China Witness

That night I barely slept. A feeling of oppression, of having no space to stretch out, welled up in my heart. I was both moved by 'the peace and kindliness in every cup of tea' that the Linhuan people had derived from their poor life, and awed by the persistence of generations of local people like Chen Lei, looking for a future for their town, seeking the true value of their native land. I muttered a lot of these things to all the cockroaches and midges that were ceaselessly 'exploring new territory' up and down my body. I think the blood racing through my veins that night must have satiated many of the mosquitoes and cockroaches that have lived side by side with Chinese peasants down the ages.

The following day at five thirty in the morning, half an hour after the time Old Mr Wu had given me, I was knocking on his front door.

Old Mr Wu was in the middle of preparing breakfast, and plainly surprised that I had kept my word, but he excitedly ushered me into his home, a converted store shed. This room was just like an antique shop or a junk shop, full of curiosities from his years of news-gathering: a magnetic Buddha, a clay statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, metal biscuit tins, plastic peonies, a long opium pipe of white jade, an agate snuffbox, a coarse pottery tea set and a redwood dressing table. On the wall directly opposite was a big row of portraits from Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping to Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the God of Wealth, a laughing Buddha and his grandparents and parents. He said that all of these were 'gods' in which he neither quite believed nor completely disbelieved. His wife kept off to one side, smiling but never speaking. It was hard to see her as the first female Party member of Linhuan or that frighteningly competent female brigade leader.

Old Mr Wu, his wife and I sat down on little square stools in the outer courtyard. I told them that I felt there had been words between the lines in our interview yesterday, and this was why I had made a special trip for an unofficial interview.

When Old Mr Wu heard this, he suddenly knelt down in front of me and burst into loud weeping.

'The government appropriated the 10.2 mu of land allocated to me. It was all agreed – I was going to get over 60,000 yuan for it, to be paid in full in ten years. That was the rule. They were going to give me six thousand every year, but it's been seven years now, and they haven't even given me six hundred. They don't give me money and they don't give me land. This is what makes me angry! I've gone to speak to the people in the township government, I've been to the county government, and I've been to see the head of the law court, but nobody would listen to me, only people with no real power, and when they'd heard me out, they just said: 'Plenty of people have this problem, your turn hasn't come yet.' To this day nobody's given me an explanation.

'Where's the money? It's in the hands of the production brigade. They say they're borrowing it. The production brigade's taken it to dig ditches and roads, and I haven't seen a fen! I'm a peasant, with no money and no land. I'm old, and I can't do much business. How are my old lady and I supposed to live? That's what hurts me most. I'd like to buy a gong and go up to Beijing to shout out my grievances! I've been treated so unfairly!

'I've had such a raw deal, fifty years a Party member, working all these years. Back in Land Reform they only allocated me three mu of land! It took another forty years, till Reform and Opening, before they gave me my ten mu, and I lived off that land. Seven years and no money! I've been treated so unjustly. I'm wronged! Officials these days aren't like in my day. If they'd done that, Chairman Mao would have had their heads chopped off!'

Sitting opposite Old Mr Wu, the 'written complaint' he had paid someone to write on his behalf clutched in my hands, my heart ached. These peasants who thought that young Westerners in fashionable 'begging jeans' were poor, and that doing hard, ill-regarded labour in the city was to 'enjoy life and make big money', did not even have the basic information or understanding they needed to live in the same era. But they had never made demands for a better life to the rich and powerful who requisitioned them into bankruptcy. Yet those 'mother and father officials' who have survived until today only because the peasants kept to their work instead of throwing down their hoes to make revolution and class struggle apparently never paused in their daily banquets to consider the price the peasants have paid with their blood and sweat.

China's peasants have been treated as a part of the 10,000 things of nature, a group that nobody notices. People are concerned about the melting of the ice caps, they fret over the disappearance of the Asian tigers, they fume at the desert swallowing up the green lands, they even have interminable discussions over the right combination of vitamins for every dish of food. But how many people are calling out for an improvement in the living conditions of the Chinese peasants? How many people pause to consider the bowls of weak vegetable soup in China's poverty-stricken villages, with just a few grains of rice added to stave off hunger? How many people would go to read a story like 'The Gourd Children' or 'The Monkey King' to the children of poor farmers who don't even know which end to open a book at or where to start reading from on the page, so that those hearts, whose first awareness was of days and nights of hunger, cold and disease, can have their share of goals and beautiful memories like the rest of us? How many people realise that helping those poverty-stricken, uneducated peasants begins with wresting power from local officials who in turn have no education and simply do not understand the law?

China has become strong, China has stood up, but we cannot stand on the shoulders of the peasants for the world to admire how tall we are. We cannot let the peasants' blood and sweat water the tree of our national pride.

7 Carrying on a Craft Tradition: the Qin Huai Lantern-Makers

The Huadeng brothers in their workshop, Nanjing, 1950s.

Interviewing lantern-maker Mr Li, at his workshop, 2006.

MR HUADENG, born in 1934 of a poor lantern-making family and now owner of the Qin Huai lantern workshop, and Li Guisheng, aged ninety, master lantern-maker, and his former apprentice, Gu Yeliang, interviewed in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu in eastern China by the Yangtze River. It is said that the first lantern fair was held here in 1372 when Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang ordered a spring lantern festival to celebrate both the coming New Year and the prosperity of the country. This tradition was passed down from generation to generation for centuries, but declined in the early twentieth century. In 1985 the lantern festival was revived. Mr Li is the oldest proponent of lantern-making and he and Mr Huadeng want to inspire a new generation to carry on this ancient tradition.

In the Chinese world, there are many who are hostile to the way film director Zhang Yimou has presented China to overseas audiences in films such as Raise the Red Lantern and Hero. They feel that Zhang Yimou is feeding a Western appetite for the exotic with uncouth Chinese folk customs which are a relic from the past. He is pandering to the developed world by presenting to them the humiliatingly backward face of China. In other words, he's using our warm Chinese faces to cosy up to foreigners' cold bums!

I do not know if these critics have any notion of the level of understanding of China in the rest of world.

In my ten years of wanderings outside China, I have read the English-language press every day. I have conducted impromptu surveys and asked questions about things which concerned me during visits to scores of countries. It has taught me something which I dared not believe before and am unwilling to believe now: that perceptions of China in the world today are like those of a tiny baby's first impressions – limited to mother's milk. They know this mother's milk exists but, not being capable of enlightened reflection, they cannot envisage its form. As for the sound and the way it grabs their attention, well, they have practice in distinguishing it and reacting to it, but cannot differentiate between the classic and the popular versions.

Among the world's total population of 6.6 billion, China's 1.3 billion is a huge 'unknown quantity'. Knowledge