Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [49]
“I don’t write gossip,” I said with some resentment.
After we finished eating, we had nothing more to say.
I was just thinking that perhaps Wen Lan and Ban Cuntou were quite evenly matched. Wen Lan ought to be pretty satisfied now. After so many years of “riding a donkey while searching for a horse,” she was probably tired. Was she really planning on becoming the First Lady of China?
When He Dongsheng came into the room, Jian Lin pointed to his own mouth to remind me not to say anything about Wen Lan.
He Dongsheng gave us a bottle of Maotai each and said, “This Maotai comes from the Party leadership’s exclusive Zhongnanhai supply, so it should be good. You can drink it without any worries.”
We thanked him enthusiastically. This insomniac national leader was not such a cold fish after all.
Jian Lin took out his crystal decanter and poured in a bottle of 1989 Château Lafite, a fine vintage. Then he put on the film: The Second Spring. It had come out in September 1975. This was the first film, after the Eight Model Plays, that was produced under the direction of the Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution. At the time, Deng Xiaoping had returned to office, and had just traveled to the United Nations. When he came back, he said he was going to emphasize technology. The Gang of Four put out this film aimed at criticizing Deng Xiaoping, but it had still not been screened widely around the country when the Cultural Revolution came to an end.
I was quite interested to note that the director was Sang Hu. He had directed many films, including Miserable in Middle Age in 1949, New Year’s Sacrifice in 1956, and Undying Love and Long Live the Wife, both in 1947 and with screenplays by Zhang Ailing, also known as Eileen Chang.
I looked over at He Dongsheng and saw that he had his eyes closed again. I realized then why he had been coming to this gathering for so many months. He usually suffered from insomnia, but when he “watched” the films here he could relax and have a good nap.
Then I looked at Jian Lin. He wasn’t watching either. He had his head down with his face in his hands. I never imagined that he could be so upset—he had really been hurt in love this time.
As the film ended and the lights came on, He Dongsheng opened his eyes and presented a long critique.
“That was then and this is now—we’ve gone around in such a big circle just to bring us back to a new stage of history where order has been restored,” he said.
Jian Lin and I listened attentively.
“Completely rejecting foreign technology won’t do, but completely depending on foreign technology is no good either. Self-reliance is relative, not absolute. A big country cannot be completely dependent on others, but it cannot be completely self-sufficient either. In Old Mao’s day, the people’s standard of living was low, and so we could be basically self-sufficient in food and consumer goods, but he wanted to be self-sufficient in science, technology, information, and energy and not ask for foreign help. He abandoned external trade and did business only with small third-world countries like Albania. He was seeking an absolute self-reliance that was ultimately harmful to our development and really unnecessary.
“During Old Deng’s age of Reform and Opening, the Americans wanted the whole world to abandon self-sufficiency. This kind of free-market fundamentalism is also unscientific—even the United States itself can’t do it. At that time we exported like crazy in order to earn foreign currency, and for a while it worked extremely well for us. But in a world where the U.S. dollar is the standard currency, in order to keep the value of our renminbi low to support our exports, we had to buy large amounts of dollars. Speaking rationally, this policy could not be sustained for very long because in the end, when the dollar depreciated and the American economy bombed, we were almost dragged down with it.
“Fortunately, we adjusted our economic policies. To put it simply, we adopted a form of relative