A Day in The Life . . . . . . Of China

By Michael Kramer

A beautiful day for a wedding -- crisp, clear and, for China in midsummer, relatively cool. The latest typhoon's high winds have swept away the air pollution, and under a brilliant blue sky the guests are chatting in the hollow of a terraced field beside a single spindly tree -- symbolic decoration in a country whose scant arable land continues to disappear. Arranged neatly alongside the makeshift altar, the gifts intended for the bride's parents include a new refrigerator, a 24-in. color television set and a jet black Yamaha motorcycle. The presents are ogled, but atop the TV a photograph of Margaret Thatcher creates the greatest buzz, a reaction the bride, and perhaps the groom too, would undoubtedly have enjoyed. Were they still alive.

As the other guests prattle on about the British Prime Minister, some even in English, the new language of the New China, I am transfixed by the marriage of the two coffins in front of me. The groom died in an automobile accident five days earlier at the age of 23. The body of his bride, dead of cancer for five months, cost $3 to exhume. They had never met.

After exhausting their fascination with Margaret Thatcher, a few of the guests allow as how, yes, one might think that marrying dead people is bizarre. But as an occasional feature of life in these parts for longer than anyone can remember, "ghost marriages" are just another relic of ancient China, another relatively harmless superstition for a billion people struggling to jerk themselves toward the 21st century.

Strange, surely, but about the only truly odd tradition I encounter during five weeks in China. By plane, train and car, from the prospering coastal provinces to the country's heartland, where the agricultural reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping ten years ago began a miraculous economic transformation, to Beijing and a village not far from the capital that is infinitely poorer than towns a thousand miles farther inland, I find little that is charming or especially exotic. Just a mostly drab and dusty country, a perfect backdrop for the tedious and too often unrewarding nature of daily life. Still, the people seem energetic, if fitful; a fifth of the world's population in a cage. Good, hardworking people who deserve better than the suffocating Communism that limits their enterprise.

In the end, the place still looms, as it always has. China is the stuff of our earliest memories, the faraway land where children were starving (or so our parents told us when we were young), so we had better finish our dinners. The place we could reach by digging deep in our sandboxes; a measure of size ("I wouldn't do that for all the tea in China"); a country whose mere name conjured mystery and intrigue.

Over the past decade, we rooted for a successful conclusion to China's long march away from a Communism that sometimes seemed even more menacing than Nikita Khrushchev's -- he of the take-no-prisoners promise to "bury" us. We suspected that real success might produce an economic giant capable of dwarfing even our ally Japan, but we rooted anyway. And of course, since Tiananmen Square, we have wondered what went so drastically wrong. How could any regime shoot unarmed citizens in its own capital, an action violative of a rule of governance so obvious that not even Machiavelli felt compelled to write it down?

It is impossible, after just five weeks "inside," to say what China is like. It is possible only to meet some people, sketch some scenes, let some voices tell their stories. And if, up close, childhood impressions fade, enough incongruities and paradoxes survive to concentrate the mind. Like the newspapers that urge "bitter struggle" against "bourgeois liberalism" while trumpeting the pleasures of disco dancing on the same page. Like the never ending loop of music in the lobby of a hotel in Sichuan province that alternates between a Rod Stewart oldie (Sailing) and a socialist goody (Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China). Like the young man break-dancing to a blaring Madonna album amid a few hundred elderly tai chi practitioners at a Shanghai park. Like the reserve and civility evident in personal relations that rarely translate to civic responsibility. Like the more intractable tensions of incorporating the best of capitalism while preserving socialism -- tensions that have arisen because of, rather than in spite of, Deng's economic reforms. Like everything about the ghost marriage and those who celebrate it. All this and more reflect the clash of modernity and tradition and the exquisite balancing acts required when a nation persists in pursuing contradictory notions of culture, economics and politics at the same time.

Even the dead bride's Thatcher fixation tells a larger tale. The young woman, it seems, idolized Thatcher, not because she shared her politics but because with a single phrase Thatcher once captured her own world view: "If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman."

An exchange of business cards at the wedding, as common in China as saying hello, establishes that one of the guests has more than a nodding acquaintance with cremation. "Yeah," says a middle-aged man proudly, "I burn stiffs for a living." Only I smile. Everyone else knows what's coming, a recitation of the state's official line against using precious land for burials. "This is ridiculous," says the man, arcing a wad of spittle behind him, a small measure of civility indicating that China's famous antispitting campaign has done little more than improve the people's aim. "Zhou Enlai once said that China's greatest contribution to world peace was simply feeding its own people. To keep doing it we need the land -- all of it, every square meter. Earth burials are an incredible waste of space. Cremation is the future."

"Earth burial honors our ancestors," says a guest.

"Give me a break," says the man. (My hip translator is a Berkeley graduate.) "Despite our tradition of filial piety, most of us treat our elderly relatives like crap when they are alive. Then, when they die, we feel guilty and build shrines to their memory and use valuable land to bury them. It's all nonsense. It's all hypocrisy -- as hypocritical as this wedding."

He has a point, and everyone knows it, even those guests who admit to having hired geomancers to locate and orient their homes, or those who keep black fish in aquariums in order to absorb "bad rays," or those who believe their country's former greatness was attributable to a national qi (vital energy) that even now is moving inexorably from the West to Japan on its way back to China, a shift that will once again confirm the Middle Kingdom as the center of the world. All these people know that the man is right because they know that the logic behind marrying dead people, to ensure them a peaceful afterlife, is dead wrong. The real if equally fanciful reason is that the unmarried dead are feared capable of becoming angry spirits who may disturb their living relatives. "Face it," says the stiff-burner, gesturing to the coffins now set in a common grave. "This thing we call a wedding is something we are doing for us, not for them."

