by Jianying Zha
I understand, of course, that you don’t sink your teeth in a cow to get your choice cut of beef, and China is way too big a cow for anyone to tackle in full. I know my limits and my strengths. The rural life, the small-town stories, the migrants working in huge manufacturing plants—these are crucial and essential topics, and are being covered by many excellent writers. Continued poverty in parts of interior rural China, surging labor unrest in coastal factories, the injustice of the legal system, rampant corruption among local officials, ethnic tension, and environmental destruction are urgent major matters deserving our special, sustained attention.
But what I happen to know well is the big city, the great metropolis where great fortunes are made, where great political and intellectual battles are waged, and where great cultural industries and media machines operate. The metropolis is the headquarters and home terrain of a country’s elite, the mecca that draws bright, ambitious talents everywhere to come to try their luck and gain their glory. In this age of urbanization and globalization—and at this historical moment in China’s reemergence as a rising great power in the new millennium—the metropolis is the heart of aggregated convergence, a center stage for passionate human striving and fantastic social drama. Beijing, in particular, demonstrates the attitudes of those running the country and debating its future.
I am a Beijinger. Of all the big cities I have lived in thus far—Beijing, New York, Nanjing, Chicago, Houston, Hong Kong, Fort Lauderdale—I have loved Beijing and New York the most. But if there is one city that is in my blood and soul, it is and always will be Beijing. The site of so much history and memory and the home of high culture, state pomp, bohemian enclaves, northern vernacular, noble plans, fantastic gossip, and tragicomedies large and small, Beijing is, beyond a doubt, China’s greatest metropolis. The Beijing I knew as a child has been transformed: the broad, stately avenues; the beautiful imperial parks; and the Soviet-style monuments still remain, but the long flows of bicycles, the huge crowds dressed in blue and gray, and the Mao statues have all but vanished. Today’s Beijing is a great urban jungle: cutting-edge architectural landmarks; tacky, plush shopping plazas; large gated communities; shrinking old hutong neighborhoods; traffic jams and subway commuters; youngsters dressed in hip international fashion; old ladies bargaining at the farmer’s market.
In the summer of 2005, when Paul Goldberger, architectural critic for the New Yorker and dean of the Parsons School for Design, made his first visit to Beijing, I accompanied him and showed him around. He looked about very intently for several days, and then one day told me that Beijing reminded him of Houston. It broke my heart. Of all the cities I have lived in, I have to admit Houston is my least favorite. Has three decades of ceaseless dismantling and massive, breakneck construction turned Beijing, a majestic symbol of Eastern imperial splendor and then of socialist utopia, into a . . . Houston? I was so upset I held a silent, intense grudge against Paul for days afterward. But how could I argue with him? With expert eyes, Paul had summed up something about this new Beijing that had also irritated me when I moved back. I had heard much worse verdicts from my Beijing friends!
Nevertheless, I knew then as I know now that Beijing is as great a city as it has always been, because what makes it great is not merely its constructed environment but—more important—its inhabitants, the millions of individuals who give Beijing its distinctive character and unique flair. So I told Paul, after getting over my jolted mood, that he must visit Beijing again and get to know its people a little. I thought to myself, Oh, if you only knew the language and the people, you would understand how little Beijing resembles Houston beyond its physical environment, and why it will never become Houston, not in a thousand years!
But Paul’s remark, in a way, helped me identify and crystallize a central narrative principle that I came to believe in and stuck to in this book: focus on the Chinese to explain China. And if Beijing is at the center of my canvas, then I should train the spotlight on a select group of actors and players whose life stories and contours of thinking and action would help the reader understand the mental and spiritual journeys of a people moving in a rapidly changing physical landscape and unprecedented social transformation. Through their struggles and epiphanies, their gains and losses, the reader can, I hope, feel the heart and soul of a city and the spirit of a nation.
