“What happened?”
“Well, the state demolished my home. I guess I can still claim to own the land under the demolished house, but it has built a giant shopping mall on the site. It demolished a whole neighbourhood.”
“You couldn’t stop it?”
“We tried. But we failed. In this instance.”
“Was it an expropriation?” I query.
“Here’s how it works,” Madame Hua says. “The city is already divided up into exploitation areas. The top developers have designs on everything. They cut a deal with the city and state officials to share some of the immense profits to be generated by the sale of condos, offices and commercial space in the new structures. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars. Then the state issues an expropriation notice for a given area and imposes a strict time limit for evacuation. It relocates the inhabitants to apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city and pays out tiny sums for the lost property. You must leave your home, your gardens, your neighbours, everything. If you don’t leave, you’re arrested. Then your home is demolished.”
“What can you do?”
“Luckily, things tend not to be done very carefully,” she says. “The developers hold land titles and building permits that predate the expropriation acts. They mostly concentrate just on taking the land, not on the legal procedure for doing so. Which means the state’s paperwork is full of inconsistencies. I’m fighting the state in court. But the courts often refuse to hear the cases. So I talk to the media. I make a fuss. I go to friends in high places. I show up at cocktail parties and belittle the developers. They’re criminals. It should be known.”
She pauses, thinking about her loss, then says, “I could not save my own home. But I may be able to save some of the hutongs. Come, I’ll show you,” she says, urging us to go to her house nearby.
Catherine Hua lives in a modern apartment building just around the corner from the café. The interior confirms that she is a woman of culture. The space is simple and graceful, the walls decorated with old paintings and silk screens. I imagine her personal history. She’s from an old family, and her grandfather must have been an exceptional man. If he studied in Paris in the earliest years of the twentieth century, he must have been born into the Chinese elite. A famous builder in old Peking, he was surely quite the gentleman. His son was raised in the best of Chinese and Western traditions, trained in the old arts and then educated like his father at the best Parisian architecture school. In Madame Hua’s family, one was clearly expected to respect art. I ask her about the Cultural Revolution, that brutal time when such people of culture were targeted and purged.
“Ah, that was an interesting time,” she begins with a smile. “Before then, we had a big house with a big garden around it. As a child, I used to pretend that I was in the jungle in that garden. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards forced a lot of families from the countryside into our big house. My family retreated to the servant house at the back of the compound. It could have been a lot worse: my father had been a quiet servant of the revolution—the original one, that is—so we were luckily not subjected to any further measures.”
She retrieves a large photo album, places it on the coffee table and begins to guide me through it. There are photos of old stone houses, of courtyards, trees, delicately carved wooden eaves, stone dragons and intricately cobbled walkways. These are glimpses of the treasures of the hutongs, the precious private spaces where great poems were composed and passionate love affairs conducted, where people were taught how to think, how to honour their ancestors properly and how to be good scions of a great culture.
“This house,” Catherine tells me as she points to a series of photos, “once belonged to a famous general. He was also a master calligrapher. The house had the most amazing garden walkway, with incredible arches. Look at this photo; you can see them.”
“What happened to it?” I ask.
“It’s gone. They didn’t even salvage the stonework.” She turns the page.
“Look at the gate to this house,” she says, directing my focus to a stone gateway in the photo that has an elaborate wooden roof over it. “It too is gone, crushed by a bulldozer. I was there to see it happen.”
“Who lived in these houses?”
“Many families. Normal people,” she continues. “They call me for help. Or at the very least, they tell me to come and take pictures of their treasured homes. ‘Come quick,’ they say, ‘the bulldozers are here!’”
There are pages and pages of photos. Catherine occasionally points out a house and tells me that she managed to save it. But the vast majority of the photos are of ghosts: homes, ways of life, banished into nothing. I nod my head sympathetically as I flip through the album.
“I guess the developers, the state officials, have no sense of history,” I comment.
“No,” she says, “they are without sense, without culture. They are motivated by one thing alone. Greed.”
Catherine Hua feels the need to say one final thing: “Earlier in the revolution, great changes were made. Things were turned upside down, yes. But I feel that we are now going somewhere totally new and even more radical—yes, even compared with the Cultural Revolution. Then at least, when temples and historical houses were destroyed, they were destroyed for a reason. There was an ideology. Now Chinese history is simply being eradicated without thought. This is barbaric, nihilistic even.”
Welcome to modernity, I think.
Over the next days, Viv and I criss-cross the capital preparing for our trip, getting plane tickets, doing research. Beijing is a sprawling megalopolis; we are stuck in traffic a lot, sometimes for hours. This gives us time to throw ideas around and get to know each other more. Vivien doesn’t make it difficult for me to assess her opinions about the government. She loathes and distrusts the Communist Party and tells me so point-blank.
“I’m not the ideological type and certainly not a Communist,” I tell Viv, “but then again, nor is China anymore. I just don’t want to try draw conclusions too quickly about this place.”