"Enough!" shouts the mother of the groom. "This is their wedding day. I don't want to hear anymore. Let us leave quietly." Then, apropos of nothing more than the increasingly common disdain many Chinese appear to feel for the army they saw as their great protector before it marched on Tiananmen, this small, fine-boned woman with searing brown eyes and a complexion Margaret Thatcher would compare to a rose recites some lines of Du Fu, the 8th century poet famous for decrying the gulf between ruled and ruler in China: "So it is better to abandon a daughter at birth than to see her later married to a soldier."

The guests are stunned. Everyone realizes that the sentiment just expressed -- as well as the wedding itself -- could easily cause this gentle woman's expulsion from the Communist Party, a "home" she later says she "entered out of love and idealism" 32 years earlier. The guests glance about nervously. Has the woman gone too far? Is someone in the crowd an informer?

Oblivious to any danger, the woman stands stiffly and stares at the matching coffins. The silence puts on a little weight and becomes fat before she stoops to her handbag and takes out a small transistor radio. She carefully places it on the pine box of her daughter-in-law, in the grave that is the dead bride's new home. "What can it hurt?" she says, looking daggers at the stiff-burner. "Maybe they'll want to listen to some music."

Bi is a 32-year-old English teacher in a small town not far from Shanghai on China's eastern coast. He could have taken Russian in college but chose English because "there is no one to talk to in Russian and no one interested in learning it." Bi speaks English so well that only a careful listener might guess that it is his second language. He pays particular attention to his consonants, and the effect is riveting. It seems that everything he says has been carefully weighed and thought out.

A strapping six-footer, Bi "got into the weight-lifting craze about two years ago, when it was big." He still pumps iron each morning before breakfast, which he takes at a local restaurant with four colleagues. Eating out is actually cheaper than cooking at home for Bi, since coal is very expensive. Besides, Bi is saving for new eyeglasses. He hates his thick lenses and believes he would not need them if he had grown up in the West. "Until about five years ago, we didn't have electricity," he says. "I read by candlelight till then. My eyes had gone to hell by the time I was eight."

Bi, his wife and two children live in a spare, two-room apartment of about 30 sq. yds. provided by his school. The bathroom is down the hall. In the smaller room the kids share a bed under a Michael Jackson poster. On the wall above the sink and the small stove are a calendar and a photo of the New York City skyline. "It's not much," says Bi, but the subsidized rent is only $4 a month.

The place of employment for most Chinese, called a work unit, or danwei, is usually responsible for providing housing and other essentials. "We used to get medical care for free too," says Bi, "but my danwei can't afford it now that the economic reforms have let doctors' fees rise."

Bi's seniority entitles him to a salary of about $38 a month -- less than a factory worker, taxi driver, guide and just about every other employed Chinese receives. Even so, for the next four years Bi must get by on $12 less each month. Five dollars is deducted automatically because the cash-starved government insists that state employees buy bonds. The other $7 represents a fine for the second child he and his wife had three years ago -- one child over Beijing's limit.

None of Bi's personal problems are on his mind this day. Instead he is incensed about work. "Meiyou," he says once, and then again. Meiyou (pronounced may-o) means "No, it cannot be done," or "No, we don't have it" -- a word foreigners learn quickly. "Too few primers," says Bi. "One hundred eighty-two students and 15 English books. Bad enough, right? But look at the books. They're about 40 years old, and boring. We can barely get by the first story."

Bi would like to ignore the texts entirely, but the college entrance exams test the books' content. "They can actually ask you how exactly Marx learned English," he says. (By writing for American newspapers, it turns out.) "So we have to go through them. But we also try to come up with exercises that get to the real questions of English grammar. Now, which word do you think belongs in the blank?"

The sentence on Bi's crumbling blackboard reads, "He has corn and other things -----------in his fields."

"O.K.," says Bi, "which word belongs in the blank, grown or growing?"

"Growing," I answer.

"What I said too," says Bi triumphantly to the three other teachers standing at his side.

"But what if it's a causative sentence?" asks a student who has wandered into the room. "What if the man who owns the fields employs workers so that all he does is give orders? Then the owner could be causing those crops to be < grown in his fields even though he isn't doing the actual work. Then you could use the word grown."

"What?" says one of the teachers.

"Like in Tiananmen," says the student. "Deng wasn't actually there, right? He didn't actually kill any of us himself. But he gave the orders to have us killed. He caused it."

After a few moments, Bi breaks the silence. "Don't worry, we are all friends here," he says, pointing to the school clock. It says 3:30. This time I am the one who is lost. "We are now supposed to be on daylight saving time, which is an hour ahead," Bi explains. "But we keep to Hong Kong time as a sign of our sympathies. So you see, in this place you can say what you want. Just remember to be careful outside." As we leave Bi's classroom, he turns out the lights and, without even a faint smile, sets the clock ahead an hour. Like many Chinese, Bi is expert at concealing his feelings behind a facade of impassivity and self-control. "You never know who may come by and see the clock," he says. "It is crucial to go through the motions. Be subtle even in protest."

