"Mr. China"

[fiefoe]

So far Tim Clissold has displayed good taste in selecting opening quotes to his chapters. (One forgets that Chairman Mao can be droll: 天下大乱形势大好.)

Just 15 years ago:

• I called through the little hatch to the dormitory chief and politely asked for a copy of the rules. He said that I couldn't have them, so I asked, "Why not?" "Those rules are internal and not to be told to the outside." "What does that mean? If I don't know what the rules are, how can I obey them?" "Our regulations are very clear."
• The government set the price too high and the peasants in the surrounding countryside grew nothing but cabbage. The result was a massive glut. The piles of cabbage grew and grew until they were ten feet high and hundreds of yards long. After a month, cabbage leaves were everywhere: on the pavements, on the roads, inside buildings, stacked up on window ledges. The leaves soon mashed down into a thick, slippery green slime on the ground. Bicycles collided, cars bumped gracefully into one another and people spent half their time picking themselves up off the floor and scraping cabbage sludge off their pants. It got so bad that the mayor of Beijing went on the radio and made a speech during which he said that it was everyone 's "patriotic duty" to eat cabbage.
• Although it was several weeks before anyone dared to publish the story of Deng's trip in the Chinese press, the news that he wanted more reform and further "opening up" of the economy eventually broke and by April...
  
• The meeting started with the deputy bureau chief offering (the Wall Street bankers) some melon seeds to chew {a bit LIT here} on and it got worse from there on in.
• ...turning down some leafy side street somewhere in the center of town, through a set of gates with vertical white signs hanging on either side. The columns of Chinese characters showed the work units inside: black characters for government offices, red for the party.