“In this society where, as we know, suicide rises, experts were forced to admit, with some regret, that it dropped to almost nothing in France during May 1968. Without precisely mounting an attack there, this spring also enjoyed beautiful skies, because a few cars burned and the others lacked gas so as to pollute. When it rains, when there are fake clouds over Paris, never forget that it is the fault of the government. Alienated industrial production makes rain. Revolution makes clear skies.” Guy Debord, Ill Planet1
This essay was completed in November 2005 and an abridged version appeared in the second issue of the London-based journal Principia Dialectica in 2006. I would like to thank the editors of that publication for their encouragement and advice. Although several of my readers prefer not to be named, I am able to thank Ben Bacon, Allan Graubard, Sonja Kotlitca, Michael Stewart, D.A. Smith and Michael Zarowny for their comments. My deepest gratitude is extended to Laura Salisbury, Christina Burtis and Magdalena M for their close reads and invaluable suggestions.
The transformation of life into merchandise kills, but nowhere is this more deadly than in the extreme market conditions of contemporary China. Red capitalists use anything—collagen extracted from the lips of executed prisoners2 or haphazardly recycled electronic waste from the West3 —as the raw material for runaway overproduction.
The Chinese merchandise inundating the earth stems from a pitiless market of low-paid laborers, including children and prisoners, who put in long hours, often six or seven days per week.4
With massive unemployment in rural areas5 and a huge unregistered migration to China’s cities, creating the so-called floating population, life for many unfortunate Chinese is a constant struggle of one against all. Stolen children are sold for profit6 and scavengers covet everything, even stones from the Great Wall.7
Confucianism and socialist moral codes have given way to an open and rampant sex industry; women compete to sell themselves as merchandise in exchange for other merchandise in some of the world’s largest shopping malls.8 Suicide rates have risen precipitously, becoming the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 18 and 35.9
Respiratory illnesses from urban air pollution prematurely kill more than half a million people per year,10 and poisonous discharges have spawned anti-pollution riots and occupations in the countryside.11 Pollution and the profit-minded conditions in the multibillion-dollar poultry industry, to cite another facet of this syndrome, have engendered a deadly avian flu that threatens human life worldwide and has already necessitated the mass slaughter of birds.12
People know they contribute to their own early demise through excessive work in dangerous, often fatal conditions,13 and they sometimes find ways to resist or escape this lethal commodification at the heart of the new China.
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo essay “From One China to Another”14 captured the 1949 revolution from many angles and both sides of the conflict. His shots bear shrewd witness—better than words ever could—to the historical moment.
Although not as momentous a time as 1949, I traveled to China in 1979, camera in hand, soon after the Beijing Spring and Democracy Wall movements flourished and were crushed on party orders. In addition to exploring the capital, I climbed Tai Shan and toured the industrial city of Jinan—notably the latter’s textile and heavy machine factories, its sports training facility for targeted youth and a nearby agricultural commune.
My 2005 trip—to Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, Chibi, Wuhan, Guilin and Yangshuo—confirmed reports that an economic revolution has taken place over the past twenty-six years that rivals in importance the political transformation that occurred at the midpoint of the twentieth century.
China’s major waterways provide some geographical context for my excursions—along with three of the country’s six regions, several of the 23 provinces and the four self-administered municipalities.
A glance at the map of coastal China shows the Yellow Sea in the north leading south to the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea—less visible but of great importance are the Yellow River, the Yangtze River cutting through the middle of the country and the Xi River in the south.
My travels were in the three main regions of North China, East China and South Central China.
The Beijing Municipality is situated within Hebei province, which means “north of the river” in Mandarin, referring to the Yellow River. Hebei province is indeed in the government’s northern region, and the Beijing municipality encompasses, far from the city center, the Ming tombs pictured in this essay.
The municipality adjacent to Beijing, Tianjin, is on the Bohai Gulf, the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea. The Yellow River, which empties into the Bohai Gulf, runs from the Tibetan Plateau through Shandong province, cutting through the provincial capital of Jinan.
The rain-washed willow trees at Da Ming Lake in Jinan are how I like to daydream of China, although going over maps brings my experience into sharper focus—the Yellow River flows into the Bohai Gulf northeast of the Shandong Peninsula, which separates the inner gulf from the Yellow Sea.
The larger Shandong province is in the northern part of the eastern region and has a long coast on the Yellow Sea, running south of the peninsula and beyond, to Jiangsu province, which borders on both the Yellow and East China seas.
The 1,545 meter high Tai Shan, or Mount Tai, is just north of the city of Tia'an in the middle of Shandong province and mustn’t be confused with the city of Taishan in Guangdong province, which is far to the south in the south central region.
The final leg of the Yangtze River cuts through Jiangsu province and empties in the East China Sea at Shanghai, the third municipality, which borders on the Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces—these are all in the eastern region, as is Fujian province to the south with its coastline on the Taiwan Strait.
The Yangtze River, the largest river in Asia, begins in the Tibetan Plateau in the west and runs through the fourth municipality of Chongqing—in the inland heart of China—and continues through Wuhan and Chibi in Hubei province.
The Yangtze serves as the source of the many lakes in Chongqing and Hubei that stand out on a good map, such as in the National Geographic Atlas of the World, where Chibi City is still listed as Puqi, the former name. Landlocked Hubei is in the south central region along with Guangdong province.
Also known as Canton province, Guangdong has a coast along the South China Sea, with its economic center of Shenzhen bordering on Hong Kong—a “special administrative region,” as is the case with nearby Macau, located a short hovercraft ride across the South China Sea from the world financial hub that should to be thought of as Hong Kong Island on one side of Victoria Harbor and Kowloon on the other.
Just south of Guangdong is Guangxi province, also in the south central region, with the Xi River forming there by the confluence of the Gui and Xun rivers. The Xi runs from Guangxi through Guangdong into the South China Sea near Macau.
It was only through maps and further study that I could truly appreciate the canal I observed, in one section, near Guilin. The 36.4 kilometer Lingqu canal, constructed in 214 B.C., connected the Xiang River, which flows north into the Yangtze, with the Li River, which flows south into the Gui River and then into the Xi.
I should mention at the start, in a brief digression, that despite the constraints on expression imposed by the Chinese Communist Party, there was a rare feeling of freedom in Beijing during the summer of 1979—the freedom of riding a bicycle on well-lit streets at night, with many other riders, without interference from cars.
The party had designs for cars, and now Beijing’s streets are clogged with them.15 But at that moment in history, people from all economic levels used standard bicycles, as the photos attest. And they could do things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to, such as going on dates with bicycles, with the warm summer air providing caresses serving as preludes to seduction.
There was no traffic, pollution or gasoline to worry about. The pedal-induced wind ruffled loose white shirts and dark trousers and ran through the slits in sandals—uniform clothing but at once comfortable, egalitarian and elegant.
Riding a bike, I went up an alley where I wouldn’t have ventured on foot at night out of prudence. Away from the main street, many hundreds of residents lined the balconies and steps. They were shoulder to shoulder on both sides of the alley in a calm crowd representing a powerful biological force that history shows can turn in many directions.
This biological force has at times turned away from party directives in protest, but mostly it marches in step with the call to sacrifice for the sake of industrial production and consumption—whether it comes from party bosses or private managers, socialist consumer displays or Western-style advertisements in the Chinese edition of Vogue.
From 1979 to 2005, pure state capital ceded to the new hybrid of red capital, much to the benefit of those with party or military connections.
The environmental consequences and uneven income distribution16 resulting from this economic transformation—from a system of state ownership to one of privately held firms—are sources of grievances that spark protests in the tens of thousands every year.
At its root, however, this destructive change must be seen in light of the seductive commodification that is turning mainland China into a factory-superstore along the lines of Hong Kong before the 1997 handover—only more out of control absent the efficient and stern British bureaucrats who ran things when I was there in 1995.
Now, in 2005, citizens of the city move to the mainland in search of opportunity, not vice versa.
Policy Transformation. The Four Modernizations program, essentially the key policy goals for the country’s economic development in the areas of agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology, was formulated by Zhou Enlai in the sixties—the program was delayed by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and it would eventually fall to Deng Xiaoping to implement the goals.
Zhou made a final call for carrying out the program at the Fourth National People’s Congress in January of 1975 and would die of cancer a year later—his death prompted the Tiananmen Incident in April 1976, when two million people visited the square in Beijing to eulogize Zhou but also to denounce the Gang of Four, who were responsible for the repression that took place during the Cultural Revolution.
It should be noted that the Gang of Four had targeted Zhou in its Anti-Rightist Deviationist Wind Campaign, describing his writing as “poisonous weeds.”
After the Tiananmen Incident, Party Chairman Mao Zedong immediately moved against Deng, who was accused of masterminding the incident. With the backing of the Politburo, Mao stripped Deng of his titles and conferred them on Hua Guofeng.
Mao, who had warned against emphasizing material progress in his 1976 New Year’s address, would die in September. This precipitated a power struggle between the Gang of Four—led by Mao’s widow Jiang Qing—and Hua, who had the support of the “old guard” of party elders.
Hua was loyal to Mao and probably would not have moved against the Gang of Four had they not opposed him in their quest for power. In October 1976, Hua arranged for the arrest of the Gang of Four and took control of the party, effectively ending the Cultural Revolution.
By the following year, 1977, the Four Modernizations policy was presented by the rehabilitated Deng at a speech to the party congress. Hua, however, remained faithful to Mao, supporting a “Two Whatevers” policy, which held that whatever Mao had decided must be defended and whatever Mao had directed must be obeyed.
The old guard were reminded of the 1976 Tiananmen Incident when the year-long Democracy Wall Movement got under way in November 1978, with thousands of people putting up big character posters on a brick wall on Xidan Street in the Xicheng District of Beijing calling for democracy, freedom and human rights.
At this point, Hua was not seen by the party elders as the right person to lead China into the future—they would side with Deng who, in December 1978, took control of the party and officially launched the Four Modernizations program at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee.
In addition to the more grandiose Four Modernizations program, a ten-year plan was unveiled in 1978 to develop seven sectors—iron and steel, nonferrous metals, oil and gas, coal, electricity, railroads, and water transport—at a time when private enterprises didn’t really exist.
The following year, 1979, it was pointed out to me that workers in Red Star Commune Number Five in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, had private plots and raised chickens and pigs for sale at local markets. There were other legal exceptions, but privately owned enterprises were still rare.
The ten-year plan would undergo revisions and retrenchment, but by the eighties, the party had ceded much control of the economy to the market. And by the time of my 2005 trip, with the privatization of so many state assets, privately held firms comprised 60 percent of the total economy.17 Although the United States still doesn’t recognize China as a market economy in the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO), other countries do.18
In the new market system, the Chinese Communist Party has given much care to the needs of capital and little to the lives of citizens who are lost in excessive work hours, some actually working themselves to death amid a newfound and sometimes ruinous quest for consumption.
Although China has become the second largest economy in the world in terms of purchasing power parity,19 which I discuss in detail below, an estimated 190 million people drink “harmfully contaminated” water every day20 and someone commits suicide every two minutes.21
China, moreover, has the world’s largest shopping mall—with many more on the way—to satisfy rising internal demand created by Western-style advertising.22
I didn’t know at the time I climbed the 7,000 stone steps of Mount Tai, in 1979, that the Chinese have an expression for one who “has eyes but doesn’t see Tai Shan,” meaning he or she is ignorant and arrogant, like a boss who can’t imagine workers creating a new path simply by walking on it—a path out the door with such a “stillness of mind,” as Chuang Tzu puts it, that “the entire universe surrenders.”
My abode for the night, the Bixia Temple, or Azure Cloud Temple, near the highest peak, is a collection of 12 structures ingeniously built on the stone mountainside in 1008 A.D.—reportedly a reference point for Taoist architecture. We slept on a concrete floor like the monks and went off with them in the early morning to the east side of the peak to watch the sunrise.
There were no billboards, I assure you. This spiritual experience has come to correspond perfectly in my mind with profane aspects of Asian women and with my conception of Taoism—the red hues of the rising and setting sun, the blackness of the richest earth.
