China in Ten Words Part 1

China in ten words.

Yu Hua; translated from the Chinese by Allan H. Barr.

introduction.

In 1978 I got my first job-as a small-town dentist in south China. This mostly involved pulling teeth, but as the youngest staff member I was given another task as well. Every summer, with a straw hat on my head and a medical case on my back, I would shuttle back and forth between the town's factories and kindergartens, administering vaccinations to workers and children.

China during the Mao era was a poor country, but it had a strong public health network that provided free immunizations to its citizens. That was where I came in. In those days there were no disposable needles and syringes; we had to reuse ours again and again. Sterilization too was primitive: The needles and syringes would be washed, wrapped separately in gauze, and placed in aluminum lunch boxes laid in a large wok on top of a briquette stove. Water was added to the wok, and the needles and syringes were then steamed for two hours, as you would steam buns.

On my first day of giving injections I went to a factory. The workers rolled up their sleeves and waited in line, baring their arms to me one after another-and offering up a tiny piece of red flesh, too. Because the needles had been used multiple times, almost every one of them had a barbed tip. You could stick a needle into someone's arm easily enough, but when you extracted it, you would pull out a tiny piece of flesh along with it. For the workers the pain was bearable, although they would grit their teeth or perhaps let out a groan or two. I paid them no mind, for the workers had had to put up with barbed needles year after year and should be used to it by now, I thought. But the next day, when I went to a kindergarten to give shots to children from the ages of three through six, it was a different story. Every last one of them burst out weeping and wailing. Because their skin was so tender, the needles would snag bigger shreds of flesh than they had from the workers, and the children's wounds bled more profusely. I still remember how the children were all sobbing uncontrollably; the ones who had yet to be inoculated were crying even louder than those who had already had their shots. The pain that the children saw others suffering, it seemed to me, affected them even more intensely than the pain they themselves experienced, because it made their fear all the more acute.

This scene left me shocked and shaken. When I got back to the hospital, I did not clean the instruments right away. Instead, I got hold of a grindstone and ground all the needles until they were completely straight and the points were sharp. But these old needles were so p.r.o.ne to metal fatigue that after two or three more uses they would acquire barbs again, so grinding the needles became a regular part of my routine, and the more I sharpened, the shorter they got. That summer it was always dark by the time I left the hospital, with fingers blistered by my labors at the grindstone.

Later, whenever I recalled this episode, I was guilt-stricken that I'd had to see the children's reaction to realize how much the factory workers must have suffered. If, before I had given shots to others, I had p.r.i.c.ked my own arm with a barbed needle and pulled out a blood-stained shred of my own flesh, then I would have known how painful it was long before I heard the children's wails.

This remorse left a profound mark, and it has stayed with me through all my years as an author. It is when the suffering of others becomes part of my own experience that I truly know what it is to live and what it is to write. Nothing in the world, perhaps, is so likely to forge a connection between people as pain, because the connection that comes from that source comes from deep in the heart. So when in this book I write of China's pain, I am registering my pain too, because China's pain is mine.

The arrow hits the target, leaving the string," Dante wrote, and by inverting cause and effect he impresses on us how quickly an action can happen. In China's breathtaking changes during the past thirty years we likewise find a pattern of development where the relationship between cause and effect is turned on its head. Practically every day we find ourselves surrounded by consequences, but seldom do we trace these outcomes back to their roots. The result is that conflicts and problems-which have sprouted everywhere like weeds during these past decades-are concealed amid the complacency generated by our rapid economic advances. My task here is to reverse normal procedure: to start from the effects that seem so glorious and search for their causes, whatever discomfort that may entail.

"We survive in adversity and perish in ease and comfort."* Such were the words of the Confucian philosopher Mencius, citing six worthies in antiquity who suffered untold hardship before achieving greatness. Man is bound to make mistakes, he believed, and it is in the unceasing correction of his errors that human progress lies. Viewed in this light, he suggested, adversity has a way of enhancing our endurance, while ease and comfort tend to hasten our demise-whether as individuals or as a nation. When I write in these pages of personal pain and of China's pain, it is with that same conviction that we survive in adversity. So in this quest to follow things back to their source, we cannot help but stumble upon one misfortune after another.

If I were to try to attend to each and every aspect of modern China, there would be no end to this endeavor, and the book would go on longer than The Thousand and One Nights. So I limit myself to just ten words. But this tiny lexicon gives me ten pairs of eyes with which to scan the contemporary Chinese scene from different vantage points.

My aim is to stay brief and concise, beginning this narrative journey from the daily life we know so well. Daily life may seem trivial and routine, but in fact it contains a mult.i.tude of incidents, at once rich, expansive, and touching. Politics, history, society, and culture, one's memories and emotions, desires and secrets-all reverberate there. Daily life is a veritable forest and, as the Chinese saying goes, "Where woods grow deep, you'll find every kind of bird."

