Riding the Iron Rooster

13: The Peking Express: Train Number 16

And then there were a number of public events that shocked the country. I did not set off immediately. It is so easy to be proven wrong in China. No sooner had I concluded that China was prospering and reforming, that people were freer and foreign investment rising, than the country was in crisis. True, some aspects of China never changed — the rice planters bent double, the weeder on his stool, the boy pedaling his 2000-year-Old irrigation pump, the buffalo man, the duck-herd. But in the months before I left Canton to resume my Chinese travels, the yuan was devalued by thirty percent — instead of three to the dollar there were now almost four — and the black market in hard currency was very brisk, and the most common greeting "Shansh marnie?" People were criticized for wanting to go abroad, and a law was passed requiring potential students to post a bond of 5000 yuan — an enormous sum — before they could study in another country. Foreign investment dropped by twenty percent, and Deng Xiaoping criticized Chinese manufacturers for producing shoddy goods that no one wanted.

And the students demonstrated, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. The demonstrations were orderly, but the defiance implicit in such illegal gatherings was seen to be a sign of chaos. The Chinese horror of disorder made them seem important, though I felt the parades and demands were mostly half-baked. Traditionally, December and January have been regarded by the Chinese as appropriate months for disruption, and so there was a ritual end-of-term element in the demonstrations — high spirits, funny hats, a measure of farce. The grievances were numerous, and on posters and in their chanting, the students demanded press freedom, electoral re-form, a multiparty system, and official permission to demonstrate. Banners reading We Want Democracy were flown. They demanded sexual freedom and better food in the university cafeterias. Eight cities were affected, and the size of the demonstrations varied from a few hundred students in Canton to well over 100,000 (and an equal number of spectators) in Shanghai, which came to a standstill for a full day.

The Chinese government, with its liking for scapegoats (so much more economical than a full-scale witch-hunt), blamed one man for the country-wide outbreak. This was Dr. Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist and vice president of the National Science and Technical University in Hefei. He had been very busy. He had written articles in China Youth News criticizing students for having "low democratic consciousness." He lectured his own students at Hefei, and just a month before the demonstrations he had addressed students at Jiaotong University in Shanghai.

Dr. Fang's message was a mixture of noble sentiments and platitudes. Among other things, he said, "Men are born with rights — to live, to marry, to think, to receive an education," and that the only way for China "to transform the feudalistic ideas and gradually approach modern standards in thinking" was for its intellectuals "to demonstrate the strength they possess." He replied that government leaders were not above criticism.

"Democracy can be achieved only gradually through consistent effort," he said. "There is nothing to be afraid of. Criticizing government leaders is a symbol of democracy. I hold the view that we may criticize leaders."

The abusive term for such sentiments is "bourgeois liberalism" — a sort of selfish and privileged complaining. Soon after Dr. Fang gave the speech, the People's Daily attacked "the trend towards bourgeois liberalization." In the Chinese mind a person who holds liberal views is a rightist and a person who toes the Party line most strictly is a leftist.

Dr. Fang was vilified. Taiwan was blamed for fomenting trouble. The government papers said it was partly the work of "professional hooligans." In Shanghai a worker at a lacquerware factory was arrested as a counterrevolutionary for establishing his own political party, the Weimin (Defend the People) Patty. He was the only member of this party, but still it was no joke. Starting your own party meant that you intended to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party. That was treason, and the penalty for it was a bullet in the neck.

The very fact that the demonstrations were mentioned in the news was a sign that the government was alarmed. It was fairly well known that one of the demands of the Peking students was that the demonstrations would be reported in the newspapers. Disturbances of any kind had been hushed up in the past. At first, the government sent water trucks to Peking's Tiananmen Square at four in the morning. The paving stones were drenched, and the ice that resulted seemed like a guarantee that the students would fall down when they tried to march. But 3000 students appeared later that morning and kept their footing, and when 34 were arrested and hauled off to be interrogated another demonstration was mounted; more signs, more slogans, and the 34 were released.

The most worrying thing for the government was that in Shanghai both factory workers and students — not natural allies — had come together and marched in the same parade. To ingratiate themselves with the factory workers, the government blamed the students. The mayor of Shanghai addressed a large gathering of students and was heckled. "Who elected you?" a student called out. That was regarded as very shocking, because it is a total lapse of taste to suggest that someone like the mayor (who is appointed by the Central Government) is a Party hack.

The demonstrations were peaceful. Furthermore, they were essentially supporting Deng's policies of reform. "Bourgeois liberalization" was just what the government had been encouraging. But the government did not want to be seen this way, permitting arch-unrepentent capitalist-roaders, behind-the-scenes reactionaries, harbingers of feudalism, running dogs, those left in form but right in essence and promoters of the right-deviationist wing — to use the convenient Chinese categories — to flourish. It was, as far as I could see, the most recent example of the Chinese not knowing when to stop — first the government, then the students.

