Sichuanese recruiter approached me and told me he had a job transporting goods,’ Fei went on. The man had been there, recruiting young people, for weeks by then, Fei believed. He made a bad impression on Fei; he didn’t seem honest. He wouldn’t give specifics about the job, just said, ‘You’ll find out when you get started.’
‘What was the job?’ asked a voice in the crowd.
‘He sent me to Yunnan province. The job covered food and accommodation,’ Fei said. ‘But it wasn’t any ordinary transporting job.’
Fei took a bus to Kunming, Yunnan’s capital, and another bus to a border town, Yingjiang, where he was picked up by the recruiter’s contact. The contact drove him to a house miles away from the town centre. At the house, another two men came to meet him. They explained the job to him: transporting heroin. By then, Fei knew that he couldn’t get out. He was reluctant to give us details, and didn’t want to identify the people he met there. ‘I had to swallow the heroin and transport it across Yunnan, all the way to Chengdu. I swallowed eighteen condoms filled with heroin, five kilograms total, every time they sent me. I felt really sick, and I kept vomiting. I had to leave the job after just a few days.’
Two other men had worked with him, both Tibetans, recruited in a labour market in Yunnan itself. All the people transporting drugs were males. Fei hadn’t talked much to them, just knew that they were carrying the same amount of heroin. He’d felt too unwell to think about the others.
Fei ran away, taking the first train back to Chengdu one morning. Again, he believed that the recruiters would be after him, but nothing happened. Perhaps young Tibetan boys running away from this job was a usual occurrence. He didn’t know. But he’d been worried enough to start wearing dark glasses to disguise his appearance. He wore them for months.
Opium poppy cultivation is a huge enterprise in Burma, and Burmese smugglers account for 80 to 90 percent of the heroin that enters Yunnan. The authorities currently seize two to three tons of opiates per year, and the majority of heroin in China is trafficked through Yunnan or Guangxi to Guangdong or Fujian, and then on to the international market.
Now yet another worker in this crowd of more than 100 stepped in and told his story. He was tall, tanned, handsome and well-built, with hair to his shoulders, quite unusual for a Chinese man. He had been working as a security guard in a bar in Shanghai, he said, and was determined to stay in that job, until one day, he met a woman.
He hesitated. I urged him to continue.
‘She was in her mid forties. Wealthy. I mean, stinking rich,’ he said. ‘Her husband was never at home, doing business abroad, heaven knows what business. She met me outside the bar where I worked. She stared at me as she passed, then turned back and approached me. She liked my looks. She asked if I’d be interested in meeting. So we met the next day and she took me to an expensive café for coffee and lunch.’
‘There was Western food on the menu. I’d never tried American steak, I said to her. She encouraged me to order it. During lunch, she told me she was interested in me and set up the next meeting, in a posh hotel in central Shanghai, which she paid for. She needed a young man, and offered to pay me for sex.’
The crowd exploded in laughter. It wasn’t the most usual kind of work around.
‘I was only nineteen!’ he said. ‘I was confused. But it was a large amount of cash she was offering. So I said yes.’
‘The word “prostitution” didn’t come into my head, until later, when the offer was repeated, again and again,’ he said. He managed to earn 10,000 yuan (now £909) a month working as her lover.
Someone shouted at him from the back: ‘Worker, you’re the tool!’ The crowd laughed again.
But the story wasn’t so funny for the man recalling it.
‘We began to meet regularly, once a week, after that,’ he said. He knew for certain that the meeting was purely for sex – she didn’t seem interested in anything else. She never asked a question about his background and what he’d done in his life. ‘I thought that I could continue working like that and earning good money in Shanghai. I was young and in good condition. Having sex with a woman more than twice my age was no big deal for me. I could carry on like that for years, and bring in good income for my parents. I was really naïve then.’
‘Time went by, and soon she became tired of me. One day, three months later, at the end of our session, she told me that she wouldn’t be seeing me again. She said my job was over. And she never called again. From other security guards at the bar, I heard that she’s picked another boy, from the countryside, to replace me. She’s got a new lover.’
His story was unusual; the majority of China’s three million sex workers are still migrant women, most of them peasants between fifteen and forty years old. I had received those calls from female sex workers in the hotel saunas in Beijing, but in fact these women were in every city, selling their services in karaoke bars and shopping malls and on street corners as well. Shenzhen, with the highest number of migrant sex workers, has more than a thousand of these ‘karaoke bars,’ where more than 300,000 women are estimated to work. The majority of them are from Sichuan.
Then the subject of the earthquake came up again. Yuan Gang, a middle-aged man who’d been a railway worker in Shaanxi province when the earthquake hit – spoke about how his house had collapsed, how his wife and three children were put into temporary housing, and how the compensation he had been entitled to was withheld, for no reason. ‘Knowing the past record of our local authorities, we believe our compensation is being permanently withheld!’ he cried. He was shivering with anger, and people in the crowd began to nod.
Encouraged by Yuan Gang’s open denouncement of the local government, others began to speak up about their own experiences with it, and their frustration. A white-haired, frail-looking man in his sixties, named Xue, who had accompanied his job seeking son to the labour market, had been listening at the edge of the crowd, nodding repeatedly at the things people were saying. Now he spoke, too.
‘Rulers in China know about the power of those from the countryside,’ he said. ‘China’s history is all about how the peasantry has been burdened and oppressed, and how each time they rose up to overthrow those in power. But then those new rulers would oppress the peasant masses again, until our anger could not be contained any longer and boiled over, once more, into a revolution.’
The crowd was silent as they listened to him speak.
‘We peasants brought the Party into power. Without the power of the peasantry, China wouldn’t have defeated the imperialists and the corrupt Kuomintang.’
Now the crowd around him cheered.
‘But once they came into power, we became burdened and exploited again! Because, they said, our Motherland needs to grow fast and catch up. Industrializing China and increasing output was the only thing they wanted from us in those years,’ he said. ‘And do you know what we peasants had as our reward in the decades that followed the Revolution?’ He paused, and I waited for him to continue. The crowd was rapt.
‘Poverty! Did they ask the peasants if they wanted to be collectivized in the early 1950s? Peasants just took the orders from the top. They had no right to say no. Around 130 million peasant households at that time were turned into around 7 million mutual-help groups, and then into 700,000 agricultural cooperatives. This was for the peasants to produce on a mass scale, and then produce more! And more! All for the nation! But not for our livelihood! And then those at the top used the Hundred Flowers movement in the end, to put down half a million peasants who opposed the collectivization.
