by Jianying Zha
“Guess who I am?”
There was a moment of hesitation before he boomed, “Zha-zha! Are you in Beijing?” He asked me to lunch, and the next day my taxi took me to a new Eastside development of garden residences and pulled over before a pinkish building with a pavilion façade. The receptionist standing behind the lobby desk looked crisp and professional in her purple suit and makeup. She asked who I was visiting.
“Multi-Lingua Publishing International,” I read from my notepad.
I went up and rang the doorbell. I heard rapid footsteps, instantly recognizable. The door opened: the man standing before me was an aged version of what I remembered.
“Zha-zha,” he exclaimed. “You look exactly the same!”
So I had to lie, too. “And you haven’t aged a day!”
Lizhe beamed, the wrinkles around his eyes like a pulled fishnet. “Really?” he said hopefully, ushering me in. “But I’ve got to lose a little here”—he patted his belly, which pressed against a neatly tucked-in blue dress shirt.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I said. That was true: I’d seen far worse among my middle-aged Chinese male friends in recent years—victims of a culture that requires banqueting but no exercise. A few minutes later, as we sipped tea on a couch, I decided that Lizhe really had changed little. He had the same boyish eyes, big laugh, and restless mannerisms.
I looked around. The office must once have been an apartment: besides three or four rooms, there were bathrooms and a full kitchen. A couple of rooms had beds. In every room there were couches, chairs, desks, coffee tables, computers, television sets, and cardboard boxes stuffed with papers and books strewn about on the floor, on a desk, or along the wall. The whole place had the impersonal, makeshift feel that I remembered from my Chicago visit. He told me that he had several other offices in Beijing, some in other cities, and one in Los Angeles. “Take a look around. Let me finish just a few things here and then we’ll go to lunch.” Before I could answer he vanished to another room. I heard him talking rapidly to one of the two other men in the suite.
At lunch, Lizhe talked proudly of his business accomplishments. In the two years since he had come on board, CITIC Press had begun to create buzz in publishing circles. He told me that he had brought out several thousand books, worth one to two billion yuan in revenue. I remembered something Beiling used to say: “The only size that interests Lizhe is XL.” I asked if he would consider more of the intellectually or politically challenging books.
“I don’t touch politics for the time being,” he said. “And I don’t consider books that sell under fifty thousand copies.” He cited the bestsellers he had recently brought to China, books like What Color Is Your Parachute? and a Jack Welch biography.
“Do you have any other guiding principles besides trends and the market?” I asked. It was strange to hear an icon of my youth, an embodiment of idealism and courage, sounding no different from any other entrepreneur of the current era of so-called “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” The kind of publishing he represents has drawn a good deal of recent criticism from educated Chinese. There have been complaints about the impact of a great flood of imported books, which are often sloppily translated and accompanied by intense promotional campaigns that edge out good Chinese titles.
Lizhe seemed oblivious to such concerns and continued to talk about the demand for his books. “I think the clash between globalization and traditional Chinese culture is causing a psychological crisis in China. For example, people are being divided by the pressures of success and failure—are questioning whether, with all this pragmatism, pure feelings are still worth anything.” Still, he said, “I can’t think about these issues too deeply. When you face a great tide, the important thing is action. Whatever it is—going to the countryside, to the university, going abroad, returning to China—it doesn’t matter. I just always have to play the tide.”
“What if the next tide in China is a Nazi state?” I asked abruptly and gave him a dark grin.
Lizhe looked startled. Then he broke into loud laugh. “Of course I won’t play that kind of tide! I’ll play the resistance tide then! Just like in the Cultural Revolution: I didn’t play the political card, I played the knowledge card!”
