China Road

by Rob Gifford

  We have perused the text of your state message, and the wording expresses your earnestness. From it your sincere humility and obedience can clearly be seen. It is admirable, and we fully approve…. Now you, O King, have presented various objects to the throne…. We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures.

  Of course, such a document was like a red rag to the British bull, and British traders spent the next forty years trying to open the China market. They did so by bringing opium from India to trade for the tea, porcelain, and other luxuries they wanted. British opium poisoned Chinese society, adding to the many internal tensions that were already developing across the empire. Beijing’s objections to the British trade sparked the First Opium War, which ended with China soundly defeated. Beijing was forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, which ceded the island of Hong Kong to the British and forced open five ports to the foreigners. One of them was a small fishing village called Shanghai. In these cities, the Ocean People were ceded land, known as concessions, on which to build their houses and consulates and churches, where Chinese law did not apply. The area where the former British consulate stands was part of the International Concession of Shanghai.

  The Treaty of Nanjing was the symbolic start of China’s long and tortuous road to integration with the rest of the world, as the Western powers slowly began to prize the door open. Waves of Ocean People—missionaries and libertines, adventurers and businessmen—arrived in the ports, seeking their future or fleeing their past. Shanghai grew up in the image of a Western city. Its name in the Western mind reeked of the opportunities and excesses, the sensuousness and mystery of the East. In the Chinese mind, by contrast, Shanghai bore the stench of humiliation and contamination by the West. It was the bastard child of China.

  Everything the Chinese did after 1842, from initial moderate efforts at reform to the revolution that overthrew the imperial system in 1912 to the adoption of Communism and its final victory in 1949, was about reclaiming Chinese land from the colonialists and restoring China’s greatness. Now, more than a century and a half later, that is finally starting to happen.

  The watchman grins at my interest in the history that drips from the old consulate. He doesn’t care about this place. What is it to him but run-down buildings that represent China’s past humiliation? Perhaps he thinks they should be knocked down. Why not put up something better, something modern? A few months later, I hear the site is being refurbished by one of Hong Kong’s venerable hotel groups, to be turned into the Shanghai Peninsula Hotel.

  We wander, following the beam of his flashlight, back down the long driveway.

  “Sorry about all that stuff with the opium, and the whole colonization thing,” I say to him. “We’re not very proud of all that, you know.”

  “Mei shi.” He laughs. “Don’t worry. That’s history. You can’t change history.”

  2. Dislocation

  The gnomes in the neon mines of Borneo must be working overtime to keep Shanghai lit.

  Apart from Las Vegas (and possibly Tokyo), I have rarely seen so much hot, tubed color. Walk along Nanjing Road in downtown Shanghai, and you are blinded by every kind of neon sign, the louder, the brighter, the better as far as Chinese businesses are concerned.

  Quite apart from the many types of goods and foods being advertised, all that neon is flashing out some very important messages about modern China. First of all, plain and simple, there is the amazing consumer boom that is going on in cities large and small. When I first arrived, in 1987, many everyday items could still be bought only with ration tickets, and you couldn’t even purchase milk over the counter. Now, anything you can buy in the West can also be bought in a Chinese city such as Shanghai. You want an MP3 player? IPod or any other brand is available in every department store. Food processor? Exercise bike? It’s all here. Caviar? Champagne? Oreos? Special K? You name it. Stores in China’s coastal cities stock them all.

  The second thing that is noticeable as you walk around a city such as Shanghai is rather obvious but not to be underestimated in the broader context of the nation’s history. China is at peace. For the first half of the twentieth century, it was in chaos—collapsing internally and being devoured by fierce colonial wolves. Peace seemed finally to arrive with the Communist takeover, in 1949, but the country then set about devouring itself, amid the madness of Mao’s political campaigns. Now, though, the watchwords of the Communist Party are peace internationally and stability domestically. Its policy of stability über alles causes many problems, but it also provides an environment in which many can prosper.

  And finally, the third thing lit up by all this neon is that urban Chinese people now have space to live without government interference in many areas of their lives. After the killing of the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Communist Party leaders made an unwritten, unspoken deal with the people of China: stay out of politics, and you can do anything you want. During the 1990s, for the first time in more than forty years (or perhaps four thousand), the Chinese government began to retreat from people’s everyday lives.

  This was a very clever move by the Party. The tiny birdcage in which Chinese people had previously lived became an aviary. You cannot yet fly up into the clear blue sky, and they can still catch you if they want to, but there is plenty of room to fly around. After more than forty years of being forced to participate in politics, the majority of Chinese were only too happy to disengage from it completely and get on with the business of making money.

  Now stop just a moment, and look at those three developments from a different angle.

  First of all, yes, there is a consumer boom, but the majority of people have no access to it. If in the United States you need money to get power, in China you need power to get money. China’s prosperity today is just a patina of wealth, accessible mainly to the corrupt and the very fortunate at the top, which disguises a seething mass of urban social problems, such as unemployment, crime, and outdated housing. And don’t even mention the countryside. Just go a mile from the neon of the Bund and Nanjing Road and you will find thousands of people living on forty dollars per month, severance pay from their former jobs at now-defunct factories. They have no health insurance, and if they become really sick, all they can do is go home and die.

