Riding the Iron Rooster

A Cantonese man had entered my compartment. He was panting, fossicking in his knapsack. He looked simian and strange. He spoke no language but his own. He climbed into the upper berth and rattled his bags. I turned the light out. He turned it back on. He slurped tea out of his jam jar and harumphed. He noisily left the compartment and returned wearing striped pajamas. It was midnight and yet he was still leaping back and forth, once narrowly missing my glasses with his prehensile foot as he used the table as a foothold. I went to sleep and woke at about three in the morning. The man was reading, using a flashlight, and muttering softly. I slept very little after that.

I felt just as grouchy as Mr. Fang in Canton, and so I decided to stay awhile and not make any onward bookings. It is wrong to see a country in a bad mood: you begin to blame the country for your mood and to draw the wrong conclusions.

I had once laughed to think that there were luxury hotels in Canton, with delicatessens and discotheques. The Chinese there had taken up weight lifting; they had body-building magazines. The White Swan Hotel had hamburgers and a salad bar. The China Hotel had an air-conditioned bowling alley. Now it did not seem odd to think that people would go to China to shop, to eat, or to go bowling.

Mr. Fang said nervously, "No more trains?"

"Not at the moment."

"Maybe you will go home?"

"Maybe."

Was he smiling?

"I will take you to the station," he said. "Chinese custom. Say good-bye."

"That's not necessary, Mr. Fang. Why not take the plane back to Peking?"

"There is one leaving tomorrow morning," he said. He was eager.

"Don't worry about me," I said.

He seemed reluctant, but he said no more. I bought him a picture book about Guilin, and that evening, spotting him in the lobby, I gave it to him. He did not unwrap it. He slipped it under his arm, then gave me his sad sea-lion stare and said, "Yes," and shook my hand. "Bye-bye," he said, in English, and then abruptly turned away. It is not a reminiscing race, I thought. He kept walking. He did not look back.

Then, because this was Canton, I went bowling.

13: The Peking Express: Train Number 16

And then there were a number of public events that shocked the country. I did not set off immediately. It is so easy to be proven wrong in China. No sooner had I concluded that China was prospering and reforming, that people were freer and foreign investment rising, than the country was in crisis. True, some aspects of China never changed—the rice planters bent double, the weeder on his stool, the boy pedaling his 2000-year-Old irrigation pump, the buffalo man, the duck-herd. But in the months before I left Canton to resume my Chinese travels, the yuan was devalued by thirty percent—instead of three to the dollar there were now almost four—and the black market in hard currency was very brisk, and the most common greeting "Shansh marnie?" People were criticized for wanting to go abroad, and a law was passed requiring potential students to post a bond of 5000 yuan—an enormous sum—before they could study in another country. Foreign investment dropped by twenty percent, and Deng Xiaoping criticized Chinese manufacturers for producing shoddy goods that no one wanted.

And the students demonstrated, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. The demonstrations were orderly, but the defiance implicit in such illegal gatherings was seen to be a sign of chaos. The Chinese horror of disorder made them seem important, though I felt the parades and demands were mostly half-baked. Traditionally, December and January have been regarded by the Chinese as appropriate months for disruption, and so there was a ritual end-of-term element in the demonstrations—high spirits, funny hats, a measure of farce. The grievances were numerous, and on posters and in their chanting, the students demanded press freedom, electoral re-form, a multiparty system, and official permission to demonstrate. Banners reading We Want Democracy were flown. They demanded sexual freedom and better food in the university cafeterias. Eight cities were affected, and the size of the demonstrations varied from a few hundred students in Canton to well over 100,000 (and an equal number of spectators) in Shanghai, which came to a standstill for a full day.

The Chinese government, with its liking for scapegoats (so much more economical than a full-scale witch-hunt), blamed one man for the country-wide outbreak. This was Dr. Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist and vice president of the National Science and Technical University in Hefei. He had been very busy. He had written articles in China Youth News criticizing students for having "low democratic consciousness." He lectured his own students at Hefei, and just a month before the demonstrations he had addressed students at Jiaotong University in Shanghai.