I had been traveling steadily south for a number of days, and so I took a day off in Yantai. It was unseasonably cold, with a sleety wind blowing off the sea and icy snow spread thinly on the town. It was a bleak and battered place, of low rubble-strewn hills and bouldery beaches. It was full of abandoned brick huts on which Maoist slogans had been defaced. After a day of sitting listening to the wind and drinking tea and writing, and mooching in the town, I had dinner (scallops in egg white with rancid spinach: vegetables in winter could be dire). And I conceived a plan.
For months I had wanted to see a commune. I had wondered what had happened to the commune outside Canton that I had seen in 1980. This province of Shandong was famous for its agricultural communes—or at least it had been. And the Chinese had always boasted about them before; so, now that the communes had been reformed, what did they look like?
Mr. Hu, my guide in Yantai, tried to dissuade me from seeing a commune. He said wouldn't I be happier seeing the padlock factory, the embroidery and needlepoint factory, or the place where they made grandfather clocks. I wanted to say, And you make steam engines and hat racks and quill pens and doilies and chamber pots. Who does your market research?
"A commune is what I would really like to see," I said.
"They were canceled in 1979. There are none. So you see it is impossible."
"Then what about a village or a cooperative that used to be a commune? I'm sure they didn't just burn them down, Mr. Hu."
"I will find one for you."
He kept his word, and the next day we drove to what had once been the Xi Guan (Western Pass) Commune. It was now called the Bright Pearl Cooperative. Its new name had come from a newspaper article that had been written praising it as "The Pearl of Shandong." It had 500 households—about 1500 people. It looked like a small township and was about twenty miles outside Yantai; it seemed an unprepossessing place. But as soon as I arrived, Party Secretary Ma Weihong told me that it was now an extremely wealthy cooperative. In 1971 the per capita income had been 100 yuan a year; this figure was now, in 1986, 9000 yuan. People had more money than they needed, and so each person was given a thousand a year and the rest was invested in the village.
How had they managed this phenomenal increase in their fortunes? Mr. Ma gave me a long explanation, but in effect he was saying that everything changed after the government got off the people's backs.
"During the Cultural Revolution this cooperative was a commune with a one-crop economy—wheat. That's all. We were capable of doing more, but we couldn't because the Parry would not permit it. After 1979 we began to diversify—new crops, a nursery, various industries, transport, commerce and a hotel. These projects were all profitable."
"You have more money, but do you have more purchasing power?" I explained the term to him.
Mr. Ma said, "It's true that prices are higher. But we have more than compensated for the rise."
"Couldn't you have achieved that high income with one crop if you had worked hard?"
"We worked hard," he said. "But the policy of one crop was incorrect."
"At the time, did you know that you were working to carry out an incorrect policy?"
"Yes, but it was the Cultural Revolution. We could not do anything about it," Mr. Ma said. "But now we have changed all that. We have more relationships with the free market. We are rich now."
It was so strange to hear a Chinese person utter this dangerous word.
I said, "Is it good to be rich?"
"Yes. Very good." He hadn't blinked. He was sitting with his arms folded. His expression said, Next question.
"But isn't that a capitalistic attitude?"
"No. You and I are on different roads, but we are going to the same place."
"Which place?"
"To more richness and wealth," Mr. Ma said, uttering more heresies. "Listen, we used to have a slogan, 'We should be rich together or we should be poor together.'"
"Do you still believe that?"
"Not exactly. I think if you can be rich your own way you should do it."
"Then you'll be bourgeois."
"There is absolutely no danger of that."
He spoke with such conviction that I could not think of any more questions. He was an older man. He had been in this place twenty years ago when it had been a poor commune. Who could blame him for gloating a little about the success of the place today? And I liked him for never saying /. He nearly always replied saying we; but it was a socialist we, not a royal we.
"What would you do if things continued to improve and you ended up with an enormous amount of money?"
"We would donate it to a poor village, or we would give it to the government in taxes."
I had met him in the big, drafty meeting room, and he had offered me some apples to eat that had been grown on the cooperative—one of the newer projects. They were firm and juicy. Mr. Ma said they were sent all over China. We walked ouside—Mr. Hu bringing up the rear—and he showed me the other money-making projects. This commune grew and sold mushrooms. It seemed a modest business, but I later learned that mushroom sales to the United States are phenomenaclass="underline" most Pizza Hut mushrooms are from China.
I said, "During the Cultural Revolution, were intellectuals sent to work here on this commune?"
He shook his head. "No. Even this place was considered too good for them. Most intellectuals were sent into the countryside—to farms and into the mountains. They went to the most backward provinces, like Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu. And Mongolia. Lots of intellectuals ended up in Mongolia. They had to suffer. That's what we said."
"Do you think the suffering did them any good?"
Mr. Ma said, "The policy was incorrect."
And yet it was so natural. I thought of all the upstarts, know-it-alls, teachers, critics and book reviewers that I would love to have seen herded onto a train to Mongolia to shovel pig shit and live in barns. But of course I would be among them. In China, an intellectual is usually just someone who does not do manual labor. And there we would all be, digging holes, as a punishment for being so boring. It was an awful fate, but it was easy to imagine how the policy had come about. Everyone in his life has wished at one time or another for someone he disliked to be trundled off to shovel shit—especially an uppity person who had never gotten his hands dirty. Mao carried this satisfying little fantasy to its nasty limit.
Mr. Ma showed me his hotel. Two years ago this building was put up on the theory that it couldn't fail because there were only two hotels in Yantai. The Bright Pearl Cooperative Hotel had forty rooms, it was painted green and yellow, and by Chinese standards it was a bargain. It was drafty but clean. It was not expensive. I said I would not mind moving in, but Mr. Ma said that they could not take foreigners yet.
There was a slimy pool in the lobby, and over the waterfall (which worked in spurts) a mural of the Great Wall and a stuffed tortoise. These were standard items of interior decoration in the newer Chinese hotels. The only variables were the size of the pool, the dimensions of the tortoise, the depth of the algae, and was the Great Wall painted or embroidered? This one was painted, and a wall fixture—a light socket—had been included in the mural.
"Hu Yaobang visited us last year," Mr. Ma said, referring to the high-spirited party secretary who had been regarded as Deng Xiaoping's successor. "He held a briefing in here."
We entered the conference room. There was no commemorative photo of Hu Yaobang, but there were other knickknacks: an ivory sculpture of a small dragon, a statue of a Chinese poet, sixteen tiny Buddhas, lots of ashtrays, a palm tree, and a stuffed penguin in a glass case, with a plaque saying, Presented by the Chinese Antarctic Expedition.