Riding the Iron Rooster

He kept his word, and the next day we drove to what had once been the Xi Guan (Western Pass) Commune. It was now called the Bright Pearl Cooperative. Its new name had come from a newspaper article that had been written praising it as "The Pearl of Shandong." It had 500 households—about 1500 people. It looked like a small township and was about twenty miles outside Yantai; it seemed an unprepossessing place. But as soon as I arrived, Party Secretary Ma Weihong told me that it was now an extremely wealthy cooperative. In 1971 the per capita income had been 100 yuan a year; this figure was now, in 1986, 9000 yuan. People had more money than they needed, and so each person was given a thousand a year and the rest was invested in the village.

How had they managed this phenomenal increase in their fortunes? Mr. Ma gave me a long explanation, but in effect he was saying that everything changed after the government got off the people's backs.

"During the Cultural Revolution this cooperative was a commune with a one-crop economy—wheat. That's all. We were capable of doing more, but we couldn't because the Parry would not permit it. After 1979 we began to diversify—new crops, a nursery, various industries, transport, commerce and a hotel. These projects were all profitable."

"You have more money, but do you have more purchasing power?" I explained the term to him.

Mr. Ma said, "It's true that prices are higher. But we have more than compensated for the rise."

"Couldn't you have achieved that high income with one crop if you had worked hard?"

"We worked hard," he said. "But the policy of one crop was incorrect."

"At the time, did you know that you were working to carry out an incorrect policy?"

"Yes, but it was the Cultural Revolution. We could not do anything about it," Mr. Ma said. "But now we have changed all that. We have more relationships with the free market. We are rich now."

It was so strange to hear a Chinese person utter this dangerous word.

I said, "Is it good to be rich?"

"Yes. Very good." He hadn't blinked. He was sitting with his arms folded. His expression said, Next question.

"But isn't that a capitalistic attitude?"

"No. You and I are on different roads, but we are going to the same place."

"Which place?"

"To more richness and wealth," Mr. Ma said, uttering more heresies. "Listen, we used to have a slogan, 'We should be rich together or we should be poor together.'"

"Do you still believe that?"

"Not exactly. I think if you can be rich your own way you should do it."

"Then you'll be bourgeois."

"There is absolutely no danger of that."

He spoke with such conviction that I could not think of any more questions. He was an older man. He had been in this place twenty years ago when it had been a poor commune. Who could blame him for gloating a little about the success of the place today? And I liked him for never saying /. He nearly always replied saying we; but it was a socialist we, not a royal we.

"What would you do if things continued to improve and you ended up with an enormous amount of money?"

"We would donate it to a poor village, or we would give it to the government in taxes."

I had met him in the big, drafty meeting room, and he had offered me some apples to eat that had been grown on the cooperative—one of the newer projects. They were firm and juicy. Mr. Ma said they were sent all over China. We walked ouside—Mr. Hu bringing up the rear—and he showed me the other money-making projects. This commune grew and sold mushrooms. It seemed a modest business, but I later learned that mushroom sales to the United States are phenomenal: most Pizza Hut mushrooms are from China.

I said, "During the Cultural Revolution, were intellectuals sent to work here on this commune?"

He shook his head. "No. Even this place was considered too good for them. Most intellectuals were sent into the countryside—to farms and into the mountains. They went to the most backward provinces, like Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu. And Mongolia. Lots of intellectuals ended up in Mongolia. They had to suffer. That's what we said."

"Do you think the suffering did them any good?"

Mr. Ma said, "The policy was incorrect."

And yet it was so natural. I thought of all the upstarts, know-it-alls, teachers, critics and book reviewers that I would love to have seen herded onto a train to Mongolia to shovel pig shit and live in barns. But of course I would be among them. In China, an intellectual is usually just someone who does not do manual labor. And there we would all be, digging holes, as a punishment for being so boring. It was an awful fate, but it was easy to imagine how the policy had come about. Everyone in his life has wished at one time or another for someone he disliked to be trundled off to shovel shit—especially an uppity person who had never gotten his hands dirty. Mao carried this satisfying little fantasy to its nasty limit.