China Underground: The Slacker

During Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tour” in 1992, he made the famous statement “To get rich is glorious!” This was a tacit declaration to the people: you are free to open businesses and make money. That phrase sparked the madness also known as the market reform of the Chinese economy.

The People’s Republic of China is ruled by an organization that calls itself the Chinese Communist Party, which owns most of the country’s largest businesses and, theoretically, all of its land. China is, however, not “communist” at all; in fact, its remarkable growth in recent years has been largely due to this reform of the private sector economy.

Author: Zachary Mexico
Book: China Underground
US publication date: 2009-04
Publisher: Soft Skull
Publisher: PopMatters
Formats: Paperback
ISBN: 9781593762230
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/book_cover_art/m/mexico-chinaunderground-cov.jpg
Length: 320
Price: $16.95

From the teahouses in Chengdu to the restaurants in Beijing, people were meeting and scheming, trying to figure out how to get their piece of the action precipitated by China’s rapid development. Those who already had some piece of the action were trying to figure out how to gain a bigger share. The percentage of conversations in China these days that revolve around cash and how to make it is staggering.

When this economic miracle was kicking into first gear, a small and mostly well-educated group of individuals in Beijing decided that making money wasn’t for them. Instead of going into business or looking for work, they set up shop in Beijing’s university district and spent their days sitting around, forming rock bands, and living off their families or off the kindness of others.

They were an artsy crew; the men grew their hair long and got tattoos of dragons, marijuana leaves, and English words like “Toxic” and “Danger” all over their bodies. They smoked dope and drank Yanjing beer out of green bottles. They read Kerouac and Burroughs, Marx and Krishnamurti. They listened to Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains.

Soon enough, they came up with an ideology that ironically smacked of socialism: the freedom to make money leads to class differences, which leads to greed and corruption. In China, where speech against the government can lead to a serious jail term, there was no way they could fight against the system. Instead, they did the only thing they could do without risking imprisonment: drop out of the consumer society that all other Chinese embraced.

Soon, this community of rebels had earned the name: hunzi. Slackers. Whether they gave themselves this moniker during a moment of stoned inspiration, or a frustrated passerby was heard to mutter the epithet and eventually some sociologist claimed to have coined the term, no one can remember, but it is commonly understood, now, to refer to people like Jianfeng.

The Progenitors of the hunzi movement were the “musicians” who were living on the outer edge of Beijing when the policeman dropped off Jianfeng and Liu Bo on that cold November night 13 years prior. Jianfeng’s a gregarious and pleasant guy, and he quickly made friends and found a crash pad. He checked out Beijing’s nascent art scene, went to all the galleries, and decided that artists were assholes who only cared about money and, therefore, he certainly did not want to be one, after all.

Back at the pad, his new Beijing buddies were always playing the latest tapes from Tang Dynasty and Black Panther, the capital’s emerging hip rock bands. Rock music was the in thing; Cui Jian—China’s Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Elvis Presley all rolled into one—had shot to fame after the 1989 student demonstration in Tiananmen Square when his single “Nothing to my Name” became the unofficial theme song of the student movement. New bands were starting every day. It was an exciting time for Chinese rock.

Jianfeng decided to become a drummer. In order to achieve this goal, he bought a pair of drumsticks. He did not, however, know how to play the drums.

Liu Bo took off, fed up with his friend’s impressionable attitude and tired of never having enough to eat.

Over the next few years, Jianfeng embraced the hunzi lifestyle. He bounced around from crash pad to crash pad: he lived in a tent with migrant workers, he borrowed a house while its occupant was out of town, he slept on friends’ couches and in lovers’ beds. One day he ran into an old friend from Qingdao who was attending the Beijing Film University and living off campus. This meant that the friend’s dormitory bed at the university was empty; Jianfeng moved in the next day and stayed for two years.

Now that he had a bed and, therefore, a semi-permanent base of operations, Jianfeng was free to stroll around Beijing at his leisure, make new friends, romance eligible bachelorettes, and continue in his quest to start a band. Around this time, a Harvard-educated American filmmaker, Irene Lusztig, made a documentary about Jianfeng, some of his friends, and their slacker lifestyle.

The film was called For Beijing with Love and Squalor.

In the film, Jianfeng describes himself as a “professional parasite,” living off the kindness of others, and offers up a superb statement of antiestablishment youthful ennui:

All my friends’ parents want their kids to find steady jobs. That way they can make money, find a girlfriend, get married, have kids … and be better off than their friends. My parents just go to work day after day. After work they come home and watch TV, make dinner … Then they talk about their jobs, the people in their work units … If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be this way. They put a kind of invisible pressure on me … I hate it.

A few years later, a friend of Jianfeng’s opened up a clothing store on Beijing’s Houhai, or Back Lake. The store’s location was lousy—at that time, the Back Lake area had not yet become a nightlife destination—and the place closed after a few months. Jianfeng’s friend gave him the space, rent-free, and said: “Why don’t you do something here? Open another store? Sell something?”

Jianfeng thought about the proposition and quickly agreed. The timing was impeccable: a few months later the Back Lake area became the hip place to go in Beijing, and Jianfeng had a storefront with a perfect location to capitalize on this new trend.

It was the turn of the century; Jianfeng, just shy of his 30th birthday, had yet to hold down a steady job. Then he did what many professional delinquents with a bit of money do: he opened a bar. But instead of selling drinks for a profit, he sold them at cost. He didn’t even open the place on the weekend, preferring to go party elsewhere.

From a business perspective, it was a colossally bad decision. For Jianfeng the hunzi, however, to make money would have been distasteful. He just wanted a cool place for his friends to hang out. And that’s what he got. According to a few Beijing old-timers I spoke with, it was a great place: cool décor, an interesting mix of celebrities and bohemians, and drink prices that ensured everyone present was good and toasted.

The bar was legendary, despite (or perhaps because of) its lack of a name. Eventually, of course, the landlord kicked him out to make way for a business that would make some cash.

With the bar closed, Jianfeng had nothing to do. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go back to Shandong: “If I went home,” he says, “I would have been too advanced. I was already a different kind of person. [In Shandong] you go to work, come home. Get married. In Shandong, you drink a glass down to forget your problems. In Beijing, you can choose. The pollution is terrible. The traffic is terrible. But you have freedom.”

Then, the SARS crisis suddenly descended on Beijing. It was as if an enormous hand turned off an enormous light switch: the vibrant city became lifeless almost overnight as rumors of a strange disease circulated via text message and furtive cell phone calls. Neighborhood stores closed, foreign companies sent their executives on holiday, and the government set up secret quarantine centers around the city.

In China—especially in Beijing, where China’s most concentrated and educated populace resides—average citizens certainly don’t depend on the government to let them know what’s going on when there are rumors of an impending catastrophe. And so they cloistered themselves in their apartments.

Some of Jianfeng’s crew decided to split town. Liu Jianfeng and a few friends hopped on a train heading west toward the mountains of Yunnan, and that’s where he’s been living ever since.

Want to read more about the playboy slacker Liu Jianfeng? Does he finally find true love with the perfect woman? Does he finally gets off his pretty ass and start supporting himself? The rest of this chapter and more can be found between the pages of China Underground.