Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (31 page)

A five-day weekend was declared, though no one closed shop. Retail sales were 30 percent to 40 percent above the usual. Important people had flown in from all over the globe. I saw the back of Margaret Thatcher’s head in my hotel lobby.

On July 1 (“Dependence Day,” I guess) people who should have known better sent messages of cheer, fulsomely printed in the
South China Morning Post:

 

China has made important commitments to maintain Hong Kong’s freedom and autonomy.

—Bill Clinton

 

 

Hong Kong can be an even better place in which to live and work.

—Madeleine Albright

 

 

I feel pretty relaxed about it.

—George Bush

 

Skyrockets splattered in the evening skies. The British Farewell Ceremony for 10,000 invited guests had featured not only bands from the Scots Guards, Black Watch, and various other men without pants, but also the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and (I saw this) a dance troupe with performers dressed as giant deutsche marks, enormous circuit boards, and huge powdered wigs. At the other end of the lifestyle continuum, there was a One Nation Under a Groove 11
P.M
. to 9
A.M
. rave.

In between were thousands of parties, from impromptu expat booze-ups in the Wan Chai lap-dancing district to dinners with courses incalculable by abacus at Hong Kong mogul David Tang’s China Club. Here the whole food chain was ravaged, from depth of sea slug to bird’s-nest height.

The China Club is decorated colonial style in big-wallah mahogany, except the walls are covered with Mao-era socialist-realism art, and the waiters and waitresses are dressed as Red Guards. Meaning? I have no idea.

I also have no idea why my hotel kept giving me handover gifts: a bottle of champagne, a coffee-table book about Hong Kong titled
Return to the Heart of the Dragon
(less ominous-sounding in Chinese, I gather), and a silver mug bearing crossed British and Chinese flags, and inscribed:

Resumption of Sovereignty

to

China

1 July 1997

Hong Kong

To which I intend to have added:

Bowling Tournament

2nd Place

Whimsical handover T-shirts, many making hangover puns, were for sale around the city, as were such humorous novelties as “Canned Colonial Air—Sealed Before June 30th.” I suppose the same sort of things were being marketed in Vienna in 1938: “Last Yarmulke Before
Anschluss,
” and so on. Maybe in occupied France, too: “Vichy Water,” ha-ha.

There were grumbles in Hong Kong, of course, such as dissidentish shows by artists objecting to censorship, in case there was going to be any. Martin Lee and his fellow Democratic Party members gave a glum press conference, at which they promised to keep representing their electoral districts, even if they didn’t anymore. And a certain amount of fretting in the press was seen, but mostly of the affectless editorial page kind that mixes
AFTER GENOCIDE—WHITHER RWANDA
? with
AFTER GRETZKY—WHITHER HOCKEY
? Hong Kong, on the whole, was awfully darn cheerful.

Why weren’t 6.5 million people more upset about being palmed off to an ideology-impaired dictatorship that has the H-bomb? Even one of Taiwan’s top representatives in Hong Kong was quoted saying, “As a Chinese person, I think it is a good thing that Hong Kong is coming back to China.” Chiang Kai-shek, please.

There
is
the colonialism issue. How did the Chinese of Hong Kong really feel about being ruled by England? It’s a complex question. Or, as a number of Chinese people said to me, “No, it isn’t.” Being an American, and an Irish-American to boot, I was, maybe, told certain things that the English didn’t hear. “We hate the English,” for instance.

When a Chinese friend said that, I said, “Wait a minute, I was in Vietnam not long ago, and nobody seemed to hate Americans. If the Vietnamese can forgive Americans for napalm, carpet bombing, Agent Orange, and what-all, surely you can forgive the English for the odd opium war and some ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ karaoke.”

“It’s a different thing,” said my friend. “You just killed the Vietnamese; you never
snubbed
them.”

Hong Kong’s people are also realists. Calling in to complain on the
Larry King Show
wasn’t going to do much. Thus the tepid response to the handover’s endless television and newspaper “streeters,” the interviews with random locals: “Excuse me, I understand you’re about to get secret police in your neighborhood. Would you care to tell the world how much you hate Jiang Zemin?”

There are real reasons for Hong Kong’s realism. In 1945 the population of the territory was only 1.2 million. Today, the whole city is filled with refugees and children of refugees. Until 1980, Hong Kong had a “touch base” asylum policy where, basically, anyone from the mainland who made it to downtown could stay. The Chinese who fled the civil war, the communist takeover on the mainland, and the lunatic deprivations and slaughters that followed know that there’s only one real safe haven: money.

