Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  Finally, he said, he could stand the abuse no longer, his patience snapped, and he wrestled the worst bully to the ground, kicking him and beating him until his face was bloody. He wouldn’t let go until the boy promised never to hit him again. From then on, Han says, he had always stood up for himself and others in need. He repeated this story on several occasions. It was, as it were, his foundation myth. And yet he still didn’t feel safe. Teachers, and by extension all figures in authority, were still a constant menace.

  Six months later, in the summer of 1999, I saw Han again. We had breakfast near the waterfront in Central Hong Kong. Men and women in business suits rushed in and out of the Stock Exchange next door. Han ordered an espresso and a croissant. There was one more thing I wanted to know, something I had not asked him before, though I had been told it was important. During his short time in America, Han had become a fundamentalist Christian. I asked him why.

  He hesitated, made as though to speak, stopped himself, nodded, and said: “Basically, it all comes down to trust.”

  When I didn’t get his drift, he explained. Han was too young to have vivid memories of the Cultural Revolution—he was born in 1963, only three years before it began. But he does look back on a childhood packed with lies. His parents were ardent Maoists. His own name, Dongfang, meaning East, alludes to a popular song celebrating Mao rising, like the sun, in the east. Teachers would tell stories about proletarian heroes, like Lei Feng, the legendary soldier, selfless, ever ready to serve Mao, the people, and the Chinese revolution, the man who said that he would be “a bolt in whatever part of the state machinery the party wants to screw me,” the martyr who was done in by a falling telegraph pole. Schoolchildren all over China, and adults too, had to sing the praises of Lei Feng’s “screw spirit.” Han wanted to be another Lei Feng. But he saw how teachers hated boys like himself, because they were poor. And he saw how officers abused their men. White began to look more and more like black. He came to realize that nobody in China could be trusted. Nobody at all.

  “Nobody, not even your mother?”

  “That is hard to say. Even my mother, yes even my mother. I cannot say I trust her. She would say: Criticize me if I’m wrong. But when I did, she would beat me. You see, I have a bad character, like a bull, I have three horns. But when the only person you feel safe with, when she betrays her own principles, you feel . . . confused.”

  For a long time he thought that communism was good, that the Party might contain some bad people but still stood for its principles. “The dream I grew up with was so beautiful, promising equality, a government serving the people. And yet reality looked so different.” In the winter of 1986, when the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi was actively promoting democracy in his lectures, students demonstrated in Tiananmen Square for democratic reform. Han was not yet an activist. Fang Lizhi meant nothing to him. But his tiny courtyard dwelling was near the Square, and he happened to see the students being arrested. A militiaman kicked one in the face. Another was thrown into a jeep, like a pig. It was then, he says, that his communist dream was over.

  It was then, also, that he began to turn to alternative beliefs. He spent time at a Buddhist temple. But he didn’t know what to pray for anymore—a better life, a good future, or what? It was like “living in hell—losing your dreams.” And the monks just mouthed platitudes about loving the Party, the people, and the motherland. Han tried to communicate directly to the Buddha. That gave him some relief, but not enough and not for long.

  I felt what I had felt before when talking to brave men who craved an absolute faith: admiration mixed with the sense that here was an area I could never enter. It put us in different worlds.

  “Religion,” said Han, “is very important. Even believing in Mao makes you feel stronger, makes you feel that you are a human being, living more than a material, physical life. Any religion is better than no religion. If young people have no faith, no dream language, they are living in hell. That is what China is like now. If it goes on, it will fall apart.”

  Han was restating the position of many religious converts. It is not Christianity per se that leads to activism but the other way around. To be an activist with total dedication to the cause, it helps to have absolute faith. The need to believe in something, a dream, a God, a “principle,” is largely what drives Han. It is how he survived torture and isolation. And it is why he was receptive to the blandishments of a Taiwanese priest who translated for him when he was being restored to health in the United States. Priests, he was told, were the only people you could trust.

  Han’s eyes lit up as he spoke: “I could not believe it at first. I thought it had to be for show. But people in the church trust one another. The church makes you feel strong.”

  “Like Maoism?”