My growing involvement in Chinese public life, my Chinese books, and the demands of my research institute job may explain the uneven pace of this book’s production. But in the end, I hope I have gathered here a collection of useful stories and portraits of individuals whose life journeys have educated and inspired me. At the forefront of the tide of reform, they might be called the movers and shakers of a rising China. To me, they are certainly living proof of an ancient culture’s amazing source of energy, intelligence, and unending drive to achieve dignity and glory. The six chapters are divided into two groups. The first group focuses on entrepreneurs. These are various rags-to-riches tales with Chinese characteristics: an unlikely couple who teamed up to become China’s leading real estate moguls; a gifted chameleon who transformed himself from Mao’s favorite “barefoot doctor” during the Cultural Revolution into a publishing maverick by deftly playing China’s commercializing book market; a tycoon of a chain of home-electronics stores who wants revenge for his mother, a “counterrevolutionary criminal” executed in the most brutal manner.
The second group of chapters centers on intellectuals. Here are professors in China’s number-one university locked in a deadly debate about education reform; my brother, a dissident jailed for nine years for co-founding the China Democracy Party; and finally, a famous, prolific writer who served as the cultural minister but also kept people divided as to whether he is an apologist for the Chinese Communist Party or a great author that might one day win a Nobel Prize in literature.
Tracking these lives and these stories has been a fascinating learning experience for me. I can only hope that they might also help deepen the reader’s understanding of my home culture and shed some light on the complicated, dynamic, and fluid transformation currently driving the Chinese nation and the Chinese people.
Part I
The Entrepreneurs
A Good Tycoon
On a cold December evening, I met Zhang Dazhong at his brightly lit, spacious office in Beijing. Sitting in a black swivel chair behind a T-shaped worktable and against the hypnotic backdrop of a giant fish tank in which eighteen large, beautiful, red fish swam, Zhang cheerfully told me about his recent losses in the stock market. “I was making money at first. I bought some shares one day, and within a week I raked in a bundle. That made me very uncomfortable. Too quick! Too easy! It can’t be right! Then, I made some bets, and I began to lose. After that I felt much better: I paid my tuition. I’m learning a few things about the stock market,” he grinned. “All those fancy terms, they used to give me a headache. Now I can understand them. But I’m in no hurry.”
A year earlier, it could have been argued (and many did in the Chinese media) that it was precisely this “no hurry” conservatism that had caused Zhang Dazhong, at the age of fifty-nine, to be forced out of the business of electric-appliance sales he had pioneered in China. Now, however—given China’s year-long steep fall into a bear market, the black clouds of a worldwide financial crisis, and economic downturn—the measured prudence characteristic of Zhang’s career appears in a different light.
Zhang Dazhong is a household name in Beijing, known to millions through Dazhong Dianqi (Dazhong Electric Appliance), a chain he founded that featured his first name and carried television sets, audio systems, air conditioners, refrigerators, microwave ovens, and so on. It was the biggest in the city. But in December 2007, Zhang surprised the business community by selling all of his sixty-two stores to Huang Guangyu, the thirty-eight-year-old owner of Gome Dianqi, thus enabling Gome to claim the number-one spot among national chains. The merger had attracted a great deal of media attention because it involved a war among four ele
ctronics giants and a nasty dispute full of intrigue and betrayal. In the end, though, Zhang obtained a good deal, receiving a cash payment of 3.6 billion yuan (over $500 million) for Gome’s takeover of Dazhong, which would continue to do business under the Dazhong name. Leaving the field a cash billionaire, Zhang immediately registered a new company, Dazhong Investment, and repositioned himself as a venture-capitalist-cum-investment-financier. Some of his loyal senior staff followed him. In 2008, Zhang paid 0.56 billion yuan ($80 million) in taxes, the biggest individual tax payment in the history of the People’s Republic of China. According to newspaper reports, he paid more taxes than the total sum of individual taxes in the entire Qinghai province.
In the business community, however, many viewed Zhang’s decision to sell Dazhong as an acknowledgment of defeat. The dominant take among analysts was that Zhang’s age and northern conservative approach to business had narrowed his vision and prevented him from seeing the future, whereas Huang, a young Cantonese, not only saw the coming tide of big national chains, standardization, and the power of capital market, but also had the energy, audacity, and skill to play that tide.
