John Pomfret Interview (2007): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Let's now talk about the students and what became of them, or the ones you're profiling in some kind of general sense after the change that occurred in the nineties. Was it hard to find the students, to find out what happened to them in their later life, and how did you go about doing that?
It's funny, you know, twenty-five years ago or so, alumni associations in China were illegal, but China has changed a lot, it really has, and personal freedom is much greater than it used to be. Even though now all organizations still are under Party control, the Party has allowed a lot more organizations to appear under its control. Alumni associations are alive and well, so I got the alumni book from my class and I wrote them all a form letter saying, "This is who I am, you obviously remember me. I was this lone, round guy in room number one, and I'd like to come and sit with you and visit you wherever you are." And out of 63 letters I sent out, I got about 57 or 58 responses saying, "Come on down." I literally traveled the globe because there were interviews in Salt Lake City and Rome, and in Livingston, New Jersey, and of course, all over China, with people about their lives, and they were incredibly welcoming. Several of them who had higher level Party positions would meet with me but always avoided the one-on-one, didn't want to go into things too much. But others were very, very open, shockingly so, and I really respect their courage in speaking so openly about their lives with me.
What common themes emerged? You're suggesting that some had been dispersed all over the world, they had taken the opening to the West seriously and had moved to different places. What percentage, would you say, of the people -- a small percentage?
Of my classmates? Of the 63 classmates, 5 live abroad. But that's a relatively small percentage for that university year. In the computer sciences department you're going to have upwards of 50% living abroad still, because their opportunities were enormous, getting into places like MIT, Cal Tech, etc. Tsinghua University graduates go all over the world these days. But these folks were graduates in history, which was generally a pretty low major, [lower] than it is in American schools, these days, from what I understand. But in terms of their standard of living, this is China's middle class.
You're now talking about the whole group.
The whole group. These people, when they graduated university, were making $10 a month, generally, using exchange figures. Now they're making $1000 a month. That enormous increase in material wealth has been evidenced by their lives. Of the 63 of them, five years ago about 10 had cars. I think now about 25 have cars. You have people who are now in their 50s learning how to drive, which is a scary thing if you've ever been on China's streets, but it's this desire for the new that's very strong. All of them own their own apartments. Some of them have massive plasma TVs which are bigger than my car.
Many of their kids are going abroad, which is interesting because they're achieving a dream that these people didn't quite achieve. Their generation very much wanted to go abroad. Not so many of them did, but their children are now going abroad. Their children don't necessarily want to go abroad to live; they want to go abroad as a tourist -- Chinese tourism to Europe is quite popular -- but they come home. So, it's a real sense of this middle class existence, with their SMS text on their phones, their high-speed internet connections, their fancy, centrally air-conditioned apartments. It's an interesting bunch.
Did some not change very much at all, or were those the Party types that you've already just talked about?
The Party types did change. One of my main characters in the book, we called him "Big Bluffer." He was always a bit of a big bluffer. He was a great card player, and so he was a bit of a gambler. But he changed with the times and he became, as a Party official in Nanjing, quite creative in helping his local district grow its economy, embracing capitalist tactics at every turn. In one case, he came to Vegas and he got religion and he brought a whole neon light strip back to his little district in Nanjing, and then he topped it with a Chinese dragon to give it an oriental flair. But he was quite flexible and creative, at the same time quite ruthless in achieving his goals. He had this mix of this totalitarian thing, at the same time with this free market tinge to it, which I think very much sums up how the Communist Party is dealing with China today.
When you talk about middle class, that can mean two things. The dark side of the middle class is focus on the "me" generation, on self-aggrandizement, not worrying about the broader community, on the one hand, but the middle class also is always the backbone of democracy, the people who are doing the reading, who want to become engaged politically, and so on. What do you see in China, in terms of these two conflicting currents sometimes?
