The Polite Patriots of China

Along this city’s broad, clean boulevards, placards on every lamppost remind citizens that they are blazing the way to China’s future.

“Follow regulations,” reads one. Ten yards down the road, another urges: “Love your country, love your city.” A cyclist pedaling through town--cars are banned from most roads--will see the message to “Be a model citizen!” hundreds of times.

Welcome to Zhangjiagang, the cradle of China’s new Cultural Revolution. The Yangtze River port city is President Jiang Zemin’s pet project, a city-sized paradigm of political correctness--and an idealized model for the nation’s development.

It is in this former farming village 90 miles northwest of Shanghai that the country’s leaders have incubated what they hope is the perfect balance between communism and commerce. China’s sudden move from Marxism to the market in the last decade has brought along with its sudden riches a tangle of corruption, social disorder and instability.

But this town’s orderly streets, collectively owned factories and obedient citizens represent a wishful counterpoint to the messy economic miracle. The government has a name for it--”spiritual civilization”--and an ambitious plan to launch it across China beginning this autumn.

Twice a week, the townsfolk attend ideology classes where they study from the city’s own Little Red Book, which outlines “clean” and “dirty” habits. Until recently, those caught gambling, quarreling with their neighbors or failing to put their rubbish in plastic bags had to wear yellow vests for a day to advertise their shame.

Those who obey family-planning rules, don’t indulge in superstitious activities and keep their sidewalks tidy and swept are rewarded with a plaque declaring them a “New Wind Family”--in addition to tax exemptions and insurance benefits.

“Every single citizen except newborn babies is involved in building spiritual civilization,” says the city’s vice chief of propaganda, Li Jianzhong. His enthusiastic introduction of the city’s virtues breaks off mid-crescendo when he spots a toothpick in the middle of the office floor. He springs out of his chair, plucks it off the tiles and carefully deposits it in a spittoon.

“It’s a struggle to develop better humans,” he continues, reseating himself. “We are the model for all of China!”

Only 820,000 people live in this socialist success story. But in 1995, nearly that many official visitors arrived by the busload to learn from Zhangjiagang and carry the lessons back to their home provinces.

The spirit is already spreading. Building spiritual civilization has been declared one of the country’s top priorities, and Beijing is warming to its theme with a general cleanup--a “Strike Hard” crackdown on crime.

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Since April, police across the country have reported executing more than 1,000 criminals for even nonviolent offenses such as gambling and drug smuggling. In Beijing, billboards announce the new Nine Commandments, beginning with “Love your country.” Nanjing has banned swearing and other impolite behavior.

Fujian province just created a “civilized citizen pledge” to be signed by every person in the region. Officials in China’s five wealthy Special Economic Zones have been sternly warned to upgrade their moral standards. In large cities, shop signs with foreign names are being pulled down.

Liu Defu, a young conservative scholar who will present research on how to build “a new moral man” next month at the Communist Party’s most important meeting of the year, explains what’s behind the movement.

China is exploring “how to absorb the outstanding modern cultural achievements of all countries while resisting the corrosive influence of decadent capitalist things,” Liu told Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper.

Indeed, as China goes through a painful transition from a centrally planned economy to one buffeted by market forces, the spiritual discipline campaign is the latest tool in an official struggle to reassert control. The campaign replays an age-old Chinese battle between outside and inside, old and new, balance and change.

China’s traditional strength when it comes to foreign incursions and influence has been to absorb the good and cast out the bad, from the time of invading Mongol hordes centuries ago to the current era of multinational corporations.

But with a leadership at odds over how fast and how far to push ahead with reforms--state-run factories soon will be forced to sink or swim, for example, a requirement that is expected to result in widespread unemployment and discontent--good old-fashioned values are something everyone can agree on.

The methods are familiar too. The campaign has eerie echoes of a similar movement during the not-too-distant Cultural Revolution, a decade of chaos from 1966 to 1976 when Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung tried to destroy society in order to construct a better one. The new campaign is an attempt more to reclaim traditional values than to overthrow them, but Zhangjiagang’s vow to “build a better human” recalls Mao’s exhortation to “transform the country by transforming man.”

Just as Mao elevated “everyday heroes” for emulation--such as Lei Feng, a self-sacrificing soldier killed by a falling telephone pole--Beijing has named a new crop of ordinary heroes this year. There’s Xu Hu, a Shanghai plumber who unclogs people’s pipes after-hours for free; Li Guoan, a well-driller who finds water for impoverished villages in the Gobi Desert; and courteous Beijing bus conductor Li Suli.

The official campaign rewarding their routine altruism is meant to reassure folks who feel they are being left behind in the whirl of economic change.

“Different times have different requirements,” says propaganda chief Li. “But the purpose is the same: to raise people’s consciousness of spiritual civilization.”

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Like the resurgent modern heroes, Zhangjiagang stirs uncomfortable comparisons with another model--the village of Dazhai, famed for its agricultural production during the early 1960s, when the rest of the country was struggling with famine. Just as cadres flocked “to learn from Dazhai,” their successors flock here.

Dazhai turned out to be a fake--a Potemkin village where farm output was impossibly exaggerated to please Communist Party leaders. But Zhangjiagang, insists a local official, is the real thing.

