Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes

by James Palmer

  Along with China’s fiery consumerism came a great surge of culture from the outside world. Mainland Chinese thrilled for the first time to the Hong Kong movies that Mao, Wang Hongwen, Jiang Qing and a very few others had enjoyed in the seventies. Smuggled tapes introduced eager teenagers to rock’n’ roll, though the first foreign music to become popular was Indian pop, echoing a brief post-war period when Hindi films had been hits. Many middle-aged Chinese have a disconcerting familiarity with classic Bollywood songs.

  Many of the preoccupations of the 1980s were a deliberate rejection of Cultural Revolution values. Anything from the outside had been scorned, so people embraced imports; intellectuals and technicians had been degraded and humiliated, so people became obsessed with technology and learning from Western experts. The only aspect the two eras shared was a disdain for China’s history, but for very different reasons. In the 1980s, as one veteran of the era put it to me, ‘Everybody loved money because money had no history, and all that history meant was pain.’

  Money wasn’t the only value. There was a new delight in words too. Poetry readings attracted crowds of hundreds, new books sold out one week and were banned the next. Underground artists, writers and musicians mingled, dodging the police who were determined to crack down on ‘spiritual pollution’, and pushing the envelope in any way they could.

  Imported Western values were – and still are – blamed for the breakdown in traditional culture, the materialism and selfishness of young Chinese, and the complete lack of social trust. But the ten years of denunciation and betrayal, the destruction of every non-state institution that tied people together, and the denigration of all alternative value systems, from religion to conservatism to family, seemed a more plausible cause.

  The leadership was keen to embrace modernism in some fields, but deeply unnerved by the new ‘bourgeois’ habits of the public. Numerous campaigns of petty harassment were launched, failing to have much impact on the giddy embrace of the new by ordinary people. Women started to wear make-up and daringly low-cut dresses; fortune tellers and Daoist soothsayers returned to the streets; young men gathered to smoke, sneer and play billiards.

  Deng had to walk an uneasy line between old revolutionaries, especially in the military, unhappy with the speed of change, reformists such as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang pushing for faster change and real political reform, and a newly empowered public both giddy with possibilities and angry at the loss of security. The dismantling of large portions of the state-run economy meant an end to the ‘iron rice bowl’ of a guaranteed job and a guaranteed income that some had enjoyed; workers who had assumed they had a post for life found themselves floundering in a terrifying new world as their factories were closed down or sold off to private owners keen to bring in cheaper labour. In 1987, Hu was forced out of power, undone by an old guard tired of his fierce contempt for Maoism and his open enthusiasm for radical change.

  Political liberty was high on the agenda for many young Chinese. Grassroots meetings saw fierce discussion of where China should be going next, what was happening, what radical reforms were needed. Speakers defiantly exclaimed, ‘I’m not a member of the Party!’ and were cheered for it. Officials were slammed for their laziness and corruption, and the Party for its slowness to change. In 1986 – 8, student protests became common, sparked both by high-minded concerns of political liberty and discontent over rising tuition fees, terrible canteen food and crumbling dormitories. Tiananmen was a frequent site of protests, such as the thousand who marched there in 1988 to protest the killing of a fellow student in a brawl, or the tens of thousands who protested Hu Yaobang’s sacking in the winter of 1986 – 7. Big-character posters became popular again, complaining about everything from crime to intellectual persecution to the ‘second Japanese invasion’ of consumer goods.

  1989 was when Deng’s new order temporarily came unstuck. Hu Yaobang died that April, and, like Zhou Enlai’s, his passing away triggered mourning that rapidly turned into protest. Hundreds of thousands of protestors filled Tiananmen Square for weeks, student intellectuals backed up by workers angry over job losses and stagnating wages. Like the Qing Ming protests of 1976, the protests had a wild atmosphere at first, full of music and ideas and sudden bonding between strangers.

  It was all too much for a frightened leadership. The shadow of the Cultural Revolution hung over them. They were scared – scared of an angry crowd that reminded at least some of them of the spectre of the Red Guards, scared of a new wave of civil war, scared that what was happening in the USSR and Eastern Europe might happen to China. After initial attempts at negotiation and soft force failed, they felt something had to be done. Beijing army units weren’t thought politically reliable enough. The prospect that they might side with the protestors was exceptionally terrifying, bringing up images of Russia’s revolution in 1917 and Hungary’s in 1956, so soldiers were brought in from outside the city, pumped full of propaganda about counter-revolutionaries, and unleashed on the public.

  In contrast to the popular image of the massacre, almost none of the killings actually took place in the square itself. But the murders started early, in the outskirts of Beijing, as crowds of ordinary Beijingers tried to block the advance of the army into the square and soldiers opened up with live ammunition. As the tanks rolled in, most of the protestors scattered. As in 1976, the authorities were looking to crush protest, not commit mass murder, but they were also largely uncaring about the consequences of unleashing the army against the people.

  Throughout the city, and especially in the alleys and backstreets near the square, fearful young soldiers shot randomly at anybody who seemed to be a threat. It echoed the panicked killings carried out by the people’s militia in the aftermath of the Tangshan earthquake. You could be shot for as little as poking your head out of a window to see what was going on. Hundreds of people were murdered by an army that had long lost any claim to be liberators.

