FIERCELY BEAUTIFUL, FAINTLY POISONOUS: A BILLION SOULS WRESTLE WITH MODERNITY

Paper: Miami Herald, The (FL)
Author: MICHAEL BROWNING Herald Staff Writer
August 21, 1988

Skyscrapers have sprung up along Chang An Avenue, the city's central thoroughfare, glassy monsters 30 and 40 stories tall. But at their feet it is still the 19th Century, with horse-drawn night soil carts creaking by, slaughtered pigs exposed on the sidewalk, chickens and tomatoes being raised in tiny plots and bottle collectors passing with musical cries down alleyways of clay brick, under red wooden lintels flecked with gold.

There is a magic here amid the chaos, far and strange, a sparky, quartzy-bright ice-crackle in winter, in summer a shady, cicada-buzzing watermelon ripeness. The sunsets are fiercely beautiful, faintly poisonous, glowing through tons of floating coal dust from thousands of chimneys. In spring the sun and moon can pale to a faraway, frosted-glass glimmer, seen amid the wings of great dust storms sweeping down from Mongolia.Sometimes it seems the weather is the only constant left in China.

Not since "liberation" in 1949 has the country seen such a transformation. Once cocooned off from the world in a Maoist cloud, once told that "socialist weeds taste better than capitalist wheat," China is now awakening to the pleasures of Shakespeare, Colonel Sanders and Mickey Mouse, as well as to the anxieties of galloping inflation, rising crime and a pervasive cynicism that has accompanied the crumbling of the Marxist model.

This huge surge toward the future is only a decade old. It began at the 1978 Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress, the great omnium-gatherum where Deng Xiaoping took charge of the country. In the past five years the Reform has shoved its way into nearly every level of Chinese life. It has not run according to plan and lately it seems increasingly out of control.

Beijing itself looks like a construction site with a corpse in the middle: Mao Zedong's. It is spreading like a juggernaut in all directions, unplanned. The new is trampling on the ancient with fierce indiscrimination. At the Jianguomenwai diplomatic compound last year a westerner looked out his window and noticed a group of construction workers who had blundered into an old graveyard beneath a new playground. As the westerner watched, the workers played kickball with human skulls.

A May day in 1985. The great anti-spitting campaign is launched as Jingle Bells peals clangorously throughout the morning. Microscopes are set up along the sidewalks for violators to stare through, down at the magnified horror of their very own sputum. The instruments are such a novelty that many queue up eagerly. People caught spitting are fined 18 cents by a special flying squadron of 150,000 no-spit sanitation workers with distinctive badges. More than half a million people will be fined for spitting over the next six months.

It is useless to speculate why Jingle Bells was chosen as theme music. Probably it sounded peppy, upbeat, Western. (One can hear O Come All Ye Faithful on merry-go-rounds in China in midsummer.) Campaigns against spitting, with Christmas carols in the middle of spring, show how queer China can be, how isolated and upside-down.

For five years the frenzied dawns of the Reform have brought such random campaigns: anti-dog, anti-rat, anti- spiritual pollution, anti-bourgeois liberalization, anti- total Westernization, anti-crime, anti-rudeness.

It is revolution by the numbers: with the Three Don'ts (spitting, littering and writing on walls), the Four Beauties (beautifying one's mind, language, behavior and environment) and the Five Stresses (decorum, courtesy, cleanliness, discipline and morality).

At a quick glance the Reform may seem to be built on inanity and cliche, but there is no escaping its power to transform.

Five years ago cars couldn't be driven with their lights on at night, for fear of terrifying the bicyclists. Now tens of thousands of Toyotas and Volvos imported during the madcap spending years of 1984-85 have combined with 6.8 million bicycles to create a massive gridlock in downtown Beijing. On the outskirts of the city Mercedes limousines compete with donkey carts for the right of way.

Five years ago people dressed lumpishly in duo-tone: blue cotton for the winter, white for the summer. Now the Mao suit has yielded to miniskirts and mascara for women. Men parade around in white socks and black high heels, to earn a couple inches' advantage in height. Party secretary Zhao Ziyang wears a coat and purple tie to receptions and is said to dye his hair.

