by Ian Buruma
Lawyers who attempt to use the law in that way are often heroes, and, like many critics of Chinese despots in the past, often end up as martyrs.
In 1998, a young lawyer in Nanjing was asked to defend a rural official who had been accused of taking bribes. It appeared to be a straightforward case. The lawyer did his best, and he found people willing to testify to his client’s innocence. But local authorities had decided to find the official guilty—probably because he had gotten in some higher official’s way. The defense witnesses failed to turn up in court. And the lawyer himself was jailed for “illegally obtaining evidence.”
In Shaanxi, farmers protesting that they were being forced to pay too much tax had been tortured by village officials. The lawyer who agreed to petition the central government in Beijing on their behalf was promptly arrested, then sentenced to five years in prison for “disturbing social order.”
One day I chanced upon an article about yet another lawyer, Zhou Litai. It was a short report from the Agence France-Presse: An eighteen-year-old named Fu Xulin had his right hand ripped off by a molding machine in a factory in Shenzhen, where he had been making Christmas toys for U.S. $40 a month. The factory owner, from Hong Kong, refused to pay for surgery that would have restored Fu’s hand, but offered to send him away with a modest sum. When Fu refused the offer, he was locked up in a room at the factory. In the end, Fu might well have ended up on the streets clutching a plastic begging bowl in his left hand. But he was rescued by the lawyer Zhou Litai, who gave him shelter and took up his case for nothing.
Fu Xulin was extraordinarily lucky. About twenty thousand men and women in the Shenzhen area suffer disabling accidents every year. The old and badly maintained machines are operated by poorly trained workers for ten or more hours a day. Factory owners, often from Hong Kong or Taiwan, know that the supply of workers is endless. Local officials, wined, dined, and often bribed by the factory owners, care only about profits. And although workers are supposed to be covered by state insurance, in case of accidents, the money rarely comes their way. Zhou Litai is the only lawyer in the Shenzhen area prepared to take up some of their cases.
To visit Zhou I took a taxi from Shenzhen to Longgang, an industrial town on the other side of the border that divides the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen from the rest of China. Cars rush through from the Shenzhen side. Cars coming from the opposite direction stand idle, in long queues, their drivers honking in a blue carbon-monoxide haze. Longgang is a grubby town with a wide road running through raw-concrete housing blocks. There are many new hotels, however, with Hong Kong and foreign businessmen hanging around the air-conditioned lobbies. And there are the usual seedy-looking karaoke bars, discos, and massage parlors decorated with fairy lights and white-plaster statues of Venus. Around the town is a strip of factories, belching yellow smoke into the rank, humid air.
Zhou rents an apartment in a housing complex. It was hard to get hold of him, for his telephone was usually out of order. I was shown the way by a young man dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt, with one short sleeve flapping, armless, in the wind. He was from Hunan and his arm had been mangled in a plastics factory. The street outside the apartment block was unpaved and filled with discarded plastic bags and broken bottles. We climbed the concrete stairs, which were still slimy from a burst waterpipe. I noticed a smell of blocked drains in the hall.
Zhou greeted me from a sofa in his main room. A stocky man in his forties, with a wide, crooked mouth and a bad haircut, he was dressed only in shorts and plastic sandals. Around him were a few men, all of whom were lacking something, a limb or a hand. One man had no arms. Zhou offered to show me around the place. He opened a few doors to small, stuffy rooms filled with old mattresses. People, some barely out of their teens, were sleeping snugly together, like puppies in basket. They too were handicapped in various ways. Altogether, Zhou had taken seventeen workers into his apartment. A blackboard in the main room listed various household duties and the dates of court appearances.
We sat down in a tiny room, which functioned as Zhou’s office. Zhou’s naked stomach bulged, like a small melon, over his shorts. On the floor was a sleeping figure with hideous burns on his back and legs. Occasionally he would stir, moaning. I asked Zhou how he managed to finance his law practice. How could he make these cases pay? Instead of giving a direct answer, he gave me a summary of his life, occasionally interrupted by loud screams from another room, whereupon he would leave the room to see what was going on. I heard more shouting, followed by a whining sound. Then Zhou would return to resume where he had left off.
