The Pulse Of China

By Terry McCarthy On The Yangtze

The Yangtze is a raw, uncontrolled and sometimes destructive river sweeping through China, bringing riches to many but drowning others in its floods. And like the river, change is flooding through the nation. Fortunes are being made in private businesses, but millions of workers who depended totally on their jobs with state enterprises are being laid off. More millions are roaming the country trying to find work. Corruption has become malignant, and environmental damage is off the end of the scale.

A two-week trip starting in the town of Yibin down 1,600 miles of the Yangtze, the "Long River" that runs through the heart of China from the highlands of Tibet to the skyscrapers of Shanghai, produced encounters with scores of Chinese obsessed and driven by the desire to improve their lives. Farmers, boat captains, teachers, gangsters, businessmen who work the river and engineers who seek to harness it--all want to share in the new Chinese dream, to become wealthy and regain the self-respect that China lost to colonial powers centuries ago. Political change lags behind, but if few people are ready to defy the one-party system, sneaking admiration for the freedoms Americans enjoy is more widespread than party leaders imagine. In an effort to remove the dead economic hand of the government, which has kept China poor and backward, the new leadership is unleashing the energy and ambition of 1.2 billion people to fend for themselves. It is like opening the floodgates of a dam. It is the force that makes the China that U.S. President Bill Clinton will see this week a much different place from what it was only a few years ago.

Zhong Qizhi is going to make it, whatever the cost. "I am the son of a farmer and a factory worker," he says. "It was impossible for me to get help from anyone." So the 31-year-old from Chengdu taught himself English while working as an elementary school teacher, went off to run a travel agency in Tibet for four years, then set up a computer store in the southern city of Kunming. In 1996 he passed a university entrance exam to study international finance and economics. He paid for his sister to study Japanese; she now works for Sony in Shanghai, and Zhong hopes to join her there very soon, working for a foreign bank or investment house.

"If you take the American Dream, I think the Chinese people have a stronger dream to be successful," says Zhong, sitting in a Nanjing tea shop near the university at which he is studying. He lights a cigarette from the butt he has finished and looks around at the students at the other tables. Most are 10 years younger, from more privileged backgrounds. When Zhong was their age, in the late 1980s, there was no way a peasant's son from rural China could have contemplated hopping between jobs, getting an education and applying for a job with "Goldman Sachs or Citicorp," as Zhong hopes to do. Today, with the economic reform being pressed by Zhu Rongji, the new Premier, the Chinese dream knows no limits. "Making money has become the thing to do in China; people judge you by how wealthy you are," says Zhong. "It is all a search for respect."

Chen Yuancai stands at the beginning of the Chinese dream. At 71, Chen has lived all his life in Shuangliu, a small village north of the Yangtze between the two cities of Luzhou and Chongqing in Sichuan province. In his cottage are three roughly hewn wooden coffins. "That's for my elder brother, that's for my wife," he says matter-of-factly. "Mine is on the bottom." The three coffins cost him $625, all told, including the grave sites on the hill across from his house, not far from where his father is buried. It is a sizable sum, built up over the years from the surplus grain and vegetables he has been able to sell since farmers' markets were legalized in 1979 by Deng Xiaoping. Chen is content: after seven decades of working the soil and being nourished by it, he has made all the arrangements to return to it, in the simplest of life cycles. He represents the first wave of free enterprise in China's long effort to modernize. Now, in the second wave, rural people are heading for the cities and the opportunities they offer.

Chen has two sons and two daughters; his elder son and a daughter work in the provincial capital, Chengdu. His other son has gone south to the booming city of Guangzhou, where he works as a welder while his wife does shift work at a shoe factory. They send back $75 a month to the family. "Just about every family in this village has someone in Guangzhou. They say life is all right there. They have fish and meat to eat every day. Of course it is better to be in the village where you come from, but there is no money here."