Five years ago the dreary state-run markets offered wilted cabbage, dusty cucumbers and scarred tomatoes. Now private entrepreneurs line the streets with rainbow arrays of

cantaloupe, bananas, grapes and pineapples. Each market comes with its own clutch of smarmy money-changers who look like 1940s villains with their pencil-thin mustaches and beady eyes.

Five years ago the Chinese yuan was about two to the

dollar. Now it is nearly four and the boys with the little mustaches will offer you six or more. In those days all the Chinese wanted was the "four things that go 'round," a bicycle, a fan, a watch and a sewing machine. Now it's the "eight big things" they crave: a color TV, a camera, a tape player, a motorcycle, a washing machine, an air conditioner, a refrigerator and a videocassette recorder.

A fog of money-madness has swept the country. It is an ersatz religion in a land where the gods are kept on a very short leash. It is the new politics, because politics is off limits to all but the members of a very exclusive club: the Chinese Communist Party. And in many cases it is creating a new, crass class of opportunists, people with no education and no principles but with the street savvy to push the buttons, make the connections.

Ordinary people are getting lost in this new rat race. Even a college diploma counts for little. Grade school teachers, whose starting pay is under $10 a month, work as dance partners after hours, to make ends meet. A black-market cigarette ring broken up in Beijing recently was operated by postgraduate students.

Out in the countryside, the good earth is getting better all the time. The last of China's communes, prisonlike work farms where peasants were rousted out of bed by bosses blowing whistles, was abolished in 1984. A "responsibility system," allowing farmers to keep all they produce over a certain quota, is now the rule.

Pearl S. Buck's archetypal Chinese peasant, Wang Lung, was an icon of saintly poverty who could afford tea only on his wedding day. Today he quite possibly owns a color TV, a washing machine, a two-story house and, in a handful of cases, a car. He may even be rich enough to buy a baby: He can elect to try for a second child, flouting China's ultra-strict "one couple one child" birth control policy and pay a fine of up to $1,000. Ten years' income is a small price for a son!

Mao Zedong himself is in eclipse. He is simply referred to as "the late chairman," nothing more, and it is getting clearer and clearer the Chinese are sick of the old pill. His statue at Beijing University disappeared quietly several months ago. His birthplace, Shaoshan, is virtually deserted these days.

Mao's Little Red Book of quotations, the catechism of the Cultural Revolution, is gone, simply gone. Some Chinese, with equal irony and thrift, have thrown away the text and kept the plastic cover to use as a coaster for teacups.

The West is intruding here, but not nearly as much as westerners imagine. China tends to swallow and metabolize its invaders.

It may swallow the Reform, too, in the end. Any effort to modernize this country runs head-on into a sempiternal wall of dark ignorance, entrenched privilege, deeply ingrained custom and the inert weight of the world's largest population. Every set of measures announced in Beijing is frustrated by a myriad murk of countermeasures taken at the local level by self- interested officials.

True, Chinese children have gone mad for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck since the program debuted in October 1986. Coca- Cola, after a slow start, has become very popular. "Ma-bu-ro" is the smoke of choice among hip young men. Di-si-ke (disco) is a catch-all term for any kind of ballroom dancing, and it is everywhere now. Then there is the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, three stories tall and fronting on the Great Hall of the People. It opened with immense publicity in November last year.

But all this is the thinnest of crusts. Beneath, strange and antique fancies still hold sway.

While upholding Marxist-Leninist-Mao thought, professing atheism and feeling proud of their space program, the Chinese also believe in magic and the Taoist elixir of eternal life, in the mysterious telekinesis of Qigong, a vital force that runs through the body like something out of Star Wars, in ginseng and sperm-producing powder, in Ching Chun Bao Anti-aging Oral Liquid, in tiger-bone pills that cure insanity, in deer antler extract for longevity, in chiming stainless steel health balls to twiddle against arthritis, which is aptly described as "the hundred diseases" (these health balls work, by the way). There is a remarkably widespread belief in UFOs in China.

