This get-it-now instinct has been officially sanctioned, and one of the features of society that old gweilos lament is the absence of politeness, real or pretended. I was on half a dozen airplane flights in China, and each time the plane began to descend, people threw off their seat belts, jumped up, and staggered forward to be first off the plane. Flight attendants howled and the passengers retreated, but when the attendants backs were turned, the people were up again, gathering their bags, moving unsteadily down the aisle of the still taxiing plane. Traffic in Chinese cities or on congested roads can be seen to push and compete in the same way, beeping and lane-jumping, darting into any available space.
There was still a standoff at the Canon factory. After a three-day work stoppage, the eight hundred strikers were back on the job while talks continued. Workers know it is a losing battle, however, because there will always be Chinese lining up for jobs at low wages. The government has made it very nearly a duty for its nationals to work uncomplainingly. And foreign companies will continue to bring manufacturing to China.
Yet Zhuhai, on its breezy bay, was one of the pleasanter places I saw. It had beaches and parks and a main drag. In every restaurant and hotel lobby bar, Chinese talked on cellular phones. Five years ago it was almost impossible to make a telephone call from the best hotel. The boom in telecommunications is part of the Chinese miracle, and even prostitutes wear beepers.
The yellow trade was brisk in Zhuhai. The city's somewhat steamy reputation no doubt derived from its proximity to Macau, as Shenzhen's derived from Hong Kong. But the present concern with manufacturing and the downplaying of tourism has meant that the vice business is mainly for locals or visiting provincials. A foreign tourist industry would have produced much larger numbers of massage parlors and call girls, more vicious practices, much higher prices. The narrow lanes in Gong Bei were the haunt of skinny hookers in shorts and high heels, and they circulated among the outdoor restaurants and sidewalk cafés and the men selling live snakes — xiao long, little dragons—out of baskets (500 yuan each, for the thick ones they called "Cross Mountain Blacks"). Fengboshan Park was popular among transients and seniors, and in a vice raid while I was in Zhuhai ten men were arrested, the eldest seventy-two. After the madam blabbed, her rates were published. Full sexual intercourse cost up to 60 yuan (around $10), bosom-touching was 10, and "nude peeks" were 5. As in other parts of China, barbershops and hairdressers were the cover for "relaxation services"—masturbation at 50 yuan.
In Zhuhai I was able to verify the rumor about expensive brandy. I found some likely bottles at the Zhuhai Merchandise Fair and asked to examine them. They were crystal decanters of Rémy Martin Louis XIII Grande Champagne Cognac, more than $1,000 a bottle.
"Do you sell many of these?" I asked.
"About four a month."
"Any to gweilos?"
"No. All to Chinese."
Later that day I marveled about this to a Chinese woman, who said to me, "When Americans first came to China, we thought they were rich. Now we are rich."
This remark developed into a discussion about envy among a number of Chinese. Several of them maintained that there was very little envy in the new, prosperous China.
"If a person gets rich, the attitude is, good luck to him," one said. "If I work hard, I'll get rich too."
"You don't burn a man's house down because he has a better one than you," another Chinese said. "There is even a sense that the rich man might help you."
Just as confidently, this view was contradicted by a man who described hong yen bing, or "red eye disease," a chronic condition in China whereby the envious person stared greedily at anyone who had more than he did.
Most of the speakers agreed that the wealthiest people in China were hidden. They were not the ones talking on cellular phones or buying expensive brandy and wearing Rolexes. They were perhaps living as they always had, except that they were squirreling their money away, preferably in hard currency (currency dealers thronged every sidewalk in these economic zones, pestering passersby and offering twice the bank rate for Hong Kong dollars). People with disposable income bought gold, TVs, appliances. Some bought land. Many invested in the Shenzhen stock market. The $1,000-a-bottle brandy story was colorful but misleading. Many people saved to send their children abroad (there are now eighty thousand Chinese studying in the United States, the largest number from any single foreign nation).
Meanwhile, posters and radio lectures exhorted The Four Adheres:
Adhere to Marxist Leninism
Adhere to the Socialist Road
Adhere to Proletarian Dictatorship
Adhere to Party Leadership
"Do people repeat these things?" I asked a man in Xiamen.
