Snow
How do you describe tens of thousands of people simultaneously convulsing with the desperate hope of catching a train?
You could start small. Focus on the furious blue-jacketed Chinese policeman screaming bloody murder when someone peeks over his section of the fence, while two meters away a stream of migrant workers scramble over that same fence, quick as marines. You could dip further into metaphor, as lots of news stories have, and talk about the bobbing homesick heads in Guangzhou as a sea or talk about the staggering forward steps, a crush of movement that recently killed someone, as a stampede. But then how do you talk about that scream, that rippling, rolling yell as an empty train finally pulled into the station? An earthquake? The ground, the people, everything, really, was shaking. You could talk about what it’s like to be stuck in the middle, your camera pointed and clicking while your feet don’t touch the ground because you’re packed in so close and your nose twitches from the odor of the unwashed people camped for days in hopes of finally boarding a train and sitting three to a seat on the rumble north. Or you could let the numbers stand alone. Picture 200,000 people. 500,000 people. 5.8 million people China-wide stranded at stations dreaming simply of doing the things that must be done at home: paying respect to the dead, distributing the minuscule wealth accumulated over a year of intense work, getting married, seeing children born that were conceived the last time one saw his wife a year ago, eating food one’s mother cooked, sleeping.
The massive snowstorms that crippled the Chinese railway network just days before the incredibly important Spring Festival took everyone by surprise. The workers, certainly, but most notably the government. Since the delayed reached a critical mass recognized by the media the army has mobilized 300,000 by some accounts, with over a million reservists also pitching in. And how could such a massively organized government be so humbled, so surprised by snow? It’s an image problem of such scale that the normally staid Premier Wen Jiabao grabbed a megaphone and traveled to the center of the country to personally apologize to his people. To judge by the column inches devoted to this gesture in local papers, this showed how seriously the government was treating this, and how the average person could have faith that everything that could be done, would be done. It’s impossible to know what effect, if any, this had on those jostling in the gray afternoon Guangzhou rain. All you have to go on are quick spot interviews from journalists on the ground, sentences plucked from hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of opinions. You can wonder where the blame is falling, if there is a chink in the Chinese propaganda armor. I’ll choose this conversation, from a Chinese friend (not a factory laborer) who called me while I was at the station: “You hear that the Premier is going to train stations?” “Yeah.” “He’s probably very cold.” “Yeah.” “You free for dinner later?” “Sure.”
The Chinese Spring Festival train debacle is an opportunity to think about a lot of things. How official impotence in the face of a national disaster could set the 800 million rural poor the government absolutely cannot afford to piss off seething with anger. How, as Howard French of the New York Times suggested in response to government public relations efforts, “elections and the freedom to criticize are important not just because they help keep politicians honest, but because they serve as escape valves for pressures that could become dangerous otherwise,” and manic official politics meant to preserve social stability are actually the chief agents of inefficiency and discord. You can wonder, too, about how such an unbelievable amount of people couldn’t possibly conceive of getting a full refund on their tickets and avoiding massive travel headaches. But the government isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Heads may or may not roll at government agencies but that’s far, far away from the lives of those expectant and waiting for a train. What you hear in the crowd, when you talk to the workers: factory people, security guards, waitresses, and on and on, is talk of family, not revolution. So maybe it’s better now just to think about how fragile this whole interconnected World is Flat globalized system really is.
For two weeks every February Made in China is mostly suspended as startlingly human needs: for family, for comfort, for home take precedence over the mad dash for economic progress. These are our shoemakers and television makers. Our computer makers and cell phone makers and toy makers stuck between the old way of living that lasted for so long and the promise of the middle class future they help manufacture daily. And then how all of it, the whole brittle network is stalled by white flakes of snow falling like blankets over places you never knew existed.
Maybe, too, it’s just a way of thinking about the human side of wealth. I’m writing this from Beijing, far to the north, which would put lots of these workers closer to their homes. The day after my visit to the train station I boarded a plane with a ticket far out of most people’s price ranges. I’d read reports later of scuffles at the airport over canceled flights, but I didn’t get any of that. The ride was incredibly smooth. There were lots of empty seats and, it turns out, I had the whole row to myself.