Out in the countryside -- and sometimes right downtown -- tradition blends with blind superstition. In May 1985 a young girl in Guangdong province was beaten to death because villagers believed she was a "fox spirit" who was "making the penises of young men grow smaller." That same year in January a 76-year-old peasant named Li Xianchen was buried alive by his sons who were convinced he had become possessed by the ghost of a "black snake." His coffin was roped shut, he howled all the way to the graveyard and died after two days underground. In March 1985

families began moving out of Building 207 in Beijing's Jinsong district, believing it was haunted. The China Criminal Law, published in 1979, has a glossary at the end with terms like shenhan, "sorcerer," and wupo, "witch."

But there is no witchery about much of China's backwardness. It is mostly a case of simple, economic mei you: No Got. Pronounced like the "mayo" in "mayonnaise," mei you is the first word newcomers learn here, and the last echo when they leave. Mei you is the black hole of China: no got hot water, no got electricity, no got a ticket, no got a seat, no got beer, no got a hotel room, no got change, no got a way to get there

from here.

There are shortages at every level: In the country, farmers can't get the fertilizer or pesticide they need. In the city, factories can't get the electricity to operate. Between the country and the city the lines of communication are frayed to nonexistent. Pork piles up in the hinterland. Pork is now rationed in practically all major coastal cities, except Canton. Mei you.

Inflation is running at 19 percent now, the highest since Communist China began, a rate so scary that the government has decided to freeze prices for the next six months at least.

A labyrinthine bureaucracy stifles individual initiative. "Fish begin to stink at the head," says a Chinese proverb about corrupt officials, and sure enough, Guangdong province fishermen have to buy up to 26 permits before putting to sea. Greedy apparatchiks are quick to demand their cut of whatever little wealth can be accumulated here. Peasants and entrepreneurs who prosper are immediately hit up for "voluntary" contributions for roads, schools, even police protection against other contribution-seekers.

Unwary foreigners who try to do business in China can find themselves plucked like chickens. The Ramada Inn joint venture in scenic Guilin was shut down almost as soon as it opened this year by a series of ridiculous escapades.

When the Hong Kong partner tried to search staff members after an epidemic of thefts from guests' rooms, police told him he was violating the workers' "human rights." When he fired an incompetent staffer who happened to be the son of the local water board chief, the hotel's water was cut off.

Inanition is another problem. It is not that the Chinese are lazy. It is that, as matters stand, there really isn't much for them to do. In a very real way this is a workers' paradise, if paradise be idleness.

Of the 130 million employed in China's cities, about 30 million have paper jobs that are really nonjobs, according to a report by China's Economic System Reform Institute this July. One in five Chinese factories is idle for lack of electricity or coal. Nearly all work places have a midmorning exercise break and offices have ping-pong tables in the corridors to accommodate the worker-players. This summer, because of the heat, many government employees in Beijing are going home at 2:45 p.m.

It is one thing to say there are more people than jobs in China. But the people-glut in China is something that can make the Western mind reel. The phrase, "the masses" can assume a horrific, personal meaning on a Sunday morning sidewalk in Wangfujing Street.

The crowd is the great Chinese constant. This is a country where people loom larger than the landscape, encrust the landscape, devour the landscape. China is 11 percent desert. The rest is pretty much inhabited. The subsoil itself teems with human life: Some 60 million Chinese live in caves.

The word for crowd is ren shan, ren hai, literally "people mountain, people sea" and the omnipresent crowd creates a raging hunger about everyday life here, a sandal-flapping stampede every time the gates to the railway platform open, a push-me- pull-you of long queues and inchoate mobs capsizing boats, clambering up mountains, surging through department stores, down sidewalks, into the grave. Farmland is being devoured here by new tombs, as newly rich peasants give ancestors their due.

Power is measured by the space you occupy in China. In the Zhongnanhai, the "Middle South Sea," China's top egalitarians live in a splendid, private preserve that embraces a lovely lake and an island: hundreds of acres in the very heart of Beijing. The city's other 10 million residents make do with an average of four square meters of living space per person.

