China in Ten Words Part 5

There are bizarre cases as well. In one locality, forty-odd state employees found their jobs threatened because their relatives would not agree to demolition and resettlement. A district administrator informed his subordinates that if they failed to persuade their kinfolk, thus delaying relocation, they would all be fired. In the villages where the recalcitrant relatives lived, the public address system reverted to Cultural Revolution routine, continually broadcasting demolition-and-resettlement ultimatums from eight in the morning till six in the evening. "The government is fully committed to this project," the loudspeakers blared. "Nothing will be permitted to stand in its way."

These episodes, old and new, remind me of something Mao Zedong once said. Mao offered a memorable definition of what revolution means, and during the Cultural Revolution we could recite it backward. It went like this: A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence.

In the early summer of 1972 several boys slipped quietly out of their cla.s.ses at Bright Sky Primary School and headed off in the sunshine toward Haiyan Secondary School. To get there, they had to cross a river, by way of a newly constructed concrete bridge. Workmen had laid straw sacks across the road and were spraying them with rubber hoses to keep the fresh concrete damp and prevent cracks. The wet straw squelched under my feet until I reached the other side-it was my first time playing truant. My cla.s.smates and I could hardly contain our curiosity on this walk to the school we would be entering that autumn, for there was one thing we were very eager to find out: what is revolution?

At this point, having experienced six years of Cultural Revolution, we had seen and heard of many revolutionary incidents, but we had never actually taken part. Although we had often parroted that phrase of Mao's "To rebel is justified," this idea had always been confined to the level of speech and had never been put into action. Boys who were a year or two older treated us with condescension. "You don't know s.h.i.t," they would say. "You lot need to wait till you're in middle school to know what revolution is."

This was a big blow to my self-esteem, because before this I had always a.s.sumed that my life was firmly grounded in revolution. For a street urchin like me the experience of growing up consisted of streets full of red flags and big-character posters: I had observed countless demonstrations and acts of violence, and trailing along behind grown-ups, I had gone to watch innumerable struggle meetings.

At that time the people I most admired were boys ten years older than me, for they had been able to partic.i.p.ate in the nationwide "networking" by Red Guards that had begun in October 1966. Schools canceled cla.s.ses so that everyone could take part in revolutionary activities, and Red Guards embarked on ambitious journeys designed to "develop connections" and "exchange experiences." China then was dotted with Red Guard Reception Stations, which arranged room and board, disbursed travel expenses, catered to the young activists' material needs, and lined up transportation to ferry them back and forth. The Red Guards from our town had only small change to their name-a yuan or two at most-but with an officially stamped networking letter of introduction they were able to roam the whole country from east to west and north to south-no need to fork out money for train tickets or hotels or even pay for their meals. No wonder they looked so enraptured later, when they recalled their networking adventures.

One of those roaming Red Guards was the older brother of a cla.s.smate of mine. By this time the brother had been relocated to a rural village, where he endured a life of back-breaking toil. Every couple of months he would walk five or six hours to get back to our town, and a few days later walk another five or six hours back to a village where the only nighttime lighting came from kerosene lamps. His home visits were holiday occasions for us younger children, and listening to his stories on those summer evenings was a cherished pleasure.

As the heat receded at the end of the day, he would sit back in a rattan chair, his right foot resting on his left knee and a palm-leaf fan in his hand. Soon a dozen or more admirers would park themselves on the ground in front of him, and he would travel back in time to that morning when he and his comrades had raised their red banners and marched majestically out of our little town, their Red Guard armbands gleaming. They planned to march five hundred miles to Shaoshan, in Hunan, where they would pay homage at Mao Zedong's ancestral home, then march another five hundred miles to Mao's earliest revolutionary base area, the Jinggang Mountains of Jiangxi. But they wore themselves out just on the first day's march, so instead they flagged a truck down and rode in the back as far as Shanghai, fifty miles away. After touring Shanghai for a good ten days or so, they took a train to Beijing, where they did more sightseeing, and then divided into two groups, one boarding the train to Qingdao, the other traveling south to Wuhan. Over time their numbers dwindled, and in the end my cla.s.smate's brother const.i.tuted a team of one. He traveled by himself to Guangzhou, where he ran into Red Guards from Shenyang, in the northeast, and in their company crossed the strait to Hainan Island. Six months later, he and his Red Guard a.s.sociates, like soldiers separated in battle, straggled back to our town one by one. Exchanging notes about their respective networking activities, they realized that not one of them had made it to Shaoshan or the Jinggang Mountains. They had gone only to major cities and famous tourist destinations, and in the name of the revolution had accomplished the longest and most enjoyable sightseeing excursion of their entire lives. The story always ended with a stirring refrain: "Ah, our beautiful rivers and mountains-I saw them all, you know!"

By that time the Red Guard veterans from our town had been banished to the countryside and were living in wretched conditions. After the chaos and turmoil of the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong was confronted by a harsh reality: for three years after 1966, high schools and universities had admitted no new students, creating a backlog of more than 16 million middle school and high school graduates awaiting further education or employment. Although society had become relatively more stable, China's economy was on the verge of bankruptcy and could offer no new openings for urban employment. Mao's Red Guards had shown their mettle in large-scale fighting and property confiscations and were all too accustomed to beating people, smashing things up, and stealing. Unless they had something to keep them busy, 16 million Red Guards and urban youth were in danger of becoming a destabilizing force in society.

Mao Zedong saw that something needed to be done. "Let educated youth go to the countryside," he said, with a wave of his hand. "There they can receive further education from the poor and lower-middle peasants."

