The Life and Times of Book Idiot Zhou
DURING HIS LAST YEAR AT NANJING UNIVERSITY, Book Idiot Zhou finally entered the Communist Party, swallowing his antipathy in the hope that party membership would result in a better job assignment. It didn't.
To avoid being sent back to the country-side where he'd grown up, he enlisted in the People's Liberation Army. He entered as a lieutenant a month after graduating from the university in July 1982. He awoke on his second day realizing he had made a mistake. "This is going to be a tragedy," he wrote in his diary. "I have to begin my struggle to leave."
It took Zhou four years of maneuvering to win permission to leave the army. Afterward, he landed a low-paying job as a teacher at the Anhui Institute of Finance and Trade in the small, grimy city of Bengbu, just west of Jiangsu province. His subject: Marxism. "For several years, my income was equivalent to nothing," Zhou would write later. By this time, he was married, with twin daughters to support. One daughter was healthy; the other had been born with Down syndrome. "My dinky salary had to support my parents and my family. One child needed medicine and nourishment." He needed more money.
Zhou began to think the unthinkable: going into business. Raised with the conventional view of merchants, who ranked far below government officials and scholars, Zhou had also absorbed communist propaganda describing business owners as "capitalist bloodsuckers." But China's de facto ruler, Deng Xiaoping, was changing the economy -- and changing the country's mind-set.
In just a few years, China had ditched the we're-all-poor-together egalitarianism in favor of a nationwide quest for cash.
Deng devised a new way to describe China's economy, calling it "socialism with Chinese characteristics." From then on, every capitalist-style reform was justified as falling within this deliberately vague, catch-all category. Policymakers were now free to jettison crackpot Marxist economic theory, so long as they didn't discard the one thing the party held dear: its continued domination.
Zhou's colleagues and friends were buzzing with talk about new possibilities. Several of his classmates from Nanjing University had already "jumped into the sea," as the Chinese called starting a business. One graduate student, who'd been tossed out of the university for having too many girlfriends, opened a coffee shop; another bought and sold iron ore; another raised mushrooms in the basement of his apartment building.
In 1987, a high school classmate from Dongtai contacted Zhou with a proposition. The classmate knew of a pharmaceutical factory in Guangzhou that was looking to buy enzymes found in, of all places, human urine. What he needed was a source. Zhou's friend had heard that Nanjing University had the technology to isolate the enzymes and that the chemistry professor in charge of the process was also from Dongtai.
The former classmate asked Zhou to contact the man and work out a deal. The professor agreed to share the technology. Zhou, his classmate in Dongtai and a third man, Sheng Hongyuan, then formed a partnership to open plants to extract these enzymes. Zhou was the only one without capital, so he agreed to establish and manage the facilities in exchange for a piece of the profits.
"It was pretty fitting," Book Idiot Zhou says with a laugh. "I'd made a few pennies collecting turds as a boy. Here I was doing pretty much the same thing."
Within months, Zhou and his partner Sheng had secured contracts to collect urine in Bengbu and other cities. For a fee, local sanitation departments allowed them access to the public toilets. Zhou and Sheng would then organize a platoon of laborers to pedal three-wheeled pedicabs mounted with huge vats to collect the goods each day. For every ton of urine, they would extract 60 grams of a raw material that the pharmaceutical company used to make an anti-clotting heart medicine and 100 grams of a raw material for a medicine that helps dissolve gallstones. Zhou transported the enzymes once a month by bus to Guangzhou. Book Idiot Zhou had jumped into the sea -- of urine.
ZHOU HELD ONTO TO HIS TEACHING JOB, which provided him with a safety net of sorts: an apartment and medical care. Several days a week, he taught Marxist, Leninist and Maoist thought and railed against the exploitation by the capitalist class. The rest of the time he spent as a budding entrepreneur, employing dozens at rock-bottom wages, working the system to enrich himself, his partners and his family. In 1991, Zhou was accepted into a program at Beijing University designed to keep history and politics professors up on the latest trends in teaching Marxism. Zhou spent most of his time setting up a urine-extraction plant. He landed two contracts with the Beijing municipal government to collect urine at 1,000 public toilets. He got to know each public toilet intimately while pedaling his bicycle through Beijing neighborhoods, showing his workers where the collection sites were.
None of his laborers had ever been in Beijing before. Zhou couldn't find urbanites willing to do the dirty work. Most of his workers came from the provinces, farm boys with strong bodies and a willingness to do anything to get out of the fields. Zhou's processing plant -- a bankrupt state-owned factory that he rented from a local party chief -- was south of downtown Beijing, 3 1/2 miles from the nearest toilet. The workers made as many as nine trips a day, seven days a week, earning the equivalent of $50 a month.