The way the Reform tests the limits of liberty is the most fascinating thing about China today. It is like trying to see how many bricks can be removed from a wall to make windows, before the wall collapses. Back and forth the teetering goes: One month it is "Boldly Grasp the Four Modernizations!" The next the watchword is "Stability and Unity!"

And so there is the odd spectacle of a country trying to modernize while forbidding its citizens freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to live where they choose, freedom to work where they want at whatever job they want, freedom to strike, freedom to get the hell out of here.

Political activity is larval and blind, circumscribed by naked force and the threat of imprisonment for the broadest, vaguest category of crime that exists: counterrevolution. The only people the Chinese can vote for are candidates for their say-yea National People's Congress, who are twice-vetted and finally approved by the Communist Party and who meet once a year to approve the party's decisions.

The Chinese hate and fear their police. Chinese children almost never say they want to be policemen when they grow up. Instead they want to join the People's Liberation Army, which offers the possibility of heroism without the bother or risk of politics. The three-million-strong PLA is a world unto itself. It has its own railway network, its own poetry magazine, even its own special wine, "Marshal" brand, which is bottled in Shandong province to exact military specifications and is not sold to civilians.

A ferocious crackdown on crime was kicked off festively in August 1983 with a mass rally at the Beijing Workers' Stadium during which 31 people were paraded before a crowd before being taken off to be shot. Since then at least 10,000 people have received a bullet in the back of the head. All this is extremely popular with the Chinese, who cannot understand the shilly- shallying that goes on along America's Death Rows.

As entertainment the crime crackdown has succeeded admirably. As a deterrent it has failed utterly. Violent crime remains stable at pre-1983 levels and economic crime has soared. Nor do the executions prove any fundamental strength about China's social order. If anything, they reveal a terrible, central flaw.

China, which is now on its fourth constitution since 1949, which had no written criminal code before 1979 and whose entire legal corpus is contained in five paperback books that aren't even the same format, length or width, has shown itself to be a society that lives largely without law.

People are shot here cynically, fashionably, to prove a point; "killing the monkey to scare the chickens," the Chinese call it. Last July 6 three men in Heilongjiang province were executed for stealing about $37,000 worth of electrical transformers -- $12,000 per life, if one divides it up. Last

December a bicycle repairman who stabbed a student during a fight was arrested, tried, convicted and shot within 20 days of his crime. Two men in Fujian province got a death sentence with a two-year suspension for illegal tree felling. China is perhaps unique in demanding the death penalty for killing trees.

Sitting on top of this anthill, spearheading the Reform while opposing it at every step, is the 44-million-member Chinese Communist Party. It is a fascinating mix of lofty altruism and low brutality.

On the one hand there are party members like Xia Yan, 88 years old, who last June had the courage to tell The Shanghai World Economic Herald that in China "at present we dare not even talk about human rights and regard freedom, equality and universal fraternity as things capitalist."

"In the Soviet Union they lash out at Stalin, but who in China dares publicly to criticize Mao Zedong?" Xia Yan challenged.

On the other hand there are party members like Zhu Jiaping of Yunnan province whose dog was accidentally killed by a peasant in April 1987. Zhu forced the peasant to crawl on his knees, carrying joss sticks and with a white mourning band wound about his head, all the way to the dog's grave, where he had to kowtow and wail a dirge. Zhu was later arrested for "insulting human dignity."

Party members are supposed to set an example. There are supposed to be "99 disadvantages" to being a Communist. One must be the first to charge into battle, the last to retreat. When food is scarce, the true Communist goes without, that others may eat.

But the reality is often the opposite. "When a man becomes an official," goes the old saw here, "even his dogs and chickens go to heaven." Party members use their clout to assure lives of ease and plenty for themselves and their families. Of Deng Xiaoping's five children, one has received expensive medical treatment in Canada for paralyzing injuries sustained when he was thrown out of a window during the Cultural Revolution. Another has gone to graduate school in Rochester, N.Y. A third makes frequent visits to Hong Kong, to sell her paintings.

