For his part, Yimirhan left his trucking job to start his own company trading with Kazakhstan several years ago. For a while, things went very well, but after the financial crash, access to credit dried up, and orders went down. Plus, the appreciation of the RMB drove down his profit margins ("your country did that," he added wryly). For all the political talk about the New Silk Road, he's since turned his attention inward: Now, he and two brothers have opened a slaughterhouse to sell Halal meat to Chinese Muslims. "My rule is, follow where there is need."
Shenyang: Renaissance City
"You will feel as though you are standing on the edge, and wonder at entering a museum of souls," the Shenyang novelist Wang Xiaofang told me, describing the Dante's Inferno-esque mood he aimed to evoke in his popular novel, The Civil Servant's Notebook -- which will be published in English translation this fall.
A former official in Shenyang, the largest city in northeastern China -- a region known as Dongbei in China and formerly as Manchuria to foreigners -- Wang left government after his boss and patron, former Vice Mayor Ma Xiangdong, was convicted of accepting $1.55 million in bribes, among other financial crimes, and executed in 2006. (Wang, his personal secretary, was never convicted of any crime himself.) Now a master of the distinctly Chinese genre of "officialdom fiction," Wang channels the pathos of his city and his experiences into literature. His first novel, Deadly Vortex, later renamed The Mayor's Secretary, was semi-autobiographical.
"I hope to grasp the essence of the epoch -- to compress the history and the reality," he told me, about "officials who are very calculating, adept at backstabbing, about their power struggles and those spiritual eunuchs who look virtuous, but in fact have lost their faith, and are homeless at heart." He added that through the best literature, "We can not only see our reflection in the mirror, but also understand the secrets behind it. Milan Kundera said a novel that can't define some hidden reality is immoral."
His grand themes of politics, opulence, corruption, decay, and redemption are by no means exclusive to the rustbelt city of Shenyang. Yet Wang contends that his home turf, with its strong political culture (historically many Politburo heavy-hitters have had northeastern Liaoning province on their resume -- including current Standing Committee members Li Changchun, Li Keqiang, and Zhou Yongkang -- as well as wannabe Bo Xilai) is to a unique degree defined by them.
"The official standard is the essential character of this old historical city," he explained. "Shenyang is not only the cradle-land of the Qing Dynasty, but also the most ravaged by the planned economy. It is typical of the old heavy-industry bases of the northeast, with a heavy historical burden and sluggish concepts ... long in history, but short in culture."
And yet, while many of China's successful literati move to Beijing, Wang has chosen to remain in the city where memories haunt him. It is the source of his inspiration, and indeed his personal trajectory has long tracked the city's: rising, then dramatically falling, and now at last finding some redemption in reconstituting the ashes of the past.
For many years, the sound of Manchuria was the sound of demolition.
The wrecking crews worked all night. Bright construction lights illuminated the sites -- old brick factory warehouses and workers' apartments -- and even in chilly February, a faint dusting of snow on the ground, people gathered on the downtown streets at midnight to watch the buildings, their past, being torn down. It was early 2007, my first trip to Shenyang, and while Beijing was full of pre-Olympic construction cranes, Shenyang was involved in a wholly difficult project: tearing down the rusted shell of its storied past.
For the city once touted by Chairman Mao as the heart of the communist modernization project -- known as the "elder brother of Chinese industry," with its proud skyline of factory smokestacks -- had become a dinosaur. If the New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof had described Shenyang as a "drab, Dickensian city" in 1989 -- with its sooty air, harsh winters, and grim temperament -- it was so much drabber and more desperate two decades later. While much of southern China experienced the 1990s and 2000s as a boom time, Beijing's mandate of restructuring inefficient and corruptly run state-owned enterprises fell like an axe on the average workers of Shenyang, where 85 percent of the economy was driven by the state. With rampant factory closures, Shenyang's unemployment rate hit 16 percent or higher. One of the few growth industries was prostitution, encouraged and taxed at 30 percent by former mayor Mu Suixin -- before his ouster, along with his vice mayor, for corruption. In admitting his crimes, Mu issued a statement: "My heart has always been with the Communist Party. When I was young I was a very good person. Now I am very bad. This is my tragedy." (He was sentenced to death, but died in jail of cancer.)
When I returned this winter to visit the famed downtown Tiexi ("Iron") District, site of China's iconic first Model Workers Village -- a self-contained factory complex that included housing for workers -- almost all the old smokestacks and workers' homes had already been torn down. One exception was a row of two-story brick apartments at the intersection of Beishi YiJie and Huangsi Street. There sat 53-year-old Li Liansheng, perched on a little stool on the sidewalk, with a suitcase full of his life's artifacts for sale: 5 yuan for an old postcard, 15 yuan for a booklet entitled "Korea Song List," 30 yuan for a badly stained copy of Mao's Little Red Book, 30 yuan for a jade cross. He scraped the cross against the pavement, then held it up for me to inspect. "No scratches." That was to demonstrate it was real jade.
