He said what most people had told me, that Mao in old age was senile. After 1957, Mao was not the same. He kept making mistakes and was easily misled by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four.
"People worshipped him. It was very bad. He did not encourage it but he tolerated it."
I asked Mr. Zhang whether he was optimistic about the changes in China.
"Yes," he said. "Things are much better. We should have more money to spend, but if we tighten our belts for a few years I think we'll see some results."
"Don't you think there could be a change for the worse when Deng dies?"
"No. He has already chosen his successors."
"So you don't see any problems?"
"Overpopulation is a problem. Traffic is a problem—already we have too many cars. We have to manage that. But we are doing well in many areas, like agriculture."
He said he liked what was happening to China. Chinese history was long, but it had distinct phases. This was a very tiny part of it, and it might be years before we could assess it. That reminded me of Mao's reply when someone had asked him about the French Revolution—what did he think of it? "It is too early to say," Mao said.
Mr. Zhang then told me some of his war stories, as we strolled down Wangfujing. He had been a translator for General Chen Yi who, in April 1946, had a top-level meeting with an American general whose name Mr. Zhang could not remember. Liu Shaoqi (later chairman of the People's Republic, and much later tortured to death by Red Guards) was also present at this meeting.
'The American general gave a carton of Camel cigarettes to General Chen Yi, and some chocolates to Liu Shaoqi, and a box of rations to me.
"'We are in Shandong,' General Chen Yi said. 'We have many fruit trees here. You have my permission to encourage Americans to open a fruit-canning factory here.' But they didn't accept the invitation.
'Then I gave them all a shock. I shook hands with the American general. The American translator did not dare to shake hands with General Chen Yi. Afterwards these Americans, who were members of UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), said to me, 'You're very progressive, comrade.'
"'All men are equal,' I said."
He was a nice man, and before we parted he said, 'The food at that restaurant wasn't very good, but I like this conversation. When you come back to Peking, come to my house and have some real Chinese food."
From the train Peking had looked impressive: a city on the rise, cranes everywhere, workmen scrambling across girders, and the thump of pile drivers going, Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo!
But when I went a little closer and walked around them, these new tenements looked very shaky. Some were made as if with a large-scale version of children's blocks, or put together out of three-room modules—a sort of gigantic building-puzzle kit. And it was dear why these prefab methods were being used. When a structure was put up from scratch, brick by brick, the windows were wonky and the doors weren't square and there were bulges in the walls, and the whole thing had a handmade look that the kinder architects call "the vernacular style."
"No one knows how long they'll last," an American in Peking told me. 'They might turn out to be like those Hong Kong buildings that were put up with spit and sawdust and fell down about a year later."
"Why do you think that?" I asked.
"Because most of them are being put up by people from Hong Kong."
Certainly the development called the Hua Guofeng Wall is beginning to crack. It is a hideous stretch of apartments and tower blocks that was put up as a prestige project by Mr. Hua before he was politically outmaneuvered by Mr. Deng. The buildings are not only mismatched and cracked and stained, but also, though only seven years old, have begun to fall down.
I nosed around a tall apartment block and fell into conversation with Mr. Zheng Douwan on the ninth floor. He said that everything was fine at the moment, but he was tentative and I knew there was more to say.
"Is it always fine?" I asked.
"Not in the summer," he said. "The water table is so low in Peking that the pressure is bad. We can only get water as high as the fifth floor. This is a fifteen-story building, so the people on the upper ten floors have to get water in buckets."
Droughts and water shortages are greatly feared in Peking, he told me: for the past six years the rainfall was way below average and the outlook this year was not good. (In the event, very little rain fell, though buildings continued to rise.)
Mr. Zheng said, "From the bath point of view it's like England in the thirties. There is no hot water in any of these flats. If you want a bath you heat a kettle and pour it into a tin bathtub. It is very inconvenient, but I don't complain because that is how everyone lives."
But not tourists, not high Party officials, and not the new classes of people with money—taxi drivers and some traders. In 1980 there were three taxi companies in Peking; now there are 230, with 14,000 taxis. All are controlled by the government or by official agencies, but the drivers do well out of it because the people who take taxis are generally foreigners and they pay in Foreign Exchange Certificates.
The free market (ziyou shichang) allows anyone to do business and keep the profits. This was one of Deng's reforms, and it is the reason why factory workers are often very cross—and why they demand high bonuses and complain about inflation. The street traders in the free market can quite easily earn five times a factory worker's salary, and after an informal survey of the hawkers and traders in various Peking markets, I figured their monthly earnings to be between 500 and 700 yuan—enough to buy "The Big Three."
One market woman told me, "What people used to want were a bicycle, a radio and a gas stove. Now the Big Three are a refrigerator, a cassette machine and a color television."
Some of the markets are operated by retired factory workers who simply want a friendly place to go during the day. They say things like, "I've always been interested by old beads and pots," and they have the flea-market mentality that is familiar to anyone from Cape Cod. They love talking about the bits of peculiar junk they've accumulated and, being pensioners, are not really doing this for a living. These traders are not to be confused with the people who have been doing business in the same place for years—the specialists in birds, or fish, or herbs. In most Chinese cities, the Bird Market is a specific location and may have been unchanged for hundreds of years.
Flea market seemed to me an appropriate comparison, since that was how most people pronounced it. I saw an opium pipe on one little stall. It was about eighteen inches long, with a silver bowl and a jade mouthpiece.
"That's a genuine old piece. Forty yuan and worth every bit of it. Take it away."
"I'll give you twenty," I said.
"Listen, if you weren't with this Chinese man I would have written '120' on a piece of paper and said Take it or leave it.'"
"All right, twenty-five."
He pretended he hadn't heard me. He said, "The interesting thing about this pipe is its mouthpiece. See how strong it is?" He banged it against the tabletop. "A man would ride his horse with this hanging by his side. If he saw a thief, or if someone attacked him he would bop him on the head with it. See, use it like a club—bop! bop!"
"Thirty."
'The bowl is real silver. This is a hundred years old. I've been collecting these pipes my whole life. I worked in a shoe factory. I'm retired! I don't even have to sell you this pipe, but you're a foreigner and I want to do you a favor."
"Thirty is my highest offer."
'This is an antique, comrade. It's a collector's item. It's a pipe. It's a weapon. Take it."
"Okay, thirty-five."
"Fine. It's yours. Shall I wrap it up? Here," he said, taking out an old copy of The People's Daily and folding the pipe into it. "Serves two functions. Wrapping paper and afterwards you can read it."