“I assure you that if you stay a while and see how things work here, you couldn’t support the party,” she says somewhat fiercely.
“Well, one thing I’m fairly certain of is that China cannot simply copy the political system of some other place.”
“So how do you feel about Tiananmen?” she asks pointedly.
“I would like to think that if I were Chinese, I would have been on the square, facing down the tanks for my freedom. But at the same time, I’m not blind to the benefits that stability has brought China since Tiananmen.”
“Sacha, trust me, I’ve lived here my whole life. I’m familiar with this government and its ways,” she says with conviction. “I don’t see any good coming from corruption and injustice.”
“But look around,” I argue. “I see tremendous wealth creation. The economy is getting freer, and China is getting more and more rich and powerful.”
“It’s not all like this,” she says with a small smile. “Anyhow, you know that Confucius had nothing but contempt for the pursuit of wealth?”
“I didn’t know that. I always thought Confucius told us to seek harmony. Prosperity is a kind of harmony, I thought.”
“No. Confucius taught that harmony comes only from virtue.”
We head to a seafood restaurant called Ten Thousand Dragon Continent. Passing through the ornate entrance, we enter a big room filled with aquariums. A selection of exotic creatures squirms in the open tanks: fish of all sizes and colours, squid, octopuses, eight types of crab, four kinds of lobster, half a dozen varieties of shrimp, every kind of mollusc imaginable, a healthy selection of insects: bee pupae, silk larvae and dangerous-looking scorpions. The aquariums take the place of a menu; to order, you point at a tank and specify a quantity and cooking style: poached, steamed or fried, with black bean, imperial sauce, or garlic and ginger. The waitress then nets your selection and sends the live seafood to the kitchen.
For the Chinese, it seems there’s no greater joy in life than sitting down to a rare feast with friends and family. Even given Vivien’s discreet manner, it’s clear she loves food as well. Over tender razor clams with shallots and ginger and spiced baby octopus, I ask Vivien about her father.
“He was a mathematics professor. And later a high-school principal.”
“What did his father do?”
“He was a peasant. A farmer.”
“I could say my father’s father was born on a farm as well. But he died in 1934. So I hardly consider myself a farmer. You?”
“Not really,” she says, laughing. “I’m a city girl. But I did spend a lot of time with my grandparents on the farm when I was a child. So country life is not at all foreign to me.”
“Are your grandparents still alive?”
“Oh yes, all of them.”
“I’m curious what it was like for your family during the Cultural Revolution.”
“Well, for my grandparents nothing much changed. They were classified as ‘low to middle’ farmers. So they were spared any attacks. As for my father, since he was of peasant stock, at the university he was one of the few people who benefited from the Cultural Revolution. While the so-called intellectuals were being chased from the universities, my father did his doctorate.”
“Can I meet him?”
“Certainly not!” Viv says unequivocally. “I haven’t talked to him in several years and am not planning to. In fact, he’s not a topic of conversation that I enjoy.”
After lunch, we head back to Deryk’s apartment to book more flights for our journey. We ride the elevator to the seventeenth floor. I comment that it’s actually the fourteenth floor, since the fourth, thirteenth and fourteenth floors are missing.
“It makes sense that Deryk lives on this floor and it’s partly empty. Anyone Chinese would hesitate to live on the fourteenth flour, even though it’s listed as the seventeenth flour. Four and fourteen are very bad numbers. The words in Mandarin sound like death.”
“That strikes me as rather foolish. Not you?”
“Oh, come on! It’s tradition. We Chinese are raised to be superstitious.”
“But you seem so rational.” I say teasingly.
“You don’t get it. I choose to be superstitious,” she counters. “It’s a way to honour one’s ancestors by carrying forth their beliefs. Superstition is an act of awe. Ancestors should be held in awe,” she says, a little unsure of her footing in English.
“Awe? Are you sure you intend to use that word?”
“It means fear and respect, right?”
“Yes. And that’s how you would describe your feelings toward these beliefs?”
“Yes,” she says firmly.
Vivien certainly has no awe for the Chinese Communist Party. She has even cultivated a group of friends who have distinguished themselves through their opposition to the central government. Many of her contacts in activist and intellectual circles are from her days at Peking University. She was clearly a dedicated student and has maintained ties to many of her professors.
She sets up a meeting for us with her former professor, Hé Weifang, at a place called Thinker’s Café, a hangout for students of the humanities. As we approach, Viv explains the café’s real name: “Xing Ke means sober guest, probably after one of the greatest of Chinese poets, Qu Yuan, who was persecuted and committed suicide twenty-three hundred years ago. He wrote: ‘I was banished because everyone is drunk while I’m the only one sober.’”
The café’s front door is discreet; it leads to a dirty staircase, at the bottom of which sits a bald-headed old man smiling a toothless grin.
“I love this place,” Viv tells me as we climb the stairs.
