Riding the Iron Rooster

The Datong factory was like a vast blacksmith's shop, the sort of noisy, filthy and dangerous factory that existed in the United States in the 1920s. Because none of it is automated, it is indestructible: if a bomb dropped on it today they could be back at work tomorrow. It is essentially just a complex of sheds, but one that covers a square mile. Men squat in fireboxes, hunched over blowtorches; they crawl in and out of boilers, slam bolts with hammers, drag axles and maneuver giant wheels overhead using pulleys. You have to look at the locomotive works very hard to see that it is an assembly line and not pandemonium. And you have to step carefully: there are gaping holes in the floor, and sharp edges, and hot metal; few of the workers wear hard hats or boots. Mostly it is cloth caps and slippers—thousands of frail but nimble workers scampering among hunks of smoking iron to the tune of "The Anvil Chorus."

These workers earn 100 yuan a month, basic pay—about $40—but there are bonus and incentive schemes for high productivity.

Mr. Tan, a worker who was showing me around, said, "Workers in higher positions earn more."

"I thought everyone earned the same."

"Not anymore. The basic pay might be the same, but one of the reforms in China is the bonuses. They vary according to your position and the kind of work you do, and also to where you live and what prices are like."

This sliding pay scale was more or less heretical, but it was the way the Chinese economy now operated. I asked Mr. Tan if this reform of the pay structure had been successful.

He was very open with me. He shrugged and said, "Datong is behind in many ways—say, with regard to pay and conditions. This is an out-of-the-way place. There are many things that can be improved here. Other parts of China are much better off, particularly in the south."

As we talked, donkey carts carried heavy iron fittings through the factory, the donkeys sniffing the fires of the forges and looking miserable but resigned.

Mr. Tan gave me more statistics. At best statistics are misleading, but Chinese ones are like hackneyed adjectives—a million of this, two million of that—and ultimately meaningless and improbable.

"Eighty-six blocks of flats," he said, but so what? The flats are dark and dingy, in bad repair, with coal piles stacked against the kitchen door, and cracked walls, and painted-out slogans, and two beds in every room. The rarest room in China is one that does not contain a bed.

"This hospital has one hundred and thirty rooms," he said. But the hospital is not a pretty place: it is drafty, and not particularly clean, and it is very noisy.

The oddest feature of the Datong Locomotive Works is the portrait of Chairman Mao in the visitors' room. There are very few portraits of Mao on view in China, though another grand Chinese statistic is that there were 70 million Mao portaits hanging at the time of his death in 1976. Deng Xiaoping regards all portraits as feudal and instituted a no-portrait policy in 1981 at a Party Congress that summed up the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution.

"What did you do with your Mao portraits?" I asked Mr. Tan.

"Threw them away."

"Why didn't you keep them with your souvenirs?"

"Because I didn't want to remember."

The slogans on the banners in the factory were not political. Many were about safety, and others about working together. One said Workers Should Go All Out for the Three Greatest Goals. I asked what these goals were and was told: timing production so that no work was wasted; keeping the right mental attitude; and increasing productivity. Their virtue was their vagueness. In the past—the recent past—factory slogans had been concerned with Mao worship and smashing imperialists and their running dogs.

It seemed to me that, as this was a machine shop, any machine could be made here. The same technology that produced these boilers and pipes could produce military tanks and cannons.

'That's true," Mr. Tan said. "But we already have a factory that makes tanks in Datong."

I did not know whether his telling me this military secret was deliberate candor or simple innocence, but whatever it was I liked him for it; and I asked him more questions.

Mr. Tan was about thirty, but looked older. The Chinese look young until their mid-twenties and then they begin to look very haggard and beaten. A certain serenity returns to their features when they are in their sixties, and they go on growing more graceful and dignified and become not old, but ageless. Mr. Tan had been through the Cultural Revolution and had been a Red Guard in Datong.

"But I was a follower, not a leader."

"Of course."

"I'm glad it's over. When Mao died, it ended, but then we had a few more years of uncertainty," he said. And then, glancing around the great clanging factory, he added, "But there are people on the Central Committee who would like to take over from Deng and run things their way."

"Is that bad?"