Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [3]
“Did you notice that?” I said to my wife, Sylvia, as we set about returning the displaced starfish to the shallow water.
“You mean the interesting approach to wildlife?”
“Yes, that too. But that they were tourists from China. When exactly did tourists from China start coming to the South Pacific?”
I, frankly, had stopped paying attention to China sometime in 1989, that magical year when Communism dissolved elsewhere in the world. Then, in an historical blink of an eye, dissident shipyard workers and philosophers suddenly found themselves transformed into elected presidents. Democracy flourished and the Czechs, bless them, stumbled over themselves to join the Beer Drinkers Party. Borders were opened, and soon Hungarian tourists could be found camping in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, while Westerners, myself included, settled in cities like Prague, where the women were beautiful, the beer cheap, and the times significant. For two generations, Eastern Europe had existed under the gray shroud of totalitarian rule, and suddenly they, too, were free to compete with campy bands from Liechtenstein and punk-monster groups from Finland for the awesome privilege of winning the Euro-vision Song of the Year Competition. This was freedom.
Nineteen eighty-nine played out a little differently in China, of course. When thousands of students converged upon Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand a little democracy—Hey hey, hey ho, Maosim has got to go—they were greeted with a decidedly old-school response. Deng Xiaoping, the chain-smoking gnome with the twinkling eyes who then ruled China, simply reached for his totalitarian rulebook, flipped toward the index—Democracy protesters, suitable response—and followed directions. He shot them. And that was that.
Except, of course, it wasn’t, and therein lay the dissonance I was feeling about China. Something was clearly happening there. The presence of Chinese tourists blithely frolicking on the beaches of Fiji suggested that China was no longer solely a nation of peasants, factory workers, and clipboard-toting political officers. And yet, as far as I could tell, China remained ruled by the very same clipboard-toting political officers who had brought forth the excitement of the Cultural Revolution, those last years of the Mao era when China went stark raving mad. In the early seventies, one pushed boundaries in the U.S. by lighting up a joint and engaging in a sit-in at Berkeley. For the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, a good day might be spent destroying a Ming-era temple and torturing the teachers and intellectuals accused of possessing revanchist tendencies. When it came to pushing boundaries, the hippies had nothing on the Red Guards. Maybe Charles Manson did. But Charles Manson is in prison. The Red Guards simply faded away.
Once Sylvia and I returned to the United States, this sense of incongruity only deepened. Wading through the thunder and bombast of what passes for news programming today—Motto: All terror, all the time—I’d come across little nuggets of information such as the startling fact that IBM Computers is now owned by the Chinese company Lenovo. Clearly, the creators of 2001: A Space Odyssey miscalled that one; HAL should have been speaking Mandarin. And then, sometime later, as the television news paused for a commercial—Coming up next: Are we all going to die tomorrow?—I’d pick up the newspaper and learn that to combat a few cases of rabies, Chinese authorities had decided to club or electrocute, or even bury alive, hundreds of thousands of pet dogs. Even for someone like me, who had long lived in a region where dogs are regarded as either a menacing nuisance or a good choice for lunch, the response seemed a tad barbaric. IBM had long represented the future—the American