For me, as for a bus driver who drives back and forth along the same route, my starting point is also my last stop. My busload of stories sets off from daily life, pulls over when it reaches junctions with politics, history, society, and culture-or with memories and emotions, desires and secrets-and sometimes it pauses at outlying stops that may not even have a name. Some stories disembark along the way, while others board; and eventually, after all this bustle to and fro, my bus returns to where it started.

My goal, then, is to compress the endless chatter of China today into ten simple words; to bring together observation, a.n.a.lysis, and personal anecdote in a narrative that roams freely across time and s.p.a.ce; and finally to clear a path through the social complexities and staggering contrasts of contemporary China.

*Mencius, trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 181.

people.

As I write these characters I have to look a second time to make sure I have them right. That's the thing about this word: it feels remote, but it's so familiar, too.

I can't think of another expression in the modern Chinese language that is such an anomaly-ubiquitous yet somehow invisible. In China today it's only officials who have "the people"* on their lips every time they open their mouths, for the people themselves seldom use the term-perhaps they hardly recall its existence. We have to give those voluble officials some credit, for we rely on them to demonstrate that the phrase still has some currency.

In the past this was such a weighty phrase. Our country was called the People's Republic of China. Chairman Mao told us to "serve the people." The most important paper was the People's Daily. "Since 1949 the people are the masters," we learned to say.

In my childhood years "the people" was just as marvelous an expression as "Chairman Mao," and when I first began to read, these were the first words I mastered; I could write them even before I could write my own name or the names of my parents. It was my view then that "the people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people."

That was during the Cultural Revolution, and I marched about proudly sharing this insight with everyone I met. They responded with dubious looks, apparently finding something problematic about my formulation, although n.o.body directly contradicted me. In those days people walked on eggsh.e.l.ls, fearful that if they said anything wrong, they might be branded a counterrevolutionary, endangering their whole family. My parents, hearing of my discovery, looked equally doubtful. They eyed me warily and told me in a roundabout way that they couldn't see anything wrong with what I'd said but I still had better not say it again.

But since this was my greatest childhood insight, I couldn't bear to hush it up and continued sharing it with the world at large. One day I found supporting evidence in a popular saying of the time, "Chairman Mao lives in our hearts." I took this to its logical conclusion: "Chairman Mao lives in everyone's heart, so what lives in Chairman Mao's heart? It has to be the entire people." Therefore: "The people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people."

Those doubtful looks among the residents of my little town gradually dissipated. Some people began nodding in approval, and others began to say the same thing-my little playmates first, and then grown-ups, too.

But I felt threatened when lots of people started saying, "The people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people." In a revolutionary era one cannot claim a patent for anything, and I found my status as inventor was being steadily eroded. "I was the first one to say that," I would declare. But no adults set any store by my claim of authorship, and in the end even my young companions refused to accept that I deserved credit. Faced with my strenuous arguments or pathetic pleas, they would shake their heads: "No, everybody says that."

I was upset, regretting bitterly that I had made my discovery public. I should have stored it forever in my own mind, safe from anybody else, keeping it for myself to savor my whole life through.

These days the West is astonished by the speed of China's makeover. With the flick of a wrist Chinese history has utterly changed its complexion, much the way an actor in Sichuan opera swaps one mask for another. In the short s.p.a.ce of thirty years, a China ruled by politics has transformed itself into a China where money is king.

Turning points in history tend to be marked by some emblematic event, and the Tiananmen Incident of 1989 was one such moment. Stirred by the death that April of the reform-minded Hu Yaobang, college students in Beijing poured out of their campuses to gather in Tiananmen Square, demanding democratic freedoms and denouncing official corruption. Because of the hard line the government took in refusing to engage in a dialogue, in mid-May the students began a hunger strike in the square and the locals marched in the streets to support them. Beijing residents were actually not so interested in "democratic freedoms"-it was the attacks on profiteering by officials that drew them into the movement in such huge numbers. At that time Deng Xiaoping's open-door policy had entered its eleventh year, and although the reforms had triggered price increases, the economy was growing steadily and the standard of living was rising. Peasants had benefited from the changes. Factories had yet to close, and workers were yet to become victims. Contradictions were not as acute then as they are now, when society simmers with rage. All we heard then were grumbles and complaints about the way the children of high officials had made themselves rich on our national resources, and those sentiments found a focus in the protests. Compared with today's large-scale, multifarious corruption, the diversion of funds by a minority back then didn't really amount to anything. Since 1990, corruption has grown with the same astounding speed as the economy as a whole.

The ma.s.s movement that had begun to sweep across the country quickly subsided amid the gunfire on the morning of June 4. In October of that year, when I visited Peking University, I found myself in a different world, where engagement with affairs of state was nowhere to be found. After nightfall, courting couples appeared by the lakeside and the clatter of mahjong tiles and the drone of English words being memorized were the only sounds that wafted from dorm windows. In the short s.p.a.ce of one summer everything had changed so much that it seemed as though nothing at all had happened that spring. Such a huge contrast demonstrated one point: that the political pa.s.sions that had erupted in Tiananmen-political pa.s.sions that had acc.u.mulated since the Cultural Revolution-had finally expended themselves completely in one fell swoop, to be replaced by a pa.s.sion for getting rich. When everyone united in the urge to make money, the economic surge of the 1990s was the natural outcome.