Pursuit of Harmony? The leaders in 2005, President Hu Jintao—also general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party—and Premier Wen Jiabao, advocate the development of a “harmonious society.”23 The contradiction between their plans and everyday life is painfully sharp in a society where 5 percent of the population has 50 percent of bank holdings.24
The masses believe their eyes not their ears—they are the ones who have created the new China, often paying for it with their lives: over 6,000 miners died on the job in 2004,25 for example, and China has the highest total work-related fatalities of any region in the world.26
The ceaseless and hazardous pursuit of prosperity ultimately serves capital and its accumulation—by the state itself—seen in its surprising public intervention in the Hong Kong stock market against speculators during the city’s handover to the mainland in 1997, and by a first class of individuals that includes many communist party officials.
Hence the phrase “red capital” as used by the radical Hong Kong legislator Leung Kwok Hung, known as Long Hair, when I met with him in his offices,27 referring to the capital accumulated by party members.
His appearance and office were certainly anomalies. Unlike the other offices in the highly secure government building, his was festooned with agit-prop banners, such as the white one in red characters: “Your heart and life are calm because you have no regrets...your spirit will be strong even though you face great difficulty.”
With his hair and Che t-shirt, his hand-rolled cigarettes in the no smoking building, and, most of all, with his large following in the poor districts of Kowloon, he’s a loose part emitting pings and rattles in the otherwise mostly smooth political machine operated from Beijing.
His latest action, seeking recognition for the 2005 passing of Zhao Ziyang—the high-ranking official who had fallen from favor for sympathizing with the students in the 1989 Tiananmen protests—escalated to a dramatic protest by the Democratic Bloc that shut down the Legislative Council of Hong Kong for the first time in its history.
According to Long Hair, the role of a revolutionary could be insurrectionary or legislative, and he’s pushing for Beijing to allow a referendum on the chief executive position for this administrative area, giving the citizens final say on the person who emerges from the vote by the 800-member Election Committee, an electoral college comprising citizens and groups that are elected and selected in accordance with the Basic Law of Hong Kong.
In a recent shift, Hong Kong shipping magnate Tung Chee-hwa turned over the chief executive post to Sir Donald Tsang, a “yes man” with a penchant for film analogies who once famously compared Hong Kong’s fiscal situation to Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct for not having anything to hide.
The Legacy Question. Who is responsible for the rapid creation of powerful red capitalists? Most eyes turn to Deng, who consolidated power within the party bureaucracy in the eighties and would live to see his reforms implemented by the nineties.
The Chinese people may only half-remember Deng’s support for the Beijing Spring in 1977–78, when there was a loosening of controls on free speech, and they may attempt to forget his subsequent crushing of Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989.
But these same citizens fully associate him with the market reforms and prosperity that transformed China by the turn of the century into a society of haves and have-nots.
According to Tsinghua University professor Wang Hui, the system put in place by Deng is “market extremism,” with the party working for a particular form of capitalist acquisition that has alarming consequences.28
This brings to mind deadly anti-pollution riots in April 2005 against chemical plants in Huaxi29 and Zeguo,30 and another in August against a battery company in Zhejiang province for its toxic lead discharges that killed several children and irreparably injured countless others.31
A rural labor leader in Xiachaoshui said after the destruction of several mines and factories along the Qingshui River that if the central government cannot solve the problem, “we will wait for a little while, and if they still have not solved the problem, we will destroy more of the factories.”32
Mao is held responsible for the insanity of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the calamitous famine that resulted from the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). Likewise, Deng should be known for the pollution, class conflicts and unfortunate aspects of consumerism, not just the prosperity, resulting from his modernization program.
Party members are still required to study “Mao Zedong thought” and “Deng Xiaoping thought,” although I was assured by a party official that the former is out of favor with most business-minded comrades. Interestingly, the influence of Buddhism has seeped into party ranks, and this tendency is found even among those who still revere Mao, the official said.
At a time of rapid modernization, one understands how people would want to revive ancient traditions in an attempt to regain a sense of lost stability. The social morality of Confucius has traditionally been an unspoken and pervasive presence in China, but by 2005 this gives way to online sex discussions,33 massage parlors and recent orgy scandals.
Notably, one event this spring comes to mind involving Japanese men who came to China around the time of the anniversary of the 1931 occupation of Manchuria and commemorated Japan’s conquest with Chinese prostitutes; and yet another party-style orgy scandal the summer of 2005 at the Great Wall involving locals and Westerners.34
The Hedonist Response. Of the three major Chinese philosophical traditions—Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism—the philosophical insights of the latter most often accompanied me, in the form of a study of gestures from a small book modestly entitled Lessons of Chuang Tzu35 by Jean François Billeter.
His thoughts on Taoism accompany me to Chibi, formerly Puqi—a prosperous town located in the south central province of Hubei—where my Chinese friends laughed as I awkwardly knelt as if to pray in a Taoist temple. I didn’t really pray because I’m not religious.
As the author of a pamphlet on dialectical hedonism,36 I do think of what happened during the 1979–2005 time frame in Taoist terms: the “chi” that had accumulated from the immobility of workers prior to 1978 was released in a frenzy of work—reflecting a rest-movement dialectic that should eventually revert back to rest, conceivably in a general strike around the idea of a Big Rest.
According to my theory of dialectical hedonism, pain and pleasure exist in rest and movement, and as basic categories of existence they tend to transform back and forth into each other, with hedonists seeking the immobility of a peaceful repose and sensuous movement rather than death and work.
Many Chinese know deep down that they must embrace the pleasures of rest or else expire—the ultimate form of rest—from work-related illnesses, exhaustion, pollution or suicide.
Moreover, the country’s staggering 1.3 billion population figure indicates that Chinese people, despite all of their self-sacrifice as commodities in the ruthless labor market, still seek the pleasures of the flesh as much as the pains of work.
Yet there was a profound transformation that took place in the Chinese soul between 1979 and 2005. The lazy, in the positive sense of the word as used by Paul Lafargue in The Right to Be Lazy,37 communal farmers at Red Star Commune Number Five in Jinan who were resting in the shade when roused by my guide in 1979 have by now worked themselves to the bone.
My suspicion is that the well-dressed people lolling under an overpass watching the train go by near the Yellow River in the late seventies have at the very least been transformed into industrious types.
Aside from a ditch digger taking repeated breaks in Hubei province and a retired old man resting in a Macau island park, I simply didn’t see lazy people in 2005. Worker bees are everywhere.
This accumulated energy, or chi, was released by the 1978 party directive that lacked the practical warning of Mao, or, better, Chuang Tzu, against losing oneself in the world of things, as humans are inclined to do.38 As early as the third century B.C. the Chinese had this Taoist philosopher who inveighed against alienating oneself and compromising one’s subjectivity in things, of letting things treat people as things.
Party officials were blind to the warnings from Chuang Tzu, the author of the essay “Free and Easy Wandering,” not to mention the critique of fetishism by Karl Marx, because bureaucrats tend to think in abstract terms—rather than the misfortunes of those who experience labor, unemployment and consumer deprivation in more concrete ways.
Deng wanted socialism to become rich by making merchandise for the world. Yet he and his successors could not prevent the Chinese population’s massive loss of autonomy to market forces, resulting in the transformation of human subjects into factors of production and consumer statistics.
This negation of the accumulation of chi in China, namely the overproduction frenzy since 1979 and the more recent rise in consumption,39 will eventually be overcome with some form of unrest, or better, rest—preferably a pleasurable rest and not the deepest rest of death, which is more likely. Until then, red capital will create more value for masters and destroy more lives of slaves.
The empire of red capital is giving every indication it will smother the earth with merchandise and pollution on a scale that could surpass the production of all previous empires in terms of its consequences for universal history.
Addicted consumers worldwide happily succumb to the mighty dragon, devouring its merchandise without the slightest pangs of conscience—much the same way nineteenth century opium addicts in Hong Kong consumed their drug to the delight of their imperial master. Back then only a quarter of Chinese males were addicted to what the British insisted was a “harmless luxury.”
Now virtually everyone feeds an addiction to cheap Chinese goods that are often hazardous to their health because of poor consumer safety standards and, with regard to electronic devices, that invade consumers’ privacy in extraordinary ways.
Although Nixon visited Beijing in 1972, it wasn’t until 1979 that China and the United States established diplomatic relations and foreign investors began training their ears to withstand the shrieking, as one put it, of Beijing opera singers.
Figures in China are often slippery, but according to the 2005 World Fact Book published by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), China’s gross domestic product (GDP) quadrupled during the 1979–2004 time frame, and this measure of growth has been running at nearly 10 percent for the past two decades, driven largely by export sectors. Total GDP hit $1 trillion in 2000 and reached $1.6 trillion in 2004, according to the World Bank.40
Although China was the seventh largest economy in 2005 and the United States the largest, according to experts, China is expected to be dominant by 2030.41
The CIA’s purchasing power parity estimate (PPP), which calculates GDP based on a basket of goods to account for currency discrepancies, already ranks China as the second largest economy at $7.6 trillion, compared with a GDP PPP of $11.7 trillion for the United States.42
Deng had famously argued for economic pragmatism with the following axiom: “Whether a cat is black or white makes no difference. As long as it catches mice, it is a good cat.”
He did indeed let the capitalist cat out of the bag and China has grown into a huge tomcat with membership in the WTO in 2001 and what trade diplomats in Geneva understatedly call “economic realities,” referring to China’s estimated $100 billion trade surplus with the rest of world.43
No one would like to put that cat back in the bag more than textile workers in other countries. With the WTO program calling for developed countries to lift tariffs on Chinese imports in 2005, the sharp rise in Chinese exports this year has been led by textiles and apparel—such as t-shirts, brassieres, pocket linings, etc. In less than six months in 2005, Europe, for example, imported 181.5 million Chinese sweaters, and in 2006 it will import 200 million.44
Shipments of various textiles have exceeded quotas and are clogging European ports in what has been labeled the “Bra War,” prompting questions about how much clothing the world can absorb from this strange communist-capitalist machine that runs on a virtually endless supply of cheap labor—including millions of children under 16 and hundreds of thousands in prison camps.45
With this system in place, Chinese officials find themselves in the unusual position of seeking to slow the economy and even slow the surging export growth that marked an alarming five-fold increase in June 2005 over the previous year.46
But the market forces put in place by the party now appear to be beyond party control, and even as China’s internal market grows, it can’t absorb this vast industrial overproduction.
Economists advise that the Chinese economy, although admittedly overheating since 2003, is not growing faster than Korea in the sixties and seventies or Japan in the eighties. They concede, however, that China is so much bigger that the consequences of this overproduction crisis are unfathomable.
Red Capital Rises. Economic power is increasingly shared by party officials with entrepreneurs, industrialists and financiers—the red capitalists who work closely with military leaders and party members or are themselves present or past members of these organizations.
The goals of red capital are clearly revealed in the energy sector, which is also a good indication of how red-hot the economy has become—energy demand is now 150 percent higher than in 1980,47 so high, in fact, that in 2004 over 10,000 factories rationed power and rearranged production schemes in favor of graveyard shifts because of inadequate electricity.48
With funding from state banks flush with foreign reserves from international trade, Chinese energy firms have cut oil deals with Angola, Australia, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Canada, Iran, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Uzbekistan and Venezuela.
The July 2005 appreciation of the yuan makes oil cheaper for China, and the companies Chinese investors acquire in the West are also less expensive because of the currency appreciation, notably the acquisition of energy firms in the United States and Canada.
Unlike the Japanese, who invested in U.S. real estate in the eighties, the Chinese cleverly buy firms that actually produce things, and they clearly have their eyes set on energy deals since the naked competition for sources of oil was revealed by the 2003 war in Iraq.
President George W. Bush made real to Saddam Hussein the threat Nixon made to the Saudi royals during the 1973 oil crisis, namely seizing the oil fields.
Chinese investors, who were made to understand the national security concerns regarding their bid on the U.S. energy firm Unocal Corporation, withdrew the offer in 2005. Meanwhile, Beijing joined with Moscow in opposing American moves in former Soviet republics in the region and military advances elsewhere, in particular increased U.S. troop levels in Japan and calls in Washington and Tokyo to base nuclear weapons in the land of the rising sun.
To counter possible U.S. moves to block China’s access to energy resources, a ‘string of pearls’ strategy with bases stretching to the Middle East is being developed, notably a base in Pakistan along with a pipeline running to China, and a base in Indonesia near the strategic Strait of Malacca through which 80 percent of China’s oil imports must pass.49
The Chinese may have been thwarted by Washington from buying Unocal, but the United States can’t count China out of all deals and may, in the end, have to leave it to the red giants to show the world how to accumulate capital—even if it is a contradiction, to say the least, and a potential recipe for class war, for a purported people’s army or communist party to have devised what an expert says is “one of the most unequal economies and societies in the world.”50
China uses cost-free, risk-free loans from state banks and a sacrificial labor force to overcome crises at home while cashing in on them abroad. The bold acquisitions of bankrupt firms overseas, which give the Chinese a say in how things are run, illustrate the opportunistic use of red capital.
