Country Driving [106]
But I had lived in China long enough to accept that nothing stays the same, and finally I did what everybody else was doing: I remodeled. Mimi and I had always believed that our house should remain at the local standard, but by 2004 that standard was changing. We hired a crew of local workers, who made the same interior renovations that they had just finished in the home of Wei Ziqi. He had undertaken the most extensive improvements in the village: new ceilings of plaster, linoleum floors with the pattern of wood grain, and clean white walls covered with paint instead of old copies of the People’s Daily. Once the Party Secretary saw the results, she immediately commissioned the same thing for her own house—she wasn’t about to fall behind Wei Ziqi. Over time, most locals followed suit, and the work crews moved throughout the village. In the same steady way that they had built the new Great Wall, crenellation after crenellation, they gave every house the same marks of modernity: plaster ceilings, linoleum floors, painted walls.
That was also the year Wei Ziqi joined the Communist Party and acquired a driver’s license. In the past, Wei Ziqi had never spoken about becoming a Party member, and the Huairou fortune-teller had specifically warned him to avoid getting involved in political matters. In China, even basic membership is complicated—it’s not like the United States, where a political party will accept anybody. The Communists require a formal application, followed by meetings and interviews; local members have the authority to reject anybody they deem inadequate. And membership is rare: across China, only seventy million people, or roughly 5 percent of the population, are card-carrying Communists.
In 2004, Sancha was home to seventeen members of the Party. The majority were older than fifty, and none was under the age of thirty. It was rare for a motivated young person to apply—most people of that description had left the village entirely. As a result, Sancha’s local leadership was conservative, and a few members had been slow to accept even the most basic elements of the new economy. Some could barely read. There were only three women, each of whom had some family link to the organization. The Party Secretary’s mother had been the first woman in the village to join, before the Revolution was even finished, and she had encouraged her daughter to become involved in politics. The third female member was married to a local official. None of the Sancha Party members was engaged in business on a significant scale. When Wei Ziqi applied, he represented something entirely different: the village’s youngest prospective member, and the first to have succeeded as an entrepreneur.
He rarely spoke in detail about his motivations. In China, people tend to be closemouthed about such matters; you can be friends with a person for years and never have a conversation about what he does in the Party. Wei Ziqi’s application took six months, and during that time he was evaluated repeatedly at village meetings. Sometimes he gave self-criticisms—a common routine in China. I asked him what he talked about in such situations.
“I say that I’m not enthusiastic enough about physical labor,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“If there’s some work in the village, and everybody is supposed to contribute, then sometimes I’m slow to participate. That’s how I criticize myself.”
Whenever I asked him why he applied, his answer was the same. “I want to help the country,” he said. “And I want to help the village. This is the best way to do it.” He left it at that—he never referred to personal benefits. But I knew that he was trying to solidify guanxi in the village, where his rise in status had made him vulnerable. In 2004 his