ALEC ASH
WISH LANTERNS
YOUNG LIVES IN NEW CHINA
PICADOR
2
For my father
3
4
Note on Names
In this book I follow the lives of six young Chinese born between 1985 and
1990, telling their stories from childhood to late twenties. For those who
have English names, I use them for familiarity’s sake. Dahai and Xiaoxiao
don’t, so I use their Chinese nicknames instead, which is how their friends
know them. Fred is her English name but also serves as a pseudonym, and
details about her family have been left out at her request, out of concern for
her father’s position as a Communist Party official.
Other Chinese names and words are in Pinyin. For terms with a simple
English equivalent, I use it, but for some of the more common or interesting
terms I give the Chinese too. A few tricks help pronunciation – x is ‘shh’, q
is ‘ch’, c is ‘ts’, z is ‘dz’, zh is ‘dj’ and js are hard.
Everything in quotation marks is in translation from the Chinese, except
where marked as originally in English. All money is in yuan (RMB), which
was roughly ten to the pound sterling for most of the period covered, the
childhood and early teens of the twenty-first century.
5
Cast of Characters
Dahai (Yu Hai) – Military child, netizen, self-styled loser, born 1985 in
Hubei province
Xiaoxiao (Liu Xiao) – Small-business owner, dreamer, born 1985 in
Heilongjiang province
Fred (anonymous) – Official’s daughter, Ph.D., patriot, born 1985 in
Hainan province
Snail (Miao Lin) – Country boy, internet gaming addict, born 1987 in
Anhui province
Lucifer (Li Yan) – Singer, aspiring international superstar, born 1989 in
Hebei province
Mia (Kong Xiaorui) – Fashionista, rebel, former punk, born 1990 in
Xinjiang province
6
CONTENTS
XIAOXIAO
DAHAI
FRED
SNAIL
LUCIFER
MIA
SNAIL
FRED
DAHAI
XIAOXIAO
LUCIFER
MIA
SNAIL
FRED
LUCIFER
DAHAI
SNAIL
XIAOXIAO
MIA
LUCIFER
DAHAI
SNAIL
FRED
LUCIFER
7
DAHAI
XIAOXIAO
SNAIL
MIA
LUCIFER
FRED
DAHAI AND XIAOXIAO
SNAIL
LUCIFER
FRED
MIA
XIAOXIAO AND DAHAI
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
8
It had been a decade since Dahai buried his diary.
The leather journal was waiting in the dry earth beneath a pine tree, at the
top of the mountain behind his childhood home. He was eighteen when he
put it there, in a dark teak box used for storing tea leaves, along with a pack
of cigarettes and some old photos.
Born in 1985, he was a child of new China. His was the first generation
with no memory of Tiananmen, let alone of Mao. A generation of only
children born to a country changing as fast as they were. Natives of its
hurtling present, inheritors of its uncertain future. The thin end of the wedge.
In the diary he wrote about worries, wishes, fragile dreams . . . but mostly
about a girl.
The May heat frazzled as he topped the summit. But which was the right
tree? He unfolded an army-green spade from his backpack and plunged it
into the ground, feeling for a hollow wooden thunk. Construction workers
rebuilding a pagoda nearby took pictures on their phones, amused as he
pockmarked the landscape with holes.
Dahai ignored them. He was almost thirty now, married, and dug for his
early years.
9
XIAOXIAO
The fruit came from all over China. Apples from Xinjiang, pears from
Hebei, tangerines from Zhejiang and Fujian. Every so often there might be
dragon fruit from Hainan island in the far south, or clumps of baby bananas
on the stem. They came by thirteen-metre-long truck, all the bounty of the
land spreading its seeds, to the back door of the wholesale fruit shop which
Xiaoxiao’s parents ran, in the far north where no fruit grew.
Winter took the skin off your fingers here, north of the wall. The blanket
of hard land above Beijing, previously known as Manchuria but simply
called ‘the north-east’ in Chinese, is the head of the rooster which is
supposed to be China’s map. From its crest, you can see the Aurora
Borealis and the midnight sun. Temperatures get down to minus forty, and
snowfall comes up to your waist. There are still a few lonely Siberian
tigers, who stray over from Russia without proper visas.
Heilongjiang province is named for the ‘black dragon river’ which snakes
along its border with Russia. Four hours by train from the provincial
capital, tucked between Inner Mongolia to the west and Siberia to the north,
is Nehe. Rows of identical apartment blocks are still under construction, as
if the city had bloomed spontaneously from the tundra-like earth. But for a
frozen river that you can drive a truck over in winter, it could be any other
small Chinese city of just half a million people. Here, on 4 September 1985,
Liu Xiao was born.
She was delivered by a midwife at home, on her parents’ bed. For the
first hour she didn’t cry, and everyone was beside themselves. Then she
began bawling to the gods and they tearfully wished she would shut up. At
the age of seven days her ears were pierced with a needle and red thread, an
old tradition to bring good luck and health. Seven days was also how long it
took for her mother and father to name her, leafing through a fat dictionary to
find a character they liked. In the end they settled on xiao, which means
‘sky’ or ‘clouds’ and is part of an idiom about a loud sound resounding
through the heavens – like her first ear-splitting cries. In another tone the
word means ‘small’ or ‘young’, and from an early age her pet name was
10
Xiaoxiao, little Xiao.
Xiaoxiao was a girl, and if she married her own child wouldn’t continue
the family name of Liu. The one-child policy, implemented in 1980 not long
after Deng Xiaoping ushered in China’s reform era, meant that her parents
couldn’t legally have another. But families were still catching up with the
idea, especially further out from the urban hubs, and the law was far from
monolithic. Xiaoxiao’s parents waited another four years until her father left
his strictly supervised work unit, then had a second child anyway – a son –
and got away without paying the hefty fine.
These ‘post-80s’ only children, bearing all of the hopes and wishes that
their parents missed out on in the Mao years, are mollycoddled to comic
extremes during infancy. They are helped up after every fall, and wrapped in
more layers of protection than a porcelain vase in transit. Add the attentions
of two sets of grandparents, and the pampering snowballs into a smothering
excess. In her first winter months, Xiaoxiao was only occasionally visible
underneath layers of baby thermals, her cheeks the same shade as her
crimson padded jacket.
Until the age of seven, she lived with her maternal grandparents in a
countryside hamlet two hours’ drive out of Nehe. Their courtyard home had
pigs, geese, ducks, chickens, a dog and a single bed: a platform of clumped
earth above a coal-fired stove, called a kang, on which Grandma, Grandpa
and Xiaoxiao all slept in a bundle of shared warmth. Layers of newspaper
were pasted across the walls and ceiling; headlines about Deng Xiaoping’s
southern tour of China in the early nineties found better use as cheap
insulation. The only entertainment was traditional folk storytelling on the
radio, while Xiaoxiao sat on her grandmother’s lap.
It is common in China for grandparents to raise a child while mum and
dad work long hours in cramped city conditions, sending back money. Tens
of millions of the post-80s generation grew up like this. Those in the
countryside whose parents are migrant workers far away are called ‘leftbehind children’. Whatever the circumstances, to be separated from your
parents leaves its mark. Xiaoxiao’s mother remembers with pain one time
when she visited her daughter after being half a year away in Nehe. She
went in for a hug only to see that Xiaoxiao didn’t recognise her, but instead
hid behind Grandma.
Xiaoxiao moved back in with her parents shortly after, into the flat where
she was born. Close at hand, on the edge of town, was the family fruit
wholesaler’s. She liked to play in the warehouse, which smelt of apples.
Cardboard boxes were stacked high to the ceiling, forming corridors that got
narrower with each new delivery. At first she assumed the trucks that
11
arrived were from nearby, or maybe from her grandparents’ village. Then
her father showed her on a map of China where some of the fruit came from,
and she never looked at the trucks in the same way again.
In her first years of school, as she learnt to read and write the thousands
of characters necessary to be literate in Chinese, Xiaoxiao matched up the
place names on the fruit boxes to locations on the map. She asked her
mother about these exotic locations, and Mum – who had never travelled
further than Beijing – would rattle off the requisite stereotypes. Sweet
Xinjiang pomegranates? That’s where there were dates and desert. Bulbous
Henan apples? People are cheats in Henan. Smelly durian from Guangdong?
They eat anything that moves down there.
Lands far away were all the more appealing because there was nothing to
do in Nehe. In the nineties the city was smaller, with few cars on the streets
and a single set of traffic lights at the central intersection, which was called
Central Street. A popular drink among teenagers was (and still is) boiled
Coke to warm their insides, poured straight out of the kettle. Those a little
older favoured strong baijiu liquor made from sorghum or rice, earning the
reputation North-easterners pride themselves on as formidable drinkers
with quick tempers. In a Heilongjiang winter the only entertainment is
boozing and fighting.
Xiaoxiao ate sweets instead. There was a shop that sold them next to her
primary school: peanut nougat, White Rabbit candy, penny sweets in rustly
wrappers with a picture of a stern old man on them, tiaotiaotang powder
that crackled sugary on her tongue. She had three plastic dolls and
embroidered clothes for them herself – sequinned tops, beaded hats,
wedding dresses – having learnt the skill from her two aunts, both
dressmakers. One of the dolls had blonde hair and blue eyes, a cheap knockoff Barbie which she called Ocean Baby. The three dolls were best friends,
of course, and went on holidays together – to the deserts of Xinjiang, to
Henan where people are cheats, and to Guangdong where people eat
anything that moves.
The Chinese New Year, also called Spring Festival, was her favourite
time. It was a fortnight of feasting and treats that marked the first month of
the lunar calendar, beginning with a big family meal on New Year’s Eve.
Days of eating leftovers followed, while visiting increasingly distant family
relations. Along with the other children she was given decorated red
envelopes that contained small-denomination ‘lucky money’ in them. In the
city’s central park people lit fireworks and firecrackers on the frozen ice,
sliding back just in time before the bang and pop. On the final night of the
celebrations, Lantern Festival, she loved to watch the wish lanterns fly up
12
and away.
TV played a big role in the holidays too. She watched the Chinese
cartoons Little Dragon Club and Black Cat Police Chief, as well as the
Japanese anime Doraemon (‘robot cat’ in Chinese) and also Tom and Jerry.
Her favourite show was Journey to the West, a live-action serial based on
the Ming-dynasty novel about the adventures of a monk, a sand demon, a pig
spirit and the Monkey King as they quested for the sacred diamond sutras in
India. It had ridiculous costumes and cheesy special effects – flying Taoist
masters with white eyebrows as long as beards, animated magical weapons
flashing on screen – but was a huge hit. The show still plays on repeat every
year.
