Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

by Jianying Zha

  Finally, in 1976, Mao died and the Cultural Revolution came to an end. Like a blade of grass wilting in a long winter, Wang rejoiced at every sign that spring was returning. Watching familiar faces reappear on TV, he was often moved to tears and thought with sadness about those who did not survive to see this day. Though still uncertain, he wrote and submitted new stories eagerly, taking care that they were not too politically risky.

  One afternoon in 1978, Wang was making dumplings at home when he saw his wife rushing home through the rain, waving a copy of People’s Literature that had just arrived in the post office. “Your story is in it!” she yelled as she came inside. Wang grabbed the copy with his flour-stained hands, and couldn’t believe how fast it was happening: he was being published in the most prestigious literary journal in China. Soon he was invited to a writers residence at Beidaihe, the famous seaside sanatorium outside Beijing favored by the party VIPs—a sure sign that he was on his way back to the center. He confessed to being “drunkenly happy” when he received the invitation, and quit smoking at once. He spent six weeks at Beidaihe, swimming in the ocean, trading news, and renewing ties with old literati friends.

  Everything was happening at amazing speed. Within a year, Wang regained his Party membership, and his first novel, buried in his drawer for twenty-five years, was published to immediate acclaim. Then came the long-awaited call: an order of transfer from the Beijing Writers Association (BWA). In June 1979, the Wangs boarded the eastbound train. A large throng of Uighur and Han friends came to the station to say good-bye. When the train started moving, Cui buried her face in her hands and wept. Wang held back his tears. “We’ll come back again,” he comforted her. “We’ll definitely come again.”

  The China Writers Association (CWA), was modeled after the Soviet Union’s association, which was in turn modeled after the French institution: it’s a state-funded organization that has branches in every province and major city, and that plays multiple roles. It sets up literary awards (thus consecrating and supporting certain types of writing and writers on behalf of the state), runs writers’ residencies and conferences, manages relations between the state and the writers, and, for those chosen as zhuanye zuojia (专业作家, professional writers), it acts like a full-fledged employer.

  As a zhuanye zuojia on BWA’s payroll, Wang received a monthly salary, subsidized housing, and medical coverage. All he had to do was keep writing and publishing. It was a coveted position. The Wangs were happy and content even though their first allocated housing was a mere nine-square-meter room in a noisy building, with a washroom in the hallway and a loudspeaker blaring outside in the evenings. In the sweltering summer heat he would strip off his shirt and, wearing only a pair of shorts, produce page after page. Short stories, novellas, and essays poured out of him; nearly all were printed in major magazines.

  It was a bittersweet, exciting thaw; after decades of repression, the people’s passion for change and hunger for new reading were tremendous. Fiction and reportage in particular were favored genres with a big impact on public discussion. Literary journals thrived. In 1980, People’s Literature had a circulation of 1.5 million; other major literary magazines enjoyed readership almost as robust. Wang’s touching, deftly turned portraits of innocents and true believers struggling to survive in a dark time struck a chord: they received glowing reviews and won a large following. He also showed a taste for narrative adventure, experimenting with modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness, which piqued conservatives and stirred debate. Controversy only added frisson and enhanced his reputation as a versatile chameleon. Propelled to national fame, Wang quickly established himself as a major literary figure.

  He was also emerging as a savvy cultural official. A quick-witted speaker with impressive rhetorical skills and political acumen, Wang was elected to the CWA governing board and later served as its executive chairman. He pushed for more liberal policies, but, with a knack for striking a tone of “balance,” he enjoyed the backing of numerous senior Party leaders with whom he maintained warm, deferential relationships. As though guided by an innate compass about the middle road, he never veered too much to either side. In 1985, Wang was elected to the Communist Party’s Central Committee.

  That year, Wang’s second novel, Huodong Bian Renxing (活动变人形—the title refers to a Japanese toy that changes shape when you play with it), was published. Widely considered his best novel, it was set in 1940s Beijing and was based on Wang’s own childhood experiences, painting a compelling, depressing picture of life in “old China.” The book depicts two parents trapped in an unhappy marriage and, partly as an outgrowth, their son’s mounting belief in revolution. The year after its publication, Wang became China’s cultural minister.