After that, new vocabulary started sprouting up everywhere-netizens, stock traders, fund holders, celebrity fans, laid-off workers, migrant laborers, and so on-slicing into smaller pieces the already faded concept that was "the people." During the Cultural Revolution, the definition of "the people" could not have been simpler, namely "workers, peasants, soldiers, scholars, merchants"-"merchants" meaning not businessmen but, rather, those employed in commercial ventures, like shop clerks. Tiananmen, you could say, marked the watershed between two different conceptions of "the people"; or, to put it another way, it conducted an a.s.set reshuffle, stripping away the original content and replacing it with something new.

In the forty-odd years from the start of the Cultural Revolution to the present, the expression "the people" has been denuded of meaning by Chinese realities. To use a current buzzword, "the people" has become nothing more than a sh.e.l.l company, utilized by different eras to position different products in the marketplace.

Beijing in the spring of 1989 was anarchist heaven. The police suddenly disappeared from the streets, and students and locals took on police duties in their place. It was a Beijing we are unlikely to see again. A common purpose and shared aspirations put a police-free city in perfect order. As you walked down the street you felt a warm, friendly atmosphere all around you. You could take the subway or a bus for free, and everyone was smiling at one another, barriers down. We no longer witnessed arguments in the street. Hard-nosed street vendors were now handing out free refreshments to the protestors. Retirees would withdraw cash from their meager bank savings and make donations to the hunger strikers in the square. Even pickpockets issued a declaration in the name of the Thieves' a.s.sociation: as a show of support for the students, they were calling a moratorium on all forms of theft. Beijing then was a city where, you could say, "all men are brothers."

If you live in a Chinese city, there's one feeling you never shake off: what a lot of people there are! But it was only with the ma.s.s protests in Tiananmen Square that it really came home to you: China is the world's most populous nation. Every day the Square was a sea of people. Students who had poured into Beijing from other parts of the country would stand in the square or on a street corner, giving speeches day after day until their throats grew hoa.r.s.e and they lost their voices. Their audience-whether wizened old men or mothers with babies in their arms-greeted the speakers with respect, nodding repeatedly and applauding warmly, however immature the students' faces or naive their views.

There were comical moments, too. One afternoon I took my place in a dimly lit conference room in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for a meeting of the Capital Intellectual Coalition, a newly formed a.s.sociation of liberal intellectuals in Beijing. As we awaited the arrival of a prominent political scientist named Yan Jiaqi I noticed that some people were taking a newspaper editor to task. His paper had just published a statement by the coalition, and these people were unhappy because their names were low on the list of signatories, beneath the names of less well-known individuals. Why had these n.o.bodies been given a higher ranking? The hapless editor said it wasn't his fault but apologized anyway, nevertheless failing to mollify his critics. This farcical episode came to an end only with the arrival of Yan Jiaqi.

I remember the moment clearly; it was the first and last time I saw him. This distinguished scholar-a close a.s.sociate of Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Communist Party, who favored a conciliatory line toward the demonstrators-walked in with a somber expression on his face. People quieted down as he delivered a piece of bad news. "Ziyang is in the hospital," he said in a low voice.

In the political context of 1989, for a government leader to be hospitalized could mean only that he had lost power or that he had gone into hiding. Everyone immediately understood the implications. Some began to slip away quietly, and soon they had scattered far and wide, like falling leaves in an autumn gale.

After Tiananmen Zhao Ziyang disappeared from view, and nothing more was heard of him until his death in 2005. Only then did the New China News Agency issue a brief statement: "Comrade Zhao had long suffered from multiple diseases affecting his respiratory and cardiovascular systems, and had been hospitalized for medical treatment on multiple occasions. In recent days his condition deteriorated, and efforts to revive him proved unsuccessful. He died in Beijing on January 17, aged 85."

In China, even if it's just a retired minister who dies, the official announcement will usually be a lot more detailed than this. The statement said nothing about the career of a man who had once been leader of the party and the nation, nor did it mention the date of his memorial service. But word leaked out to a group of pet.i.tioners-or "judicial refugees," as they have come to be known-who lived in Beijing South Station. I have no idea through what channels these most disadvantaged of all "people" in China got hold of this information, but they organized themselves and went off to pay their final respects to Zhao Ziyang. They were not authorized to attend, so the police naturally blocked them from entering, but they unfurled a commemorative inscription all the same.