  “Yes, like Maoism, but communist heroes hate. The church is based on love, and on true equality. Jesus was a carpenter, the lowest of the low.”

  In the church, then, Han and others like him rediscovered a version of their Maoist dream. But Han, like everybody else involved in politics, however indirectly, faced a moral dilemma. How can trust be absolute if you have to make practical compromises? It was a problem that haunted him. He gave me a concrete example. Three men, working as long-distance bus drivers, called into his radio show one day to say they had not been paid by their company for three years. Meanwhile, their bosses had spent the equivalent of forty thousand U.S. dollars on nightclub entertainment, girls, gambling, airfare for private holidays, and fixing up their own houses. What should they do?

  What should they do? “I don’t want to be an irresponsible person and say the country is hopeless and incite bloody rebellion. Blood is valuable, and only the poor will be sacrificed. Rich people need only an airplane ticket to get out, and their children probably have green cards anyway. So I tell them to do everything openly, be responsible, and address their problems directly to the central government. And that is precisely what those three men did. They wrote an open letter to Jiang Zemin. But their bosses had good connections with Party officials. And as soon as they found out what had happened, the three workers were arrested for ‘plotting to overthrow the government.’ They could face jail sentences of more than ten years. And God know what will happen to them inside.”

  What could Han do? What can anybody do in China? Han feels guilty, to the point of despair, about advising people to take risks while he sits safely in his radio studio in Hong Kong. Han believes that slow, evolutionary change would be better, though much harder, than revolution. The price of violence is too high. And yet he fears an explosion. It is all very well to tell workers to complain to the central government, but there are no proper channels. All desperate people can really do is go into the streets and protest in ever-larger numbers. Many of Han’s listeners are waiting for that day when things explode. “They don’t like my advice,” Han says. “They say my advice just gets people thrown in prison.”

  Han’s anguish is all the more painful for the fact that in his heart he knows they are right.

  Part III

  The Motherland

  Chapter 1

  Frontier Zones

  To cross the border into Shenzhen from Hong Kong at Lowu station is no longer the dramatic transition it once was. On the China side of the stinking canal, lined with fortified fences and watchtowers, are billboards for dot-com companies, massage parlors, fancy hotels, and houses in urban developments with names like Golden Villas and Dragon Park. The first thing you see as you step into the steaming streets of Shenzhen is the Marlboro Man facing the railway station. Beggars with livid stumps where once there were legs kneel on the railway bridge, whining with outstretched arms, a plastic bowl clutched in one hand. Country girls in high-heeled shoes whisper invitations. The contrast with Hong Kong is not so much between capitalism and communism as between the relative order of modern capitalism and a cruder, more lawless version. Shenzhen is where the rest of China is heading. The other difference is also immediately apparent. The moment you cr
oss the border, you leave behind the liberties of Hong Kong, a free press, freedom of speech, freedom to openly criticize the government.

  Shenzhen is best seen after midnight. The fetid air cools down. And the ugliness of a sprawling city built on the site of a minor agricultural town in Guangdong province is transformed into something almost glamorous. Hastily erected high-rise buildings, monuments of anxious post-Maoist grandiosity meant to impress through their sheer size, become great beacons of twinkling lights after dark. Some of the streets in the shabbier part of town, the part that is older than the fifteen years it took to build the rest of the city, are taken over by outdoor bars and restaurants. These are filled with crowds of largely young men and women from all over China: traders, computer salesmen, company managers, secretaries, bar hostesses, copywriters, prostitutes, graphic designers, disc jockeys, government officials, Hong Kong businessmen, and gangsters of one kind or another. The atmosphere is young and brash. A raw, even primitive, vitality—life reduced to food, sex, and money—flows through these new streets like a muddy river.

  Shenzhen is not officially a city but a Special Economic Zone, a product of the Open Door policy, devised in the early 1980s by Deng Xiaoping. Like the old treaty ports, the SEZs are enclaves in the Chinese empire in which controls on commerce with the outside world are relaxed. Designed as a rival to Hong Kong, as well as a kind of Chinese Communist–style copy of it, Shenzhen was built by government fiat, as a monument to the Open Door. There, foreign goods and influences can be imported and, so far as possible, contained. A Chinese citizen needs special permission to live near the Open Door. The borders around the Zones are almost as formidable as the one sealing the rest of China off from Hong Kong.