When Xiaoxiao started middle school, everything changed. Her dolls
were taken away, TV was restricted and the fruit storeroom she played in
became off bounds. The shift was so sudden that Xiaoxiao remembers
thinking she was being punished for an unknown crime. Overnight, the
pampering she was used to transformed into the true legacy of the only-child
generation: crippling study pressure. Early childhood is a protected time,
but the fairy tale crumbles as soon as you are old enough to hit the books
twelve hours a day. ‘Knowledge changes destiny,’ Xiaoxiao’s mother used
to tell her at dinner, a familiar saying.
Schooldays began at 7am. The ritual in the middle of morning lessons,
shared by children across China, was group eye exercises. For twenty
minutes, the class of thirty or more kids rubbed the outside edges of their
thumbs over and around their eyes in unison, up and down the sides of their
noses and the skull behind their ears before pressing their temples. These
exercises were supposedly effective in staving off myopia from all the book
reading to follow, while Xiaoxiao’s teachers lectured her without expecting
anything but silent attention in return.
Geography, maths, science, history, Chinese, music, art. The topography
of the thirty-four provinces, municipalities, autonomous regions and special
administrative zones of China (thirty-three if you don’t count Taiwan).
Chinese inventions, foreign invasions. Ancient history and legend.
Knowledge changes destiny. In English class, national textbooks used the
same cartoon boy and girl, Li Lei and Han Meimei, to explain grammar
points through clunking dialogue. Along with their foreign friends Lucy and
Lily, a bird called Polly and a monkey called Monkey, they are the reason
why if you ask a Chinese child, ‘How are you?’ their reply will likely be, to
the word, ‘I’m fine, thank you, and you?’
During break, Xiaoxiao sat off to one side from the other kids with her
head in the clouds. The day ended at 7pm, when teams of students scrubbed
13
the school clean according to a rota before they could go home. Xiaoxiao
liked to gaze out at the dark northern sky through her classroom windows
while she scraped the muck off them, and fantasise about those far-away
places where the tangerines and dragon fruit and bananas came from.
14
DAHAI
On the outskirts of Beijing, a boy played with bullets. Dahai’s father had
been a soldier, like his father before him who fought in the Korean War, and
the family was no stranger to guns. They were originally from Suizhou in the
north of inland Hubei province. But in 1986, when Dahai was one year old,
his father was assigned to the capital.
Beijing nestles in between mountain ranges on three sides, showing an
arched back to Mongolia while its open face looks south-east. By the late
nineties the city had long since spilled out of its Ming-dynasty city walls,
themselves torn down in the Mao era and replaced by a ring road. Inside
that ring road, millions of bicycles choked the hutong alleyways of the old
town, which were hurriedly being destroyed to make way for high-rises.
Outside it, at the thinning edges of the expanding city, fields of hulking
construction cranes sat like gallows for the Titans.
Dahai’s family was further out still, in a military compound in Miyun
township, ten kilometres north-east in the shadow of the northern mountains.
The People’s Liberation Army, over two million strong, is as self-sufficient
as a small nation. Both combat forces and workers such as Dahai’s father –
responsible for army-related construction projects – are housed in these
closed compounds. Some of them are vast, cities within cities, with their
own water supply, fire service and police. Many use food coupons instead
of money at canteens. All have a guard on the gates, with no outsiders
allowed in unaccompanied.
To Dahai, his compound was the world. It was at the end of an unmarked
road at the far edge of Miyun, with a sloping cliff face to one side that
formed a natural barrier. At the west gate, a single bored guard in a box
waved residents through. In a courtyard between apartment blocks, six pingpong tables were nailed into the concrete, as if calculated to be precisely
the right amount of communal entertainment. A large low hall at one end of
the compound served as canteen, cinema and dance hall. At the other end
was a second cinema, along with a badminton court and a decorative pond
in a roundabout. Two industrial chimneys rose high behind it all, chugging
15
out smoke from the factory workshop where the army unit made military
odds and ends.
There were plenty of playmates for Dahai – children of the other soldiers
and workers – and almost all of them went to the same school just outside
the gates. Out there was another universe, one of rules and regulations.
Inside, paradoxically, they had little supervision and free run of the
compound. They played a game similar to Pogs with bottle caps, where if
you flipped yours onto someone else’s you could claim it. Then there were
the toys: guns, mechanical jumping frogs, and coloured balls that made a
loud blast when you banged them together, handy for frightening girls from
behind.
A short track of rails led from the factory workshop to a cavernous
storeroom by the east gate. Heavy boxes of bullets and car parts trundled
over in a rail carriage and were stacked high before army trucks arrived to
take them away. Dahai and the other children were forbidden from going
into either factory or storehouse, so sneaking in became their favourite
game. They played hide and seek, and stole bullets fresh from the line –
short ones, fat ones, long tapered rifle ones, pinging and shiny. They placed
them on the rails so that when the carriage rolled over, it flattened them into
spearheads, which they fixed onto sticks with string and used to play war.
Dahai was a scrawny boy, with round wire-frame glasses and a
mischievous grin. As soon as puberty hit he shot up like bamboo, and
pockmarks sprouted on his face. At all times he wore the knotted red
neckerchief that is part of China’s primary school uniform and mark of the
Young Pioneers. His given name Hai meant ‘the sea’, but nicknames are
common in China, where the full name is too formal and a single character
alone sounds odd unless duplicated. The tallest among his friends, he
became Dahai – Big Sea – while his baby brother was Xiaoyang, Little
Ocean.
When they were old enough for his parents to take them on outings, Dahai
discovered there was life beyond the compound. Every year they went to the
reservoir which Miyun is famous for, a tourist spot with green hills and
once clear water. There were weekend trips to the Great Wall and the Mingdynasty tombs. A more adventurous family holiday was to a theme park
called Minsk World in the southern city of Shenzhen, where a Soviet aircraft
carrier, the USSR Minsk, was moored as a tourist attraction. His mother
took photographs of Dahai posing in front of the carrier, as well as next to a
missile launcher and a decommissioned tank, and collected them in a photo
album to show any girls (or journalists) he might bring home years later.
By his teens Dahai had grown out of playing with bottle caps and bullets,
16
and was old enough to join the gangs. There were two of them, each with
fifty to a hundred school children: the Beggars gang and the Red Star gang.
Dahai joined the Beggars, so named because they would beg for treats at
local shops, distracting the owner while hidden agents pilfered sweets and
cigarettes from the cabinets. When not in school, gang members bicycled
around the compound in large groups, keeping an eye out for the enemy.
Fights were common, and periodically the Beggars and the Red Stars met
for arranged battles, using fists, sticks, rods and stones. Each gang called
their leader laoda, ‘old big’, the word used for Mafia bosses.
Before he started high school, Dahai got to play with real weapons.
Military training boot camp or junxun has been arranged for all Chinese
students since 1985, and became a mandatory fixture after the Tiananmen
protests of 1989 – a conscious effort to inculcate students with the virtue of
compliance. It happens before both high school and university, sometimes at
the start of middle school as well, a week or two each time. Thousands of
teenagers march and drill in unison, kitted out in full camo, and attend
jingoistic lectures when not on their feet. No long or dyed hair is allowed
for the boys, or accessories for the girls.
Dahai, used to a military environment and army paraphernalia from
childhood, fitted right in. Most of the strict regulations were flouted by the
students anyway. There was one opportunity to fire rounds of live
ammunition, but it was mostly endless discipline while instructors told them
how to stand, how to walk, how to shout together so it sounded like one
voice. The mornings were early, with 5am runs before breakfast. The
canteen food was slushy slop. But boot camp also had its perks. It was a
good way to bond with classmates in the same dorm over how much they all
hated it, and an opportunity to flirt with girls.
High school, when it started, was just as regimented. Miyun Number One
High School is built on the scale of a prison, and could have been made
from the same blueprint. Like most schools in China, there is an imposing
front gate with a traffic barrier. A spiked fence runs around the perimeter,
and motivational red banners hang along it and inside. ‘Achieve virtue,
cultivate the young.’ ‘Happily and healthily grow up.’ Each teaching and
dorm building has another message in characters fixed at the top, ‘Study
diligently, improve the reputation of the school.’ Dahai barely noticed them
– they were part of the background, like the anodyne sentiments they
expressed. ‘Follow the core of socialism.’ ‘Fervently love the fatherland.’
Every morning, students lined up neatly in the yard for roll call and
exercises, dressed in baggy blue and red tracksuit uniforms. School children
in China all wear variations of these study pyjamas, regardless of gender.
17
Part of the aim is to hide any hint of a girl’s budding sexuality. Inside the
classrooms were posters of inspirational figures – the early modern writer
Lu Xun, the Mao-era model worker Lei Feng – as role models for the
students, next to laminated thirty-point instructions for the daily eye
exercises. The centrepiece of campus was an asphalt courtyard with twenty
basketball hoops.
Despite his gangly height, Dahai was no good at sport. Nor did he thrive
on the study routine, shunted from class to class, corralled into a pen of his
elders’ expectations. Most of all he hated the culture of obedience where
teacher’s word was gospel. Just like in boot camp, he was told to accept
what he was taught without thinking. If he talked back, he might get a hard
smack around the back of the head. Worse still were the class monitors –
generally those with the best marks or family connections – who thought
they were better than you as soon as they had a smidgeon of power.
He had outgrown the Beggars gang by now, and used his free time to read
outside the curriculum. Japanese comics and novels by Murakami were his
favourite, but he also discovered two authors whose writings resonated
personally. The first was Wang Shuo, born in a Beijing military compound
just like Dahai was. Dubbed father of China’s ‘hooligan literature’, his
breakthrough novel Fierce Beasts was about a gang of compound brats
running wild during the Cultural Revolution. The second was Han Han, a
middle-school dropout and writing prodigy who mocked China’s rigid
education system in his first novel, Triple Door, published when he was
eighteen. One of his images described Chinese schools as producing
students like chopsticks of exactly the same length.
Dahai wanted to be a different-length chopstick. He wrote it all down in
his diary: his hopes, his frustrations, the girl he had a crush on. And one
morning in May 2004, two weeks before he sat the college entrance exams,
he buried it at the peak of the mountain to the north of his compound. He
packed the teak box into a hole underneath the tree roots, and swept the soil
over with his hands to cover it. It was his time capsule; the earth was its
reader. In ten years, he said to himself, he would dig it up.