These pet.i.tioners had sought legal redress for injustice and oppression in their home districts, only to find themselves stymied at every turn by bias and corruption in the judicial system. China's extralegal appeals procedure-a remnant of its hallowed tradition of humane government-offers a slender hope that some honest official might dispense justice where law has failed. Pet.i.tioners exhaust all their resources as they roam from place to place in search of a fair-minded administrator, and ultimately they make their way to Beijing in the hope that someone in the central government will respond to their pleas. In 2004 the official total of such cases reached 10 million. Their desperate plight almost defies imagination: fighting hunger, they sleep in the streets, only to be harried by the police, driven like beggars. .h.i.ther and yon, and written off by some well-heeled intellectuals as mentally deranged. It was precisely such "people" who went to bid farewell to Zhao Ziyang in January 2005. They felt that he was "the biggest fall guy in China," a bigger victim of injustice than even they themselves. However much they had suffered, they at least had a chance to pet.i.tion, but Zhao Ziyang, they said, "had nowhere to take his complaint."

I made a trip back to my home in Zhejiang at the end of May 1989, and after I'd attended to family affairs, I boarded the train back to Beijing on the afternoon of June 3. I lay on my bunk listening to the rumble of the wheels on the tracks; when lights came on in the compartment, I knew that night was falling. At that moment the student protests seemed as long and protracted as a marathon, and I could not imagine when they would end. But when I woke in the early morning, the train was approaching Beijing and the news was coming over the radio that the army was now in Tiananmen Square.

After the gunfire on June 4, the students-from Beijing and from out of town-began to abandon the city. I vividly recall the surging throngs filling the station that morning: just as people were fleeing the capital in droves, I was making an ill-timed reentry. With my bag over my shoulder I stumbled, dazed, into the station plaza. As I collided with people swarming in from the other direction, I realized I would soon be doing exactly the same thing.

When I left again on June 7, service between Beijing and Shanghai had been suspended because a train in Shanghai had been set on fire, so my plan was to take a roundabout route: by train to Wuhan and by boat from there to Zhejiang. Some cla.s.smates and I hired a flatbed-cart driver to take us down Chang'an Avenue to the railroad station. Beijing, seething with activity a few days earlier, now looked desolate and abandoned. There was hardly a pedestrian to be seen, only smoke rising from some charred vehicles and a tank stationed at the Jianguomen overpa.s.s, its barrel pointing at us menacingly as we crossed. After pushing our way through the scrum outside the ticket office, we finally managed to buy tickets, though it was impossible to reserve seats. As we entered the station we were scrutinized minutely by the soldiers on duty; I was waved in only when they were sure I didn't look like any of the fugitives whose photos appeared on their wanted list.

Never before or since have I traveled on such a crowded train. The compartment was filled with college students fleeing the capital, and everyone was so crammed together there was not an inch of s.p.a.ce between one person and the next. An hour out of Beijing, I needed to use the toilet. It took all my strength to squeeze any distance through the throng, and before I was halfway there I realized that my cause was hopeless. I could hear someone yelling and banging on the door, but the toilet itself was full of people-"We can't open it!" they shouted back. I just had to hold on for the full three hours until we got to Shijiazhuang. There I disembarked and found a toilet, then a pay phone, to appeal for help from the editor of the local literary magazine. "Everything's in such chaos now," he said after hearing me out. "Just give up on the idea of going anywhere else. Stay here and write us a story."

So I spent the next month holed up in Shijiazhuang, but I had a hard time writing. Every day the television broadcast shots of students on the wanted list being taken into custody, and these pictures were repeated again and again in rolling coverage-something I've never seen since, except when Chinese athletes have won gold medals in the Olympics. Far from home, in my cheerless hotel room, I saw the despairing looks on the faces of the captured students and heard the crowing of the news announcers, and a chill went down my spine.

Suddenly one day the picture on my TV screen changed completely. Gone were the shots of detained suspects, and gone was the jubilant commentary. Although manhunts and arrests carried on as before, broadcasts now reverted to the old familiar formula: scenes of prosperity throughout the motherland. A day earlier the announcer had been pa.s.sionately denouncing the crimes of the captured students, and now he was cheerfully lauding our nation's thriving progress. From that day on, just as Zhao Ziyang disappeared from view, so too Tiananmen vanished from the Chinese media. I never saw the slightest mention of it afterward, as though it had never happened. And memories seemed to fade even among those who took part in the protests of spring 1989; the pressures of life, perhaps, allowed little room to revisit the past. Twenty years later, it is a disturbing fact that among the younger generation in China today few know anything about the Tiananmen Incident, and those who do say vaguely, "A lot of people in the streets then, that's what I heard."

Twenty years may have gone by in a flash, but historical memory, I am certain, does not slip away so quickly. No matter how they currently view the events of 1989, I think everyone who partic.i.p.ated in them will find those experiences etched indelibly profoundly in their minds when one day they have occasion to look back at that chapter of their lives.

In my case, the thing that has left the deepest mark on me is a realization of what "the people" means.

Sometimes one needs an opportunity to truly encounter a certain word. We encounter all kinds of words in the course of our lives, and some we understand at first glance and others we may rub shoulders with but never fully understand. "The people" belongs in that second category. It's one of the first phrases I learned to read and write, and it has clung to me in my travels through life, constantly appearing before my eyes and sounding in my ears. But it did not truly penetrate my inner being until my thirtieth year, when an experience late one night finally allowed me to understand the term in all its potency. It was only when I had a real-life encounter with it-disengaged from all linguistic, sociological, or anthropological theories and definitions-that I could tell myself: "the people" is not an empty phrase, because I have seen it in the flesh, its heart thumping.

