A man sports a straw helmet in Chengdu
In Chengdu, commuters pay little attention to Mao
THIRTEEN
THE NIGHT TRAIN TO CHANGSHA WASN’T THE EXPRESS KIND: IT WAS slow to leave and slow to arrive. Even when it did lurch forward from the station in a way that suggested the beginning of our journey, it stopped moments later and waited, without any clear reason, for another hour or more. What made it worse was the heat. And in Changsha the temperature was likely to be even hotter — it was one of the four ‘furnace cities’ of Central China. ‘Patience is a virtue’, I reminded myself, echoing the advice of the German-speaking monk on the steps of Kumbum Monastery near Xining.
My ordeal made me wonder what must have been going through the mind of He Zizhen as she had followed dutifully in the steps of her husband during those first, long, hard months of the march. Did she still believe she would be reunited one day with her son? Was it ‘patience’ she displayed back then, a hopeful optimism, or the grim determination of a soldier, and a mother, to make that happen? Something told me it was closer to the second of these two. I’d read enough to know this woman would not go quietly, allowing fate to take over. She was a fighter, a revolutionary and the intellectual equal of the greatest leader China had ever known. She would not give up, not while she was still breathing.
As time went on, I thought less and less about Mao and more about He Zizhen. In my mind I had begun to see her as the real hero of the march, and therefore perhaps the real story to be explored. What she endured, both physically and mentally, outweighed possibly anything her male counterparts might have experienced. Over the course of the march she was shot at by Nationalist soldiers, strafed by their warplanes, even bombed — in fact the injuries she would suffer from that explosion would hinder her for the rest of her days. No one could say she had shirked from her duties or run from danger, although sometimes I wondered whether as much could be said of her husband.
The three men I shared the hard-sleeper compartment with were squatting in the aisle and eyeing everyone intently. They wore blue trousers rolled up to their knees, revealing calf muscles that were sharp and clearly defined, shaped by years of hard work. The dust on their shoes and jackets set them apart from the other worker-commuters who were heading home for the weekend, men with stomachs that bulged out over their trouser belts, who carried leather attaché cases like badges of rank and regiment. The three squatters looked ill-at-ease in this company and the businessmen equally unhappy with the workers’ untidy presence. One man in a shiny grey suit took it upon himself to berate the guard and demand these men make an immediate exit, not only for everyone’s safety but also for the wellbeing of the ‘foreigner’. I looked down the aisle, saw no one else who fitted this description, and realised he was talking about me. It turned out though that, because it was full, the three men had received an ‘upgrade’ from the uncomfortable but dirt-cheap seat-only section in the next-door carriage. So the guard ignored the man’s requests to have them removed and let the trio stay for the night. As the guard walked past collecting tickets, he stopped and, with great ceremony, clicked my ticket with a practised air of officialdom, then threw a mocking glance back at the business elite.
The man with the shiny suit warned me to sleep lightly and guard my things against any thieving fingers. He was in the insecticide business, he said, and presented me with a business card that was embossed with gold writing. It read ‘Michael Wu, Managing Director of Hubei Industries’ and then, in brackets, ‘Poisons Division’.
‘Before 1979,’ said Mr Wu, ‘farmers used natural pesticides and their crops were often wiped out by plagues of insects. Now they use my chemical products.’
‘Are they safe?’ I asked.
‘One hundred per cent safe and one hundred per cent effective,’ he replied, not without a certain professional pride. ‘Very powerful chemicals at a very low price.’
China had major environmental problems thanks to chemicals like these. They leached into the soil, entering the water table and therefore drinking water. Hubei province was one of the worst affected regions, and its air was heavily polluted too. Pesticides had been found in the snow on Tibet’s highest peaks, carried there by strong winds from land many thousands of kilometres away. Eco-friendly products were available, but they were 10 times the price of Mr Wu’s low-cost synthetic options, so farmers had little choice. It’s a common scenario around the world of course, especially in the developing world, where agricultural communities strive to feed their ever-increasing domestic populations through higher yields. But China’s problem is that the use of pesticides is uncontrolled and this has resulted in large areas of arable land becoming infertile. The Chinese government’s ‘solution’ is to use the trillion or so of export-related US dollars it has managed to ‘hoover’ up like a giant vacuum cleaner over the years to buy up huge tracts of land in places like Australia and America for growing food for their future generations. Even clean and green New Zealand has been earmarked as China’s dairy farm.
