Village at the Port’s Gate

July 1, 2023July 3, 2023 / Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

June 30 — Gangmencun, Dongfang, Hainan

In the heat of midday, the only things that move are the few brave chickens darting between car undercarriages and the liver-spotted hands of the old women as they mend fishing nets in the shadows of second-floor balconies.

Round and round those hands go, unspooling and tugging and wrapping, readying their lines and nets for another night’s work.

By now, the small crowd that had gathered at the folding tables and plastic stools in front of Gangmen Village’s lone restaurant has dispersed, though a few stragglers hang on, shirtless, to drink the dregs of teapots and smoke the last of their cigarettes. The convenience store is open, though nothing moves inside except for the compressors pumping cold air into refrigerators full of tea and beer. Out front, next to the rack of rainbow-colored brooms, some women in middle age sell fruit from the bed of a cart. Most of the fruits are unknown to me, but the greens, pinks, and purples pop against the scorching, whitewashed walls of the village houses, and they catch my eye.

As the garbage truck — a converted military vehicle, its vintage long passed — trundles down the lane, the women fan dust from their faces.

Not much changes here as the shadows grow long enough to make the walk down the half-dirt, half-concrete street that serves as Gangmen’s main artery more tolerable. The drone of TVs switched on and set to volumes meant for old ears, though, adds a new sound to the darkening streets.

Whether the house is one of the old ones –mortared stone and brick with peeling wooden doors, glassless windows, and dirt floors, the second stories often long-abandoned — or whether it is one of the new ones — two or three levels of gleaming porcelain tile and metal railings, doors solid and windows sealed — the TVs are the same, and they are ubiquitous. As ubiquitous the posters of the door god plastered onto the entryways, new and old alike. As ubiquitous as the ancestral shrines, the centerpiece peaking through each open door, portraits of now-gone relatives framed by electric red candles and set on mantles below giant calligraphic representations of the character for spirits, 神.

These are missing only in those scattered houses that have crumbled under the ever-growing weight of centuries. And sometimes not even there.

On the beach there is no one. Only the dying remnants of giant jellyfish, picked at by curious fingers and by birds and now half-melted in the blast of the sun.

It is not like this, come winter time, an old man tells me, gesturing at the sweep of rock and sand after emerging from the shrubs and cacti that line the upper part of the sea wall and separate the village from the shore. Every piece of this beach and every crook of these rocks will be covered with people, he tells me, nearly all of them from China’s northeast, escaping the winter chill. These houniao, as they’re called, or “migratory birds,” descend in February, filling the extra rooms of the village homes and guesthouses, before flying back north by the end of April. It’s a boon to the local economy, another old man later tells me, even if not all of the younger ones have as much culture as the old folks. And with their thick northeastern Mandarin and dongbei turns of phrase, they’re not always easy to understand.

But they bring money. Money that isn’t pulled from the sea, anyway. And like them or not, come winter time, they come, one way or the other.

What, really, can you do?

As I walk back along the beach, a Yanjing beer from the now-bustling convenience store in hand, the last rays of the sun unfold and expand like a giant pink fan above the coal tankers floating on the horizon, waiting for their turn at the port. The sun disappears somewhere over there, across the water and then, somewhere beyond it, Vietnam.

And the village, so quiet all day, has come to life. Villagers, most of them young men, scramble to load flat-bottomed boats and traps the size of mattresses down off the seawall and into the upcoming tide. One hands a boat motor down to another, struggling with its weight. All of them, to the last, have a cigarette hanging from the side of their mouth, the lit tobacco bobbing in the gloom like so many fireflies in the North Carolina summer.

“Hello!” one yells to me.

“Lu oh,” I reply in Hainanese.

“Yes yes yes!” he shouts and everyone laughs. Then they return, with urgency, to the boats and to the traps before they head out into the black ocean as the buoys and wind turbines blink in the distance and the last bits of light fade.

Overhead, a shooting star streaks across the sky.

Migrations

June 19, 2023July 1, 2023 / Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

June 8 — Guangzhou

First, I was to test the bed.

“Slower. Slower! Lightly, lightly, lightly!” the old man, shirtless in the sweltering bunk room, yelled as I hauled myself up a loose ladder onto the top bunk.

“Now, lay down. Carefully,” he said. “Carefully!”