The cities have money, but they have problems too. Most are clogged with job seekers; costs are higher than in the countryside; thieves are more plentiful; and pollution is choking. "Sometimes it is so bad the planes can't take off," says Wang Ren, a taxi driver in Chongqing, the first major city on the Yangtze's course. After barely an hour driving through the city, eyes begin to sting and throats get sore from the brown haze that hangs in the air. Wang says he cannot find another job; layoffs from state-owned industries have been heavy in Chongqing, and several times this year the unemployed have blocked traffic in the city center. "But," says Wang, using a time-honored phrase, "Chinese people know how to eat bitterness."

Life was infinitely more bitter under Mao. "My generation had the worst luck," says Zhang Shixun, the 48-year-old captain of Feizhang No. 3, a ferry that makes the daily trip from Chongqing downstream to Wanxian. "When we were starting to build our bodies, there was no food (the famines caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward killed more than 20 million). When we started to study, the Cultural Revolution happened, so we were sent to the countryside and stopped learning. Now as we start to make some money, there are all these layoffs. The younger generation will have it much better."

Zhang sounds the ferry's horn at an oncoming barge. He is in favor of the controversial Three Gorges Dam, which, he says, will deepen the water and allow big ships to sail all the way upstream to Chongqing, bringing economic development in their wake. "We are only half developed compared with the Mississippi, where you have dams that make the water flatter and easier for shipping," he says. Like most Chinese today, he is fascinated by the wealth of the U.S. and by its political system. "Mao started the Cultural Revolution on his own. Even if you want to start a war in the U.S., the President has to go through Congress first," he says admiringly. As he starts talking about China's drive to catch up with the U.S., the ferry draws alongside a large, modern cruise ship. "There, you see! That big cruise ship is America: big, comfortable, but slow. Our boat is like China: dirty, poor, but faster. We are developing more quickly." He gives another triumphal tug on the horn.

From high on the hill in the riverside town of Wanxian, Gu Xiaoli looks out over the boat dock from her kitchen window and sighs. She is cooking a modest dinner of rice soup, pigs' feet and steamed buns. In the past two years, she, her husband and her son have all been laid off from textile factories in the town. With their combined pensions of $100 a month, they also have to support her 85-year-old father. Her biggest worry is for her son. After being laid off, he opened a restaurant that failed; then he got a driver's license but soon discovered the town already had too many taxi drivers. Now he hopes to get a job with a Hong Kong company setting up in the town.

"We hope things will get better for him. He's 30 now, but he can't find a good wife without a job. Right now we are saving all we can." Her son chimes in for the first time: "In China it's like one big experiment now. And we are the test subjects." Gu Xiaoli ignores his bitter tone. "In China things will get better. But there are so many people."

From Wanxian, the river grows narrower, hemmed in by mountain ridges that tower above the boats. This is the start of the famed Three Gorges, a long, picturesque stretch with such place names as the Bellows Gorge, Drinking Phoenix Spring, Witches Gorge and Misty Screen Peak. The rapids that wrecked many wooden junks in the past have been tamed over the years by dynamiting rocks, and are now destined to disappear under 600 ft. of water after the dam is built.

Lei Xia travels through the Three Gorges twice a week. The 22-year-old English and business graduate from Sichuan International Studies University works on the Qianlong cruise ship, a gaudy floating hotel with a prow shaped like a dragon's head. After 18 months making the round trip between Chongqing and Yichang, she is getting tired of the scenery, of life on the boat and of the drunken Taiwanese tourists who make passes at her in the karaoke bar at night. Now she and a friend are planning to move to Beijing, where a travel agent she met on the boat last year has promised them jobs. There is even the possibility of traveling overseas as tour guides, now that Chinese are beginning to take foreign trips.

"My parents are worried," she says about her new mobility, "but they have not forbidden me. Compared with their generation, maybe I am lucky. I can choose for myself." Like many her age, Lei spends little time thinking about politics. When pressed about the reforming Premier Zhu Rongji, she says only, "People around me say he will make China stronger." Her real concern is the slump in tourism from Asia's economic crisis. "But tomorrow will be better," she says cheerfully. "I trust in China."

