China Road

by Rob Gifford

  In the 1980s, in art as in so many areas, China emerged from its Maoist shell and tried to work out where to pick up after a thirty-year assault on traditional Chinese culture. The result has been a mix of a rewind to established Chinese forms and a fast-forward to a completely postmodern style, which pushes the boundaries of art even more than Western postmodernism. If traditional Chinese art was too rooted in tradition, modern Chinese art is in danger of being completely deracinated. This has not stopped contemporary Chinese art from becoming hugely fashionable among China’s nouveaux riches, and also internationally. In November 2006, a painting by modern artist Liu Xiaodong sold at a Beijing auction for $2.7 million.

  “So who do you like?” Su asks me.

  “Er…Jackson Pollock?” I proffer, screeching in fifty years late to the postmodernism debate.

  “Yiban ba! He’s rather average!” he says. “How about Dai Mian He Si Te?”

  “Who?”

  “Dai Mian He Si Te. He did that thing with the shark.”

  He raises his eyebrows. Surely I can’t be such a loser that I haven’t heard of Dai Mian He Si Te.

  “Damien Hirst!” I salvage my credibility.

  “Right,” he says, “I like him.

  “You, you Westerners, brought us a new concept of art,” Su continues. “This idea of challenging the eyes. Our art used to be all about harmony, like our society. Shanshui. Mountains and water. Landscapes. Balance. It used to be separated from the dirty business of real life. Then your artists said, We want to challenge Western morality with our art, and they did. And of course it caused a storm. Why? Because even though you in the West are free to be atheists and free to be offensive if you want to, not everyone is. There are still many religious believers. Here, though, there is no religion, and no sensibility about that sort of thing. Everything is possible. Now Chinese artists are saying, ‘We can do this, we’re Marxists and atheists, we can do this.’ And we can! And we do!”

  This sounded a little like the argument put forward by Ye Sha, the radio talk-show host in Shanghai. The idea that there is nothing anymore in China that defines orthodoxy, in morality or anything else, so people just do what they want.

  “We have perfected the modernism that you brought in, and do you know why?” Su lowers his head and raises his eyebrows again, talking like a man who rarely has anyone to listen to his theories. “Because life here in China is brutal. So art is just a mirror of life. Life and death, love and hate, sex and violence. People in other countries don’t have the pressure to survive that Chinese people have. In the West, you have no issues, no problems, you have free education, you have health care, you have everything. So your art is very boring. Here, the aim of modern artists is to express themselves. They want to create a kind of political freedom through their art. We can’t express our views on lots of political issues, but we can do it through our art.”

  “But does anyone care?” I ask.

  He pauses with a smile and sighs. “No. That’s the point. That’s the problem. Art is a luxury. It can only be appreciated by people who have reached a certain standard of living. Old Hundred Names just want to make enough money to live peacefully. They have no desire to express themselves through art, or to appreciate people who do.”

  Su then switches gears and seamlessly links the need for artistic and creative freedom with China’s future. “China can’t become the strong and wealthy country it wants to be if it does not allow more creative thinking. Of course, art is a part of that. Art helps develop people’s imagination and creativity.”

  He says that, just days before, he had seen a news story on the Internet reporting that the man who helped China develop the atomic bomb, Qian Xuesen, was very sick. The prime minister of China, Wen Jiabao, had visited him in the hospital and asked him what he wanted to say at the end of his life.

  “We need more innovation,” Qian is reported to have told Prime Minister Wen. “We’re not producing any creative people. We are making only technicians.”

  Su is triumphant at the thought that the nation’s top scientist would have the same view he does, and that the ninety-four-year-old would choose that as his one piece of advice to the nation’s prime minister from his sickbed.

  “This is not just about art,” he says, as we finish our tea and prepare to leave. “We are talking about what is needed for the survival of our country. The government wants advanced education without encouraging people to think.”

