Bad Fortune

is a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report who has been based in both China and Iraq. January 2005The road is black and straight, and Lin Qiang cannot see the end of it. As he looks out the tinted windows of the hired GMC, Lin, a 39-year-old Chinese national with a crew cut and mild eyes, can see only desert stretching out to the horizon, flat and lifeless. This highway from Baghdad to Amman is known to be one of the deadliest in the country. It passes through the heartland of the insurgency--Ramadi, Falluja--before continuing for miles through the open desert. Drivers typically shoot through it in the middle of the night at breakneck speeds, preferring to risk dying in a car accident to something unimaginably worse. The GMC races toward the Jordanian border, carrying a bounty of eight Chinese workers on their way home for the Lunar New Year holiday. They have been living in Iraq for the past year and a half, running a shop selling cheap electronic goods made in China. Although they are optimistic about their adopted country, the last few months have been difficult for all of them, and they are ready for a break. They sit with their legs folded under them, in the Chinese peasant style, chattering about home. Zhou Sunqin, the youngest at just 18, dreams aloud about his mother's cooking. Lin worries about seeing his wife after so long. The Iraqi driver, whom they have used before, stares quietly at the road ahead. Suddently, the driver looks in the rearview mirror. He veers off the highway into a gas station. Lin's head jerks up. From behind, a bus and two sedans roar up and screech to a halt around them. A dozen men dressed in traditional Arab tunics jump out, waving guns and yelling. They are not masked, and in reading their faces, twisted with hatred, Lin sees death. July 2004 Lin sits in his storefront on Sadoun Street in Baghdad, in a white undershirt, smoking unfiltered cigarettes. His countrymen are sprawled on straw mats beneath a creaking ceiling fan that ekes out a thin breeze, surrounded by stacks of televisions, DVD players, and plastic sandals piled on a metal bed frame with no mattress. Above the door is a banner that says china trade shop in English and Chinese. Lin has been in Baghdad for a year, trying to make his fortune, when our paths cross that summer. I notice the sign while driving by and stop in to investigate. So far, the country is all he has wished for. "They don't know quality yet in Iraq," he says, smiling wryly. "In China, no one will buy a 21-inch TV--everyone wants 25-inch or bigger. We counted our profits in pennies. Here, 21-inch TVs are all the rage." An Iraqi man wanders in off the street and gestures at a rosewood chair set, which Lin and his colleagues have made in China and then shipped to Baghdad, where they apply the varnish. In broken Arabic, Lin tells him his price and that it will take seven days to deliver. The man shakes his head and tries to bargain, but Lin pretends he doesn't understand, and the man gives up and leaves. "He'll come back," says Lin. "They always do." The sight of Chinese entrepreneurs in Baghdad is surprising at first--and seemingly incongruous. But they are settlers, and, in their own quiet, opportunistic way, they are as responsible for driving change around the world as the American soldiers who patrol their street in armored fighting vehicles. Rather than exporting democracy and liberal ideologies, though, the Chinese are stalwart pioneers of global capitalism. Even the shabbiest backwater of a developing country has a Chinese restaurant and televisions that are made in China. They troop into slums and war zones, armed only with cheap goods and services, an entrepreneurial spirit, and the sheer determination to make life normal in the most dire of circumstances. One flight of concrete steps above the China Trade Shop are two adjoining rooms, where Lin and 15 other Chinese men live. Sleeping mats cover the floor, and thin polyester pants and shirts hang from rusted nails. On a little stove in the corner, a pot of rice simmers, and a skinny, bare-chested Chinese man pours tea into a metal cup, looking as at home as if he were in provincial China. The door is open, and a few Iraqis who live in neighboring apartments wander the hall in their underwear. This group of migrants comes from an area of Fujian, a coastal province across the strait from Taiwan. Their region, near the provincial capital, is one of the most prosperous parts of China, though it has little agriculture and almost no industry--much of the money that pays for the shiny new tiled houses that line the major roads comes instead from its export of people. The majority of Chinese restaurant workers in the United States are from this corner of China, and snakeheads--human smugglers--are more active here than anywhere else. Like most of their neighbors, Lin and his crew left voluntarily, in search of what was once known as the American Dream but could now more accurately be called the Chinese Dream. "We heard Bush and Blair on the radio after the war saying they'd rebuild Iraq and make it into a free and stable country, and we thought, `This is what we do!'" says Lin. "We were just scraping by in Fujian, and we thought there would be more opportunities here.... I hope a lot of Chinese people come. It's just like China in the '80s now; we need Chinese people to develop it." They came in a few waves, through word of mouth, getting a "business exploration" visa, flying to Amman, and taking a $30 minibus ride across the desert to Baghdad. It is unclear how much help they got from smugglers in leaving China, but, when they got to Jordan, they were on their own. When Lin was crossing the border, he says, the Iraqi guard asked for a bribe. "I didn't speak Arabic," he laughs, "so I gave him half a bottle of water, and he waved us through." Once