The same don't-make-a-big-thing-of-it, be-subtle manner is present in Shanghai, one of three Chinese cities directly under the national government's jurisdiction. There, a lobby notice in the Hilton hotel duly conforms to official policy: WESTERN NEWSPAPERS ARE UNAVAILABLE. But upstairs, there they are. The hotel's televisions air the supposedly banned daily news shows of ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN -- all broadcasting press conferences by Chinese dissidents who have escaped Beijing's dragnet.

Similarly, everyone I speak with who has attended a "re-education" session designed to promulgate the government's version of the Tiananmen tragedy professes to have listened stonily to the government's lies. Those forced to respond claim to have merely parroted the official line verbatim -- a transparent but unpunishable form of dissent.

"A lot is still possible as long as you are careful not to gloat," says a low-level government official in Beijing. "That's where I think the students went too far. They forced a crackdown by causing the leaders to lose face when Gorbachev visited. Problem is, the students weren't up on their Mao." Had they been, they might have come upon a 1927 essay in which the future Chairman identified atrocity as a desirable power-holding tactic. "To right a wrong," Mao wrote, "it is necessary to exceed the proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted without the proper limits being exceeded . . . To put it bluntly, it is ((sometimes)) necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror."

"I guess the main reason I was surprised that the demonstrators rubbed the leaders' noses in it," says a professor of Chinese literature in Guangzhou, "is that their actions were so uncharacteristic of the way in which most smart Chinese operate. The emperors and their policies change rapidly in China. As the old proverb says, 'In the morning, welcomed as the guest of a high official; in the evening, held as a prisoner under the steps.' To survive in China, you must keep your head down and be ready to change your allegiances and enthusiasms quickly -- or at least appear to. The elements are simple enough. Trust the papers only for sports. In politics, believe nothing until it is officially denied. Report your own opinions by saying things like 'I heard it on the bus,' or 'The rumor is . . .' Learn to recognize euphemisms."

As we walk in Guangzhou, the professor notices an old woman with a broom made of twigs and straw methodically sweeping dirt from one side of the street to the other. "You see that?" he says. "That's what it is all about. Is the street really clean? Of course not. But she is making it look clean, right? That's the important thing in China. Everything here is appearance. Everything here is pretend."

Feigned compliance is the term used by Lucian Pye, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to describe such self-protective make-believe and the obedience it spawns. As a trait central to the Chinese character, feigned compliance has distinct Confucian roots, and Confucius is very much in vogue in China today. Not for that part of his philosophy that extols good-heartedness and broad-mindedness, but for his celebration of authority, hierarchy and anti-individualism. For the purposes of China's leaders, what counts is that Confucius presumed the ruler's right to rule.

The Chinese believe it is never too early to teach children that their elders should be respected as models of benevolence and sobriety. Children are dissuaded from expressing hostile feelings toward authority of any description. The concept of self exists only as it is expressed in terms of the other, usually the group. Even if taught at home, such discipline is inculcated most strikingly at school.

The typical Chinese nursery school combines day attendees and quan tuo | (literally "whole care") students. From Monday through Saturday, with the exception of Wednesday evenings, a quan tuo student lives at his school around the clock, a situation no one seems to think the least bit odd. For despite filial devotion and the supposed centrality of family life, long separation is common in China. It is not rare for spouses to work in different cities and see each other infrequently. Similarly, far from signaling neglect, paying to deposit a three-year-old in another's care for a week away from home is often taken as a sign of affluence. In fact, since the economic reforms have raised the living standards of so many Chinese, a complaint about quan tuo is that without guanxi -- connections, a word I was to hear repeatedly -- no amount of wealth can secure a coveted sleep-away space.

I visit two schools, one near Guangzhou, the other in Beijing. At both places, two teachers handle a class of approximately 40 four-year-olds. Instructive slogans adorn the walls: THE NAIL THAT STICKS OUT GETS HAMMERED DOWN and THE LONG POLE GETS SAWED OFF. Creativity, experimentation, even simple play are discouraged. Handed blocks, the children erect structures pictured in workbooks; once completed, the buildings are torn down and put up again and again until the time allotted for block-building expires. And "No talking, while you're building," a teacher scolds. Or while you're eating, for that matter, or while you're going to the bathroom. "Sit upright, with hands clasped behind your backs," says another teacher. "That is correct behavior."

Later, over lunch with a psychologist, I try connecting the phenomenal spread of television in China with the West's greatest contribution to childhood education. "What about Sesame Street?" I ask. "You must be kidding," says the psychologist. "Sesame Street is about individualism, about accepting differences. Don't you get it about Communism?"

I get it, finally, when I chance on a hot seller at a bookstore in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province, deep in the heart of China. Buried in A Guide to U.S.A., The Visitor's Companion, is a section titled "Individualism." A sample observation: "People in the United States generally consider self- reliance and independence as ideal personal qualities. As a consequence, most people see themselves as separate individuals, not as representatives of a family, community, or other group . . . Visitors from other countries ((read China)) sometimes view this attitude as 'selfishness.' "

I get the point again in Shanghai, the city called the "Paris of the East" during the Roaring Twenties; a place made famous forever when, in the 1932 film Shanghai Express, Marlene Dietrich drawled, "It too-oo-k more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily." Shanghai is no longer trendy, modern or even cosmopolitan, but its streets are still tops for infant watching. Sadly, though, the toddlers I see seldom cry or laugh or even suck their thumbs. Most seem sullen. And in the beautiful Jing an Park, which used to be a cemetery before the bodies were exhumed for cremation (the old story about the land's being too valuable for the dead), the kids ride around in bumper cars in careful circles and don't wave and don't smile and stare straight ahead and never once smash into one another -- which by now even I know is the whole point.

