Riding the Iron Rooster

His wife gave me a bowl of sweet lumps made of puffed rice. "You'll like them. They're Mongolian."

They tasted exactly like the concoction you see described on the back of cereal boxes in the States: Tastee 'n' Fun-licious Dessert Idea That Will Have Those Kids Asking for More!!! They were sticky and crunchy.

Picking fragments out of my teeth, I said that if he had been in the New Fourth Army he must have come across the song, "Baking the Cakes."

"My wife and I can sing that song," Comrade Ning said.

I told them I had met the man who had composed it—Zhang Mei, in Peking—and how we had talked about the patriotic songs in which the Japanese had been referred to as ghosts, rapists, robbers, devils and so forth.

"I have nothing personal against the Japanese," Comrade Ning said, "and I have no objection to their doing business in China. But there is'a militaristic element in Japanese society—that is something we have to be very careful of. Apart from that, the Chinese and Japanese have a great deal in common."

I said that when I had been in China six years before it had seemed very different, but that there had been a sort of equality in poverty. I said, "Doesn't it worry you that some people are getting rich—and a few people very rich?"

"You know about the watermelon tycoon?"

Wang had told me the story. A penniless peasant who knew the Chinese fondness for eating watermelon seeds started a small business that grew and grew. He hired workers, he bought land, he made millions; and then he bullied his workers, the government taxed him heavily, and recently he had renounced all his millions and returned to his peasant life. A moral fable in the form of a play was written about him and staged with government approval. It was called The March of a Foolish Man.

"He was a fool," Comrade Ning said. "But there is nothing wrong with being rich. Our aim is for everyone to be rich."

"But surely wealth will produce a privileged class that will undermine the socialist state."

"In China, privilege is not bought with money," Comrade Ning said. "Power comes from the political sphere, not the financial sphere."

"What about cases of corruption—back-handers?" I said. The Chinese term is houmen—"backdoor" business.

"Of course, there are such cases. The danger is when people have an excessive regard for money." Up went Comrade Ning's skinny finger. "Man should manipulate money—money should not manipulate man."

We talked about corruption. There was a current example: a Chinese businessman who had been taking bribes and embezzling from the government was found guilty in a Shanghai court. His woman accomplice was given a long sentence, but he was executed—the Chinese way: a bullet in the back of the neck.

"He had Hong Kong connections," Comrade Ning said, as if this sordid fact explained everything.

"Do you think the death penalty might be regarded as a little severe in a case of stealing?"

Comrade Ning laughed at me for this. His teeth were yellow, and so were his long fingernails. "There is a certain amount of money that makes this case serious. If anyone steals this amount he has to be killed."

"So you believe in the death penalty?"

"It is a Chinese custom," Comrade Ning said. "If you kill someone you pay with your life. That is simple. And his was the same sort of serious crime."

That leap in logic was characteristic of Chinese thinking, and lao-dong gaizao (Rehabilitation Through Labor) had declined in popularity. I specifically wanted to know what Comrade Ning thought about capital punishment since, along with Deng's reforms, in the three years between 1983 and 1986, 10,000 people were executed in China—and not only murderers, but also rapists, arsonists, swindlers and thieves. On August 30, 1983, there was a public execution in Peking of 30 convicted criminals. It was held in a sports stadium, which held a cheering crowd of 60,000 people. Soon after, the list of capital criminals was widened to include pimps, spies, armed robbers, embezzlers and organizers of secret societies. It is easy to calculate the number of Chinese who receive the final solution (their hands are tied, they are forced to kneel before witnesses, and they are dispatched with one bullet to the occiput, where the neck joins the skull). Their photographs are always displayed in whatever town they lived in, often at the railway station or outside the post office. In the rogues' gallery tacked to these bulletin boards, a red mark appears beside the criminals who have been executed.

I said, "Personally I don't believe in the death penalty."

"Why not?" Comrade Ning asked.

"Because it's savage and it doesn't work."

"What would you have done with those terrorists that bombed the dance hall in Berlin a few weeks ago?"