18
FRED
She liked banyan trees the best. They weren’t as common as coconut trees,
but were more beautiful with twisted trunks and veils of dangling hair
connecting to the roots. There were enough of them to enjoy on the tropical
island of Hainan, in China’s far south. Over water from the megalopolis of
the Pearl River Delta, the island province is right at the bottom of the map,
hanging underneath a peninsula west of Hong Kong as if China had dripped
it out. Not counting a spray of contested rocks in the South China Sea, it is
the southernmost part of the People’s Republic – politically part of the
mainland, geographically not.
The south of China can feel like a different country entirely from the
north. Wheat fields give way to rice paddies cut into the hillside, and arid
yellow land gradates to green. The people are often built smaller, and speak
Cantonese or a variety of dialects that are incomprehensible to those in the
north, who mostly speak Mandarin. Differences in personality can be
summed up by their respective cuisines: Northerners quick-fry their meat
and speak just as directly, with a toughness that is sometimes only skin deep;
Southerners braise, boil and stew, but a soft exterior can hide subtle and
sharp flavours.
Hainan itself is the same latitude as the Caribbean. The temperature in
mid-December averages twenty degrees Celsius, and summers get up to
forty. There are sandy beaches, palm and lychee and banana trees, mangoes
and passion fruit and mangosteens. In the resort town of Sanya there is
snorkelling, surfing, banana-boating and jet-skiing, while tourists from all
over China (especially the frigid north-east) paddle in the ocean wearing
beach pyjamas and plastic facekinis. If you’re lucky you’ll see a golden
monkey in the lush central mountains. If you’re unlucky a snake will fall
onto you off a tree.
Hugging the northern shore, a ferry ride away from the continent, is the
island’s capital, Haikou. The name literally means ‘mouth of the sea’, but its
nickname is ‘coconut city’. You can buy a coconut at any convenience store,
to hack open and drink with a straw. Spindly coconut trees line the streets,
19
and only occasionally someone is killed by a falling package. Inside a gated
residential community to the east of town, one such tree juts out over the
road at forty-five degrees, like a raised traffic barrier. Further in is a rock
garden with a miniature waterfall and sandy park. The buildings have pillarstrutted balconies in the European style, an architectural import thanks to
returned migrants from former British colonies in Malaysia.
The girl who grew up in this luxurious setting didn’t lack for anything. A
live-in maid cleaned her room, laundered her clothes and cooked her meals.
When she needed to shuttle around town or go to school, the family driver
took her in their Mitsubishi. An only child, no expense was spared on her
comfort and education, and she enjoyed the best of everything. There is a
name for these sons and daughters of rich Chinese who live gilded lives:
fu’erdai, the ‘rich second generation’. She was in a closely related tribe:
guan’erdai, the ‘Party second generation’, offspring of government
officials.
There are tens of millions of Communist Party officials in China, of
various ranks, including those who make up its leviathan bureaucracy. Her
father had been in the machine for decades, at first in a human resources
department and later rising higher (his job title and family name are
undisclosed here to protect his identity). Like all officials his salary was
nominally small, but the position came with a flat, a car and other perks.
Her mother, also a Communist Party member, was a professor in one of the
Party schools where officials were versed in their ABCs of communist
ideology and governance.
When she was nine, her father travelled to Guangzhou, the nearest
metropolis, to buy her a Chinese-made grand piano. She practised one hour
every day. On top of her homework, reading time and chess practice, it was
just another routine in a childhood overscheduled by ambitious parents.
(There may be no tigers in Hainan, but there are always Tiger Mothers.)
Playing the piano was her favourite chore, especially Frederick Chopin and
Franz Schubert. She combined their two first names to make her own
English name – Frederanz – and shortened it to Fred.
Fred was that kind of a student. Top of her class, first with the answer,
perfect essays in neat small characters hugging the line. In her spare time
she read Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and A Tale of Two Cities in
translation, alongside the four Chinese classics. Of those she liked Dream of
the Red Chamber best, especially the descriptions of intrigue and
backstabbing within a noble family. Meanwhile, the library at home was
lined with more stolid fare: Quotations of Mao Zedong in thick red
volumes next to revolutionary biographies, but also foreign political
20
philosophy in translation from her mother’s collection, including Adam
Smith and John Stuart Mill.
Politics class was the worst. Patriotic education – a campaign launched
in 1991 in reaction to the Tiananmen protests – is compulsory for all
Chinese students. From middle school to the end of university each student
tots up almost a thousand hours of it. Fred sat through two classes a week,
each of the fifty minutes dragging endlessly. Modules included ‘Mao Zedong
Political Thought’, ‘Deng Xiaoping Economic Theory’ and ‘Jiang Zemin’s
Three Represents’. The dominant historical narrative was that the
Communists liberated China after a century of humiliation at the hands of
foreign powers. Whether the purpose is to drill political consciousness
deeper, or bore the class out of having one at all, is unsure. Fred preferred
to stare out of the fifth-floor window at the coconuts dangling outside.
Hers was the best school in Haikou, with marble-floored halls and lofty
buildings. There is a statue of Confucius inside the front gate, but the Party
is everywhere else. Set onto plinths around campus are varnished stone
busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Fred and her friends put jumpers and
scarves on them as a prank, to the infuriation of the head teacher. Fred was
asked to be a class monitor, overseeing her fellow students, but felt it was a
sham and abdicated power after a week to better focus on study. The one
time she got 77 out of 100 on a politics test, her mum was livid.
Fred got her real political education at home – the inside story on how the
Communist Party actually worked. While her father was in the human
resources department he had seen how local officials won their positions.
His favourite complaint over dinner was that top officials got the job
through connections not merit. Networks of patronage and mutual backscratching, cemented by gift-giving and male bonding over banquets, came
with the territory. If you didn’t have a liver of steel to cope with all of the
hard-liquor toasts, you were in the wrong line of work.
He learnt to play that game himself as he rose higher in the ranks, hosting
other officials in high-end restaurants and being hosted in turn. They ate
birds’ nest soup, sea cucumber and other delicacies, learning to love the
expense account. Fred wasn’t invited to those feasts but often accompanied
her parents on house visits. There she saw large jade ornaments, marble
interiors. A gold watch here, designer specs there. Mention of a child in a
prestigious university overseas. All clues to a lifestyle that didn’t match the
official salary.
Businessmen constantly courted her father for favours. Fred remembers
one time when a local property developer angling after a contract dropped
off a hamper of fruit at their home, then left. Later her father found a large
21
jade bracelet buried in the bottom, the most expensive variety worth tens of
thousands of yuan. He invited the developer back and returned the bracelet.
At Spring Festival, Fred’s red envelopes were always stuffed with extra
lucky money, sometimes over a thousand yuan in each.
One of her father’s duties after his promotion was touring local villages
whenever they held an election. Village elections were introduced in China
in the eighties on a small scale, but by the millennium they were
widespread. The contested position was that of Village Chief, a separate –
and arguably less important – role to that of Party Chief, who was appointed
by a less participatory process. Elections gave the Village Chief legitimacy,
fixing a thorny problem of rural governance, but they were also a fledgling
experiment in democracy at the level with the lowest stakes.
By many measures it was a failed experiment. Villagers were less
educated and elections often devolved into tribal affairs where groups voted
for the candidate who shared their surname. Just as common was for a
candidate to buy votes outright. Some looked to the Party Chief to tell them
who to vote for, and at other times it was the Party Chief who ran for
Village Chief as well. The result was regularly contested, sometimes
involving riots. After the first kerfuffle Fred’s father always went with two
police officers, and his function was to anoint the winner with official
Communist Party approval – which some might say defeats the purpose.
Fred had learnt all about democracy in school. It wasn’t a dirty word.
China’s supreme leaders used it all the time in speeches, even held it up as a
national value. But it was always democracy with a lower case ‘d’. A vague
sense of popular agency, ‘serving the people’, but nothing as specific or
taboo as multi-party national elections. The very word in Chinese is barely
more than a century old: minzhu, the characters for ‘people’ and ‘rule’
originally combined in Japanese and imported to China later. The literal
translation is ‘rule by the people’, but official use makes it sound more like
‘rule for the people’. Put into elective practice, Fred only heard from her
father how it fell short of the mark.
History was another topic at the dinner table. Fred’s parents were keen
that she knew the true story of China, not the bowdlerised version she got in
school. Secure in their official status, they told her about starvation and
ideological madness during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution. Tiananmen they glossed over, but even what they did say was
exceptional. For most of the post-80s generation, their parents don’t tell
them about China’s recent past: why burden your child with that knowledge,
when it might not be safe for them to know it?
One family story that struck home was how her grandfather, an official in
22
the Education Ministry in the sixties, was sent for six years of reform by
labour on a dam in Hainan’s mountains when the political tides turned
against him. He was rehabilitated years later, after humiliations including
‘yinyang head’ where half of his hair was shaved off, while Red Guard
teenagers threw rocks at his son, Fred’s dad. Fred couldn’t reconcile that
story with the bent but smiling man she knew as Granddad, any more than
she could the tales of people eating bark to survive back then with the life of
plenty around her, or the fact that her father was working for the same Party
that had stoned him. It felt more like fairy tale than history.
Those times were gone, and for Fred’s parents what mattered was
building a good life for the next generation. In that respect officialdom was
the smart choice: the proverbial ‘iron rice bowl’ that guaranteed a good
living, except this bowl was gilded. For all the Party’s past crimes it still
held China together, was the common line of thinking. It was possible to live
with that cognitive dissonance while the centre of power was two thousand
kilometres away in Beijing. ‘The mountains are tall, the emperor is far
away’ went the old proverb – and mountainous Hainan was as distant as it
got.
It was a pleasant corner of China to call home. Islanders like Fred’s
family, who were ethnically Han but had come to Hainan generations ago,
prided themselves on a leisurely attitude to life. There were long afternoons
filled by tea-drinking, mah-jong marathons and meals of dim sum or fresh
seafood while shooting the ocean breeze. Building golf courses has been
illegal in China since the early 2000s, a capitalist excess, but Hainan has
over twenty (developers called them ‘nature resorts’).
At the weekend and on holidays Fred’s parents took her into the central
mountains, where they had a second home. She read, caught fish in the
creeks and played with the indigenous minority kids. But she was always
back in time for the family ritual of watching the national news at 7pm, a
mind-numbing, state-controlled programme broadcast simultaneously into
homes all over China. She knew she would leave Hainan eventually. There
was a whole nation above her. But when she was hidden in those hills, she
didn’t want to know it.
