The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  In this instance the workers were made aware of their rights when their bosses set out to drill them on the correct answers to give to a visiting inspection team from the factory’s American customers. This was how they learnt of their entitlement to five-day work weeks, eight-hour days, Sundays off and limits on overtime—all entirely absent within their workplace.

  China’s Labour Law was enacted in 1994 but, like many other laws passed in the country since the beginning of reform, lofty ideals were not matched with the means (or often the will) to enforce them. Workers’ frustrations over the inability to get what was legally theirs made Shenzhen infamous throughout the country as the worst city in China for labour disputes. By the turn of the century even conservative estimates suggested that there were hundreds of large-scale protests or strikes breaking out annually in Shenzhen.

  Yet, despite the harshness of life in the cities, workers continued to leave the countryside in droves to try their luck. It is the dreams of these workers that have driven the urbanisation of China, turning a country where 70 per cent of people once lived on the land to one where more than half live in cities.

  The notion of success in the city persisted because for most of those who came, despite all the difficulties they faced, they did end up better off. Most earned more than they would ever have been able to make at home. This was money that could be remitted to their families or used to fund vocational study or investment in a small business. Then there was the intangible, but exhilarating, gain that they made—a sense of control over their own destiny.

  Cao Fei’s father recruited many of these rural itinerants to work with him on the massive sculptures which he was now being commissioned to create. Cao Fei spent hours hanging out with them, listening to the stories of their floating lives. The workers told her how they would fake their identity cards, lowering their age over and over again, as the young always found it easiest to find work. She was fascinated by their stories and curious about their dreams, which she put at the centre of her art when she made the documentary Whose Utopia?

  She spent six months in a Guangdong lighting factory charting both the minutiae of the work and the fantasy lives of the employees. In Whose Utopia? the workers pirouette in tutus among the machines, play electric guitar, sweep through store rooms in evening dress, and dance like Gene Kelly across the shop floor. Young workers look out dreamily over the rooftops of the city and don T-shirts with the slogan ‘My future is not a dream’. For Cao Fei the message of her film was clear: even when life is difficult or boring for people, their dreams can give them some power.

  But when Whose Utopia? was released, audiences saw it as a commentary on the cruelty of capitalism, the fantasy elements inserted to highlight the workers’ wretchedness. She was hoping that they would see something more complex. When she talked to the workers, she discovered that rather than feeling exploited, they felt lucky to have escaped poverty in the countryside for a job where they could help their families and themselves. Cao Fei was wry when she told me this, pointing out that it was important to not just see issues from a ‘correct line perspective’.

  Despite my natural cynicism as a journalist, I knew immediately what she meant: I had been there myself. In 1996 I had teamed up with ABC TV’s new China correspondent, Jane Hutcheon, to tell the story of China’s floating population. We had decided to look at it through the eyes of a young rag picker from Anhui who we had found living on the fringes of Beijing. He had sunk all his resources into a pedal cart on which he scoured the city collecting cardboard, plastic bottles, cans and every other kind of rubbish that could be turned into cash, selling it on for tiny sums to professional recyclers one rung up the economic ladder from him.

  Yet he was managing to house and feed his wife and child on the money he was making, as well as sending some funds home to his parents and saving a little, too. When we travelled back with him at Chinese New Year to his home in a hardscrabble village in the heartland of Anhui, we saw him greeted like a hero and glowing with happiness at his parents’ evident pride. We saw the benefits his remittances had brought—in the quality of the food his parents ate, and in the improvements to their house. Nearby we saw the local version of a mansion being built. It was owned by a man known as ‘Mr Shanghai’ for the city in which he had made his fortune. In this village everyone but the old or the very young had either left for the cities or were planning to do so. It was hard to deny the power of the urban dream.

  Further up the economic ladder from China’s floating population were young people with an education, looking for routes to success in the new economy. For many, the solution was xia hai.

  Meaning literally ‘jump into the ocean’, xia hai is Chinese slang for going into business. But it also implies taking a chance, jumping out of the box you’d been put in, swimming free. Deprived of the place in the nation many of the Tiananmen generation might have dreamed of, blocked from work in the bureaucracy or in academia, or simply finding these paths too frustrating, they embraced business instead.

  It was one of the ironies of the 1990s that while much of the youthful idealism of the 1980s had disappeared, the reforming economy created opportunities that sparked a boom in youth culture across urban China in the new decade. Rock music exploded, and fashion followed, as did bars, cafés and restaurants that opened late, bringing life to the cities that had once been shuttered and dark at 6 p.m. Gay culture became more visible, as did the guys and girls we called liumang. Liumang was Chinese for ‘hoodlum’, but these liumang were much more than that. They were punk and grunge, rock and pop, they were whatever the official culture did not want youth to be. Like outlaws in a Hollywood Western, they were avatars for their generation’s alienation; they were cool. It didn’t hurt that a whole range of things that people liked to do (like extramarital sex) were branded as hooliganism under Chinese law, and hooliganism was (till 1997) a crime.