Just how far the party's leadership has deteriorated was demonstrated last summer during the gigantic Daxinganling forest fire, the worst in more than 40 years. The blaze claimed over 200 lives between May 6 and June 2.

The remarkable thing about the Daxinganling fire was that it produced no heroes. Apart from accolades bestowed on the People's Liberation Army -- it was extolled as the "Great Steel Wall Protecting the Motherland" -- the story of the fire was largely shameful, revealing incompetence, dereliction of duty and cowardice. Eleven people received prison terms after the fire was put out: four for starting it, seven for failing to extinguish it.

The forestry minister was sacked for neglecting to visit the site for two weeks after the blaze began. He said he was in the hospital, but this excuse was rejected. The area of the fire was found to be swarming with vagrants and criminals who had sought refuge in the hard, no-questions-asked life of lumberjacks in China's far north. China's press, which always tries to accentuate the positive, kept announcing that the fire was under control -- and kept having to eat crow and admit it wasn't. An army of 60,000 firefighters was hurled into battle against the monster blaze, armed mainly with sticks.

After the fire was extinguished -- more by opportune rain than any human intervention -- it was discovered that a deputy fire chief named Qin Baoshan diverted four fire engines and bulldozers to protect his own house. A local Communist Party boss, Li Yongqing, commandeered a precious official car and used it to flee with his family.

Yet it must be said that the government faced up to its shortcomings after the fire; and thousands of Chinese dug into their pockets to contribute their own meager savings toward the fire relief effort.

Competent or not, the party's insistence on absolute power brooks no denial. When pro-democracy student demonstrations swept 19 campuses in December 1986 and January 1987 the government's reaction was instant and crushing. An icy political penumbra fell over the country for the better part of a year, in the form of a virulent anti-bourgeois liberalization campaign that revealed a strong subcurrent of xenophobia.

Newspapers were shut, intellectuals silenced. The head of the Communist Party, the freewheeling Hu Yaobang, lost his job. At least he was freewheeling by Communist standards. One of Hu's contributions as party chief was to order the nation's media to report 80 percent good news and 20 percent bad about the Reform. That 20 percent was viewed as a big concession at the time.

Racist commentary and cartoons showing westerners with gigantic noses proliferated. "Big nose" is a Chinese racial slur for foreigners. America was vilified as a pesthole of crime,

drug abuse, alcoholism, homosexuality, AIDS and general depravity. The students' demands for democracy were ridiculed with such fury that it was clear the party didn't think them ridiculous at all, but dangerous. Commentaries like this, broadcast by the Henan Provincial Radio Service on Jan. 19, could be heard all over the country:

"Socialism is advancing victoriously over the vast land of China. In the face of this excellent situation, the Chinese people as a whole are overjoyed and all the people of the world congratulate us. Socialism is good! Socialism is good! Let us sing this glorious battle song still more resoundingly! Let us advance bravely along the road of building socialism with Chinese characteristics!"

It was as though the entire country were curling itself into a frightened ball. The campaigns against bourgeois liberalization and total Westernization pointed up the strength of the opposition to the Reform, the deep inferiority complex many Chinese feel when confronted with the technical verve of the West. The impulse is to retreat to "Chong Guo," the "Middle Country," the name for China when China was the center of the world, surrounded by the four seas and various barbarians.

At the very lowest level this self-absorption can seem ostrichlike. Beijing is crisscrossed with a web of pretty much

useless underground tunnels, miles and miles of them, hastily dug in the early 1960s after the break with the Soviet Union. In those years Mao feared a nuclear attack from the north and his slogans can be seen on the tunnel walls: "DIG TUNNELS DEEP! STORE GRAIN EVERYWHERE! RESIST HEGEMONISM!" Many people were buried alive building these things, and only a fraction of them are used today, mostly as fruit and vegetable cellars. They represent the most unimaginative Chinese response to a foreign threat: to burrow into the motherland and hide.