And they’re serious about making it. The hours posted on the door of the fashion-forward department store Joyce are,
MONDAY-SATURDAY
10
A.M
.–7
P.M., SUNDAY AND PUBLIC HOLIDAYS
11
A.M
.–6
P.M
. Take two hours off for Christmas. And the in-case-of typhoon notice in my hotel room read:

 

Signal Number 9 and 10:

When these signals are hoisted, extreme

weather conditions will prevail, meaning

that the typhoon is centered over Hong

Kong. May we suggest that while you

are confined indoors, you enjoy the

facilities of our restaurants and bars.

 

Finally, the residents of Hong Kong were putting a good face on things because…what the hell else were they going to do? There’s a joke they tell in Shanghai about the Hong Kong handover. Mao asks Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, “How do you get a cat to bite a hot pepper?”

Zhou says, “You hold him down, pry his jaws open, and shove the pepper into his mouth.”

Mao says, “No, that’s force. We want the cat to bite the pepper of his own free will.”

Deng says, “You take the pepper, wrap it in a delicious piece of fish, and, before he knows it, the cat has bitten the pepper.”

Mao says, “No, that’s trickery. We want the cat to know he’s biting the pepper.”

Zhou and Deng say, “We give up. How do you make a cat bite a hot pepper?”

“It’s easy,” Mao says. “Stick the pepper up the cat’s ass. He’ll be
glad
to bite it.”

There may be an even better way of getting a cat to eat a hot pepper. Make the cat a senior vice president for sales at a global hot-pepper conglomerate and promise to open mainland China to hot-pepper imports.

I went to Shanghai to see what was taking over Hong Kong, and to Hong Kong to see what was being taken. And in the month I spent visiting these two parts of China, every employee of an international corporation I met said that the “reunification” would be good for business.

The corporations are seduced by the idea of 1.2 billion mainland customers. It has become a mantra for marketing departments around the world. “Om, one point two billion.” Management is mesmerized. Right now the board of directors at Boeing is sitting around going, “One point two billion…boy, if just one half of one percent of those people bought a 777…”

Not that the corporate executives aren’t worried about communist abuse of human rights. They’ve been deeply concerned about this for years. Here is the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia Ltd., quoted in
The Washington Post
business section, agonizing about the events of Tiananmen Square: “The border was closed. JCPenney stock went down because their entire fall supply of shoes had to come across the border.”

But on July 1, 1997, the day after the Hong Kong handover, Lehman Brothers, Samsung Electronics, Chase Bank, Singapore Airlines, Canadian Airlines, AT&T, Credit Lyonnais, Maxell Tapes, Louis Vuitton, and that White House favorite, the Lippo Group, had congratulatory ads in the former colony’s English language papers. And Toshiba had decorated the top floors of its Hong Kong headquarters so that its logo was visible in almost every outdoor TV shot or still photo of the handover ceremonies.

No offense to businesspeople, of course, especially if they happen to own publishing companies or chains of bookstores. I’m just wondering if multinational executives have thought this through. There are some strange players in the Chinese communist economy. For instance, the People’s Liberation Army is a major investor. Consider putting PLA officers into positions of corporate responsibility. “Sir, the merger strategy is a minefield, sir. Literally, sir.” And now I’ve offended the People’s Liberation Army. There go my 1.2 billion hardcover sales.

I don’t want to disparage private enterprise. The world has political, religious, and intellectual leaders for that. But when a totalitarian government gets cozy with large financial and manufacturing concerns, it rings a twentieth-century historical bell. I’m thinking how a certain “people’s car”—
ein Volkswagen
—got its start. I’m thinking, “Made the trains run on time.” I’m thinking, “Greater Asian Coprosperity Sphere.” There’s a technical name for this political ideology.

Shanghai, on first impression, seems fine—that is, it seems to be in the dire, hideous, and enjoyable state of confusion that market freedoms always produce. I can’t even tell you what Shanghai looks like, because, look again, and it looks different. Other cities have construction sites; Shanghai
is
one—a 220-square-kilometer cellar hole where the full business of urban existence is scrambled with the building trades. Tan yourself during lunch hour in the arc-welding glare. What fortieth-story I-beam girder do I inch down to get to McDonald’s? Don’t call a cab; flag a crane and get hoisted back into your office window.

