I Stand Corrected (13 page)

What I saw would cheat anything in fiction.

Imperial Springs has a center equipped for corporate conferences
that includes a thousand-seat state-of-the-art auditorium with eight simultaneous translation booths and a ballroom that can accommodate five hundred.

There is also a golf club with the confusing name of International Summit. The twenty-seven-hole course features remote-controlled electric golf carts that drive themselves. The golf club resembles a larger version of the Gate of the Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square; its interior is borrowed from Ralph Lauren.

Overlooking the resort is the presidential villa. With perfect feng shui, it backs onto the Phoenix Mountains and faces the Liuxi River. The villa has a helicopter landing area, twenty-eight bedrooms, twenty-four-hour butler service, a private chef versed in international cuisine, and outdoor and indoor swimming pools. All of these amenities are scrupulously maintained by a dedicated staff and await the president of a country, any country. Alas, there have been no takers. But for those non-presidential guests staying at Imperial Springs, there are, situated along the mountains, thirty-seven individual villas in the traditional Chinese style.

The resort also boasts China’s only all-suite hotel, a bar that also functions as a giant humidor, and a spa with six treatment rooms, each with its own radon-infused hot spring. There is a private museum to house Chairman’s art collection and a separate living compound for the thousand people who work at the resort.

Although Imperial Springs had been built two years before my visit, Chairman could count the number of guests on one hand. That face-losing fact was the troubling issue he wished to discuss with me. But in China it is considered inexcusably impolite to discuss business over the first meal, and so no business was mentioned during the elaborately staged dinner that night. The meal began with a total of five rare Tibetan caterpillars being gently placed in my soup broth. Each cost a hundred dollars, and the time-consuming presentation meant I could not ignore the math. I was grateful that it took the time it did to complete the ritual, for it ensured that—on the off-chance they were still alive—the caterpillars would likely
drown before I was expected to show due appreciation by eating them one after the other.

It is a genetic understanding in China that you don’t trust anyone but your family. And so it was Chairman’s family I met the next day before an overture was made for me to become a consultant to his holding company, which controlled interests in a private bank, restaurants, hotels, and schools, in addition to Imperial Springs.

It wasn’t until I flew back to Beijing with the woman who brought me that I heard the story behind International Summit, the golf club whose name makes no reference to golf. The Chinese are enthusiastic players of golf. It combines business with the obvious display of wealth: building golf courses in China requires a subsidized move of farmers off the land. For that reason, it is against the law to build a golf course on the mainland. Chairman built one nonetheless—three, as a matter of fact, and not one of them was referred to by what it was.

The caprices of the very rich in China are no different than those I’ve seen in any number of other countries, including my own. The morning I left Beijing for Guangzhou,
China Daily
ran an article on a certain tea that is grown by using panda droppings as fertilizer and costs $31,000 for five hundred grams. Chairman’s wealth was made obvious not so much by his resort but by the fact he had three children. He had paid dearly for that privilege with something known as a “social compensation fee,” a fine for the very rich that buys them dispensation from the one-child policy.

If—for whatever reason—Chairman had failed to reproduce, he would have been given the option to subcontract that task. For there are now agencies in China that cater to wealthy would-be parents by securing a birthing surrogate in America. When that child—born in the United States and thus a U.S. citizen—turns twenty-one, he can apply for green cards for his parents. In this way, some wealthy Chinese are ensuring their succession in China and, at the same time, are incubating backup plans to immigrate to the United States.

PART SIX
Children and Their Many Consequences

A child’s life starts like one piece of white paper.
—
Chinese proverb

O
ur Dongzhimen apartment looked out on one of the compound’s several playgrounds, where ever-attentive nannies shadowed their single charges as if protecting perishables. Small, spry grandmothers used straw fans the size of elephant ears to cool down what would always be their only grandchild.

Like most apartment enclaves in Beijing, ours was enormous, and it was at its Olympic-size swimming pool one morning where I saw something plausible only in China.

Two women arrived with a little girl who looked no more than three years old. One of the women was the little girl’s mother; the other, her nanny. While the nanny removed the little girl’s clothes and replaced them with the bottom half of a bikini, the mother conferred with a young man dressed neatly in sports attire. He had a whistle around his neck and a small kickboard tucked under his arm. The little girl, familiar with the routine, held out her arms while the nanny made the necessary adjustments to her water wings. After a second check to make sure the water wings were secure, the nanny picked up the little girl and handed her to her mother, who handed her to the young man, who lowered her—now holding the kickboard—into the pool. He blew his whistle. The little girl kicked her way down the full length of the fifty-meter pool without stopping. As I watched her turn around and kick her way back, I thought to myself,
The rest of us have had it
.

The little girl kicking her way up and down the Olympic-size swimming pool was not the only example of supervised discipline among the children in our compound. As I left my apartment every morning for the market, I walked by a young boy being put through an impossible-looking regimen of table tennis. When I passed him on my way back several hours later, the poor boy—drenched in sweat—was still at it, relentlessly driving the ball across the net and returning it at lightning speed. I wondered if he was allowed the occasional pleasure of simply playing the game.

