AWAKEN, SLEEPING BEAUTY

Miami Herald, The (FL)
August 9, 1992
Author: MICHAEL BROWNING Herald Staff Writer

China is vaporing away from me: Great, dusty, cruel, mountainous, antique, silk-robed and bronze-belled China, vexing and voluminous to the very end. All its pagodas and blue-white porcelain, all its palaces and pigsties, all its cabbages and communists, are floating equally toward the millennium, like the peach petals fallen from jasper peaks in the Ninth Century poem by Li Bai, petals drifting on secret streams "to other skies and earths than those of mortals . . ."Let them go. Yet how painful it is, to leave the theater in the middle of the last reel, before the movie is over! What a wrench, to walk out half-backward, crick-necked, staring hungrily at the receding screen, trying to guess the ending!

Will Alec Guinness save or destroy the bridge on the River Kwai? Will Gary Cooper meet the noon train? Will Humphrey Bogart leave Casablanca with Ingrid Bergman? Will China ever be free and democratic? I'll never see how it turns out, though I may hear about it later, in vague, faraway reports.

It is hard to be departing after nearly nine years here, but it is perhaps for the best. Whole lives are easily swallowed up by China, to little purpose. Missionaries here in the 19th Century sometimes stayed 50 to 60 years, waking up one morning to find their lives spent, and China still heathen.

Not so I. Still, I'm dying to know how it winds up. This isn't Hollywood. Happy endings aren't obligatory. Will there be a civil war? A military dictatorship? Or a long, calm process of "peaceful evolution" into a democratic state? When will the old sinners at the top "go to meet Marx"? Which of them will die next?

Nowadays a titanic endgame between communism and capitalism is being played out in China as nowhere else on Earth, with the hearts and minds of 1.12 billion people as the wager. Despite all the government's brag, bluster and bullets, despite all its slogans, jails and head-cracking thuggery, the West is clearly winning.

As I signed for traveler's checks at the Bank of China on July 3, preparing to depart, I noticed a blue Hula-Hoop hanging on the wall of the "Inward Remittances" window. Chinese workers love to twirl these things on breaks. Ten years ago, such a Western frill would have been inconceivable.

The Avenue Of Eternal Golden Arches

"Ladies and gentlemen . . ." the stewardess said over a fuzzy loudspeaker on a warm night in July 1983, advising us that we were approaching Beijing. I looked out the window. An almost lightless void yawned below the plane, with only a few faint bulbs glowing like scattered embers in a vast black landscape. Can this be the capital of China? I wondered.

Gray and coal-dusty by daylight, Beijing by night is now a crystal lattice of millions of starry little lights. A brilliant new fad has swept the city in the past two years. After dark in the streets and byways, thousands of strings of tiny Christmassy bulbs are strung in twinkling cascading veils and canopies over private restaurants and shops that stay open practically all night long. Capitalism is arriving here in a fantail of electricity, luminous and mysterious as St. Elmo's Fire.

"Better fifty years of Europe, than a cycle of Cathay!" the poet Alfred Tennyson wrote in the middle of the 19th Century, but he spoke too soon. The 1980s were a pivotal decade in Chinese history, beginning in hope, ending in bloody horror and ideological bankruptcy. For nearly three years since the Tiananmen massacre, the government has tried to turn the clock back, in vain. The Chinese people are going their own way, looking outward, westward, more and more each day.

The old socialist glue that ranked and regimented the society into "work units" where ordinary Chinese were slotted

from cradle to grave is dissolving rapidly. Moonlighting and "sideline activities," officially permitted in after-hours and spare time, are gnawing into regular jobs so deeply that the whole state-run economy is hollow and rotten. It is a cynical joke that barbers earn more than rocket engineers in China.

