Riding the Iron Rooster

"Not condemned them to death, if that's what you mean," I said. "Anyway, don't you make a distinction between political violence and criminal violence? Let's suppose these men, whoever they are, were Palestinians. That's an army of liberation, isn't it?"

"We would regard what they did in Berlin as terrorism," Comrade Ning said. "That is a crime. Armed struggle," he went on, using the Maoist term for people's war, "is another matter. That is legitimate."

He could not be budged from wishing to execute every pimp and hooligan, along with every strangler and arsonist. He maintained that such drastic action kept the crime rate down. It was Maoism at its most anti-Confucian. Confucius abhorred capital punishment and had always been regarded by Maoists as a dangerous softie for his humane views (as in Analects XII, 19). But even a relatively open-minded man like Deng Xiaoping has revealed himself to be an energetic hangman, clinging to the Chinese belief in the efficacy of "killing a chicken to scare the monkeys." In a pep talk to the five-man standing committee of the politburo (and reprinted in a book of his talks and speeches entitled Fundamental Issues in Present-Day China), Deng said, "As a matter of fact, execution is the one indispensable means of education."

Returning to the subject of money, Comrade Ning said that he did not think there were financial problems in this new go-ahead money-making economy. The government would control the work force, protect the workers, tax the people getting rich and in general supervise all businesses. He said it seemed to him much more serious that prices were rising, in some cases to double-digit inflation—he used that English term in his Chinese sentence. But salaries were also rising. His wife knew a draftswoman in her native town of Wuxi who earned 300 yuan a month. That was regarded as a high salary, but most of it came from bonuses, because she was productive.

"So, Comrade Ning, you're an optimist."

"Of course!"

"No dangerous social tendencies that you can see?"

"Yes, there are some. But we are trying to deal with them. The government has instituted a program called 'Spiritual Civilization.' Look at the posters and slogans. You'll see a big-character poster near Suzhou Creek..."

The Spiritual Civilization program was a direct response to various types of antisocial behavior that emerged after the relaxation of restrictions—the open door policy. It was started in 1985, and as Chinese dogma is always expressed in clusters, it was made up of The Five Talks and The Four Beauties.

The Five Talks were concerned with communication. They were: Politeness, Civil Behavior, Morality, Attention to Social Relations and Attention to the Hygiene of One's Surroundings. This was all to combat a slob-factor that had become very obnoxious; and the slobs who weren't changed by The Five Talks might be altered by considering The Four Beauties. These were Beautiful Language, Beautiful Behavior, Beautiful Heart and Beautiful Environment.

As a program and prescription it seemed rather twee, but it was a great deal better than the brutishness that was called for in Smashing The Four Olds (burning churches, turning monasteries into shoe factories, and so forth), or observing The Eight Antis—persecuting intellectuals, burning books, and making teachers wear dunce caps and having them recite "I am a cow demon" all day in front of a mocking classroom.

It was Comrade Ning who explained the Spiritual Civilization program to me. I liked him, and I was impressed by him. He knew what the world news was and he was hospitable to a total stranger. His tolerance was of course a willing suspension of disbelief—at heart he clung to Mao's Thoughts—but he was without greed or envy, and he didn't have the slightest trace of vanity. He wasn't a bully either, and I respected him for arguing with me.

But afterwards, I heard that his wife had been rather cross with him. She had been listening the whole time.

She said to him, "If we have any criticisms or doubts about the current policies we should keep them to ourselves and not talk to foreigners about them."

There is a Chinese conundrum. If a place has a reputation for being beautiful, the Chinese flock to it, and its beauty is disfigured by the crowd. If a train is very fast, like the Shanghai Express from Peking, everyone tries to take it, and it is impossible to get a seat. The same is true for restaurants: the good ones are jammed. And hotels. Reservations are unthinkable, and the worst of it is that you are sometimes laughed at for ever believing that you had a chance: the Chinese can be extremely rude in turning you away—the Chinese elbow is very sharp.

This conundrum is constant in Shanghai. For example, Shanghai is known to be a city of sidewalks—wonderful for pedestrians, an excellent city for perambulating. Therefore, everyone walks; and the mobs are impenetrable.