Countless families were affected, and many tragedies ensued. Children said good-bye to their tearful parents and left home with a simple bedroll on their backs, heading off for border regions and rural villages. Transplanted into China's poorest areas, they began a life of deprivation, of sad partings and all too short reunions. Of the high school graduates in our town who "went up to the mountains and down to the villages," some were sent to Heilongjiang, a thousand miles away, and others were relocated to hinterland areas in their home province. These former Red Guards were now pessimistic and despondent about their future prospects. Every time they came home on a few days' furlough, they waxed nostalgic about their networking during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution and loved to regale us with vivid accounts of their adventures. But somehow it was their reports of what happened at the train stations that I remember best.

As they networked, Red Guards crammed into all the trains running on Chinese tracks. Some managed to stretch out underneath the seats, and some squeezed themselves onto the luggage racks overhead, but most had to settle for standing hour after hour as their train wended its way slowly from one stop to the next. The toilets were even more congested than they would be on my train out of Beijing twenty years later, so it was utterly impossible to use the facilities. As soon as the train pulled into a station, the Red Guards would pour out of doors and windows like toothpaste squirting endlessly from a tube; boys would boldly unbuckle their belts and urinate and defecate right there on the platform, while girls would huddle in circles, taking turns to squat down and do their business within this human shield, hidden from the prying gaze of boys with wicked notions. Then the Red Guards, boys and girls alike, would squeeze back into the carriages and the train would pull away, leaving the platform dotted with foul-smelling piles and puddles.

My cla.s.smate's older brother was for a time the symbol of revolution in my eyes, because he loved to tell stories about his experiences as a Red Guard traveling the country. Later, however, after a bamboo flute appeared in his hand, he no longer talked about his splendid adventures and instead became silent and subdued. Each time he returned from the countryside, he arrived wearing mud-stained old sneakers, carrying an old canvas duffel bag in his right hand and the flute in his left. It would be much the same picture when he headed back a few days later, except that by then his mother would have washed his shoes. During his time at home he would sit by the window playing his flute-fitful, fragmentary s.n.a.t.c.hes of revolutionary anthems that, as performed by him, lost their impa.s.sioned energy and took on a decadent la.s.situde. Sometimes he would simply sit at the window, a blank look on his face, and if we went up and said h.e.l.lo, he made no effort to acknowledge us.

Once so communicative, he had become a different person, taciturn and glum. Perhaps his flute had replaced speech, giving expression to the complex of emotions that he could never put into words. During those two years, any time I heard the trill of a bamboo flute as I was walking down our lane, I knew that he had come home. The only flute music ever heard in our alley, it served to signal his existence. Now and again he would play the tune of a peddler hawking pear-syrup candy, which would induce us younger kids to come running in his direction, eager for a treat. Seeing our chagrin at having been duped, he would chortle with amus.e.m.e.nt, then revert to his customary silence.

This erstwhile totem of revolution died during my final year in primary school. He had come back home again and this time stayed for a couple of weeks, refusing to return to the countryside. As I pa.s.sed his house I would often hear his father cursing him as a slacker and a good-for-nothing. In a feeble voice he would dispute this, saying he simply felt so exhausted he just didn't have the energy to work in the fields. "You're as lazy as a little bourgeois!"-his father's voice went up a notch as he poured scorn on this lame excuse-"Idlers are always complaining they've got no energy."

His mother felt it wouldn't do to keep on arguing like this, nor was it practical for their son to stay on indefinitely, for it would just lead others to conclude that the problem was ideological. She did everything she could to talk him around, and finally he gave in. On the day of his departure she slipped a couple of hard-boiled eggs in his jacket pocket-they were luxury items in those days. I glimpsed him as he left. By then he was as thin as a rake and his complexion had a yellowish tinge. He shuffled off with his head bowed, the flute in his left hand, that battered old duffel bag in his right, his old sneakers on his feet. He was sobbing and kept rubbing his eyes with his left sleeve.

That was the last time I saw him on his own two feet. A few days later, out in the fields, he collapsed on the ground and ended up being carried into the county hospital on a door panel. The doctors diagnosed his condition as late-stage hepat.i.tis and rushed him off to Shanghai, but he died in the ambulance on the way there. According to my father, when they examined him in the hospital, they found that his liver had shrunk to a minuscule size and was as hard as a stone. With his pa.s.sing, the flute that had graced my childhood forever fell silent.

What is revolution? The answers I have heard take many forms. Revolution fills life with unknowables, and one's fate can take an entirely different course overnight; some people soar high in the blink of an eye, and others just as quickly stumble into the deepest pit. In revolution the social ties that bind one person to another are formed and broken unpredictably, and today's brother-in-arms may become tomorrow's cla.s.s enemy.

Two scenes linger before my eyes, one that sums up for me the beauty of the human character and another that epitomizes its ugliness.

The first of those images is that of a cla.s.smate's father. He became a target of attack when I was in first grade; being just a low-level official in the Communist Party apparatus did not protect him from being labeled a capitalist-roader. I liked him because he recognized me as his son's cla.s.smate and always smiled at me in the street-the only grown-up to do so, so far as I can remember. After he became a target, I never saw that heartwarming smile again, and if we ran into each other, he would quickly look away. During his months on the blacklist he must have been subjected to all kinds of mistreatment; every time I saw him, his face was battered and bruised. My cla.s.smate, once a cheerful, carefree boy, now had terror in his eyes, and during recess he would stand by himself in a corner as the rest of us played. One morning he arrived at school crying and sobbing, and as he stood waiting for the bell to ring, his whole body shook and he buried his face in his hands. His father, we soon learned, had drowned himself in a well. The culmination of many weeks of suffering, his suicide was surely not an impetuous act on his part, but he had taken great care to conceal his intentions from his loved ones. Torn between staying and leaving, in the end he elected death; in the early hours of the morning he rose silently, bade a soundless farewell to his sleeping wife and son, then opened the door and took that leap into another world. I had seen him in the street just a few hours before. Blood was trickling down his forehead, and he was walking with a limp. In the failing light of that late afternoon, his right hand rested on his son's scrawny shoulders, and as he talked to the boy, he wore a smile of seeming nonchalance. Many years later, as I wrote Brothers at my home in Beijing, I was always haunted by that spectacle of a father walking with his son on the last evening of his life. It was out of that indelible image, perhaps, that Song Fanping emerged to live and die in the pages of my book.

