The Tree of the Doves by Christopher Merrill

Author:Christopher Merrill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2011-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

“Tell me, Mr. Niu,” I said, “do they still teach Marxism to the Communist Party cadres?”

Mr. Niu sighed.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“We have a long drive,” I replied.

“Very well,” he said, for he could not resist telling a story.

Mr. Niu was a gifted raconteur. But a series of mishaps on our trip from Shanghai to the pagodas and gardens of Suzhou—the driver hired to take us to the so-called Venice of the Orient (the industrial city is built around polluted canals flowing from the Yangtze River) kept getting lost, then the van broke down in front of a military barracks, and then, after assuring the wary soldiers at the gate that a tow truck was en route to take the van to a garage, Mr. Niu hailed a taxi to drive us back to Shanghai—had unsettled my ordinarily unflappable guide. It took him a minute to collect his thoughts.

“You see, the three main tenets of Marxism remain valid,” he began. “First, one should take a scientific view of the situation.”

I nodded.

“Second”—and here he paused, a look of consternation sweeping over his face—“oh, well, never mind.”

But if he no longer remembered that Marxist triad he could tell a story about the Communist Party restyling itself along capitalist lines to stay in power. How to repudiate the revolution upon which its authority rested without undermining its foundations? This was the story of a carefully constructed illusion. It began with Deng Xiaoping’s decision, in 1979, to create a special economic zone in Shenzhen, a fishing village near Hong Kong, in which to encourage private enterprise, foreign investment, and the development of a market economy. Deng, who was Chairman Mao’s successor in all but name, was convinced that in the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution the Party must create a form of socialism with Chinese characteristics—a socialist market economy, which was of course a contradiction in terms. But he persisted, replacing the Cultural Revolution’s campaign against the Four Olds with Four Modernizations, in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and the military. Deng’s determination to open China up to the rest of the world had led to tremendous economic growth (the joke was that the national bird was the construction crane), fueled by what the economic historian Niall Fergusson called “Chimerica”—a system whereby American consumers bought Chinese-made goods, the Chinese government bought American debt, and everyone was happy, save for American workers who lost their manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor in China, antiglobalization and environmental activists who warned of impending catastrophe, and economists wary of the growing American current account deficit with China.

The riots in the French concession, which brought Perse to the Middle Kingdom, signaled the beginning of the end of the Sino-Franco relationship, while my journey took place in what might be the last days of “Chimerica”—the latest incarnation of globalization, the empire of connection first envisioned by Genghis Khan. I would not repeat Pound’s mistake of imagining that I understood how the system worked. And indeed the economic crash of 2008 was still in the offing.

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