The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHOSE UTOPIA?

  On February 19 1997 Deng Xiaoping died. He was 92, and had not been seen in public for more than two years. The last glimpse was an official photograph from October 1994. He was seated in an armchair, tucked up in a rug and wearing a cap against the autumn chill, watching the fireworks for the 45th anniversary of the People’s Republic exploding in the sky over Beijing.

  His passing had long been anticipated. Early in 1995, when I was working for Foreign Correspondent, Sally Neighbour and I had jumped the gun by two years, flying to China to produce what we intended as an obituary piece on the great man, who was rumoured to be at death’s door.

  We talked to a whole cast of characters on that trip in 1995, and learned how varied the experience of Deng’s reforms had been for people, depending on where they lived, what they stood to lose or gain, or what vision of the future they nurtured.

  There was the newly made millionaire, a high-school drop-out who had made his fortune in real estate while still in his twenties and was eager to share with us his taste for high-priced Scotch and luxury cars. He drove us around Tiananmen Square and up the Avenue of Eternal Peace under the eyes of Mao’s portrait without a hint of embarrassment. He told us he had made a fortune transforming deserted factory buildings into smart office accommodation, and was now developing apartments for the new middle class.

  Then there was the young pollster, at just 29 the head of his own company. Formerly a bureaucrat with the Ministry of Commerce, he had met an American executive from Gallup and thought there might be scope for a polling firm in China. He was right: one of his first customers was the Communist Party’s propaganda department.

  His company was in the middle of a major survey of the ‘floating population’ in Beijing, trying to understand more about the hundreds of thousands of former rural workers who had come from all around China to find employment in the capital. He described how they had congregated on the outskirts of the city, forming themselves into separate ‘villages’ depending on where they came from. There was the Henan province village, which specialised in rag picking, and the Zhejiang province village that was full of entrepreneurs running small businesses. And then there were the workers from Anhui, who laboured on construction sites and as domestic help. All of them had come to Beijing without permission, living on the margins with dreams of making a new life.

  We interviewed dissident intellectuals who placed hope in the development of a civil society in China as an alternative path to democracy. They pointed to the nascent environmental movement, and to the non-government organisations which were beginning to appear, specialising in workers’ rights or education for the poor. They took heart also from the rise of a more freewheeling and commercially minded media, with a new focus on personal pleasures like fashion and sport. The media kept clear of sensitive political ground, but there was a big market for crime news, and our informants explained how this allowed all sorts of titillating topics to be explored under the banner of ‘law and order’.

  Others we spoke to were less sanguine, such as the sociologist with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who had been studying the reforms since the 1980s. He warned of the fissures opening up in society as the new economy eroded the secure guarantees of socialism and made workers more vulnerable. He believed workers and others should be able to form their own organisations, but knew the party wouldn’t allow it. And yet it was heartening that he could at least float the idea, as he had in an article with the provocative title, ‘How much reform can Chinese society bear?’

  But we remembered the sociologist’s pessimism when we met with a young woman whose husband, a lawyer and activist for workers’ rights, was serving three years’ hard labour for the crime of printing T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Labour solidarity is sacred’. She had been barred from seeing her husband for almost a year and had herself been detained for three months without charge. Even her attempts to send him mooncakes at the Mid-Autumn Festival had been denied. She seemed broken by this lack of basic decency and was angry that a slogan once embraced by the Communist Party was now seen as criminally subversive.

  It was clear that China was a richer and more powerful country for Deng’s reforms, and in the private realm it was freer as well. But it was also true that a lack of political reform had allowed corruption to thrive and left ordinary people vulnerable. The government’s harsh tactics with even mild dissent were disturbing, too. And there had been no attempt at a reckoning with the tragedy of June 4 1989—something that would taint Deng’s legacy in years to come.

  The contrast between the anguished woman whose husband was lost to the prison system and the brash young real estate millionaire was so stark that it was hard to believe they shared the same generation and the same city.

  The experience of economic reform for ordinary citizens was a profound shock—devastating for some and transformational for others.

  Take the example of the signature reform of the 1990s, the corporatisation of hundreds of China’s lumbering state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The shockwaves spread into all corners of Chinese society, bringing some regions to their knees and galvanising others, destroying the hopes and plans of millions and making a handful into millionaires.

  Deng Xiaoping probably never said ‘to get rich is glorious’, despite this classic 1990s slogan being widely attributed to him. But he certainly did say that in the pursuit of development it was necessary to ‘let some people get rich first’. By the end of the 1990s it was clear who those people would be.

  Those with connections made a killing from the SOE reforms. They got in on the ground floor, working the angles in the sale of enterprise assets, or picking up shares in new commercial subsidiaries in advance of their listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Billions of dollars of state assets were transferred into such subsidiaries, effectively moving them from state to private ownership. Those with the best connections of all—members of China’s elite families whose patriarchs had served as Mao’s comrades in arms, a group popularly known as the ‘princelings’—secured executive positions in the most promising of the newly corporatised enterprises, ones that commanded powerful stakes in key sectors like energy, communications or banking.