The ugliness I observed in second grade. As we children ran around during recess, our teachers would stand in the playground in cl.u.s.ters of two or three, exchanging a few words while they kept a watchful eye on us. A couple of the second-grade women teachers would regularly stand next to each other and chatter away jovially. Often I would hear them cackling over some amusing story and I would throw them an envious glance, for it seemed to me they had a special rapport, like sisters who share all their inner thoughts. One morning, however, I arrived at school early, before anybody else had arrived in the playground. I went into the cla.s.sroom to find one of the teachers already at her desk, correcting homework. Looking up, she beckoned me conspiratorially and told me with unmistakable excitement and relish that her colleague was the daughter of a landlord-something the school had just learned, after sending someone to her hometown to conduct inquiries-and now she was in custody and facing investigation. When I realized how this teacher was savoring the other's downfall, I was struck with horror, for all along I had been so sure they were best friends. Later I would always shudder when I saw teachers in the playground engaged in seemingly intimate conversation. Even the gruesome street battles didn't frighten me as much as that false veneer of camaraderie.

What was revolution? In my early years I had a living example before me, in the shape of my brother. Hua Xu was born, it seemed, for revolutionary agitation; "To rebel is justified" could have been his blood type. When still in second grade, he performed a revolutionary feat that shocked the whole school. His grade teacher had criticized him, in harsh language that he found offensive, for disrupting cla.s.s. He rose to his feet, picked up his chair, and carried it to the side of the rostrum where the teacher was standing. As she watched in bewilderment, he jumped up on the chair and from this commanding height smashed his fist into the side of her head, just above her ear. Though just nine years old, he managed to deliver a knockout punch; the next thing the teacher knew, she was lying in a hospital bed.

Once he entered middle school, Hua Xu's revolutionary nature found even richer soil to till. The testimony of his language-and-literature teacher left a deep impression on me: when pushed beyond her limits, she took the step of visiting us at home and delivering to my parents a long list of grievances, interspersed with bouts of tears. To catalog all her charges took her quite some time, and one particular episode she recounted has always stayed in my mind.

During cla.s.s one day that winter, Hua Xu had taken off his sneakers and laid them on the windowsill to dry out in the sun. His nylon socks gave off a rank stench, all the more intrusive because he sat in the front row and put his feet on the top of his desk. As the teacher introduced the lesson, she had altogether too close an encounter with the stink emanating from my brother's direction. She told him to put his shoes on. No, he couldn't do that, he said; his footwear required a further period of exposure to the sun. So saying, he wiggled his toes ostentatiously, the better to distribute his foot odor. Goaded beyond endurance, the teacher stormed over, picked up the shoes, and chucked them out the window. But Hua Xu knew how to counter that: he jumped onto his desk, and from there onto the rostrum, where he grabbed the teacher's notes, then ran over to the window and tossed them out, too. Amid the cheers of his cla.s.smates he then jumped out the window and climbed back in again, sneakers in hand. Returning his shoes to their preferred location, he plopped himself down in his chair and put his feet back on his desk. Finally, like a conductor leading an orchestra, he waved his hands in the air to direct his cla.s.smates' applause and watched in triumph as the teacher shuffled dejectedly out of the cla.s.sroom. She could not bring herself to hop out and back in the window as my brother had done, so was forced to make a long detour around the building to retrieve her notes. As she bent down to pick them up off the ground, she noticed her pupils' faces glued to the windows and heard a gloating chorus of mockery.

My father was incensed. No sooner did he see the teacher out the door than he sprang into action, grabbing a stool by its leg and hurling it at Hua Xu, who dodged to one side and deflected the blow. My mother tried desperately to put herself between them. "I can't believe these outrageous things you've done!" my father cried.

Hua Xu was unabashed. "Revolution-that's what I've done."

At last my father managed to shove my mother aside. He charged, fists raised. Hua Xu turned tail and fled, but once he had reached a place of relative safety, he called back defiantly: "Revolution-that's what I've done!"

It made me hanker for revolution. Cultural Revolution or not, we primary school pupils were afraid of our teachers. If we talked or distracted others in cla.s.s or if we got into a fight, they would often force us to write self-criticisms. I must have written more self-criticisms in primary school than I did compositions. And our teachers would then paste them up on the cla.s.sroom walls, making us lose a lot of face. The exploits of Hua Xu and the other older boys gave us a sense that we wouldn't have to write any more self-criticisms once we got into middle school, for there it was not the pupils who were afraid of the teachers but the other way around. Once we got into middle school, we thought, misbehavior had a chance of gaining legitimacy as revolutionary action.

So it was that in the early summer of 1972 we crossed the new concrete bridge and entered the grounds of Haiyan Secondary School. Some students were playing basketball, and others lay sprawled on the gra.s.s, chatting away. As we pa.s.sed the cla.s.sroom buildings, we saw students sitting on almost all the windowsills. One of them beckoned us-a boy from our alley who was a year older than us. "Just got out of cla.s.s, did you?" we asked.

He shook his head. "No, we're in the middle of cla.s.s." He leaned out, pulled each of us up through the window, and introduced us to his neighbors.

We'd never seen anything like this. The cla.s.sroom was buzzing with noise, with some pupils sitting on desks, others walking back and forth, and a couple locked in a furious argument, seemingly about to come to blows. A teacher stood on the rostrum, writing some physics problems on the blackboard. As he wrote, he explained some point or other, but not one of his pupils seemed to be listening.

This scene left us dumbfounded. We had to be missing something. We pointed at the teacher. "Who's he talking to?" we asked our friend.

"He's talking to himself."

We snickered. "You're not afraid of him?"

