by Rob Gifford
Three men in dirty workmen’s clothes are sitting just in front of me on the bus. They are migrant workers who have been in Tibet, building the railroad that will link the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, with the rest of China. Originally farmers from a valley just off Route 312, they are returning home to gather in the harvest.
The Tibet railroad opened in 2006, a major government-funded project linking Tibet by rail for the first time with the rest of China. It is the world’s highest railroad and it runs for more than seven hundred miles from the city of Golmud to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. The point where the track surges through the Tanggula Pass on its way to Lhasa is at an altitude of 16,640 feet—higher than the highest peak in the lower forty-eight states of the U.S. (Mount Whitney), and higher than the highest peak in Western Europe (Mont Blanc). Passenger cars are pressurized like airplanes to prevent altitude sickness. The government says the railroad will aid Tibetan development. Activists abroad and Tibetans in Tibet say that it will just facilitate the influx of Han Chinese into Tibet, and the extraction of natural resources. Both analyses are correct.
“How was the pay, working on the railroad?” I ask my travel companions.
“Very good,” says one of them with a grin. “About two thousand yuan a month.”
That’s $250, twice what the average farmer can earn in a year.
“But we are nongmin, we are farmers,” he goes on, “and we have to come home in the summer. Once we’ve harvested the crops, we’ll head back to Tibet to finish the railroad.”
“So your lives are much better than before?”
“Of course!” says the same man, his smile revealing a couple of crooked teeth. “It used to be kao tian sheng huo. Relying on heaven to survive. But now it’s not.”
There’s a silence as we ponder the magnitude of what he has just said. I ponder it, at any rate.
“That’s a big change,” I say, eventually. He nods.
It’s not an overnight change. But while political reform is blocked, this is what is changing China. It’s the first time in history that a farmer from this, or any, valley near here has been able to say, “We are not relying on heaven to survive.” If the rains fall, or the crops die, it will cause them problems, but they will not die. It’s the first stage in the empowerment of Old Hundred Names, in their eternal struggle with heaven. The improvement is strictly economic. The farmers are exploited when they get to their new industrial jobs, and the villages they return to are even poorer here in Gansu than they were back in Anhui. But the people of Gansu province are grateful for small mercies, and for these three men and their families, it is empowerment all the same.
Huge electricity pylons stand out on the hills like scarecrows, a glorious sign of progress, no doubt, to the people of these distant, poverty-stricken valleys. Soon the three men get off the bus and wave goodbye, returning temporarily from their new identities as migrant laborers to be the farmers that they once were. They and their forebears have wrestled with the land, and with heaven, for so many centuries, and frequently they have lost. Now there is another option.
It is still several hours’ journey up Route 312 to the first major oasis town of the desert, Wuwei. The road is wide and straight, and the buses, blue trucks, and occasional cars speed along, faster than any camel caravan ever traveled. In Wuwei, I change buses and leave Route 312 temporarily, heading two hours north, to the city of Minqin. Wuwei is already on the fringe of the Gobi. Traveling to Minqin (pronounced Min-chin), I am plunging into the heart of the desert. This town of 300,000 is perched precariously at the end of a road that extends up from Route 312 like a green pier sticking out into an ocean of sand.
For centuries, the biggest threats to Chinese settlements here were horsemen from the north. Now the biggest threat still comes from the north but in the form of the encroaching desert, which is creeping toward Minqin at the rate of ten to fifteen feet every year. There are still a few villages to the north and east and west, but gradually people have left them and moved either to Minqin itself or even farther south. The desert is merciless in its consumption of land, a situation tragically compounded by man-made blunders, such as the damming of what rivers there are and the inefficient use of water resources. Past deforestation has not helped either, and efforts now to plant trees to reverse the process do not seem to be working. Just as China needs to be expanding cultivable land, it is losing it.
Minqin is poorer than many of the cities along Route 312. Salaries, even for the fortunate, hover well below a hundred U.S. dollars a month. Its apartment buildings are old, and the balance has not even begun to tip from bicycles toward car ownership. But there is still an energy in Minqin, as there is in most small Chinese cities, however poor, as though the people are refusing to accept their geographical fate and are determined to push toward their own modest goal of “moderate prosperity.”
A few months earlier, at a party in Beijing, I had met a young Chinese guy, a friend of an American friend of mine, who works in Beijing but whose hometown is Minqin. I had mentioned that I might be passing through in the summer. He had said that he would be there visiting his family and that I should give him a call. So I did, and he picks me up at the bus station and takes me to meet his family.
His brother-in-law insists on taking us out for dinner that evening with all his work buddies. It’s not often that a foreigner shows up in these parts is the general tone of the invitation, and we want to show you a good time. We embark on a delicious meal of stir-fried Chinese dishes, over which ten inquisitive, increasingly inebriated small-town Chinese men quiz me on everything under the setting Gobi sun. They are among the town’s more fortunate residents, many of them minor government officials or employees of state-owned companies that still exist here. All are curious about their visitor, possibly the first foreigner many of them have ever met. What do I think of China? What do I think of Chinese universities? What do I think of Japan? Why does the United States support the Dalai Lama and the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong? Is health care in Europe really free? Why do Americans love guns?