Tall and broad-shouldered, he used to have one of the best jobs in Shenyang. For two decades, he had worked in a state-owned farm equipment factory until he was laid off fully a decade ago. He hasn't worked since, and likely won't again, like many among the city's "lost generation," so dubbed because with their education cut short by the Cultural Revolution, it's been difficult for these laid-off workers to find new employment. When his downtown apartment block was torn down, the government calculated total compensation based on square meters, but it wasn't nearly enough to purchase a new home, so Li and his wife moved into the cramped apartment rented by their 27-year-old son.
To pass the time, he comes back to this place, where other laid-off workers gather to swap stories and sell knickknacks. "People still live here," Li gestured behind him. The old brick buildings are slated for demolition, but smoke was still coming from a few chimneys. An old man stood on one balcony, foisting over it small furniture items. Another man stepped across the piles of rubble and disappeared into a doorway framed by rotted lintel beams. A light flickered inside. Those without families to fall back on hold on for as long as they can.
The modern history of Shenyang began with deception and violence. In 1931, Japanese army engineers blew up a section of railroad tracks outside the city, blamed it on the locals, and used that as pretext for their invasion and occupation of northeastern China. The Japanese built a new city center some distance from the old Manchu palace, centered on a large traffic circle from which eight broad avenues radiate. Not long after the founding of the PRC, the old obelisk that had stood in the center of that circle was toppled and a giant statue of Chairman Mao erected in its place -- one of the largest in China.
Today there's a good view of Chairman Mao from across the street at the Hotel Liaoning, an ornate old building with a spiral staircase, plastered ceilings, a high-ceilinged banquet hall, and a revolving door with brass fixtures; it was built in 1927 by the Japanese, whose tastes ran as extravagant as the Soviets were utilitarian. On weekends, the banquet hall is still in use, now hosting stately weddings for the sons and daughters of the city's BMW-driving elite.
As with the old city grid, the communists didn't undo the legacy of Japanese planners; they built atop it. They also built atop the colonial legacy of heavy industry in Manchuria. It's a disorienting fact that the early flames of China's industrial revolution -- later so important to the communist vision of patriotism and national progress -- were stoked while the Japanese occupied the region in a brutal quest for materials to fuel their own modernization. For instance, the Anshan iron mine, one of the largest in China, just south of Shenyang, was first developed by Japan's South Manchuria Railway Company. A legacy of that enterprise, the Anshan Iron and Steel Group, remains today China's second-largest steel producer. Under the PRC, Shenyang Aircraft Corporation was founded in 1953, followed by the Shenyang Locomotive and Rolling Stock Co., and Shenyang Brilliance Jinbei Automobile Co., among others.
"This place used to be like Detroit back in the day. Then the government let things get bad, and now it's working to come back."
That was the assessment of an American quality-control engineer for Boeing, who last year moved from Seattle to Shenyang. His job is "making sure everything gets off the [assembly] line all right." We had lunch in the cafeteria of the new Ikea -- and it tells you something about Shenyang today that it even has one; a sign outside proclaims: "No dream too big, No home too small."
After a protracted economic convalescence, the city's pulse has returned and it runs in a remarkably similar vein: Shenyang is making big planes and automobiles, only in collaboration with very different sorts of foreign powers. In 2005, Boeing signed a $600 million contract with a revamped Shenyang Aircraft Corp. to source parts for its aircraft, including the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Last year, BMW announced that it would spend $1.42 billion to open a second factory in Shenyang to assemble luxury cars exclusively for China's fast-growing domestic market -- now the largest auto market in the world. BMW reported selling 233,630 vehicles in China in 2011, up 37.7 percent in a year. Together, its two Shenyang plants -- one is in Tiexi district -- are designed to have a production capacity of up to 400,000 vehicles annually. Michelin expects its new $1.5 billion tire plant in Shenyang to open this summer, with an annual capacity of more than 10 million tires.
Most of Shenyang's iconic smokestacks have been moved to the suburbs; its streets are newly paved, and there's now a Carrefour hypermarket across from the Red Star Macalline Global Home Furniture Life Mall. New sports stadiums are being built for the 2013 National Games. It looks different. But the iron and coal are still here; now there's a growing constellation of research and technology universities, a base of engineering talent willing to work at internationally competitive wages, and growing domestic demand. Shenyang is still ground zero for manufacturing the Chinese dream, if you consider that BMW symbolizes the new Chinese dream as much as Mao stood for the old.
Visitors to China are often fixated on the pace of change, but just as often I hear Chinese people describe what hasn't changed in their cities. One pretty good rule of thumb is that whatever you can see changes quickly -- buildings, clothing fashions, restaurants -- but what you can't see doesn't -- culture, politics, social networks. Upon returning from Beijing to her hometown of Shenyang, photographer Luo Jian of China's Economic Observer newspaper made a comment that might well apply to many old Chinese cities: "Like a cell phone, the city changes its shell when it's worn. But the guts don't change."
SUBJECTS:
