Out of the Gobi

by Weijian Shan

  The voting ended at 6 p.m. By 7 p.m., preliminary results were already out. East Germany’s Christian Democratic Union won the general elections with 47 percent of the seats in Parliament. The Communist Party won only 15 percent of the seats. The stage was set for German reunification, which was achieved later that year. When I returned to Berlin a couple of years later, the wall was already gone. I did bring home a few pieces of concrete taken from the wall as mementos. But I soon read that the wall materials contained asbestos, so Bin threw them away, ignoring my protests.

  * * *

  In addition to my regular classes, I did a fair amount of executive education organized by Wharton. These programs took me to different parts of the United States and abroad, often in summertime, because Wharton has a large network of alumni in many countries, and they were willing to help fund these programs. In fact, my family only took summer vacations when they traveled with me on these trips.

  In the summer of 1990, Wharton held an executive training program in Shanghai on the campus of Shanghai Jiaotong University, one of the best in China. It was the first program of its kind in China. I served as the program director. The participants, about 50 of them, were relatively young officials drawn from different levels of the Shanghai government and state-owned companies. The level of their English proficiency varied, but by and large they were able to follow the classes in English. For a period of two weeks, Wharton professors took turns giving lectures on various subjects related to management, marketing, finance, and international business.

  Many of the participants in the Shanghai program went on to become high-ranking officials in the Chinese government. One early star was Chen Liangyu, who became the city’s top leader and a member of the Party’s Politburo. Unfortunately, he fell from grace in 2007 and was sentenced to 18 years in jail for corruption. Another one was Hua Jianmin, the CEO of Shenergy, a state-owned power company. He became secretary general of the State Council and eventually vice chairman of the People’s Congress. Meng Jianzhu was the head of a suburban county government who rose through the ranks to become China’s minister of public security and a member of the Politburo.

  The social unrest of 1989 had taken a toll on China’s economic growth. In both 1987 and 1988, the real economy grew at more than 11 percent. In 1989, it grew only 4.2 percent, followed by an even tamer growth of 3.9 percent in 1990. Economic reforms seemed to have slowed down, and in some cases to have halted or reversed. Many were concerned that China might go back to the pre-reform old system.

  I judged that in spite of the recent setback and slowdown, China’s reforms had become irreversible. This had been borne out by my observations on the ground during my visits to Beijing and Shanghai. In the United States I gave speeches on a number of occasions, including at Wharton and elsewhere, to explain my reasoning. China’s population was much better off now than it was in pre-reform days, and any policy to reverse that would meet with insurmountable resistance. When people were making a dollar a month, as I had been doing in the Gobi, nobody cared much how the politics changed; whatever happened, we could not be much worse off and there was nothing to lose. But people were now making $50 a month; going back to the old days of $1 per month was unacceptable. Such a change would create so much chaos and instability that no government would be able to roll back the wheels of history.

  In 1992, Deng Xiaoping was also concerned about the slowdown or reversal of reforms. Even though he was already 88 years old, he embarked upon what the official press called a “southern tour.” He traveled to Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, three cities that had become the most open and market-oriented over the previous half-decade. During his visit, he declared, “Development is the hard truth,” suggesting that any debate about socialism or capitalism was irrelevant and no policy was good if it did not produce growth. He also said, “Whoever isn’t in favor of reforms must step down.”

  His very act of the southern tour and his pro-reform remarks resonated strongly with the population and rekindled another wave of enthusiasm for reforms; it also silenced those officials who still questioned whether reform policies were socialist or capitalist. It was clever and practical of him to set aside that ideological debate to focus on efforts to promote growth. And it worked. After his southern tour, investment surged. In 1992, the real economy grew an astonishing 14.2 percent. If there was any doubt about China’s resolve to continue with market-oriented reforms, it dissipated. China was entering another round of rapid growth.