  Some of the protestors fought back, improvising Molotov cocktails or beating individual soldiers caught in back alleys. Beijing stood with them; crowds of ordinary citizens swarmed to block the army’s way, throwing stones and jeering at the troops for betraying the people. Xi Chuan, a prominent poet and intellectual, saw a cluster of protestors grab a submachine gun from a ruined tank, wrapping it in cloth and blowing on the metal, overheated from firing, to ready it for use against the soldiers. The grand battle that Hua and the others had feared would overtake the capital in 1976 had finally happened.

  In the end, inevitably, the army won. Tiananmen, and the wave of political persecution that followed, killed the freewheeling atmosphere of the 1980s for good. The brightest and fiercest minds went into exile or prison, or simply lay low to avoid trouble. Xi Chuan, who had lost two friends over the course of the protests, later commented, ‘For me, that day was like the big bang. I witnessed deaths, losses and departures. The moral and aesthetic values within me collapsed. Like a useless man, I started to accept evil with my mouth shut.’8

  Three bleak years in which the political hardliners seemed close to rolling back many of Deng’s reforms came after Tiananmen. Zhao Ziyang, who had made his sympathies with the protestors very clear, walking and talking with them in the square, was placed under house arrest until his death; he passed the time writing a memoir that called for liberal democracy and an end to the one-party state, but that was now further off than ever.

  Deng had been complicit in the decision to unleash the troops, but he was also the one who helped break the freeze. In yet another masterful political stroke, and despite having nominally resigned his political positions, he exploited his old power base in 1992 on what would become a famous ‘southern tour’, visiting the areas that had boomed most under his economic reforms in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other parts of South China. The tour was a wild success and a new course had been firmly set for Deng’s successors.

  Deng died in 1997, at ninety-three. He’d seen almost the whole of the Chinese century, from the warlord era to the Japane
se invasion to Maoist insanities, ending in his own triumph. Although he never built his own personality cult, many Chinese feel the same respect for him as they do for Zhou Enlai. Despite everything, in the end he was on their side. I have a small plastic statue from Guangdong which seems to sum up much of the Chinese feeling for Deng; he’s sitting in pyjamas on a large armchair that almost dwarfs him, enjoying a smoke, while wearing two slippers in the shape of cats, one black and one white. It’s impossible to imagine a statue of Mao showing the same kind of joking affection.

  After his death, the economy continued to grow, fuelled by a seemingly insatiable American consumer market and the flow of cheap credit. In 1998, the old system of Foreign Exchange Certificates was abolished, where foreigners had been given special currency which allowed them to buy import items – a perk discreetly shared by officials and the rich. At this point, the lifestyle of the average upper-middle-class urban family, with their own phone, two-bedroom apartment, car, big TV, CD player and VCR, was better than that of most of the leadership in Zhongnanhai in the 1970s.

  Personal liberties increased at the same time. For instance, in 1999, the government stopped assigning graduates jobs after university, instead throwing them into an open labour market. In 2003, it became possible to get married or divorced without permission from your work unit. Other policies were allowed quietly to lapse into disuse, such as the once-common police habit of arresting unmarried couples at hotels.

  The new order came with an implicit bargain: stay out of politics and you won’t get hurt. This was all very well if you were part of the up-and-coming middle class in the cities, getting rich off exports to the West. For a worker whose state-owned factory had just been closed, or a young farmer whose sister had been raped by the local cadre, or a woman forced to have an abortion because it was her second child, or a family whose home was bulldozed without compensation in order to make way for a shopping mall or a new ring road it was a little less appealing.

  The economic benefits, too, were increasingly confined to a coastal urban majority. The incomes of unskilled workers stagnated when measured against inflation, while the country’s new wealth was devoted to holding on to US government bonds instead of being spent on improving the lives of ordinary people. (In the words of one US economic analyst to me, ‘For Christ’s sake, I’m a Texas Republican and this country’s lack of welfare is enough to convert me to socialism.’)

  Private charities stepped in to fill what gaps they could as rural education and healthcare crumbled; between 2000 and 2005, for instance, the absolute number of illiterate people in China increased by 30 million, reversing one of the regime’s few successes since 1949.

  Today, failures in the tax system mean that local governments increasingly rely on selling off land to raise funds, leaving farmers dispossessed and pushing up housing prices to unaffordable levels. Officially, rural residents aren’t supposed to pay tax; in practice, local officials extort money from them on a regular basis as ‘fees’ and ‘fines’, money that goes into their pockets rather than to the state. As a result of the One Child Policy, tens of millions of Chinese don’t even have an official existence, leaving them completely unable to get public benefits without using fake ID numbers. (Graffiti advertising where you can get these is common as you come into second-tier cities.)

  Yet the political bargain still clings on, just about. Politics classes are compulsory for both students and officials, but are also stunningly – perhaps even deliberately – boring, a mere repetition of outdated slogans and Marxist theories the teachers themselves rarely grasp. There’s no attempt to bring a political lens to bear on modern issues, and the classes are essentially opportunities for students to enjoy some hard-earned rest. Only inside Party colleges does real debate take place over political theory, and how to keep control. One professor, back from teaching cadres, commented slyly, ‘You have to be willing to kill a couple of hundred people if you want to advance in local politics.’