In far Tibet, 1986 was the Year of the Fire Tiger, the end of the 16th cycle of 60 years (arrived at by combining the 12 zodiacal signs with the five elements: wood, fire, water, earth and iron). This cycle had begun in 1927 and had seen the death of the 13th Dalai Lama and the installation of his successor, Ngawang Lobsang Yishey Tenzing Gyatso.

The 16th cycle had witnessed the Chinese conquest of Tibet in the Year of the Iron Tiger; the bloody revolt in the Year of the Earth Pig, which cost 89,000 Tibetans their lives and caused the 14th Dalai Lama to flee into exile where he remains today. It had involved the nightmare years of the Cultural Revolution, which began in the Year of the Fire Horse and laid waste utterly to Tibet's religious past. The 16th cycle had been one of the most dreadful in Tibetan history.

Ever since 1980 the Chinese had seemed to recognize the extremities of misery their rule had brought to Tibet. While they were not prepared to allow self-rule, they were willing to make some amends.

And so things had been improving on the roof of the world. Tibet's communes were finally abolished (they were among the last in China to go), ambitious plans for heavy industry were scrapped and tourism was promoted. Tibet went from zero tourists in 1981 to 28,000 in 1986.

So the 16th cycle ended. No sooner had the 17th commenced than something snapped.

On the afternoon of Sept. 27 a group of monks led a pro- independence demonstration around the sacred octagonal Parkhor Street that begins and ends in front of the Eighth- Century Jokhang Monastery, the holiest spot in Tibet. Through the clouds of fragrant juniper smoke at 12,290 feet above sea level appeared the Tibetan flag, with its distinctive white snow lions.

This demonstration dispersed peacefully. But a second, held Oct. 1, erupted into a huge riot. Cars were overturned and the local Chinese police station was set ablaze. Police opened fire. As many as 20 people were killed.

The Chinese thought they had the situation under control by March, the time of the annual Moinlam Qenmo New Year's festival. This festival was going to prove that the Tibetans were happy in their traditional ways under Chinese rule. The proceedings were being broadcast live across Tibet from a TV van parked outside the Jokhang.

Suddenly, right on television, a second riot broke out. Then the screens went dark: Monks had dropped heavy coping- stones from the parapets of the Jokhang down onto the TV van, crushing it. Other monks chased two Chinese policemen into a latrine and threw them out of a window. One died of injuries sustained in his fall. Police opened fire again and another four people were killed. More than 100 Chinese who drank tea at the festival had to check into a hospital with stomach pains: Somebody had put something in the tea.

The rioters were ruthlessly suppressed, denounced as "splitists" and jailed. Several hundred remain behind bars today. Tibet is currently off-limits to foreign journalists, though tourists are being allowed back in.

The incidents in Tibet show dramatically the limits of the Reform. It remains an essentially material thing, a very mechanical construct. The Chinese leadership is trying to offer physical well-being to its people today, in lieu of the burning convictions of Marxism and Maoism. It is promising money, convenience, ease; not freedom, not faith, not choice.

And so in Tibet, where religion and nationalism are identical and the spiritual world has for centuries seemed richer, more real and worthwhile than the physical, the Reform isn't working very well. The Tibetans aren't all that keen on "building socialism with Chinese characteristics." They do not want the "four things that go 'round," or the "eight big things." They want their Dalai Lama back.

"China under communism appears more and more like a dead planet," writes Sinologist Simon Leys in his recent book of essays, The Burning Forest.

"It is on a steady orbit, but the very nature of its political atmosphere prevents any kind of growth and even seems to preclude the emergence of life; yet it will pursue its sterile and immutable course -- until a random collision makes it explode."

This seems harsh. The political atmosphere may be deadening here, but the Reform is sweeping through Chinese life like a huge everything-must-go clearance sale. It is the ultimate campaign, fraught with risks but by now irresistible and irreversible.

And it seems to be succeeding. China is experiencing double-digit growth on a yearly basis now (along with double- digit inflation). It is surging forward so fast that it may overtake the Soviet Union economically by the year 2050, according to a CIA study published in June.