  In Beijing filming our Deng Xiaoping ‘obituary’ in 1995, we were surrounded by the xia hai spirit. It was there in the characters we interviewed, and it was there among many of my friends, too. One couple I knew paid the bills with the husband’s salary from his assigned job teaching oil painting at an art college, while the wife ran a thriving business selling trinkets and beautifully forged ration tickets on the side. With the cash she earned they rented part of a courtyard house deep in the centre of the city where they could make art, preside over an open-door salon, and escape the college’s prying eyes.

  Then there was the painter I’d last seen hanging out at the Old Summer Palace artists’ village, living from hand to mouth. At that time, he had agonised to me about the creeping commercialisation of the art scene and the need to stay true to his ideals as a painter.

  When I next saw him in 1995 he had opened a chic restaurant in the middle of Beijing’s Sanlitun embassy quarter and was planning to expand into a chain. He was the first of my friends to tell me his ambition was to make enough money to one day be a person of influence. Only then would his generation really have a chance to ‘change China’.

  This was quite a common sentiment in those days among the young entrepreneurs who were doing well. ‘Get rich and change China’ was almost a slogan.

  And so, in the 1990s, the children of revolutionaries would become crony capitalists and one-time workers would become middle class, the south would boom and the north would rust, and one-time idealists would go into business.

  Many creative artists, though, still preferred to live on the edge in one way or another. For some, keeping their heads down just wasn’t in their nature. In the year after June 4, Cui Jian performed his song A Piece of Red Cloth in a series of high-profile concerts, each time putting on a red blindfold before he began to sing. As a result, he was banned from playing in Beijing for the whole of the ’90s and his music was blacklisted on TV and radio.

  Many others just wanted to fly under the radar and make art. At the end of 1994, after months of rising tension, the police broke up what was left of the artist
village at the Old Summer Palace. For several months before the crackdown, artists had been leaving the village in search of new places where they could live and work, some even heading abroad. Many moved out to a village called Songzhuang in the neighbouring province of Hebei. Meanwhile, inside Beijing, a new colony of artists had established themselves in a workers’ village on the city’s eastern fringe. They christened the place ‘East Village’ in homage to the eponymous bohemian district in New York.

  These artists were a special breed, and the East Village precinct (now long gone) nurtured some of China’s finest art talents. Those who set up there were interested in pushing themselves to extremes. Their performances ranged from the gender-bending and sexually provocative work of Ma Liuming, to the masochistic feats of endurance of Zhang Huan. These events, held for small groups of friends and critics and photographed by their fellow artist Rong Rong, eventually attracted the attention of police. Ma and Zhang were both arrested, with Ma spending three months in detention for ‘distributing pornography’.

  Zhang Huan later wrote that his work at the time was aimed at ‘experiencing the authentic existence of adaptability and endurance’. The most infamous of his performances was entitled 12 m2, named for the dimensions of the noisome village toilet in which he sat for an hour, naked and covered in honey and fish oil, giving himself over to the attentions of swarms of flies. Rong Rong’s photographs of the performance, showing Zhang shaven-headed in the half-light, have the stoic beauty of a Renaissance painting of a martyr.

  The day Zhang was arrested he was attempting an even more painful feat, hanging naked in chains from the rafters of his studio, blood dripping from a tube inserted in his arm onto a heated hotplate below. The smell of burning blood and the sizzling of his sweat as it dripped onto the hotplate made the piece almost unbearable to watch, let alone perform, and yet he persisted for an hour.

  In 1997, just before Zhang Huan left China for New York (and eventual international art stardom), he joined with a group of 46 itinerant workers to create a piece called To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond. The workers waded into a large fishpond, where Zhang finally joined them, carrying the young son of the owner of the pond on his shoulders. The achievement behind this oddly poetic work—that together they had managed to alter the level of the water—was negated by the fact that, as Zhang put it, theirs was in the end ‘an action of no avail’.

  When the police broke up the artists’ village at the Old Summer Palace, Guo Jian decided to leave China altogether. He had been there at the start of the village and he was there for the end. It was time to go. ‘I just wanted to be able to express myself in my art and I knew that wasn’t going to be possible in China,’ Guo Jian told me.

  In the months previously the police had visited him. They seemed to know everything about him, including the fact that he already had a visa for Australia. ‘They said to me, “If I were you, I’d go to Australia and never come back.”’ Then, a week before the village was broken up, a soldier in uniform turned up to see him. Guo Jian didn’t know him but the soldier spoke with the accent of his home town. He told him he had a message for him: to get out of the Old Summer Palace. ‘He told me, “This place is not going to be allowed to survive, go anywhere, but don’t stay here!”’ It seemed that the army was reaching out to him. They knew he had once been one of them and they wanted him to know that they were still keeping track of him.