  The fiercest and most effective indoctrination is the one provided by nationalism; the Taiwan reunification drum is beaten at every opportunity, and history and politics distorted to produce an ever-victimised China. After the 1989 Tiananmen incident, students were required to undergo two weeks of military training after matriculation, along with an inoculating dose of nationalist rhetoric. There’s hot competition among single PLA officers to teach these classes, not because of any desire to mould the young, but because they’re stationed in remote army bases most of the time and this is their only chance to meet girls.

  At the higher levels, the struggle for succession has been replaced with a careful rotation of leadership, with each new generation selected and cultivated as possible contenders long before they reach the top levels. Technocracy is the order of the day, with engineering degrees and overseas study common attributes of the new mandarins. There are factions within the Party, but they’re largely based on the networks that brought leaders to power. For instance, the seventy-year-old Hu Jintao is considered to head the ‘Youth League’ faction.

  There are no personality cults among senior leaders any more; indeed, Hu seems to have gone so far as to eliminate his personality altogether. The current Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, seems to be following in Zhou Enlai’s footsteps, deliberately building up an image of himself as concerned, kind and connected to the public. But Wen’s attempts to pitch himself as the nation’s favourite grandfather are deliberately non-ideological, and his calls for reform carefully circumscribed.

  Yet the government has also surrendered a tremendous amount of rhetorical ground, on terms that started with Deng’s own changes in 1978. When you are publicly calling for the rule of law, it becomes harder and more embarrassing to lock people up on spurious national security grounds. When talking about the need to protect private property, driving farmers off their land to build shopping malls doesn’t look good. When claiming that democracy is the future of China, even if the Chinese aren’t ‘ready’ for it yet, the very idea of the one-party state is weakened. Activists, intellectuals and reformers inside the government increasingly press for change within ideological frameworks accidentally constructed by the state itself.

  The legacy of radical protest has continued far beyond Tiananmen, and remains inspired by memories of past struggles. A limited study by Chinese sociologist Feng Chen at two factories found that ‘almost all instances of factory-based resistance were led by people who strongly believed in Maoist socialism, and most of the leaders were former Cultural Revolution activists whose thinking and actions showed a strong imprint of that time’.9 The tools they used, like ‘leaflet distribution, group meetings, mass rallies, placards, slogans, red armbands and factory takeovers’, were all methods they’d learnt in the early years of the Cultural Revolution.

  The appeal of Maoism in a materialist and often brutally authoritarian society isn’t limited to factory protestors. The Utopia bookstore in Beijing – the name, alas, is not ironic – was founded in 2003, and stocks a full case of Mao’s works alongside Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and other anti-globalisation writers. Its walls are covered with Cultural Revolution posters showing miners, factory workers and schoolchildren swooning over Mao. The website, Land of Utopia, saw its hits per day rise from 10,000 to 300,000 between 2006 and 2010, as the global financial crisis struck and the appeal of neo-liberalism dimmed even further.

  According to the 33-year-old owner, Fang Jingqing, ‘Mao is a symbol of equality and justice. In his time workers and farmers lived with dignity and their rights were guaranteed.’ The bookshop is frequented both by young neo-leftists, enthusiasts of European post-modernist thinkers, and old-school Maoists given to walking out or throwing temper tantrums when irritating realities like starvation deaths and political murders are mentioned.

  Today’s Maoist activists, even those who were alive at the time, dream of a Maoist era when, ‘Cadres did their jobs in accordance with Chairman Mao’s instructions. They were not corrupt and did not have many privi
leges.’ And when ‘Workers and peasants were the masters . . . People lived a happy life without worry and anxiety and got paid for their work. Everybody worked hard for the country without trouble back home, as the state provided housing and medical insurance.’10

  This is clearly as much of a fantasy as, say, William Morris’s dreams of medieval England as a land of contented families and rosy-cheeked guild workers turning out everyday art, or neo-Confederate fantasies of benevolent plantation owners guiding happy slaves. But it appeals, too, to something older and stronger than just politics, to the old millennial dreams of a world turned upside down. Living in a country where the gap between rich and poor grows daily, the lifetime income of a factory worker won’t buy a one-bedroom apartment in a provincial city, and real wages for most workers have been flat since the 1990s, you can hardly blame people for dreaming.

  Fantasies of the past are not limited to the political fringe, though. In many Chinese cities, the revolution has become a dinner party.11 Cultural Revolution theme restaurants are masterpieces of kitsch featuring musical extravaganzas of singing workers and dancing soldiers, where staff address customers as ‘Comrade’. When I went to one, the young people there seemed to find it camp and funny (helped, no doubt, by the word for ‘comrade’ having shifted meaning among the young to ‘homosexual’12). For the middle-aged, it was more stirring. ‘It reminded me of the friends I was with in the countryside,’ one 54-year-old businessman told me. ‘We really believed in something at that time, you know? It wasn’t as bad as they say.’ He handed me his business card and got into his Audi.