‘This is all for the good of the people,’ said a benevolent Mr Wu. But when he looked around the carriage, his eyes fell upon the three dusty workers camped in the corridor and his compassion faded to a scowl.
It turned out he had good reason to be unhappy, though. At Changsha the next morning, the three men were gone and so was Mr Wu’s leather attaché case. His anger was apocalyptic and, the last I saw of him, he was speeding past the window on the platform outside, looking for the police, his face puce with rage.
I jumped down from the carriage and made my own, more sedate way into town. The taxi driver dropped me at his brother’s hotel and I paid for a night in advance. The manager asked if I wanted to pay ‘extra’ for a massage, then gestured towards the three pretty girls in short skirts who were lounging on a sofa. Next to them was a table with an old style telephone on top of a pile of magazines. Politely, I declined the massage, but asked if I could use his phone instead. He agreed, probably thinking this was a strange choice, and waved at the girls to make some space so that I could sit down. With their help I managed to contact the university, asking for the professor whose name I had been given back in Garze. But the university hadn’t heard of him. It seemed as if I had encountered yet another dead end.
One of the girls introduced herself as Ning, part-time masseuse, mum and librarian. It was Ning’s job to sort out returned books at the Hunan Library, a job that probably paid less than pummelling the tired limbs of hotel guests, but one which was far more pleasant.
‘The air conditioning is very good. In summer when Changsha becomes an oven, the library is lovely and cool.’
Ning took me there later that day and showed me to an English section where I was able to read a book on the history of the city. As well as being relentlessly attacked by the Japanese in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and for a brief period captured by them before being retaken by Chiang Kai-shek in 1944, it was also the city in which Mao’s second wife lost her life. In 1930, Yang Kahui lived on the outskirts of Changsha in relative peace and quiet, until Mao laid siege to the city with his army of Communists and the local Nationalist commander ordered her to be tried and killed. Had Mao thought to protect her in some way before he attacked? Reading between the lines, even in this pro-Mao history book, it seemed that was not the case. Though he wrote about his grief later, in letters and poems, it could not disguise the fact that he simply did not care for anyone other than himself.
I visited Yang Kahui’s home and found it had been turned into a kind of shrine to touristy knicknacks and Party propaganda. Souvenir sellers displayed their wares, which bizarrely included soft-porn paperbacks and a giant jade phallus. Leafing through the books I found myself talking to a young man who said he was a hydro engineer, overnighting in Changsha on his way home to Beijing. I asked him if building dams was a good career and he agreed, but added that it was dangerous. There had been 12 recent fatalities in Sichuan’s hydro industry alone, he said, before returnin
g to his salacious and well-thumbed novel.
I wandered off, but before I left he came up to me, almost apologetically, and tapped me on the shoulder.
‘You know, China is built on such tragedies,’ he said.
The next day I wasted little time and took the morning train straight to Nanchang, then in the afternoon located the bus station that serviced all of the roads heading south. Nanchang was a famous city in Communist Party circles. People called it the ‘City of Heroes’ after the men and women here who became the first Communists to take up arms against the Nationalist government, during an uprising in 1927. But my main interest lay elsewhere. There was a bus leaving that day for Jinggangshan and I was soon travelling with a host of Chinese families with young school-age children, who were eager to see another famous home of the Communist Revolution. There was much excitement, chiefly because of the adventurous journey they were undertaking, but also because I was making it with them. One young boy was already dressed up in a light blue military suit and peaked cap adorned with fake gold braid and a red star at its centre. From the seat opposite he smiled then snapped his heels together and saluted.
