Mr. China Read online

  So it was to howls of protest that the court issued its verdict six months later. We had to pay for the whole amount of the letters of credit, the guarantees and our legal costs. The bill was more than ten million. Detailed reading of the written judgement rubbed salt into the wound; the judgement included new evidence that had never been heard in the court. Moreover, some of the documents that the court had demanded had been ‘lost’ by the bank and only photocopies were supplied. One of these photocopies was of a document where the police had found the original in the raid on Solarworld in Hong Kong; on the ‘photocopy’ supplied to the court, several parts had been altered.

  The judgement then became a hot political issue. We had been keeping the US Embassy in Beijing abreast of developments and the staff there had been very supportive. Once the judgement came out, it transformed the issue from a commercial dispute into a question of the reliability of the Chinese courts. In the following months, letters flew between the top levels of the governments concerned, raising the case and asking China’s Prime Minister Zhu Rongji to investigate. We decided to appeal to the Supreme Court of China.

  Although Michael had handled much of the work on this case, I was exhausted. The fight in Harbin had been going on at the same time and we had increasing troubles in our breweries in Beijing. I had been travelling almost continuously for nearly a year, putting out fires and trying to get to grips with the factory directors. I had an ear infection that affected my balance and I had lost a pair of glasses so I couldn’t see properly. I couldn’t sleep either. We were making such slow progress. So it was in a black mood that I went to France for a much-needed rest.

  Eight

  Crushed by the Weight of Mount Taishan

  Traditional saying: Taishan is

  one of China’s five holy mountains and

  represents enormous force or weight

  In France that year the snow just fell and fell. Up in the mountains, wooden chalets disappeared, swallowed whole underneath a great white cloak. Streams were caught mid-flow; trees sagged, their branches drooping under the great load of snow until, suddenly, they’d cast off the burden and snap back to attention. Occasionally, the creaking, crunching sound of an avalanche drifted down through the mists. The skies were leaden and heavy; the snow seemed to deaden all sound as we trudged up and down the slopes. Clouds, rotund and mournful, rolled up the valley. All was grey. The weather matched my state of mind. I seemed imbued with a sense of heaviness that had soaked into my bones.

  I couldn’t sleep. For several nights, as I twisted about in the sheets and wrestled with jet lag, I felt breathless, as if a heavy weight was pressing on my chest. And the headaches: not even Mayor Huang’s baijiu had made me feel like that. As I lay there in bed, great stupefying depth-charges boomed at the centre of my brain. I tried to kid myself that it was all caused by the altitude and rolled over, sweating. But on the third night I woke up with a pain in my chest that I could no longer ignore. My hands became clammy as the pain waxed and waned. Slowly, it grew in intensity and radiated through to my back and down to the fourth finger of my left hand. I sat for an hour on the edge of the bed, vainly attempting to deny the truth, and watched the first cold fingers of light creep across the sky. I tried an aspirin; but it wasn’t that kind of problem. We called a doctor.

  Fifteen minutes later, three men arrived in what looked like firefighters’ outfits. I was confused. They seemed to have brought an oxygen bottle and wanted to carry me out. I insisted on walking. We drove for ten minutes to a local clinic where a doctor shoved a needle into my arm and strapped monitors to my chest. I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. I was irritated by all the fuss; if they carried on that way, I’d end up missing the morning’s skiing. So I was in a filthy temper by the time they’d strapped me to a stretcher, dumped me into the back of an ambulance and driven me down the valley. Fuming silently, I lay on my back in the ambulance, watching the tops of the fir trees at the edge of my vision turning back and forth against the dull grey sky as the vehicle wound slowly down the mountain road.

  The gentle rocking sent me to sleep. I was exhausted. I must have been in a deep sleep when we arrived at the hospital. I remember vaguely someone putting a probe on my chest again and a big monitor, but nothing else. I found out later that I had been sedated.

  I woke up with a start in a room that I didn’t recognize. Gas bottles and monitors crowded in on me. There were charts on the wall. A nurse came in, looking hassled. She leant over the bed and, with a slight sideways glance, whispered, ‘You’re in intensive care.’

  She waited as it slowly seeped in.

  And then, ‘You’ve had a heart attack.’

  At first I really had no idea what she meant. How could I have had a heart attack? I was thirty-eight and ran three miles a day. They’d got the wrong guy! I thought briefly about the baijiu and the Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes: not enough there to cause problems, surely. So I sank back into a fitful sleep and waited.

  I was fitted with all sorts of drips and monitors and oxygen gauges. The nurse told me that they’d put me on heparin, a blood thinner that might give me a headache. If it got too bad, I should tell them.

  The next day was uneventful, but the following morning I woke up with a crashing pain in my head and called the nurse. She adjusted the heparin dose and went away. Gradually, the pain came back in my chest. I struggled against a rising sense of panic. I felt my heart stopping and restarting again with a great thump inside my ribcage. But much worse than feeling these breaks in my heartbeat, I could see them as well! I stretched my neck sideways and backwards, craning to watch the green point on the monitor screen that registered the heartbeat. As it moved silently and relentlessly across the screen, there were long depressions in the wave followed by a sudden burst of activity before it flattened out again. The heart rate on the monitor screen fell from sixty down to fifty-five and through fifty. The pain increased. I felt great stabs through my chest and a dull all-consuming ache in the temples. My head span. Down through forty-five to forty. At thirty-eight, great squashy blotches appeared in front of my eyes. As I passed out, I remember hearing, as if through a long tunnel, the frightened voice of the nurse calling for a doctor for ‘le jeune anglais’. And then all was black.

