The Five Brothers' Dream

When Ma Xinde entered the Personnel Department of the Provincial Foreign Trade Administration, he arrived just as a government office was moving from quietness toward clamor.
The office building of the provincial administration stood on Huanshi East Road in Canton, in an excellent location. By then, Huanshi East Road already carried something of the air of an international city. Traffic was growing heavier; the trees along the road were green through all four seasons, and when the wind blew, their leaves flashed in the sunlight. Across the road was the Friendship Store, once one of the places in Canton most filled with a “foreign” atmosphere. In its display windows were imported cigarettes, foreign wines, watches, electrical appliances, cosmetics. Many ordinary citizens, passing by, could not help taking a few extra glances. Not far away, the five-star Garden Hotel was under construction. Cranes stood high, scaffolding dense upon dense, like a new world slowly growing out of steel and cement.
The first time Xinde went to report for duty, he stood downstairs and looked up for a while, feeling something in his heart that he could not quite describe. This place was not like a university; it did not have the poetry of plane trees and shaded paths. Nor was it like his second brother Yide’s company, with its steaming ambition of the marketplace. This was a government office, with a gatekeeper, a mailroom, corridors, meeting rooms, and offices one after another hung with nameplates. Yet it was not the heavy stillness of old-style bureaucracy either. People came and went through the building. Telephones rang without pause. Some people carried files up and down the stairs. Others pushed carts delivering stacks of inspection materials. In the corridors one could often hear such words as “export,” “inspection,” “certificate,” “foreign merchant,” “Shenzhen,” and “Ruizhou.” Xinde vaguely felt that what he had entered was not an ordinary office building, but a sluice gate standing at the edge of the great tide of reform and opening.
The director, Li Lili, was the wife of Deputy Secretary Xia of the provincial Party committee.
When people outside mentioned this relationship, they could not help lowering their voices a little, as though the name itself carried a certain weight. Yet those who had truly met Li Lili would usually add another sentence: “Director Li is a good person, and very capable.” She too had been transferred from the army. She carried a soldier’s briskness in her manner, and when she spoke, she did not drag mud and water. In meetings, she often went straight to the heart of the matter. She disliked empty talk, and she disliked even more when simple matters were wound into complexity. If someone reported work for half a day, she would lift her head and ask, “What is the conclusion? What are the difficulties? What do you need the bureau to solve?” With a few sentences, even the smoke in the meeting room seemed to thin.
In the eyes of a young man like Xinde, newly entering the office, Li Lili had a special aura. She dressed plainly, her hair neatly combed, her steps quick, her eyes bright. She did not put on airs, but no one dared muddle through before her. She knew that the position of the Foreign Trade Administration was changing. In the past, import and export commodity inspection had seemed merely a professional department, concerned with certificates, sampling, quality, and procedures. But after reform and opening began, Southern Yue became one of the most 个已启用 places in the country for opening to the outside world. Foreign trade, processing, exports, joint ventures, processing with supplied materials, entrepôt trade—all surged up like a spring tide. Goods had to go out, and quality had to be guarded. Foreign merchants had to come in, and credibility had to be built. Ports had to be opened smoothly, and supervision had to keep pace. In the tide of the times, this building of the Foreign Trade Administration became heavier and heavier in weight.
At the beginning of reform and opening, the provincial headquarters had only a little over five hundred employees. The number was not small, but it was not enormous either. Below it, mainly in Shenzhen, Ruizhou, and a few other cities where opening and foreign trade were 个已启用, there were branches or offices, and their staff were not numerous. At that time, many things still carried the flavor of exploration. Systems were being built, procedures changed, cadres trained, and foreign trade enterprises were also testing their way forward. A document might come down today and require supplementation tomorrow according to a new situation. The opening of a new port, a new enterprise exporting goods, a new batch of commodities submitted for inspection—any one of these could make several offices in the building busy for an entire day.
Old comrades often said, “In the past, we did not handle many orders in a day. Now, as soon as the telephone rings, we know there is another new situation.”
In the Personnel Department, what Xinde first felt was not commodities, but people.
The development of a unit appears on the surface as an increase in business volume, but in its depths it is actually the increase of people, the increase of posts, the increase of institutions. Wherever an office needed to be set up, cadres had to be assigned. Wherever export volume rose, manpower had to be increased. Shenzhen did not have enough people; Ruizhou did not have enough people; Dongguan, Zhongshan, Shantou, Zhanjiang also began to show needs. Report forms were sent one after another to the Personnel Department. Staffing quotas, transfers, training, archives, assessments, appointments and removals—all these matters finally turned into stacks of materials pressing down upon the desks of Xinde and his colleagues.
He had originally studied philosophy, thinking of existence, meaning, freedom, and fate. Only after entering the Personnel Department of the Foreign Trade Administration did he discover that a person’s fate could sometimes be folded inside a transfer order, a form, or a cadre résumé. Who would be transferred from the provincial bureau to Shenzhen, who would be temporarily assigned from the Ruizhou office to Canton, who would attend training, who would be promoted to section chief, who would go down to support a newly established institution—behind each matter were family arrangements, personal expectations, and also the age’s redistribution of human beings.
Reform and opening was not merely a slogan. When it fell upon the Foreign Trade Administration, it became telephone after telephone, box after box of samples, certificate after certificate, transfer order after transfer order.