"Afraid of him?" He chuckled. "This is middle school, you know-it's not your primary school."

As he spoke, he rummaged around in the desk until he found a piece of chalk. He raised his arm and let fly. The teacher saw it coming and ducked out of the way, then carried on explaining the laws of physics, as though it was perfectly normal for pupils to target him for missile practice.

What is revolution? Now at last we knew.

*geming.

Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), p. 28.

In Yu Hua's most recent novel, Brothers, Song Fanping is father and stepfather to the main characters, Song Gang and Baldy Li.

disparity.

It's only a short step from cowardice to bravery-that's something I learned from a teenager many years ago. This was back in the mid-1970s, when amid many dreary strictures we reached the final stages of the Cultural Revolution. He was one of my high school cla.s.smates, and today he still lives in the town where we grew up; unable to hold down a job, he depends on his father's meager pension to make ends meet. The boy I remember had fine, delicate features marred by protruding teeth; with his puny, underfed frame, he would tag along in the rearguard as our gang roamed the streets.

We were eager for any kind of trouble in those days, picking fights with others our age, sometimes even plucking up courage to take on boys a good few inches taller than we were. When the action was at its thickest, this cla.s.smate would make sure he kept out of harm's way, looking on from a safe distance-not running away but not taking part in hostilities either. But one day he was transformed into a fearless hero, and thereafter he was always the first to throw himself into a fight and the last to beat a retreat.

Our gang had been bested that day by a pack of older youths, and we ended up fleeing from them in terror, clutching our heads. He raced home but soon came running back, kitchen cleaver in hand. On the way he paused for a moment and slashed his cheek with the blade. As blood poured from the wound, he daubed it freely over his face like warpaint and then, screaming at the top of his lungs, charged toward our adversaries.

They who had been chasing us so gleefully now found themselves confronted by a daredevil brandishing a kitchen cleaver, with blood streaming down his face. "The weak fear the strong," the Chinese saying goes, "the strong fear the violent, and the violent fear the reckless." Our vanquishers turned tail and fled, with the boy hot in pursuit, shouting, "I'll teach you who's boss now!"

The rest of us, who had been scurrying away in panic minutes earlier, took courage from his truculent display. We regrouped and charged after him, shouting, "We'll teach you who's boss now!" As we raced through the streets, in no time at all we were dripping with sweat, and in order to maintain speed and avoid getting winded, we soon abbreviated our battle cry to the snappier "Who's boss?"

That afternoon news of our exploit swept through the whole town, earning us celebrity as the Who's Boss Gang. After that, other young hooligans would greet us with obsequious smiles and the older boys would give us a wide berth. My cla.s.smate, having won our heartfelt respect, no longer tagged along behind us-overnight he had become the leader of the pack.

Why the sudden transformation? The reason was simple, so simple that today it hardly seems credible. One day his parents had gotten into an argument with the neighbors over some trivial matter, suspecting them of pinching their coal briquettes or something of the kind. The argument escalated into a full-blown fight, in which the boy too became involved. He chose to strike out at the weakest possible adversary he could find, the neighbors' pretty daughter, landing a punch right on her plump little b.r.e.a.s.t.s. That was all it took to make him a new man. Later he waved the palm of his hand before our envious eyes and recounted how his four happy fingers had-separated only by her blouse-established firm contact with her shapely bosom. His thumb, he said, had missed out on the treat, but his fingers had felt a heart-stopping softness.

That momentary feeling of ecstasy convinced my cla.s.smate that he had already lived as long as he needed to. "I've had a feel of a girl's t.i.ts! I can die now," we often heard him say, a blissful smile on his face.

It was the conviction that he could now die without regrets that inspired this timid creature to feats of extraordinary daring. That's what our adolescence was like: momentary contact with a girl's b.r.e.a.s.t.s was a life-changing catalyst. Growing up in an era of extremes, we might be afraid of nothing when we were in the middle of a street fight, but we would tremble at the thought of a female body.

A second high school cla.s.smate-whose ident.i.ty remains a mystery to this day-once scrawled on the blackboard the words "In love," an expression we understood intuitively, although we had never once used it. As the news spread, students in the other three first-year cla.s.ses rushed over to view the inflammatory graffiti, although they were careful to wear sternly censorious expressions and shout "Let's catch the hooligan!" as they approached the cla.s.sroom. Once in front of the blackboard, they gawked in awestruck silence, unable to tear themselves away. I myself had never seen these two words together, for the phrase had long disappeared from popular usage, and to be suddenly confronted by it made the blood flow hot in my veins.

The two crudely written characters were allowed to remain on the blackboard for a good ten days, as incriminating evidence, because the school's Revolutionary Committee needed to track down the hooligan who had written them. First they had all the boys in our grade hand in their composition books so they could compare the handwriting. When this failed to produce a suspect, they scrutinized the composition books of all the girls, with an equal lack of success. The scope of the search was then extended to the second-years, again to no avail. In the end nothing came of it, and the Revolutionary Committee chairman had personally to purge the crime scene of the offensive language. For me this came as a big blow, since I had got into the habit of stopping to admire "In love" every time I went past, thereby slaking my thirst for romance. With its disappearance, even this vicarious satisfaction was impossible.

The anonymous cla.s.smate who wrote these words on the blackboard must surely have known that he was committing hooliganism, and so, we concluded, he must deliberately have written the characters in such a sloppy hand so that he could escape detection and get away scot-free. A popular film at the time had a line that went, "No matter how sly the fox, he's no match for the wily old hunter." After the "In love" episode, a new version of this line began to circulate among us: "No matter how wily the hunter, he's no match for the sly little fox."

My son has told me that in his middle school biology cla.s.s the teacher directed the girls to sit on the boys' laps and then began to explain the physical differences between the s.e.xes and the principles of s.e.xual intercourse, pregnancy, and so on. After he had finished, one of the students raised his hand and asked, "Sir, is there a lab cla.s.s, too?"

