"I have nothing personal against the Japanese," Comrade Ning said, "and I have no objection to their doing business in China. But there is'a militaristic element in Japanese society — that is something we have to be very careful of. Apart from that, the Chinese and Japanese have a great deal in common."
I said that when I had been in China six years before it had seemed very different, but that there had been a sort of equality in poverty. I said, "Doesn't it worry you that some people are getting rich — and a few people very rich?"
"You know about the watermelon tycoon?"
Wang had told me the story. A penniless peasant who knew the Chinese fondness for eating watermelon seeds started a small business that grew and grew. He hired workers, he bought land, he made millions; and then he bullied his workers, the government taxed him heavily, and recently he had renounced all his millions and returned to his peasant life. A moral fable in the form of a play was written about him and staged with government approval. It was called The March of a Foolish Man.
"He was a fool," Comrade Ning said. "But there is nothing wrong with being rich. Our aim is for everyone to be rich."
"But surely wealth will produce a privileged class that will undermine the socialist state."
"In China, privilege is not bought with money," Comrade Ning said. "Power comes from the political sphere, not the financial sphere."
"What about cases of corruption — back-handers?" I said. The Chinese term is houmen—"backdoor" business.
"Of course, there are such cases. The danger is when people have an excessive regard for money." Up went Comrade Ning's skinny finger. "Man should manipulate money — money should not manipulate man."
We talked about corruption. There was a current example: a Chinese businessman who had been taking bribes and embezzling from the government was found guilty in a Shanghai court. His woman accomplice was given a long sentence, but he was executed — the Chinese way: a bullet in the back of the neck.
"He had Hong Kong connections," Comrade Ning said, as if this sordid fact explained everything.
"Do you think the death penalty might be regarded as a little severe in a case of stealing?"
Comrade Ning laughed at me for this. His teeth were yellow, and so were his long fingernails. "There is a certain amount of money that makes this case serious. If anyone steals this amount he has to be killed."
"So you believe in the death penalty?"
"It is a Chinese custom," Comrade Ning said. "If you kill someone you pay with your life. That is simple. And his was the same sort of serious crime."
That leap in logic was characteristic of Chinese thinking, and lao-dong gaizao (Rehabilitation Through Labor) had declined in popularity. I specifically wanted to know what Comrade Ning thought about capital punishment since, along with Deng's reforms, in the three years between 1983 and 1986, 10,000 people were executed in China — and not only murderers, but also rapists, arsonists, swindlers and thieves. On August 30, 1983, there was a public execution in Peking of 30 convicted criminals. It was held in a sports stadium, which held a cheering crowd of 60,000 people. Soon after, the list of capital criminals was widened to include pimps, spies, armed robbers, embezzlers and organizers of secret societies. It is easy to calculate the number of Chinese who receive the final solution (their hands are tied, they are forced to kneel before witnesses, and they are dispatched with one bullet to the occiput, where the neck joins the skull). Their photographs are always displayed in whatever town they lived in, often at the railway station or outside the post office. In the rogues' gallery tacked to these bulletin boards, a red mark appears beside the criminals who have been executed.
I said, "Personally I don't believe in the death penalty."
"Why not?" Comrade Ning asked.
"Because it's savage and it doesn't work."
"What would you have done with those terrorists that bombed the dance hall in Berlin a few weeks ago?"
"Not condemned them to death, if that's what you mean," I said. "Anyway, don't you make a distinction between political violence and criminal violence? Let's suppose these men, whoever they are, were Palestinians. That's an army of liberation, isn't it?"
"We would regard what they did in Berlin as terrorism," Comrade Ning said. "That is a crime. Armed struggle," he went on, using the Maoist term for people's war, "is another matter. That is legitimate."
He could not be budged from wishing to execute every pimp and hooligan, along with every strangler and arsonist. He maintained that such drastic action kept the crime rate down. It was Maoism at its most anti-Confucian. Confucius abhorred capital punishment and had always been regarded by Maoists as a dangerous softie for his humane views (as in Analects XII, 19). But even a relatively open-minded man like Deng Xiaoping has revealed himself to be an energetic hangman, clinging to the Chinese belief in the efficacy of "killing a chicken to scare the monkeys." In a pep talk to the five-man standing committee of the politburo (and reprinted in a book of his talks and speeches entitled Fundamental Issues in Present-Day China), Deng said, "As a matter of fact, execution is the one indispensable means of education."
Returning to the subject of money, Comrade Ning said that he did not think there were financial problems in this new go-ahead money-making economy. The government would control the work force, protect the workers, tax the people getting rich and in general supervise all businesses. He said it seemed to him much more serious that prices were rising, in some cases to double-digit inflation — he used that English term in his Chinese sentence. But salaries were also rising. His wife knew a draftswoman in her native town of Wuxi who earned 300 yuan a month. That was regarded as a high salary, but most of it came from bonuses, because she was productive.
"So, Comrade Ning, you're an optimist."
"Of course!"
"No dangerous social tendencies that you can see?"
"Yes, there are some. But we are trying to deal with them. The government has instituted a program called 'Spiritual Civilization.' Look at the posters and slogans. You'll see a big-character poster near Suzhou Creek…"
The Spiritual Civilization program was a direct response to various types of antisocial behavior that emerged after the relaxation of restrictions — the open door policy. It was started in 1985, and as Chinese dogma is always expressed in clusters, it was made up of The Five Talks and The Four Beauties.
The Five Talks were concerned with communication. They were: Politeness, Civil Behavior, Morality, Attention to Social Relations and Attention to the Hygiene of One's Surroundings. This was all to combat a slob-factor that had become very obnoxious; and the slobs who weren't changed by The Five Talks might be altered by considering The Four Beauties. These were Beautiful Language, Beautiful Behavior, Beautiful Heart and Beautiful Environment.
As a program and prescription it seemed rather twee, but it was a great deal better than the brutishness that was called for in Smashing The Four Olds (burning churches, turning monasteries into shoe factories, and so forth), or observing The Eight Antis — persecuting intellectuals, burning books, and making teachers wear dunce caps and having them recite "I am a cow demon" all day in front of a mocking classroom.
It was Comrade Ning who explained the Spiritual Civilization program to me. I liked him, and I was impressed by him. He knew what the world news was and he was hospitable to a total stranger. His tolerance was of course a willing suspension of disbelief — at heart he clung to Mao's Thoughts — but he was without greed or envy, and he didn't have the slightest trace of vanity. He wasn't a bully either, and I respected him for arguing with me.