Mr. China Read online

  When I eventually ventured into the Chinese students’ domitories, I felt a lot less sorry for myself. I had never seen anything like it. Seven students crammed into a tiny room in bunk beds, with inadequate lighting, wire cages over the windows and not much in the way of heat or sanitation; and that for the best scholars in China. The rooms were arranged off a central corridor and the students threw rubbish out of their rooms on to the floor for collection later on. The walls were blackened to waist height and hadn’t been painted for years. The girls’ dormitories were even worse because they cooked on makeshift electrical stoves perched on top of piles of bricks in the corridors so that the floors were covered in scraps of food, pools of dirty water and discarded tins. At the end of the corridor, where the toilets were, great piles of used sanitary towels had been tipped out of the wire baskets in each cubicle and swept out over the floor into the corridor outside. The concrete floor was cracked with potholes, so it was impossible to clean up properly.

  Although the dull winter months in Beijing could be dispiriting at times, the planned economy still provided some light relief. Beijingers have a tradition of eating cabbage in the winter. It resists the cold and doesn’t get damaged by the frost so, in earlier years when food was less plentiful, the Government organized cabbage to be brought into Beijing and distributed free to the people. Each year, from early November, long convoys of trucks, queued up on the outskirts of the city, waiting until nightfall to rumble in with their vast loads of cabbage into the city. Thousands and thousands of tonnes of the vegetable were brought in and piled up at the main intersections in the city. Teams of elderly women guarded it by night and handed it out during the day. The whole process took about a month and the huge mounds on the street corners became a familiar sight. However, in the run-up to that first winter in Beijing, the government set the price too high and the peasants in the surrounding countryside grew nothing but cabbage. The result was a massive glut. The piles of cabbage grew and grew until they were ten feet high and hundreds of yards long. After a month, cabbage leaves were everywhere: on the pavements, on the roads, inside buildings, stacked up on window ledges. The leaves soon mashed down into a thick, slippery green slime on the ground. Bicycles collided, cars bumped gracefully into each other and people spent half their time picking themselves up off the floor and scraping cabbage sludge off their trousers. It got so bad that the Mayor of Beijing went on the radio and made a speech during which he said that it was everyone’s ‘patriotic duty’ to eat cabbage. Although all the political sloganeering over the years had dulled the Beijingers’ senses, the Mayor’s remark provoked howls of derision and, to this day, long-leafed cabbages are still known in northern China as ‘Patriotic Cabbage’. As winter changed to spring, there was an almost tangible relaxation as the ripples from Tiananmen receded together with the cold. Even the political campaigns on campus became half-hearted. I heard that there were still compulsory Marxism lessons on Tuesdays, but the students generally sat around reading novels. The teachers were bored senseless, just like the students, so they made no attempt to impose discipline. Gradually, the flavour of life changed. As the spring came round, the cherry trees blossomed and the regimen as well as the weather seemed to thaw out.

  Between the lighter moments provided by the planned economy and the restaurant menus, living in China was much harder than I had expected. All the same, I felt that I was peeling back the layers to find out what was at the core. I made slow but steady progress with the language and after a year or so I could enjoy a simple conversation with a stranger. Although I knew that life in China could be tough, I felt I was slowly mastering it, but from time to time I came across small incidents where I felt a hardness that I had never known at home and which would set me back a few weeks. I remember once seeing an old man, dazed on a sidewalk, who’d been knocked off his bicycle and concussed. He was sitting unattended in the broken pieces of a pot of pickled vegetable roots that he had been carrying, surrounded by pedestrians all arguing about whose fault it was. Occasions like that would shake me. Another time I met a leper sitting on the pavement not far from Tiananmen Square. His skin was terribly sore, red and messy, and his hands were all distorted. I went to get a carton of milk and fitted a straw into it for him. I passed by the same place about half an hour later and found some people in uniform questioning him sharply, wanting to know where he had found the milk. A truck arrived. They threw him in the back like a sack of potatoes. I screamed at them, but it was as if I wasn’t there. I was an embarrassment. As they drove off, he looked at me out of the back of the truck and smiled Mao Zedong’s smile, serene but expressionless. I’ll never know quite what it meant but I was starting to sense a sort of protective detachment that some Chinese people needed in order to survive.

  At the same time, of course, there were many kindnesses, small acts of charity that meant so much to me as I struggled in unfamiliar surroundings. They showed the human side of China.

  These experiences made me feel as if the rigidity of the regime in China magnified each side of human nature: the good and the bad; the pettiness and the generosity. But what would it make out of me? I felt under stress dealing with such a foreign environment, and if the pressure really built, which way would I turn?

  After a year at the university I was rapidly running out of cash. I had been studying full time and had quickly got through everything I’d saved in Hong Kong so I found a job writing up books in my shaky Mandarin in an office down the road. I used to get there on my bike each day, about half an hour if the wind was with me.

