Riding the Iron Rooster

"Yes," he said. "Things are much better. We should have more money to spend, but if we tighten our belts for a few years I think we'll see some results."

"Don't you think there could be a change for the worse when Deng dies?"

"No. He has already chosen his successors."

"So you don't see any problems?"

"Overpopulation is a problem. Traffic is a problem—already we have too many cars. We have to manage that. But we are doing well in many areas, like agriculture."

He said he liked what was happening to China. Chinese history was long, but it had distinct phases. This was a very tiny part of it, and it might be years before we could assess it. That reminded me of Mao's reply when someone had asked him about the French Revolution—what did he think of it? "It is too early to say," Mao said.

Mr. Zhang then told me some of his war stories, as we strolled down Wangfujing. He had been a translator for General Chen Yi who, in April 1946, had a top-level meeting with an American general whose name Mr. Zhang could not remember. Liu Shaoqi (later chairman of the People's Republic, and much later tortured to death by Red Guards) was also present at this meeting.

'The American general gave a carton of Camel cigarettes to General Chen Yi, and some chocolates to Liu Shaoqi, and a box of rations to me.

"'We are in Shandong,' General Chen Yi said. 'We have many fruit trees here. You have my permission to encourage Americans to open a fruit-canning factory here.' But they didn't accept the invitation.

'Then I gave them all a shock. I shook hands with the American general. The American translator did not dare to shake hands with General Chen Yi. Afterwards these Americans, who were members of UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), said to me, 'You're very progressive, comrade.'

"'All men are equal,' I said."

He was a nice man, and before we parted he said, 'The food at that restaurant wasn't very good, but I like this conversation. When you come back to Peking, come to my house and have some real Chinese food."

From the train Peking had looked impressive: a city on the rise, cranes everywhere, workmen scrambling across girders, and the thump of pile drivers going, Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo!

But when I went a little closer and walked around them, these new tenements looked very shaky. Some were made as if with a large-scale version of children's blocks, or put together out of three-room modules—a sort of gigantic building-puzzle kit. And it was dear why these prefab methods were being used. When a structure was put up from scratch, brick by brick, the windows were wonky and the doors weren't square and there were bulges in the walls, and the whole thing had a handmade look that the kinder architects call "the vernacular style."

"No one knows how long they'll last," an American in Peking told me. 'They might turn out to be like those Hong Kong buildings that were put up with spit and sawdust and fell down about a year later."

"Why do you think that?" I asked.

"Because most of them are being put up by people from Hong Kong."

Certainly the development called the Hua Guofeng Wall is beginning to crack. It is a hideous stretch of apartments and tower blocks that was put up as a prestige project by Mr. Hua before he was politically outmaneuvered by Mr. Deng. The buildings are not only mismatched and cracked and stained, but also, though only seven years old, have begun to fall down.

I nosed around a tall apartment block and fell into conversation with Mr. Zheng Douwan on the ninth floor. He said that everything was fine at the moment, but he was tentative and I knew there was more to say.

"Is it always fine?" I asked.

"Not in the summer," he said. "The water table is so low in Peking that the pressure is bad. We can only get water as high as the fifth floor. This is a fifteen-story building, so the people on the upper ten floors have to get water in buckets."

Droughts and water shortages are greatly feared in Peking, he told me: for the past six years the rainfall was way below average and the outlook this year was not good. (In the event, very little rain fell, though buildings continued to rise.)

Mr. Zheng said, "From the bath point of view it's like England in the thirties. There is no hot water in any of these flats. If you want a bath you heat a kettle and pour it into a tin bathtub. It is very inconvenient, but I don't complain because that is how everyone lives."

But not tourists, not high Party officials, and not the new classes of people with money—taxi drivers and some traders. In 1980 there were three taxi companies in Peking; now there are 230, with 14,000 taxis. All are controlled by the government or by official agencies, but the drivers do well out of it because the people who take taxis are generally foreigners and they pay in Foreign Exchange Certificates.