Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (25 page)

On occasion, an editor made the mistake of crossing the Rich Lady. In January 2005, a business newspaper in Shanghai published a tough article asking why Chen was allowed to secure state loans with land that other people still owned. Within days, the paper’s editor in chief flew to Beijing and apologized to her. Then the paper published a retraction and a new article singing the praises of the Jinbao Avenue project. Other newspapers that carried similarly critical stories were also pressured into printing retractions. Even newspapers in Hong Kong were not beyond Chen’s influence. Reporters at several papers, including the English-language
South China Morning Post,
told me their editors ordered them to stop writing about the Jinbao Avenue story. And then there was the case of the newspaper
Ming Pao
. After writing a story about Hua’s campaign against Jinbao Avenue, the paper’s Beijing correspondent was accosted at a restaurant by the manager of Chen’s demolition company, her lawyer, and a city official. It was late in the evening, the reporter told me, but the three insisted that he accompany them to see the Rich Lady. When he declined, the demolition manager, whom the reporter described as a thuggish fellow, threatened to “adopt other measures” if he didn’t “eliminate the influence” of his article in two days. The reporter retreated to the safety of Hong Kong the next day. The newspaper refused Chen’s demands to disavow his article and when she threatened to sue, it prepared further stories about her. But before they went to print, the reporter told me, Chen managed to arrange a truce—by getting the movie star Jackie Chan to put in a good word for her with the paper’s editor.

Chen sometimes displayed unusual foresight in protecting her interests. In 2002, as public anger about mass evictions was building in Beijing, a few newspapers began publishing essays by a lawyer named Gao Zhisheng, who objected to the demolitions as a violation of homeowners’ property rights. Gao would later emerge as one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken human rights activists, someone the party would find it necessary to imprison, but at the time, he was a newcomer in the capital and little known. Chen, however, seemed to recognize his potential as a troublemaker, and she tried to do something about it.

Not long before his arrest, Gao told me about his encounter with her. It was one of those illuminating behind-the-scenes stories that helped explain the party’s success at defusing opposition, and it said as much about the relationship between the party and the new rich who were the beneficiaries of its rule as it did about Chen’s personal style and methods. As Gao was building his law practice in the late 1990s, he recalled, a journalist introduced him to a woman who was looking for a lawyer to represent a businessman in a corruption case. The woman worked in the party’s United Front department, the bureau responsible for forging alliances with influential figures outside the party, and over time, as he got to know her, Gao began to consider her a friend. One afternoon in 2002, after he began writing the essays protesting the mass evictions in Beijing, she called and told him she wanted to introduce him to a potential client. Gao had already resolved not to represent real estate developers, but by the time he realized he was being taken to meet Chen Lihua, it was too late to cancel.

Chen’s mansion is located in a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Beijing, not far from the home of one of Deng Xiaoping’s sons. It looks more like a grand government building than a residence, and it sits in a walled compound behind the museum she built to display her collection of sandalwood furniture. When Gao and his friend arrived, they were ushered into a second-floor conference room, and he was seated in a carved wooden chair next to the Rich Lady. She greeted him warmly, and they made small talk for a while, chatting about his background and his work. Then Chen told him she belonged to an association of real estate developers, and that they had noticed his essays. No one was afraid of him, she continued, but because the United Front official was a mutual friend, she wanted to offer him some advice. She told him to think of her as a big sister, because she had much more experience in Beijing than him. “You have no idea how deep the water is,” she said. “In the real estate business, you can’t succeed without a political patron behind you. So you can’t touch them. The only result is that they will hurt you.”