Thirty years ago, however, boys and girls in high school did not talk to one another. They would have loved to, of course, but did not dare. Even if they had a crush on a member of the opposite s.e.x, the most they could do would be to cast furtive glances at them. The boldest boys might quietly slip notes to girls, but they wouldn't dare use words that clearly expressed love and instead employed elaborate circ.u.mlocutions, saying they wanted to give them an eraser or a pencil. The recipient would understand at once what game they were playing and react with unease, even fear. If the note was ever exposed to public view, the girl would feel deeply ashamed, as though she had done something improper.

Today high school students have no inhibitions about relationships, and the issue of teenage romance is discussed openly in society at large. In one video clip I have seen posted on the Internet, a boy sits on a school desk during recess and leans over to hug a girl sitting in the chair next to him. While cla.s.smates walk back and forth and talk about this and that, the couple kiss and cuddle as though they have the whole room to themselves. In a second clip, a boy falls to his knees in a school corridor and offers a bouquet of flowers to a girl. She brushes him aside and nips into the girls' bathroom. The boy hesitates for a second, then follows her into the bathroom, flowers in hand. These days pregnancies among high school girls have become so common they are no longer controversial, but it is still startling to find that some teenage girls actually show up for abortions in their school uniforms. I read that in one case the girl was escorted to the hospital by no fewer than four schoolboys. When the doctor said she needed a relative's signature, all four rushed forward.

What has made us move from one extreme to the other? Countless answers could probably be offered, but I doubt that such a cascade of responses will really provide a clear explanation. One point, however, is clear: when society undergoes a drastic shift, an extremely repressed era soon becomes a very lax one. It's like being on a swing: the higher you soar on one side, the higher you rise on the other.

China's high-speed economic growth seems to have changed everything in the blink of an eye, rather like a long jump that let us leap from an era of material shortages into an era of extravagance and waste, from an era when instincts are repressed into an era of impulsive self-indulgence. A quick jump seems to be all it took to cross a span of thirty years.

Just look at China today: the urban high-rises shooting up like forests under a gray and murky sky; the thick mesh of expressways, far outnumbering our rivers; the dazzling array of merchandise in shopping centers and supermarkets; the endless lines of traffic and pedestrians in the streets; the constant glitter of advertis.e.m.e.nts and neon signs; the nightclubs and ma.s.sage parlors, beauty salons and foot-washing joints, lining every block; not to mention the luxury restaurants three or four floors high, each floor the size of an auditorium, rimmed on all sides by sumptuous private rooms, two or three thousand people all wining and dining, shiny-faced with satisfaction.

But just thirty years ago, before we took that leap, we saw no high-rises, apart from one or two in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai; we had no concept of expressways or advertis.e.m.e.nts; we had very few stores, and very little to buy in the stores we did have. We seemed to have nothing then, though we did have a blue sky.

Those were the days of the rationing system, when men were restricted to coupons for just twenty-seven pounds of grain per month and women to twenty-five, along with coupons for half a pound of meat and two ounces of oil per person. When you bought grain, you needed to hand over grain coupons along with your cash, just as when you bought pork and vegetable oil, you needed to pay in cash, meat coupons, and oil coupons. On top of that there were cotton coupons, which we combined with cash to buy cotton in the fabric shop, then went to the tailor's to get measured and fitted for a jacket or pants-although most people would try to save money by making their own clothes. There were no clothing factories then, and stores didn't sell ready-made clothes. If you had a sewing machine in your house, you would be the undying envy of all your neighbors.

In managing the household budget, we had to run the tightest of ships, restricting ourselves to nine ounces of rice a day, a few slices of pork a week, and ten drops of oil with each stir-fry, for only in that way could we avoid overspending our monthly allotment. In the world in which my generation grew up, we neither had enough to eat nor so little to eat that we would die of hunger. When we think back to what was best about our childhoods, we tend to reminisce about remarkably similar things, all involving the eating of some kind of treat; apart from that, we have very few memories to cherish.

We townsfolk seldom had anything left over, even if we reduced consumption to a minimum. For men it was practically impossible to fully satisfy one's appet.i.te on twenty-seven pounds of grain a month; but women could typically manage with a little less than their ration, so they would use their leftover coupons to supplement the diets of their husbands or brothers. Oil coupons and meat coupons likewise failed to meet one's needs, so people would often buy coupons on the side to help maintain life and limb.

Peasants in my home district tended to have extra oil coupons in hand, for when they harvested rapeseed and delivered it to state-owned oil-pressing plants, the coupons would be their compensation. For them it was an important source of supplementary income. If they needed money to pay for medical treatment or a wedding, cash-strapped peasants would come into town and quietly sell their surplus coupons. In that era of public ownership, this was considered speculation and profiteering.

Inspired with a crusading zeal, some high school cla.s.smates and I formed a team of vigilantes to crack down on such activities. Today, I suppose, we would be described as volunteers, but volunteers at least can expect some free meals, and the only meal we got was if we opened our mouths wide and took a gulp of the raw winter wind. We would rouse ourselves at four in the morning to lie in ambush near the marketplace, hiding at street corners or behind utility poles, like hunting dogs poised for action. If we found someone selling oil coupons on the sly, we would leap out at him, confiscate his coupons, and march him off in triumph to the anti-speculation office.

We got a kick out of bullying those weaker than ourselves, believing too that we were performing a public service. Although we certainly had victories to our credit, our detainees tended to be peasants well past their prime, and the oil coupons we seized from them seldom amounted to very much. What's more, the peasants never dared resist, for they themselves were convinced they were doing something wrong, and so their only reaction was to weep helplessly as we s.n.a.t.c.hed away their coupons.

