Riding the Iron Rooster

I stayed in Shanghai a while longer. I bought an old goldfish bowl at the antique shop. I saw a truly terrible Chinese movie: it was violent and thoroughly philistine. It rained. People talked about the power struggle in the inner Party. They were not cynical or indifferent to such big changes—the expulsions and resignations—but since they could do nothing about them they had to accept them. The rain began to leak into my soul. I walked through the rat's maze of back lanes near the cathedral and got glimpses of ancient China in the drizzle. I was happiest those nights, trudging alone in the rain, glancing into windows, seeing people ironing and making noodles and pasting up the red banners for the Chinese New Year, watching people roistering in cheap steamy restaurants and strangling chickens. It was wonderful to be anonymous those dark nights in Shanghai, when no one could see my face, and I heard a mother scolding a child with "Where have you been?"

20: The Night Train to Xiamen: Number 375

It was the familiar exit from Shanghai, the main line through the cabbagey province of Zhejiang and tarted-up Hangzhou, the haunt of tourists and nifty little Japanese; and as soon as the hills appeared the sun slid behind them and night fell. There were three Chinese in my compartment when I pulled the blanket over my head, but by morning only one remained. This was Mr. Ni. He explained that the others had gotten off at Yingtan, when the train turned left onto the spur line through Fujian, the coastal province that faces Taiwan. Mr. Ni was also going to Xiamen, and even referred to it (for my benefit) by its old name, Amoy.

He was beginning work on an offshore dredging operation. He explained that he was a surveyor and that he disliked south China. It was his sorry fate to have been posted here for two years. He was Shanghai born and bred and had all of that city's characteristic bumptiousness—he was blunt, offhand, presumptuous and fluent. He regarded himself as cultured. Southerners were yokels, in his view. They were greedy. That was why so many of them had left China. (It was true the world was full of spirited and hard-working Fujianese.) We were at Zhangzhou, where tangerines grow.

"In Shanghai we are sick for knowledge," Mr. Ni said. "But these Amoy people are only interested in making money. That is their main characteristic. They don't like reading or education. Just business."

A moment later, Mr. Ni asked me if I wanted to change money—my Foreign Exchange Certificates for his renminbi. Or did I want an interpreter in Xiamen? Or he could accompany me on my way. He had taught himself English and wanted to practice it. Also—he repeated—what about changing money?

Mr. Ni was invaluable to me that day in unraveling the news of the political confusion in the People's Daily. Such subtle news did not get into the English-language China Daily. The first interesting item quoted a high politburo member, Li Peng, as saying, "The Party has full confidence in intellectuals."

An intellectual in China is someone with a high-school education, doing a white-collar job. It is not a bespectacled nerd who sits around sipping tea and quoting Mencius. In the way that Chinese society is more easily defined by negatives, an intellectual is not a factory worker or a peasant farmer. He (or she) is a person who can read and write, who does not get his hands dirty.

The main report in the paper was of Zhao Ziyang: a strong implication that he had taken Hu Yaobang's place. He had been elevated by Deng. That was incontestable. He had met a Hungarian delegation—meeting such delegations had been Mr. Hu's old job. But the clearest sign that he had displaced Mr. Hu completely was his unambiguous criticism of Mr. Hu.

He said that Mr. Hu had been "incapable of fighting against Westernization"; that he had sought "to push political reforms too far," and—in an unusual burst of frankness from a Chinese leader—that Mr. Hu "had been warned several times over the years."

It was obvious that Mr. Zhao was in the ascendant and that Mr. Hu was on his way to becoming a nonperson. Mr. Zhao was a natty dresser—he nearly always wore a Western suit and tie. He jogged. But he was careful to distance himself from Westernization, which was almost synonymous with bourgeois liberalization. It had already taken hold, and seemed at the moment to be irreversible. And because its adherents—so-called intellectuals—were nervous, displeased and demoralized, Mr. Zhao had to be especially enigmatic.

Mr. Ni and I puzzled over the paper, and then I asked him what he thought would happen? Would Mr. Zhao ultimately replace Deng Xiaoping?

"I do not know," he said, and raised his hands in surrender: it was the Chinese funk when considering the future. After the shocks and reverses that had surprised the Chinese, only an ignoramus would risk making a fool of himself in speculating on what was to come.