23
SNAIL
The pond at the back of the village used to be clear and unpolluted. Miao
Lin played in it as a kid, poking at snails and slugs and tiny crabs with a
twig. He splashed in the shallows and cupped water in his hands to throw
over other kids as they passed by. There was only one path into town and
that led past the gully, so everyone got splashed sooner or later.
The farmlands of northern Anhui province, inland from Shanghai, are
historic countryside near the cradle of Chinese civilisation. The Taoist sage
Laozi was supposedly born nearby, as was the general Cao Cao,
immortalised in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Pearl Buck set her
classic novel The Good Earth here, a rags-to-riches-to-rags story of a
farmer who tilled the same fields that still stand, unimpressed by her Nobel
Prize. Northern Anhui is also one of the poorest regions of China, and in the
nineties its men and women started to seek their own riches in the cities, as
part of the largest rural to urban migration in human history.
Miao Lin’s family had worked this land for centuries, but his father
joined the exodus when Miao Lin, born in 1987, was six. He went to
Jiangsu to be a construction worker, and from there to Henan and Hebei and
back again, changing jobs like clothes and sending money home every
month. Miao Lin’s mother and paternal grandparents tended to their crops
while he was gone. They planted wheat in the autumn, soya beans and
sweetcorn in the summer, as well as cabbage and chilli pepper and pak choi
for the dinner table in garden plots around their home. Not an inch of land
was wasted.
Even as a half-left-behind child, Miao Lin wasn’t lonely. China’s onlychild generation never lack for company, surrounded as they are by kids
their age. Miao Lin’s three male cousins were like his brothers, and all of
them were roughly the same age. The surname Miao – shared by most
people in the village – combines two ideograms, ‘grass’ above ‘field’. His
given name Lin means ‘forest’, and is two ideograms for ‘tree’ side by side.
His cousins Miao Sen, Miao Guodong and Miao Mei all share the same tree
ideogram in their given names – an in-joke by their respective fathers,
24
because trees grow in grassy fields.
Along with the other children in the village, the four of them played a
version of cops and robbers with a single water gun (whoever had it was
called King of the Kids). If they found a bird’s nest in a clearing of reeds,
they looked inside and sometimes stole the eggs. Hide and seek was another
favourite game, and there were plenty of places to hide: nooks and crannies
in between the brick and clay houses, pig pens and cow sheds, streams and
groves. Miao Lin’s craftiest hiding spot was in the outdoor toilets behind
each home, clay and earth privies with a hole over a pit, vegetables growing
in the fertile soil next to it.
The village, Tangzhangcun in Sixian county, was a two-hour bus journey
from the nearest city. There were a hundred-odd households, and Miao Lin’s
bungalow was at the far western end, closest to Sixian town. Conditions
were simple. There was a well pump outside, and an outer wall around two
earth courtyards. In the first courtyard, their dog Little Yellow kept guard
over chickens, ducks and geese. In the second courtyard, three pigs and a
cow conspired around a trough. The house had one room for eating and
another for sleeping. The kitchen was a separate shack off to one side in the
first courtyard, little more than a giant wok over a hay-fired stove. Another
side room was for storing the harvest, where a giant vat held up to ten
tonnes of freshly chopped wheat.
They had twenty mu of land to grow it all on (one mu is 666 square
metres) – a good amount – scattered piece-meal around the western fields, a
legacy of communal farming in the fifties. Great mounds of earth rose up out
of the crops every hundred metres or so, four or five to a field. They were
the graves of their ancestors, buried in the soil they had lived off. In the
moonlight they looked like silhouetted beasts, crouching to pounce. To think
that some distant grandfather’s bones still lay in the mound closest to his
house gave Miao Lin the shivers.
His family had lived there for centuries. A major battle of the civil war
between the Communists and the Nationalists had been fought nearby, at
Huaihaizhanying. One well-flogged family story was that Miao Lin’s greatgrandfather had hidden his son, Miao Lin’s grandfather, in a stack of hay
when the troops came around recruiting young men – though no one
remembers which of the two armies it was. During the Great Leap Forward,
another of his uncles starved to death. In the Cultural Revolution they were,
as peasants, of the right background to escape more or less unharmed. Now
the times had changed all over again, and they were back at the bottom of
the pile.
Before first light, Miao Lin walked thirty minutes through the fields to his
25
primary school, at the cross-roads on the way into town. One day in class,
his teacher said that each child should choose an English name for
themselves, and wrote a list of popular, if old-fashioned, names on the
board from a book. Miao Lin’s cousin Guodong picked Gordon – a good fit.
Other children got creative and chose random words because they were
cool (Dragon, Sky, Rain), aspirational (Lucky, Clever) or just plain
descriptive (Fatty). Miao Lin thought of the pond where he liked to play, and
the animal who carried its home with it wherever it went, like he would
when he left Anhui. He looked up the word in his dictionary: Snail.
*
There was an unspoken understanding between Snail and his parents that
whatever he did in this life, he would never be a farmer. The most crucial
goal was for him to settle in a city, as a resident and not a migrant worker
like his father was. In the countryside his family had prospered some and
suffered some more, but now there was only stigma and poverty for them
there, while the rest of the nation was transforming into an urban society. If
their son didn’t get out, he would miss out.
Snail was a diligent student, and his parents put all their energy and
savings into supporting him. When he got into one of the best high schools in
the area, in Sixian, they were thrilled. Less than half of rural children attend
high school in China (education is only compulsory up to the end of middle
school at fifteen) and even then access is far from equal, as the best teachers
are poached by urban schools with higher fees. Those who drop out find
work in factories and on construction sites, or as building security guards,
chefs, drivers and hairdressers. Those who get a college degree have a
chance at a better life. Knowledge changes destiny.
More accurately, as Snail came to realise, the gaokao changes destiny.
China’s college entrance exams are over in two days, but that single mark
out of 700 decides which university a student will go to, and by extension
their job prospects. From day one of middle school, students are drilled that
preparing for those two days six Junes later is the sole purpose of their
existence. The tradition of using a single examination result to separate the
wheat from the chaff dates back to the seventh century, with the old exam for
the imperial civil service. It can feel like little has changed. When the pace
picks up in high school, students cram fourteen-hour days, and those with the
highest marks are fêted in the national press.
‘Supervision through scientific attitude’, blasts the facade of Snail’s
high school in golden embossed letters. ‘Walk the road of inner
26
development.’ In the first quad, a Soviet socialist-realist statue shows a
student holding a football in one hand and a rocket in the other. The silver
sphere of a planetarium, a feature of better Chinese high schools, perches on
top of one building like a Death Star. At the back is a football pitch with
spectator stands. Yet for all the pomp and circumstance of the campus, the
classrooms themselves are threadbare: concrete floor, blackboard and
roughly forty cramped desk-chairs. Students board in bunk beds, twelve to a
room.
Each boulevard that crossed through the school is named after a top-tier
Chinese university, and street signs displayed potted histories. At 6am Snail
would rise, and walk along Tsinghua University Road (‘founded in 1911,
home to China’s top-level science and technology students’) to the main
building for first class at 7am. At lunchtime he would take Renmin
University Street (‘founded in 1937, for the cultivation of China’s
outstanding talent’) to the canteen, and wolf down sweet and sour pork or
fish-flavoured aubergine with a bowl of rice. After class he would jog up
Fudan University Road (‘founded in 1905, Shanghai’s top tier place of
learning’) to the sports ground for football practice, before dinner and
homework until lights out at 10pm.
There was strictly no dating under the prudish eyes of the teachers. In the
first three years of middle school Snail sat directly behind the same girl,
whom everyone called Xiaoli, Little Beautiful. Her best female friend sat to
Snail’s right, and Xiaoli would turn around to chat with her while Snail
gawked. Sometimes he scrunched paper into balls and threw them at her
back. But at the start of high school Snail chose sciences, Xiaoli chose
humanities and the star-crossed lovers parted. Ever the romantic, when
Snail saw her walking down one of the boulevards he would creep up
behind and hit her on the head with his books.
Before he knew it, the day of judgement loomed: the gaokao was upon
him. Most of his knowledge was crammed by rote memorisation. For the
compulsory language and culture exam, critical-thinking skills were
frowned upon. Imaginative answers were wrong answers. The essay
question that carried a frightening percentage of the final mark was infamous
for its ambiguous prompts, but examiners weren’t afraid to give essays zero
marks if a student got too creative – for instance mocking an aspect of
Chinese politics or society.
Snail sat his exams on 6 and 7 June 2005 at another school down the road
(schools swapped exam halls to prevent scrolls being hidden in the chair
legs). He took four three-hour papers – Science, Maths, English, Language
and Culture – each a stack of sheets crammed with diagrams and questions
27
in small printed characters. That year in Anhui there were two titles to
choose between for the dreaded essay: ‘Grasping the journey of life’ and
‘The bright and dark side of the moon’. Snail scribbled in spidery
characters for an hour about grasping the journey of life, but can’t remember
a single word of what he wrote. Those two days went by in a haze.
Leading up to and during the exams, his mother moved into a hotel in
town to be near him. She cooked all his meals, did his laundry, and made
sure he had nothing to worry about except study. At 5pm on the last
afternoon, she waited with hundreds of other parents outside the school
gates for him to come out of his final paper. When he stumbled out, she
drove him back home in the family tuktuk, cooked a large meal and tried her
best not to ask how it went until later.
Snail thought it went fine, but as soon as he left the examination hall he
got the creeping sensation that all of what he had learnt was useless in the
real world – begging to be forgotten. He could plot complicated
mathematical graphs and solve university-level physics questions, but that
wouldn’t help him beyond his exam score. After two agonising weeks he
rang a number to find out his mark, a breakdown of which was then posted
to his school. When the envelope arrived he took out a thin slip of paper
with the results of each of his four exams, and scanned to the right to find the
combined three-digit number that would define the rest of his life.
28
LUCIFER
Li Yan always knew he was going to fail his college entrance exams. But
marks aren’t important when at the age of fifteen you decide you’re going to
be an international superstar.
He was born on 16 June 1989, less than two weeks after the bloody end
of the Tiananmen Square student protests. His own coming of age was not
one of political awakening – as it had been for the generation of young
Chinese before him – but was set to the tune of South Korean pop music,
Japanese porn and the rise of Chinese celebrity culture. He was a millennial
to the bone.
Li is the second most common surname in the world (Wang is the first),
shared by almost a hundred million Chinese. Li Yan wanted to stand out. His
given name – suitably for the brand of superstardom he had his eye on –
means ‘rock’. From boyhood, he had the feeling he was special. He
remembers the moment in his early teens when he looked into the mirror
after his growth spurt and realised he was handsome, a ‘smart brother’.