The Chinese, above all, want to continue selling their merchandise to western markets and may be inclined to make concessions to their counterparts in Washington, except on issues such as Taiwan and energy access.
It will be interesting to see if the West allows so-called communists, who are in fact nationalists, to play the game of capital on an equal footing in the international arena. As a consequence of their trade advantage, the able bureaucrats at places like the Finance Ministry, the People’s Bank of China and the China International Trust and Investment Corporation have emerged, collectively, as a major force on world capital flows with investment at 45 percent of GDP and sharply increased mergers and acquisitions abroad.51
These red capitalists saw to it that the nation held a formidable $659 billion in foreign reserves in March 2005, according to the U.S. Treasury Department’s estimate,52 which is second only to Japan’s and rising by tens of billions of dollars every month.
Economists at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) observe that China’s holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds have fallen steadily since 2003,53 and despite claims to the contrary, it appears China may be moving away from the dollar holdings, which now comprise 62 to 75 percent of its foreign currency assets.54
This unwillingness to continue financing U.S. consumption could prove bitter medicine for America’s credit-driven, debt-ridden society—potentially threatening to cause a hike in interest rates and trigger a recession.
A full-scale financial and currency crisis, perhaps with a festive name like the phrase ‘tequila crisis’ used to describe Mexico in 1994 or the ‘tango crisis’ used with Argentina from 1998 to 2002, could be in the economic outlook for the United States.
Another possibility is a crisis that takes on viral qualities and spreads, as was feared with Asia in the late nineties but is more likely in the U.S. case, given the role of the dollar as the global reserve currency.
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Harvard President and former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers, and institutions such as the IMF and the Bank of International Settlements in Basel—the so-called central bank of central banks—are sounding the alarm about the U.S. trade and fiscal deficits.55
Clyde Prestowitz of the Economic Strategy Institute thinks a run on the dollar could be triggered by the central bank of any number of countries, probably one less entangled with the United States than China, if the bank decides it has too many greenbacks.56 A Budweiser crisis, perhaps, is in the forecast, one that hits Joe Sixpack with housing foreclosures and soaring gas prices.
Workers Suffer and Die. From 1949 to 1979, the Chinese population doubled at the behest of the party’s directives to “make China stronger.”57 This proved all too successful, and in 1979, when the population was still under a billion, the party instituted its controversial one-child policy and actually forced abortions on its citizens.58
In July 2005, the Chinese population reached 1.3 billion, according to a Chinese government figure. The CIA estimate, however, is 1.5 billion, demonstrating the vast scale, as the difference in estimates exceeds the populations of most nations.59
A consequence of this huge population is that each year 20 million more people are selling their labor power into a ruthless labor market, which enables the nation to hire people rather than use robots, as Japan prefers to do.
In the late seventies and early eighties, the party began encouraging flexible forms of employment, such as self-employment, part-time work and seasonal jobs, in response to rising unemployment.
The party now openly speaks of “inducing workers to change their employment opinions”60 in favor of new forms. Whereas in 1978 zero Chinese workers were self-employed or worked for foreign-funded companies, by 2001 the numbers had risen significantly (to 2131 and 345, respectively, per 10 thousand workers).
Although most people, 76 percent, still worked for state-owned firms in 2001, over the 1978–2001 time frame collectively owned units in urban areas fell 37 percent as a source of employment and private enterprises rose 10,080 percent.61
Researchers find that in the current market conditions of labor oversupply, employers neglect working conditions, to pursue higher profits, and “workers may work excessively when they are in competition for jobs and tend to underbid one another to get a job.”62
A Renmin University survey found evidence of a great deal of forced overtime, and concluded that the most prevalent reason for the extension of work hours is intensified market competition.
In the three cities surveyed, 43.2 percent of workers would prefer not to work overtime, compared with those who wanted the extra hours and those who were indifferent. Workers with lower education had longer hours; construction was one of the hardest jobs in terms of hours and hazardous conditions, the survey said.63
In 2001 the Chinese public learned with alarm that a fellow citizen worked 226 consecutive days at 17 hours per day, becoming the first reported “death caused by tiredness” from work.64
Moreover, China surpasses all other regions in work-related accidents, fatal and nonfatal work-related diseases, and deaths by dangerous substances from work.65 Work-related fatalities in China are reportedly over 450 thousand per year.66
Like workers everywhere, the Chinese die of violence at the workplace, and of work-related conditions such as cancer and suicide, not to mention a host of respiratory, circulatory and communicable diseases with links to work that go underreported.
Unlike the problems faced by workers elsewhere, workplace safety issues are far worse in China. In 2001, for example, 102,606 workers died from contact with dangerous substances on the job.67
Although market reforms have lifted many millions of Chinese out of absolute poverty,68 i.e. living on less than a dollar per day, the workplace safety figures show that the salary increases are often so tainted with toxins that they’re better left untouched.
Those who would organize or protest in favor of labor rights and many others, including so-called “hooligans and lazy people,” are abducted and sent away without trial for “re-education through labor.”
Prisoners—the world doesn’t really know how many—rise at five in the morning and work in camps, specializing in brainwashing, until midnight.
“We carried stones to a river wharf all day then made artificial flowers at night, seven days a week,” said one former inmate.69 It is difficult to imagine a more hopeless scenario, for example, than being forced to chant banal pro-work slogans, such as “labor makes a new life,” while toiling deep underground in a dirty prison mine.
Reverence for Mao and his thought, such as the exhortation to “conquer nature and thus attain freedom from nature,” has faded by 2005, although he still looms over the society like a totem of rectitude, and sculptures line the Long March with his likeness.
Despite Mao’s adversarial perspective on nature, he instituted work brigades that took care of communal spaces, natural resources and the roads that were so lightly traveled during the late seventies that rice could be processed on them—as I saw on roads near the capital in 1979.
Deng was just beginning his reign back then, when people walked and rode bikes or took buses. Eventually Dengists filled the bureaucracies and propagated his axiom “to grow rich is glorious” with great effectiveness.
These bureaucrats implemented policies that by 2005 filled the streets with cars and set the nation on track to soon become the largest consumer of automobiles and the biggest auto manufacturer.70
This market-oriented tendency led to business practices, replicated innumerable times, aimed at economic growth above other goals.
The predictable environmental results were exacerbated by scavenging and theft of public resources for private use, such as absconding with stones and trees that would otherwise have prevented erosion.
Orville Schell’s prediction of this ecological nightmare—the desertification, contamination and overall degradation—has become all too real.71
At a hot spring in Hubei where at first everything seemed incredibly healthy—mineral-rich water, budding cherry trees—I later learned that the lights visible at night were from a coal-fired power plant down the road.
In the other direction, maybe a kilometer away, a closed concrete plant stared like a ghost at the abandoned homes across the street—the former inhabitants had fled the pollution to save their lives.
Most Chinese are no longer oblivious to the devastation triggered by Deng-inspired policies. A recent nationwide survey reveals that 95 percent regard environmental degradation as a critical issue.72
But even if people say pollution must be handled immediately, they also find it difficult to quell their pursuit of economic glory.
Surviving and thriving in the market are perceived in 2005 to be just as vital to one’s existence as threats posed by pollution—until they become so immediate and intolerable that fleeing one’s residence or rioting are reasonable responses.
Before leaving on my latest trip it was clear that I would not see the sunrise from the heights of Tai Shan in the same dazzling hues as in my youth because of the infamous ‘Asian brown cloud.’
The waters of Victoria Harbor, a shimmering blue under a sunny sky in 1995, would now reflect haze in the gray-green wavelets. Satellite photos show a dense blanket of industrial emissions covering central China, and where the pollution dissipates, it still partially obscures the land below, such as along the coastline around Shanghai.
Satellite sensors also pick up the vast plume of carbon monoxide wreathing across Asia and extending over the Pacific to Hawaii—at times the plume stretches as far as the West Coast of the United States.
Green GDP. Chinese policymakers planned to create a ‘green GDP’ indicator that accounts for environmental costs, but as of 2005 no results have been released.
The World Bank estimates that costs from environmental contamination run 8 percent to 12 percent of GDP, including direct damage from acid rain, lost work, health care and disaster relief.73
If the Chinese were to fully assess the cost, they would have to also make a subjective assessment of the price of the pain caused by soaring asthma from suspended particles in the air, bronchitis and emphysema from sulfur dioxide—a substance that is often so concentrated one can smell it in the street.
This was the case in the booming city of Shenzhen in 2005, just inside the mainland near Hong Kong, which has an even more intense factory-superstore quality than the former colony.
I spoke with a doctor who had witnessed Shenzhen transform from a small fishing village into a place where stockbrokers rub shoulders with a vast floating population, some of whom I saw napping at night under their coats in an internet café.
Now Shenzhen and its environs hardly have any fish to catch—a consequence of the millions of tons of pollutants that flow into the mouth of the nearby Pearl River every year.
The doctor said most inhabitants suffer in some way from the problems associated with carbon monoxide and lead emissions from cars. Also, across China millions of people have coughs, chest pains and throat and eye irritation from high ozone levels.
Deng, a man of small physical stature who survived three purges, liked to remark “the sky will never fall on short people,” but he was wrong: it is falling on the citizens who came after him, whether short or tall.
Government Response. To its credit, the current leadership has acknowledged China is facing an ecological crisis. Pan Yue, deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), said the “develop first” attitude was “absolutely wrong” because it made cleanup more difficult.
“Pollution will quadruple by 2020,” he predicted, “if the pace of pollution remains unchanged.”74 SEPA has begun closing down some highly polluting enterprises, such as gold mines and paper mills,75 and it is also pursuing officials who protect polluters.
Many enforcement hurdles stand in the way of effective environmental protection in this vast, highly populated country where pollution is not controlled from Beijing. Outside the capital for example, SEPA workers are paid by local governments so they can be easily deterred by local officials from probing too deeply.
Deputy Director Pan rightly considers pollution to be a political problem, as well as a question of justice and democracy.
Although many poor people are learning to live with pollution, others are making formal complaints about contamination (426,000 in 2003)76 and many unsolved problems on issues like this led to ‘disputes or incidents’ with authorities (60,000 in 2003).77
Pollution occurs more often in poor districts and villages, such as the ‘cancer village’ of Shangba where half the deaths every year are from cancer.78 In China as a whole, one person in five dies of cancer.79
Pollution horrors are played out every day across the nation: in the countryside where arable land was, until recently, routinely requisitioned by manufacturing plants with the help of corrupt local officials; and in the cities that by 2005 have seen a massive internal migration, that puts intense demands on water and waste management.80
In rural areas, an estimated 300 million people don’t have access to safe drinking water and food is often grown with polluted water.81 Seventy percent of the country’s rivers are tainted, and of the world’s thirty most polluted cities, twenty are in China.82
Middle Kingdom’s New Clothes. The ecological situation is so dire that it can’t be covered up with new vestments, however bright the fabric plastered with ersatz logos or pirated cartoon characters. The new fashion styles are everywhere in 2005—one of the most visible changes seen in China since 1979.
Shreds of colored plastic from the cheap bags used to carry the merchandise home are also ubiquitous. The bags end up scattered by the wind and water, eventually sticking to branches and twigs as random bright specks. These plastic scraps are not in the photos from my first trip, for example, the Yellow River shots.
But I recently saw signs of pollution along both the banks of the Yangtze and marring patches of the exceptionally lovely Li River between Guilin and Yangshuo—arguably one of the most beautiful river gorges in the world where strangely shaped limestone peaks, referred to as karsts by geologists, rise up from the plain by the thousands—suggesting similes of musical notes and elephant trunks.
A Song Dynasty scholar, Fan Chengda, said he sent paintings of Guilin’s karsts to friends back home, but few believed what they saw.
They are now depicted in the Chinese landscapes one sees in cheap reproductions on everything from bamboo scrolls to lamp shades—usually a steep gray mountain adorned with vegetation and perhaps a pagoda, with more peaks in the background.
This terrain has long been the shameless model for these bamboo forest artists, laying bare her some 70,000 rumps as far as the eye can see.