There was a suspicion that behind it all was a power struggle in the Chinese leadership. The students were being manipulated, not by Dr. Fang (who was fired from his university job and then expelled from the Party), but by leftists who wanted to discredit the reforming rightist Mr. Deng. Or was it the rightists who were inciting the students in order to provoke the leftists into overreacting?

I decided to find out for myself.

On a hot muggy winter day in Canton I went to Zhongshan University, south of the city on the opposite bank of the Pearl River, to see whether the students were still rioting. They were not. It was very placid under the eucalyptus trees. The students were cycling and punching volleyballs and jogging. They were doing their laundry, they were smooching, they were studying. Some of them stared at me. They had few inhibitions. They even talked about the demonstrations. They said their own professors were critical of the government and especially the official policy of suppressing or misreporting the news.

"How do they know it's misreported?" I asked.

"Because we know the truth," a student said. "We listen to Hong Kong news here."

The Hong Kong stations came in loud and clear in Canton, and some Hong Kong newspapers circulated in the city, as well.

A student who called himself Andrew — he was a Cantonese fellow named Hen To — said, "I'll tell you anything you want to know about the demonstration here."

I liked his attitude, but there was not much to tell. He said the students in the south were complacent and money minded, not furiously political as in the north.

"We only had two hundred students in our demonstration," he said. "After they made a fuss here they marched to the government offices in town and sang songs. It wasn't much — not as big as Shanghai or Peking."

"What did the students say they wanted?"

"Democracy and reform," Andrew said.

"But China is changing very fast," I said.

"That's what the old people think," he said. "We young people say it is changing too slowly. But that is the government policy. They want China to look stable so that foreign investment will be encouraged. No one will put money into China if there are riots."

I asked him his plans.

"I'd like to take up business," he said. "Import and export."

"You might make a lot of money."

"I hope so."

"Then you'll become a capitalist-roader."

"Maybe," he said, and snickered. "I think we have a lot to learn. We want to use the good features of capitalism but not the bad ones."

"Is that possible?"

"We can try."

That was the new thinking—"To be rich is glorious," was a politically okay slogan. It was the philosophy of the young, of the rising students, and even of many farmers. It was the essence of Deng's thinking, too. It was in total opposition to Mao's philosophy, and it was one of the reasons Shaoshan had no visitors.

Andrew saw himself as an individual, with his own needs and desires. He didn't say what every student had said for the past thirty-five years when asked about their ambitions: "Serve the people." He said "business," "money," "import-export." He was fairly open-minded. He studied hard. He liked his fellow students. He lived in a room with seven others and did his homework in the library. His favorite author was Mark Twain. In the movie theater on campus (built by a Hong Kong tycoon named Leung) he had seen On Golden Pond, Superman and Rambo.

I said that Rambo represented everything that I loathed.

"But he is strong," Andrew said. "His body is interesting. The way he looks. The things he does."

That was a point, the freakishness of it; but I said, "Do you realize that it was about Vietnam?"

"Yes."

"So doesn't that make it a reactionary, bourgeois, violently imperialistic movie?"

Andrew shrugged and said, "We don't take it that seriously."

He was twenty-one years old. His parents, as teachers, had been singled out during the Cultural Revolution.

I said, "They were The Stinking Ninth."

"Yes," he said. He knew exactly what I meant. Mao decreed nine categories of enemy: landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents, capitalist-roaders, and — The Stinking Ninth — intellectuals. It is a strange list, because it seems to embrace the whole of humanity.

His parents had been rusticated — sent shoveling. They had fared better than the brother of my friend Miss Zhong, who had been locked in a broom cupboard right here at Zhongshan University by Maoists. His crime was that he was the son of a man who had once been a Guomindang politician. He was kept in the broom cupboard for two years and, after a severe interrogation, he hanged himself.

I told Andrew the tale. He said that it was not an unusual story. Well, that was true enough, but it made me feel once again that wherever I was in China I was among ghosts.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" I asked.

"No," Andrew said, and I could tell that he meant it.

He wasn't superstitious, he wasn't spiritual, and he certainly wasn't political — there was no future in Chinese politics. He was practical. His was the first generation in China to grow up with no dogma — no emperor, no gods, no chairman; no Taoism, no Maoism, no Buddhism. Nor had Andrew's generation been touched in the least by Christianity. Democracy was such a long shot that Andrew had not bothered to take part in the student demonstrations. His realism was a kind of glumness.

