Barbarian Lost

by Alexandre Trudeau

  In the late Qing dynasty, just over a hundred years ago, much of the Chinese countryside was owned by large landholders who relied on masses of impoverished peasants to farm the land. These peasants’ annual salary was little more than a bag of rice and rent on a hut. The peasants who actually owned land were also dismally poor, and whatever meagre surplus they could generate was often entirely owed in taxes. The utterly destitute roamed the land and insecurity was rife. Births were numerous but so were deaths.

  Born of a rich peasant father in a territory of abuse and misery, Mao Zedong was acutely sensitive to the pulse of rural China. Unlike the city-born sons of privilege, he was viscerally aware of the rage and endurance of the peasant. His arguments for a peasant revolution were made forcefully in the early meetings of the burgeoning Communist Party of China, but he was chided or ignored by the movement’s elite, whose views espoused the Marxist doctrine of a workers’ revolution that would first harness the power of the nation and take control of industrial production. For the urbane Communist intellectuals, the fraternity of enlightened factory workers must have seemed far more solid a foundation for a new society than the depravity of peasants.

  But Mao was stubborn. Despite being sidelined through the 1920s, he never relinquished his idea of a peasant revolution. He remained convinced that only the peasant’s wretchedness, borne of immense suffering, had the potency to turn the poor and parasite-ridden earth of China and allow a new nation to bloom. He instinctively understood that the revolution had to start in the countryside.

  From 1928 to 1933—dark and difficult times for the Communist Party of China—Mao formed a small band of adepts and roamed the hills of the border region of southern Jiangxi, eastern Hunan and western Fujian. In these remote corners of China, he perfected his understanding of rural society and experimented with peasant violence.

  Wherever he went it was easy to find malcontents—plenty of people were barely surviving and receiving nothing from the powers above them, treated not as humans but as commodities to be consumed and traded. From among them, men and women could be recruited. Mobs could be assembled rapidly, especially if first allowed to bring violence upon the most immediate sources of injustice: the greedy local trader, the corrupt magistrate or the venal landlord family. Mao would promise the malcontents a new China and a new world, and would encourage them to be bold and decisive, to become a force of justice—a new people’s army—and to purge China of her scourges.

  He played with the forces of chaos and order. Coming upon communities, he sought to decant their frustrations and unleash waves of violence on what was a semblance of order. Yet at the same time, he attempted to galvanize and unify into a single harmonious force the people’s guilt and will to survive and prosper. Once atrocities were committed, the peasants could hardly turn back; they were fully invested in the revolution.

  As he fostered this principle across village after village, commune after commune, Mao began to wield an incredible weapon. Although it remained unclear what society might emerge from the destruction, it became more and more certain that Mao and the peasants could destroy all things before them and might well vanquish the Kuomintang and gain control of China.

  Peasant violence had its advantages but also its disadvantages. It was crude and messy. Peasants were not skilled soldiers. They were unpredictable. And pulling them from their already-poor farms to be sent into costly battles often resulted in further shortages and an increase of suffering. The violence could also be induced by competing factions and turned on itself in destructive rampages. In the wilderness, rival camps within the Communist Party wielding peasant mobs repeatedly waged vicious purges and campaigns against each other.

  Mao was a careful witness to all of this. He began to conclude that discord among the peasants mirrored the larger discord within China itself. Once unified, the nation would be free of contradictions and find balance.

  Mao had great faith in the land itself. He believed that if rid of its scourges of greed and decadence, China would provide for its people. If the forces of food production were rationalized and rid of parasitical elements, the people would prosper, food would be plentiful and more sophisticated types of production could be implemented.

  Mao’s vision was hardly novel: the virtuous society, free of all vices, had long promised a rich bounty. But Mao was as much conqueror as philosopher, and like Alexander, Genghis or Napoleon, he embraced and admired catastrophic violence. New orders, he felt, could be forged only in battle, through great destruction and upheavals. But the bold would be rewarded.

  In conquest, it’s a natural and logical step to embrace the idea of ambitious population growth. A movement finds its ultimate expression of success in a new world full of healthy children, children who grow up to be strong and selfless servants of a harmonious new order. So Mao adamantly encouraged childbirth, and China’s population experienced immense growth in the early years of the revolution.

  During the Great Leap Forward, starting in the late 1950s, Mao concluded that peasant force alone would not safeguard China from its enemies. He decided that China should be in a position to satisfy on its own the entirety of its various appetites. He thus enacted a series of reforms aimed primarily at the countryside. Mao dreamt that the countryside would become the new centre of industry in China, a diffuse and inexhaustible source of essential products. Farmers were told to build iron smelters.

  The Great Leap Forward was born of the sense of urgency to match Western and even Soviet achievements in the nuclear age. But the Leap also had as its foundation Mao’s ideal that Communism could not help but bring about vast material improvements and innovations. It was only a question of virtue. And this merely had to be taught to the people.

  Mao, however, had grown far from the people. His ideas were increasingly abstract and philosophical. If implemented, they would bring about damaging absurdities. More often, they were never fully implemented. Whole societies chanted them aloud and pretended they were real, but they were not, nor could they be.