Sadly, the river is no longer as beautiful as it once was. The reflections of clouds that once floated on its surface have disappeared into the polluted haze.
Despite its fading beauty, a diminishing consolation of rural life for locals, the five-hour, 85-kilometer voyage on the Li was still a highlight of my recent trip.
The steel ship sailed through a valley of karsts where bamboo groves line the banks and waterfalls pour down mountains that rise from the green surface undulating from the wake. From the stern of the ship, the smell of cooking wafts over the passengers, and as music issues from the ship’s speakers, I’m struck by the serenity of the deep-green water and sheltering mountains that bestow a sense of calm grandeur.
The Chinese have a word that is now spelled you, formerly yeau, meaning to walk around but also to swim and be carried away by currents.83 This recalls the Situationists and their concept of drifting along the streets of Paris, especially when one is caught up in the pedestrian flows at the outset and end of the work day.
Here on this peaceful river, the situationist image of millions of Chinese abandoning their factories and fields comes to mind...I can see them being taken away by the current, floating on their backs, peering into the clearing sky as their black hair swims like slender eels in the emerald water.
The river is always changing, and human transformations submerge themselves with it, with what could reasonably be called the Way if there weren’t so many.
Currently, tourist ships crowd the river that is otherwise fished from bamboo rafts with nets and cormorants—trained birds with rings around their necks to prevent swallowing.
I feel guilty bringing my tourist sewage to the family crossing the river on a slender raft, the children kneeling on the bamboo slats close to the swift-moving water, hanging on with their tough little hands.
Anti-Pollution Riots. Ecological misery mars the lives of millions in the new China, and this indubitable fact was reflected in an event first reported in the South China Morning Post.84
Villagers in Huaxi, a town in Zhejiang province, demanded in April 2005 that factories be moved and attacked government workers with rocks and clubs, inflicting scores of serious injuries and destroying police vehicles and buses. With the air and water fouled by hazardous substances, the villagers smell the pollution with every breath and are unable to grow crops that are safe to eat.
Local officials hold shares in the factories and have little incentive to halt or even reduce emissions and discharges. The Huaxi villagers first took their concerns to officials in the provincial capital and in Beijing, to no avail.
As a last resort, elderly people, mostly women, set up a tent city blocking the road to the factories. Their brave efforts closed the chemical plants. Police had encircled the villagers on the pretext of helping the poor old women out in the cold, but the police were themselves encircled by more locals.
A reporter who arrived the next day, and had her notes summarily taken by the police said she found a cop uniform draped over a shattered car. Eyewitnesses said the skirmish resulted in deaths on both sides.
A similar pollution protest erupted in August 2005 in Meishan, a town in Zhejiang province where the Tian Neng Battery Factory continually released toxic discharges containing high amounts of lead into the water supply.
This mismanaged waste from the factory is particularly tragic for children, as those not killed by lead poisoning are afflicted with gruesome growth and developmental problems.
One thousand policemen went to villages around the town and beat up protesters who demanded that the factory, which had poisoned, and in some cases, killed their children, be shut down.
During the night, five thousand residents retaliated by breaking into government offices and those of the factory itself, setting them on fire. Before it was over, they burned four police cars and scores of people were injured.85
Lest people in the West judge without also judging themselves, U.S. electronic waste is routinely shipped to China for recycling by children who scavenge computer parts and breathe solder fumes without protection as toxic dust settles around them.86
Because the United States has not ratified the Basel Convention, it is legal for Americans to export their discarded electronic gear—between 50 and 80 percent of such material collected for recycling in the United States is exported.
Although China tried to prevent this trade by banning the import of electronic waste in 2000, Greenpeace, which is now legal in China, discovered e-waste still arriving in the port of Guiyu in Guangdong province, the nation’s main center for this type of scrapping.
As more children die from contact with toxic substances that are intrinsic to China’s economic overproduction and globalized economy, citizens may react like the farmers who live near smelting factories in Guideng, along the Qingshui River.
Soot from the smokestacks was causing severe lung congestion and other problems, so in April 2005, 600 farmers attacked the refineries and tore them apart while the owner and his guards hid in their offices. Party officials obviously worry that the environmental situation threatens social stability.
After 1,000 villagers in nearby Xiachaoshui spent the day destroying hundreds of river-polluting mines, also in April 2005, the town’s anti-poverty funds were used by the officials to finance a late lunch in several restaurants in an attempt to appease the protesters.87
The obvious must repeatedly be said regarding the continued existence of single-party rule in China at this stage in history: even if one allows for the uneven development of political systems, near-absolute communist control represents a form of dictatorship.
The “council communist” alternative to a party-oriented system, as envisaged by those worthy of identifying with this tendency, allows for multiple types of councils, usually with small groups, including freedom-loving libertarian socialists, coming together in a larger federation.
The desire for freedom was directly, if furtively, expressed to me by a young English-speaking man in 1979 when I was alone for a moment behind the train station in Jinan. It was outside, at night, and my elderly translator went to look for our car and driver.
The young man approached me but looked away. “We will continue.”
“Continue what?”
Our eyes met for less than a second.
“The fight for freedom.” He walked away.
My ears, surprised to hear English, registered what he said as I watched him disappear in the crowd.
My translator suddenly moved next to me. “What did he say?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Don’t listen to him.”
The passerby was of course right, people fought for freedom and democracy in China by massing at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and by continuously pushing the envelope on censorship and honest expression, as during the Democracy Wall movement in 1978–79.
Yet authoritarian control of information is still woefully real in 2005. The state-run news agency has a special version of the news for trusted members of the party and military, presumably reflecting reality more accurately in terms of presentation, scope and detail.88
Corporate-owned media are starting to rival the party’s control on information, with brave journalists often jeopardizing their personal freedom in the process. China has more journalists in jail under dubious circumstances than any other country.89
Although the party would rather censor the Internet, the party leaders realize they simply can’t stop information from leaking out to so-called “netizens” despite a new Internet-related law on the “correct guidance of public opinion.”90
Independently published books are by 2005 also communicating information about food poisoning and SARS, the acronym for “severe acute respiratory syndrome,” which is a key part of the broader new China syndrome described in this essay; as well as information about other vital matters, such as the plight of the peasantry.91
A young woman, her pensive face framed by a window, looks out on a modest pedestrian walkway in Yangloudong, an ancient village in Chibi City. The nearest town is Zhaoliqiao, or Zhao Li Qiao, where tea was cultivated and processed beginning in the Tang Dynasty, becoming known for Songfeng green tea, Yangloudong brick tea and Hubei Laoqing dark tea.
She once loved the village where walkways zig-zag over a creek, some of the buildings date to the Ming and Qing dynasties. She is now at the height of her powers and sees little in her past to keep her there, nothing in her future.
The economic reforms that began with the Four Modernizations have spurred a massive internal migration from rural areas to fast-growing coastal cities. Single women, like the one in the window, and single men, with their hungry stomachs as their only companions, abandon the countryside.
Husbands and wives are fleeing the wide-open domains where they first met and loved one another, leaving for cramped cities where contact with the world feels like a second skin and reality imposes itself everywhere, refusing to be rejected.
These couples are leaving the land they have known all their lives in search of work in urban areas, losing contact with the soil that has served them so well as their trains pull away from the station into the transparent night.
This floating population is no longer on terra firma and only half aware that with this separation from the soil, with this alienation from it, many will lose themselves in a sea of social chaos.
Divorce rates have skyrocketed because of work-related separations, and child abuse is a widespread problem. Suicide rates are by government admission alarmingly high—the highest in the world.
These are unintended consequences, along with pollution and class conflict, of the new system’s promotion of overproduction, competition and self-sacrifice.
Yet members of the floating population, estimated to number 140 million people or more,92 hang on tenaciously to their dreams, even when they have to count their salaries in hope rather than money.
They become illegal inhabitants, hence floaters, in urban areas because they are unregistered, always risking arrest because of this status. Hence this population suffers from a degree of continuous psychological tension during the never-ending escape from the economically depressed countryside.
In the train station at Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, I saw people who might be floaters, such as peasants dressed in their best clothes calmly sitting row upon row in the station’s cavernous waiting room, illuminated by golden sunlight streaming through the windowpanes.
I looked down on them from the air-conditioned area that requires tickets to enter—down on the waiting room’s commercial space peopled by those who are now counting money in yuan and who shop at the many brightly lit kiosks located around the edges of the waiting hall. They buy something to calm their nerves before the long trip.
Most of these travelers strive to appear prosperous in the same style I saw in the seventies—white shirts, dark trousers and leather shoes—still splattered with mud from the countryside. Many others, especially younger people, sport new fashions and bright colors as signs of success in the red capitalist economy.
Some of the Confucian manners and socialist ethics concerning work are still rooted in these travelers in 2005. Yet they now find themselves governed more by the anxiety from uncertainty and a desire for economic success than the moral guidelines from the past.
Out of necessity, I ventured down into the train station’s main waiting room, through the maze of people, past the hall with a large-scale hand-washing operation—numerous large sinks with people lining up to use them.
With some trepidation, I went into the men’s room, knowing that doing so in a railway station always poses risks in the United States and Europe. My chances of avoiding trouble looked good as the long urinal to my left was sparsely populated and it was empty near the corner, where the window, built into the wall to the right, was open.
A pair of young peasants came in right after me—they were laughing and looked at me as they pulled up to the urinal. I turned away, toward the large, chest-high window that would seem improper in the West. Without as much as a pane of glass between us, my eyes met those of woman walking by outside the station—she looked away nonchalantly, without breaking her stride, once she realized what I was doing.
Times had certainly changed. When I visited Jinan in 1979, I told a waitress that I wanted to kiss her. She pretended not to understand me.
Now, in 2005, when I told the salesgirl in Wuhan as she was buttoning my jacket that she should be careful and perhaps move away, she didn’t budge—her hand rested on my chest for an instant, feeling my heart pound deeply, as is rarely the case simply because of the presence of a woman.
It would have been an imperialist kiss, I told myself, if I were to impose it on her, even if she looks and even smells like she is born for love. The air is still. Sweat forms on my brow as she stays close to me, close enough to read my mind.
“You could marry her,” my guide whispers in my ear.
“Really?” My vision shifts and shifts back, like a mild bout of vertigo. “How in the world?”
“Give her your card.”
The salesgirl smiles calmly, not moving away, leading me to believe she didn’t understand what was said. If she can read my mind, she knows one sure way never to be forced into love, is to never resist it.
My left eye blinks. Our minds are silently speaking a language that obscures the precise meaning, even from us. Her right eyebrow quivers.
I would give her my card and later receive a package by mail from her with a small bundle of raven hair and a real black-and-white photo of her wonderful face. It was easy, with these objects, to conjure her hair draped over her slender neck and beige shoulders, and her smiling at me in a welcoming way.
My letters were inevitably delayed, and I realized that I didn’t really want to be enchained by marriage, rather joined at the hip with a woman who recognizes the futility of labor, or perhaps a Buddhist who can attach the negation of desire to merchandise—a woman wise enough to gently remind me of the virtues of voluntary simplicity and the vice of voluntary servitude.
It would be nearly impossible to find a woman in the new China who wants to rid her country of useless labor, although I may have come close with this salesgirl from Wuhan who called herself “Free” when we corresponded by email.
She would invariably ask when I would return, and it became apparent to us after a while that we had been close for only an instant, and then impossibly far apart, with her in Wuhan and me in Washington where there would be other Chinese women for me to meet.
There was a certain Tibetan woman whose beauty graced the streets of D.C. one spring, and whose youthful body repeatedly betrayed her adult mind when I was near, even though I was twice her age.
She didn’t know what she was doing and asked me if I knew. The answer was obvious when she wanted to sit on my thigh as if riding a horse and eel her slender arms around my neck.
Despite my best efforts to embody the social morality of a Confucian sage on my voyage in 2005, I couldn’t resist gazing at the women in the massage parlors and noting the abundance of sex workers in some parts of China.
They are so plentiful in Yangshuo that a young woman I met, who could well be part of the floating population, was maliciously called a prostitute by a rival travel guide, presumably because she was with me. The thought of sex work must’ve crossed her mind as guide work is underpaid, with long hours and traveling great distances every day.
My new friend nonetheless has it better than most. She is studying English at a private school that employs the many foreigners who come here to raft and rock climb in a stunningly beautiful place.
We became good friends very fast, making me think she might be connected to the local police, although she seemed more like one of the few who was yet to be fully controlled.
