my cabin window. I climbed down from my bunk bed and saw the dusty land of the Shanxi province unfolding in front of my eyes. The barrenness looked strangely beautiful. I was struck by the magnificence of the country’s landscape as well as by the breadth and depth of its rural poverty. Shanxi, a large mountain plateau some 1,000 metres above sea level, is bound on the north by the Great Wall and on the south by the Yellow River. It was China’s strategic bastion against the ‘barbarians’ from the West for many centuries. The land is clearly poor here along the northern border, eroded by rainfall and by lumbering and ruthlessly scoured by sand and dust moved in constant wind and water, giving the bare earth a distinct yellow polish. The Gobi Desert seemed to spill over into this place. There were no traces of livestock. Many of the houses here are extremely basic – caves built up with mud walls.
When we entered the dining car the next day, we were greeted by restaurant staff in stewardess-like uniforms. Two public security officers sat at the back of the car, chain-smoking and keeping an eye on what went on. We ordered our favourite mapo tofu and minced pork with aubergines, as a first taste of Sichuan.
A young woman and an older man asked to sit with us. She was in her early twenties, a biology student at Chengdu University. The man was in his late 50s. ‘We’ve just met,’ he said. ‘I have a daughter in Chengdu University, too. So we have a lot to talk about.’ Like everyone else, they were curious as to why we were heading to Sichuan at this time, when the province had barely recovered from the earthquake. ‘We visited Sichuan years ago and would like to see it again,’ I said, sticking to our preplanned story. The student nodded.
Then dots of blue came into view outside the window: overcrowded tents, inhabited by villagers who had been made homeless by the earthquake. Not only had the Sichuanese had their homeland and their limited infrastructure destroyed in the eight mountainous counties, and now had to worry about aftershocks and heavy rain causing further disasters, they were also still waiting for their homes and communities to be rebuilt. Although the government had pledged to spend £100 billion ($15 billion at the time) on reconstruction, as reported by international media, no one I spoke to during my journey in China had a clue about this cash, let alone when it would arrive, how it would be spent and over what period of time. In fact, earthquake reconstruction was rarely in the news here, buried under the glory of the Olympics, even after the Olympics were over.
The Chengdu government had estimated that three years would be required for reconstruction to be completed – a frightening length of time for the victims, long enough for their plight to become dormant in the general collective memory, at least until the next tragedy. While the homeless waited in their tents, local officials experienced their share of stress: They’d been ordered by the central government to reduce their expense budgets, for example, by eliminating all ‘unnecessary official banquets’.
I couldn’t help asking the student, ‘Do you think the government is doing enough, or putting enough resources into reconstruction?’
The student seemed offended by my question. ‘Of course! No doubt about that!’ she said. ‘Our government has done all it could to help the victims.’
I said nothing, noticing her rising anger.
Altogether, 4.45 million households had been damaged by the earthquake, including 3.47 million in rural areas. Ten million people were living in temporary housing (tents) three months later. When winter came, the majority of villagers were still waiting for their homes to be rebuilt. By November 2008, 195,000 homes, less than one eighteenth of the total needed, had been completed. Even in May 2009, a year after the disaster, millions were still in temporary housing, and many will continue to live in those tents for years to come. State compensation in money – for those who actually received it – ranged from 16,000 yuan (£1,609, $2,540) and 23,000 yuan (£2,313, $3,651) per family, which most found insufficient to build a home themselves.
‘Maybe you’ve read negative reports about our government,’ said the student, provocatively. Her tone reminded me of students I had known in 1970s Taiwan, who had been deeply indoctrinated by the nationalist ruling party there, the Kuomintang. ‘So, do you support Tibet’s rioters? A lot of the reports in the West are anti-China. They picked on our government about everything.’
This would be my first direct experience of nationalist ideology on the trip, an ideology that wasn’t purely relative, expressed in terms of East vs. West, with the East a victim of Western encroachment, but instead increasingly positive, expressed as Chinese nationhood. It was the year of the Beijing Olympics, and the Chinese press was busy bombarding its viewers and readers with self-congratulating propaganda, including street ads exhorting them to ‘Fight for your Motherland.’ There can be no understanding of the history of modern China without facing up to its nationalism; since the reform era, no other ideology has been as powerful.
My nostalgia for Chengdu proved to be overly romantic. A decade of new development had changed the city. Most of the tranquil avenues dotted with teahouses were gone, along with the little surprises hidden in alleyways, like street snack stalls and sellers of pirate CDs who happily engaged in conversation. The town’s past simplicity and richness had been replaced by a crude and impersonal display of private affluence. Chengdu had become another grim and depressing Chinese city with chaotic traffic, suffocating pollution, oppressive high-rise shopping blocks and Starbucks everywhere, along with other multinational companies.
As always on this journey, the first place I visited was the city’s largest employment centre, the City East Labour Market, which advertises all types of jobs. It’s situated in the extreme east end of the city, that is, in the middle of nowhere. A row of cargo tricycles was parked near the market, and the riders were trying to get customers. Like the job seekers in the labour market, these riders come from the surrounding villages. Outside the gate, hundreds of rural workers were gathered, from Pengzhou area, An county, the Dujiangyan area and as far as Wenchuan, the earthquake’s epicentre, about five hours away by bus.
When I began to talk to one of them, others surrounded me and curiously asked me where I was from.
‘Taiwan? The treasure island!’ a man said.
‘I wouldn’t mind going to Taiwan to work!’ another man added.
The crowd grew bigger still, and I suddenly found myself in the centre of a large circle of job-seekers, all eager to talk. I asked if any had worked outside of Sichuan before.
‘We worked in Beijing!’ a man pointed at himself and his friend.
‘Taiyuan! For two years!’ shouted another.
‘Shanghai!’
A white-haired man in his fifties said he was from Huangtu village, five hours from Chengdu, and had been a migrant worker for ten years, including a long stint as a builder in Shenzhen, some 2,000 kilometres away. ‘I came home because I was worried about my family,’ he said. ‘Our house was damaged in the quake.’
He was interrupted by others around him, pushing and nudging, all impatiently waiting for their turn to speak.
A man from Wenchuan broke in, ‘My family and I have become homeless and are now staying in temporary shelters. The local government promised permanent housing and job priority for people in Wenchuan. But we are all waiting, for months now.’
Then a man whose thick eyebrows over deep-seated eyes distinguished him from the Han Chinese workers approached. He was in his mid-thirties. He introduced himself as Shen Wei, from the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture in southwest Sichuan. Liangshan contains the country’s largest population of Yi, the seventh-largest of the fifty-five ethnic minority groups in China. ‘I come here every day, to look for work. It’s been so difficult,’ he said, his accent flatter in intonation than