  The SOEs had once been the backbone of the economy and the guarantors of the ‘iron rice bowl’ that protected Chinese workers from cradle to grave. Their new mission would be starker—to maintain state control of strategic sectors of the economy while cutting loose loss-making enterprises. Over six years from 1995 to 2001 the number of SOEs would be slashed by more than half and some 36 million jobs would disappear.

  Shenyang was ground zero for the economic reforms which decimated the once proud industrial north-east. The capital of Liaoning province, Shenyang witnessed the long, sad death of the old system which had offered lifelong protection to workers.

  In the late 1990s Shenyang and the whole province of Liaoning was wracked by unrest as pensioners and unpaid workers took their grievances to the streets. At that time it was estimated that more than a quarter of retirees’ pensions were in arrears in Shenyang, while 23 per cent of the city’s workers were owed wages. Roads were blocked, and government offices besieged. There were reports of riots and looting.

  But even as protests multiplied those involved were careful to avoid any impression of being involved in an organised movement. They were diligent in presenting official petitions to the government for redress, focusing narrowly on their particular grievances and disavowing any wider demands. They described their protests as ‘spontaneous’, and avoided making common cause with people from other workplaces. The memory of what had happened to those who had tried to form independent workers’ unions in 1989 was still fresh.

  Yet anger ran hot over the corruption that was being exposed as the economy was transformed. As enterprises went bankrupt, workers sometimes caught a glimpse of how their assets had been stripped and diverted into private hands. In the provincial town of Liaoyang
, some 85 kilometres from Shenyang, the workers’ anger finally bubbled up into mass protests early in the new century.

  The trouble began with workers at the Liaoyang Ferro-alloy Factory (or Liaotie for short). The workers at Liaotie had been petitioning the local government for help since 1998. Their wages and pensions were months in arrears and it was an open secret that management were illicitly transferring the assets of the enterprise for private gain. In May 2000, after two years of petitioning without response, 1000 Liaotie workers blockaded the Liaoyang–Shenyang highway in a desperate attempt to get the authorities to act and ensure their outstanding wages and pensions would be paid. Police broke up the protest, and even when the workers took their grievances directly to the city hall they still got no response.

  The final straw came at the end of 2001 when Liaotie was declared bankrupt. All around them in the city, Liaotie’s workers saw other examples of bankrupted enterprises and workers like them being left without hope of recovering their back pay, or retirees their pensions. In March 2002 they took their action to the streets once more, with 30,000 workers rallying in front of the local government headquarters, the biggest demonstrations in China since 1989. The workers sang ‘The Internationale’ and protested the local government’s lack of support for the workers and their complicity in the corruption. In an open letter they called for the payment of owed wages and pensions and the removal of corrupt officials.

  A week later the protests had spread far beyond Liaotie and an estimated 100,000 workers rallied in the city.

  By the time of that demonstration the authorities had already begun to round up the leaders of the movement. Two were charged with subversion; in January of the following year they were sentenced to four years and seven years in prison. Even when sentenced they remained unbowed, one declaring that he had no regrets and considered his seven-year sentence as ‘a seven-year contribution towards democracy’. There was some satisfaction when soon afterwards the manager of Liaotie was put on trial for corruption, and drew a thirteen-year sentence.

  During these years of upheaval Jia Aili had come to study in Shenyang. The Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts was poignantly situated just next door to the once monumental industrial district of Tiexi. When Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began, Tiexi was the country’s leading industrial centre, and home to one million workers. Now Jia Aili watched as it hollowed out and became an industrial wasteland. Eventually even the emptied factory buildings disappeared. Razed to create commercial real estate, the factories were reduced to scrap, and a way of life passed away before his eyes.

  Of course he had been witness to this demise in his home town of Dandong since he was a boy. ‘The concepts of reform and opening up are two separate things for us people in the north-east,’ he told me one day. ‘We experienced the reform but not the opening up. The 1990s was a very sad period, a very harsh period for us.’

  Eight years after he arrived in Shenyang, Jia Aili would leave for Beijing and it would be there that he staged his first exhibition. It would be titled ‘The Wasteland’.

  For all the wrenching social impact of the SOE reforms, few at the time realised that corporatisation had a far-reaching upside as well. As SOEs shed their labour force they were directed to give up the stock of housing they had maintained for their workers. In the late 1990s, huge swathes of urban housing in China were privatised and the apartments sold to sitting tenants at prices well below market rates. In this way, tens of millions of Chinese were given the chance to acquire a property that appreciated in value over the next few years. Many leveraged their asset for more real estate, becoming landlords or even speculators, and changing the outlook for their children.

  The result was a massive broadening of China’s propertied middle class, their expectations and interests very different to the workers they had once been. It was as if, in the words of the economist and former Australian ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, ‘Margaret Thatcher had come to China’.