  There couldn’t be a better summary of the Chinese dilemma today: the tension between the need to enforce orthodoxy in order to retain unity and the need to allow freedom in order to encourage creativity. For the moment, in the cities like Xi’an at least, the government has bought off many people with economic development. If you can get people just to think about earning and spending, earning and spending, then they are less likely to want to think for themselves. But what happens if the anesthetic of prosperity wears off in the cities as it has in the countryside? And in today’s globalized world, how can you become a Great Power anyway—a country that will progress and succeed and endure—if you don’t allow your people to think?

  10. The Hermit of Hua Shan

  “I’m a lost soul,” says Zheng Lianjie. “I feel like I’ve lost my way.”

  We’re sitting in a coffee shop in Xi’an. Zheng is a very youthful forty-something artist and photographer. I’m meeting him because he is heading the next day to Hua Shan (Flowery Mountain, in English), one of China’s holy mountains, two hours’ drive outside Xi’an. I’m heading there too.

  Zheng Lianjie (pronounced Jung Lyen-jyeh) has long black hair, tied in a ponytail, and is wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt and black jeans. He grew up in Beijing and came of age as an artist in the 1980s, when as he puts it, “There was still idealism, there was still heroism” in China. With the crushing of the pro-democracy demonstrators by government troops in 1989, China changed, he says. Politics were out, experimenting was out, everything was out, except making money. So Zheng moved to New York, where he still spends part of the year.

  We sit for a long time discussing the “death of heroism” in China, and Zheng says he is missing something in his life, deep down.

  “I’ve decided to escape from the modern world for a week,” he says, “and go and live with a Daoist hermit who lives on Hua Shan.”

  “There’s a Daoist hermit on Hua Shan?” I raise my eyebrows.

  “Yes. I met him when I visited there last year. I’m going to stay with him, in his cave, for a week.”

  “Why?”

  “To rediscover myself. And to reconnect with…something. I don’t know what.”

  “Can I come? I mean, could I meet the hermit?”

  “Well…” He pauses.

  “Well, can I at least visit the hermit?” I ask. “Briefly? I won’t intrude on your own plans.”

  “Okay, then. I don’t think he’ll mind.”

  And with that, we arrange to meet at the Hairy Woman Cave Hostel, halfway up the mountain, the next day. Zheng gives me directions to the hostel and then tells me where the hidden path is that leads to the hermit’s cave.

  There were traditionally five holy Daoist mountains in China, one at each of the four points of the compass, plus one in the center, symbolically connecting heaven and earth. Hua Shan is the Holy Mountain in the west. Its five peaks are said to resemble a five-petaled flower, hence the name, Flowery Mountain.

  The word Dao (which used to be spelled Tao) means “the Way” in Chinese and refers to the way of the universe, the order behind nature, and the power within nature. While Confucianism is more of a social philosophy and Buddhism came from outside China, Daoism can claim to be the only really indigenous Chinese “religion.” It is all about man finding his place in the great cosmic balance of things. In contrast to the monotheistic religions, with their emphasis on good fighting evil, in Daoism there is what’s known as a unity of opposites. Good and evil, light and dark, strong and weak, empty and full are all part of the
same whole, and each is necessary to the other. Daoism is also closely linked with the whole concept of fengshui, the rules of geomancy that are believed to govern cosmic harmony when deciding where to place buildings or graves. The fengshui of Hua Shan was believed to be perfectly aligned and contributed to the holiness of the site, which drew pilgrims from all over China.

  It was said in ancient China that the traditional Chinese scholar was a Confucian when in office and a Daoist when out of office. Daoism was in many ways the opposite of Confucianism, although it came to complement Confucian attributes within the Chinese character. While Confucius stressed order and duties and finding one’s place in society, Daoism focused more on metaphysical questions, finding one’s place in the universe. It had connections with folk religions. It was linked to alchemy and magic, and meditation and dietary control. Confucianism followed the rules of li, or “proper behavior according to status.” Daoism followed the concept of wuwei, or “nonaction.”

