Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

by Jianying Zha

  Both Gates and Buffett have stated that they did not intend to press the Chinese tycoons but only wanted a dialogue with them. Afterward, the two men pronounced the dinner an unqualified success. “I was amazed last night, really,” said Buffett at the press conference the following day, “at how similar the questions and discussions and all that was to the dinners we had in the U.S. The same motivations tend to exist. The mechanism for manifesting those motivations may differ from country to country.” According to a Chinese report, Buffett told his guests at dinner that China’s philanthropy is growing faster than he had imagined, and will grow faster than the United States’ in the future.

  The Barefoot Capitalist

  My friend Sun Lizhe is in trouble again. One of his protégés betrayed him and squeezed him out of a publishing business that he had spent years turning into a success. It had published many national bestsellers and won an award as “one of the five best new companies in China.” As soon as I heard of Lizhe’s troubles, I tried to contact him, but he was in America, getting business diplomas from Northwestern and the University of Pennsylvania. Later I discovered that he had enrolled in several other part-time or correspondence degree courses—some in business, some in law—at both American and Chinese universities. Going back to college at his age—fifty-two—seemed bizarre, but, on reflection, it struck me as an action as full of fresh starts and striking transformations as modern China itself.

  I had first heard about his publishing venture during a visit to Beijing in the spring of 2001, at a dinner with some people in publishing circles. We were in a new, popular Hangzhou restaurant, a three-story affair with a gleaming white façade, red tile roof, cheerfully gaudy decor (including a large gilt Buddha), and a clientele composed of newly prosperous Chinese. We were discussing publishing trends in China—how the business was getting more commercial, more complicated. Now that China had joined the World Trade Organization, there was general expectation that government restrictions might gradually loosen up. One important publishing house was making a deal with Bertelsmann, the German publishing conglomerate. Shen Changwen, a veteran Beijing publisher and editor, was talking about the special nature of joint-venture publishing in China. (Commercial firms must cooperate jointly with government agencies.) Shen, a short, colorful figure with close-cropped hair, is greatly respected among publishers as a shrewd politician; he always knows all the gossip, and he mentioned Sun Lizhe as a big mover in the field. Sun, he said, was a meiguo zibenjia, “an American capitalist.”

  “An American capitalist!” I exclaimed. “But don’t you know he used to be a barefoot doctor? He was the most famous barefoot doctor in the Cultural Revolution!” An earlier innovation of the Cultural Revolution, “barefoot doctors” were people given rudimentary medical training to work in remote parts of the country, where peasants were still resorting to folkloric remedies. The people at the table stared at me blankly, as if the Cultural Revolution, and Sun Lizhe’s part in it, had occurred in another universe. Then they continued talking about the Bertelsmann deal.

  Sun Lizhe was a legendary figure in those earlier days. Graduating from one of Beijing’s elite high schools, he had answered Chairman Mao’s calls for zhi qing—another catchphrase of the Cultural Revolution, meaning “educated youth”—to take their knowledge to poor parts of China. Sun volunteered to go to northern Shaanxi and proved to be a born healer, improving his skills so rapidly that he was soon conducting major surgical operations. Sick peasants came from hundreds of miles away to see him. Operating from his crudely equipped clinic inside a mud cave, he treated thousands, working day and night. He and his assistants grew herbs around the clinic to make their own medicines.

  As Sun’s fame spread, a team of specialists, led by China’s most eminent surgeon, was sent to the village. The team watched Sun operating, tested him extensively, and eventually concluded that the self-taught doctor had reached a level of proficiency equivalent to that of someone with a medical school degree and ten years of clinical experience. The news reached the Party Central Committee and so impressed Chairman Mao that, in 1974, he included Sun in a list of five “model educated youths.” He was twenty-three.

  At the time, the phenomenon of “barefoot doctors” was attracting a good deal of attention both inside and outside China. Sun Lizhe, the most gifted and successful of them, became a celebrity. The newspapers followed his story; television documentaries and a widely seen cinema newsreel were made about him; he was awarded luminous political titles (Party secretary of the production brigade, head of the regional health bureau, member of the provincial Communist youth league committee) and touted as a role model for Chinese youth. I was in my midteens at the time, and, as a high school student in Beijing, was required to study Sun Lizhe’s life in my politics class.

  Then, in 1976, Mao died, and some of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution were reversed. By the end of 1977, the college entrance exam had been reinstated. Those of us who passed could hardly believe our good fortune to be reading in a university library rather than doing manual labor on a farm.

  But the new era wasn’t hospitable for everyone. Even though all that Sun Lizhe had done was to treat peasants at his clinic, the many official titles that had been heaped on him identified him as part of the old regime. For an entire year he was taken from village to village and publicly denounced. On open-air platforms he faced huge crowds, among them his former colleagues and admirers, who shouted slogans at him for hours. In the lonely hours inside his mud cave, he began to drink.