The phrase he used for “play the tide,” nong chao (弄潮), was an old one. Where there are big waves—like the annual tidal bore at the mouth of the Qiantang River in Hangzhou province—local daredevils, known as nong chao er (弄潮儿), have been playing the tides for many centuries. Classical Chinese poets described with amazement the sight of nong chao er swirling around in the deadly current, swimming and turning somersaults while they held aloft brightly colored flags. For all the years I’ve known him, Sun Lizhe has always been playing the tides, sometimes daring and colorful, often nearly drowning in the unpredictable riptide of Chinese history. Operating in a cave in Shaanxi, making dumplings in Chicago, or launching a publishing business in Beijing—for Sun Lizhe, nong chao is always the central impulse. He has always been determined to prove his resourcefulness and versatility, moving fast and succeeding in whatever course he has chosen.
A year after Beiling’s death, Lizhe had married a young employee named Zhang Jin. She gave birth to a boy and a girl and looked after the children of Lizhe’s previous marriage. Lizhe installed his family in two houses in the Los Angeles area. The larger one in Northridge was huge. “My sons could ride bikes in the living room and play golf outside,” he told me now. “I once planted thirty apple trees around the house.” But Lizhe generally made visits rather than living with the family. “Family life is deadening,” he confessed to me—and so his young wife was left with the job of running the household. He also bought a lot of properties in Beijing: eight apartments, two villas, and four office suites. In each place, he kept a room with a bed for himself, but none of them was exactly a home. In 1999, however, while business was slow in China, he spent a lot of time in L.A. with his family. He spent his time day-trading tech stocks, and ended up losing over a million dollars. “That forced me back to concentrating on my China business.”
After I moved back to Beijing in 2003, Lizhe and I didn’t meet for a while: he was a frequent traveler and hard to reach. But I grew concerned after hearing rumors that he was being forced out of CITIC. The details, as usual in Chinese business, were hazy, but it seemed that Lizhe had suffered from a series of setbacks. To start with, he had lost a powerful ally within CITIC when an important executive there left to run a state bank. He was replaced by a man named Wang Bin, a protégé of Lizhe’s who saw no prospect of further advancement within the joint-venture framework and began maneuvering to squeeze Lizhe out. He had his staff establish direct communication with Lizhe’s many international business contacts. After a few months, Wang and his new team were able to cut Lizhe out of the loop altogether.
Wang may have acted with the collusion of his bosses. Thanks to Lizhe, CITIC Press had become prominent, but it was unacceptable to those in charge that the credit should go to someone with a U.S. passport. The press’s reputation meant that its executives could now expect great career prospects. And once the management of the parent firm realized that publishing could be a profitable business, they wanted to put it in the hands of their own people.
According to his friends, the ouster hit Lizhe hard. The novelist Shi Tiesheng and his wife told me that Lizhe had been avoiding even old friends like them. “I don’t think he can admit defeat,” Tiesheng said. “He has always been a winner. He must win.”
When I next met Lizhe, in Beijing’s plush Oriental Plaza’s lobby café, my heart ached at the sight of him: he looked tired and gaunt. But within seconds I was swept up in whirlwind of energy. It turned out that he had stayed up all night studying and had just taken a big exam that morning—for one of his four graduate degree programs. “Exhausting!” he said exuberantly, ordering a coffee and a chocolate cake even though we were going to have lunch soon. While I sipped my grapefruit juice, he wolfed down the cake and talked rapidly, filli
ng me in on his recent business engagements: a meeting with some senior managers of Amazon.com—Lizhe, I learned, owns a Chinese online bookselling service—and his plans to launch a new publishing venue in the States.
At lunch, Lizhe talked about the future. “Where is China going?” he asked rhetorically, leaning over a plate of smoked suckling pig and beef in black bean sauce. “Three areas will be hot: ethics, law, health care. You are with me? Am I right on this? All right then, that’s where I’m going.” This is the reason that he is studying law. He is making plans to open hospitals in China, and he is working on yet another joint publishing venture. He has even set his sights on the English-language market; he plans to publish Chinese classics in translation and books about how to conduct business in China. (“The world’s interest in China is growing as fast as the Chinese economy keeps growing,” he said.) And this time he would register the company in the States, so that his partners would not be able to wrest control from him.