The Qianlong is moored for the night at Wushan, and next to it at the dock is a large boat with a neon sign for WUSHAN GODDESS ENTERTAINMENT CITY. Gambling is illegal in China, but this is a casino, open all day, with high-low dice games, blackjack and bingo. Laid-off workers crowd the tables, spending their last renminbi on a few rolls of the dice. The casino is run by an overweight Hong Konger who wears expensive jeans and a heavy gold watch but doesn't want to give his real name. Neither do his two formidable-looking bodyguards. "I had to put in a lot of money to get this," he says, watching the flow of chips across the dice table, "mostly to pay off the local officials. And they will probably shut it down in a couple of months anyway. I have done it in a Beijing suburb and in Tianjin already. They shut me down there too." Gambling? "If you want to win, you have to struggle."

The farther from Beijing, the weaker the law. In Dachang, a pleasant farming town up the Daning River, which flows into the Yangtze at Wushan, postmaster Wen Daquan is quick to voice his concerns. Dachang will be completely flooded by the new dam, and the government has said it will pay for everyone to be relocated. "First of all, each person was to get 10,000 renminbi ($1,250) each. Now the local officials are saying it will be just 7,000 renminbi. They will try to keep the rest." The new land is on top of a mountain, so it will not be nearly so good for farming as the rich alluvial soil they till now by the river's edge. "Everyone here is angry," he says.

They are not angry in New Zigui City, half a day's journey downriver. With its shiny new apartment buildings and broad streets, the town looks as if it has been dropped from the sky onto a hilltop above the site of the new dam. It will replace the quaint old town of Zigui, which will be inundated. And good riddance too, according to Feng Wanhu, a local teacher. "It was dirty, cramped. I lived in a house that was just 10 sq m [100 sq. ft.]. It had no bathroom, no running water, no kitchen inside... Here is much better." Feng's new home is 900 sq. ft., and he bought it for $5,000, which he borrowed from the bank. He has two bedrooms and all the amenities he lacked before. And now he is giving a banquet in the new hotel to celebrate the birth of his first son. Money is flowing into the town because of all the dam-construction work, and as he circulates among the tables with a bottle of rice liquor and good-luck eggs boiled in red dye, his guests are aglow with dreams for the future. He pauses to offer a toast: "I hope my son will have a happy life."

A hilltop near the town gives a full view of the Sandouping construction site for the new dam. Looking down on the empty expanse between the mountains on either side, one can hardly conceive of a mass of concrete 600 ft. high, stretching 1 1/4 miles across the river valley, to be finished by 2003. Nor is it easy to picture the 360-mile-long reservoir that will back up behind the planned dam, flooding more than 150,000 acres of land and forcing 1.3 million people to relocate to higher ground. The cranes on the site are hundreds of feet high, but they look like matchstick models until they are compared with the minute scale of the boats passing by on the river. This, then, is the size of China's dreams for the future--bigger and more ambitious than outsiders can imagine. Even within China, the dam has its opponents. But no one leaves Sandouping--resounding with trucks in low gear, clanking machinery and the occasional detonation of explosives--without being overawed by the size of the biggest construction site on earth.

The river slows down as it emerges from the Three Gorges onto the plains, but the impatience for wealth and success only increases. Wuhan, China's fifth largest city, is the transfer point for cargo from oceangoing ships to smaller boats heading further upriver, and has long been a center of commerce. Here are department stores with imported brands, stock-trading houses, U.S. fast-food chains--and "Balls," a newly opened NBA theme bar run by a former car salesman from Taiwan. Not so slick as Shanghai, Wuhan still has its pretensions, enough to attract people such as "Johnny" Wang Liang, a hairdresser who left fashion-conscious Guangzhou "because it was already full of people like me." Wang finds Wuhan fairly tame and doesn't like the food, but he is making good money dyeing orange the hair of the local youth at $25 a treatment, to create that Hong Kong fashion look. "It is all about money in China these days, isn't it?" he says with a grin.