Everything in Shanghai seems to be going up or coming down. Maybe at the same time. Maybe, between customers, store clerks tear bricks off the shop’s back wall while the saleswomen run up front to lay cinder blocks. On my first morning in town, I saw a whole platoon of the People’s Liberation Army going down a manhole with plumbing tools. Which is a good place to put communist military, as far as I’m concerned. But it’s beyond telling if all the activity in Shanghai makes as much sense as that did.

THIS SITE WILL DEVELOP A SUPER HIGH BUILDING
, read a sign on a narrow side-street lot. Buildings were being built everywhere—on top of other buildings, smack in the middle of the street, and smack under it, too. People’s Square, Shanghai’s Tiananmen equivalent, the place for mass rallies and such, was torn up so that a multilevel shopping center could be installed below it. That way, if any more of those 1989-style democracy protests happen in Shanghai, the kids will be able to stand in People’s Square and guess whether tanks will squash them and also run downstairs and buy a pair of Guess? jeans so they’ll be dressed for the occasion.

There was so much scaffolding in Shanghai that when I saw a framework of bamboo poles holding nets over a sapling, I thought, “Christ, they’re building trees.” Actually not. Miles of once-shady streets have been timbered to make way for steel and glass. Although new trees were being planted. I counted a dozen. And at least two parks hadn’t been completely paved. Not that Shanghai has turned its back on nature. The downtown freeway overpasses, stacked four deep, had little flowering window boxes hanging from their guardrails.

Like Hong Kong, Shanghai began as an enclave of market freedom—albeit market freedom imposed by military force (the way we’ve tried to impose it in Cuba several times). Both Hong Kong and Shanghai were “concession ports” granted by the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 after the first opium war. Hong Kong belonged to Britain, but Shanghai belonged to practically everybody. A slew of foreigners threw together the Shanghai city administration, described thus in a 1911
Encyclopedia Britannica
entry: “As there are now fourteen treaty powers represented at Shanghai, there are consequently fourteen district courts sitting side by side, each administering the law for its own nationality.” Recipe, if ever there was, for a failed civic soufflé—which rose anyhow. China was experiencing one of its 4,200 consecutive years of bad government. Imagine a ruling elite so lousy that fourteen Western political systems all operating at the same time wouldn’t be worse—fourteen Jesse Helmses curling your hair in the Senate, twenty-eight Bills and Hillarys bloviating at the White House, and seventy people yelling at each other on the
McLaughlin Group.

But Hong Kong and Shanghai were havens for personal and substantial liberty on a continent where everyone’s person and substance had always belonged to the emperor, the warlord, or the man with the largest hatchet. And they were havens for overseas merchants and Chinese natives alike. Even in 1885, seventeen of the top eighteen taxpayers in Hong Kong were Chinese.

Until the communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai was the more important of the two cities. It was one of the few deepwater ports on the China coast not cut off from the interior by mountains or crabby peasant rebellions. And its central location, where the Huangpu empties into the mouth of the Yangtze, made it the nineteenth-century wet version of O’Hare Airport. Shanghai is still the largest and richest city on the mainland—even though it isn’t really Chinese and dates back only 156 years in a country that eats eggs that old.

Shanghai has grown from a piffling village to a metropolis with a population of 13.4 million. Or so says my 1996 guidebook—outdated while still on the press. The 1996 official estimate was 16 million. Wrong, too. The city government has since decided that 17 million people is closer to the mark. But no one keeps pace with Shanghai. I had a tourist map so current that the copyright was for the next year. I went to the spot marked Shanghai Art Museum, and the museum was gone. They’d sold the museum. A department store was going up in its place.

It took me two days to find the new art museum, though it’s a whopping-big round thing with loops on the top like a granite wok—perfect for stir-frys on Jupiter. I was usually lost in Shanghai, despite the fact that the main part of the city is no larger than midtown Manhattan and is laid out more or less on a grid. Getting lost in right-angled intersections with street signs in English produces a chill of embarrassment and a hint of Alzheimer’s-to-be, like getting lost in a Kmart.

And, indeed, familiar brand names were everywhere. The very words for foreign goods are enough to conjure with. The most common form of advertising is just a product’s moniker in large roman letters, as if Toyota had a billboard in Times Square reading “
” Shanghai buses carry so many logos, they look like NASCAR Chevys. Every lamppost seems to be named after a soft drink.