  I woke up feeling like death.

  For a long time, I didn’t move. My arm hurt. I looked down and found that my body was covered in repulsive bruises right down to my feet. Great black veins on my arm stood out half an inch. I had been given an emergency treatment with a powerful drug that turns blood to water, a risky crisis treatment for someone actually having a heart attack. It dawned on me that this might be for real.

  I lay there for six days, drugged and drifting in and out of sleep. On the sixth day, I was loaded into a tiny jet and flown back to Oxford. I had been given a letter to take with me. It was in French and I had it translated afterwards. It described all the symptoms and the diagnosis, concluding that my problem was an ‘inferior subendiocardial infarct in a young man with no risk factors except stress.’ From where I was lying that meant trouble.

  I had an angiogram at the hospital. I was frightened before I went in. They had told me that it wouldn’t hurt but that they needed to push a tube up through a vein in my thigh into my heart while I was still awake. They promised to knock me out a bit while they were doing it; ‘gin and tonic’ said the surgeon. Luckily it was stronger than that. I don’t remember much except that my feet were very cold; I discovered afterwards that while they were doing the procedure the fire alarm had gone off and I had been wheeled out into the car park for ten minutes until it was safe to go back inside.

  That afternoon the surgeon came in with a smile on his face. ‘Good news,’ he said. ‘Your pipes are as clean as a whistle.’ The diagnosis had been wrong so he sent me home with an aspirin.

  I was completely shattered. How could all this have happened? How could everything have gone so bizarrely wrong? For me personally the whole experience had been an u
tter disaster.

  My nerve had held during the crisis. I had been too confused to think that I would die there and then, but as soon as it was over I collapsed completely. Thoughts of my children tore at me; my little one was only four months old. For days afterwards I wept silently and alone.

  At first the doctors didn’t know what had happened so they gave me test after test. Once they called me on the phone and told me rather lethargically that the problem might be a cracked aorta, but I replied that I thought that I’d be dead if that was the case. They seemed to agree and promised to look for something else. The tests eventually showed that I had suffered some weird viral attack that had inundated my heart and liver and had got into my joints. They said that a combination of my body’s ‘depleted batteries’ and the altitude in France might have contributed, but that now the trouble was gone and I should rest for a few months and not worry about China.

  I didn’t think about China for a long time, but gradually my thoughts drifted back to the other side of the world. My first instinct was just to forget the whole thing. The problems appeared overwhelming. We were losing nearly twenty million a year while the factory directors careered off in every direction and we argued among ourselves about what to do. With this new blow to the solar plexus, I thought that the personal cost of continuing was just too high. I decided to quit.

  But then, throughout the early spring in England – days, unusually, of sunshine – I thought more and more about what had gone wrong. Strangely, as time passed, the shock had had a calming effect. It put the business difficulties into perspective and, as the months rolled by, I felt that I could view things more objectively from England.

  As I sat in the sunshine, listening vaguely to the birds in the hedges and thinking, I started to have my first doubts about just jacking the whole lot in. China seemed to have worked itself into my bones. It wasn’t going to be easy to leave all that behind. And what about the people who had given us all that money? Didn’t I owe it to the investors to at least try and sort out the mess? And the Chinese: for every Pang Yuanweng, there was an eager translator up in the hills, desperate to expand his horizons and embrace the outside world. For every Wang who had stolen millions from our joint venture in Zhuhai, there was a Mayor Huang and an Ironman Jiang and a Li Wei. What about the people who really believed in what we were trying to accomplish? Or Ai Jian who’d had the guts to leave the security of his job? No, here was something worth fighting for. I realized that I couldn’t just run away.

  And there was another, much bigger reason for wanting to go back. China was in a state of supreme upheaval as it fought to adapt. The pessimists gleefully predicted from the sidelines that the crisis was so deep that it might destroy China’s existence as a unitary state. I didn’t see it like that. But I knew that when Deng had opened up the gates he had unleashed centrifugal forces that sent millions reeling; billions and billions of dollars had poured into China along the coast in a great splurge whilst the neglected hinterland remained destitute. A confused tidal wave of people rose up from the country villages sending a hundred million itinerant labourers swirling towards the sea.

  At the same time, with its resources exhausted, the government began wearily removing the props from the old state-owned factories. Staggering under the weight of bloated payrolls, these old factories began collapsing as though in a great domino pile, dragging down banks and savings cooperatives with them and toppling millions more out onto the streets. And – almost as a side issue – the newspapers routinely reported the execution of officials caught looting state coffers of millions of dollars and bank managers who lent astronomical sums of money to their relatives. In just one case, the Bank of China admitted that in their branch in Kaiping, a medium-sized town in Henan Province, they had lost $483 million dollars when five officials fled in ‘a well-organized escape plan involving dozens of fake passports’. Meanwhile a cowed peasantry of nine hundred million toiled on the land while images of unattainable affluence beamed into the villages from outside.