Chen asked why Gao had moved his family to Beijing from the western province of Xinjiang. “Wasn’t it to make a living and earn money?” she said, before quickly promising: “We can give you whatever you need.” At the end of the conversation, Chen made a big show of presenting Gao with a gift, an exquisitely carved sandalwood container for holding calligraphy scrolls and paintings. She boasted that the piece was more valuable than similar ones she had given to members of the Politburo Standing Committee. Gao accepted the present, but Chen refused to let him bring it home himself and ordered her employees to load it into her Mercedes, deliver it to his apartment, and place it wherever he instructed. Riding the elevator down with him as he was leaving, Chen reminded Gao again that she and her industry friends were willing to take care of him. “Listen to me,” she whispered. “I can even give you real estate.” Then, as she walked Gao to the door, Chen engaged in a last bit of flattery, saying that she usually didn’t go downstairs to see off visitors. She was seeing him off, she said, just as she saw off President Jiang Zemin and the premier, Zhu Rongji, when they visited her, but she didn’t usually bother for other Politburo members.

Chen’s overture was unexpected, because Gao had never mentioned Jinbao Avenue or any of her other projects in his essays. When he continued writing the articles, posting them on the Internet after newspapers stopped publishing them, his friend in the party’s United Front department called and insisted on taking him to visit Chen again. This time, Chen offered to pay him three hundred thousand yuan per year to serve as a legal consultant for her company. It was a large sum, almost half Gao’s annual income, and Chen added that the amount was negotiable if he thought it wasn’t enough. When Gao declined, Chen expressed surprise, telling him that law firms were always trying to persuade her to hire them. Then she summoned her son into the room, and told him that all the lawyers he had hired weren’t worth “a dog’s fart.” Gao was “a real lawyer,” she declared, and from now on, he would be the company’s chief counsel. Gao refused again, but Chen told him not to rush to a decision. She said they should stay in touch, and she paid him about $1,250 in cash for the two hours he had spent listening to her pitch. Over the next two years, Chen summoned Gao to her home twice more, and she paid him each time. She kept trying to change his mind, telling him she was looking out for him and warning that he would suffer if he didn’t heed his big sister’s advice. Gao accepted her money—after all, he told me sheepishly, she was taking up billable hours—but he continued writing the essays.

The last time Gao saw Chen was the first time he asked to see her. Hua Xinmin, the preservationist fighting to save her family home, had come to Gao for help, and he had agreed to introduce her to Chen. The meeting didn’t last long. Hua appealed to Chen not to demolish her father’s house, and Chen listened politely but made no promises. Later, though, the United Front friend told Gao that Chen was offended that he had brought Hua to see her. And he never heard from the Rich Lady again.

O
N BOTH OCCASIONS
that Chen Lihua agreed to meet with me, she gave me presents. At the end of my interviews with her, she would tell me to turn off my tape recorder and then motion to her secretary, a young, efficient-looking man hovering nearby, and he would scurry over with bags of gifts. The first time, Chen gave me a Chinese-style padded silk jacket and a long cashmere coat, both of which she insisted I try on for size before leaving. The coat cost nearly five hundred dollars, according to a price tag that was still attached to it. The next time, she gave me another silk jacket, and told her secretary to slip a thousand-dollar Hong Kong banknote in the pocket. I objected strenuously both times, telling her that American journalists generally did not accept gifts and that it was against the
Washington Post
’s policies. But the Rich Lady would hear none of it. She said reporters from around the world had interviewed her and accepted her presents, and if I refused, she would take it as a personal insult. Both times, we went back and forth about it for several minutes, and when I finally relented and told her I would take her gifts and donate them to charity, she seemed satisfied that she had gotten her way.

We met in a conference room on the second floor of her mansion, probably the same room where she had wooed Gao. Hanging on the hallway outside were separate photographs of Chen shaking hands with each of the nine men sitting on the Politburo Standing Committee at the time, as well as other photos of her with past party leaders and with foreign dignitaries such as Colin Powell. In person, Chen came across as more down-to-earth than she appeared on television. She was a large woman, and she projected a maternal air. She clearly enjoyed receiving guests, but she also seemed insecure about her limited schooling and humble background. She often mangled her sentences, and she strained to sound more literate by stringing together idioms that made little sense the way she used them. She spoke at length about red sandalwood—its beauty, its history, its scarcity—and at one point, she made me pinch her arm to demonstrate its beneficial health effects. “I’m in my sixties now, but can you tell?” she asked. I politely said no. “I’ve had diabetes for seventeen years, but can you tell?” she continued. “No, you can’t. Red sandalwood is great for my diabetes.”