The sidewalks bustle with entrepreneurs. Blocks of milky ice on rickety tables hold bottles of Pepsi Cola and Beijing beer, twirled and chilled by eager vendors. Women sell hot egg pancakes sprinkled with tasty leeks and chili peppers. Wiry old men sell hot sweet potatoes. Watermelons by the million are piled in green parapets all over the city in summer, and the farmer-vendors sleep amid the amassed fruit, to guard against thieves.

Millions of people here have something going on the side, almost like a hidden moonshine still, dripping money in secret. Officially China is devoted to "Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought." Officials demand their cut in the form of "voluntary contributions" and sometimes shut down businesses that prosper too fast. But tens of millions of Chinese are hustling, seizing the day. It is still at the level of shoeshine-boy capitalism, but the energy and enterprising spirit are astonishing.

The government well knows by now that its only chance to remain in power is to guarantee a prosperous economy. Free enterprise is no longer a choice, but a necessity. As one popular phrase goes, "We are using capitalism to save socialism."

International satellite television signals and shortwave radio broadcasts are falling from the sky in an invisible dew, bathing the nation in morning-new ideas. Despite the government's clumsy attempts to jam Voice of America radio broadcasts, telephone lines and fax machines link China with the rest of the world. From the coastal provinces inward, free enterprise is spreading as fast as a penicillin mold on a fertile agar plate, killing and healing by turns. The agelong isolation of China, its stubborn and self-imagined centrality and apartness, is ending forever.

So, sadly, is its strangeness, its storied exoticism. Jet by jet, cheeseburger by cheeseburger, MTV video by MTV video, China is being dragged willy-nilly into the wider world. For good or ill, it can never retreat into itself again.

More and more there are two Chinas now, diverging, bifurcating into East and West, old and new. It is impossible to tell whether this new, brindled nation is white with black spots, or black with white spots.

"Some people who have forgotten their ancestors have nothing Chinese left to them save their black hair and yellow complexion," railed the People's Daily in an editorial published May 17, 1991. "Some of these people have displayed inferiority complexes and a bitter hatred for socialism."

The communist hard-liners have a point. Certain it is, that in the process of headlong modernization, China is losing part of its soul. A fulminating greed has struck the land. The country is materially richer than it has ever been in history, spiritually more impoverished than at any time since the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.

Avon ladies go door-to-door in old Canton, selling cosmetics by the bushel. Heinz Baby Food and Procter & Gamble shampoos and soaps are fantastically popular. Coke and Pepsi are now bottled in China, along with Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Chinese children chew M&M's and Snickers chocolate bars instead of sunflower seeds. You see commonly today a sight extremely rare nine years ago: fat Chinese.

Chinese people are eating more sugar, eggs and fatty meat than ever before. Meat consumption is up 200 percent over the past decade, rice consumption down by 11 percent, according to a report published by China's Institute of Nutrition and Food Hygiene.

At the same time China now admits to having 140,000 heroin addicts, up from 0 after liberation in 1949, and 57 drug dealers were recently executed on one day alone, June 26, in a country- wide crackle of pistol fire. Prostitution is so common in the major cities that police arrested 29,315 ladies of the evening in a two-month sweep last summer. Three stock exchanges have opened in China and two unlucky investors have already committed suicide in despair over losing their life's savings.

As late as October 1986, China had not yet seen a single case of AIDS. By March 1991, there were 493 HIV-positive patients and there had been four deaths, mostly from contaminated imported blood and dirty needles.

Traffic jams, easy-listening FM radio and Bart Simpson T- shirts are all part of modern Beijing. Horse-drawn carts are an oddity now. We used to fall asleep with the soothing clip- clop of horses' hooves outside our windows at night. No more.

When I arrived here in July 1983 my predecessor, Dan Williams, had succinct advice: "Bring everything with you," he warned. "It's like coming to the moon." He wasn't far wrong.

In those days one could still see little Chinese boys running around under elm trees in the summer heat, trying to snare dragonflies in gauzy white nets. They would tie a thread to the trapped bugs and use them as toy "airplanes." Other children twirled big wooden whistling tops that sang as they spun, emitting a sweet musical coo. These were pastimes centuries old, painted on ancient scrolls in museums.