From that day he had his sights set on stage mirrors and fame. The first step
was to get to the capital.
It wasn’t far away. Hebei is a populous northern province that encircles
both the Beijing municipality and the port of Tianjin to its east. It has a
reputation for choking smog, donkey meat, and being the province that isn’t
Beijing. Li Yan grew up in Gaocheng, a suburb an hour by bus from the
provincial capital of Shijiazhuang. Gaocheng is a backwater’s backwater:
rows upon rows of street grid, filled with apartment blocks, hair salons,
plastic-table-top restaurants, massage parlours, hand-job shacks, and the
occasional school, hospital or government building. It is as ordinary as
China gets, and to Li Yan it was the most boring place on the planet.
His father, a short red man with a crushed nose and no visible neck, had
been a soldier stationed in Qinghai province to the far west. When he
returned to his native Hebei he worked the land for a while, then moved his
family into town where he opened a shop selling tractor parts. Now the
farmers came to him, to repair their machinery before harvest season, and he
29
made a good living. Li Yan’s mother, a kind and doting woman with a mop
of frizzy hair, taught maths in the local primary school where she
embarrassed her son to death.
School just wasn’t for him. Li Yan was the chatty kid who sat at the back,
always late for roll call. His geography teacher slapped him around the
back of the head whenever his attention drifted. Another teacher told a
female student not to sit next to him or it would drag her marks down. Li
Yan has a vague memory of making that teacher cry in grade six, though he
never quite understood why. The best experience he had in middle school
was a mock fashion show in art class where he was one of six to swagger
up a makeshift catwalk. He got a new haircut for the occasion, an artfully
swept fringe that he kept for ten years.
Instead of doing homework he goofed around with his friends. They
scaled a factory wall nearby, stole scrap metal and sold it to scrap
merchants who trundled by on three-wheeled carts. The ill-gotten proceeds
funded Japanese porn DVDs from bootleg sellers on street corners or the
kind of shop with a curtained door at the back. They climbed through the
windows of each other’s flats to watch them when their parents were out. Li
Yan couldn’t name the members of China’s politburo standing committee but
he could rattle off other names without a second’s thought: Sola Aoi, Hitomi
Tanaka, Maria Ozawa, Saori Hara, Sakura Sena, Akiho Yoshizawa.
And he listened to music. Most of the stuff on Chinese radio was sugary
Mandopop, although he liked the Hong Kong band Beyond and the
Taiwanese singer Jay Chou. Instead, he bought Western pop and rock from
stores that sold discarded-CD imports. All the CDs had a hole punched near
the edge of the disc by the record label when they were thrown out, but
entrepreneurial Chinese scrappers bought them up in bulk and shipped them
home. They were dirt cheap and you could still listen to all the tracks except
the last couple, where the music skipped. They were called dakou or
‘holed’ CDs and introduced a whole generation to what their peers in
America and Europe were banging heads to.
Li Yan sang along in pidgin English to Green Day, Blink-182, Rancid,
Sum 41. When his best friend Li Fan, a skinny boy who wore skinny jeans,
said that he wanted to learn guitar, the two of them loitered outside a music
shop where a sales-clerk-cum-hippy taught guitar for beer money. All the
other shops on the street were ‘hair salons’ in which young women sat in the
window display like mannequins. Even the kids knew they were brothels,
but they were more entranced by their teacher, who riffed on his Gibson
while his Jesus-like hair swayed, his disciples sitting cross-legged on the
shop floor.
30
The first time Li Yan plugged in an electric guitar he fell in love. It was
loud, cool, and came right out of the songs he was listening to. He went to
the shop for lessons every day after school, and most lunch breaks too, until
his teacher got annoyed and asked him not to. His parents were permissive
at first but at the first sign of dropping marks they balked. Li Yan had a
brother, eight years older, who had just landed a stable job as a prison guard
and was engaged. (His parents had paid a fine of 2,000 yuan to get away
with the second birth, and his mother’s salary was cut.) As the younger
sibling, Li Yan had less pressure on his shoulders, but his father started to
prod and probe. Why couldn’t he study hard like his brother did? Then he
could get into a good university, find a stable job, get married. It didn’t
cross his father’s mind that to his son there were other standards of success.
When the end of middle school was in sight, the topic came up again over
dinner. Instead of brushing it off as usual, Li Yan said he didn’t want to go to
university – he wanted to play music. His father leapt to his feet, and told
him flat out to give up the guitar. It was a brain-dead hobby, he said, a
Western game. Li Yan was taller than his father now, but skinny and
awkward and he despaired at what to do. Before, he had punched walls and
slapped himself in empty protest. This time he grabbed a glass from the
tabletop and smashed it hard against his own head, dropping the shards as
blood trickled down from under his fringe.
Guitar wasn’t a game to Li Yan. He knew what his life would be like if he
went to a good university, found a stable job, got married. He wouldn’t be a
farmer or a soldier, but he would be a worker ant and that was all the same
to him. He felt he had something unique to say. He could either follow that
feeling, or he could work nine to five. The family got back from the
emergency department in the early hours of morning. When they sat down
for dinner the next day his parents told him guitar was too ‘low’, but if he
really wanted to play music they would find him a violin teacher and he
could take the vocational exam for entry into music college. It was good
enough for him.
*
Shijiazhuang is a concrete dustbowl of a city, but one step closer to Beijing.
Its nickname among residents is shijiazang, switching the characters to
mean ‘shit plus dirt’. At high school here, Li Yan had to take the gaokao as
well as a special music exam – he rejected the violin in favour of the
clarinet – but he needed a lower mark to pass. The pressure was off. Li Fan
went to the same school, and after class broke they shredded guitar together
31
or watched music videos online to discover new influences. Li Yan’s
favourite was the Toy Dolls’ staccato punk. He loved the lead singer’s
oversized white sunglasses.
All of those bands sang in English, which for Li Yan became the language
of escape. The problem was that for all the hours spent slogging vocab and
grammar at school, his spoken English was atrocious. Chinese schools teach
English like it’s an equation to crack. Example sentences are uninspiring,
about exchange students who would like (future conditional) to find the
library, or how reform and opening up (gerund) developed China’s
economy. Most students find that by the end of a twelve-year education in
English they can parse a technical essay but can’t string together two
sentences when talking to a native speaker.
Instead Li Yan joined a new craze sweeping China, an English-language
group course that felt more like a cult. The leader was a charismatic man
called Li Yang, who stood on stage with a microphone and roared out set
phrases for the crowd to bellow back as loud as they could. The reasoning
went: if you could scream English, you could talk it. Bigger events were
held in stadiums to throngs of thousands, something between metal concerts
and megachurch evangelism, with a healthy dose of self-help. Li Yan loved
the positive message that anyone could succeed, if they only shouted hard
enough. Appropriately enough, it was called Crazy English.
Both times Crazy English passed through Shijiazhuang while he was
there, Li Yan stood as close to the front as he could in the crowd, and
bawled back loud motivational sentences. ‘GETTING DAILY EXERCISE IS
IMPORTANT.’ ‘SHOUTING ENGLISH IS VERY HELPFUL [sic] CONQUERING YOUR
SHYNESS.’ ‘MAKING MONEY IS EVERYBODY’S DREAM.’ He bought an
accompanying textbook and practised in the corridors of his school dorm,
howling sentences at random until he drove his dorm mates up the wall.
‘YOU ARE SPECIAL.’ ‘YOU ARE CRAZY.’ ‘YOU ARE GOING TO WIN.’ His
favourite passage was from Li Yang’s own self-introduction, and he learnt it
by heart: ‘I WAS ONCE A POOR STUDENT OF ENGLISH AND IT WAS MY BIG
HEADACHE AND TROUBLE MAKER.’
The louder the better was a mantra that fitted the rest of his life too.
Scrimping and sponging money off his parents, he bought a pair of tight red
trousers, flowery shirts, a polka-dotted jacket. Knock-off Converse shoes,
flat-cap hats and colourful cravats. He experimented with two buttons
undone on his shirt, then three, then four, then back to three when people
started laughing. A pair of wrap-around white sunglasses – like the ones the
singer in the Toy Dolls wore – completed the new look. Everyone in his
dorms thought he looked like a clown.
32
In Shijiazhuang, as in other second-tier Chinese cities in the mid-2000s,
there was a burgeoning alternative music scene where Li Yan could fit in by
sticking out. At the weekend he went with Li Fan to gigs at a basement dive
bar called Velvet Underground (the words ‘Fuck School’ are etched into the
wooden bar). There was even a summer rock festival, and it was here in his
second year of high school that Li Yan star-spotted a white guy. He was a
red-bearded, scraggly-haired twenty-something, sitting on the kerb with a
cigarette in one hand, a beer in the other and a guitar on his lap. To Li Yan
he was the epitome of cool. He skipped up close and started shouting frantic
half-sentences in Crazy English. To the best of both of their recollections,
this was Li Yan’s self-introduction:
‘HELLO MY NAME IS LI YAN! I WAS ONCE A POOR STUDENT OF ENGLISH
AND IT WAS MY BIG HEADACHE AND TROUBLE MAKER! I WANT TO PLAY MY
PUNK MUSIC FOR YOU!!’
The foreigner was called Brian Walker. He was an American teaching
English in Shijiazhuang on a self-described four-year alcoholic binge, and
he let Li Yan play his punk music for him. In their way, they became friends.
Li Yan went to Brian’s flat, uninvited most of the time, to practise English at
a more normal volume and talk about music. Brian was a musician too – he
played flute, guitar, hand drums and bagpipes – and introduced Li Yan to
The Pogues, The Dubliners, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen. Li Yan drank it all
in, while Brian drank spirits.
One day, Li Yan asked Brian to give him an English name. It was quite a
responsibility, albeit one that English teachers in China are well used to.
Brian racked his brains for male names beginning with L: Leo, Leonard,
Liam, Lewis, Logan, Luke, Luther. Li Yan didn’t like any of them.
‘There’s one more name which everyone knows that begins with L,’ Brian
joked. ‘But it’s very unusual. It means the devil.’
Later, Li Yan looked up the word and found that it had another, literal
meaning – bringer of light. Failing that, the devil worked. ‘I am the light
side of the darkness,’ he would say later when he introduced himself to
foreigners. It was something different, at least.
‘I want that one,’ he said, and Lucifer was born.
33
MIA
Mia got her first tattoo at seventeen: an AK-47 rifle across the small of her
back, with the words Bang of Youth underneath in stencilled English. When
her mother saw it she tried to scour it off with soap for two hours, tearfully
repeating that men didn’t like girls like that. Her father didn’t speak to her
for a week. That hurt even more, but Mia brushed it off and reminded
herself why she got the tattoo in the first place – a symbol of independence.