Chen happily repeated the story about the antique wardrobe that she rescued during the Cultural Revolution, and she was eager to tell me about her run-in with the swarm of killer bees in the mountains of Burma. But whenever I asked about how she made her fortune, Chen would get evasive and resort to platitudes. “It was all through hard work,” she told me. “Some reporters have asked me where my money came from. They all want to ask this question, and today you’ve asked it, too. I’ll tell you the same thing. Earning money is justified. Spending money is proper. That is, the money I earn, I spend it properly. I feel confident investing in China, and that proves all the money is earned legally. Some things are private, and I don’t necessarily want to say too much.” I struggled to follow her logic, and I thought my understanding of Mandarin had failed me, but a Chinese colleague who accompanied me to the interview confirmed that Chen was babbling.

Later, I tried a more direct approach. I asked Chen whether she had special access to a factory warehouse full of antique furniture seized by the Red Guards. She laughed and said she had only purchased a few worthless items from the factory. Then she added that she never sold any of the antique furniture she collected and restored. It was a puzzling statement, because she had already told me that she went into the antique furniture business before going into real estate. How could she make a living if she didn’t sell any furniture? “I had my savings, and I also have my economic secrets,” she replied. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Chen acknowledged the importance of connections in doing business in China, but denied she had any special access to party leaders. “Connections are very important, but it’s different from what you imagine,” she said. “It’s not like what people usually say, that connections can overturn the law, that they can trump anything. In my experience, that’s not the way it is.” Instead, Chen said, her connections with officials were aboveboard and built on integrity and trust. “You need credibility to build connections,” she said. “You do things according to the regulations and policies. You do whatever they say. Then they trust you.” Once you win their trust, she continued, it is important not to abuse it. “I might never ask favors from friends whom I have cultivated for decades,” she said. “Leaders are leaders of the nation and the people. You can respect them but you can’t make requests of them. If you ask for favors and lean on them like an armchair, it will cause problems…. The leaders will keep a distance from you.”

When I asked Chen whether entrepreneurs could succeed without special access to party officials, she maintained it was possible. All you needed to do, she said, was “follow the law and the policy of reform and opening, and go to all the departments. Go to the land bureau, and the planning bureau, and the local governments…. Go and have tea and try to understand things.” It was as simple as that, she insisted, adding that there was no need to treat officials to fancy meals or give them big gifts. She said she herself gave them only pieces of art, such as the sandalwood items her carpenters produced. (It was at the end of this interview that Chen gave me the thousand Hong Kong dollars, the equivalent of about $130. Her secretary said I should use it to buy lunch.)

Chen defended the mass evictions and demolition of Beijing’s old neighborhoods, casting herself as an enlightened developer acting in the interests of commoners who didn’t know what was best for them. “Some ordinary people don’t want to move, and that’s understandable. It’s hard to leave your native land. Don’t say that his house is small. He grew up there, and he’s used to it,” she said. “If you ask him to leave, he may not be able to understand it at first, but after he leaves and moves into an apartment building, he changes his quality of life, his cultural quality, and his tastes. Then he’s very happy.” When residents resist demolition, she said, “we try our best to negotiate with them.” She claimed she never evicted anyone or demolished a home without reaching a deal. She began telling me about the Jinbao Avenue project and boasting that not one displaced resident complained, but she must have sensed my skepticism, because then she brought up Hua Xinmin, whose name she kept getting wrong. At the time, Chen’s company had already torn down Hua’s family house and begun building a private club on it.