She would help me, by the river, feel the seductive beauty of this locale with the karsts jutting up on the other shore and as far across the plain as far as the eye could see. She would serenade me with the incomprehensible tones of her bird-like voice, as I describe in more detail in the coda to this text on Yangshuo.
More often than not, the floating population, such as those that appear as silhouettes in the vast Wuhan train station waiting hall, milling around in sharp slanted rays from the late afternoon sun, travel south through the night on long trains, chasing the dream of owning possessions in the city.
Many members of this population wind up living solitary lives in urban slums—a psychologically painful existence that begins with the first steps getting off the train. It can be an economically difficult one as well without the food and housing subsidies reserved for urban residents, made even harder when honoring commitments to send money back to those they have left behind in the countryside.
Some will have the extra energy and deep need to pursue sexual possessions, whereas all want and ultimately possess at least some merchandise, always only partially satisfying their desire to obtain goods.
Capitalism, even the red version, is like an ingenious machine that replaces the existing hearts of consumers, which could be synchronized by lovers, with a pump that operates in harmony instead with the vibrations emitted by the magic and largely unknown powers of goods.
The floaters generally work in restaurants, clothing stores and factories, and as unskilled laborers on construction sites, to be able to buy the merchandise they need for survival. Many suffer chronic illnesses due to harsh working conditions at these jobs and poverty-related poor nutrition: that is in addition to being increasingly afflicted by the universal gangrene of consumerism.
Locals tolerate floaters because of the need for workers, but they are often regarded as criminals, whereas a fair judge would find them to be merely possessing more tenacity than any other human quality.
The floaters often work when they are sick, and when one dies, five more show up to replace him or her, driven to work by necessity and their illusions and desires—often stemming from advertisements for charming objects.
Objectively speaking, rural unemployment is a serious problem, but even so, there are also work shortages in rural areas caused by the internal migration to the coast.
At the tea plantation in the town of Zhaoliqiao, near the ancient village of Yangloudong, one of the owners said that it is difficult to find people to pick the leaves because everyone has left for the city. I worry children are already doing this work, and labor shortages will only make their plight worse.
To his credit, President Hu has exempted, beginning in 2005, China’s 800 million farmers from a thousand-year-old agricultural tax.93
This is a significant source of relief as most peasants must still pay their 30-year land use contracts, which are controlled by party members with a penchant for requisitioning land.
If one can imagine floaters who drift into the coastal cities often looking down, through the rain and soot, at their cheap watches as if they were afraid of being late for work, the farmers in the countryside fret over the columns of smoke they see on the horizon, fearing one more of their kind is finished and his fields set ablaze.
When developers want rural land, they just bribe party officials who in turn give tax cuts for selling land to themselves. The farmers, standing amid their plants, gaze at the smoke wreathing up into the sky in a silence that is only broken by the songs of birds.
The party members, who pretend to be blind to the problem, have reacted to the loss of arable land with regulations forbidding development except under certain circumstances, such as the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
In the war of voices, whereby every combatant is just a voice, villagers seem to have embraced the chance to press for their rights in so-called “meetings on stools,” which are like community council meetings and are an outgrowth of the government’s rural democracy campaign.94
In the war of flesh and bones, whereby resistance is opposed by force, developers use mercenaries to put in place party-oriented land requisitions. A recent video report showed entirely black-clad troops descending upon the village of Shengyou in Hebei province, killing six and beating the rest into submission.95
The instinct for revolution, covered up by the party, often by using theory, is revealed in practice by these villagers whose lives have a historic quality in the context of social struggle.
Yet as one who loves Chinese women, all Chinese women, it’s easy to see that this system of often corrupt, market-oriented reforms has been particularly hard on rural Chinese women. They suffer in silence and resort to the solitary revolt of suicide, which needs to be part of the historical record regarding the early rise of red capitalism.
The party created women’s programs and a “harmonious family” campaign in response to this obvious social problem.96 Chinese women commit suicide at three times the rate of men.97
Abandoned by their husbands, who work in the coastal cities, many women keep on farming if they still have land, and they care for children without assistance, alone save for the birds. All too many of these rural women dream of sleeping without dreams, which is to say they dream of death.
Many young women have nothing, not even China’s beautiful nature, to fall back on, and they eat readily available pesticides to kill themselves, swallowing the poison to blind their eyes from the changes they have witnessed.
What will they do when asked, because of desertification and erosion over the next decade, to buy imported grains they can’t hope to afford?
Hunger will force many women who haven’t killed themselves to sell themselves—to move through the haze of drunkenness from a table at a seedy bar to a back room where they undergo what feels like rape in exchange for money.
Hunger and sex, sometimes brutal, become the dominant forces in the lives of many rural women who have been uprooted from the land and forced to service hordes of men thanks to the economic modernization. The door to one of the back rooms is open a crack, revealing a nude couple. I can see the young woman talking to the john, she seems to be asking: “Why do you want me to do something like that?”
In most cases, the collective farms have been privatized by 2005 meaning that a staggering 40 million peasants have lost their land through requisitions over the last decade, triggering the massive influx to urban areas.98
The coastal cities in Guangdong groan from the weight of so many internal migrants who don’t float as much as walk with heavy steps home from work as uncertainty continuously evaporates and crystallizes again. A worker sees his double reflected in a shop window, not sure what the common thread is between him and this image that at first appears lost in shelves of merchandise but on closer inspection is fully afflicted with the universal gangrene of consumerism.
China’s cities respond to the added stress of the floaters by treating people like things, whether it’s the bosses who treat factory workers like cogs in a machine or the criminals who prey on these same workers.
The man with lawless eyes in Shenzhen is looking at my bag filled with camera gear and sizing me up through the crowd on the sidewalk with an eye for making a desperate move, such as a strong-arm robbery.
His chances with me are slim, he must realize that, as I’m much bigger than he is, but he could be one of those blue-collar workers in cities worldwide who have such serious job-safety concerns that they put their lives on the line every day—it’s not unusual for them to risk a broken jaw or a little jail time.
Even if he is more likely a floater, at some point he has done some factory work, which must have felt like being robbed or even raped. Now he seems to want to rob me or rape my guide.
The others, the white-collar workers, or at least many of them, are in the streets all the time as well. They’re incessantly moving between work and study in communal apartments and have “too many things to handle in too short a time,” according to a recent study.99
Of course, most power is exercised not in the street but in closed rooms, often provided by hotels to guests, such as party members or military officials who have close relations with the hotel managers and security teams.
After their meetings, they leave behind the deadly scent of wolves in the air, and from there they can only be seen as the silhouettes of passengers in fast-moving dark cars.
Hu talks about “lasting stability and unity” and the capacity to deal with serious problems, while setting up special riot squads in cities across the country.100
He may be too insulated in his limousines and highly secure palaces, insulated even from the sandstorms that whirl around Beijing, to effectively deal with problems on the huge scale of increased household waste from the millions of people flocking to cities.
These rural bird-and-plant people who migrate find themselves cut off from their families, suffering deep loneliness, and working themselves to death in cities where they see the trash piling up around them and decomposing before their eyes.
The decomposing waste on the street reflects the rot forming in their souls as they work at jobs where the rate of pay can actually decrease as hours increase. They don’t feel there’s much to lose in risking everything when the factory riots start or when throwing themselves out of university windows.
Competition over exam scores and career opportunities are the main reasons more young urban people than ever in China commit suicide. Many attempt this impulsively, less than five minutes after the idea comes to them, which indicates they don’t suffer from depression, rather they kill themselves because of bleak material conditions and prospects.
Suicide is a common cause of death in China behind lung cancer, traffic accidents and heart disease. Yet suicide is the number-one cause of death for people 15 to 35 years of age.101 A quarter of all suicides in the world are committed in China, and researchers believe the figure of 250,000 suicides per year is a gross underestimate because many deaths are not investigated.
Few tears are shed for party officials who commit suicide after their corruption has been exposed, schemes such as kickbacks for allowing pollution and skimming of funds to finance their now-forbidden gambling junkets to Macau.
Suicide in such situations is clearly a viable option as corruption is a capital crime anyway. Traditionally executions are carried out with a bullet to the head, but now the courts are shifting to mobile execution vans using lethal injections.
China still has beautiful dusks at twilight despite the environmental degradation; its citizens use this time to contemplate their place in society as the class divide deepens, seemingly day by day.
They walk along lakes and rivers, as well as along city walls as night falls, eventually pressing the code to enter a private apartment vestibule or grip the doorknob to an always-open dormitory entrance—both classes seeking to transform themselves, if only for a while, from workers into resters.
Hu calls for building a harmonious society while cracking down on the symptoms of class conflict erupting across the country on a daily basis—a cart scratching an expensive car that leads to a full-scale riot,102 for example, or the astounding number of organized protests nationwide.
Sharp class divisions and ecological disaster were not factored into Deng’s equation of domestic savings, foreign investment and cheap labor that would theoretically enable the country to grow out of any problem.
Market capitalism has blossomed within state capitalism giving the country many examples of success, “small flowers” as they were described to me, referring to the small- and medium-sized companies that have been springing up since the turn of the century.
Looking through the weeds, which seem to be more prevalent than flowers, one still sees lots of employment slack being taken up by state-owned enterprises.
The new system has heightened to an extreme degree, and in a short time, the oppositions of work and consumption—forces that seem independent in origin but interact at the level of selling oneself as a commodity on the labor market to buy merchandise in the shopping market.
It’s clear that both in the abstract and concrete senses, respectively, of statistics on hours worked per day and alienation measured in suicides, Chinese workers have sacrificed themselves to red capital.
The current leaders use labor markets, always in competition with a vast prison labor system, and merchandise, some of which is useful while many items are more of symbolic or exchange value—the leaders use these two levers to maintain the party’s monopoly on administrative power.
President Hu’s new clothes were depicted by Time, on its cover,103 as a Mao jacket with the designer initials of Louis Vuitton—not that Hu would himself be a victim of consumerism, rather that he recognizes the magical powers of manufactured goods, notably the charms of luxury brands. He allows them to flourish, while attempting to control those powers to his advantage, as a way to distract the population from its plight.
Everyday life is so hard for most Chinese because of what are experienced as work and shopping obligations, they find it hard to fulfill their traditional social obligations.
They have time constraints, and the still relatively newfound sensations of self-indulgence they feel as consumers are seemingly more alluring than visiting family and friends.104
These charming objects usually have enough allure to workers that most let themselves back into the cage of work for another day instead of rioting or throwing themselves out of windows.
The social fabric is nonetheless ripped and unraveling. Time will tell whether this market, which embraces a particularly destructive form of change, can survive its inevitable crises.
Change in China has been so great over the last twenty-six years that the Middle Kingdom is now exerting immense, perhaps determinate, influence on the world. This begs the question whether the world will be able to survive China’s crises.
All the more reason to note with alarm how aggressively the natural capital of China was appropriated and exploited, and how—environmentally and socially—everyone is worse off than they were in 1979. They may think they are more free, but they’re not. They may think they live better lives, but they don’t.
Hu is at least calling for harmony, even if it clearly serves his interest to have that goal, and China has yet to use state-sponsored terrorism in the cynical way it is deployed in the West as a tactic in a broader sub-rosa strategy of tension that aims to induce anxiety and a desire for state protection.
The Chinese people may find freedom and rest somewhere in the universe of plans associated with Hu’s policy for social harmony, but more likely the policy will induce changes that beget more changes before many people get to the goals of liberty and the right to relax.
Revolutions tend to take place during periods of economic growth and rising expectations, and the Chinese people have a history of revolution and revolt to draw on that could help them carry out a Big Rest—given propitious circumstances.
The anti-pollution rioters in the countryside and unemployed floaters in the city know the merchandise economy is a parasite that threatens to kill the hosts—the workers and consumers—on which it lives. If pollution doesn’t kill them directly, work and consumerism will finish them off indirectly over time.
Riots aren’t really a viable tactic everywhere in China, and a Tiananmen style occupation would make the occupiers vulnerable to high-tech weaponry that didn’t exist in 1989.
Sensual exchange between autonomous subjects and the deep rest one enjoys afterwards, as well as workplace sabotage if the situation calls for it, are the best immediate treatments for the new China syndrome that can only be cured by a general strike that genuinely leads to sustained relief from excessive work and runaway consumerism.
Chibi City. My 2005 trip took me to the end of a long road cutting through the fields of rape, in bloom with yellow flowers, to the place on the Yangtze River where the Battle of Red Cliffs took place in the winter of A.D. 208–209.