Physically precocious children appear in the crosshairs of their country’s fixation on winning, and promising athletes are often plucked from their families at adolescence and sent to state-run sports academies. But the wider scope of pressure forced on the nation’s children has been enabled by their parents’ upward mobility. Chinese adolescents are swallowed whole by the schooling their parents can now afford.

Confucian principles dictate that the mastery of any subject is achieved only through long and exhaustive study. This fundamental tenet—that hard work and rote study trump creative discovery—echoes through Chinese history.

Each year, China’s Ministry of Education is faced with the daunting task of educating over 250 million students; for the most part, it succeeds in that ambitious and admirable endeavor. According to the
CIA World Factbook
, China boasts a literacy rate of 95 percent. That the Chinese education system places an emphasis on high-pressure memorization and promotes standardization of knowledge over creative expression and independent thought is not without consequences. It has resulted in an intense work ethic, but it has also produced young people less capable of envisioning issues within a larger perspective.

China is undergoing an economic transformation ten times the speed of the West’s Industrial Revolution, but for China to maintain its national growth, it must change its economic model from one based on manufacturing to one based on innovation. It is possible that China’s educational system will prevent that metamorphosis.

Mei convinced me of this.

Mei and her parents lived on the same floor as we did in the Dongzhimen compound. Her mother was a doctor; her father, the editor of a business-to-business magazine specializing in aviation. Mei was twelve years old and attended a well-regarded middle school in another neighborhood. The school’s reputation was based largely on the number of its students who were accepted into excellent high schools—high schools that had an impressive percentage of their graduates accepted into good universities.

Every weekday morning, Mei was up at six. She dressed, had breakfast with her mother, and was out the door by seven in order to make her first class at eight. Mei arrived at school fifteen to twenty minutes early so she wouldn’t risk being late by one minute, for the school’s strict attendance policy penalized tardiness. Mei’s mother did her best to drive Mei to school, but sometimes Mei had to take public transportation; on those days, she started her commute even earlier.

Mei’s class schedule depended on the day of the week and included the subjects of Chinese, mathematics, English, and history. There were also “electives,” such as Chinese classical literature, which, though technically voluntary, were considered obligatory in light of the highly competitive nature of high school admissions.

In class, Mei sat quietly, listened intently, and took notes. She made herself known only to answer the occasional question from a teacher, which required naming a place or date. Regardless of the subject, the class structure was roughly the same: new material was presented, exercises were assigned to ensure that the material was properly processed, and weekly tests were given to confirm that the material was retained. Essays had a standardized format: students synthesized information they had been taught, drawing conclusions the teacher had already outlined for them. Standardization was rewarded. Diverging opinions resulted in lower grades, a risk not worth taking.

Mei finished school at five and immediately went to evening classes at a private cram school adjacent to her middle school. During her second shift of schooling, Mei reviewed the
same material she’d studied in her day classes. She also learned various techniques designed to give her an edge on standardized tests. The evening classes finished at six-thirty, and Mei usually ate dinner on the same block as the cram school and with the same girlfriends who were attending the same school. Once home, Mei did several hours of homework, getting to bed no earlier than eleven. Every Saturday, a private tutor worked with Mei to improve her test-taking techniques. On Sunday, Mei did something she was not allowed to do for the six preceding days and nights: she put aside her schoolbooks.

Between 2005 and 2010, China’s urban population increased by 43,500 every day, according the the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics. China’s middle class will continue to grow at a staggering rate, and a correspondingly large number of students will flood the education system. Demand for higher education in China is outpacing supply, and two fundamental facts are creating a voraciously competitive student body: there are only so many hours in a day to study, and there will be more and more students applying for a finite number of openings at the prestigious universities. The year I knew Mei, seventy million high school seniors in China were vying for nine million university slots.

Given the incredibly competitive nature of the Chinese education system, any slip in Mei’s schedule might have lowered her class rank, significantly lessening her chances at a successful future. Mei’s father lacked the connections to guarantee his daughter’s smooth transition into an elite high school, leaving Mei entirely dependent on her grades and test scores in order to stay on her upwardly mobile path.

Mei had a guitar, a gift from a relative, but she never learned to play it. It wasn’t that Mei was uninterested in music. It had been deemed an “unuseful” activity by her parents. They believed that any activity not directly improving Mei’s chances of getting into college was a liability.

Mei didn’t know any boys. Her school separated the sexes in the classroom, and the teachers didn’t encourage mixing on the playground. Mei’s few girlfriends went to the same school, shared the same class schedule, and attended the same cram
school. With the exception of occasional outings to a karaoke parlor to sing with these girls, Mei rarely saw them outside of school. Never would Mei consider confiding in them, for when the time came to apply to college, those same girls would be her competition.

Mei’s life, as I came to know it, was typical for children in her family’s socioeconomic bracket. Acceptance to a good university is believed to be crucial for a secure future in China—not so much for the quality of the education as for the status of attending the right school. The right school brings with it the likelihood of connections and the inevitability of a higher salary after graduation.

Tens of thousands of Meis are being shaped by China’s educational system—a system that is not teaching the next generation how to think critically, a system that prevents creative spontaneity, a system unheeding of the cautionary warning of a Chinese proverb: “Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.”