Zhou Litai was born in 1956 in a small village in Sichuan. His parents were poor farmers. Two and a half years in the village school were all the formal education he had. But at least he had learned to read. Like He Qinglian, he read anything he could lay his hands on, mostly stories of Communist heroes, such as Lei Feng, the self-sacrificing martyr who wanted to be a “rustless” screw in the Maoist machine. In 1974, Zhou joined the army, inspired perhaps by the heroic stories. It was also the quickest escape from village life. He was sent to Tibet, where discipline was harsh, but again Zhou escaped into the heroic world of Communist literature: uplifting stories about patriotic soldiers in the Korean War or self-sacrificing workers in steel foundries.
There was not much Zhou could do with a mere two and a half years of formal schooling. After leaving the army in 1978, he worked in a brick factory in Hunan. And there his idealism, shaped by official fantasies of heroism, turned into anger. The workers were treated like slaves, bullied, humiliated, and driven to the limits of their endurance. When they were injured, they were simply replaced by others. That is when Zhou realized that people had to stand up for their rights. It was the only way to stop the bosses from getting away with capricious brutality.
Zhou left the factory for a menial job in a prosecutor’s office near his old hometown. He dedicated the next few years to teaching himself the law, sitting up nights studying, copying, reading. In 1986, at last, he was able to take the national exams and qualify as a lawyer. After setting up an office in Chongqing, he came down to Shenzhen to specialize in workers’ rights.
Factory bosses hate him, the social security bureaucrats wish him dead, and there have been threats—and violence. Some of his clients, who finally got paid thanks to his efforts, ran off without giving him a cent in legal fees. He has to rely on charity, some of it from Hong Kong, on loans from friends, and on the odd commercial case. Yet, in the way of the self-sacrificing heroes of his youth, Zhou carries on, because, as he puts it, “Seas change into mulberry fields, and mulberry fields into seas”—that is to say, everything changes over time.
Zhou spoke to me softly, in a heavy Sichuan accent. It was clear he had rehearsed the story many times before. His life has been reported in the Chinese press, as a tale of heroism and self-sacrifice. It had the pattern of traditional Chinese tales of virtue: the heroic industriousness of the poor scholar beating all the odds, the willingness to give up everything to serve others. It was a Confucian pattern, often adapted by the Communists. Perhaps that is why Zhou became too well known to disappear easily into a prison. What is extraordinary, however, about his version of the traditional narrative is that he turned it into a story about the rule of law. Here was a stubborn, intelligent man, who could not be called westernized in any meaningful way. In terms of social background, political culture, or education, Zhou Litai could not be further removed from Martin Lee, and yet he had reached a similar conclusion: Only under the rule of law can people be safe from official bullies.
But can the rule of law exist without democratic institutions? Zhou is not a political activist. Nor is he a revolutionary, who aims to save China. He does not talk about China in abstract terms. Zhou believes in rights, in legality, in a more “positive social environment, where the rule of law prevails.” If one believes, as do He Qinglian, Martin Lee, and Wei Jingsheng, that such an environment can come about only after a systemic change, which would constitute a re
volution, then Zhou’s mulberry fields will never change into seas. He will do good, force factory bosses to concede here and there, perhaps even bring about some changes in the law. But the rule of law will remain elusive. And Zhou, like others scattered across the Chinese empire, will be a lonely hero, sacrificing, fighting against all the odds, but limited in the end to putting bandages on the wounds of a fatally flawed system.
According to He Qinglian, 60 percent of China’s wealth is owned by 1 percent of the population. Yet this is still nominally a socialist society, ruled by a Communist party. “To Get Rich Is Glorious,” the slogan coined by Deng Xiaoping to justify his economic reforms, is fine as far as it goes. Enough young people still hope to get rich, and enjoy the new freedoms of life in the large coastal cities and economic zones. But what will happen when the gold rush ends, when millions fall behind, when the promise of riches turns out to be hollow? What then? How can the Communist Party justify its monopoly on power when the quasi–free market goes bust? People will not have the satisfaction of voting their rulers out of power. They cannot even criticize them for their mistakes. But what will the rulers have left?