  Sun Lizhe twice attempted suicide. Then, trying to drink himself into oblivion, he poisoned his liver, which is actually what saved him: he became so weak that the government decided to send him to Beijing for medical treatment. While he was convalescing in the hospital, a romance started with a kind, intelligent, if plain-looking, woman named Wu Beiling. A classmate of mine, she had known Sun for years. Like him, she had been a Beijing zhi qing in Shaanxi, and she had evidently fallen in love with him back then, though he had always treated her simply as a comrade. Beiling brought him gifts—homemade food, fresh fruit, books—and stayed by his bed, trying to cheer him up. Along with a few other close friends, she petitioned for Sun’s rehabilitation, using family connections to plead his case to senior officials. Within a few months, with the sponsorship of the head of the Beijing Institute of Medicine, who had been so impressed by the young barefoot doctor back in Shaanxi, Sun was allowed to take the 1979 college entrance exam (he scored at the top in his subject) and was admitted into the graduate program at the Beijing Institute of Medicine. His ordeal was over.

  I was in my second year at Peking University when Beiling first brought him to our dorm. Tall, good-looking, and very articulate, he impressed us all. He had an excellent command of English—a rarity at the time—and seemed knowledgeable about every conceivable subject. All of us, I think, secretly envied Beiling her famous boyfriend; she was breathless whenever she talked about him, endlessly impressed by his memory, intelligence, and indefatigable energy. I also learned that he used to have a stutter, that his personal hygiene left something to be desired, and that at times he behaved like a little boy. Gradually, through Beiling, Sun lost for me his heroic aura and became like an older brother. I learned to call him Lizhe, as all his friends did.

  Whenever I saw him, he was usually with Beiling and other friends who had spent time in Shaanxi. Over hot lamb and cold beer they would reminisce, telling amazing tales of hardship, poverty, and loneliness, but also of naive, passionate idealism. They poked fun at one another, but there was also great tenderness and a shared romanticism about Shaanxi. Shaanxi was their youth.

  I noticed something else they had in common: their health had been damaged. These were city kids from comfortable families who plunged into backbreaking labor at the age of seventeen or eighteen. Even though they were still in their twenties, almost all of them had contracted some illness during the Shaanxi years. One man, Shi Tiesheng, who would become a famous fiction write
r, was paralyzed from the waist down. He had gone to the same village as Sun, and had been a shepherd in the hills until one day he was stricken by a fever, the cause of which no one could identify, and his legs went numb. He was twenty-one, and he never walked again.

  Lizhe was reputed to be a brilliant student at the Beijing Institute of Medicine. But he didn’t finish. As China reopened its doors to the outside world, information about the West, though still scarce, began to circulate, and the government was making it easier for people to go abroad. In 1981, Lizhe and Beiling both applied for scholarships to study abroad. They left China separately, but in 1982 they joined each other in Chicago and began a new life.

  I didn’t see them again until the spring of 1990, when I visited their home in Skokie, Illinois. The neighborhood was classic suburbia—with big cars in driveways and basketball hoops above garage doors—and their house looked just like any other in the neighborhood. The minute the door opened, however, the illusion of Americanness vanished. There stood Lizhe and Beiling, smiling and talking as though they had never left China. There were big couches, multiple television sets, a barbecue in the backyard, but things seemed snatched up and thrown together in a hurry, with no thought for appearance or style. Beiling took me on a tour of the house, and I marveled at its size. What struck me the most, though, were the second-floor guest rooms, a long row of identically furnished rooms, each with a bed, a table, and a TV set. It was like a set of rooms in a functional, no-frills hotel.

  Relatives and family friends were constantly dropping in and out. Lizhe’s mother helped look after their two kids, a sullen seven-year-old boy and a plump baby girl. The ambience in the house was at once discordant, careless, and harmonious, from the way Beiling shuffled about in what appeared to me like a housedress and her slow, slouchy way of speaking in a colloquial Beijing accent, to Lizhe’s jumping up and rushing around, now cutting into the conversation, now issuing orders for refreshments, now shooing the kids out of the room. At dinner, the tables were laden with homestyle Chinese cooking, and Lizhe bustled about serving beer and tea around the table. A group of exiled intellectuals, blithely ignoring the surrounding commotion, carried on an intense political discussion. (This was less than a year after the Tiananmen massacre.) In many respects, the feast was the same as the meals among the Shaanxi zhi qing back in Beijing. The role of the Chinese immigrant mixing with other exiles seemed to fit Lizhe as naturally as Maoist hero had years before.

  But Beiling seemed distracted and tired, and when she put Sheng Sheng, her seven-year-old son, to bed, I followed her upstairs. Sitting in semidarkness on the bedroom floor while Sheng Sheng dozed off, we talked. Their life over the past decade, it emerged, had been turbulent. To earn income while his medical studies continued, Lizhe volunteered as an experimental subject for Northwestern’s medical-school lab and also sold blood. When he started to suffer recurrent asthma attacks, he turned that to his advantage, too, becoming a paid subject in an asthma research project. But the attacks intensified, finally reaching a point where he could no longer enter a lab; the touch of a mouse was enough to trigger a violent bout of wheezing. He abandoned his dream of a medical career and turned to entrepreneurial ventures. Beiling had started a dumplingmaking business at home, a project to which Lizhe now brought his usual energy. In the beginning, everything was done by hand, and even Lizhe’s parents were enlisted, kneeling on the floor to stuff, fold, and pack dumplings. As demand and profits grew, they ordered dumpling machines from China and turned their house into an assembly line. This lasted two years.