Outside the windows, rural China rolled past in neatly squared off sections of arable farmland. Every square centimetre was planted and tended; even some rooftops sprouted cabbages and pumpkins. Here, droughts were rare and water aplenty washed down the gutters and channels to nourish the farmers’ fields. Tall crops of barley waved from the roadside and, beyond these, yellow-flowering rapeseed burst forth in a riot of colour. All of this under a bright blue sky bordered with lush green mountains in the distance.
These were the same plains the soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek had marched over in the late 1920s and early ’30s, aiming for the same far-off Jinggang Mountains, where not only thieves and robbers lurked, but a good number of the earliest Communist supporters. There were deep valleys nestled in those ranges that you could hide in for years, and indeed Mao had united his armies from Jiangxi province there, along with those from the neighbouring Hunan region, for that very reason. Having brokered peace with the thugs and criminals in hiding there, who no doubt shared an equal hatred for all government forces, he was free to come and go as he pleased for the most part, choosing when and where to confront his enemy. But when that enemy became too strong, not even the deepest mountain fortress was safe.
I had a romantic notion of Jinggangshan as a tiny, quaint, history-laden village, but the reality was far removed from this. Although small, pretty and tree-lined, Jinggangshan had been turned into a tourist mecca for Red Travellers bent on spending their holidays revelling in former revolutionary glories. It was clean swept and immaculately presented, but this fuelled my doubt that it had either heart or soul. Tourism can be like a surgeon’s scalpel at times, removing the character of a place and leaving an ugly scar behind.
It was just on evening and the central square was crowded with the young and old, talking and chatting, drinking tea and eating ice cream. It was warm and muggy, without a breath of wind to disturb the lights that hung from the camphor trees. Kenny Rogers crooned a love song from a number of loudspeakers mounted on wooden poles, while children in clean white shirts and pretty dresses played tag beneath them. A man who owned a nearby hotel struck up a conversation as I watched all this from a bench. He started off trying to sell me a room — a very special room. Visiting dignitaries used it when they came to Jinggangshan, even the state governor of Jiangxi, he said. It came with a large bed, a view of the mountains and a pretty young girl who would attend to my every wish. I said I already had a room and he asked where, so I pointed across the road to the hotel I had chosen. It was quite expensive, but there was nothing cheaper in the village that I could find. He scrunched up his nose in horror and warned me that the bed would be small, there would be a view of the alley and the girl would be ugly.
I left him and walked into the middle of the square. Small children scattered or clung to their mothers’ skirts as I passed. Just at that moment, the crowd of people around me started to organise themselves into straight lines and, as I watched, Kenny Rogers was replaced with something even more unexpected: line dancing.
I was in the middle of a good old-fashioned Chinese hoedown. There were no cowboy hats or boots and jeans, just little old men and middle-aged women in loose-fitting trousers that looked like they doubled as pyjama bottoms, gyrating their hips and shuffling their feet in perfect formation to Dwight Yoakam’s ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. The young generally stood back and looked on as their parents and grandparents performed their synchronised moves, but not in embarrassment; it was more like respect. One female line dancer saw that I was watching and immediately started putting on a show, standing straighter and adopting a stern expression of concentration, as if this were a competition. Unfortunately, the gentleman to her right was not quite as competent and she became flustered by his ill-timed steps and eventually sought out the company of better dancers a few rows on.
It was, without a doubt, one of my most bizarre experiences in China. Here was one of the world’s oldest civilisations, which, over several thousand years, had given us such things as paper, gunpowder and the compass. And what had we given it in return? Line dancing. I wondered what we would give them next: Saturday Night Fever, Grease perhaps, or maybe ballroom. In which case, if it took off in this massive country of over 1.3 billion, it might completely exhaust the world’s supply of sequins.
Still chuckling, I wandered off to my humble room with no view and no personal services, to sleep and dream of a Chinese Elvis, in a white silk suit with a red star on the back, who takes over the world and forces everyone to sing ‘Jailhouse Rock’ while following him on a long walk to nowhere.