Most Chinese nursery schools display a mural of young, cherubic children riding a dragon. The dragon represents China; the well-fed kids symbolize a prosperous future. But outside a primary school in Kai Kong, a factory town in Guangdong province, the traditional mural is decidedly modern. There isn't anything special about the dragon, but the fat children are carrying cameras, videocassette recorders and boom boxes.

As a metaphor for Xinhua (New China), the Kai Kong mural is perfect. And no area in New China has taken more readily to Deng's economic freedoms than Guangdong, the province on the southeastern coast that borders Hong Kong. Famous for being shrewd businessmen, Guangdong's residents also have a long tradition of ignoring imperial edicts. Even today the province negotiates its tax remittances to Beijing, in part because the national government's ability to control various localities differs greatly depending on an area's wealth, strategic significance and the personal connections and acumen of its leaders.

In a sense, Guangdong can be viewed like the Soviet Union's Baltic states, the province's relative wealth representing a willingness to stretch the rules to fit whatever works rather than restrain expansion to fit the rules. Left alone, which it may not be, Guangdong will continue to provide the nation with both hard currency and an example of entrepreneurship at full throttle.

Not surprisingly, Guangdong's success has produced severe envy, what the Chinese call "red eye" disease. The neighboring province of Hunan feels particularly aggrieved by what it sees as Guangdong's economic warlordism. Faced with the migration of millions of its residents to Guangdong, Hunan on occasion has even gone so far as to establish border roadblocks to stem the flow of materials and people.

Although Beijing has declared that the economic reforms and the opening to the outside world will continue despite its political crackdown, the capital appears torn between leveling the playing field and letting the laws of supply and demand run their course. Not that there is much evidence yet that a province like Guangdong would salute if Beijing insisted that it slow its rush to prosperity. As a Guangdong official says, "When the belly is fat, the emperor is far away." Which is not to say that Guangdong doesn't understand feigned compliance. A visiting Beijing big shot might not be accorded the kind of reception Rob Lowe would get in the girls' locker room of an American high school, but as this Guangdong cadre says, "When the leaders come, we are very careful to treat them very well."

The Lun Feng stuffed-toy factory is one of about 1,000 Guangdong manufacturing operations that together employ more than 2 million people. As one of approximately 10,000 joint ventures established since 1979, most along the coast, Lun Feng represents both the promise and the problems that have accompanied Deng's economic reforms.

To upgrade Lun Feng for state-of-the-art stuffed-toy manufacture, which really means little more than loading an empty building with sewing machines, Lun Feng's Hong Kong joint-venture partner lent the factory's nominal owner, the town of Kai Kong, more than $1 million. (The national government got its cut by charging a fee for converting the Hong Kong dollars into Chinese currency.) Since then, Lun Feng has been on its own. Much of the fabric used by the factory comes from Taiwan. "No problem," says Lun Feng's operations manager, who happens to belong to the Communist Party. "This is business, not politics."

It is possible for a non-Communist to be a factory manager in China, but most managers are still card-carrying party members. Even so, there is always a party secretary to enforce Communist discipline. Before Deng's reforms, there was no question that the Communist secretary dominated, even if he was functionally illiterate in basic business precepts. Since 1984, though, Beijing has directed that party secretaries leave operations to the factories' designated managers -- a direct slap at Leninist ideology, which holds that since the party is the only body capable of enforcing the will of the workers, factories must be under party control.

On the ground, however, where nothing is ever simple, the power relationship varies from place to place. "It is nothing more than a normal battle for control," admits a factory party secretary in Jinan. "I don't know much about what my factory actually does, but that doesn't mean I don't want to be the boss." At Lun Feng, Deng's system works fairly well. Only after Tiananmen did the secretary actively meddle, but then just to direct that the radio be tuned to a mainland station rather than one in Hong Kong. The music the workers listen to all day is the same, but the news is different.

There seem to be three keys to Lun Feng's success. The first is its location on the Kai Kong River, which allows the factory to ship its goods by sea and not by the country's notoriously awful roads. Even in Guangdong, many of the paved highways are narrow, and virtually impassable when travelers stop to shop at roadside stands.

Lun Feng's second ace is electricity. Across China, electric power is in such short supply that even favored state-owned operations must routinely shut down for two or three days a week. Lun Feng beat the power problem with money. For about $3 million, the factory installed five auxiliary diesel generators. With eleven workers maintaining the equipment 24 hours a day, eight seconds is the longest Lun Feng has been without electric power.

Then there are "the girls," about 3,000 of them, who work from 7:30 in the morning until 11 at night six days a week. None I speak with are over 19. Almost all are from Hunan province. Most stay no more than two years and then return home to marry. They earn close to $200 a month, an almost unheard-of wage in China.

As troublesome as it can sometimes be to have a mercurial government as one's business partner, greater problems often arise from a mismatch of position and personnel. Most jobs are assigned by the government, often with little regard for a person's qualifications or preferences.

At a Guangdong electronics factory, the quality-control officer concedes his own ineptitude. "I graduated in English from Fudan University ((in Shanghai)) and was immediately assigned here," he says. "I don't know anything about the work here, so I can't judge product quality very well. I wish I could go somewhere else, but I may be stuck here for the rest of my life. I could learn the job, but moving up is almost impossible without guanxi" -- that word again -- "which I don't have. If I had it, I maybe could have arranged it so I wasn't sent here in the first place."

