A Day in The Life . . . . . . Of China: Free to Fly Inside the Cage

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(12 of 18)

Quan has another claim to local fame: in the middle of his orange groves he has erected a 6-ft. shrine to Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader whose tacit support of the student protesters in Tiananmen Square contributed to his ouster in late June. Near the top of the tiled column is a photograph of Zhao -- with Tommy Quan standing at his side in his Seattle Seahawks cap. "Zhao made it all possible," says Quan. "He showed people that incentives can turn China around. Now that he is out of favor, my friends think I should tear my monument down. No way. I am keeping the faith. Eventually, Zhao will be vindicated. There's no turning back over the long run. The emperors in Beijing won't change the label. They'll still call China Communist. They'll have to do that to keep themselves in power. But we're heading toward capitalism, no matter what they will call it, because finally China is going to opt for what works."

Quan's admiration for Zhao may be a bit too public, but many of the Chinese I meet seem to share it. About 1,000 miles from Quan's farm, in Guanxian, a group of excited Chinese tourists is visiting the Dujiangyan irrigation system -- another marvel of China's ancient genius -- built 2,200 years ago. On a misty morning the tourists can barely make out an aging, abandoned hydroelectric plant about a mile upstream. Like much of what was built by the Soviets during the heyday of Sino-Soviet cooperation in the 1950s, this power station too is crumbling. In fact, the plant had been little used; the Soviet advisers had sited it improperly.

"Zhao would have done it right," says one.

"Great man," says another.

"Quiet," says a retired railroad conductor. "Someone might hear us. Hush up."

"You hush," says an elderly woman. "Zhao will return. You'll see."

Everywhere I go in China, most of the people I encounter, including those aware of what happened in Tiananmen Square, express perfectly understandable human sentiments grounded in fatalism. "As the old proverb goes," says a middle-level government official in Guangdong who holds a master's in political science from an American college, 'Happiness and sorrow flow along the same river.' Do we deplore what the army did in Tiananmen? Of course. Do we wish the government were different, more democratic, more humane? Of course. But what would you have us do? Take to the streets? For what? We have had ten relatively good years of economic growth and domestic tranquillity. Yes, there is some retrenchment now. But consider the previous ten years, the time of the Cultural Revolution, when everything was at its worst. Do we want to return to that? Take to the streets against those with the guns and risk all that we've gained? Who but the hotheads can honestly say such an action would be worth it?"

Three hundred miles south of Beijing, the view from Zouping County is different. Not all Zouping's citizens are true believers, but they appear to revere the army and seemingly remain loyal to the government. Zouping has come far in the Deng era -- it even has a local beer, Hupo, that someday may rival the popularity of Tsingtao in the U.S. (The word on the street has Tsingtao's springwater supply running out in the early 1990s.)