Halfway through the flight, just as they crossed the border into China, the captain announced that a sandstorm had made it impossible to land in Beijing. They would land in a town called Taiyuan and wait for the weather to improve. After landing they were bussed to a freezing cold terminal where well-wrapped-up Chinese were waiting in silence. The time difference was making her feel tired and unsure of her first impressions of China. The countryside was covered in snow, the airport surrounded by hills, and on a nearby road she could see buses and ox carts.
Two hours later the sandstorm in Beijing had died down. The flight took off, then landed again. When she had passed through all the controls, she found Karin waiting for her.
‘The Rebel has landed,’ she said. ‘Welcome to Beijing!’
‘Thank you. It hasn’t sunk in yet that I’m really here.’
‘You are in the Middle Kingdom. At the centre of the world. In the centre of life.’
That evening of the first day, she found herself standing on the nineteenth floor of the hotel, in the room she was sharing with Karin. She gazed out over the glittering, gigantic city and felt a shiver of expectation.
In another skyscraper at the same time stood a man looking out over the same city and the same lights as Birgitta Roslin.
He was holding a red ribbon in his hand. When he heard a subdued knock on the door behind him, he turned round slowly to receive the visitor for whom he had been waiting impatiently.
The Chinese Game
22
On her first morning in Beijing, Birgitta Roslin went out early. She had breakfasted in the gigantic dining room with Karin Wiman, who then hurried off to attend her conference, having explained how she was looking forward to hearing what was to be said about the old emperors. For Karin Wiman history was in many ways more alive than the real world in which she lived.
Birgitta had been given a map by a young lady at the front desk who was very beautiful and spoke almost perfect English. A quotation came into her mind. The current upswing of the peasants’ revolt is of enormous significance. It was one of Mao’s sayings that kept cropping up in the heated debates that were held in the spring of 1968.
The current upswing of the peasants’ revolt is of enormous significance. The words echoed in her mind as she left the hotel and passed the silent and very young men dressed in green who were guarding the entrance. The carriageway in front of her was wide with many traffic lanes. Cars everywhere, hardly any bicycles. The street was lined with imposing bank buildings and also a five-storey bookshop. People were standing outside the shop with large plastic sacks full of bottles of water. After only a few paces Birgitta could feel the pollution in her throat and nose and the taste of metal in her mouth. In sites not already occupied by buildings, the arms of tall cranes were in constant motion. It was obvious that she was in a city undergoing fundamental and hectic change.
A man was pulling an overloaded cart piled high with what looked like empty chicken cages; he seemed to be in the wrong century. Apart from that she could have been anywhere else in the world.
When I was young, she thought, I saw in my mind’s eye an endless mass of Chinese peasants in identical quilted clothes toiling with picks and spades, surrounded by chanting revolutionaries waving red flags, transforming rocky hills into fertile fields. The teeming crowds are still here, but in Beijing at least, in the street where I am now standing, the people are not as I anticipated. They are not even on bicycles; they have cars, and the women are wearing elegant high-heeled shoes as they march along the pavements.
During those days when the Swedish masses were preparing to assemble in town squares and chant the sayings of the great Chinese leader, in Birgitta’s imagination all Chinese people were dressed in identical baggy grey-blue uniforms, wore identical caps, had the same close-cropped hair and furrowed brows.
Occasionally, in the late 1960s, when she had received an issue of the illustrated magazine China, she had been surprised by all the healthy-looking people with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes raising their arms to the god that had come down from heaven, the Great Helmsman, the Eternal Teacher, and all the other names he had been given, the mysterious Mao. But he had not actually been mysterious. That would become clearer as time passed. He was a politician with a shrewd feeling for what was happening in the gigantic Chinese Empire. Until independence in 1949 he had been one of those unique leaders that history very occasionally produces. But after coming to power he brought about much suffering, chaos and confusion. Nevertheless, nobody could take away from him the fact that, like a modern emperor, he had resurrected the China that was by this stage well on the way to becoming a world power.
Standing now outside her gleaming hotel with its marble portals and elegantly dressed receptionists speaking flawless English, she felt as if she’d been transported into a world she knew nothing about. Was this really the society in which the upswing of the peasants’ revolt had been such a major event?
That was forty years ago, she thought. More than a generation. Then I was enticed like a fly to a pot of honey by something reminiscent of a religious cult offering salvation. We were not urged to commit collective suicide, because the Day of Judgement was nigh, but to give up our individuality for the benefit of a collective intoxication, at the heart of which was a Little Red Book that had replaced all other forms of enlightenment. It contained all wisdom, the answers to all questions, expressions of all the social and political visions the world needed in order to progress from its present state and install once and for all paradise on earth, rather than a paradise in some remote kingdom in the sky. But what we didn’t even begin to understand was that the sayings comprised living words. They were not inscribed in stone. They described reality. We read the sayings without interpreting them. As if the Little Red Book was a dead catechism, a revolutionary liturgy.
It took Birgitta Roslin more than an hour to get to Tiananmen Square — the Square of Heavenly Peace. It was the biggest square she had ever seen. She approached it via a pedestrian passage under Jianguomennei Dajie. The place was teeming with people on all sides as she walked across it. Wherever she turned there were people taking photographs, waving flags, selling bottles of water and picture postcards.
She stopped and looked around. The sky above her was hazy. Something was missing. It was some time before it dawned on her what it was.
There were no birds at all. But people were milling around everywhere, people who wouldn’t notice if she stayed or suddenly left.
She remembered the images from 1989, when the young students had demonstrated in support of their demands to be able to think and speak freely, and the final solution when tanks had rumbled into the square and many of the demonstrators had been massacred. This is where a young man had been standing with a white plastic bag in his hand, she thought. The whole world saw him on television, and people held their breath. He had stood in front of a tank and refused to give way. Like an insignificant little tin soldier he personified all the resistance a human being is capable of. When they tried to pass by the side of him, he moved sideways as well. What happened in the end she didn’t know. She had never seen a picture of that. But all those crushed by the tracks of the tanks or shot by the soldiers had been real people.