The government likes to talk about bringing "the superiority of socialism into full play," and there is no doubt, on paper at least, that China has the potential to become a superpower. You can see it in the factories (the Chinese word for factory is gongchang and that is exactly the noise the machines make), the overnight appearance of a computer district along Beijing's Haidian Street, the intense, hungry way young people gather in Purple Bamboo Park every Sunday to practice their English on each other.

Even drunk, the Chinese act purposeful. Americans get maudlin and tuneful in their cups; the Chinese tend to get boisterous and mathematical. Instant number games, guessing an aggregate total of fingers around the whole table in less than a second, are the rule.

China has become a maverick on the international arms market, selling land mines and AK-47s to the Afghan resistance, Silkworm missiles (through North Korea) to Iran, East Wind 3 intermediate range missiles to the Saudi Arabians and -- so far only a rumor -- M-9 missiles to Syria. Protests from the United States over these sales have met with huffy denials and pained predictions that Sino-U.S. relations will suffer if the U.S. Congress doesn't shut up.

In the 19th Century it was the dream of British textile manufacturers to get every Chinese to add an inch to his shirt hem. Now China is the biggest producer of textiles on Earth. Processed and finished in Hong Kong, Chinese fabrics are clobbering the U.S. cloth and clothing industry, which would be annihilated overnight if it were not for a complex quota system.

Nor is there any question which country the Chinese have chosen as an economic model. It is America. Ever since the Nixon visit of 1972, China's eyes have been fixed on America.

President Richard Nixon is still an unqualified hero here, a sort of white god in a dark blue suit who showed up looking rich, calm and powerful in 1972, when China was writhing in the dark agony of the Cultural Revolution. He shook hands with Mao, chatted with Premier Zhou Enlai and began a process of opening to the outside world that continues today. The Chinese feel intensely grateful toward "Ni-ke-son." I saw the faces of Chinese students who met with the former president during one of his recent visits here and they were simply agog, as though Nixon were someone superhuman.

America has had some undeserved luck in its relations with China. China envies Japan its postwar success, but still thinks of the Japanese as "dwarf bandits" who plundered the coastline and borrowed China's culture to get ahead. By contrast America is "Mei Guo," the Flowery Country, so-called because its flag looked like a bouquet of flowers to the 19th Century Chinese. Coolies that departed from southern China to work on the Union Pacific railway were told they were "going to the Golden Mountain," and even today American bachelors in China are jin shan ke, "guests from the Golden Mountain," a prize catch for Chinese women who hanker after a blue passport.

Students in Shanghai quoted Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death!" during the pro-democracy demonstrations there in December 1986 and hundreds of thousands of young Chinese dream of studying in the United States. An American diploma carries a cachet of success that spills over into every sphere of life here. It can even be an aphrodisiac. One young man frankly admitted to me he wanted to study in the United States because he was having trouble finding a girlfriend.

But at heart the Chinese are nowhere near as concerned with other countries as they are with themselves. No other nation has quite this sense of selfhood. The influential 20th-Century writer Lu Xun said that the Chinese have only two ways to regard foreigners: as gods and as devils. There is no middle ground, even today.

It is difficult to convey to Americans how different China really is. Most Chinese books still read from "back" to front. Poetry is written not in lines, but continuously. Women have smoked here for centuries, and men still flutter fans. White is the color of death and red the color of weddings. In the countryside coffins are bought well in advance of the day they'll be needed and proudly displayed in the living room of a home. Loud laughter is the first, proper response when one is deeply embarrassed or furiously angry. Dates are written year, month, day, not the other way 'round. Names are backward, with the family name first. U.S. envoy Patrick Hurley made an extraordinary gaffe during World War II when he told Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek that he was very glad to meet him, and he was looking forward to meeting Mrs. Shek.

This farrago of unique traditions is all part of something far greater: an unshakable racial pride that serves instead of patriotism and has given the Communists a line of credit that even they, for all their colossal mistakes, have not quite exhausted yet. However maddening they may be, the Chinese remain their own people, completely distinct, beholden to no one.