  In the year 2000 Cao Fei wrote her first email. It was her first encounter with the internet—a medium that as an artist she would soon make her own.

  To get her message into cyberspace, she had to ask around among her friends till she found one whose parents had an email account. It was on their computer that she wrote her first ‘artist’s statement’.

  She had been asked by a curator to explain the ideas behind her first film, titled Imbalance. She had made it the year before on a borrowed DVD recorder, casting her classmates at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts into a study of ‘restless adolescence’. Entered in a competition in Hong Kong, it had caught the attention of curator Hou Hanru, who chose it for a photography festival in Madrid.

  Hou had been attracted by Cao Fei’s filmmaking flair, the skew-whiff camera angles and tracking shots. But what struck me when I saw Imbalance years later was how free her classmates seemed to be, despite their adolescent angst, how mockingly they faced the world. The whole thing read like an advertisement for the pleasures of ‘spiritual pollution’. All the things that had agitated the Old Guard back in 1983, all the toxins they had sought to expel from China—‘pornography’, drugs, gambling—were there, and not even as the main point of the film, but just as part of the background of these college kids’ lives.

  They were enjoying the luxury of adolescence—an indulgence that was still new to China—in a city that was booming and open to the world. Guangzhou was the capital of Guangdong province, which by the year 2000 was producing 42 per cent of China’s exports and attracting the majority of the country’s foreign investment. Workers flocked to the factories of the Pearl River delta, and by the turn of the century Guangdong province was home to a third of the 144 million workers who had by then left their villages in search of a new life.

  The south was being transformed socially and physically, and this was the subject of Cao Fei’s next project.

  Through the 1990s she watched as her home town of Guangzhou grew, rolling out into the countryside, turning fields into factories, farms into condos. As Guangzhou grew it began to swallow entire villages whole. The farmers would lose their fields but keep their houses. Robbed of their old livelihood, they built tenements on top of their homes and set up as landlords, offering cheap accommodation to the floating population of workers who had left other farms around China in order to find work in the city.

  Villages that had once been home to three or four thousand people now housed ten times that number in these strange pockets within the city. Slipping down an alley off a main street you could find 130 such urban villages in Guangzhou, where the tenements crowded in so tightly that sunlight reached the ground only in shafts, and the old village life continued side by side with a whole new service economy for immigrants. Long-distance phone offices sat side by side with nail bars, dumpling shops and workshops that restored discarded white goods for sale. The landless farmers planted vegetable crops and raised chickens on their roofs. On feast days, traditional dragon dancers squeezed their way through the narrow alleyways. One of these villages—a place called Sanyuanli—became the subject of Cao Fei’s first major documentary film (produced in association with her then boyfriend, the artist and writer Ou Ning) in 2003.

  Like Jia Aili, Cao Fei saw the face of her home town transformed as she grew up. But while Jia Aili became obsessed by wastelands, Cao Fei was gripped by cities. In the new century she would return to urban landscapes again and again, creating whole fantasy cities on video, in animation and on the internet, while taking her camera out to explore real cities in her documentaries. In all of these she was working out how people live in these urban spaces, and while living there how they could still find a way to dream.

  By the turn of the century, with more than 10 per cent of China’s population on the move, many itinerants found appalling conditions in their new employment: exploitation was rife in the factories and much of the alternative urban work was dirty or dangerous. And yet those who came still believed they had made the right decision by leaving
home.

  In the factories of Guangdong, despite booming profits, nonpayment and underpayment of wages was rife, as were inhuman hours of work. At the turn of the century, research by the Communist Party Youth League found the majority of factory workers in Guangdong worked twelve to fourteen hours per day with rarely a day off. Conditions were particularly severe in the garment industry, where pressure to fill orders pushed conditions to new extremes. A new word, guolaosi (‘overwork death’), entered the language to describe cases where workers dropped dead of exhaustion. The Chinese press reported twelve or more cases per year of guolaosi in the early years of this century, while deaths due to industrial accidents were reported as occurring at a rate of one every four days in Shenzhen during 1998. Incidents of serious injury were also common, with Amnesty International counting more than 12,000 such accidents in that same year in Shenzhen.

  The special economic zone of Shenzhen was in the vanguard of China’s transformation into a manufacturing superpower, its GDP growing by more than 30 per cent a year on average throughout the ’80s and ’90s. In the ’90s Shenzhen would also become a pioneer in labour activism, as workers there tried to enforce the rights that were laid down for them in China’s national labour legislation. These laws, which prescribed conditions such as maximum hours and minimum pay rates, were routinely ignored by employers, but in the ’90s there was an increasing number of cases where workers would, often after Kafkaesque manoeuvrings through the system, achieve some limited redress. Some industrial actions began in almost comical circumstances, as happened in the case of an export textile factory recounted by the sociologist Ching Kwan Lee in her brilliant study of labour activism in China, Against the Law.