  The contortions required of the Chinese leadership in this immense social and economic balancing act were scarcely comprehensible. For certain, China had to change in order to progress and the Government had to relax its grip to let that happen. But if central authority should collapse, the population movement would affect the whole world. So, for me, this was a chance of a ringside seat at a spectacle of massive historical importance. There wasn’t a choice. I felt that I had to go back.

  So what had I learnt? From my eight years at the coalface in China, I knew that I was dealing with a society that had no rules – or, more accurately, plenty of rules that were seldom enforced. China seemed to be run by masterful showmen: appearances mattered more than substance, rules were there to be distorted and success came through outfacing an opponent. The irony was that the entire nation seemed to be shadow-boxing with itself. Whereas to most foreigners China seemed too centralized, with an all-controlling Party brooding at the hub of a vast monolithic State, everywhere I had looked there had seemed to be a kind of institutionalized confusion.

  I’d realized during the dispute in Harbin that there were two completely separate power structures in China: the Government and the Party. The idea was to provide checks and balances. But every senior official in the Government was also a senior Party member. Most senior Party members had held top Government positions. They constantly switched jobs between Party and Government so that real power ended up in the hands of the individual rather than the office. Responsibilities overlapped, which resulted in protracted and pointless power struggles, but elsewhere the system left no one in control. Ministries fought over territory whilst the army expanded into commercial activities such as manufacturing medicines or investing in hotels. I remember hearing that the police in Guangzhou were running a chain of cake shops.

  The result was a society with some areas of rigid control where the Party delved deep into narrow vertical sections. But these sections seemed roped off from each other, leaving great voids in between. That was where the Chinese entrepreneur learnt the ropes, where officials routinely manipulated badly written rules: a place of writs and freezing orders, fake letters of credit, judges who did not understand a case but passed judgement anyway, officials from an Anti-Corruption Bureau who asked for cars and bags of money. One thing was for sure: if you played by the rules you were finished. I realized that if I was going to go back, I would have to unlearn everything.

  I knew that we would have to find a Chinese solution to a Chinese problem. As I thought through what had happened and tried to anticipate the battles ahead, one remark kept coming up again and again. It went round and round in my mind. It had been made when Pang Yuanweng had told the managers up in Harbin that they had to choose between ‘the factory or the foreigners’.

  The factory or the foreigners. That didn’t sound good.

  I had sensed early on that Chinese people understandably had exceptionally negative feelings about the country’s colonial history. Conversations often came up about the nineteenth-century Englishmen who arrived with their gun-ships and their Indian opium. I knew that Chinese people had not forgotten that long period of national humiliation. It was too much part of their heritage: part and parcel of Mao’s audacious promise that his new People’s Republic would ‘reverse the reversal of history’; the reason why Deng was never going to let Hong Kong remain British.

  I turned Pang’s remark over and over in my mind. But, as I thought about what had happened up in Harbin, I still couldn’t characterize it neatly as a straight fight between Chinese and foreigners. Despite the slogans and ‘the factory or the foreigners’ remark, I still hadn’t felt any real racism creeping in. Even when the fight was at its most intense, I hadn’t seen the closed-mindedness, the chauvinism or the essential lack of self-confidence that fuels true racism. When anger spilt over, as it did in 1999 when NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and demonstrators threw rocks at the US Embassy in Beijing, it seemed natural that th
ese emotions should have found direction most easily along nationalistic lines.

  But ours was a much more familiar story; it was just another fight between two groups of people over power and money. And Pang, when he tried to stoke up ethnic differences, was using every weapon he had and it hadn’t really worked. No, I felt that the Chinese were too practical, too self-confident and too curious about what was going on in the world outside to fall into any negative racist trap. They wanted to catch up.

  I hoped that this might give me a chance of reaching across the cultural divide, a chance of appealling to common values. If it came to a struggle with the factory directors, I had to convince them that I was fighting them not as a foreigner but as a businessman. That way, I might have a chance.

  Chinese people have a deep sense of ‘Chineseness’, which I felt I had to break through. This ‘Chineseness’ extends well beyond patriotism, nationality, citizenship and loyalty but includes all of those ideas. I wrote that when I first came to China almost ten years earlier, I had found something so vast and so old that it took me right out of myself. Over time, I tried to clarify those hesitant first impressions into something more distinct. I had developed a sense of some special bond between the people now living in the country we call China and the immense and ancient culture of their ancestors; ancestors who lived on that land for five thousand years and wrote down their history in an unbroken chain. ‘Bond’ is the right word: a binding, restraining force that includes the concept of owing as well as receiving. I think that being part of that exclusive five-thousand-year-old club gives the Chinese a sense of separateness and self-esteem. It can occasionally develop into a sense of superiority, but no more than anywhere else. And the legacy has its costs. The price that China paid came from the burden of history. Until recently, China couldn’t change.