Riding the Iron Rooster

A few days before I left Canton I met a woman who had been there, she said, many times. She was also leaving, but she was going in a different direction. Her name was Lisa Packard. She lived in Hong Kong. She had been visiting China for a dozen years, off and on, and now she was sick of it. She was in her mid-forties and she seemed to me an enterprising person, with enough cultural and commercial interests to keep her busy. And she seemed well connected.

I agreed with her that things had changed, and I asked her whether she remembered the year that had happened.

"Remember the year?" she laughed. "I remember the week things changed. There was a speech by Deng. Everyone responded to it. The Chinese are experts at interpreting jargon, and they knew he was saying something significant. It was one particular week in 1984, and after that everything was different."

She said that sourly, so I said, "But there have been a lot of improvements."

"I don't think so," Lisa said. "I hate the changes. Now, all they want are trinkets and toys—color TVs, cameras, watches, tape recorders, refrigerators, motorcycles. They're greedy, they're starting to be very crooked, they don't trust each other, they lie. Remember how you used to hear how they'd give you back your used razor blades? 'Oh, we don't need these. We have razor blades of our own.' So honest! So straight! So Chinese!"

I said that was a directive of Mao's from the Little Red Book. The Three Main Rules of Discipline for soldiers—but also for Party workers—were: Obey orders in all your actions; Do not take a single needle or thread from the masses; and Turn in everything captured. He had also made rules such as Speak politely; Return everything you borrow, Do not swear at people; and Do not take liberties with women. Was this disillusionment with Mao a reason for this change in conduct?

Lisa said, "Their excuse is that they have to get things while they can. They've only had a few years of this free system. But they know that China has periods of violent change. No one had foreseen this period. No one can foresee when it might end. So they are absolutely frantic. They feel it could all end tomorrow, and so they are grabbing with both hands. 'If we delay we might never get another chance.' That's what they say when I ask."

"Surely that's an understandable attitude for people who have had their asses kicked for the past thirty years. And all the sermons they've had to listen to!" It often seemed as though Chinese life was one long sanctimonious drone of warning and advice, and it was often hard to distinguish the moralizing edicts of the Chinese Communist Party from the corn-pone saws of Elbert Hubbard. Not only Mao, but his followers as well had created a whole anthology of pious parables, from "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains" to "Lei Feng the Model Soldier."

"I'm talking about real corruption, the worst kind—Party corruption," Lisa Packard said. "Where only the high Party members get privileges—they go abroad, they get into five-star hotels, they have access to hard currency. The rest of the people are out of luck. But the army is watching. The army isn't sharing in any of this. A soldier has no means of making extra money, he is not part of the economy, he simply watches people come and go."

I had heard that before: only the army—still sentimentally called the People's Liberation Army—had the key to China's future because no one could govern without the army's consent. And the PLA was notoriously conservative.

'The army is watching, and what does it see? People who are spiritually hollow, spiritually bankrupt. At least with fat, crazy old Mao they had a kind of faith—even idealism—and a sense of working together. They always used that Chinese expression 'working together.' There was a unity in that, but it's totally lacking now. They're not nice, they're not polite. I think they're lost and it will all end horribly for them."

But far from dampening my ardor, what Lisa Packard said only made me eager to plunge back in. Anyway, I was sick of this rain. I heard there was no rain at all in Inner Mongolia, and that the crocuses were popping up all over distant Gansu; so I planned a long trip by train through the westernmost provinces of China—so ambitious a trip that I had to enlist the help of the Railway Board. They were suspicious, but they said that if I went to Peking they would discuss it with me. I needed permission, they said.

The tourists were leaving China for home. Some had gone already, the Wittricks, the Westbetters, laden with souvenirs (lacquerware, carpets, chopsticks, brassware, fans); and the Cathcarts were already back in Bexhill-on-Sea.

Kicker and Morris had not left the bar of The White Swan since arriving in Canton. Kicker said, 'The guys back home will never believe it when I say I screwed a bald woman."

He was chuckling softly. His laughter always reminded me that he had a metal plate in his head. Then he squinted at me.