  By then, Beiling, too, had quit graduate school. Both she and Lizhe took jobs translating commercial documents from English into Chinese for American companies. This led to their next business: desktop publishing. It started as a home business too, but grew steadily.

  Beiling was still swept up by the force of Lizhe’s personality. In a large household teeming with in-laws, she was a supportive wife and a dutiful daughter-in-law, but the role weighed heavily on her. She shared her husband’s enthusiasm for business, but she wasn’t a natural manager, and they had almost no time alone together. Lizhe’s mother was a force to be reckoned with, and once, when an argument broke out between her and Beiling, Lizhe sprang to his mother’s defense and slapped Beiling. “Lizhe is a big filial son,” Beiling said as we headed back downstairs to join the others.

  In 1988, a tumor had been found in Beiling’s abdomen and was removed. The following year she gave birth to a daughter, Jennifer. In 1990, shortly after my visit, another tumor, the size of an orange, was found and excised. The doctor thought it was benign, but in fact, it was malignant, and the cancer had already spread. Lizhe was furious at the misdiagnosis. “I had suggested to the doctor that he should assume it to be malignant and cut out more,” he told me. “I’m a doctor myself, I knew what I was talking about. But the arrogant bastard gave me a contemptuous look and ignored me.”

  After the operation, Lizhe moved Beiling back to Beijing. I remember visiting her in the hospital there in the spring of 1991. She was pale, feeble, nearly bald from chemotherapy, and depended on morphine to manage the pain. Yet she seemed happier than she had been in Chicago. She was amazingly calm, while Lizhe was haggard and more frantic than ever. He fussed over her constantly, and she let him, with visible pleasure. Their roles were now reversed. In those final months of her life, she became his obsession. Later he told me that he had been racked by remorse for being unable to save her, despite having been a doctor himself, and for not having been more loving to her, especially given how much he owed her. She died that August.

  After the funeral he filed a suit against the doctors who had missed Beiling’s cancer. He drove through a dozen cities in the United States visiting hospitals and medical archives in search of the medical information and expert witnesses needed to win the case. His files eventually filled thirty cardboard boxes. “My lawyer was amazed,” he recalled. “He never had a client like me.” His tenacity paid off; he won settlements of over $2 million for Beiling’s two children.

  “It was a year of complete madness,” Lizhe told me later. “I was sick, broke, and in debt. So, between running upstairs and downstairs attending to Beiling and my father (who was also ill) in the hospital, I set up a little office nearby in a six-square-meter room. I put in a couple of computers and carried on with my typesetting business there. I had to make some money!” That was how business brought him back to China.

  Soon after Beiling’s death, Lizhe noticed that computerized graphics were not yet used in Chinese publishing, and he shipped highresolution color-separation scanners from the United States. But the technology quickly spread and he lost his market advantage. Besides, he realized that his local partners were cheating on him. He sold his machines and got out of the business, but he stayed in China. It was 1993, a time when economic reforms were speeding up across the nation. It seemed clear that the great rising commercial tide was carrying society toward a more internationalized, market-oriented future, and, once again, Lizhe sensed opportunity.

  With his years of American experience and his command of English, he figured he could bring all kinds of useful American books to China. He immediately invested the money he made from selling his scanners in several businesses, including a number of joint-venture publishing companies that produced books and magazines. The first magazine he put money into was a journal called Electronics Today, which published information on computer technology. The journal had impeccable official connections: Lizhe’s business partner succeeded in getting President Jiang Zemin to do the calligraphy in the journal’s title. Gradually Lizhe entered more joint publishing arrangements, all focused on technology. He began to make regular trips to book fairs in the United States and Europe, searching for promising titles and buying translation rights.

  There were ups and downs. Since he had become a U.S. citizen in the 1980s, he could not, by Chinese law, publish in China unless he had a Chinese partner. This meant he was dependent on local partners
who were often corrupt, incompetent government officials. Frequently, contracts signed by one official were invalidated by a successor, and people whom Lizhe trusted sometimes disappeared with large bundles of his money.

  In 2000, Lizhe joined forces with the CITIC Press. CITIC is a conglomerate with impressive Party connections, but the press had no reputation and little money. Lizhe brought to it his certainty that China was in a great moment of modernization: China used to be a society where the state was big and the individual small. Now, he thought, the reverse was becoming true. And so the books he recommended to the press were all about how to be a modern person—how to handle marriage, divorce, parenting, investing, success. Though technically Lizhe was only a consultant, he threw himself into the CITIC projects, drawing up business plans and title lists. He took CITIC staff to international book fairs and taught them how to scout for foreign books. He bought translation rights with his own money.

  Soon after the Beijing publishers’ banquet where I first heard of Lizhe’s business, Shi Tiesheng, the wheelchair-bound writer, told me that Lizhe was in town and gave me his number. I had not seen him since Beiling’s death. I called that evening.