Mao to Now

I'm lucky: starting with the ride on Train 119, China's journey has been mine as well. A year after my trip to Suzhou, Deng threw the floodgates wide open, and NEWSWEEK hired me to run the first American newsmagazine bureau in Beijing since the communists came to power. Since then, from vantage points in Beijing, Hong Kong and Washington, D.C., I've witnessed at firsthand what may well be the fastest, most far-reaching national metamorphosis in human history. There is no way one person could encapsulate the myriad forces that have driven China's blindingly fast rise. But you can judge their sweep and scale by how they've transformed individual lives—mine, Guangyuan's.

I. ' Flog the Cur! '
Back in 1980, I thought I'd plunged headlong into the journalistic Dark Ages. My office was a bat-infested eighth-floor room at the Qianmen Hotel. Whenever I finished composing a new story on the typewriter, I hopped on a bicycle and pedaled like mad to the city's public Telegraph Building several miles away. There I retyped the copy on an antiquated telex machine before carrying the perforated paper tape across the cavernous room to a distant counter and pleading with the clerk (a state employee, of course) to do his job and send it out. To make sure it got done, I usually waited until the transmission ended. Sometimes I nodded off on a bench, listening to the chugging of the machine as it echoed through the freezing, lugubrious hall. The process took hours—and that doesn't count reporting time.

But Deng's priorities were to eliminate his rivals and to heal the wounds inflicted by Mao (in that order), not to unmuzzle the press. The top story of 1980 was the trial of the Gang of Four—Mao's imperious widow, Jiang Qing, and three male sycophants—on charges of instigating the Cultural Revolution's many crimes against the Chinese people in the decade before Mao's death in 1976. Everything about China's trial of the century was larger than life. The 69-page indictment listed 48 specific offenses and cited "all kinds of intrigue, legal or illegal, overt or covert, by pen or by gun." The defendants were accused of framing, purging and persecuting more than 700,000 Chinese, including 34,800 victims who died.

This was no sunlit South Africa-style "truth and reconciliation" process. No foreign media or independent monitors sat with the 900 carefully screened observers who were allowed into the courtroom. Indeed, the drama unfolding at No. 1 Justice Road was scripted with meticulous care: the process was all about assigning blame. The official version of events, faithfully put out by the state-run Xinhua news agency, cast the Gang as bloodthirsty and improbably eloquent villains. "Flog the cur that's fallen in the water!" Xinhua said one Gang member, Zhang Chunqiao, had ordered. "Make their very names stink!" Mao himself should have been put on trial, but that was impossible even posthumously. To debunk the Great Helmsman, after years of hysterical propaganda practically deifying him as China's "red sun," would have sundered the already strained fabric of Chinese society. Instead, Deng and his circle publicly rated Mao as "70 percent right, 30 percent wrong."

Signs of a new openness were far more evident outside the courtroom, in Deng's first tentative economic reforms. Within months of my arrival, public markets had sprung up all over, selling items ranging from pet mynahs to antique bronzes. I interviewed Chinese, regimented for years by Maoist diktats, who were downright giddy about changes like the dismantling of "people's communes" into family farms. At one Anhui collective the members had divvied up not only the land but also the commune's physical assets. "I got the wheel of a wheelbarrow!" one happy villager told me. "And my neighbor got the rest of it!"

Such opportunities filled many Chinese with unaccustomed hope, including my own family. After visiting Guangyuan, I stopped in Shanghai to meet my eldest uncle. He had once been a public-health official, but during the communists' first wave of witch hunts in the 1950s he was condemned as a "rightist" and banished to Xinjiang province, at the edge of the Gobi Desert. He returned home a broken man in 1964, only to have his old "crimes" trotted out again. Members of his family were forced to denounce him. My aunt, now in her 80s, still whispers of their "treachery" as if the intrigues had happened only yesterday.