Postcards From Tomorrow Square (28 page)

Perhaps because the social aftermath of the Hanyuan relocation was such a disaster, the next big Sichuan dam-building project was handled more deftly. We drove inland and uphill for several hours, until we reached an elevation above 10,000 feet, and confronted a scene whose scale recalled
Dr. Zhivago
. From one side of the horizon to the other, a recently completed dam spanned the Qingyi River. Behind it, a lake was slowly submerging the former village of Yaoji, famous for being the last stop on the Red Army’s Long March before it crossed the snowy passes of Mount Jiajing.

The people of the village were mainly ethnic Tibetans, and they had been moved a few miles upland to a newly built city in Tibetan style. The windows, doors, and balconies had elaborate wooden fretwork, painted bright colors of yellow, green, red, and blue. The professional class—shopkeepers, teachers, police, government cadres—of the previous village were in a fancier village, with bigger rooms and wider streets;the farmers and laborers were in an economy-class version of the same structures across a ravine.

The fancy village had clearly been built as an attraction for Chinese tourists, a kind of Tibet-land. We asked innkeepers and merchants how things were going. Business had been slow since the earthquake, they said, but they assumed it would pick up in a few years. The guesthouse where we stayed was indeed busy when we were there, with guests from what appeared to be a convention of big-city policemen accompanied by flashy-looking and much younger women. (How did we know they were from the big city? Because they were so much bigger and heavier than the villagers we had seen over the past few days. In the Western world, the richest people are the trimmest, and the same is now true in China’s glitzy cities. But in the hinterland, poor people are thin not because they’re dieting but because they’re short on food. The people who can afford to eat more, do.)

This relocation had gone better, because of more painstaking local attention—with one big exception. John Flower began asking villagers on the poor side of the new town whether they knew anything about Liang Heqing, a man who had lived in Xiaoji since the 1930s and who if he were still alive would be in his late eighties. As a teenager, Liang had traveled with the Red Army, for which his father was a guide. Recently he had been in bad health.

Flower asked, got no reply, and was about to give up—when, near the crest of the dam, he saw a pile of boards that looked like a demolished house and got out to look around. He pounded on a makeshift door—and after a few minutes it opened slightly and a face peered out. It was Liang and his wife, who over the next few hours told their own story of dislocation. It involved countless twists and strokes of bad luck, but its central theme was the family’s absolute refusal to move off a final bit of their land that would not be flooded by the dam. The older members of the family remembered the Great Famine, and they thought that land would be their only security if hard times came again. “If they give us money, the money will go away,” Liang said. “The only thing we can trust is land.”

Apart from the simple drama of a Tibetan couple in their eighties hanging on in dire conditions, what struck me about the situation was the couple’s faith that their cause, being just, would prevail. The law said they could not be moved without permission. (It was different for land that was being submerged.) Therefore they would stand on their rights. The villains, in their view, were corrupt local officials, in cahoots with the power company that was trying to evict them. Again, the role of “the state” was much more tangled than outsiders usually assume. National policy dictated a shift to hydropower; some local officials tried to arrange a relatively humane transition; others undercut those efforts.

BAOSHAN: ONE MAN’S INFLUENCE

We could not get near Wenchuan or Baoshan, the two cities with the largest casualty counts. The roads were still too bad, and still crowded with bulldozers and dump trucks. But evidence of the earthquake’s effects was everywhere.

Before the earthquake, Dujiangyan was perhaps the most famous city in Sichuan, one of about 30 World Heritage sites in all of China. Some 2,000 years ago, an imperial official named Li Bing devised an irrigation system that would keep the Min River from overflowing its banks at floodtime and assure a steady flow to the fields the rest of the year. The stone irrigation structure is still in use and survived the earthquake. Many other structures in the town did not. The most notorious was the Juyuan Middle School on the east side of town. Its cement floors completely pancaked on top of one another, killing some 900 schoolchildren. Meanwhile the private school on one side of it, and the apartment building on the other, rode out the earthquake intact.

The field where the Juyuan School once stood is one of the few sites in Dujiangyan to have been entirely cleared of rubble. Elsewhere through town, ten weeks after the earthquake, buildings looked as they must have on the evening of May 12. Some were mere heaps of masonry; others had the roofs or windows shaken off; others had deep enough cracks in the walls or foundations to have become uninhabitable. The former inhabitants of those structures were on the outskirts of town, in makeshift tent-and-trailer cities that were already being prepared for long-term occupancy in the summer after the earthquake.

In the city of Baoshan, closer to the center of the quake, we saw a resort hotel that had collapsed when half a mountain slid down on top of it, and the remnants of a bluff, most of whose earth had been sheared off, buried cars and their drivers so deeply that they were never expected to be retrieved. At every intersection and on every wall hung big red inspirational banners:
Show the Red Army Spirit in Recovering from Hardship
;
Thanks to the People of Hainan for Their Help
;
Hearts Always Together.

But we saw something more surprising in Baoshan. Half a mile from where the earth had shaken so violently that it dislodged the bluff, a modern building with a delicate glassy exterior stood shining with not a pane damaged. In front of it flew not just the bright red flag of the People’s Republic of China but also two red flags of the Communist Party, with hammer and sickle in yellow, and another big Communist flag hanging in the front lobby.

This was the headquarters of the Baoshan Industrial Group, a modern company with a shared Communist ownership structure among most residents of the town. It had been led through its entire existence by a man named Jia Zheng-fang, who demonstrated in the most forceful way the difference one local official could make.

Jia, now in his mid-seventies, came of age in Baoshan during the Great Famine. He saw in Baoshan that a sensible local official could blunt the effect of high-level idiocy by selectively ignoring the most damaging new rules. Where other villages lost half their population, Baoshan lost merely a third. Jia trained as a geologist, lost the sight in one eye in a mining accident, then came home to Baoshan in his late twenties to become a party official. He was beaten up by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution but was popular enough to become a senior local party official by 1971.