in the capital, they were immediately folded into the small--but rapidly growing--Chinese community. The Chinese Embassy in Baghdad says that, as of July 2004, there are only 30- some of its citizens in Iraq, but restaurateur Chen Xian-zhong estimates that there are more than 100 Chinese here, and he counts them off on his stubby fingers. Thirteen Fujianese. Thirteen in the embassy. Three from Xinhua, the state-run news service. Sundry merchants from Zhejiang selling shoes and makeup. And 24 or 25 in the Green Zone--including the proprietors of two competing Chinese restaurants next door to each other, nicknamed by acronym-mad American soldiers as CRF and CRB--"Chinese Restaurant Front" and "Chinese Restaurant Back." Chen knows them all, and they all know him. The thickset 51-year-old is commonly called "Abu Fady." He is not only "the father of Fady," but also the honorary patriarch of the Chinese diaspora in Iraq. Chen, an Arabic studies major at Beijing University, first came to Iraq in 1984. He taught for two years, then worked as a translator, an engineer, and finally as the representative of China's military trading conglomerate under the Oil-for-Food program. He left Iraq three days before the U.S. bombing began and returned two weeks after the fall of Baghdad, where he opened Dragon Bay, the city's first real Chinese restaurant. That summer, I frequent his restaurant, ordering authentically spicy chicken with Sichuan peppercorns as a welcome respite from kebabs. The waitresses are all fresh off the boat from rural China, speaking Chinese with heavy regional accents, and they stay cloistered in the restaurant, with its cheap hanging lanterns and empty banquet tables. Chen paid for their plane tickets, visas, clothing, and makeup. The Chinese diaspora is one of the largest in the world, with an estimated 33 million people of Chinese origin living outside mainland China. They spread across the globe for the most basic of reasons: money. And, often, the best money is made in places where others fear to tread. After the Taliban left Afghanistan in 2001, one of the first enterprises to move in was a Chinese restaurant serving barbecued pork--with waitresses in miniskirts. In Iraq, before the first Gulf war, there were 50,000 Chinese, according to Chen. During the war, however, 30,000 left. "But, wherever there are people, you'll find Chinese," he says. "Chinese people like to gamble. That's what I'm doing now-- betting on the future." The Chinese Embassy in Baghdad, worried about kidnappings and diplomatic incidents, strongly dissuades people from making this bet. "But there are tens of thousands who want to come and do business here," says Chen. Like Lin Qiang, he is optimistic about the future. "For anyone, anywhere, Iraq is the best market right now," he says. "Iraq is the last piece of cake in the world, and it has yet to be sliced." Baghdad in July 2004 seems to reflect Abu Fady's optimism. A month after the transfer of sovereignty, the city feels safer than it has for a while. Though there has been a spate of kidnappings of foreigners, it still seems reasonable to ride in an unarmored car, walk on the streets, and talk to regular Iraqis. On one blazingly hot day, my driver drops me off in front of the China Trade Shop, and, when I walk in, Lin and some of the other men are eating sunflower seeds around a folding Chinese card table. They run next door and bring me a cold can of Pepsi. We chat about the kidnappings, but this violence does not faze them. They teach me the Chinese word for kidnapping with intent (bang jia), which is different from incidental abduction, or hijacking (jie chi). A DVD of Passion of the Christ is playing on one television, sans subtitles. They can't understand it, but they don't really care. Instead, they talk about Zhou Sunqin, their youngest member. He has round eyes and a face filled out with baby fat. "The Iraqis joke that he's just the right age to join the army!" says another man named Lin Zhong, who speaks with a barely comprehensible Fujianese accent and lolls shirtless on the straw mat. "But he's thinking of converting and finding an Iraqi wife." As the Americans struggle to bridge their own culture gap with the Iraqis, the Chinese seem to co-exist with them effortlessly. There is a universal appeal to what they represent--the desire to make a living, to do good by their families. Unlike the Americans, there is nothing ideological about the presence of these Chinese. They act exactly the way they do anywhere else in the world, imposing nothing but their belief in the right to make a buck. But this raw capitalism is itself a force of change--one that seems to have a decent chance of bringing Iraq into the global village. Their next-door neighbor, an Iraqi shopkeeper, wanders in with a glass of tea in his hand. "Marhaba!" he says loudly. "Chai? Tea? Tea?" Lin answers with a faltering "Marhaba," and they exchange smiles and vague gestures before the neighbor leaves again, glass of tea still in his hand. "We Chinese can be at home anywhere," says Lin. "We stay, we bring our sons here, and they stay. When the grandsons come, the sons go back.... When you come back in three, five years, we'll still be here." But they did not stay. Later that summer, after I left, a massive bomb exploded on their street, catapulting body parts into the shop and leaving a large crater. Lin and the others were shocked but happy to be alive and not ready to give up on Iraq. When they were offered an opportunity to work for a Chinese construction company in Najaf, they decided to sell off the remaining goods in the store and leave Baghdad. They stayed down south for three months, and, at the beginning of 2005, they decided to go back to Baghdad and try to open another shop. But things had changed. In December, the seemingly irrepressible Abu Fady had closed Dragon Bay and sent