Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (45 page)

Media coverage of Deng’s visits overseas—not only to the United States but also to Japan and Southeast Asia—had opened up a view of the larger world, as well as driving home the painful awareness of China’s own backward state. More shocks were on the way. As 1979 dawned, British diplomat Roger Garside was startled to see a New Year’s Eve TV broadcast featuring a singer from the “renegade province” of Taiwan. American stars like the pop musician John Denver and comedian Bob Hope trekked to China in the course of the year. Foreign classical music orchestras also put on performances. During the Cultural Revolution, book publishing had dwindled away to a minimum, and foreign works of literature disappeared. But then, one day in 1979, literature lovers awoke to find a new edition
of Hamlet
in the bookshops. The Quran and other religious works reappeared as well.

Such changes had a monumental impact. This was a China where road maps and telephone books were still regarded as state secrets, so the act of sharing them with foreigners was a crime. The same restrictions applied to weather forecasts and the location of gasoline stations; a foreigner who managed to hail a taxi could find herself in a tricky predicament if the car’s gas tank turned out to be empty. (Of course, taxis were extremely hard to find. Bicycles still predominated on the streets of Beijing.)
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Consumer products were scarce. Cloth was rationed.

There were ways to take advantage of the new atmosphere of comparative openness, but manufacturing new products took time. So some of the first obvious changes—like opening private restaurants—came in the realm of services. Hair salons quickly widened their menu of services: suddenly, every woman seemed to be getting a permanent.

As is typical of situations where an all-powerful state begins to relax its grip, a market for the illicit emerged with startling speed. The American journalist and China scholar Orville Schell recorded his adventures in a seedy Beijing café in the company of Wang Zaomin (“Benefit-the-People Wang”), whom he described as
“a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army and a procurer of women.” Wang styled himself a petty gangster and dressed accordingly in a fedora, a Western-style trench coat, and army pants. The girls who worked for him yearned for the precious hard currency that would give them access to Western cigarettes and magazines and dreamed of one day owning the same kind of beautiful clothes they saw in foreign fashion spreads. Wang and his charges had zero interest in politics, and they displayed little of the idealism of the intellectuals who were provoking the authorities with their writings on issues of the day. But Schell rightly refused to dismiss the denizens of Wang’s back alley, noting that they were, in their way, “every bit as rebellious and subversive to the geist of the old Chinese Communist Party as their dissident compatriots.” What drove them was the vague yearning for the lifestyle that the West seemed to exemplify—a world of variety and stimulation: “‘Why is our life so boring when Western life is so rich?’ one young woman asked me in the Peace Café, confessing that she was transfixed by what she had seen on Chinese TV when Deng Xiaoping visited the United States.”
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Schell had visited China during the waning years of the Cultural Revolution and recalled how hard ordinary people were prepared to work to ward off even the most glancing contact (much less conversation) with visiting foreigners. Returning to China on a short trip in 1978, however, “was like entering a different country,” he later wrote. The impression was intensified when he came back for a longer visit in 1979. In a Beijing mental hospital he ran into a doctor who spoke unabashedly of the teachings of Freud (a taboo topic in the days of Mao) and defied long-standing party doctrine by refusing to regard the cause of mental illness as “class oppression.” A young judge’s assistant interrogated him about how to find jobs and housing in the United States and then openly declared his desire to emigrate.
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For many Chinese, though, even remote contact with the West sufficed. TVs were still few and far between in 1979, and anyone who owned a set could count on a persistent audience of friends and neighbors. But that scarcity quickly eroded in the course of 1979 and 1980. Relaxation of the rules allowed mainlanders to order sets in Hong Kong and take delivery in the People’s Republic. An even more accessible technology was the cassette-tape player—the same affordable device that had such a transformative effect on political discourse in Iran. Characteristically enough, however, the Chinese did not use their tapes to record incendiary texts or to distribute political messages. They were listening to bootleg music recordings.

They were particularly enamored of a Taiwanese pop star named Teresa Teng, a young beauty who specialized in songs of tenderness and yearning. The spirit of her music was diametrically opposed to the strident revolutionary operas held high
by Jiang Qing in the Cultural Revolution years. And, indeed, befitting the hesitations of the early reform period, Teng’s songs were officially banned in the People’s Republic until well into the 1980s because of her associations with the renegade province. But that stopped almost no one from listening. (Some of her biggest fans were in the People’s Liberation Army.)
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Teng’s new fans on the mainland knew her by her Mandarin name, Deng Li Jun—and since she had the same surname as the man who was leading China into its new era, she was soon dubbed “Little Deng.”
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Though on the face of things it might seem frivolous to compare the two of them, there was actually a deeper logic to the association. Her music, and the world of bourgeois pleasures it evoked, was one of the first everyday manifestations of Big Deng’s policy of “reform and opening” (
gaige kaifang
).

What initially escaped the notice of many of her mainland listeners was the point that Teresa Teng was far from a purely Chinese phenomenon. In fact, she was a perfect exemplar of the accelerating trend of globalization, one that was having a particularly notable impact on the countries of East Asia. She was a household name not only in her Taiwanese homeland and Hong Kong, but also in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore. Her popularity throughout Southeast Asia undoubtedly had something to do with the regional presence of ethnic Chinese—many of whom would take advantage of Deng’s plans to open the doors to outside investors. So Teng’s gentle ballads also made a fitting, if unintentional, symbol of China’s return to the global information circuit from which it had cut itself off for so long.