Now plastic has driven out bamboo. Children play with "Super Soaker" water pistols in the back alleys of Beijing. Hula-Hoops are everywhere, like plastic zeroes. Silk kites are still popular here, in the country that invented kites; but it will probably not be long before Mylar replaces silk.

Kentucky Fried Chicken came to Beijing in 1986 and now has two outlets. Pizza Hut arrived in 1990. McDonald's opened its giant 700-seat restaurant on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, across

from the Beijing Hotel, in April of this year. It is the only McDonald's restaurant in the world with a Communist Party secretary on the payroll. He is a dapper man named Cai Weiqian.

This July a huge yellow Ronald McDonald balloon sat on the restaurant's roof, grinning and swaying in the summer breezes, overlooking a boulevard that still has tank treads fretted into its asphalt, three years after the Tiananmen massacre. Automobile tires hum, passing over them, even today.

A Government Of Murderers

Everyone in Beijing wears moral bifocals, as do hundreds of millions across China. Through one set of lenses shines the broad, neutral light of day. The Chinese use these lenses to get up, ride the "Flying Pigeon" bicycle to work or to the fields, eat lunch, buy vegetables at noon break, take a nap, head home to the family at quitting time, scheme to prosper, to buy a refrigerator next month. Everything seems normal through these lenses.

Through the other set of lenses glares a guilty, greenish- black twilight inhabited by dim, distant monsters who have literally gotten away with murder since the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989. They are the leaders of China. They appear on television from night to night, smiling, wearing coats and ties, shaking hands with foreign dignitaries, who are only too glad to forgive and forget, sign contracts and approve loans. China is a vast and lucrative market, getting vaster every day.

"We Americans have a tendency to be too Puritanical," airily said an American hotel manager to me in 1991, dismissing outrage over the Tiananmen affair.

These second lenses behold an unavenged evil. Byss and abyss gape before their gaze, deepening into a jumbled, bottomless dark of unpunished sin.

"We have government of murderers," the fleeing, wounded pro-Democracy demonstrators screamed that June night in 1989. For anyone who saw them, being gunned down by their own army after nearly a month of peaceful protest, their chests shattered, their bellies oozing blood, it is a clear truth that much of China's top leadership should go to the gallows, or at the very least stand trial in a Nuremberg-style tribunal. It is a strange thing to be a foreigner here, to give up the idea of retribution at the airport Customs gate, to enter and live in a country ruled as a feudal fiefdom by actual, demonstrable murderers.

The virtues that won the communist revolution were the virtues of youth: courage, idealism, optimism, dauntless disregard for hardship and death, generosity, faith and the willingness to make supreme sacrifices. The vices that disfigure modern China are the vices of old age: avarice, suspicion, arthritic caution, bloodless pessimism, twisty cunning, stubborn arrogance and, above all, a pathetic reluctance on the part of the leaders to depart the stage, now that their role has been played, and their active lives are over. At the very top, China is wizened in soul and in body.

"I'm Depressed Leave Me Alone"

Barred from any meaningful role in deciding their own destinies, the Chinese people are detouring into business, or turning to religion, or dreaming desperately of going abroad. The bright red ideals of Maoism have been discredited, but the government has nothing to offer instead. A tone of hollow mockery, very new, has seeped into China like mildew.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

What is that sound so resonant?

What is that sound so joyous?

It greets the silvery moon,

And wakens the fiery sun.

It is our tall Pile-Driver,

Singing at the work site!

Bang! Bang! Bang!

What is that sound so powerful?

What is that sound so vibrant?

It is part of the symphony of modernization

Bringing skyscrapers and factories.

It is our precious Pile-Driver

Singing at the work site.