That night I wondered what would become of him. But of course it was very obvious. If he went into business and made some money he would prosper in a small way and raise a one-child family. He would not use expressions like Serve the people. He would regard himself as an intellectual (zhishi fenzi), the grandiose term the Chinese use for anyone who does not work with their hands. If he was self-employed, as he wanted to be, he would probably work hard. On holidays he would visit hotels like mine, where they had "holiday specials" — Christmas banquets, New Year's parties ("free hats, favors, racket-makers") and a "New Year's Day Champagne Brunch Buffet" at 28 yuan a throw.

One of the worst aspects of living in brisk, dictatorial China is that you seldom have an accurate idea of what is really going on. It is not that the Chinese government is inscrutable. Lazy travelers and visitors love Chinese mysteries, but the Chinese are quite knowable. And Chinese bureaucrats are among the most scrutable and obvious on earth. And yet anyone must find the Chinese média obfuscatory and unforthcoming. The Chinese people manage to keep abreast of events by depending on telepathy and whispers, and by the politburo hyperbole: if a high official is said to have a cold he's likely been fired; if he is "convalescing" he has been exiled; and if he is "extremely ill" he is about to be murdered.

And liberal does not mean liberal or open-minded. The connotations of the term, which is based on the Chinese characters for freedom (ziyou), are entirely negative, implying license or licentiousness. A Chinese official and most American Republicans would agree on what the word liberal implies. For Mao it was a term of abuse.

Meanwhile, the fuss over the students had not died down — the government was still ranting. But there was no public defiance. The Chinese had that squinting wind-in-the-face expression that they assumed when they were at their most resigned. No one on earth is more silent than a silent Chinese. I asked my usual provocative questions, but made little headway. I was sure a power struggle was in progress, because the eighty-three-year-old Deng Xiaoping had still not named his successor.

A Hong Kong student at Canton Station told me, "The government has denied that there is any problem."

"Then there must be a problem," I said. "Never believe anything in China until it has been officially denied."

We were waiting for the Peking Express on this humid winter night in Canton. It was said to be one of the best trains in China. It was the old Huguang Railway line. This was a thirty-six-hour trip — two nights on the train, which went 1500 miles, passing through five provinces, bisecting China from bottom to top and crossing the Yangtze River at Wuhan.

Some visitors to China laugh when you tell them you're taking a two-day trip on a train, and then they are delayed for five days at a Chinese airport, waiting for the fog to lift. Everyone who takes a plane in China has an airplane tale of woe.

The only bad moment the train passenger has is on the platform, when the other passengers are boarding. Which ones will be in your compartment? It is a much more critical lottery than a blind date, because these people will be eating and sleeping with you. I had seen lepers on trains, and bratty children and, on the way to Guilin, a man traveling with five parrots and no cage.

I watched the people boarding. The old woman in the padded jacket, carrying a lunch tin — some pungent stuff in there, chicken-foot stew, Cantonese cow tendon, and highly prized rotten eggs wrapped in seaweed. There was a spiv in sunglasses with a radio, a man with three suitcases and a crate of bananas; a salesman with his case of samples — rubber bungs, probably; three ornery mustached men wearing high-heeled shoes; a small family — haggard father, mother with pin-curl perm, and spoiled child snatching at things that moved. The harassed spiky-haired student; the fat-faced Party hack in the Mao suit; the secret drinker with swollen eyes; the pretty girl traveling with her dragonlike grandmother; the plump boys in new eyeglasses from Hong Kong; the physics prof on his way to a conference; the loud-voiced Chinese-American who speaks only a few words of Cantonese but uses them on everyone; the middle-aged Japanese couple, looking wrinkle-proof but anxious; the students returning from overseas loaded with duty-free presents, Western clothes and a musical suitcase; the skinny, smiling and lovably ineffectual-looking soldiers of the People's Liberation Army — it is impossible to feel threatened by soldiers whose uniforms are four sizes too big.

I was assigned to a compartment with some salesmen. One was the Chinese version of Willy Loman, and another was a frisky man who smiled too much and said, "I'm in machine tools," just as his American counterpart would do. There was a third man who was practically invisible, reminding me of how the Chinese to a large extent have perfected the art of living at close quarters.

Mr. Yeo, the machine-tool man, admired my sweater ("Nice one. Good quality. Very warm. You'll need it in Peking") and was full of direct questions: "You're — what? About thirty-five? Any children?"