Characters bearing the name of the largest naval battle in history were later carved in rock, sometime between the Tang and Song dynasties, marking this spot known to most learned Chinese. The battle now offers strategic lessons for the refusal of work movement.
As the conflict played out, the northern warlord Cao Cao sought to take territory south of the Yangtze River in a bid to reunite the Eastern Han Dynasty. Cao Cao faced two southern warlords, Sun Quan and Liu Bei, at this bluff—the latter deployed a masterful series of stratagems that set the northern force back on its heels.
The most brilliant of these stratagems involved the allied southern forces, which were smaller than those of the north, infiltrating the northern camp with a spy. The southern side first whipped the spy so that he would appear, by his wounds, to be a genuine defector.
This spy convinced the northern warlord to string his ships together across the river, arguing that this would both increase stability of the armada and quell seasickness among his men.
The southern forces then sent Cao Cao a letter of surrender from other would-be defectors, who said they would change sides and bring their ships with them, only these vessels had been turned into “fire ships,” i.e., soaked in fish oil and filled with dry reeds to make them more flammable.
After a favorable shift in the night wind, the southern forces approached the northern tie-up of ships and set their own ships alight, then slipped away in smaller boats.
Ablaze, these vessels drifted into the north’s giant tie-up of ships, one wooden ship after another crashing into the wooden ships of the other side, in turn setting them on fire. Flaming arrows shot by the southern forces from their smaller boats added to the conflagration of the northern fleet.
The northern forces had been on campaign for a long time and weren’t very skilled in the nautical realm—they either fled or were driven from this place on the Yangtze River where the cliffs turned red from burning ships.
“The few defeat the many and the weak defeat the strong,” is the enduring saying about this battle.105
The allied victory gave Liu Bei and Sun Quan control of the river, which served as a line of defense that eventually led to the creation of two southern states.
Will work-resisters be able to devise stratagems akin to those of the southern forces, something like to a martial-arts maneuver whereby all the force now going into work is turned against it and the relative size of the pro- and anti-work forces is suddenly reversed?
Wuhan. The Yellow Crane Pavilion in Wuhan, first built in 223 A.D. and reconstructed many times, most recently in 1981, is one of those places that now often comes to mind, for various reasons, when I’m in other places.
My guide tells me the story behind the tower as we climb the rosewood steps spiraling up the structure atop Snake Hill.
“The owner of a wine shop would give free wine to an artist who drew a yellow crane.” She stops for a second. “The crane would come to life and dance for the customers, which was good for business.”
I glance out at the hazy clouds. “Very imaginative.”
“The Tang Dynasty poet Cui Hao writes that long ago he would ride the yellow crane, but the crane left and will never return...all that remains is this tower.”
We continue ascending, taking in the tower’s overlapping ridges and interlocking flying eaves.
“This was always a gathering place for poets,” she says. “Now there’s a place reserved for visiting poets on an upper floor, you’ll see, with desks and chairs.”
I imagine them up here, the ones who felt free enough to laugh at art, waiting for the moon to sit in the river so they could put words in the mouths of fish.
“Li Bai, or as you say, Li Po, writes of coming here,” my guide continues. “He was there as a wanderer and thinking of home, remembering his far away Ch'ang-an.”
“What did he say?”
“He writes of being ‘deep inside Yellow Crane Pavilion,’ like this.” She points to the polished wood rooms with crimson pillars. “He heard a bamboo flute play ‘Falling Plum Blossoms’ and simply noted it was late spring in a city by the river.”106
“He was very restrained.” I take in the tapestries on the walls and the fine texture on the windows, all of which have of course changed since his time in the eighth century. “Unfortunately, I don’t share this quality.”
I would be so unrestrained as to say that my intellectual equator is found not in a tower but between the pillars of beige thighs, requiring me to state categorically that I hold Chinese women in the highest esteem, with the burgundy and rose nexus of those pillars constituting, for me, the veritable ‘way’ evoked by Taoism.
On the balcony, I see the Yangtze stretch out before me in a long bend that’s bisected by a low bridge, and from the heights of this five-story pavilion on the hill, I can see fiery traces of the sun through the hazy smog.
“What else did Li Bai write about this place?”
“Not much,” she says. “The legend is that he had ulterior motives for his deferral of writing more about the pavilion.”
“A deferral? Did he defer to his legendary drinking?”
“It is said that he made a tactical deferral to another’s poem because, as can be inferred from his poems, he was lazy and, yes, there was wine to drink.”
As I’m leaving the pavilion grounds, contemplating the poets of this vast land as seen from the tower’s heights, I take in Mao’s youthful calligraphy, which reflects his energy and ambition, beautifully reproduced on concrete walls. In his way, he was a poet for the people of plants and birds in his calligraphy, using images of nature in the service of revolution:
Regarding the tower, Mao repeated the familiar refrain that the yellow crane once gone does not return, adding “white clouds drift slowly for a thousand years.” Many dream that instead it would be alienated labor that does not return, and they see these clouds as the quintessential model from nature of laziness.
Mao might even welcome a Big Rest after he sees the merchandising in the pavilion gift shop of relics of the Cultural Revolution: the pins, posters and books from the sixties, such as those containing Mao’s military thoughts.
Would it have occurred to him now, in 2005, as it surely has to some of the overworked people after a long day smashing factories and destroying mines, to defer to the work that has already been done, to defer to all the alienated industrial production that is killing the planet, before doing more of it?
Deferral is admittedly a weak and subjective response to forces that are objectively quite powerful. But with conditions being as dangerous as they are for labor organizers in the new China, one can do little but try to avoid excessive work and pollution, and find consolation in the arts, athletics, science.
In all of China there must be many lazy poets with cunning tactics to somehow defeat—at least on the personal level or on a temporary basis—red capital and its many strong supporters.
Li Bai’s deferral serves as an example for something between a revolutionary tactic and a poetic posture of revolt. The Chinese should keep this in mind. I rang the giant good luck bell in front of the tower, wishing that this tactic is carried out nationwide, even worldwide.
Yangshuo. Solitary revolutions may be impossible, but the same is not true for solitary solutions. At the end of the Li River cruise, the ship docks and I walk through the arcade of vendors into the dusty town—just one of many tourists weaving through kids who pour out of school into the street dressed in bright yellow shirts and matching hats.
It’s an idyllic place nestled on a small plain, surrounded by mountains. It feels like people have lived here for millennia. Yangshuo is also a boomtown in 2005 as many merchants appear to be thriving and the sound of an unintelligible radio broadcast fills the street crowded with bikes, motorcycles, cars, trucks and buses.
Still more kids—hundreds of them—move into the crossroads around us and beyond; they remind me of the yellow flowers in the fields that grow so abundantly in many places despite the environmental disasters in specific locales.
I go half a kilometer farther to the hotel, a four-star place with photographs of presidents and prime ministers in the lobby, although visitors such as President Bill Clinton didn’t spend the night when he visited in 1998, preferring to go back to the big city of Guilin, which is only a couple hours away by car. My plan is to stay, so I register and put my luggage in the room before heading back out.
Black diamonds on yellow tiles mark the path back through the lobby—cinnamon walls with golden waves, cresting with white flourishes, are seemingly scribbled across the wall; concentric golden circles are painted onto the white ceiling, giving the place a psychedelic feel.
The uniformed receptionists are preoccupied with other guests, so I move down the hall past rooms that must be a brothel—a pretty woman watches television in lingerie in the first room; women sex workers play cards and drink in the second. The blind is closed in the third room.
A voyeuristic thrill rushes through me, and I watch the strange scenes in the first two rooms for a moment, imagining what is happening in the third room as shadows of figures move behind the blind. I decide it’s not so strange based on my knowledge of the world, which in this case is associated more with fear than love.
The women move silently in the rooms, and I feel the dissonance between their lives and mine. The scene wouldn’t be exceptional if they weren’t so lightly dressed and clearly waiting for sex. Maybe if I too wait, if I can be patient, these Chinese women will show me some of the tenderness I feel for them—maybe they will undress a bit for me and whatever is strange about them will become beautiful.
No, they’re preoccupied and ignore me, so I go around the corner to the kiosk serving the entire massage area. The male manager steps out from behind a curtain and presses his pudgy belly into the sales counter.
“Can I help you?”
“Do you have a sauna?”
“Yes.” He waves his arm. “Follow me.”
The manager invites me to go through the open curtain—the sauna is there, but I’m compelled to watch, through a glass door, the solitary prostitute in lingerie waiting for her next customer.
“Thank you,” I say to the manager. “Perhaps I’ll take a sauna later.”
My love for the woman watching television in a glass box fades quickly, like a disappearing ghost, because the scenario has a sickening, commercial feel.
As I turn across the lobby hallway toward the stairs, a little Chinese woman in her early twenties ventures an approximation of English to me. I can hardly understand a word of what she said.
“You are working quite hard on your English, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Why don’t you practice with me?”
She smiles. “Yes, I want to.”
Our encounter on the hotel stairway happens a little too fast for me not to suspect her of being a police plant or a sex worker. Yet her white pants and matching cotton top give her a clean, respectable appearance.
“I just applied to work at the hotel,” she says. “Right now, I work as a guide”
“You know the rock formation shaped like the moon?”
“We always take people there on bamboo rafts.”
“On the Li River?”
“No, it’s called the Waiting for the Dragon River. I can take you tomorrow.”
We walk down a few stairs.
“You’ll have to see the Shanshui Theater,” she says. “It’s built around karsts on the river.”
I had seen an impressive video of the red fishing nets fluttering with the melody and the lights on the dancers’ costumes reflecting on the water.
“Okay. Let’s see it and anything else you recommend.”
We exit the hotel, walk down the final flight of steps and into the street.
She sings a few notes. “Forgive me, but I want to be in the theater myself—that’s the real reason I’m living here in this village.”
I nod at her prospects of her becoming one of the daughters of the Li who sing “vines will twine the trees” and make other allusions to love. She holds a few more notes for me as we walk down the main street—a southern woman singing “whenever someone passes,” as the poet Li Bai puts it.107
A careless passerby jostles her, and her tiny lips close shut. My instinct is to wrap my arm around her as she’s so small she seems vulnerable. As I touch her back, her head snaps around.
“I’m sorry.” I smile to reassure her. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but I’m looking for the shop with slide film that I spotted earlier, on my way to the hotel.”
She nods and I go inside the shop without her, just to get a better look at the film on offer, which I intend to buy later.
“You have a lucky voice,” she says, seeming tranquil there on the street. “It’s a voice made to express your happiness to the cold people and bad things.”
“You should know I write about things that aren’t so nice, like war.”
“I once worked in a bookstore,” she says. “Now I like the sweet oral language and body language instead of the reading just by the brain.”
“I agree.”
“You probably think too much—I don’t like it.”
I say her name.
She laughs. “I like your intonation.”
I let out a long whistle. “You’re right—I do have heavy thoughts on my mind.”
In January 1979, six months prior to my first trip, Washington and Beijing established diplomatic relations, effectively terminating the U.S. defense treaty with Taiwan. Many students of international relations were not sure the U.S. military would always be able to overcome China’s strategic advantages with regard to the island 180 kilometers from the mainland.
My eyes looked at her without much expression. “China always claims to be a peaceful power, but you may have other, more or less hidden, strategies.”
I try to temper my thoughts and keep in mind that not much came of the Sino-Vietnamese War that was launched in early 1979. Now, in March 2005, Beijing has a new law in place making reunification with Taiwan a goal and reserving the right to use force.
I glance over at her. “I worry that what happened to Tibet could happen to Taiwan.”
A recent headline about Russia offering China amphibious assault vehicles, which could be used to invade Taiwan, flashes through my mind.
“We won’t need a civil war,” she said, “to reunite with Taiwan.”
“You have the face of someone who listens.”
“I listen with my mind.” I point to my head. “Not just with my ears.”
The paved street opens onto a packed dirt area close to the river. For once I don’t make a bad proposal, one that women can’t handle, even though she seems insatiable beneath her unattainable air. Our feet move in careful steps over a patch of moist earth with the jade-green river moving in front of us.
“You know your society is changing,” I say, turning back for an instant, gesturing toward the town. “All the work done by so many millions of Chinese citizens is now being done in pursuit of individual happiness.”
She looks up at me. “It’s always been that way...but we haven’t forgotten that each one of us should also work for the happiness of everyone.”