From that point on, he helped his native village prosper by developing its collectively owned industry. He applied new farming tips to increase output. He developed lucrative mines for a variety of minerals. A paper factory and a small hydropower plant. A factory making wood flooring; a golf course; an eco-tourist resort; a Buddhist temple to attract tourists. The company published annual reports and had shareholder meetings, underneath the hammer and sickle flag. Based on his experience as a geologist, Jia knew that the land around Baoshan was unstable, and he made sure that the sleek corporate headquarters was designed to withstand a major quake. So were the villa-like houses built by the collective and available for townspeople. A study of Baoshan by two historians at Chengdu University said that it had become the “number one village in the mountains of the west” thanks to the leadership of Jia Zhengfang.

John Flower had requested an interview with Jia, and we went to see him inside the company headquarters. He was a jovial man, who stressed how the company had to keep looking for new business outlets. He said he had been dictatorial at times, but that was what the village needed. He then introduced his grandson, who he said was heading off for glory at Harvard. (“I am going to the University of South Carolina,” he told us, in English, knowing that his grandfather would not understand.)

The same national rules applied in this village as in the others; the difference was local.

LUSHAN: COMPETENT GODS

Everywhere we traveled in Sichuan, Flower and Leonard kept an eye out for temples to revisit and photograph. She carried a GPS receiver to record the exact location of each site. (Chinese maps of the area are rare; the towns are too small to be identified by name on mapping sites or Google Earth.) He had a camera set up to take 360-degree panoramic pictures.

After a while, the pattern of the temples became clear. On the ground floor, most had shrines dedicated to Buddha, with scriptures and Buddha figures. Buddhism is one of the officially recognized faiths of China, and like the others that operate with state approval and under state supervision, it is considered no threat to political order.

But upstairs, or behind a curtain, or in a back room were other statues of other deities. These belonged to what Flower said was the “real” faith of China: They were local gods, folk gods, the god of wealth, the god of war, the kitchen god, at one shrine the chicken-footed god.

What these gods had in common was their practical utility. Each had a job and role. And a surprising number had been public officials. The powerful
chuanzhu
, or “river master” god, is based on the same Li Bing who built the irrigation system in Dujiangyan. A god-statue in one of the temples was wearing glasses; Flower said he was based on an early twentieth-century doctor named Lan who treated poor patients without a fee. It was as if Americans worshipped Alexander Hamilton or Benjamin Franklin—which perhaps they do, with likenesses on U.S.currency, rather than in religious shrines.

The government was skeptical of folk religions, Flower said, because unlike Buddhism or even state-controlled Christianity, they included an implied judgment on current affairs. People worshipped bureaucratic deities of the past when they were concerned about bureaucrats of the moment.

T
hese were four small settlements, in one province, in one summertime week shortly while the area was recovering from devastation. It is nothing like a cross section of rural Chinese experience, and I do not pretend to offer a full exploration of the range of local government performance. But even this limited range illustrates the point I mean most to convey: which is how varied the circumstances of this vast country are.

THEIR OWN WORST ENEMY

NOVEMBER 2008

A
fter two years in China, there are still so many things I can’t figure out. Is it really true, as is always rumored but never proved, that the Chinese military runs most of the pirate-DVD business—which would in turn explain why that business is so difficult to control? At what point in Chinese culture did it become mandatory for business and political leaders to dye away every gray hair, so that gatherings of powerful men in their fifties and up are seas of perfect pitch-black heads? How can corporations and government agencies invest huge sums producing annual reports and brochures and advertisements in English, yet manifestly never bother to ask a native English speaker whether they’ve made some howler-style mistake? Last year, a museum in Shanghai put on a highly publicized exhibit of photos from the Three Gorges Dam area. In front, elegant banners said in six-feet-high letters,
The Three Georges
. Why do Beijing taxi drivers almost never have maps—and almost always have their own crates or buckets filling the trunks of their cars when they pick up baggage-laden passengers at the airport? I could go on.

But here is by far the most important of these mysteries: How can official China possibly do such a clumsy and self-defeating job of presenting itself to the world? China, like any big, complex country, is a mixture of goods and bads. But I have rarely seen a governing and “communications” structure as consistent in hiding the good sides and highlighting the bad.

I come across examples every day, but let me start with a publicly reported event. Early this year, I came across a tantalizing piece of news about an unpublicized government plan in advance of the Beijing Olympics. In a conversation with someone involved in the preparations, I learned of a brilliant scheme to blunt potential foreign criticism during the Games. The Chinese government had drawn up a list of hotels, work spaces, Internet cafés, and other places where visiting journalists and dignitaries were most likely to use the Internet. At those places, and only there, normal “Great Firewall” restrictions would be removed during the Olympics. The idea, as I pointed out in “‘The Connection Has Been Reset,’” was to make foreigners happier during their visit—and likelier to tell friends back home that, based on what they’d seen on their own computer screens, China was a much more open place than they had heard. This was subtle influence of the sort that would have made strategists from Sun Tzu onward proud.

The scheme displayed a sophisticated insight into outsiders’ mentality and interests. It recognized that foreigners, especially reporters, like being able to poke around unsupervised, try harder to see anything they’re told is out-of-bounds, and place extra weight on things they believe they have come found without guidance. By saying nothing at all about this plan, the government could let influential visitors “discover” how freely information was flowing in China, with all that that implied. In exchange, the government would give up absolutely nothing. If visiting dignitaries, athletes, and commentators searched for a Free Tibet site or found porn that is usually banned in China, what’s the harm? They had seen worse of it back at home.