  Years later, when an artist friend remarked that Wang was “a nice guy but had no achievements as a minister,” he protested: “But I lifted the ban on nightclubs!” He did that, and some more. Wang was a decidedly liberal minister. Suave, fair-minded, and exuding good will, he was a great advocate for cultural diversity and tolerance. He urged greater openness in the arts, launching an annual national art festival. He brought Western artists to perform in China: Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo came as Minister Wang’s honored guests. He helped ethnic writers, protected young authors, supported experimental writing, and moved to ease the tension when ideological battles started to take on a sinister tone. He tried to invigorate state-funded enterprises with some market measures.

  Yet the ferment of the late 1980s made such gestures seem pallid. The so-called wenhua re (文化热, culture fever) was taking hold. Artists and intellectuals pressed against the permissible. “Emancipating the mind” was a Party slogan at the time, but younger writers and critics took the notion much farther than officialdom ever contemplated. They had little time for Wang’s cautious meliorism. The mood belonged to the likes of Liu Xiaobo.

  Liu, who was born in 1955 to provincial intellectual parents, lived in Inner Mongolia as a teenager, where his father had been sent as part of Mao’s Down to the Countryside movement, and spent his early adulthood doing unskilled labor. With the thaw after Mao’s death, he went to college at Jilin and did his doctoral work in literature at Beijing Normal University, where he started teaching in 1984. In the mid-1980s, he created a sensation with scathing critiques of eminent scholars and intellectuals of the previous generation, whose work he dismissed as derivative and mediocre. One of his more mischievous assertions was made during a 1989 interview with a Hong Kong magazine: “In a hundred years of colonialism, Hong Kong has changed to what we see today. With China being so big, of course it would take three hundred years of colonialism to transform it into the way Hong Kong is today.” Delightedly piling outrage upon outrage, he pronounced Confucius “a mediocre talent”; called for China to be thoroughly Westernized (“if you want to live like a human being, you must choose wholesale Westernization”); and dismissed Gao Xingjian, who went on to win the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, as a rank imitator, calling Gao’s celebrated play The Bus Stop a vulgarization of Waiting for Godot. For an iconoclast like Liu, cultural critique and political reform were part of the same struggle.

  But Wang had come a very long way from his naive Communist Youth League days. Decades of ceaseless, futile “revolution” and living at the bottom and on the fringe of society had killed all his illusions about grand talks and sweeping changes. He was now a level-headed pragmatic realist, a believer in gradual, incremental improvements. Part of it, perhaps, was because Wang genuinely endorsed the then-liberal Party leadership under Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. As Shao Yanxiang, a poet who sat on the CWA governing board with Wang, put it to me: “In general we harbored our best hopes for the leadership then, and cast our role as helpers rather than subverters.” Lanky and soft-spoken, Shao was a few years older than Wang, and the two men shared a warm friendship born out of very similar experiences: Shao was also a young leftist student who joined the Communist Party early, was denounced as a “rightist”
in the 1950s (partly due to an essay he wrote in defense of Wang’s novella, then under attack), and was sent to labor camps; he then enjoyed a triumphant comeback in the 1980s. His sentiment of great hope for the nation’s bright future under a more enlightened Party leadership was then widespread. Despite constant zigzagging and many setbacks, it was what made the 1980s a romantic era in China.

  Meanwhile, Wang was keenly aware of the viper’s nest of seething hard-liners and his own limited power in the entrenched, complex web of Chinese state bureaucracy, and he moved with characteristic caution. His mission, as he saw it, was no more than “building a bridge of understanding between the Party and the intellectuals, particularly the writers.” In the edgy, boisterous scene of wenhua re, he detected symptoms of a certain “messianic complex,” the fantasy that culture and society could be transformed, in one swoop, by collective willpower and action. This had been the lesson of the Chinese Revolution. But now, among some intellectuals and their intoxicated followers, he recognized a similar mind-set. Privately, he was alarmed. A consensus builder through compromises, he did not approve of impatient overreaching.

