Country Driving [117]
Wei Ziqi hung the portrait in a place of honor behind the dinner table, where customers often sat. Cao Chunmei’s Buddhist shrine was nearby. The first time I saw the photograph, I asked Wei Ziqi what the city was.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s some foreign place.”
At first I thought it might be Cleveland or Detroit. Finally a friend from the States happened to visit, and he recognized it as Denver, Colorado: a pinup in the Chinese world of development porn.
In 2005, the same year that every Party member in Sancha received the Mile-High skyline, they attended a series of meetings under the title of “Preserving the Progressiveness.” It was another local echo of national change—in Communist China, whenever a new leader takes office, he sponsors a slogan-filled study campaign as a way of consolidating power. “Preserving the Progressiveness” was Hu Jintao’s first attempt at theory, and the precise meaning of the catchphrase was characteristically vague. It was intended to resemble a grassroots operation, although of course all directives and study materials came straight from the top. And clearly the Party was concerned about its rural base; they had already started to increase funding in the countryside. Ouyang Song, a vice minister in charge of the study campaign, told reporters that so many migrants had left villages that there was now a shortage of young candidates for membership.
In Sancha, Wei Ziqi and the others dutifully attended the meetings, where they studied the Party constitution and historic speeches by Mao and Deng. All of these documents were read aloud, a mind-numbing ritual—the Party constitution is 17,000 words long. Because Wei Ziqi was one of the youngest and most literate members, he was often assigned the task of reading. One afternoon during the heart of the campaign, I drove to the village and found him drinking baijiu alone. He appeared unhappy, and he was clutching the left side of his face, which looked swollen. I asked if something was wrong.
“I hurt my tooth,” he said.
“How did that happen?”
“Opening a beer bottle,” he said. In rural China, where people often can’t be bothered to use a bottle opener, dental injuries are a common side effect of alcohol. Sometimes I wondered if that might be the next campaign: Build New Countryside, Preserve the Progressiveness, Stop Opening Bottles with Your Teeth.
I asked Wei Ziqi if he planned to see a dentist, and he shook his head. He generally avoided any sort of medical attention, regardless of what sort of misadventure occurred in the village. One year he was bitten by a badger. Armed with only a stick, and acting more or less out of boredom, Wei Ziqi trapped the badger in a hole; it took a nasty bite out of his finger before he could beat it to death. “Badgers don’t carry rabies,” he said, when I suggested seeing a doctor in Huairou. I looked it up online and confirmed that this theory was wrong, but he didn’t care. He treated the badger bite with the same medicine as the injured tooth: repeated shots of Erguotou.
After the attack of the beer bottle, we sat together at the table while he applied baijiu therapy. He told me that all morning the tooth pain had been doubly annoying because of the Party campaign. Today’s meeting had lasted five hours, and they had reached the stage of self-criticisms. I asked him what failing he had targeted.
“Labor. I said that when the village had been repairing the road, I didn’t contribute enough physical work.”
“What did the others say about you?”
“The same thing,” he said. “They criticized me for not offering to do enough work.”
“What did the Party Secretary criticize herself for?”
“Bad temper,” Wei Ziqi said.
Any tensions between the Party Secretary and Wei Ziqi had been set aside temporarily.