I leaned back as slowly and carefully as I could until my head touched the plywood and waited as the old man examined the underside of the bed. He grunted.

“I think it’s fine,” I said.

“How much do you weigh?” he asked.

“Let me think. I know it in American,” I said, unhelpfully.

His eyes narrowed.

“You weigh the same no matter where you are,” he said. “What are you talking about.”

I didn’t bother replying while I did the conversion on my phone. “About 71 kilograms,” I said.

The old man sucked on his teeth. Reaching behind him he produced a bent aluminum bar.

“This is what happens when you’re too heavy. Or not careful,” he said, eyeing me. “Just move lightly and it’ll probably be okay.”

By now, I must have looked doubtful because one of my new roommates spoke up to tell the old man that the bottom bunk across the way in this ten-person room had been vacated earlier that day.

“Ah, perfect!” The old man said. He transferred my mattress from top bunk to the bottom.

I sat down and looked around. Across the way a heavyset man with a whispy beard stared at his hand. He would continue this way for the next ten or 15 minutes as I quietly unpacked my bag. Above me a shirtless twenty-something watched a Chinese drama at full volume on his phone. Across the room a stick-thin man with silvered hair and a clothed only in a tiny pair of underwear wrote number after number on a practice pad for Chinese characters. When he got up moments later to go to the shared bathroom in the hallway, he put on his uniform–a blue collared shirt, black slacks, and shiny black shoes. When he returned, he took it all back off and went back to writing.

Before long, the bigger bearded man stood up and turned to stare at the wall.

I walked out onto the balcony, where several persons worth of laundry hung on various lines. A half dozen trunks lay stacked in a corner. One planter was full of cigarette butts and a banana peel. On all the railings had been scrawled, in rough handwriting and permanent marker: “Dangerous!”

I went back inside. In the middle of the five rickety bunks was a card table, on which was strewn a variety of shower products and half drank bottles of tea and soda. Sandals of various colors and wear, some matched, lay strewn about the room. Mosquitoes bounced off the ceiling.

It dawned on me that at two dollars a night, I’d booked myself into a migrant laborer bunk room — fitting, in a way. That realization was confirmed moments later when a beaming face slunk through the door.

“Hello,” the face ventured.

“Hello,” I replied.

“I saw you earlier,” he said. “But I was too shy to say anything. You’re staying here?”

“I am,” I said.

We talked, as we would would the next day and the next as far as our mismatched language skills would take us. He was from a village on the far southern end of the Qiongzhou Penninsula, here in Haikou for a construction job after several years in Zhuhai, near Macao and Hong Kong, so his native language was Cantonese, Mandarin a second and in the tongueless southern style. And my Mandarin, after five years away, has gotten rusty.

Still, he was patient and easier to understand than the rest, who interjected loudly and often with their own thoughts and queries in their own dialects, which we would all struggle to make sense of. My new friend had just gotten a good job, higher up in the construction company and was waiting on medical approval, necessary for a “formal” job higher up than the informal itinerant laborers. The old man was a doorman, studying numbers with hopes of moving up in the world even at his advancing age. One of the kids was had done various odd jobs but was looking for something more permanent — anything would be better, after all, than the army of food delivery scootermen who now clog the streets of Haikou, Hainan Island’s capital city of two million, racing to scrape together a meager living against the unforgiving clock.

The heavyset man, meanwhile, interject English words here and there. But had just suffered a bad head injury on the job. That’s why he stared, he said apologetically, and why he couldn’t remember the right words.

As the night wore on, the conversation died down. The old man went back to his numbers. The kid back to his phone. The heavyset man back to staring. My new friend brought me a bottle of Coke.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “In China, our foreign friends shouldn’t pay for anything.”

I started to say something, but he cut me off.

“No, no, no,” he said.

It’s been a long time.