In part because of similar complaints, Beijing announced plans last year to scuttle the job-allocation system this November. But on April 13 the State Council rescinded the scheduled reform. The decision was understandable. Rather than work in state-run enterprises, which need talented help desperately, most college graduates would opt for private-sector jobs that offer more money, greater opportunities for advancement and the chance to travel abroad. But the government's about-face last April, combined with the death two days later of Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded Communist Party Chairman ousted in early 1987, contributed to the student demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre on June 4.

Not far from the Lun Feng factory, on the main road to Guangzhou, is an example of how economic freedom can energize a population. Shops full of sofas, chairs and beds stretch as far as the eye can see. "Furniture Mile" began several years ago when a few local farmers decided that after meeting their government-mandated crop quotas, they would rather augment their income by making furniture than by growing more vegetables. Soon, farmers throughout the area followed suit. Today anyone with wheels stops to load as much furniture as he can carry, then resells his wares later in whatever market he can find.

Individuals are not the only ones eager to earn extra money. Under Deng's reforms, most state-run businesses and government agencies are expected to turn a profit. An aircraft factory in Xi'an runs a marriage-introduction center that does a booming business serving the needs of hundreds of well- educated women who by their late 20s are desperate for husbands because men with less schooling are reluctant to marry them. In Chengdu the Xinhua bookstore owns a flower shop, a hair salon and a clothing boutique whose manager gets his goods from "a guy in Shanghai who has good guanxi." In Shanghai itself the city's world-famous acrobats attract bigger audiences by sponsoring fashion shows between tumbles. A university in Guangdong has branched out to invest in a three-story bar in Shanghai whose top floor, called Lovers' World, features 15 banquettes where couples can smooch in privacy. Even the People's Liberation Army has got into the act. Knowing that . swank hotels are truly the country's most exotic tourist attractions, the P.L.A. is a co-owner of Beijing's poshest, the Palace, where two gold-colored Rolls-Royce Corniches are available for special guests.

But the tensions generated by the scramble for money are never far from the surface. Orthodox executives of China's state-run enterprises are very much like the Soviet Union's permanent bureaucracy, the nomenklatura. They have coasted for years under the old system, and they dislike Deng's perestroika because it asks them to compete like capitalists, and capitalism has losers. "Keeping their jobs is their No. 1 priority," says Sinclair Choy, a marine engineer from Hong Kong, who in partnership with a coastal town on the mainland runs a fishing boat-repair business. "Order, stability, calm," says Choy. "That's what these Chinese officials want. Anything that threatens to upset the applecart sets them off."

Choy and I are speaking on the ferry from Hong Kong to the mainland, where he hopes finally to convince his Chinese partners that the incentive system should be introduced at their business. "Everyone is paid the same at our place, even though many are willing to work harder for more money," says Choy. "But my Chinese government partners don't want to upset those who are lazy by allocating bonuses according to merit. They have their own version of the iron rice bowl, and they don't care if incentives will result in greater productivity and more profit. To a businessman their attitude is insane. But they are happy if they turn just a little profit, because they know that that will satisfy their higher-ups and that everyone will then be covered. Probably the only thing left for me to try is straight corruption."

Which is exactly the conclusion reached long ago by many other joint-venture businessmen. Perhaps the most typical piece of underhanded dealing involves the corruption of customs agents by hotels. "The law says customs can take up to 10% of an imported shipment of perishable items to test for disease," says a Chinese American who co-owns a Sichuan province hotel. To beat the delay and spoilage that can result from complying with such rules, hotel owners regularly pay off customs officials with "free samples."

"You think it's not the same everywhere? Of course it is. Corruption is endemic. It's bad in China, sure, but I still say the mainland people are like Chinese everywhere else in the world: turn 'em loose and they'll earn % trillions." A capitalist's faith expressed by a true capitalist. The speaker is Tommy Quan, 55, a millionaire Chinese American from Seattle known as the "orange king" of Guangdong's Taishan County.

Taishan bills itself accurately as the "home of the overseas Chinese." The county's 960,000 residents have about 1.2 million relatives living abroad, and much as American Jews send money to Israel in lieu of actually moving there, Taishan's "overseas compatriots" have sent millions home. Since 1982 foreign funds have built 500 new schools, 50 hospitals and an indoor soccer stadium.

Rather than send money, Tommy Quan decided to send himself. Until the Communists took over in 1949, Quan lived in a small village of 160 people not far from the Taishan County seat. Then at age 15, Quan and his family immigrated to Seattle. Eventually, Quan owned two thriving restaurants, a ski resort and "more real estate than I can keep track of."

Leaving behind a wife and four children, two of whom are Seattle cops, Quan returned in 1982 to "do something for China -- and myself." But certainly not because of any romantic longing for his roots. "You know what they say about the good old days," he says. "They are the product of bad memory."

Short and powerfully built, Quan can outswear a gale of wind -- and outtalk even the most talkative Chinese. He reminds me of Robert Strauss, the former Democratic national chairman; Quan too, I am convinced, could talk a hungry dog out of a pork chop.

On his way back to China, Quan stopped in California to pick up some orange- tree saplings. "You know the Chinese were the first to grow orange trees," he says. "But like a good deal else that the Chinese invented first, they had forgotten how to do it." Today almost all the villages around Quan's 300-acre farm, which may be the largest private landholding in China, are growing oranges.