  Before he left for Australia he travelled south to see his parents. One day he sat down with his mother to tell her he was leaving. She took the news hard. ‘She kept asking me, “Why? Why do you want to go away?”’ Suddenly there was a noise in the street that he knew well. The rumble of a convoy of trucks and the bark of a loudspeaker signalled a grim parade: doomed prisoners were being driven through the city on the way to the execution ground. He had heard that sound with sickening regularity during the Cultural Revolution when mass shootings would be held on every major holiday or festival. (‘Even on Children’s Day!’ he had once grimly recalled.)

  As the trucks rolled by, the loudspeakers blaring out the crimes of the condemned, he turned to his mother: ‘Do you hear that, Mum? If I don’t go, one day I could be on that truck.’

  In the early years of the 1990s many aspiring artists leapt at the opportunity to leave China, creating parallel tracks for the development of the contemporary art movement. Many Chinese artists rose to prominence in their new home towns—New York, Sydney, Paris and London—where they joined the Western art system of commercial galleries, museums, biennales and art fairs. Meanwhile, a different kind of art scene evolved in China. There was almost no infrastructure to support contemporary art, so artists retained their independence and learnt to manage their own careers. They represented themselves in their limited dealings with the market, and with the Western curators who eventually came calling.

  The artists banded together in the artist villages, staging informal exhibitions and ‘happenings’, pushing each other and themselves. They teamed up with rock musicians and filmmakers, dancers and actors, writers and bar owners to create an alternative world, far removed from what passed for ‘official culture’ and sanctioned forms of entertainment.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Aniwar said to me one day not long ago, ‘during the ’90s we were so down on everything, feeling it was such a comedown from how things were in the ’80s, and yet looking back you can see it was actually a really great time for art, for life. Every week a new bar would open, there was a lot of drinking, a lot of music.’

  In the same way that the ’80s in China echoed the ’60s in the West, the ’90s were a bit like the ’70s. It was a decade that people continually declared inferior to what had gone before, while ignoring how much deeper contemporary culture was becoming, how fiercely artists were mining the emotional terrain, and how determinedly people were working to allow contemporary culture to sustain itself and to grow.

  In those years Aniwar’s one-room apartment became an oasis in Beijing. He would leave his door unlocked and most nights ten or twenty friends would congregate for a party, dossing down at the end of the evening on the bed that sat at the centre of the room, or curling up on the Xinjiang carpets that softened the chill of the floor, while Aniwar painted deep into the night.

  In those years he was creating his own language of colour and light that distilled icons from his homeland of Xinjiang into richly coloured curves and strokes that kaleidoscoped across the canvas.

  He had come to the capital of China from a place so far away that its capital sits at the ‘pole of inaccessibility’ of the Eurasian land mass, the point that is farther from the sea than any other in Europe or Asia. In Xinjiang, ancient oasis towns confront the immensity of the Taklimakan Desert and the soaring peaks of the Karakoram.

  Aniwar had grown up saturated with colour and light. His earliest memories were of sunlight strobing through the leaves of the poplars that colonnaded the back roads of Xinjiang. He remembers being lifted up to face the intensity of a limitless blue sky, watching the play of colour flashing on his eyelids when he closed his eyes.

  Arriving in the monochrome Beijing of the 1980s had been a shock to his senses, and it had even leaked into his dreams, turning them black and white for the first time in his life.

  Aniwar’s paintings, at first figurative and as the decade progressed increasingly abstract, sought to capture the exhilarating meeting of the human and the cosmic that the vistas of Xinjiang can offer. As the decade came to a close his canvases became richer and more assured. With decorative borders that suggested the woven oriental rugs of Xinjiang, the paintings took on the quality of magic carpets to another world.

  In 2000 he showed them in the Courtyard Gallery in Beijing, then the leading contemporary space in the city. He chose an entry in his diary from 1989 to describe what he believed was the purpose of art: ‘It is not only to stimulate and to excite people; on a deeper level it is also to help them forget their agitation.’ Perhaps more than any other artist from the
1980s he retained something of the pure spirit of that decade’s bohemia, a dedication to art for art’s sake, beyond politics. In going deeper, his work didn’t get darker (unlike that of many of his peers), it got freer. As he once said, ‘If you allow yourself the quiet of mind to follow your instincts, art rewards you with a huge space and within it you can do as you wish.’

  Recently Bao Tong, who was Zhao Ziyang’s secretary and long-time adviser during the 1980s, gave his verdict on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping. Under a form of house arrest even today, after being imprisoned for seven years after the Tiananmen crackdown, Bao Tong has become one of contemporary China’s most mordant critics. His verdict? ‘The upshot of Deng’s revolution was that those with significant power got significantly rich, those with modest power got modestly rich, and those with no power remained in poverty.’

  This verdict is too sweeping, and too tough.

  True, the gap between the rich and the poor, between the rust-belt north and the booming south, and—most worryingly—between the city and the country, had become enormous by the end of the ’90s. And although the booming economy had given millions of people the chance to aim for a better life, workers remained vulnerable in a system that was stacked against them and where corruption was rife. While huge numbers of people became property owners for the first time, they would also find that their rights mattered little if their property stood in the way of development.