  The buildings are close approximations, and sometimes even direct copies, of buildings in Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, and Hong Kong. But the political model, the kind of place Shenzhen, and in the long term perhaps the whole of China, is supposed to resemble, is not Hong Kong, let alone Taipei, but Singapore, where economic liberties are matched with political authoritarianism. Capitalism in the southern Chinese periphery is not supposed to evolve into democracy. Individual freedoms are subordinate to the patriotic demands of the state. That, at least, is the idea. Hence the other billboard at Lowu station, between ads for dot-com companies and massage parlors, which reads LOVE THE MOTHERLAND, LOVE CHINA.

  China in this instance is like the Cosa Nostra: The main beneficiaries of capitalist enterprise are the local bosses who represent the state, the Party dons, and their minions. It is a world where official connections count for more than private initiative. To a lesser degree, and certainly in a less crude fashion, the same is true of Hong Kong and Singapore.

  Another difference from Hong Kong is that Shenzhen, although located firmly in the Cantonese region, is not Cantonese. You can hardly hear Cantonese spoken in the streets. People come from all over, in the way that American pioneers headed west a hundred-odd years ago. Shenzhen is what Shanghai was in the early twentieth century, a city of immigrants, from such places as Hunan, Sichuan, Anhui, Beijing, or the industrial northeast. In the late 1970s there were about seventy thousand Cantonese living there. In 2000 there were almost 3 million people from everywhere else. The average age is about thirty. And the beggars are either old or very young.

  People come to Shenzhen for all kinds of reasons, mostly to do with money. Village girls from Sichuan or Hunan come to work in the factories, dreaming of independence from the drudgery of rural life but also from fathers, brothers, or even husbands. If they are unlucky, their permits will be confiscated by the bosses, salaries reduced to a pittance, and their dreams of freedom turned into nightmares of virtual slavery. The prettier ones might escape the sweatshops and find work in bars, massage parlors, barbershops, discos, or brothels. Some will be taken up by businessmen from Hong Kong as “second wives.” Certain areas in the zones have so many second wives living in pleasantly appointed apartment blocks that they have become like dormitory towns for mistresses. The female body is a basic commodity in Shenzhen.

  Shenzhen, with its vast underground of illegal and exploited labor, is also a place of refuge for shadier characters. There, I once met a man who told me he was a military intelligence officer on the run. We sat in a bar called Chicago, in a haze of stale cigarette smoke.

  He had the wild-eyed look of a young patriot in a Chinese propaganda poster: ablaze with sincerity. He spoke in a staccato of Chinese and broken English. Based in a provincial city in central China, so he said, his unit had been told to crack down on a demonstration of workers who had lost their jobs without pay. The PLA soldiers, including the intelligence officers, were sent in to do their job disguised in uniforms of the People’s Armed Militia. The demonstrators were mostly old people. Shots were fired. The young officer protested and was reprimanded for “incorrect thinking.” When he still wouldn’t shut up, he was jailed. He felt his patriotism had been betrayed; trained to protect China against foreign enemies, he was not prepared to fire on unarmed Chinese. Now he would have his revenge. He would blow up banks; he would spy against the communists. He loved his country, but China was too corrupt. Did I know any intelligence people in the U.S.? His was one story in many. I do not even know whether it was true. But I wished him good luck before he disappeared into the seedy underworld of gangsters and “snakeheads,” who smuggle people across the border for a fee.

  Many young people with a higher education come to Shenzhen to learn English and to work for foreign companies. The Pearl River delta has been a source of emigrants for centuries, but the new type of emigrant is different from the Cantonese peasants who used to flee hunger and violence. In a sense, moving to Shenzhen allows you to get away from “China,” with its oppressive central government, its patriotic dogmas, and its rigid family hierarchies, while still living in China. Shenzhen, people like to say, is a “cultural desert,” a place “with no tradition,” a zone “without history.” The Chinese tradition is represented in large theme parks on the edge of town: a Chinese Folk Village, with mountains made of concrete, and Splendid China, where you ride in a golf cart past the Forbidden City of Beijing, along the Great Wall, and from there past the great Buddha of Leshan and the Wild Goose Pagoda of Xian, to the Dalai Lama’s old palace in Lhasa. As the past is being obliterated everywhere in China, it is being reconstructed here.