You have the same currents in China. What happened after '89 was that for several years there was a collapse into very conservative policies, where all economic reforms were halted. The economy slowed, foreign investment began to dry up, opportunities for foreigners decreased, and even places like Shenzhen -- Beijing started criticizing Shenzhen for doing too many joint ventures, saying, "You're selling China's eggs to the foreigners." It was a very tricky period. Then in 1992 Deng Xiaoping goes to Shenzhen and basically says to Beijing, "Forget all your leftist claptrap, we need to open our economy." And to the Chinese people what he says is, "Okay, we killed a bunch of you in 1989. Fine. You know that politics is not a possible door for you to run through, but you can get rich." And from 1992 to this day, he launched his country on this very single-minded pursuit of riches.
That change in allowing Chinese to become agents of their own fate has been an enormous change in the society, that people now can say, "I want to be a _______ when I grow up," whereas previously your job was assigned, your university was almost always picked for you, your major was definitely picked for you, the place you lived, your work unit, everything, was all decided for you. Even when you could have a baby was decided for you, when you could get married was decided -- those things have all gone away. You now can have those decisions. You're limited to only one child but you can have it whenever you want. Previously when you wanted to get a divorce you had to get permission. Now you don't have to. So the sense of man or woman as agent of their own fate is now coming into China. From that perspective these people are the middle class, because the middle class, [as] in Western history, [are] the first agents of their own fate, other than the aristocracy. And so, that change in China's sensibilities about what the Chinese can do was something that was started by Deng Xiaoping.
Now what about the urge for democracy, for true democracy? Is that bubbling from the bottom, or it's being controlled because of the satisfaction with what we've just discussed?
Deng and the Party state after Deng died have been very good at buying off China's elite. China's elite has a good deal -- if you exclude the whole political issue. They have access to all the information they want, pretty much, and in fact, in many Chinese small property developments, like housing developments, if the educational level of the people living in those housing developments [is high] they can have access to satellite TV, whereas the people in the low-end housing developments don't have access to satellite TV, which means you can't see foreign broadcasts. This is the kind of distinction that the Party is making, and so the elite is benefiting from this. They get passwords, they can go overseas, and they also can have three nannies for $18 a month. So, because the differentials between rich and poor in China it's very easy to live like a king in China, as long as you make a little money.
From that perspective, the middle class is, in some ways, very supportive of the regime. There are problems, though, because when the regime comes up against the middle class, for example, in terms of property deals -- now that the middle class can afford to buy their own homes, Harry, you buy your apartment which is supposed to be 900 square feet and you move in and it's actually only 750, you go to sue the property developer and then you discover that he's actually in cahoots with the local neighborhood Party guy. That type of tension is increasing.
And so, on one hand, while the Party is bending over backwards to make sure you have a good life, on the other hand, the Party is also screwing you at the same time, a different aspect of the Party. That corruption issue is angering people a lot. So, when you say, "Do people really want democracy?," it's a very difficult thing to gauge. A lot of foreigners and business people who go to China say the Chinese aren't interested in democracy, they just want cash, and that's a real simplification of the system. The Chinese want clear rules by which things can operate, they want clarity, and they want a fair shake. And if that to them means democracy, then that's democracy. They want to be able to determine who determines their lives. But to say, do they want to vote -- no, in some cases they don't because that's been so sullied by their constant propaganda streams against Western democracy. So, it's a very complex picture.
So, the Party is, in a way, in a race to buy people off, but it continues with these contradictions that at a certain point could lead to a political protest, whether it's people being [cheated on] property [transactions, or larger] issues like the environment, where aggressive capitalism doesn't factor in the damage that's done to the environment.
Yes. The number of protests in China is growing rapidly, and the Party's tactics for dealing with the protests are relatively simple. They try to cut the head off and then buy off everybody else. That's generally been relatively successful. If the leadership has made connections with other protesters in other provinces, then they get into real trouble and they spend a lot of time in jail, because that connection between groups is something that the Party very much fears.
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