I carefully brought up the subject of the CITIC fallout. “Yes,” Lizhe replied coolly. “They want to play me off.” He said it had to do with complicated politics among the senior CITIC people. I asked if he was going to sue CITIC. “Yes, and it won’t be a small case,” he said emphatically. “They think I’m a little guy, but a little earthworm can kick up a big dust storm.” I had heard that Lizhe had lost a great deal of money in the previous few years. He now told me he had sold both of his Los Angeles houses to help pay for the CITIC projects. His family would be moving to Chicago. But he assured me that he was fine financially. What mattered the most to him was the nearly four years of time and energy he put into the CITIC projects.
After lunch, I stopped by his apartment, as temporary in feel as every other home of his that I’d seen. Books were everywhere: on shelves, tables, the floor, and in boxes. A cousin was there doing the cleaning. Later she helped pack his luggage—Lizhe hadn’t even unpacked his suitcase from his last trip, and he was catching an early flight to Chicago the next morning. We had tea sitting on the balcony, surrounded by more piles of books. Lizhe talked a lot about the delight of learning: how exciting it was to be a student again and to curl up with books night after night, alone in your own room, and have a new world open before your eyes.
Yet I was taken aback by some of the books he had been reading: a history of torture and punishment; a complete set of Dark Lens, volumes of prize-winning photographs on war atrocities, famine, and other traumas; several memoirs on the Maoist purges. He explained that he found the accounts of Party politics in the 1950s revealing because they constantly reminded him of his business dealings in China today. “The resemblance is striking,” he said. There was the same factionalism, the same sudden, opportunistic power alignments, the same tide playing. “In fact, they are playing exactly the same sort of politics as before,” he said.
He’d been reading about older Chinese history too, and asked me if I knew the story of General Yuan Chonghuan. In the late Ming era, Yuan was a celebrated general who won many battles against invaders. But he fell victim to court politics when certain jealous officials saw to it that he lost the emperor’s favor. He was executed in the most horrible fashion: the death of a thousand knife cuts. This took several days, since the executioner had to make nine hundred and ninety-nine cuts on his body without letting him die. Ordinary people, believing that General Yuan was a traitor who lost China to enemies, lined up outside the prison house, each demanding a small piece of Yuan’s flesh so they could eat it with liquor. I wondered whether Lizhe saw himself, at some level, as a modern-day General Yuan.
Then he told me about an insight he’d had during a class for his MBA Program. “It dawned on me that what they are teaching here is exactly the opposite of what I learned as a doctor. Doctors save people—that’s the meaning of life for a doctor. But here they are teaching us how to beat down others, how to defeat them to win the competition, to be the strongest animal. Of course it’s all dressed up in pretty language. But the message is brutal: you kill the weaker ones to get ahead.”
The youth hero of the Cultural Revolution was determined to ride the wave of Chinese-style capitalism, and this time he figured he could afford no illusions. For the first time, though, I saw something like uncertainty in his face. “It takes time to sort it all out,” he said pensively. “But something’s got to give one day.”
Postscript
Sun Lizhe has continued his publishing business in China, Europe, and the United States. Unlike with CITIC Press, several other partnerships he has formed have proven to be stable as well as profitable. The most successful is Huazhang Books, a joint venture between Lizhe’s Chicago-based Multi-Lingua Publishing Company and China Machine Press in Beijing. Through Lizhe’s help, Huazhang has established long-term working relationships with many leading international publishers, and has brought to Chinese readers a steady string of educational and professional bestsellers. Its publishing of IT, economics, and management books have led to the company being ranked among the top Chinese publishers, and they have led the market for years. Reflecting Lizhe’s personal interest in health care and psychology, a more recent division, Huazhang Psychology, has been publishing books in these fields.