  A joke I heard in China captured Deng’s pragmatism well: Three cars came to a crossroads, driven, respectively, by Mao; Josip Broz Tito, the former Yugoslav leader who split with Joseph Stalin to lead his country into a market economy; and Deng Xiaoping. Mao took the road on the left. Tito took the road on the right. Deng signaled to turn left but took the road on the right.

  My visits to China convinced me that it was moving into a new phase, one that represented the opportunity of a lifetime for millions of Chinese. I wanted to find a way to capture these opportunities and also to help in this process. The training programs I had taught, the seminars I had led—these all helped. But I wanted to do more. I was thinking of going back to China.

  I knew, however, that returning to China would mean that I would have to leave too much behind. Life in the United States was comfortable. Bin had a good job at the corporate office of AT&T. Our son, Bo, now 10 years old, was an American kid who loved his friends at school and in the neighborhood. The year before we had welcomed our daughter, LeeAnn, who was born in New Jersey, and who was now taking her very first steps. We wanted the best for our children. Going back to China would mean I would leave academia to plunge into the world of business, in which I had never tried my hand, and our family would have to uproot itself and face new challenges. It was the toughest decision I had ever faced in my life. At this stage in my career, I knew it was now or never: Once I made a decision, there would be no turning back. And while Bin said she would be supportive whichever road we took, I knew I would be making a decision for my family that would forever alter their lives as well.

  * * *

  By 1992, I had been teaching at Wharton for six years. I had published my fair share of research papers, although I knew they were not enough to earn me a tenured position. But I found I didn’t much care. I could have concentrated more on my research instead of traveling almost every summer to different countries for teaching and consulting. I allowed myself to be pulled into these excursions, away from my research work, because I found them interesting and rewarding, whereas academic research was getting quite tedious and dreary. Increasingly, I felt that my research was of trivial significance and did not provide any profound insight anyway. I could not imagine myself holed up in an ivory tower forever when the outside world seemed so exciting and enticing. Besides, I told myself, I had preached for too long; I needed an opportunity to practice what I had preached.

  My life had taken many twists and turns so far. Now I was looking for another change. I thought I would make an attractive candidate to big US firms with ambitions in China, because of my familiarity with US businesses, my knowledge of China, and my stature as an academic in business education. I opened myself up to opportunities.

  Soon, I received job offers from some of the most venerable names in the US corporate world, from firms that were increasingly looking for ways to capitalize on the fast-growing Chinese market and on its potential. I was somewhat surprised by the generosity of these offers. I had long known that Wharton graduates, especially those working on Wall Street, earned more than their professors. But I had no idea how much more until that moment. Professional athletes are also paid vastly more than their coaches. However, there is a difference. While sports coaches cannot really compete as professional athletes do, there is no reason for business professors not to be able to do the same work they teach their students to do.

  In the spring of 1993 I took a job with JP Morgan, the banking institution as storied as Wall Street itse
lf. Soon I shipped out, together with my family, to the then-British colony of Hong Kong, to start a new career in banking. My responsibility would be to help the firm develop its business in China.

  Epilogue

  In 2005, 30 years after leaving, I returned to the Gobi.

  My life took me a long way from the desert. I had since earned a PhD at UC Berkeley, taught at the Wharton School, and worked as a managing director of JP Morgan. Then, in 2005, I became a managing partner of Newbridge Capital, the Asia offshoot of Texas Pacific Group (now called TPG), a major private equity investment firm based in San Francisco. When in the Gobi, I often did not know where and when my next meal would be. At Newbridge I was dabbling in the dispensing of hundreds of millions of dollars in investments and corporate acquisitions. How I got into playing high-stakes money games is, perhaps, another story worth telling.

  In 2005 I was also serving as an independent director on the board of China Unicom, one of China’s largest mobile telecommunications companies.

  Unicom’s management had arranged for all of its independent directors to take an “inspection tour” in a province of their choice to learn more about the company’s operations at the grassroots level. I chose Inner Mongolia, which I hadn’t seen since I left in September 1975.