  Prudence, however, is not always a universally admired virtue. In those years Wang visited the West frequently, and in the winter of 1986 he was invited to speak at the International PEN Congress in New York on an assigned topic: “The imagination of writers and the imagination of government.” Among the other speakers were Günter Grass and Nadine Gordimer. “Government has no imagination,” Gordimer declared, drawing loud, appreciative laughter. Wang admired her courage in challenging apartheid in South Africa, but found her speech arrogant and condescending. As for the American writers at the conference, Wang wrote later: “I must say that they showed off their liberty in the same way as showing off their new cars.” In his speech Wang said that if the government’s imagination strayed away from reality and people’s wishes, it would lead to disaster; otherwise, it would win support from the people, including the writers—as with Chinese government’s present reform and open-door policy. During the Q&A, an American participant named Judith Shapiro hinted that Wang was censoring the speech of another attending Chinese writer. This was not the case. So another American participant who had lived in China stood up to defend Wang, explaining to the audience that in fact Wang had been playing an important role in helping to liberalize writing and thinking in China. But Wang’s speech didn’t go over well. The New York Times wrote sardonically of his cozy relationship with his government.

  On the other side of the ocean, hard-liners in China attacked Wang for “negating the Party’s leadership on writers” while speaking abroad. Wang was chastened by the experience: a gulf of misunderstanding on one side, a pack of lurching wolves on the other. Later, when The Nation asked him to write about his impressions of America, Wang conveyed his admiration of many things, but also his feeling that, if Americans could know not only what they know and can do, but also what they don’t know and what can’t be done, then they would be an even more lovely people. As for himself, he had this piece of advice: “While you try hard to defend and explain China to foreigners, you must watch your own back!” Perhaps only those who endured similar backstabbing and political trauma could understand such caution.

  At the same time, the political situation in China was growing increasingly tense. In 1987, General Party Secretary Hu Yaobang, the most liberal of the Party leaders, was forced to resign. In the ensuing campaign against “bourgeois liberalization,” Wang found himself under attack. He survived, but had a premonition of tougher battles to come.

  A lighthearted vision of cultural and political reform and its travails plays out in a story that Wang published in early 1989, “Tough Porridge” (坚硬的稀粥), which won China’s top literary prize for short fiction. It’s about a large family that has always eaten porridge and pickled vegetables for breakfast. The grandfather, a revered but open-minded patriarch, offers to turn his authority over the menu to others. When the family’s retainer of four decades takes charge, she starts skimping on ingredients and, with the money she saves, buying the grandfather ginseng royal jelly for his health. Soon, the trendy teenager is trying an all-Western breakfast, to which some family members secretly add Chinese spices, causing digestive woes. Various other reforms are attempted, including democratic voting. People start eating separately. A great-grandson goes off to work at a joint-venture company. The intellectual son and his wife move abroad. Eventually, though, they all return to the porridge breakfast, so plain and so soothing.

  Nobody was in a mood to be soothed when, in mid-April 1989, Hu Yaobang died and students, grieving and angry, started to demonstrate on Tiananmen Square. For many liberals, it was a stand-upand-be-counted moment. Liu Xiaobo was at Columbia University at the time; when he learned of the protests, he promptly gave up the fellowship and flew back.

  But Wang felt dread, not elation, as the demonstrations grew. At one point, he spent seven hours talking down his twenty-year-old daughter, then accompanied her to her university, and waited outside the campus gate until she persuaded her entire class not to take to the street. While he was abroad with a delegation in Europe and Egypt, the situation rapidly deteriorated. Deeply disturbed by the news and anxious to get home, he forgot his suit in an Italian country hotel and suffered diarrhea in Egypt. On June 4, the 1980s—idealistic, naive, fragile—came to a crashing end as the tanks arrived on Tiananmen Square.

  The massacre destroyed the tenuous bond between the Party and the intellectuals, forcing some of the most idealistic Chinese into a more combative stance: some renounced their Party membership and openly broke with the regime; some went into exile or were jailed. Wang distanced himself from the henchmen, but he made no renunciations, no protestations. He kept a low profile and kept his mouth shut. In the eyes of the hardened radicals, he behaved no differently from a host of other cowardly functionaries.

