And so farmers were told to build iron smelters. Villages across the country were integrated into a national campaign for rapid self-sufficiency and slapped with impossible production quotas. Not only did the rural population fail to produce anything close to the quantity or quality of goods necessary to turn China into a modern industrial power but, distracted from their farms, the peasants began to experience massive food shortages. The Great Leap Forward caused a great famine.
At the time, the Communist Party so tightly cloaked the countryside from sight that visitors like Hébert and Trudeau could not imagine what was happening in certain parts of China while they toured other sites. To this day, the Party has made it impossible to fathom how many people really died in the famines caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Thus the Party survived the first great catastrophe of its reign.
It is said that the emperors of China governed the land by virtue of a heavenly mandate. As such their authority was sacrosanct. But the mandate also meant that, through the Emperor, the people were the benefactors of heaven’s blessings. The Emperor was beyond reproach, but only so long as his rule was, by and large, beneficial for all. If it was not, the Emperor clearly did not have a heavenly mandate, which meant that he could not be the true Emperor of China. So ended many dynasties.
Things are no different today. In the decades immediately after the revolution, most Chinese people embraced the Communist Party, because it had united China and formed a wholly Chinese government for the first time in centuries and also because it offered a new hope to the poorest class: the landless peasants, hundreds of millions strong. But by Mao’s death in 1976, the Communist Party was ideologically bankrupt and close to collapse. Too many great experiments had gone desperately wrong. The people had begun to sense that the heavenly mandate was on the wane.
Two major changes shored up the Party’s mandate to govern. The first was a thawing of relations with the West. Stunned by American defeat in Vietnam, social strife at home, humiliating expulsions from former colonies and the continued radiance of Soviet power, the Western powers became more realistic about their global hegemony. Seeing that their dominance was no longer total or inexorable, they became more open to negotiating with hitherto snubbed rivals.
Shortly after the revolution, Mao came to see Soviet involvement in China’s affairs as a particularly insidious form of foreign domination. And so he led the way in establishing a third pole of world power: the non-aligned movement. By the seventies, China was thoroughly at odds with the Soviet Bloc.
But the Western powers could not afford to be at loggerheads with both the Warsaw Pact countries and the non-aligned nations, and they saw the former as a far greater threat. China was both an enemy of the Russians and the natural great power of the non-aligned movement, so the Western powers gambled that a rapprochement with China would be in their interests. More subtly, they guessed that by elevating China, they would also stall the growing non-aligned movement, which would lose its natural leader.
So at the very time that the Communist Party of China, controlled by increasingly irrational ideologues, was beginning to lose the mantle of the heavenly mandate, the West offered China the recognition it had craved for so long. China was invited to join the table of superpowers and was granted permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council. The People’s Republic suddenly had new grounds to claim legitimacy.
The second change that shored up communist authority took place within the Party. Faced with the catastrophic famines brought on by the Great Leap Forward and the insane purges of the Cultural Revolution, a group of respected elders fought against the more orthodox Maoist core of the party to introduce another benchmark for legitimacy: prosperity. They also used their influence to elevate a critical mass of younger cadres that might become agents of reform. The party had to find ways to create wealth. With Mao’s gradual withdrawal into senility, his right-hand man, the wise and venerable Zhou Enlai, allowed this reformist movement to survive in the face of fierce opposition within the party. But it was the old revolutionary peasant Deng Xiaoping who eventually ensured the movement’s success. In so doing, Deng became the Communist Party’s dominant figure after Mao Zedong.
The pursuit of prosperity—the logic that Deng finally made inevitable in the late seventies—has held to this day. Prosperity may even have eclipsed the other virtues of communist power in China. And for more and more Chinese, prosperity has become the only benchmark for legitimacy. These days, Communist Party rule will be tolerated only so long as it creates wealth.
The new wealth is overwhelming in the big cities and undeniable in most towns. But if it doesn’t trickle down to the hundreds of thousands of villages of China, the claim to the celestial mandate will find three quarters of a billion detractors. And prosperity does seem to be reaching the countryside. Villages are more connected than ever before. A village may be extremely remote, but it is now linked to the rest of China in a whole variety of ways, both wired and wireless. In even the most far-flung hamlets, people now use cell phones. And with the huge migration of workers, every village is also still home to individuals hundreds of kilometres away, living in dormitories or camping out in makeshift shacks and toiling away in factories or on huge construction sites. In its own little way, each village is an active part of the whole, a wellspring of food and labour.
In accordance with the heavenly mandate to govern, the Chinese government must bring some blessings upon every little village and its people. So over the last decade and a half, the government has connected countless villages with the rest of China. They have brought electricity and telephone wires and beamed in television signals and mobile communications. When necessary, they truck drinking water in for the people. Eventually they will build proper roads to most of the country’s villages to make it easier to deliver water and extract the fruits of the land. China is reaching into its bosom, both taking and giving, becoming more united than ever before.
China’s dual residency system governs the delicate balance between the cities and the countryside. It creates a subtle but powerful barrier between the two. Under this system, all Chinese citizens must have a residency permit stating where they live. City dwellers can obtain permits for wherever they choose to live fairly easily, but it is extremely difficult for the rural poor to obtain permits to inhabit the cities. One often hears of the hundred million homeless people in China. This number actually refers to all those rural residents who have migrated illegally to the cities and thus cannot have official addresses there. These people, commonly referred to as migrant workers, make up the brunt of the workforce in the new manufacturing centres of China. Their illegal status in the cities puts them in a particularly precarious position vis-à-vis the law and makes them a highly docile and timid workforce.
The Chinese authorities are well aware of the social tension induced by such a system. But they also recognize that the malleable workforce it creates is one of the main factors driving China’s lightning-fast development. Theirs is really a containment strategy for the rural populations: keep them in the countryside, allow just enough of the rural population out of the hinterlands to fuel the manufacturing sector’s need for cheap labour, but deny these migrant workers any real status that might make their presence in the cities more permanent or powerful.
PRESENT-DAY BEIJING preserves much of its classic layout. It is arranged in concentric rings around its nucleus, the Forbidden City. The First Ring is rather vague and hard to define; it works its way around the huge moat and walls of the Forbidden City, through the old imperial quarter once composed of official compounds and warehouses, now more and more made up of tourist shops and restaurants.
By the Second Ring Road, one is more properly in China. This road marks the old walls of the city; the entire Ming Dynasty capital sits within its confines. Here are the ancient living quarters, crammed with traditional abodes called hutongs. In the tiny, tortuous streets, China goes about its way. The residences themselves are hidden behind ten-foot walls. Behind some, eight families dwell in stone or concrete houses around cluttered central courtyards; behind others, a single general or party leader lives with his family amidst tranquil gardens. But in the open lanes, it all mixes together. The bicycle squeezes by the black Mercedes and dodges the vegetable cart. Newspaper in hand,