I liked his answer: "Yes. Like the Bible."
I thought, Exactly, because that clearly reminded me of all the cant and hypocrisy that goes under the name of Christianity. And it was no different for the Chinese, who were able to parrot Party slogans while at the same time hustling on the black market or trying, as one man did, to run me down in his BMW while he talked on his cellular phone.
Xiamen was the third of the three Special Economic Zones, and in its way the prettiest, the least ruined, with more open space than the others. Modernity elsewhere in China had seemed slightly ridiculous and imitative, looking out of place and foolish. Much of Xiamen was unmodernized, and consequently retained its dignity. It had shop houses and hawkers, beggars, hookers, Buddhist nuns, rickshaws, and general confusion, as well as chugging ferries in the harbor. The old town remained—I had thought of it when I went there the first time as being one of the most attractive in China, with a busy waterfront and a lovely island, Gulangyu, just offshore, where venerable mansions of returned Chinese had been preserved and cars were forbidden. The island was marred only by its billboards (for Coca-Cola, Marlboro, and eighteen other products). These days even Chinese flocked to see it, to take the ferry and climb its ancient hill.
Xiamen was now five times bigger, both in area and population, than it had been five years ago, when I had first passed through. It had a McDonald's now, and while this fast-food place and a Hamburger City were just across the road from the traditional Fujianese restaurants that had menageries out front (live snakes, lizards, eels, frogs, and rabbits trapped in cages, waiting for diners to single them out to have their throats cut before they were skinned and cooked), the dull fact was that the mass of people did not eat either snakes or Big Macs. They went to bun and dumpling shops, to noodle stalls; they stuffed themselves with cheap candy and boiled rice and crackers; they slurped stewed vegetables at home, with their elbows on wobbly wooden tables.
I had been told that the large town of Shishi ("Stone Lion"), in the hinterland, was the center of the Fujianese yellow trade—not only prostitutes but contraband. I spent a whole day getting there, and it did seem odd for this large, prosperous place to be in the middle of nowhere. That was the point: Shishi flourished because it was off the map. You could buy anything in Shishi's markets, and its bars were far more louche than their counterparts in Xiamen. But what I remembered afterward was the long drive there: the pretty preserved town of Jimei with its handsome buildings, the brand-new walled-in eighteen-hole golf course surrounded by rice fields, vegetable gardens, and barefoot peasants. Every five miles or so we passed a school or college. Perhaps fifty miles into the countryside we came to strange junk villages, one village piled high with glass bottles, another with scrap iron, another with paper, another with rubber tires—a whole province of scrap, awaiting recycling. Then Shishi, and the realization that it simply had not existed a few years ago except as a wide place in the road.
Outside Xiamen I found my first sweatshop, the Rubber and Plastic Shoes Making Factory, a nightmare of squatting women and toxic fumes and bad light, where no one earned more than 200 yuan a month. I failed in my attempt to find convict or child labor, but people swore they existed and did not see much wrong with employing ten-year-olds or convicted criminals.
The Huli Indu
strial Zone was one of many outside Xiamen, where joint ventures flourished. One factory produced cigarettes. It was a huge success, an R. J. Reynolds partnership, with work for 1,100 and an annual profit of $33 million, making Camels as well as Youyi and Haima "peppermint type filtertip" cigarettes. Other factories were Pirelli Tires, Golden Dragon Auto Body, and United Clothing. This zone comprised about six square miles of factories, with two luxury hotels, on a grid of streets. Every factory was booming. Dynasty Optical, for example, contracted to make designer frames and sunglasses under license. The workers got the standard 400 yuan a month, and the frames were shipped to America and Europe, where they retailed (because of the quality and the famous label) for hundreds of dollars. I kept thinking of the Italian man at the Canton Trade Fair: China is the manufacturer for the world. How had it happened that the Chinese had taken over? Simple, perhaps. Foreign investment was invited. Factories got built. The Chinese workers showed up on time. They accepted the lowest wages. They didn't protest. They were not religious. Because of their peculiar political indoctrination, they were totally materialistic.