  On Saturday, July 9, 2005, I flew from Hong Kong to Beijing, then to Baotou, the second-largest city in Inner Mongolia. I thought I could use the weekend to go back to see Urat Farm. The flight from Beijing to Baotou took little more than an hour. What a sharp contrast from 36 years ago, when the journey took more than 30 hours under so much less comfortable circumstances.

  I was met at the airport by a team from China Unicom, who presented me with a bouquet of flowers. They drove me to Weixin Golf Club, a resort about halfway between Baotou and Urat Qianqi. I arrived just before sundown. I was surprised: a golf course surrounded by modern-looking villas had sprouted in the middle of the Gobi Desert. My hosts told me proudly that Weixin had more sand traps than any other golf course in the world. I didn’t tell them that in my time the toughest thing to find was not sand but rather a way to grow grass in the Gobi. As we got out of our vehicles, I saw wild rabbits eating grass and running around by the roadside. They were lucky to live in modern times. In my time, they would have been all caught and eaten.

  I was given a luxury villa all to myself. It was the sort of place you would find in resorts in the Caribbean Islands or in the Maldives where the wealthy go on holiday. The front driveway of my villa alone could fit several cars. How times had changed. During our hungry years there, who could have imagined anything like this would ever exist in the Gobi?

  The team from China Unicom and I had dinner at the clubhouse of the resort. The main course was a roasted whole lamb. I joked with my hosts that I would have stayed in the Gobi if life had been so good in my time.

  The next day, we left the resort and drove first to Urat Qianqi and then to Batou, the former headquarters of my regiment, almost 80 kilometers (∼50 miles) away. Batou was where I had received my medical training 35 years earlier. Almost nothing was recognizable. The regiment headquarters building remained, but it was empty and dilapidated, apparently no longer in use though not yet demolished. But there were many modern-looking multistory buildings with tinted glass windows reflecting the sun.

  After a tour of Batou, which had been turned into a lakeside tourist attraction, my hosts and I went into one of the restaurants. There had not been a single restaurant in Batou 30 years ago. Now there were several. But I didn’t eat. I was anxious to go and find my old farm, but I didn’t want to go back with so many people in tow. So I snuck out of the restaurant with a driver, and we got into his white four-wheel-drive SUV. I took the wheel while he sat on the passenger side.

  I had to stop the vehicle several times to ask people if anyone knew where former Company No. 5 of Regiment No. 19 was located. Someone who used to be with Company No. 4 pointed us in the right direction. After a few minutes of driving, the paved roads of Batou gave way to gravel and dirt tracks. Soon, the road disappeared entirely. Now I was really back in the Gobi. All around me was sand, gravel, thorns, and dunes, stretching to the horizon. The sky was blue with a few white clouds. I saw a whirlwind here and there moving across the dunes and then dissipating. All the familiar sights.

  After about an hour of driving through the Gobi, I stopped at a small village. A few people were sitting in the shade of a tree. A woman told me this was where the subheadquarters of our regiment had been. The site of our company’s old barracks was just a few minutes’ drive to the east. Remarkably, the small shop where I used to buy canned pork was still there; it looked exactly as it had 30 years earlier.

  I asked the woman if there were still any Construction Army Corps soldiers left here. She told me that yes, there was one married couple. She led me to an iron gate. I opened the gate and walked into a rather dirty yard where I saw a well-dressed young woman in her twenties who looked more like a city girl than a farmer’s daughter in the Gobi. Her mother had been with the Construction Army Corps. Just then, a woman came out of the house. As soon as she saw me, she called out my name in a loud voice: “Shan Weijian!” I was so surprised that she immediately recognized me after 30 years. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t recall her name.

  It was Li Yongzhi. The young lady who had greeted me at the gate was her 24-year-old daughter, Wang Hui. Yongzhi took me to her home in the back of the yard. Their living quarters were quite small, no more than 50 square meters (∼400 to 500 square feet) combined. There was a foyer just inside the door where a piglet snuffled quietly in a box. The couple’s bedroom was on the right side and their daughter’s bedroom was on the left. That was about it. The place was quite dirty and run-down, not much different from what I had been familiar with in the old days.