This is a new song at Chinese karaoke bars, where people grab Japanese-made microphones and sing along, guffawing with drunken laughter, late into the evening. In the 1950s, this sort of song would have been a hymn to labor, very reverent. Now it is a laugh-riot, as campy as "Howdy Doody."

In July 1991, police raided markets in the Xidan district of western Beijing, scooping up T-shirts with such innocuous- seeming slogans on them as: "I'M DEPRESSED LEAVE ME ALONE," and "I'M ONLY TRYING TO FEED MY FAMILY." The T-shirts were viewed as subversive. This past June, a new municipal ordinance was laid down in Beijing, actually forbidding "joking" in Tiananmen Square.

A whole slew of air-brushy government-sponsored films praising Mao Zedong have come out in the past two years. The result: Chinese movie attendance dropped 20 percent in 1991 and is down 30 percent this year. Work units pass out tickets to these films in clumps. Workers accept them, then skedaddle. They throw away the tickets and play hooky.

Even while the state publishing houses crank out new 60- volume editions of Lenin's works, even while the leadership speaks confidently of its policy "for the next 100 years," the sands are running out.

Mao himself has undergone a curious transformation. He was the Father of New China for nearly 20 years. Then the excesses of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution elevated him to the status of a cruel and vengeful god, whose face shone with a solar halo in posters, and who could blast people with crooked lightning bolts out of nowhere. An estimated 300,000 people perished for imaginary political crimes in the decade of purges launched by Mao.

In the mid-1980s, China began devaluing Mao, quietly dynamiting old statues of the "Great Helmsman" and removing from circulation his Little Red Book and the controversial Vol. V of his Selected Works, which contained some of his wildest fantasies, among them that nuclear weapons would be useless against China.

Today Mao has made an amazing comeback, not as a patriarch, but as a kind of communist rabbit's foot. Drivers hang plastic- coated cards with his portrait on their rearview mirrors, to prevent accidents. Just as Americans travel with a pair of furry pink dice or a St. Christopher medal above the dashboard, so the Chinese are invoking Mao, as a lucky charm on a journey through an uncertain age.

The Chinese people must have been astonished to learn in

December 1987, when then-party Secretary Zhao Ziyang delivered his speech at the 13th party congress, that after nearly 40 years of absolute communist rule the country was "still in the initial stage of socialism."

This quickly became a jest in the foreign press corps. Anything small or imperfect was "still in the initial stage of socialism." At a 1988 banquet at the Beijing Capital Iron and Steel works, we were served roast quails, exquisitely glazed. Some reporters had never seen roast quails before and asked what the tiny fowl could be.

"A chicken in the initial stage of socialism!" shot back a Hungarian reporter, before anybody else could answer.

Amnesia, Anesthesia, Gangrene

"I do not know what is happening to my country," said a young woman named Ma, whose husband is a successful businessman in Beijing. "The worst people seem to be rising to the top, and the best people seem to be sinking to the bottom." Like many Chinese, Ma says she copes with the government by not thinking about it. "When my Western friends ask me questions, I say: 'I do not know, I am not too clear.' I cannot change the government, so I keep all such thoughts off to one side. Why think about painful subjects?" she asks.

"Not too clear"; "Everything goes in cycles"; "All governments are bound to commit errors"; "Stability is Number One"; "The stomach is king" -- these are the queasy slogans of China in the 1990s.

In this evasive atmosphere, corruption and cruelty abound. Capital punishment has a flavor-of-the-month quality in China. Lately people have been put to death for dealing in pornography, abducting women and children, and even for stealing electrical generators worth $8,800.

Despite the promiscuous executions -- about 1,000 a year now, or 2.7 per day -- despite this grim hail of bullets, bribery, corruption and zha qu -- "squeeze" -- are pandemic here. Communist Party members are among the worst offenders.

Eels and turtles

Every cadre likes to eat;

But each mouthful

Is the peasants' flesh and blood

So goes a ditty written by a peasant in Wandui village named Sun Zhonghua. Sun was protesting the siphoning off of flood-relief funds in Jiangsu province by dishonest officials.