China's cityscapes reminded me of those of my childhood—just as busy, just as fully employed and go-ahead, just as ugly and confusing. There had been a time when all American cities looked like Xiamen's industrial zones, with street after street of factory buildings. They are lighted, working versions of the mills in Massachusetts that fell into dereliction after World War II. Fall River had them, so did New Bedford, Lawrence, and Brockton; they still have them—the structures have been revived now as factory outlets, selling designer-label Chinese-made goods. South China's cities would be familiar to anyone who has lived in an urban area in Europe or America, where the factories are now empty and the machines are stopped. Not just Boston and Chicago, but Bradford and Manchester in England, and Derry in Northern Ireland, and so many others. China is doing it now, for everyone.
In the 1950s Raytheon was the great patron and employer of high school graduates in Boston and its suburbs. Raytheon manufactured electronics equipment. I often heard it said, approvingly, of people I knew, "He's got a job at Raytheon. He's pulling down good money. He'll be all right." In Xiamen, in the Huli Industrial Zone, one of the booming factories bore the sign Raytheon.
China has succeeded because China is at work. The world has put it to work and has invested in it, and the world has received a return on its investment. Most people reading this are wearing a Chinese-made shirt, or sweater, or trousers, or pair of shoes. Traditional Nantucket baskets are Chinese. Carved Christmas decorations are Chinese. Our do-it-yourself tools are Chinese. Our children's toys are Chinese. Our bikes. High-fashion beaded dresses are Chinese. Ninja Turtles are Chinese. The tires on our cars are Chinese. Many Japanese electronic goods are assembled in China.
"In the nineteenth century," Michael Lind wrote in The National Interest, "corporations in European lands of settlement would actually import coolie labor from China and India by the thousands to compete with home-country nationals for jobs, driving down wage rates. In the twenty-first century, corporations may take the jobs to the coolies, as it were, rather than bringing the coolies to the jobs. The result is the same—the lowering of developed-country wage costs towards Third World levels—only the rhetoric is new."
This has already happened.
What next? is never asked in China, but outside the country the question is on everyone's lips. That the answer is unknowable does not stop people from speculating. I am one of those speculators.
When countries modernize these days they become Americanized and often lose their cultural identity. China is exceptional. The more China develops, the more it seems to be turning back into the old China—just as regional and unequal and busily self-sufficient and hard to read as ancient Chung Guo. As it modernizes, it reveals a greater complexity and a deeper Chineseness. The difference is that while in the past there had been an ethical sense—Confucianism or else patches of Christianity—it seems now completely materialistic, cannier, wiser, even selfish. The provinces of Guangdong and Fujian may have the oily, muddy look of old China, but except for filial piety they have few of China's old reverences, the Confucian virtues of refinement, gentleness, decency, and good order.
And there are the throwbacks that show in something as simple as tipping. In Maoist times it was not done. With the influx of tourists and businessmen in the 1980s some tipping was acceptable. Now a gratuity is expected when a transaction takes place or service is given. There can be an ugly scene when a tip is not offered, and in a new permutation, for many services the tip comes before any act is performed. In a very short time in China tipping has turned into bribery. Or is it bribery? After all, this is the East. Perhaps a tip has become what it has been in this hemisphere for thousands of years: baksheesh. Not a reward, but grease.
The pressure to get things done quickly has bred crime. With bad roads and slow services and backed-up deliveries, grease helps. Many people I spoke to in China, foreign and Chinese alike, said that payoffs were an absolute necessity for a smooth business operation. Their view was that prosperity without crime is almost unthinkable. Obviously, corruption is not new in China, but it has become pervasive, and China's biggest single social problem will continue to be crime. The triads, crime syndicates, and secret societies that flourished in China for centuries, and seemed to be stamped out, have returned—many from Hong Kong and Taiwan, where these ritualistic brotherhoods and protection rackets were reconstituted. The highwaymen and cat burglars are back, too. As recently as seven or eight years ago, you could have confidently sent your eighteen-year-old daughter traipsing all over China alone. No longer. China has become unsafe; I feel it will become even more so. But then, for thousands of years it was a country famous for its perimeters—behind the Great Wall were more walls, walled compounds and fortified cities. These days, look at any new housing development of condominiums, apartments, or single-family dwellings and you will see high perimeter walls.
