Riding the Iron Rooster

'They're whistling in the dark. Most companies have withdrawn their top people. They had highly paid executives in China, but they haven't been making any money. So they pull out their expensive American yuppies and they put in Joe Chen from Hong Kong—you know the guy, middle-aged, brown suit, plastic briefcase. They say 'Go for it, Joe!' and he makes a dive, hits a brick wall and staggers back. 'Go for it, Joe!' they yell again. And he hits the wall again. But so what? He's only costing twenty or thirty thousand a year. That's the kind of guy operating now. The six-figure executive is gone."

To provoke this man Fliegle I said that the Chinese seemed very confident about doing business.

"I'm not talking about them—I'm talking about investor confidence, and that seems to be ebbing away. That's why the next three or four years are so crucial. Already companies have pulled out. They aren't philanthropists or idealists. They want to make money, and if they don't make it they'll leave. At the moment, China's in a big expansionist phase, but so far there hasn't been much of a return—nothing to justify great hopes or big investments. The bubble might burst, and if it does it's going to be hell here. We'll know inside five years whether it's going to work."

I found what this man said interesting because he had no political ideas at all—he was all practical and unsentimental about the quickest way to make a buck. It fascinated me to think that there were many Chinese who were just the same.

Some Chinese had begun to rob graves. One of the commonest and most frequently condemned crimes in south China, where the best graves were, was relic smuggling: digging up armor, weapons, pots, bronzes, silver and ornaments, and bringing them to Hong Kong. In just two years, from 1984 to 1986, over a hundred instances of smuggling had been foiled by the Chinese police—and 20,000 antiques recovered. These were not just family treasures but items filched from Tang and Han Dynasty tombs in Hunan. In some instances, there was a medieval kind of vandalism—farmers trampling on Han lyres and flutes because they had tiger motifs inscribed on them, which the farmers found "inauspicious." Or the sixty tombs in Hengyang County which were destroyed by pig keepers, who used the mausoleum bricks to make pigsties. But the majority of the artifacts uncovered or stolen from tombs became smuggled goods.

Typically, the valuable contraband is hustled to Hong Kong by boat, or in trucks, hidden under loads of Chinese cabbages. The destination is nearly always Hong Kong—none of this stuff is ever sold in China.

There are almost no antiques of any value, or of any real age, for sale in China. It is illegal to sell anything older than 150 years—that is, anything earlier than the corny imitative and degraded late Qing stuff. For Tang celadons, Ming bowls, even ancient terra-cotta and neolithic figures, Hong Kong is the place, and Hong Kong is busier now than it has ever been, because the smuggling is so intense.

"Nowadays, the Chinese know it's valuable," an antique dealer told me. 'They used to sell it to the state, but they don't anymore—the state prices are too low. And it's this new attitude. Everyone's in business. Everyone is digging. They're looking for another Xian, another terra-cotta army—but this one they're going to sneak into Hong Kong. You'll see it in the shops in Hollywood Road and Cat Street. Already I am seeing the most incredible pieces—you wouldn't see them in the Victoria and Albert Museum, I'm not kidding. They are looting tombs, stealing from graves, digging holes. There has never been a period like this."

It was very easy to say what China wasn't. It wasn't a frenzied and fanatical slogan-chanting mob of workers and peasants. It wasn't very political—people rolled their eyes and began to yawn at the mention of Mao. It wasn't particularly well built, and indeed had some of the shoddiest-looking apartment houses I had ever seen. It wasn't a country with lovely cities—and even much of the countryside looked torn apart and scalped. It wasn't very orderly, it wasn't quiet, it wasn't democratic. It wasn't what it had been—particularly here in Canton. That was obvious.

But it was hard to say what China was. Perhaps there was an intimation of hope in its complexity, but it was maddening for me to sit there watching the Cantonese rain come down and not to know what this all meant. And then I got a big dose of people attitudinizing—there was probably more of it in Canton than anywhere else because Canton had more foreign visitors—and I thought: I'll just write it down and keep my own mouth shut, and I'll keep moving through China, going everywhere the train goes, to the highest and lowest places, the hottest, the coldest, the driest, the wettest, the emptiest, the most populous—that is the only way—and afterwards I'll make up my mind.