It was not the enormous rallies in Tiananmen Square that imparted this understanding, but an episode in another part of town one night in late May 1989. Martial law had been declared by that time; students and residents alike gathered spontaneously to defend every major intersection in Beijing as well as all overpa.s.ses and subway exits, to block armed troops from entering Tiananmen Square.

I was then studying at the Lu Xun Literary Inst.i.tute in Shilipu, on the east side of the city. Practically every lunchtime I would ride my rickety old bike to Tiananmen Square, lingering there through the evening and into the early hours, when I would cycle back to the inst.i.tute.

Beijing in May can be hot at midday but cold at night. I remember I was wearing only a short-sleeved shirt when I set off after lunch, and by late that evening I was chilled to the bone. As I cycled back from the square an icy wind blew in my face, making every part of me shiver-and every part of my bicycle, too. The streetlights were dark, and only the moon pointed the way ahead. The farther I rode, the colder I felt. But as I approached Hujialou, a current of warm air suddenly swept over me, and it only got warmer as I rode on. I heard a song drifting my way, and a bit later I saw lights gleaming in the distance. Then an astonishing scene appeared before me. Now bathed in warmth, I could see the intersection flooded with light; ten thousand people must have been standing guard on the bridge and the approach roads beneath. They were fervid with pa.s.sion, l.u.s.tily singing the national anthem under the night sky: "With our flesh and blood we will build a new great wall! The Chinese people have reached the critical hour, compelled to give their final call! Arise, arise, arise! United we stand...."

Although unarmed, they stood steadfast, confident that with their bodies alone they could block soldiers and ward off tanks. Packed together, they gave off a blast of heat, as though every one of them was a blazing torch.

This was a key moment in my life. I had always a.s.sumed that light carries farther than human voices and voices carry farther than body heat. But that night I realized it is not so, for when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what "the people" means.

*In Pinyin romanization, renmin.

leader.

The leader* I have in mind here is one who enjoys a special prerogative. When reviewing the National Day parade from Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, he alone can wave to the marchers as they pa.s.s; other members of the ruling elite can only stand at his side and clap their hands. There is just one leader, of course, who fits this description. His name is Mao Zedong. During the Cultural Revolution years Mao would wear a military uniform when he stood on Tiananmen and-maybe because he was happy or maybe just because he was hot-would often take off his cap and wave it at the a.s.sembled mult.i.tude in the square below.

At the outset of the Cultural Revolution "big-character posters" started to appear. Political screeds rendered in clumsily handwritten characters-and now and again some elegantly written ones, too-these were the first acts of the disenfranchised ma.s.ses in challenging the power of officialdom. Written on broadsheets as big as decent-sized windows and posted on the walls that ran alongside city streets, shorter versions took the form of two sheets of paper mounted one on top of the other, while longer ones involved five or six sheets set out in a horizontal row. In the years to follow, these big-character posters would become the largest exhibition of calligraphy China has ever seen: all across the country, in cities and towns, big streets and small, walls were decorated with them. People would gather in the streets and read the posters with undisguised relish, for although they all employed much the same revolutionary rhetoric, they began to criticize officials and their high and mighty ways.

In Mao a politician's grasp of the historical moment was coupled with a poet's whimsy, and it was often through some improvised flourish that he would unveil his program. When the Communist Party Central Committee and the top bra.s.s in Beijing tried to clamp down on popular protests, Mao did not use his supreme authority as party chairman to set his colleagues straight. Instead, he employed the very same approach as the ma.s.ses by writing a big-character poster of his own, ent.i.tled "Bombard the Headquarters," protesting that "some leading comrades" had adopted "the reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie ... encircling and suppressing revolutionaries" and "stifling opinions different from their own." You can imagine people's reaction: what can it mean when the great leader Chairman Mao has gone so far as to write a big-character poster? It can mean only one thing-that Chairman Mao is in the same boat as ordinary people like themselves! No wonder, then, that the great proletarian Cultural Revolution soon engulfed China with the speed of an unquenchable wildfire.

Historically, emperors have always cut the kind of figure and spoken the kind of language expected of an emperor, no matter how exalted or how humble their origins. Mao was the only exception. After he became leader, he often acted quite out of keeping with accepted norms, taking his comrades in the Communist Party leadership completely by surprise. Mao understood very well how to whip the ma.s.ses into a frenzy, and by appearing on the Gate of Heavenly Peace in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution and greeting fanatical "revolutionary students" and "revolutionary ma.s.ses" there, he impelled the high tide to ever greater heights.