  A sandstorm blasted through Beijing one day in April 1992 and caught me on my way to work. The dust storms in northern China in the late spring are often so dense that at times they blot out the sun and the light fades into dusky sepia colours. It took me an hour straining against the wind before I got to the office and when I arrived I was filthy. After I’d rubbed the grit out of my eyes, I found on my desk a letter from England. A friend had sent me a copy of a job advertisement from the Financial Times in London. ‘Mandarin Speaker Needed by Large Financial Services Company.’ It looked interesting. They needed someone to help them advise investors how to get into China. My mind’s eye instantly flew back to the short interview in London and that awful uncluttered desk. I could have written that job spec three years earlier when I’d gone to see Old Roy back in London.

  I cobbled together a CV and sent it off. When I called the number later in the week, the voice at the other end of the line was chuckling. ‘You won’t believe who it is,’ I heard him say through the crackles from London. ‘It’s your old firm. Andersen!’

  ‘What?’ I said as it slowly sank in.

  ‘Yeah, it’s Arthur Andersen!’

  ‘Yes!’ I shouted punching the air. The interview was a walkover and, two years after I left them in London, I went back to rejoin the firm in Hong Kong that summer.

  During my time in Beijing, I had started to figure out that China was ruled by complex and ceaselessly shifting alliances within a group of very old men, known as the ‘Eight Immortals’. I never made any serious attempt to understand how it all worked, but at the centre of these fluid coalitions was a man called Deng Xiaoping.

  Deng had been a senior member of the Red Army prior to Liberation and for years afterwards he was a key figure at the top levels of power. His reputation was that of an able, pragmatic politician who was more interested in getting the job done than in worrying about political dogma. After the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, he rose through the ranks and ended up as the Number Two to China’s President Liu Shaoqi. But in 1966 both Liu and Deng fell from power during the Cultural Revolution.

  Mao and Liu were old political rivals, and Liu had gained the upper hand when the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s mad dash for economic growth, ended in famine. Liu tried to put China on to a path of stable growth based more on sound economics than politics. But it didn’t last long; Mao hit back in 1966 when he launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutio
n by encouraging young men and women to break all forms of social convention by attacking ‘bad elements’ in society and waging ‘perpetual revolution’.

  The country rapidly descended into chaos. Schools and universities stopped functioning when the more radical students became Red Guards. They started to attack anyone suspected of being Mao’s political opponent, labelling them ‘Rightists’ or ‘Capitalist Roaders’ and parading them through the streets in dunces’ caps. Factories ceased production as the Red Guards formed ‘Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams’ and demanded that the workers spend hours a day in study sessions. Rival factions of Red Guards set up speakers in the streets that blared out propaganda until the early hours, and festooned walls and gateways with posters criticizing each other. Mao personally pasted a ‘big character poster’ on to the doors of the Great Hall of the People calling for the masses to ‘bombard the headquarters’, and held a series of massive rallies, one of which was nearly a million people strong, in Tiananmen Square.

  With Mao’s implicit support, the Red Guards began to target senior figures in the Government, ransacking their homes and arresting family members. Social order collapsed completely. No one attended to the normal functioning of the State; everything revolved around politics. Government ministries stopped functioning because officials were too frightened to go to work, and large crowds of Red Guards besieged foreign embassies. A huge notice was erected on the front of Beijing station that summed up the nonsensical politicization of the times: ‘Better a socialist train that’s late than a capitalist train on time.’

  Liu Shaoqi, China’s President and Mao’s principal rival, and Deng, as Liu’s Number Two, rapidly became targets. There is a photograph of Liu standing in the Central Government compound, Zhongnanhai, being denounced by a large crowd of thugs wearing Red Guard uniforms. One can almost smell the fear coming out of the picture. Liu died a year later on the floor of a jail in Kaifeng.

  But while many around him perished, Deng survived. From 1967 to 1974, stripped of all power, it seems that he spent most of his time working in a tractor factory in Jiangsu. His son ‘fell’ out of an upstairs window in Beijing University where he had been studying physics and has been paralysed from the waist down ever since. After Mao died in 1976, there was a protracted power struggle before Deng emerged triumphant three years later. Paradoxically, he succeeded by resigning. It forced his opponents to resign as well, whilst he continued to manipulate real power from behind the scenes. One of his first steps was to start to rehabilitate many of the people who were unjustly attacked during the Cultural Revolution and insist on the trial of the Gang of Four, the chief protagonists of the chaos, led by Jiang Qing, Mao’s third wife. There was a televised trial lasting several weeks where Madame Mao repeatedly shouted down the judges and refused to recognize their right to try her. She claimed that she was acting on Mao’s orders and that the court had no authority to question him: ‘I was Mao’s dog,’ she said. ‘What he said “bite”, I bit.’ She was sentenced to death ‘suspended for two years to see if she would behave’ and spent the next twelve years in jail, making cloth dolls, until she committed suicide in 1991.

  Deng was incredibly tough. It seemed as if he was made of an indestructible material, a kind of political tungsten carbide, and, by the time he emerged as China’s paramount leader, he was well into his mid-seventies.

