While I was in the hospital waiting for my IV drip to drip, Hsin went back to the guesthouse to take care of a few chores. He returned an hour later to pick me up, and as we walked back, he mentioned that a policeman had paid a visit.
“He wants me to provide a job for his niece,” Hsin said.
China runs on this sort of coercion. The economy has been greatly liberalized since the ’70s, but corruption remains rampant. Connections — guanxi — are a necessary part of doing business.
When I mentioned the term to him, Hsin laughed. “How do you know that word?” he asked.
It is a slightly odd term for me to know, given that it comprises fully one third of my Chinese vocabulary. The reason is straightforward. I’ve read a handful of books on China, and guanxi is the one word that reliably comes up.
I asked Hsin whether he was going to offer the niece a job. He laughed again. “You never say no.” She starts tomorrow.
Hsin laughs a lot when I ask him naive questions about life in China. He’s happy about the new freedoms he enjoys, and doesn’t think much about politics or world events. He has absolutely no opinion on the war in Iraq. Mainly he wants to talk about basketball; he is thrilled to hear that I once met Michael Jordan.
When I ask him about freedom of the press, he says that in the past, the media wouldn’t utter a critical word about the government. Now they occasionally do. When I ask him about political freedom, he laughs yet again and tells me that you simply don’t say anything bad about the party, or else. Then he draws a finger across his throat, smiling all the while.
As always, I find myself wishing that the citizens living under these incompetent governments would feel greater urgency for change. But I can’t really fault them for focusing on opportunity.
Ten years ago Hsin would have been unable to move to Zhongdian to start a guesthouse. The reason he chose this location is that he knows he can run a business better than the local Tibetan population. This fact highlights another of the problems underlying China’s economic expansion, but Hsin can hardly be faulted for that. He has an eight-year lease, and his immediate goal is to get a mention in the Lonely Planet. It’s a good goal.