Quan spends most evenings in his new two-story home "drinking beer and watching my Rambo tapes, because it's so damn boring here." Many of those who remember Quan and his family from before the revolution think he was crazy to return, despite his roots in Taishan. "Most of my friends here thought I was on the lam when I showed up." Others thought Quan could not possibly have anything to offer. "The Chinese have an incredible superiority complex," he says. "They're backward as hell, but they still believe the world revolves around China. They take great pride in their civilization simply because it is old. It is almost impossible to teach them anything. You have to do what I have done. You show by example, and they pick it up as if they were the ones who had the idea all along. You can't even get them thinking about why, if China was so far ahead of the rest of the world 2,000 years ago, it is so far behind today."

Quan has another claim to local fame: in the middle of his orange groves he has erected a 6-ft. shrine to Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader whose tacit support of the student protesters in Tiananmen Square contributed to his ouster in late June. Near the top of the tiled column is a photograph of Zhao -- with Tommy Quan standing at his side in his Seattle Seahawks cap. "Zhao made it all possible," says Quan. "He showed people that incentives can turn China around. Now that he is out of favor, my friends think I should tear my monument down. No way. I am keeping the faith. Eventually, Zhao will be vindicated. There's no turning back over the long run. The emperors in Beijing won't change the label. They'll still call China Communist. They'll have to do that to keep themselves in power. But we're heading toward capitalism, no matter what they will call it, because finally China is going to opt for what works."

Quan's admiration for Zhao may be a bit too public, but many of the Chinese I meet seem to share it. About 1,000 miles from Quan's farm, in Guanxian, a group of excited Chinese tourists is visiting the Dujiangyan irrigation system -- another marvel of China's ancient genius -- built 2,200 years ago. On a misty morning the tourists can barely make out an aging, abandoned hydroelectric plant about a mile upstream. Like much of what was built by the Soviets during the heyday of Sino-Soviet cooperation in the 1950s, this power station too is crumbling. In fact, the plant had been little used; the Soviet advisers had sited it improperly.

"Zhao would have done it right," says one.

"Great man," says another.

"Quiet," says a retired railroad conductor. "Someone might hear us. Hush up."

"You hush," says an elderly woman. "Zhao will return. You'll see."

Everywhere I go in China, most of the people I encounter, including those aware of what happened in Tiananmen Square, express perfectly understandable human sentiments grounded in fatalism. "As the old proverb goes," says a middle-level government official in Guangdong who holds a master's in political science from an American college, 'Happiness and sorrow flow along the same river.' Do we deplore what the army did in Tiananmen? Of course. Do we wish the government were different, more democratic, more humane? Of course. But what would you have us do? Take to the streets? For what? We have had ten relatively good years of economic growth and domestic tranquillity. Yes, there is some retrenchment now. But consider the previous ten years, the time of the Cultural Revolution, when everything was at its worst. Do we want to return to that? Take to the streets against those with the guns and risk all that we've gained? Who but the hotheads can honestly say such an action would be worth it?"

Three hundred miles south of Beijing, the view from Zouping County is different. Not all Zouping's citizens are true believers, but they appear to revere the army and seemingly remain loyal to the government. Zouping has come far in the Deng era -- it even has a local beer, Hupo, that someday may rival the popularity of Tsingtao in the U.S. (The word on the street has Tsingtao's springwater supply running out in the early 1990s.)

But for all its progress, Zouping represents what can be called an altered sequence of development. Like much of the rest of the country, Zouping is experiencing the telecommunications and electronics revolution before agricultural mechanization. It is possible to stand in a field in Zouping and watch wheat harvested exactly as it was 2,000 years ago, by sickle, and then to look up and see the giant satellite dish that links the town with Beijing's Central Television -- as incongruous a sight as that of Chinese businessmen furiously pedaling their bikes through the capital as they speak on cellular phones.

In the midst of Zouping is a village of 1,100 where Wu Baohua, 57, has been Communist Party secretary for 25 years. Wu is soft-spoken and polite, and his face expresses a sanguine dignity without a trace of self-importance. Then there are his teeth, big strong Jimmy Carter teeth. Separately, each one could win a prize. Taken together, the effect is electric. You could read fine print at the bottom of a well by his grin.

Unlike Guangdong, where Deng's injunction to "seek truth from facts" has led provincial officials to cite "unique local conditions" as a way of drifting as far from Communism as Beijing can tolerate, Wu's village represents the opposite tendency. In many ways it is still a collectivist town. The village employs doctors and covers all medical costs -- a practice $ no longer common in China, where many must pay for health care out of their own pockets. Land is privately owned, but much of its cultivation is accomplished by group effort.

The neighborhood committees that exist almost everywhere in China -- watchdog groups that keep an eye on everyone and everything -- are unnecessary in Wu's village. In tone and in fact, he controls almost every aspect of village life -- and the villagers have prospered thanks to his wisdom. When income from the local ice-cream factory fell short of projections, Wu converted the plant to a successful cotton-fabric operation in six months. When this summer's drought threatened to devastate the village's wheat and vegetable crops, Wu proposed that water from the Yellow River -- unused previously because it was so muddy -- be tapped immediately. Within 36 hours, 4,000 Chinese, including Wu, were digging a new irrigation ditch two miles long. The entire job was completed in twelve hours.

On the wall of one of the newest buildings in Wu's village is a saying widely heard during the Cultural Revolution two decades ago: PREPARE FOR WAR, PREPARE FOR NATURAL DISASTERS, SERVE THE PEOPLE. Wu makes no apologies. "Of course I know the slogan's origins," he says. "But there is nothing wrong with those words. We should use more of what Mao taught. His themes were self- reliance and sacrifice. I say to our leaders, more of that and less riding around in fancy cars.