  Slogans multiplied, and villages across the country were integrated into a national campaign for rapid self-sufficiency and slapped with impossible production quotas. Not only did the rural population fail to produce anything close to the quantity and quality of goods that were necessary for China to assure its position as a modern industrial power but, distracted from their farms, the peasants who fed China began to experience massive food shortages. The Great Leap Forward caused a great famine.

  To this day, the party has made it impossible to properly fathom how many people died in the famines caused by the policies of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. But the Chinese population still grew under Chairman Mao. Even in error and calamity, he achieved his billionaire kingdom.

  But China’s ancient measure of success was always much more than a demographic milestone reached by the masses, or a matter of mere numbers. There was something more subtle and grandiose to which Mao and his party needed to answer.

  It is said that the emperors of China governed the land by virtue of a heavenly mandate. As such, their authority was sacrosanct. But the mandate also meant that, through the emperor, the people had to be the benefactors of heaven’s blessings. The emperor was beyond reproach but only so long as his rule was by and large beneficial. Of course, no single person could decide that the emperor’s rule was not a happy one; only China as a whole could conclude that it was not blessed by the heavens under the rule of such and such emperor. This could only mean that the dynasty had lost the heavenly mandate and the emperor had lost his legitimacy. So ended many dynasties in China.

  In the few decades immediately after the revolution, the Communist Party was largely embraced by China because it was perceived to hold the heavenly mandate by which great blessings would be meted out to a long-suffering people. It delivered a wholly Chinese government to China for the first time in centuries. It united China for the first time in a long time and offered a new hope to the poorest class of China: the landle
ss peasants, hundreds of millions strong. It also commanded violence so convincingly that no one dared oppose it.

  But by the time of Mao’s death in the mid-1970s, too many great experiments had gone desperately wrong. Popular belief in the Communist Party was mostly bankrupt. Although more numerous than ever, the people were tired, unhappy and afraid. They began to sense that the heavenly mandate might be withdrawing.

  Still, the dynasty had its quiet protectors. With Mao’s increasing withdrawal into senility, Mao’s right-hand man, the venerable and wise Zhou Enlai, allowed a reformist movement to survive in the face of fierce opposition within the party. Some even say that Zhou was himself a reformist at heart. But his own life force was waning. He himself would not play an active role in bringing about change but would use his power to protect future champions of change. One such champion was Deng Xiaoping, a diminutive and clever early member of the party.

  At the time of Mao’s death, an extremist clique known as the Gang of Four (which included the chairman’s monstrous widow, former actress Jiang Qing) was poised to take over. But in a quick and unexpected succession of events, the Gang of Four was summarily purged by discreet military leaders still part of the remaining old guard, and Deng Xiaoping was summoned back from the abyss and propelled to the fore. Without Mao above him, Deng would ensure that his pragmatic vision for China would succeed. He became the Communist Party’s dominant figure after Mao Zedong, a second emperor of the Communist dynasty.

  Deng was not a man of forceful slogans. His most famous mantras show a flexibility never exhibited by Mao. “Who cares if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice?” was Deng’s cry for the triumph of pragmatism in party policy above and beyond rigid ideology. Deng also famously said of Mao that he made mistakes but was right seven-tenths of the time. A strange endorsement considering the sizable divergences of vision between the two and the calamities Deng suffered during the Cultural Revolution. In truth, Deng knew that his own authority and the political stability he needed for reform required the dynastic legitimacy of Mao. So Deng carefully ensured that Mao’s party, the Communist Party of China, and Mao’s image if not his ideas would oversee the next phase of China’s transformation. To this day, Mao’s iconic mug graces the Chinese currency and lords over Tiananmen Square.

  Deng’s most telling saying—“To get rich is glorious”—heralded the advent of a new logic, the pursuit of prosperity. Prosperity has perhaps even eclipsed all other virtues of Communist power in China. For many, prosperity has become the only benchmark for legitimacy. As the memory of wars, diseases and famines grows faint, what else could better motivate the people?

  Communist Party rule will be tolerated only so long as it creates widespread wealth in China. So, according to Deng’s plan, over the last four decades, the Chinese central government has made itself relevant to the people not by making huge ideological demands on them or even requiring huge leaps in their production capacity but by methodically investing in the infrastructure and means of production while gradually allowing the principles of free trade to return to Chinese society.

  In the new configuration, Li’s village, for instance, is not an unknown speck left to its own devices, as it was a century ago, nor is it expected to produce new and improved kinds of humans, as Mao perhaps might have hoped. The different layers of Chinese government have brought electricity and telecommunications wires to Li’s village. They broadcast television and mobile phone signals to it. They truck in drinking water for the people in times of need. Eventually, the Chinese will build a proper road to the village, to make it easier to deliver water and simpler to extract the fruits of the land. Increasingly guided by an invisible hand, China reaches into its bosom, both taking and giving, becoming more united than ever before.

  Deng also relinquished Mao’s obsession with self-sufficiency. Deng reasoned that China does not need to answer every one of its many needs; it can focus on what it does best and trade for the rest. Such a trade economy became plausible when relations were normalized with the West in the early 1970s. With proper management, Deng calculated, China’s immense labour pool could form the basis of a manufacturing economy aimed at the export market.