She could understand why they couldn’t understand. Mum was a PE
teacher, and Dad worked in a city planning office. Like almost everyone
else, they lived modestly in a two-bedroom high-rise apartment, with an
interior balcony to hang laundry in and an air-con unit strapped outside.
Born in the mid-sixties, they had missed the maddest years of the Mao era
but were still old enough to come from a fundamentally conservative age.
Their daughter was born in 1990, and they could scarcely believe that
teenage girls now inked their bodies.
The ‘post-90s’ generation were leaving not only their parents behind, but
the post-80s. One phrase used by young Chinese is ‘a generation gap every
five years’ (some have it as every three), and the two digits of your birth
year is essential information, often the first thing out of your mouth after
your name and home province. A child born in ’80 grew up in a China
emerging from chaos and poverty; another born in ’85 won’t remember
anything of or before the Tiananmen protests; a third born in ’90 is a net
native surrounded by international influences. That was Mia.
The English name was foisted on her by a teacher at school. She hated it
with a passion until at the age of eighteen she saw a bootleg DVD of Pulp
Fiction, and fell in love with the drug-dealer’s wife Mia. Her Chinese
name, Xiaorui, used two rare characters that meant ‘deep water’ and ‘farsighted’, while the family name Kong was the same as that of Confucius,
Kongzi. Some members of the family tenuously claimed a direct bloodline –
along with thousands of other Chinese with the same surname.
It was her paternal grandfather who had first come out to Xinjiang in the
fifties, as a car mechanic for the People’s Liberation Army. The far western
34
province is one sixth of China’s landmass, the size of Alaska, but has just
1.5 per cent of China’s population. It is homeland to the Uighurs, a Turkic
and Muslim people, and a melting pot of other ethnic groups with high
Scrabble scores (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Xibe, Uzbek). But it is also home
to millions of Han Chinese, like Mia and her parents, who had lived there
all their lives.
As a place to grow up, Xinjiang had its peculiarities. It is home to the
Taklamakan desert, the flaming mountains and miles upon miles of nothing.
In the south there are spices, dates and scorpions, where it can feel more
like Persia than China. The young play football in the dust, the old smoke
tobacco from long metal pipes. The sun sets at eleven in the summer and
rises at eleven in the winter. Xinjiang should be two or three hours behind
Beijing, but the powers that be decree China is one country, one time zone.
Uighurs use local time; everything else runs on Beijing time. Some residents
wear two watches to keep track.
Parts of Xinjiang have been brought into the folds of – and declared
independence from – China several times over the centuries. The name
Xinjiang itself dates from the Qing dynasty and literally means ‘the new
territories’. In 1949 the region was reclaimed by Mao’s armies and
declared an ‘inseparable part of the unitary multi-ethnic Chinese nation’.
Since then the osmosis of immigration – encouraged by the state’s promise
of good jobs – has changed the status quo of Xinjiang to Chinese as much as
Uighur. Its capital of Urumqi, where Mia was born, is already well over
half Han, and those figures don’t include unregistered migrant workers.
Outside the Uighur quarters, mostly in the south of the city, Urumqi is
generically Chinese. Office and apartment blocks – a new one every week –
trace a skyline that could belong to any other provincial capital. At the
canopy, familiar signs blast the names of companies and property
development groups in metre-high neon characters. There are government
buildings emblazoned with red stars, schools, hospitals and parks built by
official investment to develop the west of the nation, and the morass of
humanity pushing and shoving at the railway station. In short, all the
interchangeable sights of urban China. To see them well into central Asia is
enough to remind anyone that China is an empire.
The sun beat harder out here, and by her teens Mia had a deep suntan that
other Chinese girls might shun as unfashionable. Her obsidian hair and eyes
were from her genes, but her tattoos and baggy clothes were entirely her
own style. Her school was joint Uighur and Han, just up the road from the
Grand Bazaar in the city’s south: a domed jungle of dyed silks, ornate
daggers, scented soaps and iPhone cases. Next to the bazaar is the city’s
35
largest minareted mosque, heart of the Uighur community. Several times a
day while Mia was in class, she could hear a faint ‘Allahu Akbar’
reverberate through the walls.
Teenage life was less pious. Scraps were a regular feature of break time
and Uighur kids are good fighters. But Mia was tall, with a long reach and a
fearlessness to commit. She won all her fights against the girls, and some
against the boys. It was no coincidence that her favourite Disney character
was the warrior princess Mulan. She smoked, drank beer and experimented
with dating. The first boy she had a crush on was a Kazakh from the year
above, with pale skin and soft eyes. After school, while the sun was still
high, they bought sweet nutty cake from the backs of street carts, which
Uighur men carved from a giant block with terrifyingly huge cleavers.
At home there were fewer distractions. During term Mia lived with her
aunt at the foot of Red Mountain, Urumqi’s central hillock, as it was closer
to school. Her aunt was a warm woman who constantly ate black seeds –
the sort that aunts across China crack open in their teeth – and she had two
chips in her incisors to show for it. She was a Chinese-medicine doctor, and
admonished Mia for blotches on her skin that signalled bad qi, an imbalance
of yin and yang. Sometimes she gave a treatment on the house: acupuncture,
cupping, herbs, moxibustion. Her philosophy was laminated in signs on the
walls of her clinic: ‘tranquillity, balance, quiet’.
Never a fan of the tranquil, Mia plugged in instead. She had a large
collection of dakou CDs (Korn, Def Leppard, Nirvana, Kiss, Ozzy
Osbourne, Iron Maiden) and streamed TV dramas and sitcoms online.
YouTube wasn’t blocked yet, although it was slower across the Pacific, but
China had its own clone, Youku (the main difference is brightly colourful
adverts that pop up every two seconds). She watched all of I Love My
Home, one of China’s first and most beloved nineties soaps, and later
Struggle about college graduates in Beijing, mostly rich second-generation
eye-candy with lifestyles she could only envy.
Her favourite shows were the American ones. She loved Sex and the
City but above all Friends, which is hugely popular in China. Following the
romantic entanglements of the six characters (she liked Chandler best), Mia
was keenly curious about their lives. She assumed their high-ceilinged,
artfully sofa-ed loft apartments were the norm in New York, where there
must be so much living space. That they asked strangers out on dates, or that
Joey kept condoms in his wallet, were revelations. Life must be pretty good
in the US, she decided, if twenty-somethings could lounge around in a cafe
all day.
There was a Chinese spinoff called Love Apartment but it wasn’t the
36
same, full of canned laughter and boinging sound effects. Another advantage
of Friends was that she learnt English from watching it. On Youku the show
had Chinese subtitles, but every time there was juicy slang or a biting
Chandler one-liner, she paused, clicked back and listened to the English.
Abandoning the useless grammar she was taught at school, the show became
her main teaching aid. ‘How you doin’?’ she mimicked along with Joey.
‘I’m totally not into that.’ ‘Whatever.’
It was fashion that inspired Mia the most. The news kiosks opposite her
school spread out state media papers – People’s Daily, China Daily,
Beijing Daily, Global Times – but also displayed lifestyle and fashion
magazines, drowning out the propaganda with splashes of colour. Some
were domestic glossies: chaste, milky-white cover girls and articles about
how to bag a husband. Instead Mia took home the Chinese editions of
Cosmo and Vogue, stacking them high at the foot of her bed. She cut out
photos and plastered them on her wall. Naomi Campbell was her favourite
model. The sheer boldness of editorial shoots seemed unreal to her, or
transcendentally real, totally unafraid of convention.
Now Mia had something to fight for, instead of schoolyard scrapping. She
was bright and worked hard, and applied to art and design school at
Tsinghua University, one of the most competitive colleges in China. She
burnt the candle at both ends to produce the marks and the portfolio she
needed to get in. Her parents supported her study – she was their only child
after all – but weren’t able to influence her decisions any more. The news of
her acceptance came while she was on a trip to ‘Heaven Lake’, a hundred
kilometres from Urumqi, with her mother.
Before she left for Beijing, Mia got a second tattoo, on her upper left arm
of a sea swallow clutching two cherries on the stem in its beak. Like the
bird, she would be flying towards the ocean.
37
SNAIL
Snail’s gaokao score was 584. It was just shy of the 600 out of 700 he was
aiming for – a shortfall which still pains him like a mouth ulcer. The anxiety
dreams that he was back at the exam desk, unprepared, took years to go
away.
After a student takes the college entrance exam but before the score
comes back, they predict how well they think they did. Then they select
universities and courses accordingly, in order of preference. Snail’s mark
was lower than he predicted but still good enough to get into his first
choice, China Mining and Technology University, to study automated
electronics. It wasn’t prestigious but had a decent reputation, and he was the
first in his family to go to college. What’s more, it was in the capital.
Snail took the fifteen-hour overnight train from Anhui to Beijing, hardseat class (the cheapest ticket, with no space to recline in a carriage that
smelled like cigarettes and burnt noodles). It was his first time out of his
home province, and he carried most of his possessions with him. He spent
much of the journey worrying that his classmates would look down on him
as a yokel. But Mao Zedong’s words, had he known them, might have been
appropriate: ‘Beijing is like a crucible in which one cannot but be
transformed.’
By 2005, the nation’s capital was a gridded monster, as if Hieronymus
Bosch and Lenin had joined forces as urban planners. Millions of bicycles
had given way to millions more cars. It took twenty minutes to walk the
length of a single giant block, and further out from the centre overpasses
were the only way across wide streets with high fencing to prevent
jaywalking. The soundtrack of the city was a percussion of honks and
electric scooter beeps, with a stray cymbal clash as someone hocked and
spat.
The first thing Snail did when he arrived was to go to Tiananmen Square.
It’s a rite of passage for any new visitor: a photo opportunity at the middle
of the middle kingdom. Next he took the subway all the way out to his
university. Beijing is designed in a series of concentric ring roads that
38
emanate like ripples from the Forbidden City next to the square. The first
used to loop around the historic old town; the second traces where the city
walls used to be; the third, fourth and fifth are progressively far away, each
one less traffic-clogged. The joke among Beijing drivers goes that on the
second ring road you’re in second gear, on the third you’re in third, and so
on.
The university district is in the north-west between the third and the
fourth ring roads. Here are the colleges that gave the boulevards their names
in Snail’s high school: Renmin University, Peking University, Tsinghua.