Graffiti on bamboo near Jinggangshan: ‘Peng was here’
FOURTEEN
THE LUOXIAN MOUNTAINS AROUND JINGGANGSHAN WERE CLOAKED in a mist that happily made it several degrees cooler on the slopes than down in the village. I had woken early and been persuaded to get onto the pillion seat of a small motorbike by a young local soldier who called himself Joe. He was about 24, of average height but with the physique of someone who looked like he knew his way round a judo ring. He was dressed in the standard green army uniform but wore socks and sandals on his feet instead of boots. As we climbed higher and higher, Joe sang revolutionary songs and excitedly pointed out places of historical interest.
‘There is the tree our great and illustrious Communist Leader Mao Tse-tung climbed in order to speak to his victorious troops. And, over there, that is the rock our great and illustrious Communist Leader Mao Tse-tung sat upon and devised tactics for his victorious troops.’
By the time Joe had finished describing whatever event had taken place we were usually well past the actual site. It didn’t matter though. Colourful they might have been, but somehow I doubted the veracity of his stories and put them down to exuberance rather than a sound grasp of history. My suspicions were further aroused when Joe described the mist that surrounded us and wet our hair as we zoomed along. He said it was the same mist that ‘our great and illustrious Communist Leader Mao Tse-tung used to conceal his victorious troops’.
‘The same mist?’ I queried.
‘Yes,’ Joe replied. ‘The same mist exactly.’
Then he burst forth with the first lines of another operatic song while waving one hand as if he were conducting an orchestra.
It took half an hour to reach the top of Jinggang Mountain, where Joe said we would find the remains of one of Mao’s hideouts. As we pulled over to the side of the road, the sun broke through the cloud and began to dry us out. From this vantage point I could look out over the forests, following the jungle-clad mountainsides as they sloped down to the plains below. Ridge after ridge stretched into the distance, with the furthest one barely discernible against the grey-green misty horizon.
Just as hazy was the precise location of Mao’s hideout. A tourist guide, who’d just arrived by coach with her group of gawking Chinese tourist
s, directed them amongst some shallow ditches that looked like they’d been recently dug out with pickaxes. They were deep enough to squat in and their position was a commanding one, overlooking the valley, but it was hardly an impressive historical site.
As always, however, Joe was enthusiastic. He peered down into the trenches as one would into the recently unveiled tomb of Tutankhamun. Each clod of earth was a sacred relic. He even tsk-tsked at a red-scarved Chinese woman who had the gall to jump down into one of the ditches and pose for a photo. Apologetically, she climbed out, but, as far as Joe was concerned, the damage was done.
‘Beijing tourists,’ he whispered contemptuously. ‘Who do they think they are?’
Not all that Joe had to say on his country’s history was complete hyperbole, however. There were some things that rang true that could be backed up by recognised sources, notably records compiled by several foreign observers who maintained an interest in the early development of Communism during the 1920s and ’30s. One of these was the American journalist Edgar Snow, famous for his 1937 book Red Star Over China, an account of his dealings with Mao and other party leaders of the time. In the book, Snow details the way the Communists adopted a policy of ‘non-confrontation’ with government troops, fearing they could be wiped out by the enemy’s superior forces if they met them in a pitched battle. Joe reminded me of this when he waved an arm over the forested land below us and commented that it was dense enough to hide a hundred thousand men.
‘Behind every tree was a brave Red Army soldier,’ he said.
Instead of tackling Chiang Kai-shek’s armies head on, the Communists of Jinggangshan used guerrilla tactics, staging sudden attacks on key strategic posts or supply lines and then, as quickly as they had come, disappearing from view. These attacks were highly successful in slowing down the advance of government forces as well as destroying their morale. Sometimes the Reds would come away with more than captured guns and ammunition too. Government troops regularly defected to the Communists, joining what they saw as the ‘People’s Army’ as opposed to a government one. After all, the Communists could boast an ideology that sought to remove power from the landowners and hand it back to the peasant class, and the peasant classes made up a significant proportion of Chiang Kai-shek’s army. Land was like gold, and the lure of ownership was an extremely attractive proposition to any man or woman.
A Boy of China Page 15