  Four decades into Deng’s gambit, he has been proven right: those things that China is lacking, like food, raw materials and energy, are largely made up for by the manufactured products it sells on the world market.

  Although Deng started liberalizing the economy in the villages by allowing farmers to trade their surplus produce, the massive wealth in the new China stems more from urban industry than agricultural labour. China has perhaps not turned its back on its age-old agricultural sector, but in most places it now almost seems as though farming is an outlet for surplus labour not used in the factories—like in Li’s village, where only the middle-aged and elderly remain to tend to the crops, while the young and able toil in the manufacturing centres.

  Yet because much of the manufacturing labour is derived from the villages, wealth is not trapped in the cities but trickles down to the villages. Li and his hundred million brethren send a portion of their income back to their dependents in the villages.

  This distribution of wealth is further enforced by the dual residency system. The situation in Chongqing is unique in that, technically, the peasants of Li’s village are inhabitants of the municipality of Chongqing and are allowed to work and reside in the city. But in most of China, village dwellers are not allowed to reside in the cities. They cannot legally pay rent or make real estate purchases there and are thus denied a major outlet for their income. If they want to save or invest their earnings, migrant workers are forced to do so in their villages.

  That evening, Viv and I are to be Li’s guests. He has gone all out for dinner. His tiny table surely hasn’t seen a spread like this in a long time: roast duck with scallions, candied pork meat, vegetable broth, mushrooms with ginger, two types of sautéed greens and rice. Wisely, Li has invited the local party secretary and his wife to dine with us.

  A more surprising guest also shows up at the feast: the rough chap from the afternoon’s dramatic argument, who turns out to be the village butcher and holds a station of some prominence. The heated disagreement with the farmer seems to have had little impact on him. He now cuts a rather merry figure. Li explains that the butcher will be hosting me that night, while Viv will spend the night with Li’s mother in the house next to his. I look to the butcher and he is beaming, enthused by the chance to show hospitality to a stranger from halfway across the planet.

  The party secretary is eager to know more about Viv and me. Viv answers most of the questions. She explains that I’m a tourist on vacation and that I’ve hired her to be my guide and translator. The whole story sounds outlandish to me. But somehow Viv manages to explain it to him in a satisfactory way. Still, the party secretary wants to hear me speak.

  “What do you do in your home country?” he asks.

  As she translates Viv cautions me to make something up. But she catches me off guard and I draw a blank. I finally just blurt out that I’m a television producer. Not exactly a lie, and not exactly helpful either. I should have seized the opportunity to finally become an architect à la George Costanza. Viv makes sure to add that I produce a show on art and culture in my country, something as remote as possible from news and journalism.

  “Is this your first time in China?” the secretary asks.

  “Say yes,” Viv urges. I do.

  “Where else have you been in the world?” the man then inquires.

  “Oh, I have been to many places, in Europe, Asia and Africa,” I tell him, unwilling to continue lying. “I’ve travelled a lot.”

  “And what do you think of China?”

  “It’s simply immense,” I say, quite sincerely. “I could travel in China for the rest of my life and not see the half of it.”

  The party secretary seems to appreciate my somewhat empty answer, which combines both awe and humility. Having won his favour, I try my l
uck at a flattering line of inquiry. “Has this village produced many university students?”

  “Oh yes, nearly a dozen. Our own son is currently studying at a university.”

  “Congratulations,” I say. “I see a good future for this village.”

  The meal ends pleasantly. The party secretary and his wife take their leave, uttering good wishes to Viv and me. The butcher also heads home. We sit around with Li, drinking tea. Out of the blue, Li says, “I know I’m poor and will probably not achieve much in my life, but I look at the things I have, my wife and my daughter, and you know what? I’m happy. I do not want anything else. I already have all that I’ll ever need.”

  Viv and I look at each other in amazement. This Li Gang really is a unique individual. A free man, perhaps? We are almost envious of him.

  My sleepover at the butcher’s house turns out to be amusing. The butcher is really a jolly fellow. He’s also a better example of village prosperity than Li is. His home serves as a meeting spot for the village, or bar, or mah-jong parlour. The house is relatively big, two storeys high and built out of cement blocks. A large room on the ground floor opens to the street, similar to a garage or mechanic’s bay. It’s filled with tables and chairs.

  When I arrive, the last of the day’s mah-jong players are just exiting. A huge television is at the back of the room. The butcher proudly shows me that it’s connected to a satellite dish. He flips through the channels, beaming a huge toothless grin at me. Ten channels from India, four from Pakistan, eleven from Arabia, twenty from Europe, and so on. He hands me the remote, and I settle on francophone TV5 and learn of ever more deaths in Iraq.

  I notice how incredibly filthy the butcher’s parlour is. Impressively filthy, really. Dried earth and spittle are caked on the cement floor, which is littered with cigarette butts and chicken bones, speckled with bloodstains and tea leaves. As I soak it all up, two immense flying cockroaches dive-bomb into the room and hit the floor near my feet.