Along with Fudan in Shanghai they are the most famous in China. The
railway junction to their east is called Wudaokou: a bustle of student bars,
bookshops and a dingy club called Propaganda familiar to legions of
foreign-exchange students. Every fifteen minutes or so the barriers go down
and a train rushes through. Snail’s college was beyond it – quite literally on
the wrong side of the tracks.
China Mining and Technology University is a typical campus, with wide
paved avenues and even the occasional tree. Each dormroom housed six
students, and Snail’s fears were allayed when he found out his roommates
were all from the provinces too and just as out of place as he was. He also
discovered that the study pressure he had lived under for the past decade
had ended as suddenly as it had begun. He had climbed the granite face of
the gaokao, been accepted into a good college, and provided that he didn’t
make a complete hash of things he would get through these four years and
come out the other end with a university degree and the prospect of
respectable employment in the city that it afforded.
With time to kill, he spent it doing nothing in particular. There were
lectures in the morning but few and simple assignments, and the afternoons
were his own. He took up rollerblading, looping in circuits around the
basketball court in a group. At night a fierce woman guarded the front gate
of their dorm building, and she didn’t approve of students going out after
hours. Snail and his dorm mates took turns climbing out of their secondstorey window, sneaking back with clinking bags of beer and junk food
which they hoisted up on a stick to the window before climbing up a pipe
back in. They drank the beer on the roof while looking into the girls’ dorm
windows opposite.
In his more solitary hours, Snail read sci-fi. His main go-to was the
Chinese magazine Science Fiction World, founded in 1979 and with a peak
circulation of 200,000, sold in every kiosk outside every school and
university gate. Most of the stories were about robots and aliens, clones and
space travel, but every so often they satirised contemporary society, slipped
39
past censors who dismissed sci-fi as kids’ stuff. One story published in
Snail’s first year, ‘The City of Silence’ by Ma Boyong, was set in 2015 in a
nameless totalitarian state where citizens only communicate online using an
approved, and ever-diminishing, list of ‘healthy words’. When a splinter
group escape surveillance and vent their frustrations in a weekly ‘talking
club’, the book they read to each other is George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour.
Most of his time he spent not in bars but Internet bars. By the mid-2000s
there was one on every block, the neon character wang for net – XX inside
a gate pictogram – blaring outside like a cut-rate sex-shop sign. Snail found
one such cave outside the east gate of campus in his first week. Inside, rows
upon rows of identical monitors stretched into the windowless distance.
Cigarette smoke clung to the ceiling, and a pale face was glued to each
station. Over three hundred computers were divided into zones according to
plushness of seating, and it was cheap at two yuan an hour (five yuan for
VIP thrones). At the counter you could buy crisps, soft drinks, cigarettes and
instant noodles in cardboard pots, fillable at a water boiler in the corner.
When punters hit the glowing power button in front of them, and logged
on by tapping out a long string of numbers from their receipt, the screen lit
up with an array of icons promising connection or distraction. The Internet
had been slower coming to China than the West, but when it did it boomed,
with hundreds of millions of users, mostly young and in the cities. A few
checked email or chatted on QQ, China’s biggest instant-messaging service.
A handful surfed news and gossip sites, basking in the information age, or
streamed films while wearing headphones as large as Princess Leia’s
hairbuns. Everyone else was eyeball-deep in games.
*
The first Chinese computer games in the nineties were underwhelming:
boardgames such as Chinese chess, Mahjong and Go. Console games were
banned in 2000 out of lingering fears of spiritual pollution, but foreign
gaming companies saw an opportunity in the Internet bars and negotiated
with Chinese technology firms to preinstall their games on each station.
First came Diablo in 2001, with its dimly lit dungeons and obstinately
animate skeletons. Next Starcraft introduced gamers to real-time strategy in
the outer Milky Way. Network gaming followed on its heels, and by 2005,
when Snail started playing, World of Warcraft was the most popular game in
China.
World of Warcraft – WoW to its disciples – is a Massively Multiplayer
40
Online Role-Playing Game or MMORPG (not all acronyms are born
catchy), and truly a world unto itself. The planet Azeroth to be precise,
although Argus, K’aresh and Xoroth are only a few light years away. This
primordial universe is populated by an ecology of beasts and critters, flora
and fauna – and by the avatars of millions of players exploring terrain,
finding treasure, completing mini-quests, battling beasts and each other.
They are part of one of two warring factions: the Alliance (humans,
dwarves, elves and all things nice) and the Horde (orcs, goblins, ogres and
various degrees of undead).
Snail created his avatar in the image of a well-muscled, scantily clad
female elf mage. He started with next to no equipment or gold, but quest by
quest he levelled up until he had a nice long health bar, a small arsenal and
mana galore. Some players skipped the early phases and bought existing
avatars off ‘farmers’, entrepreneurial gamers who hoarded in-game skills
and gold in order to sell them off for real yuan. Snail did it the slow way,
relishing every detail of the artificial world. In the villages he rampaged, he
always stopped to trample the roses.
As the hours and weeks and months went by, Snail’s elf mage got swept
along with the plot. She was part of the assault on Blackwing Lair, where
the black dragon Nefarian had created a mutant breed of warriors to battle
with the firelord Ragnaros. She helped throw down the Blood God Hakkar
the Soulflayer in the jungle fortress of Zul’Gurub. She stormed the ruined
temple of Ahn’Qiraj to vanquish C’Thun and his insectoid qiraji, and she
laid waste to the fell sorcerer Kel’Thuzad’s flying citadel. By the climactic
showdown with the war orc Thrall, she was a battle-scarred veteran.
Every minute Snail spent in elfskin was a minute of college lost. He was
a zhainan, literally ‘home boy’, a term used to describe geeks who never
went out. His lecturers were oblivious but the student supervisor in his
dorm noticed Snail’s dropping marks, the glaze in his eyes and the odd
hours he came back from the east gate. He twice warned Snail to stop
gaming but the message didn’t get through. Instead his supervisor rang
northern Anhui, and spoke to Snail’s parents.
41
FRED
Fred was in the library, surrounded by treasure: rare scrolls, classical
novels, early Republican-era first editions. The reading room thrummed
with the silence of mass swotting. Some students fell asleep at their desks
between piles of books as tall as themselves. But that was to be expected in
China’s most prestigious university.
Naturally bright and with access to the best education, Fred had sailed
through her college entrance exams, which in Hainan are marked out of 900.
She got 829, the fifth-best mark in her year on the island. That meant she
could take her pick of colleges and subjects, and she chose to study
International Politics at Peking University. It was the holy grail for elite
students, firmly on the right side of the tracks in the university district.
Tsinghua University was next door, and side by side they were China’s
Oxbridge.
Peking University – known to its students as Beida, a shortening of the
Chinese name – is an oasis of charm in the urban desert of Beijing’s outer
ring roads. Past the library there are quiet groves, pagoda-roofed teaching
buildings, hidden dumpling stalls and arching bridges over algae-green
ponds. To the north is Nameless Lake, a curving expanse of water with
lilies, lotus flowers and a rocky island with a decorative stone boat from the
Qianlong emperor’s reign moored next to it. A multi-storey pagoda, once
used as a water tower, rises past the lakeside. To the south is a garden full
of immensely fat and lazy cats, waiting for passing students to feed them.
When one was spotted looking at a book, it was adopted as Beida’s ‘scholar
cat’.
Fred’s first impression was all the ordinary buzz of freshers’ week as
new arrivals milled about campus to sign up for extra-curriculars. It was
difficult to adjust. At school Fred was used to being the brightest spark;
now, irritatingly, all her classmates were just as clever. After a pampered
childhood, she wasn’t used to dorm life, sharing a room with five other girls
and using a communal shower. Back home in Hainan there had been plenty
of space for everyone, among the green hills and on the sandy coastline. The
42
north was crowded and noisy, and it didn’t even feel like there was enough
air.
In her major she studied both Chinese and Western politics. The style of
education was still PowerPoint-driven but the professors were among the
best in the country. It was intellectually challenging and surprisingly
uncensored, although any criticism of the Communist Party was taboo.
Meanwhile, her compulsory political education classes continued in
parallel, two hours every week. In the mornings, as part of her degree, she
read Thomas Hobbes and Hans Morgenthau. In the afternoons, she zoned out
while being told for the hundredth time about Mao Zedong Thought and
Deng Xiaoping Theory.
Dotted around the winding paths of the campus were statues to inspire
students by example, from Lu Xun to Cervantes. There were also busts of
college presidents and historical figures from the university’s own past,
equally famous in their own right. These were the ones who Fred admired
the most, for Beida has been at the vanguard of the last century of change in
China, and long before reading rooms and scholarly cats its reputation was
for political protest.
*
The genesis of student dissent was 4 May 1919. The Qing dynasty had been
overthrown in the Xinhai revolution of 1911, ending some four millennia of
dynastic history. But the fledgling Republic was weak, divided and bullied
by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War, which granted
concessions to Japan in German-controlled Chinese territory. In this uneasy
new era students and intellectuals were among the loudest voices,
especially on the campus of Beida – then a tall red-brick building at the
north-eastern corner outside the Forbidden City.
On the afternoon of 4 May over three thousand Beida students marched
the short distance to Tiananmen Square. ‘Don’t sign the Versailles Treaty!’
they chanted, demanding a stronger central government and a boycott of
Japanese goods, which they symbolically burnt. They accused three Chinese
officials of collaborating with the Japanese, tramped to the house of one and
burnt it to the ground, beating the official so badly that his skin, a doctor
noted, ‘looked like fish-scales’. Some protesters were arrested, others took
up their patriotic cause across the nation, and the May Fourth Movement
was born.
It wasn’t the first student protest march – that was in 1895 after defeat in
war with Japan – but it sounded the clarion call for a whole generation. The
43
May Fourth Movement had a bookish elder sibling, the New Culture
Movement, which from the mid-1910s had rejected sclerotic old Chinese
culture in favour of more progressive notions. They held up the twin idols of
‘Mr Science’ and ‘Mr Democracy’ (as opposed to ‘Mr Confucius’) and
argued that there was much to learn from the West. Lu Xun joined the fray,
satirising traditional customs as cannibalism. China’s very future was at
stake.
The flagship magazine of the movement, founded in 1915 by the then dean
of Beida, Chen Duxiu, was called New Youth. ‘Youth are like early spring,’
Chen wrote in his opening editorial, ‘like the morning sun, like budding
blooms and first shoots, like the sharp blade fresh from the whetstone; youth
is the most precious time of life.’ He called China’s students ‘fresh,
vigorous cells inside the human body’, and exhorted them to ‘drive out the
rotten, corrupted cells’ of the old guard. Six years later, in 1921, he cofounded the Chinese Communist Party with Beida’s librarian, Li Dazhao.