He handed me an envelope of pemmican, as a sort of get-acquainted gift, shared his tea with me, and accepted a chocolate bar in return. I thought he might be exhaustingly friendly, but he slept through most of the trip and snored loudly. The Willy Loman character also slept a great deal, but woke at four in the morning and did lazy calisthenics, wagging his head and slapping his forearms. He was in feedstuffs and cereals. His luggage — both boxes and suitcases — filled the luggage shelf. He was very solemn except when I caught his eye. Then he broke into a laugh and gave me a broad smile. His laugh was urgent and meant: No questions, please! As soon as he turned away he frowned. That was also very Chinese.

The first night there was a tremendous amount of snoring in our compartment. From time to time it woke me with its flapping wind. It was louder than the clanging wheels of the train. But I slept soundly the rest of the time and didn't get up until nine.

The train was so cold that morning the windows were streaming with condensation. I shaved in cold water — but it was always cold — and in midmorning we arrived at Changsha, where I had been some months before on my way to Mao's birthplace. It had been steamy and dismal in the summer. In the winter it was smoggy and brown and much uglier. The words a Chinese city had acquired a peculiar horror for me, like Russian toilet, or Turkish prison, or journalist's ethics. In the cold rain of winter, with the cracked and sooty apartment houses, the muddy streets, the skinny trees and dark brown sky, Chinese cities are at their very worst.

But this city was the signal for the attendants to stoke the fires, and as soon as the coach was reasonably warm the passengers threw their clothes off and clomped around in plastic shoes and wrinkled pajamas. They propped themselves in the draft between the coaches and brushed their teeth. Some practiced t'ai chi in the corridors.

The dining car was crowded at lunchtime. Although there were no tourists on the train and everyone wore old clothes — shouting and spitting and blowing smoke into each other's faces — they were also flinging money around. I guessed that they were mainly Cantonese, on this profitable business route: Guangdong was a producer of goods and Peking a lucrative outlet. These scruffy passengers were all in business. The man next to me paid almost 20 yuan for a meal for himself and his wife. Call it five bucks and it doesn't seem much; but for a Chinese it was nearly a week's pay. He was a grizzled man with matted hair. He smoked and ate at the same time — chopsticks in one hand, cigarette in the other. His small boy did not eat. This little irritant dug out all the toothpicks from the plastic holder and threw them on the floor; then tipped over a glass of water; and then began smacking an ashtray against the table and squawking. He was about five or six. His father laughed at this obstreperousness — very un-Chinese. But that was not the only uncharacteristic behavior in this rowdy train. It was also full of drunks, and not only beer drinkers, but also old men getting plastered on the rice wine they had brought with them.

I read and dozed and woke up in the north of Hunan, at the city of Yueyang, which was a gray town surrounded by fat, shadowy mountains. A few hours later we came to Wuhan. I had been there once before, in 1980. It had seemed to me a nightmare city of muddy streets and black factories, pouring frothy poisons into the Yangtze. It was bigger than I remembered it, but not so black. There were dozens of high-level cranes putting up new buildings, including a hospital.

The Yangtze is almost a mile wide at Wuhan, and on its banks it has landing stages and flights of steps that resemble the ghats on the Ganges. On the Hankou side there were also many new buildings, and there were cars in the streets — I remembered the wagons and carts, pulled by old women. The buildings and the traffic jams were not necessarily improvements, but they made a difference. Modernization did not make any Chinese city look less horrific; many cities looked more so as a result of building schemes.

It was cold enough in Wuhan for people to be wearing mittens and boots. That was what the salesmen in my compartment were wearing when they got out, pulling their suitcases through the windows. They did it clumsily. They were bemused by the sight of a girl walking along the platform, carrying a dead fish.

Before we pulled out of Wuhan the sleeping-car attendant roused me and said I had to move.

"You are in the wrong berth," she said.

"I am in the right berth," I said. I knew she wanted to move me, but I saw no reason she should put me in the wrong. I made her compare my ticket with the berth number, and I created a hoo-hah so that I would have the satisfaction of hearing her apologize.

"It is a mistake," she said, ambiguously, and led me to a compartment that held a man, a woman and an infant.

"How old is that baby?"

"Two weeks."

The baby was snoring. After a while it began to cry. The man took a bottle out and fed it, and the child's mother left the compartment.

That was how it went. The man did everything for this baby, which was wrapped in a thick quilt like a papoose. The man fed it, changed it and dandled it. The woman hung around and lazed, and several times I saw her sleeping in the Hard Class coach that adjoined ours. Perhaps the woman was ill. I did not want to ask. The man took charge.

"It's a boy," he said, when he was feeding it.

I hadn't asked.

He was a doctor. His wife was also a doctor. He worked in Peking, his wife in Canton; and he had gone to Canton to be present for the birth. Now they were all going back to Peking for a few months — the woman's maternity leave. There were feeding bottles, baby powder and cans of soluble milk formula all over the compartment. They used disposable diapers, which they discarded in a bucket under my bed. I did not mind; I like the milky smell of babies, and I was very touched by the love and attention that this man gave the child.

