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

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It is impossible to describe the complete pleasure her smile conveyed. Perhaps she gets a bonus for being a particularly petty bureaucrat. Perhaps she resents foreigners and their privileges. A Chinese train's best accommodations, the "soft sleeper" compartment, in which two bunk beds actually sport linen, are reserved for foreigners and high party and government officials. I could understand her hating such preferential treatment, but then again, she and her colleagues do pretty well because of it. For notwithstanding my status as a foreigner, the "soft sleeper" car was "sold out" until a kind official laid a carton of cigarettes and a small cash "bonus" on the ticket agent. "Funny to you, isn't it?" said the official. "Here I am from one bureau of the government, and I have to help you pay off another bureau to get what the regulations say is yours by right."

Funny? Maybe. But not unexpected. By now, even I understand the role of guanxi in China. I only wonder how the whole system works nearer the throne.

Despite its vast gray Soviet-style tenements and the absence of the imposing wall that enclosed it for a thousand years, Beijing strikes me as China's prettiest and most livable large city. Staggered work shifts are common, and vehicles from outside the city are banned during the day. The avenues are broader, the streets are cleaner. There are even more trees.

To me, Beijing appears normal, not only in the sense that people go about their business apparently oblivious of the martial-law troops who stand at rigid attention under the cover of multicolored beach umbrellas, but because Beijing too exhibits the limits of governmental control. For example, China has strict residency rules. Identity documents guarantee that a person who receives permission to move from his hometown to a new location is still eligible for ration coupons, housing allowances and other subsidies. But even without permission, people have been drawn by the economic reforms to the major cities, and the financial opportunities they have found there more than compensate for their lost stipends. In central Beijing it is estimated that a fifth of the 6 million residents are illegal transients.

It is in the bookstores that one can best see how daily life has outgrown the political system's controls, how the campaign against "spiritual pollution," so rhetorically fierce, is flouted with such abandon. While elsewhere in China, government booklets like The True Story of Tiananmen Square are prominently displayed alongside issues of Vogue, Elle and Glamour, you have to hunt for the lies at Wangfujing, Beijing's largest bookstore. The section labeled "Ideology and Political Education" actually displays books titled Modern Woman, Smart Woman, Handbook on Love and Life and dozens of how- to monographs like Eighty-Eight Points on Developing Public Relations. In other cities the regime appears successful at banishing books and periodicals dealing with "pornography, bourgeois liberalism and feudal superstition." Here one can buy steamy romances, political biographies of discredited leaders -- and seemingly anything ever written by or about Richard Nixon, pro or con.