"What we have today is a lot of talk about ending corruption and nepotism," Wu continues. "Just like we've heard before. But unless we finally get serious about such things, we will never build our New China. We will watch Chinese on the outside rise in even white societies because of their industry and intellect. We will never catch up."

If Beijing is not serious about its anticorruption campaign -- and given the regime's track record, there is little reason to believe it is -- it means only that, like leaders everywhere, China's rulers reflect their culture's values. So, just as the people engage in pretense when dealing with the government, the leadership in turn expends considerable time and energy of its own in going through the motions.

The Cultural Revolution's aftermath makes the point. Very little effort has ever been spent investigating the question of why so many followed so dastardly a design. Personal accounts of the period's horrors have been written ("scar literature" it is called). But unlike the Germans, who have collectively wrestled with the Holocaust's blackest implications for 40 years, the Chinese appear content to let the past rest.

Perhaps because the Chinese are historically indifferent to introspection (as befits a culture where family rather than self is the core of an individual's identity), I never hear a coherent analysis of the Cultural Revolution, an event that so inverted the natural order that parents were shamed, beaten and in some instances even killed by their own children. All I pick up is a line or two about the traditional absence of psychological study in totalitarian societies, and some bits and pieces, mostly about the worship of Mao as a semidivine figure, and tales of the Chairman's senility.

No matter why Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution, what is most interesting today is that the Chairman's successors appear totally uninterested in the question. For the party's present leaders, so expert at rewriting history that they regularly crop from official photographs whoever is currently out of favor, it has been enough to blame a few scapegoats for a decade of chaos and leave it at that.

Those eager to delve further have been rebuffed. When some Shanghai writers proposed a Cultural Revolution museum in 1986, Beijing said no. The leadership apparently fears that any thorough investigation would quickly run to criticism of the current regime and so must be prohibited. The outer boundaries of permissible complaint in China have been set. Anything may be criticized except that which really matters: the right of the party to rule. To today's leaders, the experience of the past demands a straitjacket on political dissent and helps explain why Deng so feared accepting the Tiananmen demonstrators' demand for free expression.

Since bureaucratic sadism is familiar to everyone everywhere, I was somewhat prepared for the denial of a simple request during the 600-mile, 18-hour train trip to Beijing. But I was not prepared for the sheer delight visible on the conductor's face when she said, "Meiyou, the rule does not permit turning on the lights before 7 p.m. and it's only 6:30. You will just have to wait 30 minutes."

"But it's storming outside, it's dark, and it's hard to read."

It is impossible to describe the complete pleasure her smile conveyed. Perhaps she gets a bonus for being a particularly petty bureaucrat. Perhaps she resents foreigners and their privileges. A Chinese train's best accommodations, the "soft sleeper" compartment, in which two bunk beds actually sport linen, are reserved for foreigners and high party and government officials. I could understand her hating such preferential treatment, but then again, she and her colleagues do pretty well because of it. For notwithstanding my status as a foreigner, the "soft sleeper" car was "sold out" until a kind official laid a carton of cigarettes and a small cash "bonus" on the ticket agent. "Funny to you, isn't it?" said the official. "Here I am from one bureau of the government, and I have to help you pay off another bureau to get what the regulations say is yours by right."

Funny? Maybe. But not unexpected. By now, even I understand the role of guanxi in China. I only wonder how the whole system works nearer the throne.

Despite its vast gray Soviet-style tenements and the absence of the imposing wall that enclosed it for a thousand years, Beijing strikes me as China's prettiest and most livable large city. Staggered work shifts are common, and vehicles from outside the city are banned during the day. The avenues are broader, the streets are cleaner. There are even more trees.

To me, Beijing appears normal, not only in the sense that people go about their business apparently oblivious of the martial-law troops who stand at rigid attention under the cover of multicolored beach umbrellas, but because Beijing too exhibits the limits of governmental control. For example, China has strict residency rules. Identity documents guarantee that a person who receives permission to move from his hometown to a new location is still eligible for ration coupons, housing allowances and other subsidies. But even without permission, people have been drawn by the economic reforms to the major cities, and the financial opportunities they have found there more than compensate for their lost stipends. In central Beijing it is estimated that a fifth of the 6 million residents are illegal transients.

It is in the bookstores that one can best see how daily life has outgrown the political system's controls, how the campaign against "spiritual pollution," so rhetorically fierce, is flouted with such abandon. While elsewhere in China, government booklets like The True Story of Tiananmen Square are prominently displayed alongside issues of Vogue, Elle and Glamour, you have to hunt for the lies at Wangfujing, Beijing's largest bookstore. The section labeled "Ideology and Political Education" actually displays books titled Modern Woman, Smart Woman, Handbook on Love and Life and dozens of how- to monographs like Eighty-Eight Points on Developing Public Relations. In other cities the regime appears successful at banishing books and periodicals dealing with "pornography, bourgeois liberalism and feudal superstition." Here one can buy steamy romances, political biographies of discredited leaders -- and seemingly anything ever written by or about Richard Nixon, pro or con.

On the surface, then, totalitarianism in Beijing seems no more oppressive than a constant low-grade fever. Underneath, though, the town seethes. Even the silence is telling. Herded by their supervisors to the military museum's "True Story of Tiananmen Square" exhibit, those I see viewing it are stone-faced. Politically reliable cadres are everywhere, but so are wry smiles, especially when people see a giant blowup photograph of the man who defied a column of tanks, with a caption saying he had been spared because of the army's humanity.