The Yangtze swim was a fine example of our leader's distinctive style. On July 16, 1966, Mao appeared unexpectedly at a ma.s.s swimming event in Wuhan. Cheered on by the ecstatic roars of the spectators lining the banks, with the strains of the revolution's anthem, "The East Is Red," blaring from the loudspeakers, Mao, then seventy-two years old, braved the wind and waves in the company of several thousand other swimmers, who, carried away with delight, shouted "Long Live Chairman Mao" at the top of their voices as the Yangtze swirled around them. The water they gulped down as they shouted must have been quite filthy, but when they returned to sh.o.r.e, they were unanimous in p.r.o.nouncing it "unbelievably sweet." At the end of his swim Mao clambered onto a boat, hitched up his swimming trunks, and waved majestically to the dense throngs lining the banks. After a brief wave he ducked into the cabin to change. In the newsreel doc.u.mentary released after the event, the scene of him waving was edited in such a way that Mao appeared to be waving to the people for a good couple of minutes. If you count the propaganda posters that freeze-framed this famous moment and reproduced it endlessly during the Cultural Revolution, then Mao's wave lasted a full ten years.

The next day the People's Daily had this to say: "It is the greatest joy of the Chinese people-and of the revolutionary peoples of the entire world-that our revered leader, Chairman Mao, is in such excellent health!" Mao himself wrote about swimming the Yangtze in one of his lyric poems: "Let the wind blow and waves beat / Better far than idly strolling in a courtyard." With such offhand gestures this leader of ours propelled the Cultural Revolution forward into the madness that would follow.

The film of Mao's swim was shown repeatedly inside China and out, and posters commemorating the event lined the walls of Chinese cities and villages. They showed Mao in his swimsuit, smiling and waving his hand, surrounded by a throng of beaming workers, peasants, soldiers, students, and shop clerks, all striking eager, attentive poses. What other political figure would make a point of waving to his people in a swimsuit? Only Mao could carry this off.

It was a style that, in fact, preceded his becoming China's leader, for we see evidence of it during the War of Resistance Against j.a.pan, when he was living a hardscrabble life in the caves of Yan'an. During an interview with an American reporter Mao groped around in the crotch of his pants, catching lice, as he confidently predicted China's victory over the j.a.panese.

Once the Cultural Revolution was launched, Mao kept on waving, but the party officials around him stopped clapping. Instead, their right hands would be doing a little wave of their own, because they would be clutching copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao. The Little Red Book, as it was called, had given them a chance to wave as well, though they never dared raise their hands as high as Mao or swing them in as wide an arc.

In the Cultural Revolution, even when Mao was not present, the party officials would wave the Little Red Book as a way of greeting the revolutionary ma.s.ses. Just as today no famous actress would ever appear in public without makeup, the leadership in those days would never show their faces without the Little Red Book in hand. It was their political makeup kit.

Today the Chinese Communist Party takes the form of a collective leadership, and when the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee attend a news conference, they wave simultaneously to reporters, their hands at the same height, waving in the same arc. This always makes me think of Mao on Tiananmen, and of how impressive it was that he waved and everyone else clapped. Reflecting on the past in the light of the present, I have a sense that in today's China we no longer have a leader-all we have is a leadership.

Many years after the 1976 death of a genuine leader, ersatz leaders are sprouting up everywhere in China. Since 1990, as beauty contests have swept across the country, compet.i.tions to select different kinds of leaders have followed hot on their heels-contests to decide fashion leaders and elegance leaders, leaders in charm and leaders in beauty.

Although there are many varieties of beauty contests, they ultimately are all somewhat confined in scope. For example, there's the Silver-haired Beauty Contest for women over sixty, the Tipsy Beauty Contest for pretty girls who have knocked back a few shots, and the Artificial Beauty Contest for veterans of plastic surgery.

Contests for leaders, on the other hand, are not subject to any particular limitations, and so leaders from every walk of life are emerging thick and fast. Youth leaders, child leaders, future leaders, innovation leaders, real estate leaders, IT leaders, media leaders, commercial leaders, and enterprise leaders-their numbers make one's head spin. With so many leaders on the loose, there are naturally lots of summit meetings to go along with them-summits that make practically as many claims for themselves as does the G8. Leadership contests even extend to geography and technology, so that now we have leaders in natural scenery and leaders among elevators. Such is China in the post-Mao era: even elevators have leaders. When the sun comes up tomorrow, who knows in what corner of the land we'll find a new pack of leaders sprouting up. If we were to hold a contest to choose the word that has lost the most value the fastest during the past thirty years, the winner would surely have to be "leader."

In the Cultural Revolution, however, "leader" was a powerful, sacred word, a synonym for "Chairman Mao"-Mao's exclusive property, one might say. n.o.body then would have had the temerity to claim that they were a leader, not even in their dreams. "Sacred and inviolable is the motherland" was a line much favored in those days, and "sacred and inviolable" could equally well have applied to the word "leader"-and to the surname Mao as well.