  Sections of the big department stores are permanently empty, as are many of the new office blocks and shopping malls, built as a result of corrupt deals, giving a veneer of affluence that makes the city look more prosperous than it is. For every member of the emergent middle class who drives her family to Pizza Hut in her new Volkswagen sedan, there are perhaps a hundred who can barely afford a bicycle.

  Second, yes, China is at peace with most of its neighbors and at home, but it is an uneasy peace. By the Party’s own estimates, there are more than two hundred incidents of rural unrest every day, many of them the result of the economic inequalities that have emerged since reform began. Then there’s the anger felt by many Chinese citizens at the kickbacks and extortion that go on throughout the one-party state, against which they have no recourse because there is no independent legal system.

  Looking further afield, there are more than seven hundred missiles, not to mention plenty of bellicose rhetoric from Beijing, aimed at the island of Taiwan, which China claims as its own. China keeps Tibet and its Muslim northwest from seceding only through sheer brute force. It enforces claims over islands in the South China Sea by building military outposts on coral reefs that are nowhere near Chinese territory and maintains relations with nations such as Iran, North Korea, and Sudan that are condemned by many Western countries for their nuclear activities and their human rights records.

  And third, again it is true that there has been some loosening of social controls, but Chinese people still enjoy no protection from their own government, and there is nothing even approaching a functioning system of checks and balances on Communist Party power in China.

  Religious groups, such a
s “house church” Christians, who refuse to be part of the government-sponsored church, and members of the spiritual group Falun Gong, are still persecuted relentlessly by the Communist Party, and any case that even sees the inside of a courtroom is manipulated by the Party, which appoints all the judges. Chinese courts have a conviction rate of more than 99 percent. Beijing still runs a system of labor camps, to which any member of society can be sent, at any time. Tens of thousands of people are still sentenced to “reform through labor” every year.

  Everything that I have just written, from both points of view, is true. It just depends on how you look at it. Is the glass half empty, or is it half full? How foreigners see China often has as much to do with their own characters and their own prejudices (or the character and prejudices of the reporter who writes the article or book they read) as it does with the reality on the ground. For every fact that is true about China, the opposite is almost always true as well, somewhere in the country.

  This dichotomy has led to a division among China watchers between the panda huggers, who say China is doing great and won’t be a threat to anyone (while admitting, of course, that there are a few peripheral problems), and the dragon slayers, who say China is a threat to everyone and needs to be contained (while noting that there have been a few small improvements).

  What do I think? It depends which day you ask me. China messes with my head on a daily basis. One day I think that it really is going to take over the world, and that the Chinese government is doing the most extraordinary thing the planet has ever witnessed. The World Bank says China has lifted 400 million people out of poverty since 1978. That’s more than the entire population of South America.

  The next day it will all seem built on sand and I expect it all to come tumbling down around us. I’ll be disgusted at the way the Communist Party treats its people, and shocked at the sheer cost of it all, the human cost, which seems acceptable to the government in everything that it does.

  To my mind, though, one of the key things is choice. Whatever our own prejudices, we simply cannot deny that there is more choice in China now than there used to be. And I am of the opinion that where there is choice, there is often change for the better, and that includes the possibility of political change. You can now choose where you work in China. You can choose whom you marry. You can choose paper or plastic to wrap your groceries, full fat or skim for your cappuccino. It’s not happening tomorrow, but I think that once you allow people to choose their pizza toppings, sooner or later they are going to want to choose their political leaders.

  “Shanghai has three hundred miles of elevated expressway.” My taxi driver has a glint in his eye as he hits the ramp leading up to one of the city’s most modern roads. “How many miles of elevated expressway are there in New York?”

  I tell him I don’t have that fact at my fingertips. He gets beyond the slow-moving traffic in the center of town and accelerates at a crazy speed westward, a sort of Fu Manchu does Blade Runner, which has me reaching for a rear seat belt that isn’t there. I notice, as one notices bizarre things in times of danger, that on the back of the headrest of the front seat is an advertisement for breast enlargement surgery.

  “Don’t worry,” he shouts back at me, with a grin. “Anquan diyi. Safety first.”

  If you survive the driving, the roads in Shanghai are extraordinary. A series of elevated expressways race through the city at varying heights above the ground. Swathes of beautiful colonial villas had to be demolished to make way for some of these roads. Some of the villas that remain now stand just yards, sometimes inches away from the six-lane freeway, kissing the road as it slashes their faces.

  I’m heading to meet the host of a radio phone-in show whose name is Ye Sha. Her show, called Shanghai State of Mind, goes out from midnight till 2:00 A.M. every night and has been popular among the city’s residents for years. You can call Ye Sha (pronounced Yeah Shah) with any problem and ask her advice, live on air, and thousands of people do.