  The two philosophies were later joined by Buddhism, which arrived from India in the first century A.D. The three entwined, borrowing from one another, in the minds of the people at least, and creating a bounteous pantheon of Chinese gods and beliefs. The absence of a monotheistic faith claiming to be revealed as divine truth is no doubt one of the reasons Chinese people claim they have never fought a war in the name of religion. But some Chinese intellectuals lament that the lack of any firm concept of revealed truth has led to an unhealthy moral relativity in the Chinese mind. Truth has always been relative in China, while political power has not, they say, and the same is still true today.

  I can see why the ancients would call Hua Shan holy. It is a fantastically otherworldly place. The highest peak rises nearly seven thousand feet above the plain, its great white rock faces glowing incandescent in the sunshine. Coniferous trees cling to the sheer sheets of rock, somehow finding crevices to claw in their roots. Other green bushes and grasses find a roothold too, cascading down the rock like strands of hair on an otherwise bald mountain.

  When the Western powers arrived with their machines and their guns in the nineteenth century, they found a country still infused with the search for the balance and harmony of Daoism. But the Dao proved to be an ineffectual shield against the thrusting, forward-looking Ocean People. As China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grappled with how to stave off foreign incursions, traditional belief systems came to be seen by reformers and revolutionaries alike as a major part of the problem. The Communists, as they gathered support in the 1920s and ’30s, put their faith in conquering nature, not finding harmony with it. They saw China’s traditional philosophies as holding the country back. But rather than just sidelining them quietly, they launched a full-scale assault, and after 1949 many traditional Chinese beliefs were wiped out, on the surface at least.

  As a result, after sixty years of Communist assaults, China can appear a strangely soulless place. There are no saddhus here, the holy men seen in every town in today’s India, dressed in their flowing orange robes. There are few overtly religious ceremonies or traditions to compare, for instance, with the washing away of sins in the River Ganges. There is nothing to compare with the hajj of Muslims to Mecca, or the ritual and discipline of praying five times daily. In China, you are more likely to come across a traveling salesman hawking cell phones than an itinerant holy man dispensing wisdom.

  India and the Middle East have retained spiritualities of their own, which China has not. Although there is now a resurgence of interest in some folk religions and a growth in religious activity around the country, mainstream China feels very secular. I don’t think it is coincidence that China also has a faster economic growth rate than other areas of the world. In destroying its traditional ways of thinking, it has done away with any ethical restraints on a headlong pursuit of wealth and development.

  As if to make this point, a huge power station stands belching out smoke not far from the entrance to Hua Shan, warning would-be pilgrims that the mountain is no longer the holy place it once was. A railroad has been built right along the foot of the mountain, too. There’s nothing quite like the Xi’an to Beijing Express to rattle your fengshui.

  Having been delayed in my departure, I decide with regret that I don’t have time for the five-hour climb to the top of the mountain if I am to get back down to the Hairy Woman Cave Hostel by sunset. So I take the cable car halfway up and climb in the heat to the lowest of the mountain summits, the North Peak. Even here there is a stunning view over the various peaks that make up Hua Shan. All around are the great swirls of stone, like whirlpools of white rock disappearing into the mountains, rock faces that have for thousands of years whispered to travelers: “Stay still.” “Find balance.” “Follow the Dao.”

  Now, the cacophony of tourist voices drowns out the silence. The peasants of China may be hitting the road to find work, but the new middle classes are out traveling, exploring and trekking to the four corners of their country and beyond. I can hardly move on the mountain for excited Chinese tourists, and I sweat along the narrow mountain path with them toward the steep steps up to the next peak. A young woman, on vacation with her family from Beijing, wants to practice her English. She asks to have her photo taken with me. (“Here’s me with the foreigner! Look how he sweats like a pig!”) I linger for twenty minutes, my mind escaping the crowds and drifting back to the holiness of the past, and then I start the long, steep climb back down.