I read on my bunk while the man burped his baby and the woman looked on. I drank Cantonese sherry. It was like being in a cabin in the woods with this little family. For dinner I had the speciality of this train, "iron dish chicken pieces" — a hot iron platter of chicken, sizzling in fat. The dining car was very congenial — steam, shouting, beer fizzing, cigarette smoke, waiters banging dishes down and snatching empty plates away.

The two men at my table were young and half-drunk. I liked these crowded dining cars rushing through the night, and the food being dished out, and people stuffing themselves.

"We sell light bulbs and light fittings," one of the men said. "We are heading home after a week's selling."

"Where is home?" I asked.

"Harbin."

"I am going there," I said. "I want to see the ice festival and the forest."

"It's too cold to see anything," the other man said. "You will just want to stay in your room."

"That's a challenge," I said. "Anyway — how cold is it?"

"Thirty below — centigrade," he said, and he poured me some of his beer and clinked glasses.

By then I had taken for granted the friendliness of the Chinese. Their attentions were sometimes bewildering, as when they leaned over my shoulder trying to read what I was scribbling in my notebook, or pressed their damp faces against my book, fascinated by the English words. But their curiosity and good will were genuine.

"Do you travel much?" I asked.

"Yes. All over. But not outside," the first man said. "I'd like to but I can't."

"Where would you go?"

"Japan."

That surprised me. My reaction must have shown on my face, because the Chinese salesman wanted to know what I thought of his choice of country. I said, "I find the Japanese can be very irritating."

"The Americans dropped an atomic bomb on them."

"That was too bad, but they started the war by bombing Pearl Harbor, didn't they, comrade?"

"That's true!" the second man said. "The same day they captured Shanghai."

It was considered bad manners in China to say disparaging things about any foreign country, particularly to someone who was himself a foreigner. That was why the men cackled. It was naughty to run down the Japanese! It was fun! We sat there yakking until the rest of the people left the dining car. Then we stopped by Xinyang. We had gone from Hubei Province into Henan. This station was covered in black ice and slushy snow — quite a change from the palm trees and dragonflies of Canton a few days ago.

In my compartment the man was snuggled up with his infant son, and his wife lay sleeping in the upper berth. All night the man attended to the infant. They slept together, the child snickering and snorting the way babies do. From time to time the man swung his legs over and mixed a batch of Nestle's Lactogen, using hot water from the tea thermos and an enamel cup. He was considerate: he did not switch on the light — he used the light from the corridor. The baby's fussing increased, and then the father eased the bottle into the baby's mouth and there came a satisfied snorting. The father was very patient. The train stopped and started, was delayed at sidings, waiting for a southbound express to go through, and then rattled on to the whistles of lonely freight trains. In the darkness, the man spoke softly to his child, sang to him, and when the child grew sleepy he tucked him into the berth and crept in beside him.

The muffled sounds in the morning, and the cold drafts — and there was something eerie about the daylight, too — were all produced by the falling snow. The train was battling through this snowstorm: it was beautiful — just as though the train were plowing through surf in a stormy ocean.

The loudspeaker had come on. The morning exercises were over. The comedy program with its canned laughter had ended. It was now playing music. The selections from Carmen were followed by "Rhinestone Cowboy," "Green, Green Grass of Home," "Ave Maria," and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"

I drank green tea and watched the storm abate, but as it did the weather seemed to turn colder. The ground was that pale brown of hard frozen earth, the trees stark and slender against the snow. The towns and cities lost their nightmarishness beneath the snow. But nothing else changed; nothing stopped because of the storm. There were donkeys pulling hay carts, workers crowding into factories, children tramping through fields on their way to school (wearing wool caps and carrying book bags), and lots of people cycled through the snow, down partly cleared roads.

The sky was the color of ashes. For a few minutes the sun appeared, materializing into a perfectly round but very dim orange, like an old light bulb that is about to blow. It hung there and then trembled and withdrew into the rags of cloud.

The train was still very noisy. A man was shouting — he wasn't angry, just carrying on a normal conversation. It occurred to me that this is how many prisons must be. The voice of authority was always barking over the loudspeaker, there was always a crush of people, never any privacy. It made travel in China a strange experience for anyone used to silence and privacy.

As we approached Peking, the frozen fields and furrows were emphasized by the snow, and in the coal yards beside the line, men were hacking at coal piles with picks and shovels. The snow wasn't deep — just a few inches of hard-packed stuff, because of the high winds. And then in the distance, through the smoky air, I could see the cranes and derricks of the rising city.