The Pearl River delta, stretching between Shenzhen and Guangzhou, is a frontier zone of new cities, destroyed landscapes, and cultural poverty, despised by northerners as a crude, cultural desert. Yet the area is soaked in history. Guangzhou is where the Chinese revolution of 1911 began. The first republican prime minister of China, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, was born in the delta, in a place that now bears his name. You can visit his old house, a comfortable two-story gray-brick building in a bamboo grove, a short walk from a kind of religious theme park featuring huge golden Buddhas and Indian-style temples. But the grandest, newest, flashiest historical museum in the region is about an hour’s drive from Shenzhen, on the site of China’s greatest official humiliation.
The Naval Warfare Museum is rather like a large American convention center, with an enormous parking lot. It looks out onto the muddy Pearl River, spanned by a brand-new suspension bridge near the town of Humen. Under the bridge, next to the museum, are the old gun batteries, built in the 1830s, that were supposed to have stopped the opium-pushing barbarians from reaching Guangzhou. These fixed cannon were the finest made in China. A folk rhyme about Humen, or Boca Tigris as it was then called, went: “Hard to enter, even harder to get out.” And yet when the barbarians forced open China’s door to sell drugs, and anything else the Chinese might wish to buy, the guns hardly did any good at all. In 1834, two British frigates sailed past them. In 1840, a larger fleet simply ignored them. And a year later, they were destroyed.
It might seem a little odd to erect a huge museum to commemorate such a humiliating defeat. In fact, there is a second, only slightly older, museum in the town of Humen itself, which is now a veritable Lourdes for wounded patriots. On the spot where, in 1839, the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu had 3 million pounds of raw opium dissolved in pits filled with water, salt, and lime, you can visit the Opium War Museum and the Lin Zexu Memorial.
Commissioner Lin was not a xenophobe but a brave and honest man, who ordered a translation of Vattel’s Law of Nations and wrote a famous letter to Queen Victoria protesting the opium trade6: “Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it; certainly [you] would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused. . . .” After China’s defeat in the first Opium War, poor Lin was sent away in disgrace.
Outside the Opium War Museum is a small, dark shrine where Lin, the “patriotic hero,” is worshipped together with other deified heroes, whose statues are placed next to those of the God of War and the Yellow Emperor. The museum is earmarked as a “National Educational Model Base of Patriotism,” to which schoolchildren, company employees, and soldiers are bused in for patriotic propaganda.
The shrine reminded me of a similar monument in Taiwan, where the legendary loyalist to the Ming dynasty, Cheng Ch’eng-kung (Koxinga), is remembered. Koxinga had to retreat to Taiwan to escape the Manchu invaders of the Qing. There, in 1662 he expelled the Dutch from their trading post. He, too, fought against foreign domination, but at least he was never defeated, and even enjoyed a victory of sorts. In Nationalist patriotic education, Koxinga’s heroic retreat was the model for the KMT’s last stand against the Communist regime—an enemy that was of Chinese blood but enslaved to an alien creed. I visited the Koxinga temple in Tainan after the KMT had lost its dominance on Taiwan. It was a sad, dilapidated place. The few visitors were mostly old.
Not many people were around when I visited the Lin Zexu Memorial, either. Two young men lay fast asleep where the opium had been dissolved. I read the words engraved in rather clumsy calligraphy on the stone wall: THIS IS WHERE LIN ZEXU HAD THE OPIUM DESTROYED. This banal statement was written by Premier Li Peng, the man most people hold responsible for the Tiananmen killings. Opposite the shrine for Lin and the Yellow Emperor was a wall with a painting of nineteenth-century British warships. For a small fee, visitors were invited to shoot rubber bullets at them. The ships had begun to fade, as though shrouded in gunsmoke, where countless bullets had hit home.
Once more the Communists have updated an earlier myth of patriotic resistance against foreign imperialists. A text on the wall of the Naval Warfare Museum explains, in Chinese and English, inside a large tableau of furious Chinese people, eyes bulging with rage, like revolutionary workers in a socialist-realist Soviet poster: “Facing the invaders with sharp weapons, the Chinese people were not afraid, but bravely resisted. As the Qing government was corrupted and the ruler pursued a compromise policy, the resistance finally failed. However, the sublime national integrity and great patriotic spirit of Chinese people displayed during the anti-invading struggle had cast a national statue that would never disappear. And it has been encouraging one Chinese generation after another to make a sustained effort for the prosperity of the nation.”
