kilometers up the Yellow River valley into northern Shaanxi province to see his new coke plant.

  We were getting toward Inner Mongolia and the Great Wall. In the hills and canyons of this part of China, the “open door” has barely creaked. Except for the occasional high-tension wires and the pavement beneath our wheels we saw what Marco Polo saw. And how poor the Italy of the thirteenth century must have been that Marco was impressed. The land was terraced to a fare-thee-well. Only on perfectly vertical surfaces had the farmers despaired of cultivation. Crops ran up to the very gravestones. The power from the power lines didn’t reach the tiny villages; nor did the pavement or any water pipes. I saw very few animals—no wild ones or any wilderness in which they could live, and not many sheep, goats, pigs, or cows, either. Average annual income here is $415. When the peasants leave to go work in the cities they’re called “foreign labor.”

  This is where Mr. Tian came from. He was born in 1964, the youngest of six children. When he was still a teenager he had an idea to import new kinds of vegetables that could be grown for bigger profits. But he was ahead of his time and was made to study electrical engineering. Although “electrical engineering” is more what Mao, rather than an American, would call being taught to run a movie projector. Anyway, Mr. Tian worked as a movie projectionist and waited for opportunity. After the Open Door came into effect, he started a business trading steel.

  “The policy at that time,” Mr. Tian said, “was a ‘Dual Rail System.’ ” If you wanted to do something commercial privately, you had to have something to back you up, owned by the government, on the industrial side. The government encouraged contracting with government factories. This didn’t work. Government factories didn’t produce according to the market. Instead of contracting with a government factory I decided to build my own factory.”

  “And this was more efficient?” I asked.

  Mr. Tian looked at me as if, despite my interest in coal and coke, I might be an idiot after all. “Of course,” he said.

  When he’d been contracting with government factories he’d learned a lot—by negative example—about how to run a factory. Then he set out to learn about economics. While he was running a trading business and building a factory he was also, like Mrs. Ng in Nanjing, going to college. “There are more than fifty universities in Xi’an,” Mr. Tian said. Evenings and weekends he attended what he called “training classes,” not only in economics but in basic accounting, marketing, and management. “The cost was a few thousand yuan,” he said—about $400. “All the students were businessmen,” Mr. Tian said.

  The demand for steel was strong, but Mr. Tian shifted his business to coke. Shaanxi province has no iron ore, and Xi’an’s steel industry is not well developed, but the region is full of coal to make coke to make steel.

  Mr. Tian’s coke plant was near China’s principal coal mines. The mines look every bit as dangerous as they sound in the continual news reports of death and disaster inside them. Between two of these ominous holes in the ground sat the coke furnace. It was hell’s own house trailer, a hot, black, smoking oblong the length of a football field and as tall as the top of the goalposts.

  Coke is to coal as charcoal is to wood. Great piles of coal were being fed into the furnace on conveyor belts. There, over the course of twelve hours, the heat of the burning coal itself will turn the coal to coke.

  Personally, I considered the coke furnace to be a thrilling piece of machinery. Mr. Tian and his construction crew had built it themselves from scratch. And it smelled like home. The men handling the coal hoppers and balancing precariously on the tailgates of the enormous dump trucks looked pleased with themselves. It made me want to grab a hard hat and get the kind of job where I could throw wrenches at people.

  Mr. Tian and I went back to the office and talked with his foreman about coal. Going by the expression of catatonic boredom on Mai’s face as she translated, I’ll spare the reader.

  On the way back to Xi’an I asked Mr. Tian how he’d gotten capital to go into business in the first place. “I needed a guarantor,” he said, “someone who was in private enterprise. I had a friend with a company. But, to be honest, at that time it wasn’t too difficult to get a loan.”

  “So it’s harder to get started now,” I said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Tian said. “Banks are more straight with loans.” A nice turn of phrase, which Mai said she translated literally. But a certain amount of bending had been worthwhile with Mr. Tian. Perhaps Mr. Wu’s son-in-law was wiser than I thought in his sangfroid about China’s state bank loans.

  Mr. Tian said his family had not been affected by the Cultural Revolution, because his father was a peasant and a Party member.

  I had been under an impression that the Cultural Revolution had ruined everyone’s life. Of course in a nation of a billion people, this can’t have been exactly right, any more than Freedom House can be exactly right about China’s static freedoms. Mr. Tian thought that some damage had been done by the Cultural Revolution but that the Red Guards were not 100 percent wrong. “During that time,” he said, “the people who got criticized were not good people. They were lazy people, people who did wrong to people, right-wingers.”

  I wondered what he meant by that last term. Mr. Tian was himself a “capitalist roader” and from all I could see he was committed to his route.

  “There were factions of Red Guards fighting in Xi’an,” he continued. “During the development of the country at that time, it was needed—Red Guards criticizing each other. Criticism was needed. Development wasn’t getting far. We were under the pressure from foreign control.”