In December 1987, a cook in Linshu County, Shandong province, overthrew every single dish for a 14-course banquet, she was so disgusted at the hoggishness of officials feasting at a "dialogue meeting" in one of the poorest spots in China. She briefly became a national heroine, and a "four-dish-one-soup" rule was ceremoniously put into effect. It is universally ignored today.

During the 13th party congress in December 1987, we reporters were led by a circuitous route through the Great Hall of the People, along a corridor that looked out over a huge, hidden inner courtyard. A sea of wealth shone through the

windows: The courtyard was filled with brand new shiny black Mercedes limousines. China imported 200,000 luxury cars costing $1 billion in precious foreign exchange currency between 1981 and 1989, mostly for official use.

Early missionaries here complained about "rice Christians," opportunistic hypocrites who chose Jesus in order to get free handouts. Today China has millions and millions of "rice communists," people who know a gravy train when they see one.

In 1966, the Chinese Communist Party numbered 19.95 million members. Now it boasts 54.35 million. More and more they are seen as a plague of locusts, battening off the honest efforts of ordinary people.

I saw with my own eyes the aftermath of a typhoon that struck coastal Zhejiang province in July 1987. Peasants' houses were destroyed, and the survivors stood amazed and disconsolate amid the wreckage. Trees were splintered and flattened, lying all one way in massive windrows, as if a gigantic comb had been run through them. One ragged old man, whose home had blown into a river, thought I was from the United Nations and held out his hand for money, wincing and groaning.

We made our way to the nearby town of Shangyu. There we found local officials deep in an orgy of gluttony, banqueting on heaps of scallops, enormous prawns and a dozen other delicacies at public expense. They had spent the morning, not visiting the ruined houses, but watching videotapes of the flood damage. After a pleasant nap, they piled into their limousines and went home, leaving the peasants to their fate.

The Bad Earth

China's environment has suffered grievously from 41 years of communist rule. It dumps three billion tons of contaminated water into the oceans every year, has a birth rate of 43 a minute, and loses 40,000 acres of arable land a year to desertification because peasants hew down forests indiscriminately.

When Westerners see a flock of wild geese flying in formation, they see an inverted "V." Chinese, contrariwise, are quite sure they see the ideogram for "man," or ren. Man is the center of the Chinese cosmos, and all nature exists to please him. Animals are here to be eaten, to be pets, or to be harnessed as laborers.

The fauna of China are being hunted into extinction, driven into zoos and circuses, carved up in restaurants or converted to hard currency for their skins and organs, staples of Chinese traditional medicine.

From 1985 to 1988 in Xinjiang Autonomous Region, 100,000 antelope, 50,000 red deer, 50,000 red foxes, 1,000 turtles, and a "large number" of wild yaks, snow leopards, snow cocks and argali (a wild sheep prized for its horns) were hunted to death, according to a Chinese study.

Red deer antlers fetch $1,800 and are prized as a folk remedy promoting longevity. Chinese black-bear gallbladders fetch $1,500 apiece in apothecary shops in Hong Kong. Bear's paw is a delicacy in northeastern China. Turtles, monkeys, pangolins and pythons are all being swallowed up in tens of thousands by jaded Chinese gourmands.

Fortresses Of Money

Though China looks grim and ironclad on the outside, inwardly it is astonishingly chaotic, lawless and inefficient, a police state in which some police remind you of Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops.

"The Laws of the People's Republic of China" occupy two blue-and-gold-bound volumes, published in 1987 and totaling 791 pages.

This is an enormous step forward. Communist China only got its first written legal code in 1979, and the constitution was abrogated during the Cultural Revolution. In 1969, the People's Daily published an editorial titled: In Praise of Lawlessness.

Communism, you discover, is more loopholes than law. There is a lot of goofing off and goldbricking, a lot of back- scratching and eye-winking at infractions of the rules. Personal interest, looking out for No. 1, is preeminent.

