Two Innocents in Red China. Pierre Elliot Trudeau
his trip to the public shitter for his favourite moment of the day. Grandma and grandson head to the temple to light prayer sticks for grandma’s parents, long gone but not forgotten.
The Second Ring also houses the seats of power. Symbolically, Chinese power dwells in the great halls around Tiananmen Square, just outside the Forbidden City. These are the People’s Palaces and, of course, Mao’s great mausoleum. But the real power is elsewhere. It is scattered across the hutongs, somewhere behind those ten-foot walls.
Between the Second and the Third Ring roads, capitalism has come to blows with communism. For centuries, the city beyond the walls has been the area where various folk from different regions and callings have gathered to answer the bidding of the powers of the day. Soldiers, merchants, foreigners and workers, the people within the Third Ring have always been the tools of the establishment. Their descendants remain. Understandably, the communists took vigorous control of this quarter after the revolution. They housed their workers and their soldiers there and built factories and schools and laboratories—everything they needed to govern Red China and triumph against its foes.
The transformation of this area over the past decade may be the single most significant symbol of change in all China. Communism may not be dead, but within the Third Ring, it has lost the battle against capitalism. All over the area, office towers are taking over. They house the money: the state companies, the Chinese businessmen, the foreign investors and the multinational trading companies. The power of the New China resides in its immense economy, partly free, partly planned. And this economy is managed within the Third Ring. Here, amidst the glass towers and concrete skyscrapers lit up by so many logos of commerce and consumption, the New China glistens. China was once red. Now it is many colours.
During one recent visit to China, I rode a bicycle along the Second Ring, a broad avenue built where the old walls of the city once stood. To my left as I pedalled was the New China skyline; to my right was the old Ming city. Naturally I was more enchanted by the ancient neighbourhood I was circling than by the thick maze of corporate headquarters and business hotels surrounding it. At one point, I stopped in the hutongs just off the Ring to get my squeaky bicycle chain lubed up at an old blacksmith’s shop. The ragged area jutted right up onto the road and was sooty, cramped and authentic— quite the display from the modern highway.
I returned to China a few months later to be surprised by an abrupt change in the cityscape. Gliding along the Second Ring in a taxi, I suddenly realized that the blacksmith’s hutong was gone. An area two arteries deep into the old city—hundreds of shops and houses, little laneways and ancient trees—had been wiped off the face of the Earth. In its place a pleasant park had been installed. By installed, I mean that it had just appeared out of nowhere: big old trees, lawns and flower beds, park benches and moody lighting, even little sections of old stone wall that provide pleasant little obstacles for walkways to wind around. The illusion of permanence was so great that I asked the cab driver if the park was in fact new or if my mind was playing tricks on me. “It is new,” the cabbie replied with a knowing smile. Perhaps even a little proud of what his government can do.
Gone. I started to imagine… Gone are the blacksmith and his shop. Gone is the poultry seller. The old widow and her minuscule home behind the barber shop. Gone. All gone. Gone and forgotten?
Like everywhere else in the world where prosperity has become the great motor of society, so much of old China and its ancient ways seems to be disappearing. The very real estate they occupy is being reclaimed for new purposes, for the new prosperity. The ragged and dirty spaces are being paved over. If possible, their inhabitants are incorporated into new realities; if not, they are sent to live out their lives in small concrete apartments on the edges of the city, preserved in obsolescence. A few rare artifacts like the Forbidden City, emptied of all purpose, are preserved for the tourists.
What then has become of Red China? What has become of the strange mirage of a place into which Hébert and Trudeau ventured so innocently and which you, dear reader, are about to enter? From the beginning of their adventure, from the first sips of tea over terse negotiations with a consular official through the bizarre visits to factories, the impenetrable conversations with bureaucrats, the Marxist orthodoxies, the tremendous pretense of order and rationality of the planned society, the China that Hébert and Trudeau visited seems to have disappeared without trace, like that quaint blacksmith’s hutong.
But you are not about to read a book about an extinct way of life, a vision of some strange and implausible reality filed away in the memory like a fossil on a shelf. The amazing thing about Red China is not that it was and is no more but that, like Ming China or Han China before it, it has slowly been sublimated so that now it is part of the foundation upon which the New China stands. The Red was not washed away before China was repainted in all its new colours. The Red can still be found, muted beneath all of the new hues.
If China has lasted so long, perhaps it is because nothing that has come before is ever truly lost. Like all old societies, China has progressed by addition. All its past meanings and colours still exist somewhere, deep in the memory of its people. They are all part of the great and mysterious world that is China, a world that demands for itself both unity and perpetuity.
Even more than the Red China upon which it was built, the New China deserves to be understood. Its global resonances are only beginning to change our habits, our cultures, our economies, possibly even our climates. More than ever before, we Westerners will be challenged to take a position on China. But it is a place that is both unified and incredibly diverse. There will always remain much here that we will find odd, opaque, even ominous. Yet the lessons of the Two Innocents call out to us as clearly as ever: do not become transfixed by fear, by irrational fantasies of what China was, is or will become. For fear would close us off to China. And China—in its immense and growing prosperity, enormous production capacity and huge unanswered hunger—is already upon us.
Our societies will be better served if we reach out to China, happily and innocently, if we explore its depths, marvel at its opacities and idiosyncrasies, and yes, occasionally tremble with awe at its rumblings and missteps. Instead of fearing China, we should share as much as possible in the great adventure of its people.
For the West and China will never overcome each other. Nor should they ever stop learning from each other.
A NOTE ON THE FIRST ENGLISH EDITION
The publication of this book in translation eight years after the journey it describes gives rise to some misgivings. In the meantime the condition of its subject and of at least one of its authors has changed considerably. In judging its contents I must ask the reader to keep two factors constantly in mind. For all I know, many of the observations about China (and more than a few of the statistics) may now be out of date. Some of the passing references to Canada, such as to the restrictive policy of the Quebec Censorship Board, are certainly no longer valid.
This book was not written by the Prime Minister of Canada, or by any public official, but by two private citizens responsible only to themselves for inaccuracies or indiscretions.
As I have had some experience of a private critic’s unguarded words being used, years later, against a public figure, I add an all-purpose disclaimer. If there are any statements in the book which can be used to prove that the authors are agents of the international Communist conspiracy, or alternatively fascist exploiters of the working classes, I am sure that my co-author, Jacques Hebért, who remains a private citizen, will be willing to accept entire responsibility for them.
There is at least one comment in the book which I believe to be as true today as it was when we left for Peking: “… it seemed to us imperative that the citizens of our democracy should know more about China.” Perhaps that is why I am not entirely dismayed that this frank and informal treatment of a controversial subject should belatedly receive a new lease on life.
Pierre Elliott