  Again I couldn’t tell what he meant. American control? Russian control? The control of foreign Marxist thought? “Foreign” is a broad term in China. But I didn’t want to interrupt. I’d never heard the Cultural Revolution defended before.

  “The country was poor as hell,” Mr. Tian said. “We had to come out from this prospect.”

  Mai and I flew south to Yichang on the Yangtze. Here we’d take a break from my commerce and industry tour and go on a four-day river cruise through the Three Gorges to Chongqing. A friend of Mai’s, Mrs. Han, drove us upriver in her Mitsubishi SUV, to the dock by the Three Gorges Dam where the cruise boat was moored.

  Mrs. Han was an executive at the government-owned electric company. She said she didn’t want to take a chance on working for a private firm. Government jobs are more stable, though the wages are lower. But her young son was lonely, and if she had another kid she’d lose her job because of the government’s one-child policy.

  Mr. Tian has several children and five siblings, and Tom’s assistant Lilly is one of four. I’d asked Lilly if her parents had gotten in trouble for violating the bir
th control laws. She giggled and said, “Oh, you know . . .”

  “Oh, you know” in China means, “Who you know.”

  I asked Mrs. Han if the Three Gorges Dam was the ecological disaster that the ecological types say it is, even though the dam’s hydroelectric turbines are supposed to produce all sorts of electricity and no greenhouse gases.

  Mrs. Han said, “The economy is helped a lot by the dam’s infrastructure. But one million people had to move. The farmers are reassigned to be factory workers, and it is not their background. They are living worse than before. But the flooding used to be terrible. There are advantages and disadvantages. It is changing animal life. A lot of historical sites are gone. The farmers are losing good soil by the river.”

  Mrs. Han was not exactly a spokesperson for central planning.

  There are more than 30 million people in Chongqing (or Chungking, as it used to be)—a whole Canada in the space of a Los Angeles. China provides a lot of material for such statistical tropes, which are supposed to say something meaningful about China, until we try to figure out what that meaning is.

  Mrs. Xia, who runs a franchise business to set people up in the garment trades, sent her car and driver through this mob to the boat docks. Mai and I took the car to the villa that had been General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s HQ when Chungking was the Kuomintang capital during World War II. A huge photo of Chiang Kai-shek graced the front hall. I expressed my surprise to the docent. “We have to respect history,” she said.

  We went to dinner with Mrs. Xia and her husband and Mr. Kang, who runs what is in effect a Chinese Wal-Mart, a combined department store and supermarket that does 6.4 billion yuan in annual business and produces over 1 billion yuan in after-tax profits. Mr. Xia is an important something (I didn’t quite catch what and maybe wasn’t meant to) in the Chongqing Communist Party.

  Mrs. Xia was fashion-forward, her colors and patterns and makeup merrily clashing away. Mr. Xia was in an anonymous gray suit. And Mr. Kang had muscles bulging out of his sport clothes. He looked like a younger Jackie Chan.

  Mr. Kang gave me a management lecture straight from the New York Times’ “Business, How-To, and Miscellaneous” best-seller list. He told me it was important that information and understanding be shared by all levels of employees in a company. “And,” he added, “that goes for countries, too.

  “We are proud of ourselves nowadays,” Mr. Kang said. “I think America believes China is a worthy competitor.” He said that clothing, food, shelter, and transportation are well taken care of in China. Now everyone wants to travel. He urged the United States to open its travel market. But he said it was no longer so important for kids to study abroad. Mr. Xia said that Chinese industrial ownership was “thirty percent private, thirty percent government, thirty percent overseas, and ten percent by the people.”

  Mr. Kang, like Mao, was from Hunan. He studied business and, after graduating from college, he was sent to Chongqing as a government department store manager. “I missed my family,” he said. “I could have gone back to live under the shelter of my parents. But here if I succeeded it would be my own accomplishment. I wanted to prove I could do it. For ten years life was very simple, nothing exciting. I kept looking for new things, kept learning. Life is very fair to everybody. If you fail, don’t get upset. If you succeed, don’t be proud. Character and goal are very important, and persistence. You have to look to details and you will get to big business later. Once you achieve that you should look for something higher. You should be a responsible person.”

  I managed to interrupt and ask him how he got started. Business was bad at the government department store, so Mr. Kang and two of the other managers went to the government and said that they thought they could do a better job themselves. The government agreed to let them try. They opened their own branch of the government store and made 7 million yuan the first year. Now they run the whole chain and own 30 percent of it.

  “Does the department store have more competition these days?” I asked.

  “Very big competition,” said Mr. Kang. “Competition is good. No competition, no growth. I love competition. It makes me excited to go for the fight.”

  Mr. Xia said, “He’s full of confidence.”

  Mr. Kang said that he hoped by the time he retired his stores would be everywhere in China.

  “Even the central government,” Mr. Xia said, “is emphasizing that people are the most important.”

  “I have full confidence in China,” said Mr. Kang. “We have to be patriotic.” Then, making a leap I didn’t really follow, he said, “I support George Bush. He is very frank. Very sincere. But I would ask Bush one thing—to solve the Taiwan problem.”