In the little town where my wife grew up there was a workers' union whose branch chairman was named Mao. "Chairman Mao" was what the locals called him, naturally enough, and it was a name he answered to quite readily. But as a result he became a target in the Cultural Revolution: he had set himself up as a second Chairman Mao, and there was h.e.l.l to pay. Stung by the charge, he tried strenuously to defend himself, tears streaming down his face. "That's what other people call me," he cried. "It's not what I call myself!" But the revolutionary ma.s.ses would have none of it. "Other people can call you that if they want," they said, "but you shouldn't have answered them. By acknowledging the t.i.tle, you were counterrevolutionary."

When I was little, I thought it very unfortunate that I had the surname Yu and wished there had been a Mao on either my father's or my mother's side of the family, not realizing that for ordinary folk like us Mao was a name that projected authority but could be dangerous, too.

Another figure of speech was much in vogue in those days: the Communist Party was "mother of the people." If there's a mother, I thought to myself, then there has to be a father, so who is the people's father? The answer was obvious: Chairman Mao. Logically, the Communist Party was Mao's first lady, but where did that leave Madame Mao, Jiang Qing? Being a junior Red Guard, I knew only of monogamy and the equality of the s.e.xes, not realizing that men in the old society used to have concubines and never imagining that in two or three decades it would be common for men to have mistresses and second wives. Much as I racked my brains, I never found a solution that could reconcile the legitimate claims of both Mao's partners.

Apart from Mao I was aware of four other leaders, all foreign. In my first-grade cla.s.sroom Mao's portrait hung on the blackboard, and on the wall behind were arrayed the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin-the first foreigners I ever saw. For us, Lenin's and Stalin's hairstyles fell within the normal range of men's haircuts, but we didn't know what to make of Marx and Engels, whose hair was long even by women's standards, for women in our town-like Chinese women everywhere then-cropped their hair short below the ear. Hair length was the established yardstick for distinguishing the s.e.xes, and so Marx and Engels left us baffled, especially Marx-his curly hair practically covered his ears, much like the women of our town, whose ears revealed themselves only occasionally beneath their thick heads of hair. Marx's bushy beard, of course, tended to deter us from further speculation about his gender. One of my cla.s.smates, however, brushed aside this evidence and went so far as to publicly declare, "Marx was a woman."

For that he almost ended up being branded as a little counterrevolutionary. He wouldn't have been the first, of course. One girl in second grade had folded a portrait of Mao in such a way that a cross had appeared on his face; somebody informed on her, and we all called her "the little counterrevolutionary." She broke down in tears at the school a.s.sembly where her crime was reported, and she blubbered so much when making her confession that we could hardly follow what she was saying.

Afterward our first-grade teacher called our cla.s.s together and asked us to expose other little counterrevolutionaries who might have burrowed their way into our ranks. Fingers of suspicion were pointed at two young children. The first had a name unknown to us, and it took some time for the teacher to establish that he was the three-year-old son of the informer's neighbor, guilty late one afternoon of a reactionary comment. "The sun went down," he had been heard to say. In those days Mao was commonly compared to a bright red sun, so the sun was not something to be talked of lightly, and at nightfall the most one could say was "It's getting dark." For him to say "The sun went down" was tantamount to saying "Mao Zedong went down."

The second suspect was the cla.s.smate who had identified Marx as a woman. White as a sheet, he completely fell to pieces under the teacher's questioning. Tears streamed from his eyes and snivel dripped from his nose when he was asked whether he had indeed uttered such a reactionary remark. "I think maybe"-he gave a cough-"I-I did say that."

Our teacher offered him a chance to rephrase his statement: "You think maybe you said it, or you think maybe you didn't say it? "

The panic-stricken boy responded with a welter of sobbing and confusion, one minute saying he thought maybe he'd said it, the next minute saying he thought maybe he hadn't. Right to the end of the denunciation meeting he was still going back and forth between one answer and the other. By sowing doubt in the minds of his listeners, "I think maybe" turned out to be his salvation, for in the end nothing came of it.

For a brief period when I was small, I was under the impression that Chairman Mao was our leader's full name. "Chairman Mao" was on everyone's lips, and one said it unthinkingly, with even more warmth than when one said "Grandpa" or "Daddy." With time, because people were always chanting "Long Live Mao Zedong Thought!" and singing "The east is red, the sun is rising, / China has brought forth a Mao Zedong," I came to understand that Chairman Mao was actually a combination of surname and official rank and that Mao Zedong was his true name. To refer to him in that way in normal conversation, of course, would have been the height of disrespect.