We did, however, fight one epic battle against a strongly built young peasant. He was a good head taller than any of us, and his chest was as broad as two of us put together. When we threw ourselves on him, he fought back stubbornly. He clenched his right hand tightly into a fist but dared not actually punch us, for he knew that would simply aggravate his offense; all he did was shove us aside with his left hand and make a run for it. This was the fiercest resistance we had ever encountered, and he might have gotten away had we not had numbers on our side, to hem him in from all directions. It helped too that some cla.s.smates were armed with bricks, with which they banged him over the head, and soon we had him pinned down on the ground. Even so, he still had his right hand curled in a fist and still tried with his left hand to push us away. We knew he had to have coupons in his right hand, but we could not pry his fingers apart, no matter how hard we tried. Two boys pinned his arm tightly to the ground while another pounded his fist with a brick until it was bathed in blood. Finally he unclenched his hand, revealing a bunch of blood-soaked oil coupons; counting them, we found a pound's worth altogether. After we had marched him to the anti-speculation office, a thorough search revealed that he had an additional eleven pounds of coupons hidden away in his clothes.

A full twelve pounds of oil coupons-this was our biggest bust ever. Under questioning, as he mopped his blood-stained face, the young man confessed to speculation. In order to pay for his wedding, he had borrowed nine pounds' worth of coupons from friends and relatives, and the other three pounds were the result of his family's scrimping and saving: his parents and brothers and sisters had gone for half a year without eating a drop of oil, making do with vegetables boiled in salted water.

That morning thirty-odd years ago retains a grim, appalling clarity in my memory today. While we celebrated our triumph with laughter all around, our victim recounted his simple story with a grimace. Since he was a first offender, his punishment took the form of confiscating his twelve pounds' worth of coupons and making him write a pledge that he would never again engage in such nefarious activity. As he wrote the pledge, his injured right hand trembled-whether from pain or from grief, I do not know. His fingers dripped crimson, and the pledge of good behavior became a letter written in blood.

So he was released, but we were not ready to let him off so easily. We dogged and harangued him as he went on his way, eager to show off in front of curious onlookers. To them we would tirelessly relate the details of our twelve-pound coupon haul, eliciting gratifying whistles of surprise. He walked on amid our jeers, weeping openly without any trace of embarra.s.sment; sometimes he raised his right hand to wipe away his tears, wincing with pain as he did so. We didn't stop until we had walked right to the edge of town; there we directed some last words of abuse at him and watched as he gradually disappeared in the distance along a country path. Clutching his injured hand to his chest, with a dazed and hopeless look on his face, he set out on the long road home that morning long ago.

It is with a heavy heart and a feeling of shame that I recall this episode now. I have no idea whether this decent young man went on to marry as he had planned, or how he managed to pay back those nine pounds' worth of coupons he had borrowed. What I remember most vividly is how, when we were beating him on the head, he controlled his rage and never fought back, just pushed us away with the palm of his hand.

Now, after all the dramatic changes in Chinese society, yesterday's profiteers have become today's small tradesmen. Urban unemployed and landless peasants, for their own survival, set out stalls in the city or ply their wares along the street. In Beijing alone, such people number in the tens of thousands. Unlicensed, they are highly mobile, and the local government is unable to levy revenue from them. At the same time, in the eyes of munic.i.p.al officials, the appearance everywhere of these hawkers damages the city's image and detracts from "harmonious society." In response there has been created a Bureau of City Administration and Law Enforcement, whose intimidating officers fan out in all directions. If you walk along a street or cross a pedestrian bridge in Beijing, you will often find it lined with vendors squatting on the ground, hawking their cheap wares, and as soon as someone yells, "Here come the Admin!" you will see them hastily sweep up their merchandise and scuttle away.

Today's City Administration officials show little signs of progress in their ways of dealing with petty tradesmen, confiscating property as freely as we vigilantes did in the 1970s. Their spoils, of course, include items we could never have imagined back then. A few years ago, when I lived in an apartment near a Beijing subway station, I would often see unlicensed pedicab drivers picking people up or letting them off outside the station-and City Administration trucks loaded with confiscated pedicabs as well. I saw crushed looks on the faces of the dispossessed drivers, who had used all their savings and borrowed right and left to buy a pedicab, then pedaled the streets day and night, dripping with sweat in summer and winter alike, to support their families and pay for their children's schooling. When the pedicabs they depended on for their livelihood were confiscated, their futures were confiscated, too.

In recent years, as pedicabs, flatbed carts, and merchandise are regularly hauled away, relations between hawkers and city officials have become more and more hostile, sometimes leading to violent conflict. This never attracted much attention from society until a vendor named Cui Yingjie stabbed and killed a City Administration enforcer. With all the media coverage of the case, people began to realize that the crude confiscation of carts and merchandise is in effect a denial of the hawkers' right to a livelihood. As Cui Yingjie himself put it at his trial, after expressing remorse for what had happened, "All I wanted to do was to set up my own stall and try to change my life for the better."

After the stabbing, protective equipment became more sophisticated: City Administration officers were fitted out with smartphones, knife-proof vests, helmets, slash-resistant gloves, high-intensity flashlights, and so forth. Military police have been hired as instructors, to train the City Administration enforcers in practical techniques: how to seize a knife, how to extricate oneself when grabbed by the collar or the hair, how to dislodge a hand clamped around one's throat or waist.

Why did yesterday's profiteers and today's hawkers react so differently when their possessions were taken away from them? As times change and social mechanisms evolve, it seems to me, different survival instincts come into play. In social terms the Cultural Revolution was a simple era, whereas today's society is complex and chaotic. One of Mao Zedong's remarks sums up a basic characteristic of the Cultural Revolution. "We should support whatever the enemy opposes," he said, "and oppose whatever the enemy supports." The Cultural Revolution was an era when everything was painted in black and white, when the enemy was always wrong and we were always right; n.o.body had the courage to suggest that the enemy might sometimes be right and we might sometimes be wrong. Deng Xiaoping, in turn, said something that captures the zeitgeist of our current age: "A cat that catches the mouse is a good cat, no matter whether it's black or white." In so saying, he overturned Mao's system of values and pointed out a fact long evident in Chinese society: right and wrong often coexist in a single phenomenon and interact in a dynamic of mutual displacement. At the same time, his comment put an end to the argument about where socialism and capitalism belong in China's economic development.