Li Mucheng thinks about little else. A "retired" (laid-off) accountant in his 50s, he spends most of his mornings in the hall of the Shengyin Wanguo Securities company in Wuhan's downtown, watching share prices move on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Li has been lucky recently, usually buying and selling in the same day, "but sometimes I hold shares for longer, even up to two weeks." Li keeps his eyes on the big electronic screen as he talks. "America? A great country, because the President changes every four years. And rich, because it has been developing for 200 years. China has been developing only since Deng Xiaoping. Before that, Chinese were busy fighting each other."

Some significant move in the prices makes him excuse himself for a moment to make a transaction on one of two dozen automated share-dealing terminals spread around the hall. He comes back smiling; another bet has paid off on a fast-moving stock. "China is changing, for sure. Before you could only buy half a jin [pound] of meat every month. Now you can buy as much as you want, if you have the money." Politics doesn't interest him much. "Zhu Rongji? I don't know much about politics, but at least Zhu understands the stock market." At 19 Lin Yan is too young to remember the bad days of meat rationing, but she has a fair idea of what the stock market is. She has already moved from working as a hotel receptionist to a better-paying job selling sports equipment in Wuhan's Galaxy Plaza department store. Three nights a week she goes to private English classes, which she pays for out of her salary of $75 a month, "because if you don't know English, you can't use computers. And if you can't use computers these days, you can't get ahead." Her tone suggests the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Sitting outside a cafe in Nanjing sipping tea, Gao Hua shakes his head. "That is all people are interested in now: looking after their own life-styles, doing things for themselves," says Gao, a professor of history at Nanjing University. "The economic reforms are irreversible," he says, but they are also part of something bigger. "Now is a transitional period in China. There is much disorder; people are waiting for something new." Gao chooses his words carefully. He has been in trouble before for being too outspoken politically. "Only a society of diversity contains the seeds of new life. A civil society will emerge, eventually."

The river from Nanjing to Shanghai is wide, one mile across, and the boat traffic has increased exponentially: barges, tugs, dredging boats, passenger ferries, tankers, oceangoing liners and container ships. There are so many vessels that the traffic splits up, as on a highway: downstream vessels keep to the left of the stream, upstream vessels keep to the right-hand side, as the chaos of China's interior inexorably gives way to the more ordered march to prosperity of the coastal regions.

Sally Liu works for Siemens in Shanghai. It was a simple career decision: the state-owned aeronautics factory that she had joined after finishing university studies paid her $250 a month; Siemens recruited her at $875. Her view of her country is simple too: "I hope China will become the strongest in the world. China has been poor for a long time, and no one respects us. If you are the richest, you will be respected."

Her office is in Pudong, the glittering new business district created by municipal fiat across the river from downtown Shanghai. More than 100 high-rises have already gone up in the authorities' bid to turn Shanghai into China's financial capital. Companies that make a large enough investment even get a street named after them--Siemens Street, for example. But walking around Pudong is an eerie experience: at least three-quarters of the office space is vacant. Such is the impatience of Shanghai to become a world-class city: Build it, and they will come.

The Yangtze flows out to sea; humans pass away. At the Longhua funeral home, the biggest in Shanghai, Tu Zhenan, the sales director, is happy to discuss prices. Longhua does as many as 130 funerals a day, mostly cremations, since the city no longer has room for new graveyards. The ceremony costs $1,000; storage of the ashes in perpetuity in a mausoleum is $2,000 and up. There is a special corner for show-biz personalities--prices here only on request. How about Chen Yuancai's burial plans, way upstream in Sichuan? "Even Deng Xiaoping was cremated," says Tu. "We have been trying to encourage the peasants to cremate as well. Up to now they are still allowed to follow the old tradition. But China is changing."

The Yangtze spans China's changes, and they are as momentous as the Long River itself. The country has come a long way, from farmers stooping in rice fields to students hunched over computer terminals in Internet cafes. There is a distance yet to go: freedom still only means freedom to make money. But the determination of individuals like Zhong Qizhi, Lei Xia or Lin Yan to get ahead has developed a momentum of its own, a momentum as unstoppable as the water surging through the gorges toward the sea. The floodgates have been opened, and the people of China are pursuing their dreams.