Then it gets personal. Chinese people, brought up on a diet of Hollywood movies, political sex scandals, and Western rock star misbehavior, assume that white men, married or single, are just twenty-four-hour party animals (to put it politely). They ask me how many mistresses I have and how many mistresses most Western guys have, and are disappointed to learn that their guest is not the combination of Bill Clinton and Mick Jagger they were expecting. “No mistresses?” says one man with a potbelly and an outrageous comb-over. “Every man should have many mistresses before he dies.”
My hosts soon resolve that the only way for me to redeem my masculinity is to take part in some drinking games, which they now explain. All the games involve the infamous Chinese wine known as baijiu, which really is the most disgusting beverage ever squeezed out of a grain of rice. I had so far managed to get through the evening without actually having to drink any. Then one of the diners stands up and proposes a toast:
“I’d like to toast Journalist Qi, to welcome him, and to thank him for coming to this backward little town of China.”
“No, no,” I say. “You are developing very fast.”
“No, no,” says he. “You don’t have to be polite. We know we are backward. We must tell the truth. But we are glad to welcome you here.”
I then proceed to do rather well at their schoolboy drinking game. Distantly related to stone-paper-scissors but louder, it involves two participants thrusting forward a certain number of fingers of one hand while both shout out a number. If the fingers you thrust out added to the fingers your opponent thrusts out come to the number that you shout out, then your opponent has to drink. If he gets it right, you drink. Pretty simple, really. Somehow I keep getting it right, but not without losing a few, and grimacing as I down the requisite shots of the dreaded rice wine. I manage then to feign interest in a conversation with one of the men who is not playing the game and extricate myself from the really hard-core dr
inking that ensues. Even so, a few shots of baijiu are enough to make me wobble slightly as we leave the restaurant and I head back to my cheap hotel.
15. “We Want to Live!”
When it comes to reporting on China, I have always subscribed to Woody Allen’s theory. You’ll remember that New York’s most famous pessimist once said that 80 percent of success is simply showing up. And so it is with modern China. I defy any reporter to make China boring. Almost everything about it is surprising and interesting, in part because it is so different from what you’re expecting. One of the great things about living here, quite apart from the opportunity to fill up the Q, X, and Z sections of your address book, is just going with the flow, walking out in the morning with only a very vague plan and seeing where the day takes you. It’s almost always somewhere you’d never have predicted.
When I told friends in Beijing that I was going to travel Route 312 from east to west, several people asked me if I was going to set up lots of interviews and meetings along the way. As it turned out, I did call ahead a few times, and I did some research to set up interviews on subjects that I definitely wanted to include. If I’d been less busy, I might have prepared more. But either way, there would have been plenty to write about. By and large, I got onboard the bus, taxi, or camel, and just went.
Anything can happen on the road in China, and invariably it does, but some days are better than others, and there were few twelve-hour spans on this trip that were quite as extraordinary as the long summer’s day that began in a dingy hotel with no towels in the center of Minqin.
Since I knew I was to leave early the next morning, I had left the curtains of my shabby room wide open. The room had no air-conditioning, and the night had been hot. The rice wine had contributed to a deep night’s sleep. The orange fingers of the dawn wake me only slowly as they unfurl over the forgettable town outside my window. I take a cold shower (the only sort available), check out of the hotel, and head to the bus station, which is already awake, as bus stations always are.
Drivers compete for business. Others load bags onto the roofs of their buses. Passengers sit at the small portable food stalls in front of the main station building, eating fried cakes filled with bean paste or boiled dumplings as they wait for their buses to depart. Steam rises from the cauldrons and woks of the itinerant food vendors.
There is only one direction out of Minqin, and that is south, along the narrow green corridor back to Route 312. You can feel the desert, looming out there somewhere, everywhere, but unless you are crazy, or a Mongolian nomad, or a crazy Mongolian nomad, there is no reason to go north from Minqin into the Gobi Desert.
The bus is heading for the town of Jinchang, farther up Route 312 to the northwest, so rather than heading down to Wuwei and turning right, it dives off across country on the hypotenuse to 312, along a narrow road lined with spindly trees and a few mud houses clinging to the road like iron filings to a magnet. My eeny-meeny-miny-mo seat-choosing routine has landed me next to a local man of about forty, who is doing some small-scale business, selling grain and rice in Minqin and Jinchang. It turns out that I’m the first foreigner he has ever met, and he manages to resist for all of a minute and a half before pulling the blond hairs on my arm. We go through the usual quiz of whether I like China and arrive pretty quickly at how many children I have. “Two.” “Will you have more?” he asks. “Possibly.”
“So your country doesn’t limit the number of children people have?”
“No, that is left up to the individual,” I tell him. “In my country, the state cannot interfere in the personal lives of its people.” I always make this point, my contribution, however small, toward bringing on the revolution.
At this point, the woman sitting across the aisle from me interjects. She, like all the other passengers, has been listening to my conversation with my neighbor.