One day in January 1992, Zhou discovered that the plant's drainage system was blocked, leaving him with no place to dump several vats of effluent. Zhou had been told that the runoff, mostly ammonia, would harm neither people nor animals, so he discharged the stuff into the ponds of a local fish farm. Zhou spent the Spring Festival holidays dredging thousands of dead fish out of the ponds, leaving a stench on his hands and clothes for months. He reimbursed the owners the equivalent of $2,000 -- a small fortune.
ZHOU'S BUSINESS WAS FAILING. Although the market for enzymes was good, he had so little money that his platoon of 18 pedicabs had dwindled to a squad of five.
Zhou periodically would ask his partner in Dongtai for a share of the firm's profits. Each time, the partner would refuse, saying the business was facing difficulties. Then on a trip to Guangzhou, Zhou asked a representative of the Guangzhou pharmaceutical company how he thought the business was doing. "Not bad," Zhou recalls the representative replying. "We must have made several hundred thousand together." Other than the occasional pittance to cover expenses, Zhou had not seen any money from his Dongtai partner in more than six years.
His experience was typical for many Chinese entrepreneurs. So new to the business of business, the Chinese ripped one another off with mind-boggling regularity. The country's lack of a moral compass only made things worse. Zhou once stored 120 pounds of enzyme at a friend's refrigerated warehouse. The friend sold it and refused to give him any money. Zhou hadn't asked for a contract because to do so would have amounted to an insult. Business is all done on a handshake, yet in China, handshakes are worthless.
Zhou finally went to Dongtai and confronted his partner, demanding that he give Zhou the Beijing portion of the business. The partner relented. Zhou found himself at the end of 1994 the sole owner of his own urine-extraction business in the capital.
Meanwhile, Zhou was growing weary of his job teaching Marxism at the Anhui Institute, and he was increasingly unwilling to toe the party's ideological line. Each year a handful of students, usually those applying for party membership, would express doubts about Zhou's loyalty to the party and to China. One student even delivered a report with statistics on how frequently Zhou was critical of the state.
In 2002, the party secretary at the institute summoned Zhou to his office. "Either you change the nature of your instruction, or you will stop teaching Mao," the secretary warned.
Zhou told the secretary that he did not think that he was particularly anti-party or anti-Mao. The secretary remained unconvinced. He informed Zhou that he was being switched from teaching Maoist thought to teaching business administration.
LAST APRIL, BOOK IDIOT ZHOU RETURNED to his ancestral village, arriving with the air of a conquering hero. He was wearing a tie and driving his freshly washed and polished white Volkswagen Bora. It was the Qingming Festival -- during which Chinese traditionally honor their ancestors -- and Zhou planned to tend to the graves of his parents and grandparents.
With economic reforms, the Shen Kitchen Commune had been disbanded, and Zhou's old production brigade had been renamed Li's Kitchen Village; it was not bad off for a rural backwater. Every courtyard had a motorcycle. Many of the men and women had jobs in factories rather than in the fields. Zhou pointed out people, passing a wizened woman who looked to be in her sixties, but was actually Zhou's age -- 50. "That's a girl I liked when I was a boy," he said. "She was the daughter of a party guy . . . She ended up marrying a local farmer. He gets drunk and beats her now."
Zhou greeted the elderly parents of the first man killed in the village during the Cultural Revolution. A band of Red Guards murdered him because he used to paint portraits of Buddhist saints. Zhou said hello to the mother of the party secretary who had tried to bamboozle Zhou into marrying his lover three decades earlier. The party secretary had died young. "Hello, Professor Zhou," said the old woman, who, at 89, was so bent that she stood barely four feet tall. "Tell my grandson to come home, please."
"I hired her grandson," Zhou explained. "I hired the son of the man who had tried to keep me down on the farm."
Zhou walked the dirt paths of Li's Kitchen, smiling at the sunburned faces of the farmers who greeted him with a mixture of curiosity, envy and respect. He merited all those reactions. Facing bankruptcy in the mid-'90s, he had turned his business around and, by last year, was making more than $60,000 annually. He'd bought himself a sprawling condo in Nanjing, divorced his first wife and married a woman 22 years his junior.
But his success hasn't mellowed his view of the Communist Party. "Let's look at China from the Marxist perspective," Zhou says. "Let's give the Chinese government the benefit of the doubt. Why did the slave society overthrow primitive society? Because its economy was more advanced and it was richer. The same is true for why feudal society overthrew slave society and why capitalist society replaced feudal society. But then we come to Mao. Who was Mao? Who did he represent?"
"Did Mao represent economic forces stronger than capitalism? No. Did he represent anything progressive? No. He represented the most backward forces in China. He didn't even represent the working class. He represented thugs. It wasn't a communist revolution. It was a thug's revolution. That's our real history."
John Pomfret is The Post's Los Angeles bureau chief. This article is adapted from his book Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China, to be published next month by Henry Holt and Co.