Reconstruction: Assessing ‘Demolition Man’ two decades after Deng Xiaoping’s death

May 22, 2020 / Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

In early 1997, Deng Xiaoping, the greatest of New China’s leaders, died. As Robert MacFarquhar wrote a month later in his definitive obituary of the diminutive man, while Deng’s colleagues would “eulogize him as the ‘chief architect’ of China’s reform program and it’s opening to the outside world,” the reality of Deng’s leadership was quite different. He was, MacFarquhar wrote, a “demolition man,” one who “deconstructed the China he took over: not the traditional China of Confucian values and Taoist cults”—for, indeed, he’d already helped Mao Zedong destroy that one—“but the China of Communist principles and practices.”[1] When Deng died, however, that demolition was incomplete; the remnant structures of Communist China that loomed over the Middle Kingdom still half intact seemed to MacFarquhar twisted, dangerous, and deep-rooted domestically as China entered a new age at the dawn of the 21^st century. Now, more than 20 years after the death of MacFarquhar’s demolition man, it is worth revisiting the “myriad domestic problems” faced by the China Deng had left behind, problems MacFarquhar hinted might bring down the People’s Republic “dinosaur” as the country lurched toward “the end of history.”

1) Decentralization

MacFarquhar wrote that, if the central leadership was unable to maintain unity and authority, unrest in the periphery among minority groups might erupt. Erupt the peripheries have. Ethnic tensions have remained roiling in Xinjiang Province since the 1997 article, boiling over on occasion in the form of riots in the provincial capital Urumqi in 2009 and numerous terrorist attacks both inside and outside the province. The most infamous, a mass stabbing in Kunming Railway Station blamed on ethnic Ugyhur persons, left 35 dead and 143 wounded.[2] Decentralization, for the moment at least, is a word of the past, however, as the Chinese Communist Party’s response has shown. As of early 2020, some hundreds of thousands, if not more, ethnic Ughyurs have been detained in mass re-education prison camps throughout the region, draconian measures that seem to have their roots in the de-centralized experimentalist repression of Tibetans on the plateau.[3] Books that MacFarquhar said “celebrate localism or provincial chauvinism” have been replaced with Chairman Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China on the shelves of Beijing bookstores.[4] The central authorities seem to have brought the restive provinces to heel, at least when it comes to national security, and the specter of decentralization has been banished, for now.

2) Cultural Anarchy

“China’s writers, artists, pop singers and film-makers are difficult to rein in,” MacFarquhar wrote. Alas, they have proven less resilient. The increasing sophistication and authoritarianism of China’s police state under Chairman Xi has seen the virtual—and sometimes literal—disappearance of cultural dissent, its tendrils reaching even so far these days as Hong Kong, where dissident booksellers were kidnapped by regime thugs in 2015.[5] Artists, filmmakers, and journalists face even more intense censorship and repression in the PRC proper. Christianity and religious cults, MacFarquhar’s other agents of cultural anarchy, have been met with a similar welcome in recent years.[6] While some still fret about the Party’s spiritual vacuum, Party leaders are attempting to fill it with a mix of neo-Confucianism, Xi Jinping’s “China Dream,” and a healthy dose of nationalism backed by authoritarianism.[7] Order has been imposed on anarchy.

3) Crime and migrant labor

MacFarquhar’s section on crime and migrant labor could very well be written today. And now, as in then, he would be overestimating their effects. China’s crime rate is notoriously difficult to gauge, untrustworthy are its official crime statistics.[8] Officially, the PRC’s murder rate, for example, is among the lowest in the world, less than 1 per 100,000 people.[9] Even if that rate were double, it would still rate lower than France; triple, about the same as Canada. Crime may be at levels that MacFarquar writes “earlier Communist governments would have considered unacceptable”—a strange metric by which to judge post-Deng China, anyway—but even if the actual crime rate is much, much higher than officially reported, most Chinese citizens have little to worry about, in reality. That crimes are blamed on migrant laborers—and that transient young men are responsible for some significant measure of crime in China—does however points to underlying fissures in Chinese society.[10]

In 1997, MacFarquhar noted that as much as 10 percent of China’s population worked as itinerant laborers in China’s massive cities; today that number is likely closer to 30 percent of the entire working population.[11] The increase in migrant labor is indicative of the uneven development that has occurred as China’s costal commercial cities have grown—and grown rich—while the much poorer interior and hinterlands languish and shrink. China has become a country of a few very rich and many still very poor.[12] That inequality may itself congeal into its own locus for discontent. But for now, the existence of migrant labor points instead to growing prosperity. Migrants are migrating for the economic opportunities that continue to develop in and around China’s eastern cities. The growth of illegal migrant communities is a challenge for municipal governance, and the occasional clearing efforts that take place on the margins of China’s biggest cities continue more than 20 years after MacFarquhar noted them. Migrant communities also create opportunities for civil unrest among a maligned, maltreated, and malcontented population being left behind by urban development. But the existence of migrant laborers in 2020 is more mere management challenge than a dire threat to the CCP.