  On medical leave, he spent the rest of the gloomy summer in Yantai, a seaside town where Cui underwent a surgery for a ruptured appendix. In the hospital with her, he composed moody, elliptical poems, mourning the passing of an era. Anxious about China’s and his own future, he almost went back to smoking. In wistful moments, he recalled a favorite Pushkin poem he used to recite in his Xinjiang days:In melancholy times one needs to stay calm,

  And believe that pleasant times will come

  The heart forever yearns for the future

  But at the present it is often sad

  All is transient

  All will be gone

  And that which is gone will become endearing in remembrance.

  Recently, Wang had gently reminded the leadership that, when he first accepted the ministerial post, he had expressed a wish to be allowed to return to his life as a writer after three years of service. His humble request was permitted without further ado. On September 4, 1989, Yang Shangkun, chairman of the People’s Republic of China, officially terminated Wang’s ministerial appointment.

  In all the years I have known Wang, I mentioned Tiananmen to him just once, reporting a remark I’d heard about his “soft landing.” Wang corrected me: “These are the exact words: ‘He flipped a 360-degree backward somersault and landed standing on his feet.’ ” His eyes glinted behind his glasses. We both laughed and let the subject drop without another word.

  It wasn’t an easy time. His act of disloyalty—a high-ranking official disobeys at a moment of state emergency when the sound of tanks was not yet out of earshot—meant that he was willing to face the consequences. It also meant that the apparatchiks who had always detested Wang’s liberal tendencies, envied his popularity, backstabbed him, and attempted to sabotage his career were vindicated now: why, Minister Wang has ejected himself—good riddance!

  He was the subject of investigations. Some of his former colleagues, including his vice ministers, distanced themselves from him. Conservative publications denounced him. But there were also quiet, sometimes secretive, friendly gestures. More than one retired high official of
fered encouraging words in private. Dushu, a revered intellectual monthly, asked him to write a column. Wang immediately accepted the offer, telling the editor how grateful he was that they were not abandoning him. He appreciated all the extended hands.

  But with him newly vulnerable, hard-liners like He Jingzhi, the post-purge cultural minister, and the head of the CWA, a hack writer named Malaqinfu, pushed the idea that Wang’s “Tough Porridge” was actually a veiled attack on Deng Xiaoping, who, ostensibly retired, was still the supreme power at the time.

  It’s hard to convey how unsettling the charge was. China has a long tradition of yingshe (影射, shadow assassination), in which writers use allegory to criticize high officials. In fact, the Cultural Revolution was directly triggered by such suspicions: a historical drama written by a Party intellectual was accused of being an oblique attack on Mao. The charge was absurd, but Mao took it seriously; he ordered the newspapers to denounce the author (who eventually died in custody, having been beaten), and the self-fueling mood of paranoia grew into a frenzied nationwide campaign. So when the accusation began to spread, Wang responded forcefully. He wrote to Jiang Zemin, the Party chairman; he filed a libel lawsuit; and, most devastatingly, he released a fawning, obsequious letter that Malaqinfu had privately written to him when he was a newly appointed cultural minister.

  Many liberals cheered Wang at the time. Not Liu Xiaobo. Wang disregarded the laws about privacy, Liu wrote many years later, “because he thinks that you have to be petty to handle a petty guy, to be a hooligan to fight a hooligan, but he doesn’t seem to understand that this will make all of us hooligans together.” It was a lofty statement of principle, indifferent to the real risk of persecution Wang faced.

  “I lived through fengsha for more than two decades,” Wang told me later. “It’s an awful state to be in.” This time the fengsha was briefer. In the fall of 1991, Wang was allowed to attend a writers’ event in Singapore; as a former minister, his foreign travel must be granted from the highest level of leadership. A year later he was appointed to be a member of Zhengxie (政协), the political consultation body for the government. He retained his benefits and the perks, which are accorded to all former officials by rank. Wang still had, courtesy of the state, his courtyard house (later a large apartment), a secretary, a car, and a driver at his disposal. The smoothness with which Wang eased himself out of a political tight spot must have been irritating to his enemies.