We walk on a ways, implicitly agreeing that happiness is the goal while stepping onto the concrete embankment at the water’s edge that runs for several hundred meters under a canopy of trees. We stop and our souls seem to blend together as she sings and as I photograph the river wavelets with a wide angle lens.
I’m also taking in the water buffalo on the other side, the passing boats in the foreground and the oddly shaped karsts on the horizon. The majestic movement of the river itself is what I’d like to capture and the batting of her eyelashes as she sings in earnest even if it’s only to half-fulfill her artistic dreams.
I turn the camera on her; she stops singing.
“Would you pose nude for me? I’d take a naïve realism approach to this area.”
She shakes her head. “I’m not naïve.”
Given the way she approached me, she has, I suspect, a taste for the unknown, and she loves herself and confronts me with the form of love she shares with foreigners.
“There’s something I’d like to show you.”
She steps closer as if to look at my camera. “What?”
“I can’t say.”
She loves what is new to her—that much I can tell by the tone of her voice as she starts singing again.
I’d like to tell her she’s another Barbara, the mellifluous French woman who can sing like a bird in a way that some associate with the Latin poet Titus Lucretius Carus. She wouldn’t understand this reference to the fecundity of nature, and I don’t want her to stop as I’m under the influence of her melodies. My mind feels a surge, a lightness of being as light as her thighs. We seem to detach ourselves from the earth for an instant, as if into the river or even into the air.
She again stops singing. “Are you married?”
“Only to the transformations of reality.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean that you may like me now, but you may not like me after seven years.”
She seems to be thinking for a moment about how likes could change, how they had changed in her past, alternating from one man to another.
Like so many other Chinese, she has made the transformation that came with the economic opening, changing from self-restraint to self-indulgence. Perhaps it’s only natural to have crazy love for just a moment in time and then want something else. She keeps singing as we move down the embankment, passing a couple kissing under the willow tree.
I look over my shoulder. “The couple is still kissing.”
“They must be happy,” she says.
“As they should be when consuming one another rather than merchandise.”
We stop again so I can set up my tripod, turning the camera on the sunless karst-filled landscape beyond the river. She touches my hair and in the sketchbook of my mind she incarnates the women in the Taoist sex manuals from the Tang Dynasty.108 I continue to focus the camera to draw out the moment—a view forms in my mind of the strip of film being exposed not for seconds or hours but years through a minute aperture.
“I don’t know how to take pictures,” she says.
“I don’t know how to sing, so we’re even.” I smile gently. “Come here and I’ll show you.”
She’s right next to me now. Our hands grip the cable release together then she does it on her own. The shutter falls at her touch and we calmly sit by the river, immobile, listening to the water music and embracing life with inactivity.
The Taoist conception of action-less action, or wu-wei, which was a unifying idea in early Chinese thought, remains a shadowy force in China.
Len Bracken—Hong Kong, Guilin, Washington D.C.—April–November 2005
1 Guy Debord, La planète malade (Paris, 2004).
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2 Ian Cobain and Adam Luck, "The beauty products from the skin of executed Chinese prisoners," London Guardian, September 13, 2005.
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3 China Labor Bulletin, ""The Plight of E-Waste Workers," August 15, 2005.
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4 Xiangquan Zeng, et. al, "Working time in transition: The dual task of standardization and flexibilization in China,"International Labor Organization (Geneva, 2005).
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5 CIA's 2005 World Fact Book describes unemployment as "9.8% in urban areas; substantial unemployment and underemployment in rural areas; an official Chinese journal estimated overall unemployment (including rural areas) for 2003 at 20% (2004 est.)." Meanwhile, the Chinanews.cn May 25, 2005 article "Youth unemployment rate remains high," puts the official average unemployment rate for Chinese society at 6.1%. Given that even slight differences in rates equate to huge numbers of people because of China's size, I wouldn't want to say that there are, for example, 170 million unemployed people in China when the number in the rural areas alone may exceed that figure.
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6 Michael Sheridan. "China's hidden trade in children." Sunday Times, September 25, 2005.
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7 Beth Burwinkel. "The Great Wall." Kentucky Courier-Journal, n.d.
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8 Louis Uchitelle, "When the Chinese Consumer Is King," New York Times, December 14, 2003. South China Mall in Donguang is the world's largest shopping mall, and by 2010, seven of the world's ten largest malls will be in China. Industry reports also that the radio frequency identification device market is expanding rapidly in ID cards and consumer goods will likely follow, presenting some obsessed capitalist with the prospect of knowing who has what and where.
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9 Jonathan Watts, "Suicide blights China's young adults," Guardian International, July 26, 2005.
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10 Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs (Washington, 2005).
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11 See Section II under the subhead Anti-Pollution Riots.
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12 Because of dams and pollution, migratory ducks compete with farm animals for resources; as they come into contact, the H5N1 virus spreads to animals who have spread it to humans. Authorities responded with the mass slaughter of birds, the so-called cull, in 2004.
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13 See Section I under the subhead Workers Suffer and Die.
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14 Philippe Arbaizar, et al. Henri Cartier-Bresson—the Man, the Image and the World (London, 2003).
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15 China Daily, "Beijing moves to put private cars in check," April 4, 2005.
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16 Xinhua, "Income gap in China critical by 2010, experts warn," August 22, 2005. A team of income research specialists devised a color-coded warning system to predict trends. It is now yellow but may reach the red zone, which indicates the "disparity is totally unacceptable" and threatens social stability.
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17 International Finance Corporation, "IFC Publishes First Analysis of Private Sector in China," October 18, 2000; see also, China.org, "Private Sector: Pillar of Growth," March 10, 2004; see also, China.org, "Development of the Non-state Owned Sector," November 7, 2003.
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18 United Kingdom, European Union, New Zealand, Australia, etc.
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19 CIA, 2005 World Handbook (online edtion).
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20 Liu Li, "Rivers polluted, drinking water tainted," China Daily. June 30, 2005; see also, Wei Wu and Shan Chungang, "China to adopt fresh bids for environmental goals," Xinhua, June 29, 2005.
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21 Watts, op. cit.
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22 Michael Elliot, "China's New Revolution," Time, June 27, 2005 - shows steadily rising retail sales, cell-phone ownership, car ownership and aircraft departures.
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23 Xinhua, "Premier Wen stresses building of harmonious society," March 5, 2005; Xinhua, "Building harmonious society crucial for China's progress: Hu," June 26, 2005.
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24 Interview with Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations website.
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25 BBC News, August 8, 2005; see also, Mure Dickie, "15 deaths a day as China digs deep for coal," December 21, 2004.
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26 J. Takala, "Introductory Report: Decent Work - Safe Work," International Labor Organization (Geneva, 2005).
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27 Interview with Leung Kwok Hung; June 2005.
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28 Wang Hui, China's New Order (Cambridge, 2003).
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29 Jim Yardley, "Riot in Rural China as Police Try to Halt Pollution Protest," New York Times, April 14, 2005.
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30 Howard French, "China's New Frontiers: Tests of Democracy and Dissent," New York Times, June 19, 2005.
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31 Audra Ang, "Dozens Hurt After China Factory Protest," Associated Press, August 21, 2005; Voice of America, "Anti-pollution protests break out in eastern China," August 25, 2005.
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32 Edward Cody, "China's Rising Tide of Protest Sweeping Up Party Officials," Washington Post, September 12, 2005.
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33 Edward Cody, "In Chinese Cyberspace, A Blossoming Passion," Washington Post, July 19, 2005.
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34 Echo Shan, "China: Wild parties, orgies leave the Great Wall defiled," Asian Sex Gazette, August 12, 2005.
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35 Jean Francois Billeter, Leçons sur Tchouang-tseu (Paris, 2001); idem., Études sur Tchouang-tseu (Paris, 2004).
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36 Len Bracken, Dialectical Hedonism (Washington, 2003).
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37 Paul Lafargue. The Right to Be Lazy (Ardmore, 1999).
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38 Billeter, op. cit.
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39 Elliot, op. cit.
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40 World Bank, "World Development Indicators database," July 15, 2005.
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41 Lehman Brothers, China: Gigantic Possibilities, Present Realities (New York, 2005).
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42 CIA, op. cit.
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43 China Daily (Hong Kong Edition), "Mainland surplus may top US$100b," July 13, 2005.
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44 People's Daily Online, "EU Halts Chinese Sweater Imports," July 23, 2005.
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45 Figures on child and prison labor are unreliable; these numbers are on the conservative side of estimates.
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46 Reuters, "China June trade surplus swells five-fold," July 11, 2005.
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47 WorldWatch Institute, op. cit.
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48 Hayet Sellami, "China's Power Sector: Out of Juice!" China International Business, April 1, 2005.
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49 Nayan Chanda, "Crouching Tiger, Swimming Dragon," New York Times, April 11, 2005.
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50 Elizabeth Economy, op. cit.
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51 Philip Thornton, "Global savings imbalance could force rates higher," The Independent, September 15, 2005; Laura D'Andrea Tyson, "What CNOOC Leaves Behind," Business Week, August 15, 2005; see also, People's Daily, "10,000 big merger deals expected in five years," November 20, 2003
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52 Mike Dolan, "The whereabouts of China's currency stash," Reuters, June 20, 2005.
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53 Ibid.
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54 Ibid.
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55 Widely published news articles on IMF and BIS reports and speeches by Greenspan and Summers—the latter was particularly blunt in describing "screw the world" and "the world screws us" scenarios.
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56 Bruce Stannard, "Dumping of US dollar could trigger 'economic September 11,'" The Australian, August 29, 2005.
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57 http://www.engenderhealth.org/ia/cbc/china.html
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58 David Eimer, "China admits women were forced to have abortions," London Independent, September 21, 2005.
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59 CIA, op. cit.
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60 Zeng, op. cit., p. 1.
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61 Zeng, op. cit., p. 2, table 1.1.
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62 Zeng, op. cit., p. 4.
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63 Zeng, op. cit., p. 12, table 2.6
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64 Zeng, op. cit., p. 4, note 4.
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65 Takala, op. cit., p. 6, table 2.
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66 Takala, op. cit., p. 7, table 3.
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67 Takala, op. cit., p. 6, table 1.
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68 Marwaan Macan-Markar, "All growth, no jobs," Asia Times, September 3, 2005.
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69 Tim Luard, "China's 'reforming' work programme," BBC News, May 11, 2005.
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70 Keith Bradsher, "China Looms as the World's Next Leading Auto Exporter," New York Times, April 22, 2005.
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71 Schell is the author of nine books on China - Discos and Democracy and To Grow Rich Is Glorious are two titles that contain this warning.
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72 Xinhua, "Environmental issue a top concern," August 2, 2005.
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73 The Economist, "A great wall of waste," August 19, 2004.
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74 English.eastday.com, "Environmental crisis possible," June 20, 2005.
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75 Xinhua, "Polluting enterprises, mines shut down," June 24, 2005.
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76 Xinhua, "Pollution poses grave threat to the poor," July 23, 2005.
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77 Xinhua, "Pollution poses grave threat to the poor," July 23, 2005.; see also CIA, op. cit.
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78 The Economist, op. cit.
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79 China Radio International, "China Horizons," May 18, 2005.
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80 Xinhua, "3,988 water pollution accidents occur in four years," June 29, 2005.
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81 Xinhua, "Rivers polluted, drinking water tainted," June 30, 2005.
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82 World Health Organization.
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83 Billeter, op. cit.
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84 Yardley, op. cit.
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85 Ang, op. cit.
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86 Greenpeace International.
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87 Edward Cody, "China's Rising Tide of Protest Sweeping Up Party Officials," Washington Post, September 12, 2005.
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88 Perry Link, "China: Wiping Out the Truth," New York Review of Books, February 24, 2005.
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89 Ibid.
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90 Reuters, "China sets new rules on Internet news," September 25, 2005; see also, Audra Ang, "Beijing Clinic Treats Online Addicts," Associated Press, July 3, 2005.
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91 For example, Investigation of the Chinese Peasantry by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao and How the Chinese Government Controls the Media by He Qinglian
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92 Chinanews.cn, "China's floating population exceeded 10 percent of total," January 6, 2005.
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93 Xinhua, "China's 800 million farmers to be free from agriculture tax," June 29, 2005.
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94 Xinhua, "Chinese farmers gain say in village affairs through 'meetings on stools,'" December 17, 2004.
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95 The Economist, "Turning ploughshares into staves," June 25, 2005.