Landing on the second floor, I notice that the atmosphere has changed: the walls are painted black. The café is on one side; the All Sages Bookstore, the other. We turn toward the café. We pass a few display cabinets and I see Chinese titles for Jared Diamond, Milton Friedman and Edward Said.
The café is stylish and moody. It’s obviously popular with young intellectuals. We head to a table by the window to wait for Professor Hé. Viv is excited to see him again and briefs me on his biography. Hé specializes in constitutional law. He has been particularly involved in cases of discrimination arising from China’s dual residency system, known as the hukou system. He has become a critic of the government and was one of a few legal academics to write an open letter criticizing the central government.
“There was a famous case a few years ago of a student dying in police custody,” Viv explains. “This student was out one night without his papers. If you are from the countryside, you must have written authorization to live in the city. If you don’t, you can be fined by the local authorities. If you can’t pay the fine immediately, they can force you to work. The authorities farm out this indentured labour to local contractors. In this case, the student was unable to prove on the spot that he was in fact a student. The police took him in as a potential labourer. Some people say that the student was lippy with the police when they interrogated him. He died in police custody twenty-four hours later. Professor Hé came out against the measure that led to this unnecessary death.”
Hé arrives. He’s in his mid- to late fifties. He’s at once professorial, weathered and elegant. After preliminaries and several cigarettes, he begins to tell me about the Chinese constitution.
“I’m devoted to the constitution, but my government isn’t. The fundamental political philosophy of the Communist Party is Marxism. Marx advocated no laws. As such, constitutionalism was never of much interest or relevance to the party. A constitution sets out to define a certain number of rights and rules. But regardless of the constitution, the party always presents all rights and rules as it sees fit at any given moment.”
Hé then explains that, in practical terms, this means there is no legitimate avenue for social activism and no acceptable way to implement new models of society, whether democracy, freedom of speech, human rights or even trade unions.
Hé has staked out an interesting stand for himself. He believes in rule-making and the law. It’s important, he thinks, to create laws that represent the best interests of present and future society and that society can follow without too much difficulty. The constitution thus has to both frame existing laws and enshrine a law-making process that gently leads society forward.
Hé is strategically opposed to his government. He’s not arguing against the Chinese government’s laws. Quite the contrary: he is arguing that the government must respect the rules and laws that it gives itself, whatever they might be. He’s thus not making a moral argument against his government but a practical one in support of it. He’s arguing for consistency, not righteousness. In this sense, one can argue that Professor Hé is helping the government follow its own logic.
Hé believes that law can transform society. China may no longer be commanded from the Forbidden City. But the model of government it represents continues. Power remains opaque and inaccessible. This must change. By forcing the empire to bow its head to the law, power will be returned to a place where it can be witnessed, participated in and transformed.
The professor then takes me through the hukou system. He explains that at the beginning of the People’s Republic, in its first constitution of 1954, freedom of movement was guaranteed to the people. But that constitution was never properly implemented. And from the beginning, the People’s Republic of China was involved in managing and restraining the rural population. It needed that population for defence, and for food and industrial production.
This increased after the failed industrial policies of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, when millions of peasants were forced out of the fields and into haphazard industrial production. Having abandoned their crops, the peasants began to starve. Many left the countryside and the famines worsened. The free flow of people had to be restricted.
The later constitutions eventually reflected the need to restrain the movement of rural po
pulations. Over the last thirty years, the trend has been moving the other way. The growth of the manufacturing sector in the cities requires a constant influx of labour from the countryside. The limits on free movement have been lifted to allow the cities to attract this workforce. But this workforce is highly volatile and has to be managed carefully. Not everybody can be allowed to settle in the cities. The movement of people is tolerated, but legal status is not easily granted. So the workforce remains transient and cheap.
“The best friends of the party are now capitalist entrepreneurs who profit from the cheap labour,” the professor explains. “This alliance makes for little interest in the bargaining power of the workers.”
“But this alliance has also helped China secure its position in the world economy,” I point out.
“Yes, it’s the reason China has become the world’s factory. But without any proper legal environment, there’s no real stability in the long run. The next twenty years are crucial,” he concludes with a sigh.
“Do you think China can implement a liberal democracy any time soon?” I ask.
“Well, one thing is sure: we need change. We need something different while there is still latitude for change. Even for our economy, we need judicial independence.”
“Did an old party leader not say that good things take time?”
“Well, I say to that old leader, no good things can come through institutions that don’t answer to the people. I see no other alternative for us than democracy. Western-style democracy.”
“So many people participating in so great a project?”
“I cannot say it’ll be easy,” he says with a gentle smile.
“Has it started?”
“It has for some.”
Another of Vivien’s teachers, Professor Wang Yue, taught her documentary filmmaking and is now a television producer for CCTV, China’s national television network, which broadcasts on dozens of channels. Wang produces a show on channel 10, the state documentary channel, called Great Masters. Vivien tells me it is one of the best shows on Chinese state television and that she likes to watch it. It airs at 10 p.m. every weeknight.
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