The very soil is talismanic, and in southern China, in Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces, there is a thriving trade in burial plots for overseas Chinese willing to pay up to $3,000 to lie in the embrace of the motherland for all eternity.

But it is the eldritch glow of things past, the sweetness of isolation, that may seduce the Reform away from its purpose at last. Isolation is the opiate of China, a trance it returns to over and over again, sometimes for self-preservation, sometimes just for self-esteem. "One can see the whole world without leaving one's room," wrote the Fifth Century B.C. Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu. He had a room in China.

In no country can you find so many walls; not just the Great Wall (which cannot be seen from the moon!), but walls within walls. There are courtyard walls to keep out prying eyes, garden walls to hoard up loveliness, "spirit walls" at the entrances to houses, like stone mirrors to deflect evil influences that, it is believed, can only fly in a straight line. There are even temporary walls, made of bricks laid in interlocking Z-rows at construction sites. Traditional Chinese homes do not have glass windows, but paper ones: sight-walls, in effect, membrane-thin.

There are conversational walls like "not convenient," "no time" and "China's position on this matter is well-known." In pre-Communist China uninvited guests would be turned away from the door with beatific assurances that "the honor is too great." Foreigners are housed in walled compounds like bacilli in a Petri dish. Chinese lovers find instant privacy by going to a street where they are not known, facing a wall and then snuggling up to each other. They find the wall's anonymity soothing.

Inner and outer, nei and wai. This duality resonates in China's very heart. Escape from the moil and toil of the outer vulgarities carries no censure here. Often it is the reasoned response of a gentleman to a sordid reality he cannot change.

And the inner world can be so lovely. . . .

In a book-stuffed old apartment on the campus of the Beijing Teacher's College lives Mr. Qi Gong, the greatest, most sought-after living calligrapher in China. His scrolls look like willow-fronds with light shining through them. His rooms are stacked with gifts -- wine, beer, anything people think will put him in a good mood, make him pick up that celestial brush.

"Look at all this liquor! And I don't even drink!" he says with a laugh. Qi Gong is an adept in one of China's millennial mysteries, calligraphy, which can resemble a religious rite more than an artistic process, with its "four treasures of the studio," ink slab, ink stick, paper and brush; its fussiness about posture, brush angle, grip and attack; and its arcane descriptions of dots and strokes: "dew poised on a needle point," "queen swans in majestic flight," "a surprised snake in steely recoil."

Historically, calligraphy was a great escape from court life. Absent from the press of politics, men devoted themselves to the faraway beauty a brush and ink could make. They fought battles and won victories within a few square inches of blank white. Chess, the lute, painting and calligraphy were the "four sublime pastimes." Within this small compass lies a trivial world so lovely it beggars reality.

Qi Gong, impish, likes to do it all on the cheap. His brushes are of rabbit hair and cost only a few cents. He writes on whatever paper comes to hand: One of his masterpieces is on brown wrapping paper. He uses a plastic cup for ink, instead of a massive black ink stone; and he holds his brush heretically, like a ball point pen.

Yet when he sets to work on his cluttered desk, with the clear warm light of the north China plain streaming over the paper and the brilliant black quiver of ink taking sure shape beneath the flick and dart of his brush, something magical happens. There is a captured tremble of beauty in every character, half-picture, half-sound, the most difficult and allusive written language in the world, shaping itself perfectly before your eyes. You are in fleeting touch with something quite old, yet supernal and morning pure.

A few verses of a Tang Dynasty poem in his handwriting, the work of five minutes, fetch from $500 to several thousand

dollars, mounted and displayed at Beijing's Rong Bao Zhai studio. Japanese connoisseurs gobble up his rustling pages.

"Oh, I usually just give them away to friends," Qi Gong says. "Here. For you."

They ask me where's the sense
on jasper mountains?
I laugh and don't reply
in heart's own ease.
Peach petals float their streams
away in secret
to other skies and earths
than those of mortals.
Section: TROPIC
Page: 8
MICHAEL BROWNING Herald Staff Writer
Copyright (c) 1988 The Miami Herald