“Dazhai was a man-made phenomenon,” says Wang Yufang, the vice secretary of one Zhangjiagang district. “We are a real spiritual and economic civilization. The country can learn from us wholeheartedly.”

The city already has spawned its own missionary heroes. Wang tells of a textile worker who went to Tianjin, a city near Beijing, for a cancer operation. After her surgery, she got out of bed to sweep all the floors of the hospital, proving her spiritual discipline. “Doctors and nurses wrote letters praising her Zhangjiagang spirit to fight illness and help others,” Wang says proudly. “The Zhangjiagang spirit will influence the whole country.”

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That’s what China’s leaders would like to happen. But while the town’s controlled environment may breed success, when it comes to predicting the country’s future, a city like Shanghai may be closer to the real thing.

With a population of 14 million, Shanghai is the most open and cosmopolitan of China’s cities--and 17 times the size of Zhangjiagang. Monumental Western buildings grace Shanghai’s famous riverfront, marking a legacy of foreign commerce. Officials who fear that the new campaign will be used to slow reforms point to Shanghai as an example of how to combine international innovation with national values.

Shanghai has its share of detritus from the demise of rigid central control. A walk along the riverfront reveals floating garbage, disheveled migrant workers, prostitutes hovering around the landmark Peace Hotel and honking snarls of traffic.

But the city also has an expansive sense of civic pride: Shanghai launched its own “Seven Nos” campaign (No spitting, no jaywalking, no cursing, no destruction of greenery, no vandalism, no littering, no smoking) and boasts a collection of perhaps the world’s cleanest public toilets.

And where the clerks in Zhangjiagang may be polite out of national duty, those in Shanghai have discovered that cordiality is good for profit.

Until recently, the legacy of China’s 45 years of Communist egalitarianism was an entrenched resistance to serving others. The routine response to customers’ requests used to be a curt “Mei you” (“Don’t have it”). Now Shanghai businesses have decided to hold the mei you, and about 50 other rude but common phrases, such as “Can’t you see I’m busy” and “Hurry up and pay,” have been banned in public offices.

“Customers want to be treated well,” says Gu Jidong, deputy manager of Bank of China’s Shanghai headquarters. “They want to be treated like gods.”

The bank recently launched a “Smile Campaign” to improve tellers’ attitudes, requiring them to smile at customers, do one good deed a day and answer the telephone with a cheery “Good morning” instead of yelling “What!”

Gu knows the service campaign is good for the bottom line: Last year, the Shanghai branch’s $200-million profit was the highest in the Bank of China group. “Competition is tough now,” Gu says, “and we need customers.”

But the bank manager also is conscious of the political payoffs in playing to the mounting spiritual discipline campaign. Deeds like helping the monks from the local Jade Buddha Temple load 10 tons of coin offerings into a truck to enable them to open an interest-bearing account bring the bank the blessing of the government as well.

“Smiling is not just for profit,” Gu says. “It also has a good effect on society.”

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Meanwhile, in Zhangjiagang, while adults attend their ideology classes at night, students at the Liang Feng Middle School get a head start on their own lessons in socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The vice principal, Wu Yongmin, proudly provides an electronic tour of the modern campus on closed-circuit television. With a click of the remote control, he switches from a view of the gym, where two teenage boys are sneaking a quick game of one-on-one, to a science class. While a teacher supervises exam-taking students from the front, a sweeping camera silently monitors the class from the back.

“The students are used to it,” says Wu. “It doesn’t make them feel nervous.”

He leads visitors through the gym, where a suddenly abandoned basketball rolls across the now-empty court, to the dorms where the live-in students sleep in bunks, eight to a room. The beds are tightly made; the floor glows with an antiseptic shine.

In a bathroom, 16 tin mugs are lined up in a precise row, each containing a toothbrush slanting exactly northeast, like so many vigilant soldiers shouldering guns.

A visiting former student laughs. “Living here was a bit like being in the army.”

But this kind of discipline makes good workers, says Wang, who also oversees a textile factory. Zhangjiagang’s industrial production was four times the national average in 1995; it boasts the country’s sixth-largest port (though it is emptier than might be expected) and a six-lane highway to make it easier for investors--and officials--to come witness the Zhangjiagang miracle. The town has escaped the economic inequality that has plagued the rest of the country--a manager can make only three times the salary of the average worker.

At a vegetable market that was moved from the street to inside a giant building, the vendors are pleased with Zhangjiagang’s changes.

“Our living standards are better,” says a fishmonger. “Look--no flies here.”

Another takes a longer view.

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“Everything is better than 10 years ago,” she says, keeping an eye on a crab that is determined to escape over the edge of its basin. “But just because conditions are good now doesn’t mean they’ll be good 10 years from now.”

On the city’s main drag, a hand-tiled pedestrian street lighted by neon and crowded with strolling families, a pair of policemen say they’re bored. The rest of the country is in the midst of the Strike Hard crime crackdown. But these two are unable to meet their arrest quota--they can report only petty thievery, mostly by migrant workers, and a smattering of small fines for littering or bike riding in off-limits areas.

About 10 yards behind their backs, one of Zhangjiagang’s model citizens strolls by, a young woman in a neatly pressed pink suit and matching pumps. She flips her waist-length hair over a shoulder--then clears her throat and spits. The policemen don’t see her.

“This must be the most civilized city in China,” says one officer.