Because it is a flat, dry, northern city, at the edge of Mongolia, Peking has beautiful skies. They are bluest in the freezing air of winter. China's old euphemism for itself was Tianxta, "All Beneath the Sky" — and, on a good day, what a sky! It was limpid, like an ocean of air, but seamless and unwrinkled, without a single wavelet of cloud;endless uncluttered fathoms of it that grew icier through the day and then, at the end of the winter afternoon, turned to dust.

Thinking it would be empty, I went to see the Great Wall again. Doctor Johnson told Boswell how eager he was to go to China and see the Wall. Boswell was not so sure himself. How could he justify going to China when he had children at home to take care of?

"Sir," Doctor Johnson said, "by doing so [going to China] you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the Wall of China. I am serious, sir."

The Wall is an intimidating thing, less a fortification than a visual statement, announcing imperiously: I am the Son of Heaven and this is the proof that I can encircle the earth. It somewhat resembles, in intention, the sort of achievement of that barmy man who gift wrapped the Golden Gate Bridge. The Wall goes steeply up and down mountainsides. To what purpose? Certainly not to repel invaders, who could never cling to those cliffs. Wasn't it another example of the Chinese love of taking possession of the land and whipping it into shape?

Anyway, the Wall was not empty. It swarmed with tourists. They scampered on it and darkened it like fleas on a dead snake.

That gave me an idea. "Snake" was very close, but what it actually looked like was a dragon. The dragon is the favorite Chinese creature ("just after man in the hierarchy of living beings"), and until fairly recently — eighty or a hundred years ago — the Chinese believed dragons existed. Many people reported seeing them alive, and of course fossilized dragon skeletons had been unearthed. The dragon was a good omen and, especially, a guardian. It is one of China's friendliest and most enduring symbols. The marauding dragon and the dragon-slayer are unknown in China. And I found a bewitching similarity between the Chinese dragon and the Great Wall of China — the way it flexed and slithered up and down the Mongolian mountains; the way its crenellations looked like the fins on a dragon's back, and its bricks like scales; the way it looked serpentine and protective, undulating endlessly from one end of the world to the other.

On the way back from the Wall I decided to stop at Peking University, where there had been student disruption. The campus was at the edge of the city, in a parklike setting, with pines and little man-made hills and a lovely lake. The lake was frozen. Skinny, panting students, with red cheeks and bobbing earflaps, slipped and skated on the ice.

I watched them with an American teacher named Roy who said, "They do have grievances. They want to believe what they read in the papers and hear on the news. At the moment, they get it all from the VOA and BBC. They want to trust their own government — and they don't. They want to believe that the reforms that have begun with Deng are going to continue."

There were three theories to explain the sudden student discontent. One: that, as Roy said, the students really did have grievances. Two: that the government was divided and the students were being used by the liberal elements to test the conservatives. Three: that the disruptions were the work of conservative elements who wanted to discredit the liberals.

I was persuaded that the students had demonstrated on their own initiative. Their grievances were genuine bur muddled.

"They were really frightened," Roy said. "They didn't think they'd be arrested, but some were. They didn't think the police would push them around — but the police beat some of them and abused others. They know that if it happens again they will be arrested and not released. That scares them. It means they'll be kicked out of the university."

"The right to demonstrate is written into the constitution," I said.

"Sure, but it requires five days' notice, and the students have to submit their names in advance," Roy said. "So the government will know exactly who the ringleaders are."

The students were going around and around on the ice, shrieking and skidding.

"There won't be any more demonstrations," Roy said. "They're too scared. But it was interesting. They tested their freedoms and discovered they didn't have any."

The students would not tell me their names — well, who could blame them for being suspicious? They stood on the ice of Weiming Hu and became circumspect when I changed the subject from the weather to their discontent.

One boy told me he was "a small leader." He said he was a philosophy student and had been in the demonstration as well as its aftermath, when about 500 students had returned to Tiananmen Square and held a vigil from the night of January first until the early morning of January second, when the news came of their fellow students' release from police custody.

"Our teachers support us but they are afraid to say so," he said. "Officially they are said to condemn us. But the government misreports everything. They said there were three hundred students in the first demonstration when there were actually three thousand."

I said, "Do you think this repression is an effect of socialist policies?"

"I am not allowed to answer that," he said. "But I can tell you that the trouble with a lot of Chinese students is that they don't have a will to power."

Perhaps he was quoting Nietzsche from his readings in philosophy. And then I asked whether he thought that the students were too frightened, as Roy had said, to hold any more demonstrations.

"There will be more," he said. "Many more."