The new buildings in Shanghai are like giant pages in an Ugly Man-made Materials catalog. They are sheathed in kitchen-sink stainless steel, storm-door aluminum, translucent-plastic disco flooring, and vast expanses of chrome and smoked glass—vertical ’70s coffee tables crying out for a Mount Rushmore noseful of cocaine and a razor blade the size of an airplane wing.

Many structures are covered in ceramic tiles like giant inside-out shower stalls. Some have random chunks of classical decoration—pediments, friezes, Doric columns—pasted to minimalist boxes, as if the Parthenon had been converted to ministorage units. Others aspire to be Legoland built from Legos as big as 7-Elevens. And one spherical corporate HQ on a cubic plinth buttressed by hulking triangles managed to be grim, silly, monumental, and cute all at once—the Tomb of Hello Kitty.

At the top of every edifice, there’s something funny going on—a pointy or flashy or revolvy item. Favorite motifs are cocktail olive and pickle-on-a-spike. The skewered ovoid shapes culminate in the unbelievable Oriental Pearl TV Tower, 1,400 feet high, with massive geodesic globes at middle and bottom. It looks like a Russian Orthodox church of the twenty-eighth century or a launch vehicle for a pair of Houston Astrodomes or a humongous shish kebab that lost everything but two onions in the barbecue fire.

And omnipresent amid all the frenzy of Shanghai is that famous portrait, that modern icon. The faintly smiling, bland, yet somehow threatening visage appears in brilliant red hues on placards and posters, and is painted huge on the sides of buildings. Some call him a genius. Others blame him for the deaths of millions. There are those who say his military reputation was inflated, yet he conquered the mainland in short order. Yes, it’s Colonel Sanders.

In some ways, Shanghai is the familiar, homogenized world city. The restaurant at my hotel was decorated with a “Stampede ’97” theme. The waitresses were dressed in denim hot pants, checked shirts, boots, and Stetsons—the world’s only five-foot cowgirls who bow when you order a cold one. A mechanical bull had been installed across from the salad bar. One inebriated Japanese businessman got on it. And right off again. Yah-hoo.

Of course, if you want to feel like you’ve really traveled, Shanghai offers some experiences of the patently exotic kind. I went with some friends to what looked like the worst pet store ever. Inside was a wall of terrariums full of fat, angry poisonous snakes, hissing, pulling hood boners, and making wet bongo noises when they tried to strike through the glass. This was, in fact, a restaurant on Shanghai’s Huaihai Road.
Spécialité de la maison:
cobra blood.

One of the more expendable waiters opened the hinged front of the cobra case and pinned a four-foot serpent with a forked stick. He pried the critter out of its home, grabbed it beneath the head, and scuttled off to the kitchen, holding the thrashing reptile aloft as though it were a living string of furious bratwurst.

A few minutes later, the fellow emerged with a tray of brandy snifters, each filled with bright, gory liquid, plus an extra glass holding the contents of the snake’s gallbladder. Bonus.

There’s a ritual involved in drinking cobra blood. Of course. There’s a ritual involved in most very silly things. You have to get four males together and pledge a toast or something, and something else, which I don’t remember. Do I need to mention we were drunk? Then you slam it.

Being that a snake is a “cold-blooded” animal, I vaguely expected a chilled beverage. But it turns out a snake is a room-temperature animal. Which allows the full flavor to come through. You know the drill on exotic food. Cobra blood tastes like chicken…blood.

Drinking cobra blood makes you…it’s very good for…gives you lots of…The explanation was in Chinese. And cobra gallbladder juices do whatever even more. We let the youngest guy drink this. He said it was okay, although he was awake all night chasing mice around his hotel room.

But a more foreign foreignness lurks in Shanghai. There’s something, beyond a sip of snake squeezings, that’s alien and sinister about the place. For a very full city, the town is oddly empty. First you notice there aren’t any dogs. Then you notice there aren’t any cats. Then you notice there are hardly any pigeons. The protein is missing.

The beggars are also missing. In days of walking around Shanghai, I encountered just two, and these of the most desperately legitimate type, one with no hands and the other a crippled dwarf. Hard to believe begging was eliminated among 17 million poor people by kind admonishment or polite request. Or that children were eliminated this way, either. Families dot the streets and parks, always in trio form. China’s One Child program has succeeded (though whether at greater social costs than the success of America’s One Parent program, I can’t say).