Black and White Cat

Ten Years Chopping Wood wrote quite a sad post the weekend before last about leaving his job at a national newspaper after nine and half years. (Links: original Chinese; translated excerpts in English.)

Quote:

I can’t put together clearly the reasons why I want to end my journalism career now. I got weary of the job several years ago, but it was at the beginning of the year that I made up my mind to quit it. Although I carried a journalist pass around, and I was received as a reporter on numerous occasions, I was hardly given a chance to fulfill my duty as a journalist…When I am unable to truthfully document what is happening, when I don’t have freedom of expression, how is it possible for me to be a real journalist? I was doing the job just to make a living. To such a “journalism” career, it’s time to say goodbye.

My first reporting trip was to cover a meeting hosted by the Headquarters of the Armed Police in Xi’an City. There was hardly anything newsworthy to write about. The same old statements were repeated again and again. I took notes carefully, since I was new to the business, but I couldn’t help wondering how I could write a story out of this boring meeting. Before the meeting was even finished, a propaganda officer of the Armed Police handed me a story, which he had written in advance of the meeting. I was told that I just need to make a few small changes to the article, put my byline on it, and send it to my editor for publishing.

Since they could have sent the story to my editor and get it published directly, why did they invite me to the meeting? I figured it out later: My presence could help to add pomp to the meeting, for I was a reporter from a national newspaper…

Ten Years Chopping Wood started work at his paper in Beijing on March 8, 1999. I started work at a publishing house in Beijing three months later, on June 4.

When I arrived, my boss didn’t have anything ready for me to do so he told me I could go and spend some time in the library. I saw they had the latest edition of China Quarterly and sat down to read it. And so it was that on the 10th anniversary of the military crackdown, on my first day of work for a state publisher, I was reading an academic paper comparing the 1989 student movement in Beijing with the 1990 student movement in Taipei.

A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in my office correcting a translation of an administrative law when my boss came in to tell me there was a 10-day reporting trip to Liaoning province - did I want to go?

“Excellent,” I said. “Sign me up.”

Before we left, there was a meeting. The only thing I can remember about the meeting was the firm instruction that we should not speak directly to anyone unless it was approved or arranged by the propaganda department. “Not so excellent,” I thought.

Our first destination in Liaoning was Jinzhou and included a talk and Q&A session with the mayor. That evening in my hotel room I discovered an important reason for this trip that I had previously been unaware of. Turning on the TV, I was startled to see myself on the news, earnestly asking a question. The recorded commentary was a bit too fast for me to understand, so I’m not really sure what it was that I reportedly said.

Over the course of those ten days we went to various cities and counties in Liaoning, meeting many politicians and factory bosses. Unlike that first assignment recounted by Ten Years Chopping Wood, no one gave us a pre-prepared article to sign our name to. In my case, they probably should have.

We went to many places, but an ever-recurring location was the conference room. We saw a lot of conference rooms. Some of the officials seemed like out-and-out gangsters. Others seemed quite straight. But could you really tell?

There was nothing obviously wrong with the governor of the province. He certainly wasn’t very excited about meeting us and looked as if he had better things to do. But who could blame him for that? A couple of years later, he was transferred to Hubei. In 2004, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for accepting bribes during his period in office in Liaoning.

Down the road from meeting the governor, we went to the city government compound of Shenyang - the capital of the province. Outside the gate there was a small group of old people protesting. We didn’t know what they were protesting about. They were gone when we left.

Inside the main building we were met by one of the vice-mayors. He apologized that the mayor could not meet us himself, but some very important guests had arrived unexpectedly. I remember nothing about that meeting except that the chairs were large and uncomfortable and the vice-mayor was very distracted. A year or so later, I found out who those important guests probably were - the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. The mayor was given a suspended death sentence for corruption. One of the other vice-mayors was sentenced to death in the same case, with no suspension. By a strange coincidence, the second time I visited Shenyang, that sentence was carried out.

One conference room after another. In one of them, in another city, the factory boss told us he would have loved to show us round the workshops, but unfortunately he couldn’t because it was too hot. The law required that if the temperature rose above a certain level, the workers had to be given the day off. It had passed that level, so the factory was temporarily closed. Very enlightened. Perhaps.