  After Tiananmen Square, the Chinese economy had crashed and businesses everywhere faced very difficult times. Most were starved of cash as the Government tried to rein in State lending. Whilst Deng was no liberal, he was a pragmatist and realized years before his Russian counterparts that if the Chinese Communist Party was to survive, it had to deliver the economic goods. Tiananmen Square had shown that he would not shrink from using force, but he knew that in the longer term power grew from rising living standards rather than from the barrel of a gun. Immediately after the crisis, the Government had slammed the brakes on the economy, but by mid-1991 Deng had had enough of the austerity and wanted to get back on track. Even though he had won the battle for the top place in the Chinese hierarchy, Deng could not just set policy as he pleased, and when he tried to recharge the economy he faced serious opposition from the conservatives.

  The battle raged on behind the walls of the Party compounds throughout the months towards Chinese New Year in 1992. After months of infighting, Deng had had enough and he decided to seize the initiative. At the age of eighty-eight, he gave China one last shove towards further reform by grabbing centre stage from his opponents. Just as Mao had done at the start of the Cultural Revolution when he travelled to Wuhan and swam across the Yangtse, Deng achieved a huge shift in policy by a seemingly insignificant event: he went on holiday and planted a tree.

  On what is now written into Communist Party folklore as Deng’s ‘Southern Tour’, he arrived at Shenzhen Station in the southern seaside town next to Hong Kong with his family and went sightseeing. At a theme park the next day, he planted a tree for the cameramen and repeated his old slogan, ‘To get rich is glorious.’ Proceeding regally up the coast, he toured factories and visited the huge new development zone in Shanghai. Behind the scenes, the struggle intensified and Deng held meetings at Cadre Training Schools and Party Committees all along the coast. He talked directly to local officials about the need to ‘guard against the left’, and pushed his agenda for greater reform.

  Back in Beijing, his octogenarian opponents watched these antics in horror; they knew that Deng had deliberately bypassed all the normal Party structures and had reached out directly to local officials. They also quickly realized that they were fighting a losing battle; the rank and file liked what Deng had to say and the tide was against them. Although it was several weeks before anyone dared to publish the story of Deng’s trip in the Chinese press, the news that he wanted more reform and further ‘opening up’ of the economy eventually broke and by April the country was in a state of great excitement. I remember several meetings of my Chinese work colleagues when they went off to study the latest bulletins. China appeared to be on the move again.

  Deng’s speeches that spring galvanized the whole country into action and officials everywhere set up investment zones and held trade fairs to attract foreign investors. By the end of the year, the news that China’s growth rates were on the rise had filtered through to the world outside. The New York bankers started arriving in Hong Kong in their pinstripes and tasselled loafers, intent on setting up offices as a launching pad into China. Specialist investment companies appeared overnight in Hong Kong, all fighting for press coverage. Barton Biggs, one of Wall Street’s most influential money allocators, arrived in town and told the newspapers, ‘After six days in China, I’m tuned in, overfed and maximum bullish.’ In the next few days, as his words flashed across the wires in America, two billion dollars sloshed into Hong Kong’s stock market and share prices went through the roof. Investors started to gather huge amounts of capital to put to work on the mainland and, by the time I went back to Andersen that summer, there were millions of dollars sitting in ‘China Funds’ in Hong Kong all trying to find a way into the Middle Kingdom.

  My job was to help these investors find projects in China so the first thing I did was call up all my old contacts in Beijing. Over the next few months I shuttled back and forth between Hong Kong and the mainland, visiting Shanghai, Wuhan, Chongqing, Tianjin, anywhere I could get a meeting with officials. Given the overall hype, it wasn’t difficult to find a receptive audience. At each of these places, I’d go through my pitch, explaining that there were large amounts of money sitting in Hong Kong and that my job was to help invest it in China. Everyone I met seemed keen to get in on the act and promised to introduce me to good businesses needing expansion capital. ‘If you give me a few weeks, I’ll organize a tour of all our best factories,’ they’d say. But as the months went on, and I went back on second or third visits, they just kept talking, talking, talking. It was the same old story without anything actually happening. Endless tales like, �
�My cousin runs an aspirin factory in Jilin, and they really want to do a joint venture.’ But I could never actually get anyone to do anything. One man out of all those I spoke to was different.

  * * *

  Ai Jian was in his early forties when I met him. He was one of the ‘lost generation’, the people born just after Liberation who were swept up in the madness of the Cultural Revolution during their teens. The universities and schools had been closed for nearly ten years and, just like millions of others, Ai had been sent to the countryside to work in the fields.

  He was born in Jining in the eastern province of Shandong and later moved up to the capital, Beijing. His father, who was well educated, had been assigned to be the Party Secretary of a tank factory up in Harbin so the family had moved on to the north when Ai was a boy. It was a familiar story: a comfortable, even privileged childhood blown apart by the Cultural Revolution. Like almost everyone else of his age, Ai had been seduced by the excitement of those first heady days in the late summer of 1966, and he had joined the Red Guards.

  Ai had soon been brought down to reality. After his father was targeted, the family fled back to Beijing to hide with relatives. A group of Red Guards from a rival faction travelled the seven hundred miles back to Beijing to find him and, terrified that the whole family might be arrested, Ai’s father gave himself up. The Red Guards dragged him back to Harbin where he endured years of humiliation and physical abuse. Ai told me that on one occasion after the Red Guards had ‘struggled’ against him for hours, his father had died.