Zhang likes to cite a Chinese proverb: “If you don’t have a diamond bit, don’t take on a porcelain job.” He was also fond of saying, “Do as much business as your money allows you.” Huang’s motto was a simple zinger: “Commerce has no borders.” And he has lived up to it in his actions. Taking Dazhong into Gome’s fold was but one step in his rapid expansion. Huang’s ambition was far greater than running China’s Best Buy. He was building a corporate empire, from home electronic sales (HES) to real estate, from regional to national to beyond China’s borders. As for the grand gesture of handing Zhang a sack of gold while showing him the door (the equivalent of dropping Zhang from the sky with a golden parachute), it was supposedly trademark Huang style. In China’s business media, Huang had been accorded a rock star’s flashy fame: his humble beginnings, his family’s Catholic background, his penchant for gold ties, all had an exoticness even in a country full of rags-to-riches tales.
Huang also had the reputation of being a mystery genius. Reporters closely studied his business strategies and sometimes described the young tycoon’s moves in kung fu lingo, as though they were observing the movements of a cool black-belt master. They admired Huang’s risk-taking temperament and gutsy decisions. They noted his liaisons with high rollers such as Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs, his shrewdness in debt financing, and his growing interest in the capital markets, and marveled at his deft play with various financial instruments (for example, Huang frequently repackaged his various companies by shuffling holdings and reinfusing capital in order to drive up their stock prices), even though few understood them fully. As a matter of fact, the less they could figure Huang out and pin him down, the more fascinating and intriguing he seemed.
Zhang Dazhong, on the other hand, seemed a less-than-dazzling figure: genial and avuncular, he built his business by the sweat of his brow; he remained low-key and avoided the spotlight, and by all accounts lived a simple, ordinary life. He appeared to be quite straightforward. How much can you say about a guy like that?
Then, one bright morning in November 2008, Zhang, like millions of others, opened the paper and read the headline: Huang Guangyu had been arrested for allegedly manipulating stocks, money laundering, and bribing government officials. Like the reaction following the Madoff scandal in the United States, the news reverberated like ominous thunder in the already darkened sky of economic crisis. Huang was, after all, the wealthiest private entrepreneur in China. On the Hu Run List of the Richest People in China, Huang was number one in 2008, worth 43 billion yuan ($6.3 billion). He had occupied that top spot twice before. Zhang Dazhong, at an estimated worth of 3.8 billion yuan (about $540 million), was only number 269 in 2007. But now, with the economy in recession and Huang behind bars, and the official investigation of the case shrouded in secrecy and rumors, the picture suddenly changed.
So did perspectives on the two men. Adoration of Huang—perhaps also tinged with envy—soon turned to condemnation. Gibes and stabs began to appear on the Internet. The portrait of an utter scoundrel emerged. Online postings revealed that in his teens Huang was not only dirt-poor (as a kid he had collected garbage to scrape by) but also a wild hooligan. He and his brother (a real-estate developer) were often involved in ruthless exploitation, bribery, gang violence, and other shady deals; as for scruples or conscience, neither had any. Recalling the Gome-Dazhong merger, people now marveled at Zhang’s incredible luck and fortune: imagine trying to sell Dazhong now! What uncanny, perfect timing! How wise and prescient! Within one year the Chinese stock market’s value had shrunk by 70 percent. Zhang had received the last portion of Gome’s cash payment just two weeks before Huang’s arrest! According to a friend of mine, even Beijing cab drivers were gossiping about Zhang’s vindication. “I was sitting in a cab and the radio had on some news about Huang,” he told me, “and the driver said they are all happy for Zhang Dazhong.”
Zhang himself demonstrated no desire to punch the fallen man while he was down. As usual, he made no public comments about Huang’s disgrace. In our conversation, he shrugged off speculation that the arrest signaled the central government’s intention to reign in the “Guangdong Gang”—the princeling (children of Party leaders) businessmen and politicians who dominate the rich southern province where Huang comes from. If he was sympathetic to the local media’s talk about Huang’s insatiable greed and love for fancy financial manipulations as the cause of his downfall, he clearly did not want to gloat over it. “He [Huang] is very hardworking and very shrewd,” Zhang told me. “I don’t want to pass judgment. He was fiercely competitive, and that was a big inspiration and push for me.”
