____________________________________________________________________
It is almost impossible not to like Jan Wong. She has a happy-go-crazy perkiness and enthusiasm that keeps you panting with delight as you try to keep up with her. Most likeable, however, is the way she freely tells you the worst about herself - with aplomb. In Red China Blues, which chronicled her passage from starry eyed Maoist to horrified Western journalist who witnessed the Tiannemen Square massacre (Wong is third generation Canadian-Chinese), she told of how she was a snitch for the communist party. A brave admission indeed! For Jan Wong it seems that life is far too busy and urgent to indulge in the wringing of hands over past mistakes, rather her attitude seems to be to keep on moving, moving, moving.
For her new book she returned to China in 1999 on a research trip. Roaming far and wide throughout the country Wong has tried to cover a broad range of subjects, giving a sprawling picture of China's present day life and people. In Wong's optimistic estimation (and this is a very sunny and optimistic book) China is moving - albeit in a very wobbly fashion - in the right (read, of course, democratic) direction. The major engine driving this crawl towards freedom has been the introduction of the internet and other related technology. Suddenly, a lot of Chinese are talking to each other, not a good omen to a communist dictatorship. Despite China's attempts to police cyberspace, they are fighting a losing battle. As Wan Yanhai, an AIDS activist, points out, 'The Internet will break the goverment's control of society. When they say we can't publish something, we just publish it on the Internet.' Indeed, dissidents can be interviewed on the net. And so, with the openening up of the Chinese economy, it has been necessary to introduce related cutting edge technology, which in turn has become a pandora's box. Freedom of information has arrived. 'And freedom of information,' the author tells us, 'is precisely the one thing that will bring down the Chinese Communist Party.'
Of course that's only looking at things on the bright side. For many Chinese, day to day life is still no picnic. Poverty is rife. According to the United Nations, one in every ten Chinese struggle to survive. Amongst many descriptions of the appalling conditions in which Chinese peasants live, Wong tells of one mother who washed her children with snow due to the unavailabiltiy of water. In one village a married couple shared a pair of trousers, allowing only one person to leave the house at a time. The totalitarian state still reigns supreme. To give an idea of just how repressive (and paranoid) the Chinese Communist Party is, it banned a T-shirt that said, 'I'm fed up. Don't bug me.' That and many other T-shirts sloganed in a similar vein are all forbidden. Law enforcement is just as dreadful. Dissident Wang Den, having served a four year sentence, was sentenced to another eleven years, this time for enrolling, amonsgt other things, in a correspondence course at the University of California at Berkeley. Justice in some cases is the luck of the draw. In 1988, when Deng Xiaoping launched an anti-crime crusade, authorities in Changping county, north of Beijing, fulfilled a set quota to actually prove that criminals were being caught and punished by executing arbitrarily several dozen locals.
While on the one hand China suffers under a nightmarish, 1984 like oppressive state machine, the flip side of this is the kind of silly nonsense that Alduous Huxley described in his novel Brave New World. In the workers paradise, over-employment is seemingly out of control. In what could have been a Monty Python sketch, Wong describes how it takes five employees to make a withdrawel from the People's Bank. The first teller checks your identification, the second makes sure your form is correctly filled out, the third rubber stamps your signature, the fourth counts the money and then, finally, the fifth recounts your money. Voila! you have your money. At this point our correspondent can't help but make a joke: How many Chinese does it take to change a lightbulb? The answer: five. But it's not a joke! It's true. When Wong's office bulb burned out she had to get her driver to phone the dispatcher at the Diplomatic Housing Bureau. The dispatcher sent out two workmen. They showed up empty handed, so a fifth person had to be summoned to fetch a ladder..........oh, and a lightbulb too. My favourite job was one which required the employee to stand beside an escalator. Why? In case anyone fell down. Once again, Wong hastens to assure us that she's not making any of this up.
If that's not enough to give Peter Reith a cardiac arrest, then you should consider China's current retaurant culture. At the Red Hibiscus, dubbed the 'Safe Sex Diner' by the China Daily, waitresses distribute condoms with the crispy chicken. It is partly owned by the State Family Planning Commision. The Divorce Diner in Beijing, with it's theme menu - Lovebird Soup, Happy Family Reunion and Going Your Own Way Shrimp - claims to be able to soften the blows of marital break-ups. Best of all is a joint called Fattys. No, this isn't a Chinese take off of those zealous British overeaters, the Two Fat Ladies. Rather, this restauraunt is more concerned with weight loss. It sells slimming teas, has a bathroom scale positioned at the entrance and offers a 5 percent discount for fat people. 'There are too many restaurants and competetion is fierce,' explains pot bellied owner (209 pounds) Zhang Yan. 'You have to do something special to attract customers.'
Somewhat bravely, Wong visited another type of restaurant - one for vultures. Armed with a fake ID she secretly entered Tibet in order to make her research trip complete (Chinese authorities aren't keen on journalists snooping around). Positively greusome sounding, sky burials are the Tibeten way of dispatching the dead. Crews of domden, or body breakers, chop up corpses and then summon the vultures to feast. It is believed that the souls of the dead are ascended to heaven if the bones have been picked clean. How anyone does such a job is beyond me, and apparently these employees as a group are very heavily stigmatised. Domden live like hermits and are shunned by the rest of society. Meeting one of the body breakers, who grabbed her roughly by the arm and demanded money, Wong confessed to feeling scared. I would too. Here is a job description: 'The sky burial workers processed about seven corpses a day. They began by stripping off the flesh and chopping it into mincemeat. Using the salad bowl depressions [of the slab of rock used for body breaking] like a giant mortar and pestle, they pounded entrails and other organs with a rock the size of a soccer ball. Then they blew a whistle, summoning the birds down from the peak above. Later, the workers pulverised the bones and mixed them with barley flour. After the vultures had dined again, the workers burned any remaining hair and bones. The family later sprinkled the ashes in a river.'
In her epilogue, Wong warns us that China, the world's most populous country, is not as far away as we think. Whatever happens there, she claims, will affect all of us sooner than we think. When President Jimmy Carter once lectured Deng Xiaoping on human rights and Beijing's retrictions on emigration, Deng interupted with a flippant remark: 'How many would you like? Ten million?' I'm sure even Paul Keating would have gulped at the thought of suddenly accomodating ten million Chinese immigrants.
As desperate Chinese will do anything to get a better lifestyle and standard of living for themselves, they are going west. Police estimate that New York's Chinatown has absorbed some 200,000 illegal Chinese immigramts in recent years. Now, with the recent further opening of the Chinese economy, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Chinese could be thown out of their wasteful and inefficient jobs. Although all of this will be very painful indeed, Wong sees a positive side. She notes, 'Market-Leninism - Communist controls and a capitalist economy - can't work.' In other words, something's got to give. The more capitalism takes over, the less and less relevent are the Communist Party's leaders going to appear. Some China watchers predict a descent into chaos, with hundreds of millions of unemployed peasants and workers revolting. 'But I think China has a chance,' Wong asserts with her usual perkiness. 'In 1999, I felt a country moving towards freedom , democracy and unprecendented prosperity.' For everyone's sake - East and West - I hope her hunch is right.