A moment later he was gone, and I talked with other students. They were jolly, frozen-faced youngsters on old, floppy skates. To ingratiate myself with them I borrowed a pair of skates, and seeing me fall down and make an ass of myself, they became very friendly. What did I think of China? they asked. How did American students compare with Chinese students? Did I like the food? Could I use chopsticks? What was my favorite city in China? They were goofy and lovable, with crooked teeth and cold, white hands. When I asked them whether they had girlfriends they averted their faces and giggled. They did not seem like counterrevolutionaries.

I had repeatedly requested a High-Level Meeting — that is, a chance to talk with an important government official. In the past my request had done nothing more than make certain people suspicious. What was I doing in China? they demanded to know. They had asked me for my itinerary. Using an extremely clever if somewhat fanciful Chinese technique for ensnaring awkward visitors, they insisted that I was too important to travel alone and so stuck me with Mr. Fang. He had gone back to his desk in Peking: he did not know that I was still in China. Now I was traveling on my own.

I risked asking for a High-Level Meeting once more, hoping that they would not pounce on me and give me another nanny or babysitter. I received a message telling me to report to Comrade Bai at the well-known Ministry of Truth. I was told that I could ask anything I liked.

Before I left for the ministry I asked a Chinese friend what questions I should put to the official. He said, "No matter what you ask him you will find his answers in the People's Daily"

The taxi driver who took me to the Ministry of Truth was impressed by the address I had given him. He said, "Can you meet American officials as easily as this?"

I told him truthfully that I had never met a really high government official in Washington — that I had never gotten the urge to meet one. It was only in foreign countries that such things seemed important. But the fact was that I had spent all my time talking to people on trains, or farmers, or market traders, or kids playing in parks, or students. They were the people who really mattered; but it was absurd to spend a year going up and down in China and not talk with an official and hear the Party line.

"What would you ask this official if you could?"

The driver said, "About the future."

"What about the future?"

"Will I be all right? Will the reforms continue? Will we have more democracy? What about prices? And" — he started to laugh—"how can I get a new license for my taxi?"

I was met by Comrade Bai, a little fellow in a blue Mao suit. He explained that he was not the official — certainly not the high official, he added anxiously, and he breathed noisily through his clenched teeth. Then he laughed. It was the Chinese laugh of warning.

Comrade Bai led me to a ministerial reception room, and then he went to tell the high official that I had arrived.

Comrade Hu entered with a flourish, gesturing for me to return to my plump armchair. He was about fifty or so, and had Deng Xiaoping's broad, tomcat face and unblinking eyes. It was obvious that he was a Party man in the new mold: he wore a gray Western-style suit and speckled tie in the manner of the rising Mr. Zhao Ziyang. He seemed brisk and even a bit impatient, but he was candid, and his English was fluent.

After our opening pleasantries I asked him about the relations between China and the Soviet Union. He said there was trade between the two countries, but that there were political obstacles— Soviet aid to Vietnam, the Afghanistan business, and troops in Mongolia.

"The Soviets make a big mistake in thinking that their kind of socialism can be exported to other countries," he said. "It doesn't work."

"Can Chinese socialism be exported?" I asked.

"We do not force our ideas on other people," he said.

I then asked him a roundabout question, wondering whether the government was alarmed by the recent disturbances.

"Perhaps you are referring to the events in Peking and elsewhere caused by the students," he said, and he explained, "China is in the first stage of socialism — we are just beginning to develop. In some ways, we are underdeveloped and we are proceeding slowly and carefully. In the countryside the reforms have gone smoothly. But in cities much remains to be done."

"How long will this stage of socialism last?"

"Until we achieve our target," he said. He told me the statistics, the income figures and projections; but in an uncertain world such numbers seemed meaningless to me. It was not just inflation that he seemed to be ignoring but the rising expectations of the Chinese people.

I said, "Does it seem to you that the Chinese people are too impatient for changes to come about?"

"Some are very impatient," he said. "Especially the students. What do these students know about democracy? They are speaking in a very abstract way. They lack concrete ideas."

"Do you think the students don't understand democracy?"

"In each country there is a strict definition of democracy," he said. "You have yours in the United States. We must have ours in China."

"So you think student demonstrations are really dangerous?"

"Some elements could get out of hand," Comrade Hu said. "They could bring disorder. If there is no control there could be chaos — everyone doing as he likes. That could produce another Cultural Revolution."

I did not see the logic in this. Wasn't it the other way around? If the government kept the lid on and the so-called ultraleftists succeeded in suppressing the students, a Cultural Revolution was much more likely. He was using the Cultural Revolution as a frightener. But I got nowhere in trying to pursue this with him.

"You must read more," he said. "You must examine our Four Guiding Principles."