Popular culture produced inside the People’s Republic was not really in a position to compete. Movies and music still labored under the stifling legacy of the long years in which Gang of Four leader Jiang Qing had dominated the cultural scene with her bizarrely stylized “revolutionary operas” and proletarian anthems. There was, however, one notable exception in 1979—a film called
Xiao Zi Bei
, a musical comedy known in English as
Bus Number Three
. Viewed from today’s perspective,
Bus Number Three
is a bit of an oddity, the suitably awkward crystallization of a transitional moment. It tells the story of a group of young Shanghainese—a bus driver, a conductor, and various passengers, all of them bearing stylized names like “Young Green” or “Young Blue”—who are trying to find their way in the new age of Deng’s Four Modernizations. It is, in part, a typically didactic bit of political propaganda (including oblique references to the pernicious influence of “remaining forces,” meaning adherents of the Gang of Four) that nonetheless manages to point the way forward to a less ideological age, manifested in cheery songs that capture the comparative optimism of the moment.

The foreigners who witnessed all of this wondered whether they were watching the start of a new era or yet another of those transient phases that China had experienced so often in the past—like the Hundred Flowers campaign in the 1950s, when Mao solicited public criticism of the party’s reign by calling upon society to “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom,” only to crack down violently on the critics as soon as he deemed that they had overstepped their bounds. The implications of all these 1979 experiments were radical, but it was impossible to tell how far they might go. One American businessman recalls asking his Chinese interlocutors, “Do you want capitalism?” “No,” they told him, and cited models like Yugoslavia, Hungary—and East Germany, at that time regarded as one of the East bloc’s most successful economies.
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These countries, which only a tiny handful of Chinese knew firsthand, stood for the vague promise of liberalization. At this stage, it was still almost impossible to imagine a China that would tolerate a full-scale restoration of private business.

The biggest test of all, many people suspected, was to be found in the countryside, where the overwhelming majority of the Chinese lived. Under Mao’s leadership, the Communists had marched to victory in 1949 precisely because they had identified their struggle with that of the peasants. The party had promised them freedom from want and corruption, the ills that have always plagued China’s rural dwellers. But the transformation of private farms into “communes,” collectively owned and operated, had plunged the countryside into a maelstrom of famine and suffering during the chaos of the Great Leap Forward. In the late 1970s, the ghosts of that colossal disaster still haunted the land. Reviving farming seemed an almost impossible task. Or was it?

I
t was early in 1979, and Production Team No. 12 was getting ready for work. The team, which called a small village in Guangdong Province home, consisted of forty-nine families who farmed forty acres of fish ponds and fields.

As recounted by American anthropologist Steven Mosher in his book
Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese
, the team had its headquarters in what had once been the village’s ancestral temple, a building adorned with carvings of tigers and dragons that had been constructed seventy years earlier as the spiritual center of the community. Now, more prosaically, it combined the functions of a warehouse, meeting area, and repair shop. One wall was taken up by a long storage shed—“as out of place in the high-ceilinged hall as a chicken coop in a church,” Mosher writes—containing all the team’s tools (hoes, baskets, buckets, carrying poles). Tubs of dried corn stood near the door; crates and boxes lay jumbled in a corner. All the property in the building belonged to the village People’s Commune, of which the team was
a part. In the office space at one end of the hall hung a blackboard adorned with hooks. On the hooks hung no tags—one for each member of the team. Through the course of the day, the team head moved the tags around the board depending on the tasks assigned to each group of workers.
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At seven, well after dawn, the team leader arrived to unlock the door. By this time farmers in most parts of the world would have already been out in their fields. But the members of Production Team No. 12 saw no reason to hurry. They wandered in as the morning wore on. “Now everyone is waiting for the last stragglers to arrive,” said the team leader. “And no one wants to be the first to leave for the fields. They’re all afraid that that the others will sneak a few minutes more of leisure.” It was around a quarter past eight by the time the farmers shouldered tools and headed slowly off to their jobs. The team head later explained why the impression of stasis was deceptive. “People aren’t lazy all the time, just when they do collective labor. When they work on their private plots, they work hard. There is a saying: ‘Energetic as dragons on the private plot, sluggish as worms on the public fields.’”

When Mosher asked the team leader whether it had always been like this, the man replied that “before collectivization people worked hard.” He explained to the American that it now took fourteen days of work to hoe the same piece of land that once took six. “Everyone works at the same slow pace. People have learned from collectivization to do just enough to get by.”
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And this was in Guangdong, one of China’s most fertile regions. As we now know, however, not every place in the Chinese countryside was in the grip of the same stagnation witnessed by Mosher. There were a few communities where both farmers and officials were quietly testing the limits of the possible. One of the most intriguing was the village of Xiaogang, in a part of Anhui Province that had been hit especially hard by Great Leap starvation. Fengyang County had lost ninety thousand people—a quarter of its population—between 1958 and 1960.
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In the 1950s, Xiaogang village had thirty-four households; by 1979, migration and starvation had reduced the number to eighteen.
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In bad years, due to drought or mismanagement from above, the villagers had to sell possessions for food or borrow money for seed. The year 1978 was a bad one. Some of the families in the village were boiling poplar leaves and eating them with salt; others roasted tree bark and ground it to make flour
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The peasants of Xiaogang were locked into the commune system, which forced them to cultivate collectively owned farmland. In return for their efforts, they received “work points” that could be exchanged for food.
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One night in December 1978, the villagers decided that they could not go on. The heads of the households
met after dark in the village’s biggest house and made a secret deal. They drew up a contract that divided up the land of the village commune among the eighteen families and stipulated that each family would have the responsibility for tending the fields assigned to it. The villagers had vivid memories of what had happened to other families who had acted against state policy, so they also agreed that they would raise the children (until the age of eighteen) of any village leaders who were arrested or shot as a result of the agreement.