  Mrs. Xia started as a seamstress. But she always admired entrepreurs. “After I’d had a baby,” she said, “I thought I should follow my goal to do achievement in life.” She took a job as a salesperson at a clothing store even though this paid less than being a garment worker. She wanted to see how the business worked. She borrowed 20,000 yuan (about $2,500) and on this slim capital started her own clothing line. By the end of the second year it had almost 4 million yuan in sales volume. Then she began franchising her business.

  “The government is very supportive of what I’m doing,” she said. “They gave me a 300,000-yuan bonus for helping to solve their unemployment problems.” Now she’s organizing an “industrial city” for garment manufacturing.

  “I have a very great achievement feeling,” Mrs. Xia said. “But I have also lost things. I slept two or three hours a night. I lost my husband because I wasn’t spending enough time with him. I took my child and had nothing. Then, while I was experiencing my toughest times, I met Mr. Xia. He gave me great support. He was a university lecturer who got promoted to the Chongqing Committee. I have gone through my problems. I have proved myself. I was selected to the provincial assembly and am giving back to society. Also, I got the support and approval of government. But my corporation is all myself. Because of my high achievement I make my family very happy.”

  We took a stroll through the center of the city so that Ms. Xia could show me the Party’s aptly named Big Hall, built in Bolshevik baroque in 1956 and one of the ten largest buildings in Asia.

  “We are learning from American marketing culture,” Ms. Xia said. “But we can’t learn everything, because the culture is different.”

  Across from the Big Hall was a monument to the Three Gorges Dam. In a contrast of style with its neighbor this monument consisted of piles of ten-foot-high pyramidal concrete anchors used to keep eroding soil from washing away, interspersed with enormous tires from earth-moving equipment.

  “The water won’t actually rise much in Chongqing,” Mr. Xia said.

  Between the monument and the Big Hall was a square almost as expansive as Tiananmen in Beijing. When Mai and I were back in Hong Kong, I mentioned to Tom that the whole time we’d been on the mainland I’d hardly heard the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 mentioned.

  “That’s no surprise,” Tom said. “Tiananmen Square is where the abdication of the last emperor was proclaimed in 1912. It’s where the student demonstrations, which led to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party, were held in 1919. It’s where the Japanese occupation government announced its East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, where Mao declared victory over the Kuomintang in 1949, and where a million Red Guards swore loyalty to Mao during the Cultural Revolution. When the Chinese see a bunch of people gathering in Tiananmen Square, they don’t get all warm and fuzzy the way we do. The Chinese think, ‘Here we go again.’ ”

  Mai and I flew to Guangzhou (Canton, as it was known for centuries). We stayed with Mai’s friend Qing and her husband, Phillip. Phillip had been a museum curator in the United States. He moved to China to restore the antique furniture that had been wrecked and neglected by the communists and to build reproductions using the original types of wood, tools, and finishes. He showed me through his workshop, where he also runs a training program for young Chinese ca
binetmakers.

  “After a couple of generations when no one cared about craftsmanship,” Phillip said, “the craftsmanship is stunning.” I watched a young man making an intricate dovetail with a hatchet—the kind of hatchet that was featured in 1940s movie serials about Tong Wars.

  Phillip said, “There is, however, a Chinese tendency to do things the hard way.”

  Qing’s father, Mr. Zhao, is one of the last surviving veterans of the Long March of 1934–1935, when the communists escaped encirclement by Kuomintang forces and regrouped to fight both Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese.

  Mr. and Mrs. Zhao came to lunch at their daughter’s house. They were full of a rare good cheer of old age. When Qing introduced me as an American, Mr. Zhao laughed and said, “Bush is thinking too much—about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea. He should think less!”

  Mr. Zhao was familiar with the costs of excess theory. He and his wife had been upper-level Party officials in Guangzhou. When Qing was a girl the Cultural Revolution had come. She’d told me how everything had gone away—her parents’ jobs; the family’s house; their food, clothes, and privileges. Mr. and Mrs. Zhao had been subjected to “criticism,” as it was so coyly called. “But,” Qing had said, “like a kid, I kind of enjoyed the excitement—all of us living in one room and the fighting in the streets.”

  Mr. Zhao had joined the revolution in 1932, when he was twelve. He belonged to a Communist Party Boy Scout–like organization. He was sixteen when the Long March began. He was one of the “Little Red Devils” who accompanied the troops. He went with the Fourth Red Army led by Zhang Guotao, Mao’s more sensible rival for Party leadership. Mr. Zhao did not seem bitter that Mao had won out, or about the Red Guards, or even at Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang troops. “We tried to go to Yunnan to fight the Japanese,” he said, “but had to fight the Kuomintang first to get there.” Then the Kuomintang sent them material for the war against Japan. “And,” Mr. Zhao laughed, “we used it to fight the Kuomintang later.”