  I want to talk to her about the huge dislocation that is going on in people’s minds. Shanghai may make the visitor feel that China is on the verge of greatness, but the speed of the changes has left psychological and spiritual confusion in many people’s minds. After the convulsions of the Maoist years, and now the convulsions of the reaction against the Maoist years, there can be few countries more in need of therapy than China. Yet for most Chinese there are few places to turn for refuge and advice amid the blizzard of change. Untethered from both Confucian and Communist morality, many young people find Ye Sha is the closest thing they have to a guiding voice not laden down with parental disapproval (although she knows how to dish out some of that when necessary). A friend had given me her number, so I called her on arriving in Shanghai and set up a meeting over dinner.

  We meet in Pizza Hut and order Diet Cokes and pepperoni pizza. She is probably in her late thirties, with a round face and thoughtful eyes, and wearing a floral blouse and white linen pants. She tells me, as we sit munching our pizza, that she is planning her first trip to Europe. I ask her about her radio show.

  “Generally speaking, callers to my program have three types of problems,” she says. “First, emotional problems, mainly to do with love. Second, work problems and relationships at work. And third, relationships within the family.

  “I started hosting the show soon after I graduated from college, in 1992. At that time, the main emotional issue was people starting to have extramarital affairs. They knew it was wrong, and they wanted to know what they should do once it had happened. Now, there are even more people having affairs, but many of these people don’t really think it’s wrong. They think it’s reasonable, and understandable.”

  Her tone is measured and mature, and as she nibbles her pizza, I can imagine why people would want to call her on air for advice.

  “There has been a huge change, especially among women. Women want their independence. They think they have the right to do what they want. And now, they have so many choices of lifestyle, and choices of things to enjoy.”

  Ye Sha says many people now believe that, if there’s no law against it, then it’s all right. To many in the cities, she says, morality—a sense of what is right and wrong—doesn’t matter anymore. “I think a lot of young people are simply confused by all the change. They call up and say they are unhappy, but they can’t even articulate why.”

  This matters to Ye Sha a great deal. Suddenly she becomes quite emotional. Her bottom lip quivers. She stutters as she speaks, as though she were talking about the death of someone close to her, which in a strange way perhaps she is.

  “People, especially young people, are mishi le. They are lost.” She repeats the word lost in English.

  There is a pause while she regathers herself.

  “Why, after all that Mao did to ruin people’s lives, do you sometimes hear older people reminiscing fondly about the Maoist era?” she asks. “Because, despite the problems, there was still a morality, and an ethical framework to life. There was right, and there was wrong. Now…what is right, and what is wrong?”

  Ye Sha doesn’t have any easy answers, but she is trying to raise the questions for a deracinated generation, which she says is drifting in a moral vacuum. Having struggled for a century to escape the strait-jacket of family ties and social obligations, young people in China’s cities are now foundering in the isolation of individualism.

  “And people can’t keep up with the machines,” she says as we finish our pizza and prepare to leave. “The previous pace of life was too slow, for sure. But now it’s too fast. In traditional China, people were taught zenme zuo ren, how to be a person. In fact, we emphasized it too much. The morality, the rituals, the ethics. Now it isn’t emphasized enough. No one knows how to be a person anymore. We are training technicians. We are not training people.”

  Months later, I come across a quotation from the 1990s by a famous China scholar, Myron Cohen of Columbia University, that seems to sum up what Ye Sha is saying very we
ll.

  For much of China’s population, being Chinese is culturally much easier today than it ever was in the past, for this identification no longer involves commonly accepted standards of behavior or belief. Existentially, however, being Chinese is far more problematic, for now it is as much a quest as it is a condition.

  Shanghai consumes me for four whole days. I could have stayed four weeks. I meet lawyers who are working to build China’s legal system, I meet businesswomen who do all their deals on the golf course, and I meet young entrepreneurs at an Internet start-up. I meet a fifty-year-old former peasant who spent the first fifteen years of his adult life planting rice, then traveled along Route 312 in 1986 and made millions in the construction industry. He now owns four apartments, and his daughter goes to college abroad. I visit a factory, typical of so many along China’s coast, packed with hundreds of rural women working in Dickensian conditions. They will never be millionaires, but they are sending half their salaries home to their villages and helping to spread some wealth inland.

  I visit the old Jewish ghetto, to which more than twenty thousand European Jews escaped in the late 1930s because Shanghai—open, international Shanghai—was the only place in the world that didn’t require them to have a visa. And I meet a diplomat who tells me the city is now transforming itself again, moving away from manufacturing to become more of a service economy. Everywhere, people seem to have put the horrors of Maoism behind them. Those years are rarely mentioned. Everywhere, there is an energy and a focus on the future that seems to spring from the knowledge of how many years, and how many lives, were wasted.

  On Sunday I attend a service at Mo-En Church on Tibet Road, built in the 1920s, when Shanghai was still a center of missionary activity. As I climb the stairs to find a seat in the gallery, I am greeted by an old Chinese lady with silvery hair and sparkling eyes, who says “Good morning” to me in strong, clear English. I want to stop and ask her, “What have you been through in your life? What, in God’s name, have you seen?” But I just smile back at her and continue up the stairs. The church is packed with people.