The librarian’s assistant was a young man with a mole on his chin who had
written an essay for the magazine on the importance of exercise. The byline:
Mao Zedong.
When Mao founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949 he declared
May Fourth a national holiday, ‘Youth Day’. Years later, when he felt the
Chinese revolution needed to be reignited, he tapped the same rebellious
young blood by forming the Red Guards from the ranks of middle and high
schoolers. Beida was closed along with the other universities, except for a
handful of students from politically correct backgrounds. All the knowledge
required was in Mao’s little red book. ‘You young people,’ read one of his
quotations from a 1957 speech to Chinese students in Moscow, ‘are in the
bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning . . . The world
belongs to you. China’s future belongs to you.’
That future, thankfully, died with Mao in 1976. When Deng Xiaoping
reopened the universities in 1978 and trumpeted ‘four modernisations’ to
reform China, dissent resurfaced in what was later called a ‘Beijing
Spring’. On a strip of brick wall to the west of the leaders’ complex of
Zhongnanhai, public posters were permitted to criticise the Mao years. It
was nicknamed Democracy Wall after one of the posters went further to
demand the ‘fifth modernisation’ of democracy, declaring ‘we do not want
to serve as mere tools of dictators’. It earned the author, a twenty-eightyear-old former Red Guard called Wei Jingsheng, a prison bunk for eighteen
years.
The iconoclasm of the decade that followed was likened to coming out of
the dark to be dazzled by the day. Throughout the eighties, Chinese students
44
were exposed to fresh culture and ideas – free to experiment with long hair
and listen to jazz – and with that came the hope that a new politics might
also be born. In 1986 and 1987 small-scale student demonstrations called
for faster political reform. And in April 1989, when Fred was three, Beida
students marched again on Tiananmen Square, this time from their new
campus in the north-east which had been relocated in the fifties.
At first they went to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist official
who had been purged in the wake of the 1986 protests. They were joined by
students from other colleges, and before long the growing crowd was
demanding official accountability, a free press, greater personal freedoms:
not a new government, but a better one. Numbers swelled. Workers joined.
Hunger strikes began. The Goddess of Democracy was unveiled, a tenmetre-high papier-mâché statue holding her flame aloft to face off the
portrait of Mao above the gate of the Forbidden City. Students signed a
‘New May Fourth Manifesto’. Seventy years on, China’s elite youth had
reconnected the thread of their legacy of protest. A month later, they died for
it.
*
The anniversary of 4 June 1989 is a muted affair in the grounds of Peking
University. The original ‘triangle’ of concrete near the library where the
students first assembled has been built over, with another one paved nearby.
Student supervisors warn student union leaders to keep an eye out for
troublemakers, and the university assigns a couple of its regular security
guards to roam the triangle, checking that no banners are unfurled. The
guards have a boring job: there is never any drama, just another quietly
leafy summer day. The only new feature is the occasional foreign reporter,
out fishing.
Although Fred would never have dreamt of marking the anniversary
herself, she was surprised at the indifference of her peers. For many of
them, accurate information about the protests was swallowed in the black
hole of patriotic education. History textbooks either gloss over the
Tiananmen protests entirely or throw in a few lines about a ‘student
upheaval’, in which subversive Western forces tried to destabilise the
country while protest leaders acted out of self-interest. The massacre itself
is subject to strict state-sponsored amnesia, and 4 June is a date the Party
would rather scrub from the calendar. Online, it’s safer to call it 35 May.
More students knew full well what the day signified – they just had other
priorities. Too young to remember the rebellious mood of 1989, they face
45
intense competition for success in an environment where there is more to
gain from silence and everything to lose from speech. Collective history is
of less concern than individual futures. Besides, some of the hopes
articulated by the Tiananmen generation had been achieved. ‘What do we
want?’ said student leader Wu’er Kaixi. ‘Nike shoes. Lots of free time to
take our girlfriends to a bar. The freedom to discuss an issue with someone.
And to get a little respect from society.’ The post-Tiananmen generation
already had most of that, went the argument, so why risk losing it?
It was only at Beida that Fred found out the full story for herself. Outside
the classroom, her professors – some of whom had participated in or
supported the protests – were surprisingly keen to talk about it. She watched
the American documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace about the
demonstration and killings, which a student had posted on a university
bulletin-board thread (it didn’t stay up long). Like others around her she
skirted online censorship through proxies, ‘climbing the wall’ as it was
called, to read accounts of the protests from the Western and Hong Kong
presses. She saw the iconic picture of the tank man, and more graphic
images too: dead students and soldiers, charred bodies on roads she had
walked down.
Her first feeling was of betrayal. China’s military was meant to protect its
people, not kill them. For all the hours of education instilling love of
country, why had none of her teachers mentioned this before, let alone her
parents? She appreciated the irony that the June Fourthers were killed on
orders from the same Communist government that emerged from the legacy
of the May Fourthers. But another truth was just as apparent to her: China
had changed all over again between 1989 and now.
Far from protesting against the Communist Party, Beida students were
now clambering over each other to join it. The Party was 80 million strong
and keen to swell its ranks further by co-opting elite students. Every primary
school child is a member of the Young Pioneers, and many middle- and
high-schoolers join the Communist Youth League (Fred did when she was
fourteen), but it is only at college age that full Party membership becomes
possible. Careerism, rather than politics, motivates most of the eligible
candidates. Being a Party member is useful CV padding, a shiny red feather
in your cap, especially when angling for competitive jobs in a state-owned
enterprise or bank.
At other universities, only the best students are invited by their
supervisors to apply. At Beida they are all the best. The application form is
as long as the emperor’s robes and includes an essay explaining your
reasons for applying and political stance, as well as a backlog of termly
46
‘thought reports’. No one bothers to write those reports during college but
samples are easy to find online to copy and paste – it’s all cookie cutter
anyway, expressing patriotism, love of socialism and optimism for the
future. It isn’t uncommon for a student to knock out two years’ worth of
thought reports in a weekend.
In Fred’s Politics department, to the best of her knowledge, every single
one of her classmates applied. Everyone except her. It was less than a week
into her first term before a senior student-union member invited her to give
it a try – with her marks and an official in the family, she was the perfect
candidate. But she had no interest in joining for joining’s sake. Fred wanted
to be an academic like her mother, she could take or leave the CV-booster,
and she disliked empty political posturing. Precisely because she was a
daughter of the Party, she was too close to the system to have any illusions
about it.
Back home on Hainan, her father had been promoted again, and was now
in the administration of an inland town. With new power came new false
friends. Some developers offered direct bribes, which he turned down. The
more cunning among them appealed to his fatherhood. Fred remembers one
time in her first year at Beida when he called her to discuss a proposal from
a well-connected businessman who said he could get her into college
overseas for graduate study and would pay all her fees. That was a sweeter
offer, but they rejected it too.
Cramming in the library, surrounded by the intellectual history of China’s
past, it was hard for Fred not to feel those revolutionary thinkers were just
gathering dust. State presence was keenly felt on campus, where the Party
secretary was more powerful than the college president. There might be
busts of Beida’s anti-establishment figures on display but their stone silence
was contagious. Fred’s professors knew where the red line was: not an
overt diktat but a tacit understanding of what not to say.
She was at the birthplace of May Fourth and the Tiananmen protests, the
origin of the New Culture Movement and Chinese communism. But her
peers were a different kind of new youth, and a generation divorced from
history. The tradition of student protest was broken. What new ideologies
had replaced it, besides materialism and careerism, she was yet to discover.
For now, after a century of dissent, no one seemed to care.
47
DAHAI
Dahai couldn’t care less about his own degree, Computer Science at Wuhan
University. It was his parents who had pressured him into choosing the
subject for its employment prospects, regardless of whether he liked it or
not. Distant tracks were laid early.
His four years at college were still the best of his life, twelve hours by
train away from Beijing in the capital of Hubei, his birth province. Wuhan,
where the first shots were fired in the Xinhai Revolution that brought down
the Qing dynasty in 1911, is a sprawling metropolis that straddles the
Yangtze. Locals call it ‘river city’, and when fog rolls over the waters past
Yellow Crane Pagoda the scene can be ethereally beautiful. It’s just far
enough south to miss out on central heating in winter, which is only
provided for cities above the Yangtze, but has an equally warming peppery
cuisine. Dahai’s college staple was ‘dry hot noodles’ mixed with thick
peanut sauce and chilli paste.
His favourite haunt was Zebra cafe, named after an oddity of the local
dialect in which a zebra – ge banma – sounds like the slang for ‘fuck’.
Dahai and his friends holed up there to chain-smoke and play board games
set in ancient Chinese warring kingdoms. In his dorm after hours, they
roleplayed at Killers, a talking-based group game popular in China at the
time. He played computer games too, mostly the shoot-’em-up Counter
Strike, in which he liked best to hide in tower windows and wait for the
others to come out into the open below, before picking them off one by one.
There was nothing more satisfying than a clean Player Kill.
On weekend nights he went to the web of interconnecting lakes, laced
with long bridges, not far from Wuhan university in the south-east of the city.
Here was Vox livehouse, which hosted alternative music gigs. Behind the
stage, painted in cursive English, were the words ‘Voice of Youth, Voice of
Freedom’. It took Dahai a few visits before he deciphered the meaning, but
when he did he liked the sound of it. With friends he formed an amateur
band – he played acoustic guitar – and in empty rooms on idle afternoons
they butchered Coldplay covers. It was the first time he felt the space
48
around him to sing.
As the workload was easier than in high school, he spent most of his time
procrastinating online. Instead of gaming, he preferred to scroll through the
university bulletin-board forums or BBS, where students discussed anything
and everything. He chatted on QQ, the instant-messaging service, and he
bookmarked Sina.com, a commercial news site filled with cramped articles
in a tiny font. It was still subject to state censorship but Dahai trusted it
more than the print newspapers, which with a few brave exceptions were
mouthpieces written in Party-speak. His rule of thumb when it came to the
news was: if it wasn’t online, it wasn’t true.
Best of all he liked the blogs. Blogging was still a relatively new form in
China in the mid-2000s, embraced mostly by those with something different
to say. The first Chinese blog to take off, in 2003, was the sex diary of a
woman in her twenties, Muzi Mei. Sina provided the most popular platform
and soon hosted millions of blogs, of which a handful skirted the political
red line. The artist Ai Weiwei openly mocked the governme...
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