Criminal irresponsibility is commonplace.

A cloud of deadly pesticide from a tank truck killed 38 villagers in Jiangxi province last June. The reason? One of the two truck drivers wanted to visit his mother and detoured down a country lane with low, overhanging boughs. A tree limb knocked a valve open, releasing the poison.

Twenty-eight young schoolchildren drowned in a foul cesspool of urine and excrement in January 1987 in Huichang County, Jiangxi province, when the wooden floor of the school restroom collapsed. It turned out the floor was jerry-built by relatives of the schoolmaster who knew nothing about carpentry.

Deprived of any effective legal redress, cut off from the possibility of political reform by a government that is a tightly circumscribed oligarchy (by some estimates the number of people who actually control China is as few as 50), the Chinese have diverted their dammed-up energies into moneymaking. They are building tiny, personal fortresses of money.

There are now at least 400 millionaires in a country where the average annual income is about $371 a year. Sidewalk entrepreneurs cluster in every corner of Beijing, selling everything from watermelons to wooden flutes. Many of the trishaw drivers who wait outside the hotels and shops on Chang An Avenue in central Beijing are ex-convicts, bald, sly-faced old lags who are spurned by normal work units and factories in China. They are getting their revenge. They are getting rich.

As the communist sector of the economy rusts, private entrepreneurs bustle and hop like fleas on a hot griddle. Back- street markets have proliferated in Beijing, and Eastern Europeans and Russians come here by the thousands, by train, to fill up huge plastic bags with apparel they cannot get at home, and hope to resell there. The Chinese not only sell apparel, they sell bags to put it in, and beer to drink while shopping.

Science Fiction, Socialist Fact

In A Gift From Earth, a short science fiction novel written in the 1960s, American author Larry Niven describes a planet

from whose boiling surface rises a large, cool plateau, several miles into the upper atmosphere. On this isolated plateau lives a small society of Earth colonists, who prey off each other for organ transplants.

To keep up the supply of fresh organs, the death penalty is enforced for ridiculously small offenses. Practically everything is a crime against the state, which is ruled by the incredibly old survivors of the original, colonizing Earth-ship. These cloistered, patchwork tyrants survive in heavily guarded compounds, living inside bodies wholly made of organ transplants, by now entirely repaired and renewed several times over. Their children also have first pick of the transplants, as do the state security police.

Criminals are executed by having cold ethanol pumped into their veins, to preserve their organs. They are then cut to pieces, carefully, and stored in various freezers, their body parts destined to rejuvenate the leaders.

Just as a bloody civil war is about to break out, a spaceship arrives, bearing a "gift from Earth": a small yeast- like bacterium called a "rotifer," which invades the body

from the skin inward, and rejuvenates it. The colonists no longer have to slice each other up to survive. The novel ends happily, with the prospect of virtual immortality within reach for everybody.

Without meaning to, Niven has described modern China with uncanny accuracy. Here, too, people live marooned in a place with no easy exit, preyed upon by extraordinarily aged leaders who see that the death penalty is enforced for a wide gamut of crimes, and who siphon off their own people's vitality to maintain themselves and their families in power and in comfort.

But a "rotifer" bacillus has arrived, and it is changing China from the coast inward. The "rotifer" is free enterprise. It is not too much to say that every organ of China's economy that is Marxist-modeled or state-run is ailing and dying; while all the parts that are run by private initiative and private capital are flourishing, rejuvenating and growing wildly. China experienced 11 percent growth in the first five months of 1992, practically all due to private enterprise.

The official sector is moribund -- a staggering 40 percent of China's state-run industries are in the red, losing an aggregate of over $7 billion a year. Fully three million of the state's 43 million workers report daily to factories that have shut down. There they idle, daylong. It is a grim jest among these underpaid people that "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." In some overmanned plants, surplus workers are sent out to polish bicycles in company parking lots, in a curious charade of labor.