Outside these walls are the poor, some of them predatory, most of them simply pathetic. The poor subsistence farmers in neglected provinces have never known prosperity in the whole of Chinese history. It is doubtful that life will change for them. In the cities, the struggle will go on, but such extreme class divisions will certainly re-create even more of the old China—more conspicuous wealth and ownership and a deeper oppression, of which the client and his prostitute are one version, the factory owner and his sweatshop another.
No one owned gold in Maoist China—there was none to buy—but before Liberation the Chinese had always been great buyers of gold and jewelry. The habit is back. It is not greed, just another technique of survival, a Chinese way of concentrating wealth. In the past, during periods of famine or war or repression, the Chinese—the most portable of people—picked up a small bundle of their belongings and fled for their safety and well-being. Not all Chinese have gold in their little bundles, but some do. Others pay it in advance to men who smuggle them out of China and into other countries. As recent events have shown, the United States is a prime destination for Chinese illegal aliens. U.S. immigration officials estimate that 100,000 undocumented Chinese arrive each year on our shores, and the number is rising.
With crime and class and immigration linked, it is not hard to envision the future of Chinese tensions. Already China is corrupt and its provinces unequally rewarded. Although the Tibetans are oppressed and occasionally volatile, and there are discontented Muslims in Xinjiang, it is hard to imagine any change in their status. China does not thrive on chaos, because the Chinese are not blame shifters, not confrontational, not litigious. These days the Chinese who are aggrieved or ambitious can travel throughout China in search of work. Many yearn to emigrate, the perennial solution to Chinese misery. This fact, of many millions of people out of sympathy with the destiny of their country and eager to come to America, seems to me to be of overwhelming significance. But if emigration becomes impossible in a climate of economic confusion and rising or thw
arted expectations, then I believe there will be real chaos in China. It will be hell for them. It will be hell for the whole world.
Ghost Stories: A Letter from Hong Kong on the Eve of the Hand-over
I
HERE COMES the ghost man," someone muttered in the herbalist's waiting room on Sugar Street, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong Island, as I limped in, foot swollen, toe joints inflamed. Piled high with trays containing bark and twigs and leaves, Dr. Gwai's office smelled like a hamster cage. The mutter went around the room, "Go gor gweilo lay lai."
The word gweilo is usually translated as "foreign devil." The non-Cantonese speaker thinks of a little red monster with horns and a pitchfork, but no, gwei means "ghost" (a gwei gwu is a ghost story). The ghost can be malevolent or benign. It is invisible. And now that Hong Kong has begun to seem haunted, and foreigners (especially the British) have become more and more invisible, the word gweilo has acquired an aptness and a novelty, and ever more suitably describes the white folk on these last imperial days before the 234 offshore islands (Hong Kong Island is one, some others are mere rocks) and the parts of the mainland known as Kowloon and the New Territories cease to be British Hong Kong and would become (as specified in the 1984 Joint Declaration, the Anglo-Chinese hand-over agreement) the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. After that, the gweilos will definitely be ghosts.
"People here have used the word gweilo more freely since the signing of the Joint Declaration," a Hong Kong woman told me, as she explained the meaning. "It used to be our secret word for white people, but now it is used in a sort of friendly way."
Like "Chinky-chonk," gweilo is basically affectionate.
The white people (for whom a politer term is sai-yahn, "Western persons") number around 124,000. Hong Kong's population is 6.2 million, spread over 413 square miles, nearly all of the people Cantonese-speaking ethnic Chinese. The present paradox is that in almost every case, these people—or their parents or grandparents—came to the colony to escape the political convulsions of the People's Republic, from the late 1940s, just before China's independence, to the subsequent reigns of terror—the Campaign for Religious Reform, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, and others. The Great Leap Forward (1958–62), chronicled by Jasper Becker in Hungry Ghosts, produced pure horror: wide-scale famine, murder, even cannibalism. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese at a time rushed to Hong Kong, as they were to do some years later, during and after the Cultural Revolution. Typically, when people flee China they head first for Hong Kong. They are still sneaking over the border: almost every day an illegal immigrant ("eye-eye" in local parlance) is captured in Hong Kong.