During the Dragon Boat Festival of 2009 the following text message began to circulate: New China News Agency, May 28: The Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully cloned Mao Zedong; the clone's physical indicators match those of Mao in his prime. This announcement has elicited a powerful reaction internationally. U.S. President Obama has declared that within three days the United States will repeal the Taiwan Relations Act and withdraw all military forces stationed in Asia. The prime minister of j.a.pan has ordered the demolition of the Yasukuni Shrine, acknowledged that the Senkaku Islands are Chinese territory, and approved reparations for the 1937 invasion of China to the tune of 13 trillion dollars. The European Union has lifted its ban on arms sales to China. Russia's President Medvedev has conceded China's claim to a million square miles in eastern Siberia. Mongolia has signaled to the United Nations that it has always been part of China. Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou has promised to abide by all arrangements proposed by the mainland regarding reunification and has applied to be a scholar at the National Archives. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has sent instructions to his representative at the Six Party Talks to handle things according to Chairman Mao's directives. There has been a rapid turnaround in domestic affairs: in just twenty-four hours officials from the county level and up have returned their ill-gotten gains, to the tune of 980 trillion yuan; privately run businesses have converted to public ownership; 25 million s.e.x hostesses have become honest women overnight; the stock market has soared; house prices have declined by 60 percent; the Chinese people once more are singing the anthem of the age: "The east is red, the sun is rising, / China has brought forth another Mao Zedong."

By changing "China has brought forth a Mao Zedong" to "China has brought forth another Mao Zedong," popular humor has resurrected this long-dead leader, imagining how his comeback would awe the world, strike fear into the hearts of China's corrupt bureaucrats, and solve at one fell swoop the historical problems, diplomatic issues, and domestic crises that plague China today. What, I wonder, are the wider implications of this overheated fantasy? A sign of discontent with contemporary realities? Evidence of neonationalist fervor? Or is it just a joke, a wry reflection on the time and place in which we live? All of these, perhaps, and probably other things as well.

In the thirty-odd years since Mao's death China has fashioned an astonishing economic miracle, but the price it has paid is even more astounding. When I left South Africa at the end of a visit during the 2010 World Cup, the duty-free shop at Johannesburg's airport was selling vuvuzelas-Chinese-made plastic horns-for the equivalent of 100 yuan each, but on my return home I learned that the export price was only 2.6 yuan apiece. One company in Zhejiang manufactured 20 million vuvuzelas but ended up making a profit of only about 100,000 yuan. This example gives a sense of China's lopsided development: year after year chemical plants will dump industrial waste into our rivers, and although a single plant might succeed in generating a thirty-million-yuan boost to China's GDP, to clean up the rivers it has ruined will cost ten times that amount. An authority I respect has put it this way: China's model of growth is to spend 100 yuan to gain 10 yuan in increased GDP. Environmental degradation, moral collapse, the polarization of rich and poor, pervasive corruption-all these things are constantly exacerbating the contradictions in Chinese society. More and more we hear of ma.s.s protests in which hundreds or even thousands of people will burst into a government compound, smashing up cars and setting fire to buildings.

Many Chinese have begun to pine for the era of Mao Zedong, but I think the majority of them don't really want to go back in time and probably just feel nostalgic. Although life in the Mao era was impoverished and restrictive, there was no widespread, cruel compet.i.tion to survive, just empty cla.s.s struggle, for actually there were no cla.s.ses to speak of in those days and so struggle mostly took the form of sloganeering and not much else. People then were on an equal level, all alike in their frugal lifestyles; as long as you didn't stick your neck out, you could get through life quite uneventfully.

China today is a completely different story. So intense is the compet.i.tion and so unbearable the pressure that, for many Chinese, survival is like war itself. In this social environment the strong prey on the weak, people enrich themselves through brute force and deception, and the meek and humble suffer while the bold and unscrupulous flourish. Changes in moral outlook and the reallocation of wealth have created a two-tiered society, and this in turn generates social tensions. So in China today there have emerged real cla.s.ses and real cla.s.s conflict.

After Mao, Deng Xiaoping drew on his own personal prestige to implement reforms and pursue an open-door policy, but in his final years he came to reflect on the paradox that even more problems had emerged after development than existed before it. Perhaps this is precisely why Mao keeps being brought back to life. Not long ago a public opinion poll asked people to antic.i.p.ate their reaction if Mao were to wake up today. Ten percent thought it would be a bad thing, 5 percent thought it would have no impact on China or the world, and 85 percent thought it would be a good thing. I am unclear about the sample's demographics, but since the respondents were all Internet users, I suspect they were mostly young people. Chinese youth today know very little about Mao Zedong, so their embracing the idea of Mao's resurrection tells us something about the mood of the age. Gripped by the zeitgeist, people of diverse backgrounds and disparate opinions find a common channel for their discontent and-half in earnest, half in jest-act out a ritual of restoring the dead to life.

In an online discussion of this scenario, someone cracked the following joke: Mao rises from his gla.s.s coffin and walks out onto the steps of his mausoleum as morning sunshine bathes Tiananmen Square. A bunch of tourists dash to his side. "Gu Yue," they cry. "Give us your autograph, will you?"

Gu Yue, you see, is an actor famous for playing Mao.

When I was in primary school, I firmly believed China to be the greatest country in the world. I had two reasons for thinking that way. The first was that we had a great leader in Chairman Mao, whereas the four foreign leaders on my cla.s.sroom wall-Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin-had all died, so other countries did not have any great leaders. The second reason was that China had the biggest population, and Chairman Mao had said the more the people, the greater their strength.