At cinemas, free tickets are distributed for Baise Uprising, a new film extolling Deng's early military career, but even those who attend -- and most of the theaters are half empty -- talk through the movie or read. At work, employees protest by increasing their sick leave and slowing their production. At school, the results of an essay competition glorifying the army's role in Tiananmen are supposed to have been made public weeks ago. Perhaps too many entries reflect the view of an eleven-year-old girl whose grandparents I meet. Her short, three-page paper, reflecting the unpopularity of China's conservative Premier, has Li Peng resigning because he is "too stinking." Most significant of all, perhaps, few people seem to have become informers in spite of a well-advertised Ratters Anonymous network.

While stories like these are everywhere in China, few people but the most emotional predict the regime's imminent collapse -- or even want it. Most who do so live in Beijing, but in this respect at least, the capital seems as representative of China as Manhattan is of the U.S.

The most famous man in China this summer seems to be Xiao Bing, the "rumormonger" who was sentenced to ten years in prison for "exaggerating" the Tiananmen death toll in an interview with ABC News (he said 20,000 had died). Absolutely everyone knows the tale of Xiao. "Xiao Bing makes a point about the future," says an economics professor in Chengdu. "The people in Beijing were there -- and so may be very willing to take to the streets again. But we elsewhere are more cautious. It's not that the propaganda campaign is working. Most of us know full well what went on -- if not the details, then the essence. It is that we have seen how far even Deng, who we thought was a good guy, will go to keep power. It may seem strange -- we are used to executions -- but ten years in jail just for talking sends a powerful signal."

But maybe not powerful enough. My conversation with the professor takes place more or less publicly at a table for twelve in a teahouse in Chengdu, a drab city where the sun rarely shines more than 60 days a year. Instead of smoking and no-smoking sections -- almost everyone in China smokes -- this teahouse sets aside tables for those who want coffee. Unfortunately, we are at one of them. Drinking Chinese coffee is like drinking hot water with a distant memory of caffeine; there is an atavistic link somewhere, but it is not coffee.

While the professor talks about the government's propaganda efforts, his face becomes heavy. His brooding eyes are cast downward, his mouth grows sulky. But not because of the coffee, which he insists is "quite good." What causes the professor to lower his voice to a drone is the presence, at the next table, of a local Communist official. "They say he is honest," says the professor. "They say that he doesn't have a crooked bone in his body. Maybe so, but I am certain those bones are held together by crooked fat."

Nonetheless, the professor wants to make one final point. What resonates for most Chinese, he says, "is when Deng and the others argue that permitting Tiananmen to run its course could have led to chaos and disorder, to another Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution is the benchmark against which everything looks better, the one thing above all that we do not want again."

He is describing a social contract, abhorrent to an American but understandable, even comforting, to many Chinese. In exchange for letting the rulers rule, the subjects will be permitted by the regime to continue the economic progress they have enjoyed for ten years.

But how exactly will the balance be struck? What is a controlled expression of opinion that does not threaten the party's authority? Thousands believed their criticism within bounds when Mao urged freethinking in the mid-1950s campaign known as "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom." Then Deng, whom Mao had / once described as "a needle wrapped in cotton," orchestrated a crackdown that sent many to prison for merely following the Great Helmsman's invitation to criticize.

Most of those I meet seem to believe that despite the current retrenchment, China's economy is evolving into one not unlike South Korea's or Taiwan's. And while neither of those nations offers the political freedoms available in the West, both are light-years ahead of China economically. Is that really where China is going, or will the new resemble the old, a return to the Stalinist economic system that even Mikhail Gorbachev is trying to abandon? Will Deng succeed in anointing party chief Jiang Zemin as his successor, and would Jiang, in power, affirm continued economic liberalism?

"If the retrenchment worsens and if the economy fails, if Premier Li stops Jiang's succession, then all bets are off for Deng and his cronies," says the Chengdu professor. "Deng got the point that Communism doesn't work, that it tries to change human nature. He got the point about incentive. The problem is that many of the other old guys don't like his views and never have. And right now they are trying to force a serious turn back, and they're using the ammunition of a faltering economy. Well, the macroeconomic numbers are indeed bad, but most people have conveniences they have never had and never dreamed they would have. The stores are full of goods, and you still see many people buying. But most want more, and having now been exposed to the outside world, they know very well what more means."

Forty years ago this Sunday, Mao Zedong stood on a balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square and said, "The Chinese people have stood up, and the future of our nation is infinitely brighter." Infinitely messier is closer to the mark today. The economy's course is uncertain. Provincial and municipal governments will surely pursue their own interests despite efforts to restrain them. The party, with its ideology bankrupt, offers only order and is begging for faith -- and not getting it. How long can a government like that retain control and stay in power? "A regime that . . . is forced to fire on the young, who protest in the name of liberty," said French President Francois Mitterrand after Tiananmen, "has no future."

Yes, but how long, exactly? The Chinese live in a cage. Some farsighted policies have expanded the cage beyond what anyone would have imagined a decade ago. But it is still a cage, and even if it continues to expand, how long will an increasingly modern nation be content to live behind bars?

"I don't know," said an 88-year-old man in a Beijing park. It was early morning, and along with a score of others, the old man was exercising his birds -- by illusion. The men walked about and swung their birdcages. The movement is said to convince the birds inside that they are free. "We trick them, you know," he said. "How long can they stay fooled? Who knows? Maybe they hope. Like us. We hope. I hope. But you know, in China it is dangerous to hope. Your heart is always being broken." I said I knew.