“Prosperity of the nation,” the Party’s post-Maoist goal, dates the text accurately. It suggests that the nineteenth-century heroes were forerunners of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. The facts are more complicated. Opium was an unfortunate product with which to inaugurate trade with China, but demand in China was high, and foreign and Chinese merchants, the latter often in league with criminals and corrupt officials, were making huge profits in the opium trade. In a way, the barbarians who came to China’s shores in the 1830s were the pioneers of the Open Door policy. They wanted freedom to trade and legal protection.
The last imperial government was poorly placed to grant such favors, for it had an attitude as well as a currency problem. Imports and domestic taxes had to be paid in silver, while other domestic transactions were done in copper. People were hard-pressed to pay their taxes, while the opium trade was draining the country of precious silver. A further complication was the imperial court’s refusal to accept foreigners as equals. China was late in adjusting to the practices of the modern world. Foreigners were supposed to bear tribute, not trade. The resulting clash between traditional imperial ideas and modern trade practices cost China dearly. And yet officials who persisted in hopeless resistance are still worshipped as patriotic heroes, whereas those who advocated compromise and more freedom to trade are remembered as traitors to the Chinese race.
The wording of the patriotic myth is telling, if a little disingenuous. The hopeless fight against superior British forces is equated with the “sustained effort for the prosperity of the nation.” And the “integrity of the nation” for which the brave Chinese people fought is modern code for national reunification with Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. But the most important message is that the “patriotic spirit” of the “anti-invading struggle” was a question not only of national but of ethnic pride. Indeed, the Chinese “nation” becomes—or became in the nineteenth century—an ethnic idea: the Han Chinese against the barbarians, but also against the corrupt Manchus. This idea of China, born in humiliation, is meant to include all those of Han Chinese blood. In fact,
it has little resonance in Taiwan or in cosmopolitan Hong Kong, which have their own foundation myths, though overseas Chinese in Europe and the United States are more susceptible to this last refuge of a bankrupt Communist government.
I was surprised at first to see Li Peng’s calligraphy carved into the Lin Zexu Memorial’s wall, for it seemed rather late to be putting so much effort into the history of the Opium War. But in fact it makes sense. After the debacle of 1989, the government needed every shred of legitimacy it could find. Economic growth through mafia capitalism is not enough. And throwing the door open to foreign trade, however beneficial in the long run, is a risky enterprise. Some Chinese will end up richer; many will not. So the more China’s door widens and the wilder things get in the wild southern Zones, the more people must be reminded of earlier humiliations. By claiming to be heirs of the “patriotic heroes” and not of the collaborators of foreign traders, the government can blame the ill effects of its own policies on wicked barbarians. Only the Chinese Communist Party can protect the Chinese people from another bout of racial impotence. This is the only claim it has left.
Chapter 2
Roads to Bethlehem
A recorded voice over the public address system on the train to Guang-zhou pointed out, rather too loudly, the historic beauty spots of the region while I looked out the window at the landscape flashing by: sad stumps of dynamited hills, orange-brown, like dried blood; uniform rows of numbered concrete housing blocks; high-rise buildings with colonial-style finishes; factories belching plumes of pus-colored smoke; bulldozers, cranes, open pipelines, a half-finished overpass broken off in mid-air; and here and there, a duck pond, rice paddy, or polluted canal to show what this part of the country had looked like as recently as fifteen years ago.
I was heading to meet Grace Liu, a friend from America. Grace had left her native Guangzhou for the United States in the 1980s, when she was still a schoolgirl. She had become a sassy, well-dressed New Yorker, with high ambitions and a brassy voice, which, if you disregarded the American accent, sounded rather like that of the Cantonese announcer on the train. I had noticed in the U.S. that she used the word “we” a lot: “We Americans,” “We conservatives,” and, on occasion, “We Chinese.”