Zhang Dazhong is a short, compact man with the soft, pale skin of a gentleman scholar, a scrubbed, glowing complexion that comes from regular exercise and good health. At sixty, he is trim, youngerlooking than his age, with alert eyes and a quick, assured gait. In conversation he speaks an informal, colloquial Beijing lingo, lapsing occasionally into earthy expletives. His sartorial style is on the conservative side without being stuffy: on most days he is dressed in “business casual,” with a button-down shirt in a solid primary color, dark slacks, good leather shoes, and, on cold days, a blue or gray sweater. His manner is friendly and easygoing yet at the same time careful and vigilant. In a group he tends to listen more than talk, with the self-effacing attentiveness of someone who is accustomed to constantly sizing things up, watching, and absorbing information. This billionaire is definitely not full of himself. Nor is he taking his success and fortune for granted.
“I don’t think I’m that much smarter than a lot of the guys out there,” he said to me recently in his office, smoking and sipping tea in turns as the hour drew late. Earlier on he had told me about his first encounter with Benchi, or Mercedes-Benz. Somewhere in the late 1970s, Beijing had held an exhibition of German-manufactured products, and Zhang had gone to see it. At the time he had a job selling pork at a village grocer on Beijing’s outskirts, earning 30 yuan ($5) a month, and after nearly a decade of working he owned a bike and nothing else. He had no apartment, no savings, no girlfriend. At the exhibition, a particular picture caught his eye. “It was a Benchi [奔驰],” Zhang recalled. “I looked at it for a long time, thinking: what a beautiful car! Of course I never dreamed of driving my own Benchi one day.” Today Zhang owns two Mercedes. “If China hadn’t shifted to the reform and open-door policies, someone like me, coming from a family like mine, would never have a chance. If you write up my story, you’ve got to put this in: considering where I was thirty years ago, it’s like a trip from hell to heaven.”
The journey had started in 1979 when Zhang decided to embark on a mission that back then appeared even more impossible than possessing a Benchi: he wanted the Chinese government to change its verdict on his mother.
Wang Peiying, a kindergarten teacher, had publicly criticized Mao Zedong before and during the Cult
ural Revolution. Detained, denounced, yet refusing to retract her views, she was put in a mental ward and received forced “medical treatment” for two and half years. Later she was taken back to her work unit and locked up in a “cowshed” (detainment center for “counterrevolutionaries”). Besides being subjected to forced labor, she was regularly interrogated, beaten, and humiliated. Her stubborn defiance earned her the label of zui da er ji (罪大恶极, “great crime, extremely evil”). On January 27, 1970, at an organized Pi-dou (attack and strike) rally in Beijing’s Worker’s Stadium, before a packed crowd of 100,000, she and sixteen other “counterrevolutionaries” were sentenced to death. They were to be executed immediately. Still defiant, she struggled with the guards on the way to the execution site. They strangled her to death with a rope inside the convoy truck.
Wang and her husband, a midlevel official working for the Ministry of Railways, had seven children: six boys in a row and then a girl. Zhang Dazhong was the third boy. When Dazhong was twelve, their father died of liver failure, leaving Wang to raise the children alone. The family struggled financially. Zhang recalls crying silently on the balcony when they had to let a beloved old nanny go since they couldn’t afford her anymore. He learned how to mend his own clothes, which were always covered with patches. For the summertime, each of the Zhang children had just one pair of pants, which they washed every night so they could dry in time to be worn the next morning. To make ends meet, Wang regularly sold things for cash: antique pieces passed down from her parents, her husband’s old winter coat. But poverty was nothing compared to what happened after Wang openly criticized Mao. They became a “black sheep” family. Zhang still recoils at the memory of his emotional confusion, of his weekly visits to the mental hospital and the sight of his mother, drugged out, pale, yet unfaltering. The case cast a deep shadow on the children’s lives. The stigma of having a mother who was an executed counterrevolutionary meant that none of them could get a decent job or go to a university; their marital prospects suffered since most people would not want to forge such an alliance. Zhang’s siblings accepted their lot. Several settled in dreary jobs in the provinces, abandoning hope of moving back to Beijing.