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96 Xinhua, "Forum focuses on harmonious family," August 19, 2005; Xinhua, "Happiness Project helps needy rural mothers," August 18, 2005.
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97 Watts, op. cit.
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98 The Economist, "China's land disputes," June 23, 2005.
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99 Xinhua, "'White collar' now becomes unpopular title," June 25, 2005.
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100 Richard McGregor, "China sets up squads to combat terrorism," Financial Times, August 18, 2005.
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101 Watts, op. cit.
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102 Joseph Kahn, "China's 'Haves' Stir the 'Have Nots' to Violence," New York Times, December 31, 2004.
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103 Elliot, op. cit.
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104 John Ridding, "Hungry for the many tastes of freedom," Financial Times, April 10, 2005.
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105 Interview with local guide and Internet travel sites. According to the website MonkeyPeaches, John Woo will film The Battle of Red Cliff based on the screenplay by Zou Jingzhi and staring Leung Chiu-Wai and Ken Watanabe.
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106 Li Po and Tu Fu (London, 1973).
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107 The Erotic Spirit edited by Sam Hamill (Boston, 2003).
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108 Jolan Chang, Tao of Love and Sex (New York, 1977); idem., Tao of the Loving Couple (New York, 1983).
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As described in my “New China Syndrome” essay, Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978 with the goal of implementing the Four Modernizations program. The Deng Era of Chinese history spans from this year until his death in February 1997.
The 1978 revision to the constitution, the third constitution of People’s Republic of China, was adopted in March. It included the Four Modernizations, as well as “four big freedoms,” namely the freedoms to “speak out freely, air views fully, engage in great debate, and write big-character posters.” These rights are also called the “four bigs.”
In late 1978, dissidents would carry out a campaign using these big-character posters. Deng initially gave his support to the mounting of posters on a wall on Chang’an Boulevard in Beijing, but he would later label those responsible for the posters as troublemakers.
The Democracy Wall movement coincided with the return to cities of those who had been banished to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution—they were returning to cities with claims that they had been unjustly persecuted, creating what some party officials saw as a potentially explosive situation.
The noted dissident Wei Jingsheng mounted a poster on the wall calling for “The Fifth Modernization,” namely for democracy and power to the laboring masses. As described in the chronology, the Democracy Wall movement would carry on into 1979.
Through the 1980s and early 1990s, Deng was considered “paramount leader,” an informal title, even though during this time others held key positions, such as general secretary of the party, president and premier. His last official post would be chairman of the party’s Military Affairs Commission.
Deng would be succeeded first by Jiang Zemin and then by Hu Jintao, who were also considered paramount leaders, although they were not as powerful as Deng.
Jiang led China from 1989 to 2002; and Hu was the leader from 2002 to 2012.
The era of China as a global power begins in 1997 with the July handover by the United Kingdom of Hong Kong to China.
1979
January: Deng visits the United States as the Democracy Wall movement is taking place, and the China-and-the-United States’ Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations becomes effective. In the pact, Washington recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate government of China and terminates its participation in the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan.
March: The Sino-Vietnamese War erupts on the border because Vietnam had invaded and occupied Cambodia, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge, which had the backing of Deng. The occupation of the Spratly Islands by Vietnam was also a point of contention. Vietnam was an ally of the Soviet Union. China claimed that with the gate to Hanoi open, its declared goal was met and therefore withdrew.
March: Dissident Wei Jingsheng challenges Deng to support true democracy and describes Mao Zedong’s “The Democracy of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” as a slogan used to conceal tyranny. Wei is arrested.
March: Deng issues the Four Cardinal Principles, about which no debate is allowed. The principles call for upholding: socialism; the people’s democratic dictatorship; the leadership of the Communist Party of China; and Mao Zedong Thought. The Beijing municipal government simultaneously issues new regulations limiting mass demonstrations.
July: Four “special zones,” later called “special economic zones” were established with the goal of attracting foreign investment in the cities of: Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Xiamen.
August: Zhao Ziyang is appointed to the Politburo.
October: Wei Jingsheng is sentenced to 15 years in prison for “counter-revolutionary incitement” and spying, with the latter charge related to his giving of information to a foreign journalist about China’s invasion of Vietnam. By the end of the year the Democracy Wall is moved two miles away, effectively ending the movement. The governing method of combining political repression with economic reform was established early on in the Deng Era.
1980
February: Deng supported reformer Hu Yaobang who becomes general secretary of the party. The four big freedoms are abolished. Zhao Ziyang is appointed to the standing committee of the Politburo. Hu and Zhao would be rivals to succeed Deng.
June: China attacks Vietnam’s Cao Bang province.
September: Zhao Ziyang is appointed premier as a result of his work on economic reform.
September: The one-child policy, first announced in 1978, goes into effect. Under the policy Chinese couples are fined for having additional children after their first child, with some exceptions.
1981
Conservatives in the party wage a campaign against “bourgeois liberalization” targeting writers who did not uphold the Four Cardinal Principles. The goal of this campaign was to push back against reformers, but even chief proponents of reform, such as Deng and Hu Yaobang, would denounce some writers.
1982
December: A new constitution goes into effect that grants rights, such as freedom of speech and of the press, but it also makes the four big freedoms in the 1978 constitution illegal by using language requiring observance of laws, labor discipline and public order.
1983
The party waged a campaign against “spiritual pollution,” with Deng denouncing writers and artists who used low forms of writing to make money. The campaign would target pornography, Western-influenced clothing and hair styles, and religion. Deng and others would eventually put an end to the campaign, which they said threatened foreign investment in China. Hu Yaobang and fellow reformer Zhao Ziyang would begin wearing Western style suits rather than Mao jackets.
1984
December: China and the United Kingdom issue the “The Sino-British Joint Declaration” whereby Hong Kong will be transferred to China under a “one country, two systems” model that would keep Hong Kong’s democracy and market economy in place. China is represented by Premier Zhao Ziyang and the U.K. by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
April: Renewed fighting along the border with Vietnam.
1985
China reconciles with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
1986
December: Student protests sparked by comments from Fang Lizhi, a renowned astrophysicist, describing the socialist movement as a failure and calling for China to develop instead along the lines of the West.
1987
January: Hu Yaobang, who had called for a conciliatory approach to the students, is forced to resign as general secretary of the party—he would then retire into seclusion.
The scientist Fang Lizhi and other intellectuals were expelled from the party as an anti-bourgeois liberalization campaign swept the country.
November: Zhao Ziyang is appointed as general secretary and Li Peng becomes acting premier. While Zhao was a reformer, Li was a conservative who opposed major reforms.
November: The “General Program for Political Reform” is instituted, which shifts economic decisions from the party to the state.
1988
March: Johnson South Reef Skirmish between China and Vietnam over control of the reef in the Union Banks region of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. China took control of the reef after a brief naval battle.
April: Li Peng is formally elected premier as debate continues over the pace of economic reforms while the economy was overheating, sparking concerns over inflation. Zhao and Deng advocated deregulation of prices, but Deng would abandon this position.
August: Re-regulation of prices begins in response to panic-buying as unemployment spreads.
1989
January: Scientist Fang Lizhi sends an open letter to Deng calling for release of political prisoners, notably Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng. Other intellectuals send letters in support of Fang.
April: Pro-reform leader Hu Yaobang dies at the age of 73 and students march on Tiananmen Square and Xinhua Gate, where the party headquarters are located, calling for democratic reforms and freedom of the press. Police actions prompt more students and some workers to join the protests, which would spread to other cities.
Zhao Ziyang pressed for a soft approach to the situation and supported the students demand to end corruption among party officials. Deng backed a hardline stance against the protesters.
May: Zhao asks the students to end their hunger strikes. Premier Li Ping imposes martial law.
June: The People’s Liberation Army troops kill thousands of protesters, labeled “counter-revolutionaries,” in what is often called a “massacre.” The violence took place not just at Tiananmen Square but also in other areas of Beijing and in many other cities.
June: Zhao Ziyang is stripped of his position as general secretary of the party and Jiang Zemin becomes general secretary of the Communist Party of China and is anointed “paramount leader” by Deng, who remains the paramount leader. Zhao would live under house arrest in the same house that Hu Yaobang had lived in.
November: Deng resigns as chairman of the party’s Military Affairs Commission.
1990
January: A two-year economic recovery program begins.
April: The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China is adopted.
November. Shanghai Stock Exchange reopens.
1991
January: 1989 pro-democracy demonstrators go on trial.
May: A press code is issued to journalists requiring them to disseminate the Marxist-Leninist ideology and a secret directive is issued to party officials warning them to protect the government from being overthrown.
1992
January: Deng reasserts his economy policy of market-oriented socialism and calls for greater reforms.
April: The Three Gorges Dam project is approved. The largest McDonald’s in the world opens in Beijing.
June: Layoffs as a result of failing state-owned enterprises.
August: Industrial workers strike.
1993
March: Jiang Zemin becomes president of the country while also holding the posts of party chief and chairman of the party’s Military Affairs Commission—the first time one individual has held all three positions since Mao Zedong. Deng, however, continued to control the military commission and remained the paramount leader of the country until his death.
April: The World Bank ranks China as the country with the highest economic growth.
June: Peasant riots in Sichuan province.
August: The U.S. finds that Chinese companies have exported U.S. missiles to Pakistan, leading to U.S. sanctions on both countries.
1994
May: The U.S. grants China most favored nation status, an important step toward China’s eventual accession to the World Trade Organization.
1996
March: Taiwan holds the first direct presidential election in Chinese history.
1997
February: Deng Xiaoping dies at 92 years of age.
1997
July: The retrocession of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China.
The Ministry of Public Security takes steps to control the internet in China and the term the Great Firewall is coined in the U.S. to describe Chinese internet censorship.
October: Jiang Zemin visits the United States.
1998
June–September: Major flooding of the Yangtze and other rivers, with the People’s Liberation Army providing rescue operations.
November: Sino-Japanese Summit in Japan.
1999
May: The United States bombs the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in what Washington said was an “accident.”
July: The Chinese government declares the religious organization Falun Gong to be illegal.
December: The retrocession of Macau from Portugal to China.
2000
November: Washington and Beijing reach an agreement allowing China to launch U.S. satellites.
2001
April: A U.S. intelligence aircraft is intercepted by a Chinese fighter jet. After the two planes collide, the U.S. plane is forced to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island.
December: China joins the World Trade Organization.
2002
November: Hu Jintao succeeds Jiang Zemin as secretary general of the party. Hu would have a more people-centered approach to governing the country, seeking a “harmonious society” through increased democracy, rule of law, better living standards, less economic inequality, improvements in the education system and greater environmental protections.
November: An outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome begins in Guangdong province.
2003
March: Hu Jintao succeeds Jiang Zemin as president of the country.
June: The first stage of filling up the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River begins.
October: China launches its first manned space mission.
2004
September: Jiang resigns as chairman of the Central Military Commission.
November: China signs an agreement on trade in goods with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
2005
January: Zhao Ziyang dies at the age of 85 and the government declared a “period of extreme sensitivity” with the police on special alert to prevent mass demonstrations as had happened after Hu Yaobang’s death in 1989. Security was tightened at Tiananmen Square and at Zhao’s house. There was very little reporting allowed in China on his death.
March: The Anti-Secession Law passes whereby China restates its goal of peacefully reuniting with Taiwan while also claiming the right to use force to attain this goal.
April: Mass demonstrations against Japan take place across the country, triggered by Tokyo’s approval of a history textbook that whitewashed Japanese actions during the Second World War.
August: China conducts joint military exercises with Russia.
November: A series of explosions at a chemical plant in Jilin City kills six and forces the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
This chronology drew on diverse sources ranging from Wikipedia and the website of the French newspaper L’Express, to books such as Political Leaders of Modern China: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Edwin Pak-wah Leung (Westport, 2002), and Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History by R. Keith Schoppa (New York, 2002).
Billeter, Jean François. Leçons sur Tchouang-Tseu. Paris: Éditions Allia, 2004.
Chang, Jolan. Tao of Love and Sex. New York: Plume, 1977.
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Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu Basic Writings. Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. China! Inside the People’s Republic. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.
Confucius. The Analects. Translated by D.C. Lau. London: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1979.
Doumet, Christian. Passage des oiseaux phis: photographs de Chine de Victor Segalen. Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 1996.
Fewsmith, Joseph. China Since Tiananmen. Cambridge, United Kingdom. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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We Will Always Remember Premier Chou En-Lai. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977.