So China moved from Mao Zedong's monochrome era of politics-in-command to Deng Xiaoping's polychrome era of economics above all. "Better a socialist weed than a capitalist seedling," we used to say in the Cultural Revolution. Today we can't tell the difference between what is capitalist and what is socialist-weeds and seedlings come from one and the same plant.

Sometimes a word's meaning moves from simple to complex and in so doing reveals a social change. "Disparity"* is just such a word.

In the 1970s, as far as city and town dwellers went, there were no obvious social disparities in China, but that didn't stop us from talking about disparity every day, denouncing hollow disparities in empty rituals. Everyone scrutinized his own thinking for inequalities, for gaps between himself and progressive individuals like the exemplary soldier Lei Feng. "Study advanced models, note disparities"-such was the catchphrase of the day. Like novice monks reciting sutras, we would talk mechanically every day about "disparity," spinning our wheels in endless, hackneyed verbiage. In our compositions from elementary school through high school we would write over and over again how, under the guidance of the Lei Feng spirit, we were reducing ideological disparities, helping the old lady next door by bringing her water from the well. By my second year of high school our teacher of Chinese had taken as much as he could take. "You've all been fetching water for the old lady next door for ten years already," he said, rapping on the pile of essays stacked on his desk. "Why don't you change your example once in a while? How about fetching a sack of rice for the old man next door?"

Decades later we still talk endlessly about disparities, but no longer are they vacuous ideological disparities. Today they are real, down-to-earth social disparities; gaps between rich and poor, city and village; differences between regions; inequalities in development, income level, and allocation; and so on. Huge social disparities are bound to trigger ma.s.s protests and individual acts of resistance. When we beat that young peasant with bricks, he never once struck back with his fist; now when an official-without using any violence, just doing his job, enforcing regulations-simply confiscates a bicycle cart and the things on it, he is stabbed to death by the hawker. Why is this? I think it is because when "disparity" moves from narrow to broad, from empty to real, it demonstrates how widespread are China's problems, how intense its contradictions.

During the socialist advances of the Mao era, although development was slow and economic returns were meager, social inequalities did genuinely contract. What Mao was never able to resolve was the gap between city and country. After thirty years of Deng Xiaoping's open-door policy, economic output has rapidly expanded: GNP has grown from 364.5 billion yuan in 1978 to more than 33 trillion yuan in 2009-almost a hundredfold increase. But the gap between city and country has not diminished; on the contrary, it has increased. According to official figures, the disparity between urban and rural residents' income has grown to a ratio of 3.33:1 or, in absolute numbers, by 9,646 yuan, the largest such gap since economic reforms began. The figures for 2009 have yet to be released, and official sources issue only vague acknowledgments that the gap is continuing to widen.

In May 2006, my friend Cui Yongyuan, an anchorman on China Central Television, began to retrace the route of the Red Army's Long March, along with his film crew and twenty-six other people from different walks of life. It took them 250 days to travel the 3,800 miles, battling the elements through all four seasons, across snow-clad mountains and through endless gra.s.slands, until their triumphant return to Beijing in January 2007. Cui Yongyuan came home with many tales, both happy and sad, and one day when we were together, he shared some with me. This is one of them: By the summer of that year, just when the soccer World Cup finals were taking place in Germany, Cui's miniature Long March expedition arrived at an impoverished area in China's southwest, and there he had a sudden inspiration: to organize a soccer match for the local primary school children. Even if it was a far cry from the pa.s.sions in Berlin, he thought, at least it would create a little ripple of World Cup excitement in this backward hinterland county.

He immediately encountered two problems. The first was that no soccer ball could be found in the stores of the county town, so he had to send two fellow Long Marchers off in a car to a bigger city to buy one. The second was that the local primary school children not only had never seen a soccer match; they had never even heard that such a game existed.

Cui Yongyuan located a large field-fields were one thing they did have there-and had a designer in his film crew put up a goalpost. A thousand children sat on the gra.s.s and watched attentively as Cui launched his crash course in elementary soccer. He began the lesson by demonstrating the penalty kick, placing the brand-new soccer ball on the penalty spot and proudly introducing his cameraman, the crew member with the most soccer experience.

The cameraman was used to playing without a referee and without an audience, so with the eyes of so many spectators upon him he naturally tensed up. Although he managed to strike a dashing enough figure in his run-up, he betrayed his amateur status in the delivery. The ball ballooned over the bar like a sh.e.l.l fired from a howitzer, painted a rainbow-like arc in the air, then hit the ground with a resounding thump and rolled into the middle of a cow pie.

Bowing his head in chagrin, the cameraman trotted over and retrieved the ball from the sticky pile of dung, carried it over to a pond nearby, gave it a good wash, then returned it to its place on the penalty spot. Cui Yongyuan now had the schoolchildren line up to practice taking penalties. An unforgettable scene ensued as each child kicked the ball, ran after it, waited till it stopped moving, picked it up, scampered over to the pond to give it a cleaning, then put it back on the penalty spot. Washing the soccer ball, they understood, was one of the basic rules of the game.

This-a true story-took place in the summer of 2006, when more than a hundred million Chinese watched the World Cup on television. World Cup matches were first broadcast in China back in 1978, the year when our soccer league was officially inaugurated. In the 2002 World Cup tournament, hosted jointly by j.a.pan and Korea, the group match between China and Brazil was seen by 200 million Chinese. So in many parts of China today children have long been familiar with such brands as Nike and Adidas. Wearing school uniforms as they do, today's youngsters have little scope for making fashion statements, so-a Beijing schoolteacher informs me-they compete in showing off their footwear instead. If they are all wearing Nike basketball shoes, say, then it will come down to who is wearing which generation of Jordans or Kobes. Meanwhile, in southwest China, there are children who have never even heard of soccer.