By contrast, small, self-managed rural factories are increasing at the rate of 24 percent per quarter, and now account for 21.5 percent of the GNP. The economies of the coastal provinces, Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang, are growing at the rate of 27 percent a year, and their exports are booming. It is an amazing economic feat, as if a man in a straitjacket had somehow wrestled one arm free, and were managing to do push- ups on three fingers of one hand.

"Let China sleep," Napoleon once advised. "When she awakens she will astonish the world."

If and when the rest of China gets its economic act together, the United States ought to tremble: Even now, with all this massive inefficiency, even now, with all its shackles, China is already clobbering the United States in trade. The supply of cheap labor here is inexhaustible. Industrial know-how is pouring in from Taiwan, Japan, Europe and the U.S. The innate cleverness and will-to-work of the Chinese people is formidable. The future can only tilt the balance further toward China.

Last year the trade surplus with America was $13.6 billion in China's favor, mostly because of apparel ($2.57 billion), footwear ($1.8 billion), toys and games ($1.56 billion), telecommunications and electrical items ($1.3 billion).

U.S. congressmen have tried to make an issue out of "prison labor" used to make export goods in China, as if whips and chains were driving this new manufacturing dynamo. This is wishful thinking. It is true that prisoners must undergo "reform through labor" in jail house factories in China; but their output is infinitesimal, compared with the rivers of goods that unjailed Chinese are busily producing.

Hardhearted Pharaohs

What do they remember? What do they feel? Can a people who still nurse a grudge over the 1840 Opium War, who still smart

from the 1860 burning of the Summer Palace by British and French troops, can these people have so swiftly forgotten a massacre that occurred a mere three years ago? Surely not! Yet every year the outward remembrances grow subtler, fainter, more riddling and equivocal.

On July 3, 1990, students at Beijing University flung bottles out of dormitory windows ("small bottle" rhymes with Deng Xiaoping's name in Chinese). One gave a speech, was arrested, expelled and sentenced to two years in jail for "counterrevolutionary incitement." He was only just released a few weeks ago, after serving his full term.

This year, in a truly ludicrous exercise, university authorities went from room to room in the dormitories, preemptively buying up all bottles for a few cents each. No student was allowed to keep an empty bottle in his room. This is what the Chinese government is reduced to, to smother protest: buying up bottles.

"China is short-term stable, long-term unstable," Ma's shrewd businessman husband predicts. "This government will last at least 15 to 20 more years, and you can do a lot of business in that span of time."

I could not be so philosophical. I taught my children to give premier Li the raspberry whenever he appeared on the nightly CCTV news. Li it was, who declared martial law on May 19, 1989, and set in motion the machinery of the massacre. Li it was, whom the students demanded be dismissed, decapitated and deep-fried in those days.

We rejoiced when Li was forced to refuel his jet in Fiji, rather than Hawaii, on his way to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. If he had ventured into Hawaii he would have been pelted with rotten eggs and tomatoes.

All this was fun, but ultimately unsatisfying, like screaming into your pillow. The children were carefree, their minds unencumbered. They could not long bear the weight of these adult piques and crotchets.

So I bought a parrot for $60 at the Bird Market in western Beijing and took it home and tried to teach it to say: Da Dao Li Peng! ("Down with Li Peng!") This was a great rallying-cry during Tiananmen, and I think it would have made the parrot a rare, celebrated and probably very endangered species in China. For awhile this project soothed me. But then the mischievous bird escaped, and took with it all my counterrevolutionary hopes!

For hopes I still have. A rare, exquisitely satisfying moment came last April 4, when China's normally obedient National People's Congress embarrassed the government with its split vote on the Three Gorges Dam, a controversial hydropower project that will alter forever the hydrography of Central China.

This enormous dam is being visited upon the hapless Chinese people like the Ten Plagues of Egypt in the Old Testament, all

because of the hardhearted Pharaohs in Beijing.