Publishing may be Lizhe’s bread and butter, but he is also constantly involved in all kinds of other projects, such as consulting for local banks, organizing conferences and giving lectures at universities, and buying and selling real estate. Meanwhile, he continues to take law and business courses everywhere. Tracking him down is difficult because he still travels frequently. When I reconnected with him in the summer of 2010, it took me a while to sort out the various threads of his life and business. I discovered, only gradually, that Lizhe has also returned to his old, true passion in life: helping sick and weak people. “I’m a 网络赤脚医生 [Internet barefoot doctor] these days,” he told me one day as I watched him text-messaging a patient. “I’ve been treating cancer patients.”
At first I thought he was joking: how could he do this without a proper hospital, medical staff, and equipment? After some further investigation, however, I realized that Lizhe was not only serious, but that this was actually the work that had the deepest meaning for him. What he has been doing, essentially, is offering medical advice and certain unconventional, alternative treatment (such as the controversial Coley Fluid) to critically ill cancer patients for whom no treatment is available within the present medical establishment. In fact, Lizhe had lost a lucrative job due to this practice. In 2009, while serving as the highly paid executive chairman of a large private Chinese hospital group, Lizhe started masterminding cancer centers within the group and treating cancer patients himself, including providing special, free care for poor people. Among the drugs he used, many were not approved in China; some were even manufactured by Lizhe himself in one of his apartments in Beijing. But who could beat the deal? The drugs were effective and they were free to the patients. This was, however, fundamentally challenging the conventional ideas of running for-profit urban hospitals. In a sense, Lizhe was barefoot doctoring in a modern hospital group! Not surprisingly, after this was discovered, the hospital’s board of directors held a meeting and fired him for breaking the rules.
After that, Lizhe decided to practice as an Internet barefoot doctor. His cancer patients now come to him by word of mouth and receive his advice and instruction via the Internet. It is a dangerous gray area on the edge of the system. Lizhe’s work begins where conventional hospitals and doctors stop. He listens, analyzes, recommends treatment, and helps secure drugs, all for free. Sometimes he pays for the drug if the patient is poor. He also consoles the patients and their loved ones during the final stage or after the patient passes away, acting as their psychotherapist.
Listening to these stories and reading the touching thank-you messages from the families was a remarkable experience. Admiration aside, it also allowed me to look at Lizhe’s many business transactions in a slightly different light. Now I understand, for instance, why Lizhe
would put so much energy, time, and some of his own capital in an effort to push for the establishment of a new medical center in Changchun, Jilin Province. There, he has consulted for the regional bank and developed high-level contacts with a large state hospital. He is apparently still striving toward his ultimate goal of setting up a hospital that can provide the kind of medical service often unavailable to critically ill patients in desperate need of help.
Meanwhile, he has been doing whatever is within his own power and means to help sick people. “The source of true happiness in life lies not in self-profiting,” Lizhe said to me recently during an international conference he helped to organize on positive psychology and the subject of happiness. “It lies in helping others.”
The conference took place at Tsinghua University, Lizhe’s alma mater, but his words made me think of a documentary film about his visit to Shaanxi in 2007. A Phoenix television crew followed him on the trip, the first since he left the region twenty-nine years ago. The memory of the young barefoot doctor apparently remained powerful, for the peasants turned out in large throngs to welcome him back with affectionate words and festive banquets to follow. Watching the black-and-white footage of a young Lizhe operating in his cave clinic, the old peasants telling tales about how he saved their lives yet suffered politically, and Lizhe toasting in Shaanxi dialect was all quite moving. It was also revealing. As one of Lizhe’s old friends put it: “Lizhe’s fundamental belief remained the same all these years: serve the people. This is what he was taught and believed in his youth, back in the Shaanxi countryside. It’s still what he believes in today.”
What is more remarkable, I think, is that he still practices it.
Part II
The Intellectuals