During the 2008 Beijing Olympics many low-income Chinese longed to visit the "Bird's Nest" National Stadium and the "Water Cube" National Aquatics Center, symbols of the new China. They spent long days and nights journeying by train and long-haul bus, arriving in Beijing travel-worn but tingling with antic.i.p.ation. Asking directions all the way from the station to Olympic Park, they longed to go in and explore, but entrance tickets to the park alone were in very short supply, and the tickets resold by scalpers were outrageously expensive. For security reasons, perhaps, people without tickets were banned from entering Olympic Park, so they had no choice but to stand a long way off and take a photo of themselves with the Bird's Nest and Water Cube in the distant background. Even so, their faces were wreathed in smiles.

At the same time there was no shortage of empty seats inside the stadiums-seats with excellent views of the events as well. High officials and big shots, being accustomed to an extravagant lifestyle, set no great store by the plum seats they had been given, never bothering to reflect that the tickets going to waste in their pockets would have been treasured by other Chinese. Nor did they give a second thought to the fact that such a mult.i.tude of ordinary people would travel so frugally to Beijing and then be unable to get their hands on even a basic sightseeing ticket for Olympic Park.

China today is a land of huge disparities. It's like walking down a street where on this side are gaudy pleasure palaces and on that side desolate ruins, or like sitting in a strange theater where a comedy is being performed on one side of the stage and a tragedy on the other.

When Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and other such luxury brands build huge outlets in the most glamorous streets of Chinese cities; when exhibitions of luxury goods are greeted with open arms in places like Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen (where sales exceeded 200 million yuan in just a few days); then people suddenly realize that China has changed overnight from a luxury-goods processing site to a luxury-goods consumption center. The financial crisis may have caused sales of these goods to undergo a steep decline in the traditional European and American markets, but they remain hugely popular in China.

Since June 2008 luxury goods have been the weakest segment of retail sales in the United States. But in China, according to a recent report, sales of these goods grew by about 20 percent in 2008. By 2015, when sales are expected to maintain 10 percent annual growth, they may well surpa.s.s $115 million; this would make China the world's top consumer of luxury goods, with 29 percent of the world's total consumption. A study by China's Brand Strategy a.s.sociation reported a development even more startling: Chinese consumers who can afford international name brands already number 250 million.

At the same time, poverty and hunger are still endemic in many parts of China, and there is no end to heartrending stories. Here is one that I heard: A long-unemployed husband and wife, out walking with their young son, pa.s.s a fruit stall. The boy sees that bananas are cheap and asks his parents to buy him one. But what little change they have in their pockets is not enough to buy a banana, so they hurry him on. The boy bursts out crying: it's been so long since he had a banana. He cries all the way home and keeps crying once he's home. His father, exasperated, hits him. His mother runs over, pushes the father away; they start to quarrel. The harsh words and the boy's unending cries suddenly overwhelm his father with despair. He hates himself, his uselessness, his joblessness, his empty pockets. He goes out on the balcony and throws himself off without even a backward glance. His wife screams, dashes out the door, down ten flights of stairs, kneels on the ground, cradles her husband's head, sobs, calls his name, feels his life leaving him. Minutes pa.s.s, she pulls herself together, sets the broken body down, presses the elevator b.u.t.ton. Back in the apartment, her son still crying, she rummages around for a piece of cord, puts a stool in the middle of the room, ties the cord to a ceiling hook. Her son sits there watching, bewildered, so she jumps off the stool, turns his chair to face another way, climbs back on the stool, fastens the noose, and kicks away the stool.

Here's a second story: Another jobless couple, the daughter in primary school. She comes down with a fever; forehead scalding hot, she asks them to take her to the doctor. They have no money, they tell her; they have to go out and look for work; they don't have time. She understands, she says just borrow a little money from a neighbor, she'll go see the doctor herself. Her father tells her mother to borrow the money, and she tells him the same; they start to argue. They've cadged so many loans and never been able to pay them back, they can't face the prospect of having to ask for more. Never mind, the girl says, she doesn't have to see a doctor. But she feels faint, she's not up to going to school; she'll have a nap in her room instead. Her father sets off on his job hunt; her mother stays to clean the kitchen. As she leaves, she checks to see if her daughter is asleep. When she pushes the door open, she finds the girl hanging by her red scarf, the one she patted flat before folding every night, that she tied carefully around her neck every morning, her favorite accessory.

There are many other such stories I could tell. It's not that I so relish stories of misfortune; rather, that Chinese realities are telling us these stories every day. Our realities, of course, tell us other kinds of stories, too. For example, there are already hundreds of thousands of Chinese whose disposable a.s.sets exceed 10 million yuan-825,000 of them, according to the latest Hurun Report. This figure includes 51,000 individuals with more than 100 million yuan, whose annual expenditure is said to average 2 million yuan.

Consider, in contrast, the following figures: if you define the poverty line in China as a 2006 income of 600 yuan or less, then there are 30 million Chinese living in poverty; if you raise the threshold to 800 yuan, there are a full 100 million. When I pointed this out at a talk in Vancouver in 2009, a Chinese student rose to his feet. "Money is not the sole criterion for judging happiness," he objected. This remark made me shudder, for it is not just a single student's view; a substantial number of people in China today would take a similar line. Surrounded by images of China's growing prosperity, they have not the slightest inclination to concern themselves with the hundred million who still struggle in almost unimaginable poverty. That is the real tragedy: poverty and hunger are not as shocking as willful indifference to them. As I told the Chinese student, the issue is not how we judge happiness but how we address a widespread social problem. "If you are someone with an annual income of only 800 yuan, you will earn a lot of respect for saying what you did," I replied. "But you're not."