4) Unemployment and unrest

If migrant workers are not a major problem, MacFarquar is right to argue that migrant non-workers very well could be. China’s economy continued to enjoy astounding growth in the decades following MacFarquhar’s article, but that growth is slowing. Due to the coronavirus outbreak this year, for first time in half a century China’s economy shrank in the first quarter.[13] While the pandemic is an anomaly, the slowing economy is not, and there could be difficulties ahead for the CCP if China’s economy stalls.

Although official numbers out of Beijing have put unemployment between 4 and 5 percent over the last few decades, just as in1997, those numbers are likely at least double according to many estimates.[14] Labor protests have also been on the rise as workers feel Xi’s “China Dream” slipping out of their grasps.[15] China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based labor advocacy group, recorded nearly 1,400 labor disputes in 2019, less than the at least 1,700 of 2018, but the numbers have persistently remained above 1,300 per year since they spiked in 2015.[16] The titanic efforts of the Chinese government to keep workers employed during the coronavirus shutdown, meanwhile, should be an indication of just how seriously party leadership takes the threat of unemployment.[17] Widespread unemployment would likely shake the foundations of China’s party-state, which has implicitly promised economic growth and stability in return for power. Although China has made some progress reforming its hulking State-Owned Enterprises,[18] unless China can find other ways to re-rev its economic engine, the potentially existential challenges of unemployment and unrest will only grow in scale. MacFarquhar’s forecast was postponed in 1997 by economic growth, but instability caused by unemployment and economic inefficiency may return with a vengeance.

5) Corruption

When Xi took leadership of China in 2012, he would have agreed with MacFarquhar’s diagnosis that in China “corruption is now prevalent at all levels, and to an extraordinary degree.” Eight years later, that may no longer be so true; millions of “tigers and flies” have been snapped up by Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. Although it remains difficult to untangle the targeting of political rivals from real anti-corruption efforts, more than 1.5 million party officials have been disciplined by Wang Qishan and the CCP’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.[19] The result has been wide public praise, a less corrupt party-bureaucracy-business apparatus, and consolidated central control for Xi. While the longer-term effects of the anti-corruption drive remain to be seen (they have not, after all, much targeted Xi’s friends and allies), prosecutions of top officials and oligarchs continue. It seems likely that the party has cleaned out a least some of the rot that settled into the party infrastructure as China grew richer.

6) The military

The entrenched People’s Liberation Army has not escaped the anti-corrupt drive unscathed. Dozens of top generals and even some as high as Fang Fenghui, former military chief of staff, are now behind bars—something that seemed unthinkable in past administrations.[20] Corruption investigations have only been one piece of a sustained effort by Xi to reorganize the PLA and consolidate his control over it. Parallel to the anti-corruption drive, Xi also set out to reshuffle the PLA’s structure, to make it leaner, more responsive, and perhaps most importantly, more his own.[21] MacFarquhar noted that in any power struggle, the PLA chiefs would be decisive. Those chiefs now belong to Xi.

7) The secession

Secession issues never publicly materialized as Deng handed the party over to Jiang Zemin. Nor did they as Jiang handed it to Hu Jintao or Hu to Xi. For two decades after Deng, China was ruled by committee and consensus. That is no longer the case. The CCP abolished term limits in 2018, clearing the way for Xi Jinping to remain in power for life.[22] Whether that will happen—and what will come after— remain to be seen. Succession was not a problem in 1997, but it may be in 2022 or beyond.[23]

Conclusion:

“Is the People’s Republic a dinosaur—large, powerful, but destined for extinction in some enormous catastrophe? Or can its leaders surf the democratic ‘third wave,’ bypass ‘the end of history,’ and avert the ‘grand failure.’ Is there something invincible about a twenty-century-old “oriental despotism,” which transformed itself into arguably the most thoroughly totalitarian system of the twentieth century, the nation of so-called ‘blue ants?’ Or was the Tiananmen massacre only a Pyrrhic victory as China’s convulsive process of modernization lurches toward the democratic denouement sought by Sun Yat-sen?” MacFaquhar asks these questions to close his essay. Given the challenges he poses at the end of “Demolition Man,” in the heady days of the end of history, it seems MacFaquhar thought he could guess the answer.

