Chang has never paid attention to the anti-capitalist campaign. He firmly believes that accumulating wealth is not the privilege of communist cadres, but every citizen`s right.
In the heady days of the student demonstrations last year, Chang carried slogans around Tiananmen Square, demanding an end to the Communist Party`s monopoly and advocating a nebulous version of democracy in China. Today he peddles fake antiques, determined to make his fortune using the same type of deviousness he denounced last year.
”Ideas fill your brain. Money fills your stomach,” he said, echoing the touch of cynicism now common among countless young Chinese who carried the torch of rebellion last spring but today pursue more material goals.
Their disenchantment is not difficult to understand in the China of 1990, where the Communist Party leadership, paranoid over the popular rebellion that has swept out Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, has repressed every conceivable wellspring of dissent and launched a massive, Orwellian campaign to reassure Old Hundred Names (the masses) of the glories of four decades of Maoist Marxism.
Chang`s China is a country where people need permits to travel again, where citizens are asked to denounce one another, where toddlers chorus party slogans, where the press can barely keep track of all the new regulations, and where official jargon-”running-dog imperialists with hegemonic designs” on China-has been reactivated.
The party, which considers itself mother and father to China`s 1.2 billion people and supreme guardian of the socialist faith, employs the timeless tradition of mass campaigns. In full swing are the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign, the Anti-Corruption campaign, and the campaigns against the Six Vices, against Bourgeois Liberalization (Western influence) and against Economic Evils.
The jargon is as turgid as it is anachronistic.
Politburo member Li Ruihuan proclaimed this month that ”heavy blows have been dealt” against the Six Vices: pornography, drugs, gambling, prostitution, abduction of women and children, and feudal superstition. He said imported literature that aimed to undermine ”socialism with Chinese characteristics” was now being rapidly replaced by ”sound ideological, healthy and popular works.”
In Chang`s China, the most active state organ today is the Ministry of Supervision, recently reactivated with a staff of 60,000 inspectors selected to combat corrupt party members and bureaucrats. It is a thin veneer for ideological purges. Many of those apprehended for defrauding the working class are officials who have supported last year`s student movement or were closely associated with the free market practices of the disgraced former party secretary, Zhou Zhiyang.
The minister of supervision, Wei Jianxing, announced last week that his ministry had handled 216,178 cases of abuse of power. Among the felons were people charged with ”excessive eating and drinking at government expenses.” Most cases are reported to the ministry on 1,800 special telephone lines installed for the benefit of anonymous public informers. Four senior provincial officials were said to have been ”dealt with,” which could mean they were admonished, fired or executed.
Life in Chang`s China after last year`s Beijing Spring has also become a Catch-22. People are quoted in the official media but refuse to repeat their statements to the foreign press for fear of a political gaffe. Nearly 600 cities are labeled ”open cities,” yet foreign reporters find it difficult to visit. Under a new regulation, city administrators are empowered to authorize such visits, but they won`t do so without Beijing`s approval. Stalemate.
While provincial governments are shutting down unprofitable rural enterprises, forcing millions to seek employment in major cities, the central authorities have embarked on a plan to push millions of rural migrant workers back to their villages to free up jobs for urban residents and thus minimize the danger of social unrest over unemployment. It is not unusual for immigrants and emigrants to pass on trains going opposite ways.
Students are treated with a small carrot and a large stick. This month cheaper academic fees were promised to loyal students who, unlike Chang, do not engage in outlawed private enterprise, do not paint graffiti on walls to vent their frustration, do not read banned publications or join banned student organizations, do not read obscene Western books and do not drink alcohol, brawl or gawk at Western videocassettes.
The new Chinese student must appear in ”decent” attire with flat-heeled shoes and hair neatly cropped. Arrival on campus comes only after one year of mandatory military training and ideological instruction.
Those who cannot complete their courses on time are considered obvious addicts of bourgeois liberalization, the catch phrase for Western
contamination, and must pay their own tuition, the equivalent of two years`
wages.