  As I stepped into the room to the right, a man greeted me. I recognized him as Wang Shuangxi, whom we had all called Er Xi (meaning “double happiness”). He was reclining on a kang by the window. He excused himself for not being able to get up; he had broken his leg riding a motorcycle not long ago and had been bedridden since then. Both of them were happy to see me, as I them.

  Er Xi was Company No. 5’s stableman, taking care of our horses and driving horse-pulled carts. He was a good horseman and could mount a barebacked horse by jumping on from behind, which I had never seen anyone else be capable of doing. I asked him why he was riding a motorcycle, not a horse. He told me that keeping and raising horses was largely banned because their grazing would further destroy what little vegetation remained in the Gobi. Only camels were still allowed because they were considered somewhat endangered. Motorcycles were much more convenient. They did not need to be fed or taken care of and they traveled much faster. But I could see from his accident that riding a motorcycle in the sandy desert could be a challenge, too.

  They offered me some tea and an ice bar from their freezer before telling me their story. Er Xi and Yongzhi were the only people left of our company. They now made a living by raising pigs and selling piglets. They had about 40 pigs in the pens in their gated yard, guarded by two big ferocious-looking dogs.

  Er Xi said that they had made about 60,000 yuan the previous year (about US$7,500). Yongzhi told me that they also continued to collect a pension from the government for their service in the Construction Army Corps. In addition to raising pigs, she had also taught at the village school, although now the school was shut down for lack of students.

  I could imagine that no young people, if they had a choice, would want to stay in this place. Yes, life here had immensely improved from 30 years ago. But it was still in the middle of the Gobi with not much to do other than limited farming under improved but still harsh conditions. Wang Hui, their daughter, was now working in Beijing, where she stayed with Yongzhi’s parents. She was home temporarily to care for her father. Little wonder that she aspired to a life away from the Gobi.

  Yongzhi and her daughter took me to the site where the barracks of Compa
ny No. 5 had been. This was where I spent six years of my youth. There used to be rows of mud-brick houses that we had built with our own hands. But now all of them were gone, so completely that there was no trace left. They had just disappeared into the soil of the Gobi. The small baked-brick house of the blacksmith’s shop remained, as did the building that housed the company office and the medical clinic where I worked as a barefoot doctor. They now looked terribly shabby.

  Gone also was the company’s water well. There was no longer any farmland by the site of our former barracks, although we had toiled for years to cultivate the land. The water of the nearby lake flooded it, and now reeds grew there. We had spent so much of our youth battling with nature to turn this land into arable farms. Eventually nature prevailed and took it all back.

  We drove to the kiln where I had spent so many days and nights making bricks. Now it was just a tall mound of earth, but it was still the highest vantage point within sight. Surprisingly, it was surrounded by farmland, where some kind of green vegetable was growing in tidy rows. The farm seemed to have shrunk back to the size of its former self, before the hundreds of Construction Army Corps soldiers arrived. All our efforts for so many years to reclaim farmland from the Gobi had come to naught.

  As I looked around, all the memories of our life here more than 30 years ago flooded back. It was here we had buried our youth. It was here we had grown from teenagers to adults. It was here we had learned the harsh realities of life. It was here we had seen our hopes turn into despair. And it was also here so many of my friends had been denied a future, wasting their best years when they should have been in school. What for?

  I waved good-bye to Yongzhi and her daughter and hopped back into the SUV. We turned around to return to Batou. Still, there was no road and as I drove, the terrain around us looked the same, endless in every direction. Soon I got lost. Then I noticed a power transmission line on top of tall poles stretching as far as the eye could see. I figured the power line would lead me to Batou, the only place around that a power station could possibly be located. As I drove in parallel with the transmission line, I saw a group of people standing with their motorcycles by one of the poles. I stopped the SUV to ask for directions.