As it turns out, there may indeed be something invincible—at least in the near term—about the nation that has now certainly transformed itself into the most thoroughly totalitarian system of the 21^st century. Worries of instability seem destined to plague the CCP, but it has, by any measure, taken firm hold of the domestic challenges MacFarquar thought might bring it down. In many ways, China seems to have learned lessons from the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, and not the ones MacFarquar thought it would. Xi Jinping’s China now rules the hinterlands, the artistic commons, the party infrastructure, and the military. Its economy is slowing, to be sure, but if there is anything that has been true about Deng’s China and the China that came after, it has been China’s ability to defy predictions.

History has returned, and the People’s Republic of China has not yet gone the way of the dinosaurs.

[1] Roderick MacFarquhar, “Demolition Man,” The New York Review of Books (Vol. 44, No. 5, March 27, 1997).
[2] Reuters, “China launches campaign to promote ethnic unity in violence-torn Xinjiang region,” (March 31, 2016).
[3] The Economist, “China’s successful repression in Tibet provides a model for Xinjiang,” (December 10, 2019).
[4] The Economist, “Xi Jinping’s new blockbuster is getting a hard sell,” (April 26, 2018).
[5] Alex Palmer, “The Case of Hong Kong’s Missing Booksellers: As Xi Jinping consolidates power, owners of Hong Kong bookstores trafficking in banned books find themselves playing a very dangerous game,” The New York Times (April 3, 2018).
[6] Nectar Gan, “Beijing plans to continue tightening grip on Christianity and Islam as China pushes ahead with the ‘Sinicisation of religion,’” The South China Morning Post (March 6, 2019).
[7] Amy Qin and Javier C. Hernandez, “How China’s Rulers Control Society: Opportunity, Nationalism, Fear,” The New York Times (November 25, 2018).
[8] Christopher Giles, “Reality Check: How safe is it to live in China,” BBC (January 13, 2019).
[9] The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Global Study on Homicide” (2013).
[10] Wang Huazhong, “Young migrants cause crime wave,” China Daily (Feb. 25, 2011).
[11] China Labour Bulletin “Migrant workers and their children,” (May 2019).
[12] Thomas Piketty, Li Yang, and Gabriel Zucman, “Income inequality is growing fast in China and making it look more like the US,” LSE Business Review (April 1, 2019).
[13] BBC, “China’s virus-hit economy shrinks for first time in decades,” (April 17, 2020).
[14] Christopher Balding, “Bad Jobs Data Could Bite China,” Bloomberg Opinion (Feb. 19, 2019).
[15] Javier C. Hernandez, “Workers’ Activism Rising as Economy Slows. Xi Aims to Rein them In,” The New York Times (Feb. 6, 2019)
[16] China Labour Bulletin, Strike Map (https://maps.clb.org.hk/?i18n_language=en_US&map=1&startDate=2012-01&endDate=2012-12&eventId=).
[17] Laura He “China is really worried about unemployment. Here’s what it’s doing to avoid mass layoffs,” CNN Business (Jan. 13, 2020).
[18] Xi li and Kjeld Erik BrØdsgaard, “SOE Reform in China: Past, Present, and Future”, The Copenhagen Journal of East Asian Studies (Vol. 31, No. 2, May 2014).
[19] Andrew Gilholm, “Xi Jinping’s New Watchdog: An Ever More Powerful Anti-Corruption Tool,” Foreign Affairs (March 6, 2018).
[20] Chris Buckley and Steven Lee Myers, “Xi Jinping Presses Military Overhaul and Two Generals Disappear,” The New York Times (Oct. 11, 2017).
[21] Kenneth W. Allen, Dennis J. Blasko, John F. Corbett, Jr., “The PLA’s New Organizational Structure: What is known, unknown and speculation,” China Brief (Vol. 16, Issue 3, Feb. 2016).
[22] James Doubek, “China Removes Presidential Term Limits, Enabling Xi to Rule Indefinitely,” National Public Radio (March 11, 2018).
[23] Johnathon Brookfield, “China has New Leaders: What now?” The Diplomat (Oct. 31, 2017).