of ways, both wired and wireless. In even the most far-flung hamlets, people now use cell phones. And with the huge migration of workers, every village is also still home to individuals hundreds of kilometres away, living in dormitories or camping out in makeshift shacks and toiling away in factories or on huge construction sites. In its own little way, each village is an active part of the whole, a wellspring of food and labour.
In accordance with the heavenly mandate to govern, the Chinese government must bring some blessings upon every little village and its people. So over the last decade and a half, the government has connected countless villages with the rest of China. They have brought electricity and telephone wires and beamed in television signals and mobile communications. When necessary, they truck drinking water in for the people. Eventually they will build proper roads to most of the country’s villages to make it easier to deliver water and extract the fruits of the land. China is reaching into its bosom, both taking and giving, becoming more united than ever before.
China’s dual residency system governs the delicate balance between the cities and the countryside. It creates a subtle but powerful barrier between the two. Under this system, all Chinese citizens must have a residency permit stating where they live. City dwellers can obtain permits for wherever they choose to live fairly easily, but it is extremely difficult for the rural poor to obtain permits to inhabit the cities. One often hears of the hundred million homeless people in China. This number actually refers to all those rural residents who have migrated illegally to the cities and thus cannot have official addresses there. These people, commonly referred to as migrant workers, make up the brunt of the workforce in the new manufacturing centres of China. Their illegal status in the cities puts them in a particularly precarious position vis-à-vis the law and makes them a highly docile and timid workforce.
The Chinese authorities are well aware of the social tension induced by such a system. But they also recognize that the malleable workforce it creates is one of the main factors driving China’s lightning-fast development. Theirs is really a containment strategy for the rural populations: keep them in the countryside, allow just enough of the rural population out of the hinterlands to fuel the manufacturing sector’s need for cheap labour, but deny these migrant workers any real status that might make their presence in the cities more permanent or powerful.
PRESENT-DAY BEIJING preserves much of its classic layout. It is arranged in concentric rings around its nucleus, the Forbidden City. The First Ring is rather vague and hard to define; it works its way around the huge moat and walls of the Forbidden City, through the old imperial quarter once composed of official compounds and warehouses, now more and more made up of tourist shops and restaurants.
By the Second Ring Road, one is more properly in China. This road marks the old walls of the city; the entire Ming Dynasty capital sits within its confines. Here are the ancient living quarters, crammed with traditional abodes called hutongs. In the tiny, tortuous streets, China goes about its way. The residences themselves are hidden behind ten-foot walls. Behind some, eight families dwell in stone or concrete houses around cluttered central courtyards; behind others, a single general or party leader lives with his family amidst tranquil gardens. But in the open lanes, it all mixes together. The bicycle squeezes by the black Mercedes and dodges the vegetable cart. Newspaper in hand, grandpa shuffles his way past it all on his trip to the public shitter for his favourite moment of the day. Grandma and grandson head to the temple to light prayer sticks for grandma’s parents, long gone but not forgotten.
The Second Ring also houses the seats of power. Symbolically, Chinese power dwells in the great halls around Tiananmen Square, just outside the Forbidden City. These are the People’s Palaces and, of course, Mao’s great mausoleum. But the real power is elsewhere. It is scattered across the hutongs, somewhere behind those ten-foot walls.
Between the Second and the Third Ring roads, capitalism has come to blows with communism. For centuries, the city beyond the walls has been the area where various folk from different regions and callings have gathered to answer the bidding of the powers of the day. Soldiers, merchants, foreigners and workers, the people within the Third Ring have always been the tools of the establishment. Their descendants remain. Understandably, the communists took vigorous control of this quarter after the revolution. They housed their workers and their soldiers there and built factories and schools and laboratories—everything they needed to govern Red China and triumph against its foes.
The transformation of this area over the past decade may be the single most significant symbol of change in all China. Communism may not be dead, but within the Third Ring, it has lost the battle against capitalism. All over the area, office towers are taking over. They house the money: the state companies, the Chinese businessmen, the foreign investors and the multinational trading companies. The power of the New China resides in its immense economy, partly free, partly planned. And this economy is managed within the Third Ring. Here, amidst the glass towers and concrete skyscrapers lit up by so many logos of commerce and consumption, the New China glistens. China was once red. Now it is many colours.
During one recent visit to China, I rode a bicycle along the Second Ring, a broad avenue built where the old walls of the city once stood. To my left as I pedalled was the New China skyline; to my right was the old Ming city. Naturally I was more enchanted by the ancient neighbourhood I was circling than by the thick maze of corporate headquarters and business hotels surrounding it. At one point, I stopped in the hutongs just off the Ring to get my squeaky bicycle chain lubed up at an old blacksmith’s shop. The ragged area jutted right up onto the road and was sooty, cramped and authentic— quite the display from the modern highway.
I returned to China a few months later to be surprised by an abrupt change in the cityscape. Gliding along the Second Ring in a taxi, I suddenly realized that the blacksmith’s hutong was gone. An area two arteries deep into the old city—hundreds of shops and houses, little laneways and ancient trees—had been wiped off the face of the Earth. In its place a pleasant park had been installed. By installed, I mean that it had just appeared out of nowhere: big old trees, lawns and flower beds, park benches and moody lighting, even little sections of old stone wall that provide pleasant little obstacles for walkways to wind around. The illusion of permanence was so great that I asked the cab driver if the park was in fact new or if my mind was playing tricks on me. “It is new,” the cabbie replied with a knowing smile. Perhaps even a little proud of what his government can do.
Gone. I started to imagine… Gone are the blacksmith and his shop. Gone is the poultry seller. The old widow and her minuscule home behind the barber shop. Gone. All gone. Gone and forgotten?
Like everywhere else in the world where prosperity has become the great motor of society, so much of old China and its ancient ways seems to be disappearing. The very real estate they occupy is being reclaimed for new purposes, for the new prosperity. The ragged and dirty spaces are being paved over. If possible, their inhabitants are incorporated into new realities; if not, they are sent to live out their lives in small concrete apartments on the edges of the city, preserved in obsolescence. A few rare artifacts like the Forbidden City, emptied of all purpose, are preserved for the tourists.
What then has become of Red China? What has become of the strange mirage of a place into which Hébert and Trudeau ventured so innocently and which you, dear reader, are about to enter? From the beginning of their adventure, from the first sips of tea over terse negotiations with a consular official through the bizarre visits to factories, the impenetrable conversations with bureaucrats, the Marxist orthodoxies, the tremendous pretense of order and rationality of the planned society, the China that Hébert and Trudeau visited seems to have disappeared without trace, like that quaint blacksmith’s hutong.
But you are not about to read a book about an extinct way of life, a vision of some strange and implausible reality filed away in the memory like a fossil on a shelf. The amazing thing about Red China is not that it was and is no more but that, like Ming China or Han China before it, it has slowly been sublimated so that now it is part of the