He said the Southeast Asian economic crisis had definitely affected the factory in terms of exports, but business was still good and this was certainly not the reason for the temporary closure. Since we didn’t meet any of the workers and we would soon be driven off to somewhere else, there was no way we could find out if this was true.

Why doubt him? Liaoning had once been one of China’s great centers of heavy industry. Now it was in serious decline, regularly referred to as a “rust belt.” As economic reforms moved into a higher gear, the word xiagang - laid off - was ubiquitous all over China, but especially so in places like Liaoning. Vast factories that had once provided everything for their workers, including health care and schools, were “restructuring” - that word that brought unemployment for so many in the West in the 1980s. Many were closing down, either temporarily or for good.

One day I escaped. While everyone else went to a gold mine, I headed off away from the main road to see some of the rest of the city.

Down a side road, then turning a corner, I saw a much older building than most in the area. It looked like a temple, but when I reached it I wasn’t so sure. It certainly seemed like a temple, but looking though the gate I saw a young man going into a doorway to the side marked “Pool Hall.” There was another doorway at the front of the building, with a blackboard next to it advertising something.

An old man came out of a door leading onto the street and eyed me curiously.

“Is this a temple?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said very slowly, giving me a knowing look. “But there aren’t any monks.”

I hesitated, almost left and then decided I had to go in. I glanced at the blackboard as I passed it, but couldn’t really understand anything, and stepped through the doorway where I found myself at the bottom of a stone stairwell. At the top of the stairs, in semi-darkness, several rather dubious looking people were standing behind a table.

“It’s five kuai,” a woman said.

Something seemed wrong.

“No, no, no… Come in, come in,” she said hurriedly, noticing my discomfort. “Only five kuai. It’s very nice. There’s air conditioning.”

This was not reassuring me one little bit, but I followed her anyway. We passed through some of those thick hanging strips of plastic used to keep the cold out in the winter and the heat out in the summer and entered a cavernous space. It was almost pitch black, lit only by a European porn film flickering on a cinema screen far below.

“Do you want a girl to accompany you?” she asked. “It’s 50 kuai.”
“Er… er… um…er… well… er… alright then.”

This was actually a good decision.

I was led to my seat and discovered they were all made for two, each separated for privacy by a large piece of polished wood. Chatting to the young woman was a welcome distraction from the rather unappealing people copulating on the screen below. She made no pretense of liking her job.

“How long have you been working here?”
“A LONG time.”
“How long’s that?”
“Four months.”

We chatted for about half an hour. Her real job was as a nurse at a factory clinic, but the factory was closed and her job was on hold. No one knew if this was temporary or permanent. But for now, at least, she needed to supplement her meager monthly allowance. So here she was.

In case you’re wondering, no sex was offered and none was asked for. And I didn’t miss anything exciting at the gold mine. The only thing the others saw there was another conference room.

Aside from the conference rooms, another ubiquitous feature was the banquet. We had two banquets a day. Every day. After three days we were starting to feel decidedly ill. On the tenth day I nearly vomited at the table. Alcohol featured strongly at each banquet - lunchtime and evening. I was taking antibiotics and fought a running battle at each meal trying to avoid having to get drunk.

A week or so ago, chatting with friends, someone mentioned Mo Yan’s novel, The Republic of Wine. An investigator goes to a province where people are alleged to be cooking and eating children. When he arrives, the inspector is treated to a banquet and plied with so much alcohol that he starts to lose the ability to know what is real and what is not. All of us agreed that this is exactly how it feels going on these reporting trips.

Back in Beijing, I was supposed to write two or three articles about some of the places I’d seen. But what could I write about that I actually thought was true? We didn’t have the time or the resources to check any of the things we had been told. We weren’t expected to. Of all the places we went to in those ten days, one of the only people I actually believed was the young woman in the Temple of Porn. But I didn’t have to be told that this wasn’t the story I supposed to write.

So each time the phone rang and I was asked if I had written my articles, I gave one feeble excuse after another. In the end, the phone calls stopped. I wasn’t invited on another reporting trip, which was quite reasonable really. Why should they pay for me to go to these places if I didn’t actually produce anything?

My job didn’t depend on trips like this. I went back to my daily business of books. But if I’d been a keen young reporter at that national newspaper, like Ten Years Chopping Wood once was, I wouldn’t have had the option of making those excuses.