“It’s not right to have more than two children,” she says.
“I beg your pardon?” I ask her in my most faux-polite, you-talkin’-to-me? voice.
“It’s not right to have more than two children,” she repeats.
“I think you can say you don’t agree with it, or you wouldn’t have more than two yourself, but you can’t say it is bu dui. You cannot say it is not right.” I smile at her.
She smiles right back, the smile that many middle-aged Chinese people smile when they are about to patronize a foreigner. She has short, dyed black hair, the graying roots of which are just visible at her center part. She is dressed in nondescript brown pants and blouse, the archetypal well-meaning middle-aged Chinese woman, from the Lost Generation of the Cultural Revolution, perhaps forty-five years old, perhaps fifty-five. She is friendly but opinionated, and no doubt ready to give me a lecture on loose Western morality or how to bring up my children or, as in this case, how many children to have.
“Why do you say it’s not right?” I ask her.
“Because I work in family planning,” she replies proudly.
“So you are a doctor?”
“Yes. I’m in charge of family planning in this county.”
“And you travel around enforcing the one-child policy?”
“Yes.”
It is dawning on me what her job involves. Traveling with her are two young nurses, probably in their late twenties or early thirties. One is seated beside her, looking very prim and proper, the other is be hind her, leaning forward on the headrest of her seat to take part in the conversation.
“So…you travel around giving women checkups.” I ease gently toward the questions I really want to ask.
“Yes. That’s where we’re going now.”
“And what happens if you find that there are women who are pregnant who shouldn’t be pregnant?”
“We try to persuade them to have an abortion.”
“And if they don’t agree?”
“We have to force them,” she says, pausing slightly. “You know, zhong guo ren tai duo le. There are too many Chinese people.”
Every Chinese person says this. It is, of course, true, but it has been drummed into Chinese heads by so many years of propaganda that it has become a mantra. More important, it is not just this woman’s viewpoint, it is also her job to do something about it.
“But how do you force them? What if they won’t go?”
“There is a department of the police in each town or county that enforces the family-planning laws. They go to the woman’s house and, if she will not come voluntarily, she is taken to the clinic by force.”
Many family-planning officials in urban areas, even in small towns, know they should not talk to Westerners about such issues. They know it is a sensitive subject in the West, and one that provokes criticism of China, even though many of them do not understand why. This woman feels no such constraints.
“But what if there is a woman who is eight months pregnant, and she shouldn’t be?” I ask her.
“She is…” The woman makes an action with her hands in front of her stomach, an action of flushing something away.
“But that’s a living child, that could be born and survive.” I gasp.
The woman shrugs her shoulders and smiles faintly. “Zhong guo ren tai duo le. There are too many Chinese people.”
I’d often heard of these cases. Indeed, it is common knowledge that ever since the one-child policy was instituted, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, forced abortions and sterilizations have become completely routine, even into the third trimester of pregnancy. But I had never met someone involved in the process.
“So you are the person who actually has to perform that operation?”
She doesn’t seem to mind my questions. “Yes,” she says, laughing slightly.
Chinese laughs say many things, and it is not possible to tell if this is a laugh of pride in her job at keeping the Chinese population low or a laugh of embarrassment at having to do such work.
“But don’t you find it…a bit brutal?” I can’t help screwing up my face as I ask the question.
I turn to the two younger women, looking for confirmation that they wouldn’t be involved in such brutality. Perhaps they just stand by but don’t take part.
“But how do you actually do it? How do you kill an eight-month-old baby?”
One of the younger nurses volunteers, rather hesitantly. “You inject into the mother’s uterus, and that kills the child.”
“But she still has to give birth to the child, doesn’t she?”
“Yes. Sometimes the child doesn’t die in the womb and is still alive when it is born. But, we leave it…and it…”
The nurse, who I later learn is the mother of a young child herself, has a slightly pained look on her face and she stops in midsentence, as though torn between the emotions of being a mother and what she has been told is her duty to her country.
I am completely aghast, and I am clearly not the only one. A small man with a mousy face sitting in the seat behind me has been listening to the whole conversation. “Zhong guo ren huai tou le,” he mutters. “Chinese people are too evil.”
“I beg your pardon.” I think I didn’t hear him correctly.
He just shakes his head, not wanting direct confrontation with the doctor, and turns away, to look out the window at the scrappy desert scrubland rushing past. His arm is cradled around a boy of about eight.
“So do you have to do this very often?” I turn back to the doctor.
“Much less than before. In the 1980s it was all the time. Now, people’s thinking has been changed, and they want to have fewer children. They see the benefits.”
“But have you done one of these operations recently?” I ask.
“Not within the last two weeks or so.”
She hasn’t realized that what she is saying is sensitive. To her, it is logical, and patriotic and good. When I ask her how she feels as a mother doing these things (she herself has two grown children, she’d told me, born before the one-child policy was implemented), she doesn’t even understand the question. Chinese people look at the Western world, with all the teenage pregnancies and their consequences, and wonder what on earth we think we’re doing, allowing that to happen when it could be solved by a simple medical procedure.