Everybody hates this dam. One million hapless peasants already being evicted from their homes abhor it. People upriver fear its floods and overbrimmings. People downriver worry about its bursting or being blown up by enemy attack. Age-old temples and peaks and cliffs, celebrated in poetry and history, will be drowned by it, along with much of the spectacular scenery and rich historical traditions of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze.

Opponents of the project said it was an ecological disaster in the making, but their protests seemed in vain. Socialists love dams, and the marrowless NPC could be relied upon to do the party's stern bidding.

Or so it was thought: When the votes were tallied on the electronic board in the Great Hall of the People, Premier Li Peng and NPC chairman Wan Li stared up in disbelief. The final tally: 177 no's; 644 abstentions; 1,767 loyal ayes; and 25 delegates somehow could not find their voting buttons to push.

There had never been a vote like this in NPC history. In 1986, a single delegate voting "no" was so newsworthy that his photo made the front page of the China Daily.

The dam proposal carried, but by a humiliatingly narrow margin. It is scheduled to be built over the next 18 years, but in truth it may never be completed. A lot can happen here in 18 years, and the vote was seen by many as a startling referendum on the Communist Party itself.

Involution, Evolution

When I arrived here in midsummer 1983, the world, and China, were far different.

The Soviet Union stood rock-firm in the East, and was triumphantly carpet-bombing the disorganized Afghan resistance.

Mikhail Gorbachev had yet to come to power. Glasnost and perestroika were unknown. Erich Honecker, Nicolae Ceausescu and Wojciech Jaruzelski were the unchallenged rulers of East Germany, Romania and Poland. Indira Gandhi presided over a tranquil India, and her son, Rajiv Gandhi, was still an airline pilot, blissfully unconcerned with politics. Ferdinand Marcos was seemingly president-for-life in the Philippines. The Sandinistas ran Nicaragua with an iron hand. Augusto Pinochet ground Chile beneath his heel.

The passengers of KAL 007, JAL 123 and Pan Am 103 had yet to plunge to their doom. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was humming along smoothly, the Exxon Valdez's hull was intact. Iran and Iraq were locked in combat, Iraq was receiving aid from Kuwait, and China was preparing to sell weapons to both sides.

Ronald Reagan was in midmorning in America, while his advisers, as yet unindicted, were pushing the American economy into a black hole of debt that made the one-time richest nation in the world the biggest debtor nation on Earth. The Decade of Greed was still in its drooling infancy.

In those days when you said "CD," you meant "certificate of deposit," not "compact disk." CD players were for the wealthy few. Home computers were rare status symbols, with 64 whopping kilobytes of memory and monochrome monitors. Michael Jackson had not yet produced Thriller. Bruce Springsteen hadn't issued Born in the U.S.A. Marvin Gaye was alive. So were Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein, both still playing the piano beautifully. The immortal phrase "Where's the beef?" had not yet been uttered. Gary Hart had a good shot at the presidency.

China had a premier, Zhao Ziyang, who was a true economic reformer. State markets sold dusty cabbages and withered leeks. Farmers still toiled halfheartedly on communes. There was not a single health club or Jacuzzi in all of Beijing.

The bullets of Tiananmen were either uncast, or were stored idly by, in ammo-boxes, or in cool metal AK-47 magazines, far away, unfired. The innocent young people who would be shot by them were still walking around untouched, with beating hearts and everyday hopes.

Such things lay furled-up in time, still unscrolled.

So lay China and the world in those days. After this extraordinary decade, who can say where China will stand in 10 or 20 years?

The human ore is present, only slightly below the surface, glimpsed in pebbles and outcrops, but with its depths and limits unguessed-at, undiscovered. China is still largely subterranean, lying in lodes immeasurable. Its buried gold is only beginning to glint. The future here will be immense.

Section: TROPIC
Page: 10
Dateline: BEIJING
Copyright (c) 1992 The Miami Herald