Factories in Canton began accepting foreign orders. Household appliances from Focheng began going abroad. Dongguan’s “three forms of processing and one compensation trade” enterprises multiplied. Shenzhen’s ports were busy day and night. Ruizhou’s ceramics, home appliances, textiles, foods—all kinds of goods wanted to climb onto the international market. Every batch of goods going out needed someone to inspect it. Every stamped certificate concerned the credibility of an enterprise. Every mistake could affect a foreign merchant’s view of “Made in China.” The Foreign Trade Administration was no longer merely an office sitting inside a building waiting for materials. It had to run to docks, warehouses, factories, and ports. It had to understand products, standards, international rules, and also the urgency of domestic enterprises.
In ten years, change shot forth like a tree suddenly putting out branches.
The provincial bureau grew from more than five hundred people to more than a thousand. The original office building began to seem cramped. Cabinets were added in corridors. Desks were added inside offices. Some sections were so crowded that there was hardly room to turn around. File cabinets piled higher and higher; document bags accumulated more and more. At the stairwells, people often had to turn sideways while carrying materials to let others pass. Later, the bureau had no choice but to rent additional office space and send part of its sections and staff elsewhere. Someone joked, “Our Foreign Trade Administration is becoming like export goods too. It cannot all be packed in one place anymore; it has to be shipped out in batches.”
A larger new office building was also being planned and built. This was a thing rich in symbolism: the development of a government office would, in the end, become a larger building within the city. A building was not simply a building. It was the shadow of expanding business, the shape of increased powers and responsibilities, and also the seal that the age stamped upon a department.
The truly astonishing change, however, was across the whole province.
As Southern Yue’s outward-oriented economy raced forward, every region began establishing branches and more offices. In the past, only a few key cities had foreign trade administration forces. Later, almost wherever there was foreign trade, there had to be foreign trade administration; wherever there was an export processing zone, someone had to be stationed; wherever there were ports, docks, bonded warehouses, and foreign-invested factories, the figures of foreign trade administration cadres would appear. Later, employees across the entire provincial system exceeded ten thousand. The number sounded like a vast army. But if one thought carefully, it was not strange at all. Behind it stood the explosion of Southern Yue’s foreign trade: factories, docks, containers, customs, foreign merchants, contracts, standards, and the global market surging in together as a tremendous wave.
Xinde often felt that he was standing at the edge of a river, watching the water rise.
When he first entered the bureau, he was only a young cadre in a white shirt, carrying an old briefcase, with a hand of fine handwriting. He was assigned to the Personnel Department to organize files, copy materials, and draft notices. When leaders sometimes saw his handwriting, they would pause and praise him: “Little Ma’s characters are good—clean, with bones.” And so some meeting notices, cadre training lists, award certificates, and the covers of important materials were often given to him to write. His philosophy did not necessarily come into use at once, but his handwriting first helped him stand firmly inside the office.
People in the bureau gradually came to know him. Some called him “Little Ma.” Some called him “the Fudan graduate.” Others joked, “A philosophy major doing personnel work—just right for studying the thought of cadres.” At first Xinde was embarrassed. Later, he learned to answer with a smile: “Personnel affairs are harder than philosophy. Philosophy speaks of reason; personnel affairs must also speak of human feeling.”
Once this sentence was spoken, everyone in the office laughed.
He slowly discovered that the Foreign Trade Administration was a very special school. What it taught people was not classroom concepts, but the way an age operated. Once a country opened its doors, what surged in first was not an abstract world, but concrete goods, contracts, standards, foreign exchange, technologies, people, and risks. Opening was not finished once the door was pushed open. After the door opened, someone had to inspect goods, examine certificates, watch quality, watch rules, defend the country’s credibility, and also open pathways for enterprises.
Director Li Lili often said in meetings, “Southern Yue is walking in front, and our foreign trade administration must keep up. Enterprises are anxious; we cannot delay them. The quality gate cannot be loosened. We must serve opening, and we must also hold the bottom line.”
The words were plain, yet they spoke precisely to the position of foreign trade administration people in that age. They were not simply administrators, nor simply service providers. They were gatekeepers standing beside the torrent of foreign trade. If they released too slowly, enterprises complained. If they released too loosely, national credibility suffered. Reform and opening gave Southern Yue speed, and it also gave every government office new pressure. Whoever could not keep up would be pushed along by the age. Whoever could keep up would grow new weight within the change.
Sometimes Xinde looked out from the office window.
Traffic rolled along Huanshi East Road. More people came and went at the entrance of the Friendship Store. The Garden Hotel too was being built little by little; glass, steel bars, and cement flashed with fresh light in the sun. Foreign guests, Hong Kong merchants, foreign trade cadres, taxis, trucks, people in suits, people carrying briefcases appeared more and more often on this road. Canton was no longer only the old city of Canton. It was becoming a port city, a commercial city, a city of opportunity facing the world.
And he, a young man who had graduated from Fudan University’s philosophy department, sat in such a building, at a desk in the Personnel Department, copying names, organizing files, drafting documents, watching one person after another be transferred to a new post, watching one office after another turn from lines on paper into reality.
Later, he thought that because he had not entered a publishing house and had not immediately become a writer, it seemed he had taken a long detour. Yet this detour allowed him to see the true text of the age. Reform and opening was not merely a few large characters written in a newspaper editorial. It was written in every newly added post, in every newly built building, in every résumé of a cadre transferred from the inland to a port, in every batch of goods waiting for export inspection, and also in the gusts of wind on Canton’s Huanshi East Road, carrying dust, gasoline, and hope.
It was within this wind that Xinde began his career in government service.