"I have read them," I said. That particular pamphlet, in five languages (including one of China's favorites, Esperanto) was in the waiting room of most railway stations. I had plenty of opportunities to read it. "I meant to ask you about that. Guiding principle number four mentions Marxism-Leninism and Mao's thought."

Comrade Hu's eyes were fixed upon me. The name Mao in China always concentrated people's attention. It was probably the single most powerful syllable in China.

I said, "I was wondering which of Mao's thoughts seemed especially pertinent today."

"One cannot summarize Mao's thought," he said smoothly. "It is too subtle and wide ranging. Mao wrote about everything." But when I pressed him, he said, "His essay 'On Practice' is one which contains the essence of his thought, and that is something we can be guided by these days."

That essay is an argument for action, I found, when I read it later. It is about learning by doing; and "practice" is like a synonym for living, in this down-to-earth approach to running a society. It is a tract against handbooks, against bookishness of any kind — Mao loved literature but hated books. Mao seemed to sum up the essay when he wrote, "All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience." It was a struggler's motto, and rather a good one, I thought: action was everything. It was also a good motto for a traveler.

"You must remember that China is unique," Comrade Hu said. "There is no model for China. We have to solve our problems in our own way."

I said, "Do you think it's a problem that China seeks the West's technology but not its ideology or influence?"

"No problem at all," he said breezily.

"But surely there have been negative influences that have come to China with the new technology."

"We have to educate people to make a distinction between what is good and what is bad influence."

The word educate in China always seemed to me somewhat ambiguous. Education was sometimes classroom work; but just as often it was prison, the workhouse, exile or even (as Deng had frankly emphasized) a bullet in the back of the neck.

"What do you think is especially decadent about Western culture?" I asked, hoping to provoke him.

"The music of Beethoven is good, and so are many other things," Comrade Hu said. "And I don't think drugs or violence are specifically Western. They are by-products. We can do without them — and prostitution, too."

Remembering what the taxi driver had said, I asked, "Will the reforms continue to increase or might they diminish?"

"They will continue as they are," Comrade Hu said. "We want to keep our open policy. We want trade with the United States to expand. We believe in reform — we want a growth rate of seven or eight percent."

There was an idea current among Chinese bureaucrats that the sole purpose of political reform was to produce economic growth. It had nothing to do with enlightenment, or people's minds, or the happy imagination. If liberalization did not yield material prosperity — a chicken in every pot — they would just put the screws on again. I talked around this subject but I was not sure where Comrade Hu stood on the issue, and indeed I had begun to be rather careful in my questions, for what they revealed about me.

He made me feel young, somewhat reckless and sceptical in just the same way my father had when I was sixteen. We were uneasily like father and son. There is something in the very nature of Chinese authority that makes anyone who asks questions seem childishly naive and credulous, not to say dangerous.

We talked about travel in China. He asked me about my experiences, and were they favorable? I said yes they were, and I gave him a few examples from the various trains I had ridden.

Comrade Hu said, "You have been to more places in China than I have."

"I'm sure that's not true," I said.

"It's true," he said. "I haven't traveled much."

"Have you been to Urumchi?"

"No."

"What about Langxiang in Heilongjiang?" It was a small logging town in the far north that I aimed to visit.

"I have never heard of it," Comrade Hu said.

"Tibet?"

He shook his head: No. "But I have traveled abroad a great deal."

He clawed his cuff in an obvious way and conspicuously consulted his watch. So I said that I was grateful for his valuable time, but that I had to go. He rose and took me to the door.

"You have interesting views," I said. "I am sure people will be fascinated by them."

"No, no, no," he said, smiling for the first time since I had entered the room — but it was of course a smile of anxiety. "Don't quote me."

"Not at all?"

"No. This is a private conversation."

"What about your mention of Mao's essay. 'On Practice'? I thought that was rather pertinent."

"Nothing," he said, and the feline look left his face. "And don't mention my name."

When he left me, Comrade Bai materialized among the sofas and the teacups. Comrade Bai escorted me to my taxi. "You heard what he said" — how did he know? — "Don't use his name. And don't mention the Ministry of Truth."

I said, "But what the official said was interesting. Why doesn't he want me to write it? You know I'm a writer!"

"Yes. You can write it. But just say, 'A Chinese official.'"

What was this, the Ming Dynasty, with all the mandarins scurrying around, whispering and shifting blame and doing it with mirrors? It was not a question of being bold but simply of not wishing to be held accountable.

"Okay," I said. "Can I quote you — that you said that?"

"Ha-ha! Better not!"

I changed the names, but as you can see I left that part in. As the Great Helmsman had said, All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.