  Shenzhen, then, is “nowhere.” But for many young Chinese that is precisely its attraction. To be relieved of the burdens of home, history, and tradition is a form of liberation. Opportunities await at the frontiers of the wild south—opportunities to make money, but also to carve out a modicum of personal freedom.

  I was standing on a balcony of the seventeenth floor of a gigantic high-rise housing complex. It was built eight years ago, for relatively rich people. In the Zones, only the poor live near the ground. But the building already had a shabby, weatherworn look, with obscene graffiti in the elevators. I was standing there with Yang Yong, an artist from Sichuan, who came to Shenzhen with his wife, Yu Dongyu, a native of Beijing. We gazed at the urban skyline shimmering in the brownish, humid haze. On the far side was the soccer stadium, which is rarely used for sports but comes alive at night when the bars and discos clustered inside the stadium open up. Farther along were the green hills of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, out-of-bounds to Yang, and to most people living here. Between the stadium and those hills was downtown Shenzhen, its skyscrapers gleaming in the distance, and all around us was a sea of similar high-rise apartments, with barbershops, restaurants, supermarkets, and massage parlors on the ground floors.

  Yang is a small, pudgy man in his early twenties, with bushy eyebrows and quick, inquisitive eyes. “All this,” he said, making a sweeping gesture with his right arm, as though gathering the city in his arms, “didn’t exist until about ten years ago. It was just countryside.” I had heard almost the exact same words only the night before, from a publisher who came to Shenzhen from Yunnan in the early 1990s. We were having
a drink in the bar on the top floor of a grand hotel, where a Filipino band was softly playing “Guantanamera.” He had pointed out the window and down to the streaks of red and white lights from traffic rushing along a wide boulevard flanked by office buildings. “Nothing existed there before.” Nothing at all, until Deng Xiaoping decided that a city should be built. And Deng came down from Beijing in 1992 and said it was good.

  Yang likes Shenzhen—indeed loves it, “because everything is new.” He could have gone to Beijing, the center of contemporary arts, but “politics is too complicated,” and in Shanghai, he said, there was too much nostalgia. Shenzhen is simpler, and life, in Yang’s phrase, is more “straightforward.”

  He had been a painter but now takes photographs, mostly intimate pictures of women sleeping, washing, eating, sitting on the toilet, brushing their teeth, lolling about in coffee shops and department stores. Some are self-consciously arty, “urban youth” posing with sunglasses, cigarettes, plastic guns; one girl injects herself with a needle—or pretends to. Some of the women are prostitutes. One is only fifteen. Yang has seen the work of American and Japanese photographers engaged in similar projects. But there is a freshness, a lightheartedness about the best of his pictures, a lack of cynicism, a reveling in a kind of freedom, that is remarkable. These urban youths, even the young prostitutes, don’t look disaffected. Yang calls them lovable—keai. Keai is his favorite word of approval. Shenzhen people are keai. Hong Kong, in his view, is the opposite of keai: frenetic, grasping, hard-bitten. Keai is probably not the word most Chinese would use for Shenzhen. But compared to the rather metallic sophistication of Hong Kong, it is possible to see what he means.

  We took the elevator to another apartment in the same block, where a friend of Yang’s ran a small television production company. Yang wanted to borrow a video monitor to show me a film he had made. It was, like some of his photographs, a self-consciously arty film, based on one idea, which went on too long: Yang had superimposed an American porno film onto footage of a political demonstration in Shenzhen. The film was of three blond women licking and sucking each other on a large bed, making appropriate noises of pornographic lust. The demonstration was an officially orchestrated protest in 1999 against the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The grunts and squeals of the women contrasted weirdly with the aggressive chanting of the crowd.