  The Hairy Woman Cave Hostel is small, with only a few rooms plus some dorm beds. It’s not inside a cave, and there is no hairy woman (at least I don’t see her), though apparently back in the mists of time there was. The inn, built in traditional Chinese style, is perched between the sheer mountain face and a bend in the winding path that leads to the summits. It centers on a traditional courtyard, which is where I throw down my daypack after a walk of several hours down from the North Peak. Zheng the Lost Artist had said he would spend the day taking photos on his way up Hua Shan. We have agreed not to use our cell phones on the mountain. Doing so seemed sacrilegious somehow, especially since he is coming here to get away from all that. It is rather liberating to get to the hostel and have no idea when he will be arriving, and no way to find out. Perhaps he is lost on Flowery Mountain.

  The innkeeper brings me a beer and a bowl of noodles, and then I just sit in the courtyard watching the mountain. The harsh golden sun sets, and the gentle milky moon rises, and a carpet of exquisite stars soon rolls out across the inky Chinese sky.

  Sometimes in China, surprisingly rarely in fact, the spirit of a place, infused with those five thousand years of continuous civilization, catches you and transports you. Suddenly you are connected with the magnificent Chinese past, which is perhaps why you came, and perhaps why you stayed, and certainly why you wonder if you can, or should, ever leave. I cannot remember the last instance in my life when I lost track of time, but I sit there in the courtyard of the Hairy Woman Cave Hostel for hours, looking at the moonlit mountain, running through the archive of twenty years of mental movie footage in my brain, and trying to recall those Tang dynasty poems I learned in college.

  A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;

  I drink alone, for no friend is near.

  Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,

  For he, with my shadow, will make three men.

  A steady stream of night climbers begins to pass by the hostel, whose door they cannot miss on the only footpath to the top of the mountain. Dozens of people choose to climb at night in order to reach the peaks in time for sunrise. They buy water or sit for a bowl of noodles, or just take a break from the climb. Many of them are students, taking advantage of the summer vacation to come exploring. The conversations are always the same, microcosms of the changed Chinese psyche, the young people’s minds hurtling in the opposite direction to mine.

  “Where are you from?” I ask.

  “Hubei, but I’m studying in Beijing.”

  “What are you studying?”


  “Computer science.”

  “Do you know what Daoism is?”

  “Not really. We aren’t taught about it in school.”

  “Hi. Where are you from?”

  “Henan, but I’m studying in Shanghai.”

  “Do you know what Daoism is?”

  “Something about nature, isn’t it?”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Electronic information engineering.”

  The next morning I set off early for the hermit’s cave. The owner of the hostel says my friend Zheng arrived very late the night before, so I decide not to wake him. He is going to weave his way up to the hermit today, so I will meet him either on the way or when he gets there. I set off at seven, but the heat is already gathering. The entrance to the path leading to the cave is hidden, but Zheng has told me how to find it. When I reach the point I think he has described, I loiter for a moment to check that no one else has seen me. I don’t want a horde of Chinese tourists following me on my pilgrimage. When it’s clear no one is around, I dart up the gap between the trees and into the forest. The stone path soon becomes a simple forest path, scattered with leaves and occasional berries. There’s a sudden feeling of pleasure, getting away from the crowds on a path that few people know.

  It’s a tough climb, and soon my shirt is soaked with sweat. I reach a turn where there is a huge boulder facing toward the tourist path and offering a fantastic view of the creamy mountain majesty of Hua Shan itself. It feels as if I am the only person for miles around.

  After a brief rest, I struggle up the path again, slipping occasionally on the moist, dark dirt. I’m supposed to be fit. I’m supposed to be training for a marathon. The heat increases and I start to puff. This had better be worth it. This hermit had better have something to say for himself. Some healthy lifestyle pointers at least.