The same regulations virtually shatter the dreams of most of China`s students who want to study abroad. Those eligible for overseas study must first complete a five-year stint in the countryside. This is a Maoist purification ritual that involves daily political indoctrination sessions, a kind of slow torture with the audience chorusing speeches and slogans.
”Who wants to be a student today?” Chang asked. ”They want us to be yes-men and robots, not academics.”
He stood in his store, a makeshift cabin in the Dongshanhuan antique market on Beijing`s eastern outskirts. He was trying to persuade a Swedish tourist that a rusty and perforated bronze minisculpture of a warrior was a 600-year-old relic from the Ming dynasty, bargain-priced at $700.
”I guarantee it`s authentic. It came from Sichuan province. The peasants dug it up. They don`t know its real value,” he whispered with a conspiratorial air, glancing out the window on the lookout for antique inspectors.
Next door along the row of cabins, other young men, many of them students, hawked ”antique” vases, ”ancient” scrolls and jewelry. They hope to be paid in foreign currency or the equally coveted foreign-exchange certificates that can be used to buy imported goods or to dance and dine at luxury hotels.
The goods are fakes, of course, produced in bulk in back-yard factories around the capital. The vases had eign currency or the equally coveted foreign-exchange been boiled in tea leaves for three days to give them the rusty vintage look. Bases and rims had been chipped, and every chip mark had been expertly caked with dirt. The little bronze statues, suitably jagged, had been buried for months to accumulate rust.
”If you help me sell this, I`ll give you a nice commission,” Chang whispered as the Swede began to show bargain-basement excitement.
Could this be this same young man who last year painted a family tree on the wall of Beijing University detailing how senior communist officials, even Deng Xiaoping, had placed family members in the highest-paid industrial jobs in China?
”There are still some of us who dream,” Chang conceded later. ”Some of us get excited with the news from Moscow and Eastern Europe, and some of us are waiting to see whether our dinosaurs will die this year.”
In the meantime, Chang recalls the fate of his father, who spent the best part of his youth roaming the countryside as a Red Guard implementing the Great Helmsman`s harebrained order, ”Smash the old to build the new,” that pulverized a great part of China`s cultural heritage.
Chang recalled that his grandfather had sledgehammered an authentic Ming vase to demonstrate his loyality to Mao. The vase, Chang sighed, had been a cherished family heirloom for generations.
”Neither of them could eat their ideology. The vase is gone; so are my father`s best years. I don`t want to be another victim of another campaign. I want money.”
Chang did make the sale to the Swedish tourist. Later he was seen at the Palace Hotel, Beijing`s showcase for sumptuous living.
The hotel, faced with Carrara marble, was built to extract the maximum amount of hard currency from tourists and businessmen. The Chinese, without the foreign currency the hotel requires, used to gather outside the ornamental pagoda gate to guffaw at the glitter inside.
But lately its lavish restaurants have been crowded with Chinese families who order the most expensive meals, with imported wines. They pay with foreign-exchange certificates, thumbing out amounts equivalent to two months` wages for an ordinary working man.
Even a 15 percent service charge-with 5 percent destined for the army, the hotel`s majority shareholder-has not deterred the new customers. No questions are asked there, no Ministry of Supervision bureaucrat ever prowls among the tables to inquire how the native diners came by such vast sums of foreign loot.
Chang was seated in a plush chair of the coffee shop with two fellow antique dealers and three young women. A bottle of French burgundy was half-empty. His plate was heaped with the leftovers of foreign delicacies concocted by an Austrian cook on loan. He smoked a fat cigar and surveyed a room crowded with the families of party officials, employees of joint China-Western business ventures and the hawkers and money-changers of Beijing.
He waved leisurely and grinned. Here below the crystal chandeliers, Chang was an equal among equals in a China where, despite all the government`s campaigns, some people will always be more equal than others.
