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By Root 3937 0

He had done well since joining the Party—during summer he had been chosen to spend a week studying at the Huairou District Chinese Communist Party School. In China, such centers serve to train cadres, and the study session was a sign that Wei Ziqi was being groomed for a possible political position. At the school he reviewed local policies, and he returned to the village with a stack of Party books. One volume was entitled A Textbook for Urbanizing the Countryside. The book featured the usual spread of enticing photographs, mostly featuring road infrastructure around Huairou: broad downtown intersections, the recently finished road to Changping, the expressway that would soon connect with Beijing. The first chapter was entitled “Increased Urbanization is the Natural Choice for Huairou’s Economic and Social Development.” It read, “To have an upstairs and a downstairs, electric lights and telephones—these were the desires of people in the 1950s, and they reflected their concept of a modern life. Nowadays if we examine these longings, they seem superficial and naive.” Another chapter described the Party’s challenges in a semirural region like Huairou:

With hundreds and thousands of years of feudal peasant habits, there is a pronounced trend toward small peasant thinking, in the way that people live, in their customs, in their cultural level. All traditions of the countryside have been deeply branded into the people, and this creates a conflict with the desire to urbanize and improve.

One of the Party’s goals in rural regions was to give people some contact with the outside. Each summer the Sancha members were taken on a free vacation, and in 2005 they traveled to the beach resort of Beidaihe. It was the first time Wei Ziqi had ever seen the ocean, and he talked about the experience for weeks. Increasingly he spent time in Huairou, both for business and for the Party. His clothing continued to change—he upgraded his city shoes, and he bought a new pair of blue jeans and a black jacket made of artificial leather. He carried different cigarette brands for town and country. In the village he smoked Red Plum Blossom, the white packs, which cost less than forty cents. But in Huairou, where it was important not to look like a peasant, he made sure to carry the more expensive red or yellow packs. Sometimes a wealthy person stayed at the guesthouse and left a box of high-end smokes, which Wei Ziqi hoarded for crucial business situations.

For a Chinese male, nothing captures the texture of guanxi better than cigarettes. They’re a kind of semaphore—in a world where much is left unsaid, every gesture with a cigarette means something. You offer a smoke at certain moments, and you receive them at others; the give-and-take establishes a level of communication. And sometimes the absence of an exchange marks boundaries. A city person has little to say to a peasant and naturally he will not accept his cigarettes. Even between two businessmen, one person might refuse a smoke as a way of establishing superiority, especially if he carries a better brand. All told there are more than four hundred different types of Chinese cigarettes, each with a distinct identity and meaning. Around Beijing, peasants smoke Red Plum Blossom whites. Red Pagoda Mountain can be found in the pockets of average city folk. Middle-class entrepreneurs like Zhongnanhai Lights. Businessmen with a flair for the foreign sport State Express 555. A nouveau riche tosses out Chunghwa like it’s rice. Pandas are the rarest beast of all. That was Deng Xiaoping’s favorite brand, and government quotas make them hard to find; a single pack costs more than twelve dollars. If you carry Panda, you’re probably just being pretentious.

Most men don’t worry that cigarettes are bad for their health. In the southern city of Wenzhou, I once met a businessman in his thirties who described smoking as a career move. When I asked if he wanted to quit, the man looked at me like I was crazy. “No way!” he said. “I know it’s not good for you, but I’m young so I don’t feel any effect. And it’s important