Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [89]
“I don’t know, Jack,” I yelled into his ear. “We’ve got a really early morning tomorrow.”
“TOMMORROW?” he yelled back. “THERE IS NO TOMORROW! I HAVE SARS!”
14
We escaped.
There really is no other word for it. We had awoken four hours later in the predawn darkness and congratulated each other on our good fortune. Surely we should have been hideously hungover. Our heads should have throbbed, our stomachs churned. There had been beer. There had been Long Island Iced Teas. All consumed on a base of spicy goose intestines. We should have been feeling wretched.
But we were not wretched.
We were buoyant.
“Let’s hear it for watered-down drinks,” Jack said.
And so with unexpected cheeriness we left Guangzhou. We said good-bye to the choking sprawl of urban China. And none too soon, either. I had begun to form dark thoughts about China. I wanted happy thoughts. China was the future, yes? The twenty-first century would be China’s, no? But that thought alone filled me with dread. Perhaps it was the crated kittens in the Qingping Market. I do not object to the consumption of cats. If one can eat a pig, I don’t see how one can morally object to a cat-burger. So bon appetit, I say. But must they be skinned alive? Or maybe it was that pervasive tingling I felt, a sense that at any moment, someone might accuse me of being German and proceed to bitch-slap me senseless. But mostly, it was a creeping awareness that there are no rules in China, that so much of life in China is essentially a flirtation with anarchy.
Oh sure, it’s not all rioting and chaos. Things get done in China. Lots of things get done. This is because the system that prevails throughout the country—the system that has always prevailed from the Imperial days of yore to the Maoism of recent years to the hypercapitalism of today—is guanxi, the network of family, friends, and contacts that grease the wheels of life in China. Monarchism, Communism, and Capitalism have always been inadequate isms to describe China. Guanxi is what makes China go. It is a society based upon connections.
But above this guanxi, and below it, too, there is anarchy. The government, of course, would dispute this. Despite evidence to the contrary, there are, in fact, rules. Technically, slavery is illegal. But this doesn’t stop brick-kiln-factory owners from kidnapping hundreds of boys to work in horrific conditions in northern China. Theoretically, it should be possible for a Chinese parent to buy baby formula with reasonable confidence that it won’t kill Junior. But you can’t. Hundreds of babies in China have died from counterfeit formula in recent years. Product safety, clearly, is not a high priority. While stores from Canada to Chile were busily emptying their shelves of contaminated toothpaste, did shops in China do likewise? They did not. Once the deluge of contaminated exports became a trifle embarrassing for the government, however, they did do something: They shot the head of the Chinese Food and Drug Administration. But actually recall the toxic products within China? No.
From the madness of the roads to the endangered animals in the market, it was hard to discern the rule of law in China. And I kind of like laws—good ones, anyway. I’d spent enough time in the South Pacific, where laws are regarded as mere suggestions, to know that the absence of a fair and impartial application of law is a sure path to instability. True, somewhere there is presumably a big book of Chinese laws, but if no one enforces them, what does it matter? I had asked a lawyer friend of Dan’s in Beijing about Chinese law and he had scoffed at the very notion that there was such a thing. “Look. Here’s how