the waitstaff home. The war had intensified, and regular Iraqis had become radicalized by the conduct of the U.S. forces, anti- foreign propaganda, and the experience of occupation. The Iraqis no longer saw the Chinese as neutral purveyors of cheap televisions but as foreign interlopers. Lin noticed that people on the street who once paid them no heed now stared at them. In some instances, they even drew a line slowly across their throats. A few times, the Chinese were followed. They stopped going out at night. And, soon after, they decided to go back home for Chinese New Year, regroup, and return when the violence subsided. The GMC was not too far from Baghdad on January 11, when the driver pulled into the gas station and the Arab men swarmed their car, yanked open the doors, and dragged them out. Yelling in Arabic, they pointed their guns at the eight Chinese men and made them lie face down on the ground. The Arabs patted them down and emptied their pockets, then forced them into the other cars--stuffing the 18-year-old Zhou in the trunk--and drove them to a house in the middle of the desert. There was nothing around this house, just a few vegetables planted outside. That first night, the kidnappers blindfolded Lin and two others and moved them to another location, where they tied their wrists and ankles. Lin remembers feeling almost relaxed, resigned that he was going to be killed. The second night, their captors put a knife to their throats, whipped them with engine belts, and asked them questions in Arabic that they guessed had to do with whether they were working with the Americans. Then they were allowed to rejoin the others. They were given bread, tap water, and blankets to sleep on the floor. Twice, they were taken out to a courtyard, where they saw scraps of torn clothing, to be photographed. "We talked about running away, but we didn't know where we were," says Lin. "We were just waiting to die." On January 19, the Foreign Ministry in Beijing sent out three officials to negotiate their release. This same scenario had played out repeatedly over the previous few months, as over 70 foreigners were kidnapped and different countries' governments responded in different ways. A Filipino truck driver was kidnapped, and the Philippine government agreed to withdraw its 51 peacekeepers from Iraq to free him. Two Pakistanis working for a Kuwaiti firm were killed, their executioners claimed, because Pakistan was considering sending troops into Iraq. And many more workers of different nationalities were still being held, with the demand that their companies cease operations in Iraq. Lin's abductors, a group calling itself the Islamic Resistance Movement, viewed the Chinese as just another example of foreigners whose work--however selfishly motivated--indirectly contributed to the success of the American experiment. The kidnappers insisted that they would kill Lin and his crew within 48 hours unless China declared that its nationals would no longer work with the coalition. Chinese officials countered by saying they would ensure that no more Chinese came to Iraq. In the end, that was deemed sufficient. On January 23, at 3 p.m., the door of the house opened, and Lin and the others were led out, in a daze, to the highway. They waited there until another car picked them up and drove them to a mosque, and it was there that they were handed over to Chinese officials. In Baghdad, they were met by the ambassador and treated like VIPs, then given first-class tickets to fly home. March 2005 Asurprisingly smooth paved road runs down the middle of Pingtan island, dead- ending in Ao Dong village, where Lin Qiang and three of his Baghdad crew are from. My taxi driver is of the honk-your-way-through-traffic variety, all too common in rural China. He points out all the newly built pink and maroon tiled houses, with smoky glass windows and tiled balconies. In the past, before the coastline developed, there was a state-owned enterprise here selling household appliances, and the town was known for it. But, now, you can get the same appliances anywhere. The island's chief export-- after its people--is sand from its stone quarries, which Japan uses for making glass. After the Chinese New Year, almost everyone of working age scatters-- some to other cities, some to other countries--leaving behind women, children, and the elderly. Ao Dong is a hamlet of a few dusty streets lined with stone rowhouses built in the last ten years. Lin's house has a view of the mountains and red New Year's posters still on the door. Green felt lines the walls, and plastic grapes hang from the ceiling, betraying its past as a karaoke hall. His wife, who has stringy black hair and a drawn face, is painstakingly sticking white Styrofoam beads onto the heads of pins to earn a little money making fake flowers. His 14-year-old son, wearing a tracksuit and a crew cut like his dad's, runs into the house, dumps his backpack, and runs out again. "He's smart," says Lin. "I hope he can study overseas someday." The Communist government has always had a complex view of their citizens' expansive instincts. When it first came to power in the 1950s, it closed the country's borders to international migration, viewing emigration as an act of treason. Now, however, every citizen has the right to apply for a passport, and local governments actually see the benefit of maintaining ties with their overseas communities, which are traditionally the biggest investors. But in high-profile cases--which have the potential to bring shame upon the motherland- -Beijing is quick to crack down. In April 2004, seven Chinese from Lin's region were kidnapped in Falluja as they entered Iraq for the first time. The Chinese government bailed them out within 36 hours and, though they asked to stay, sent them home the following week. A similar fate has befallen Lin and his workers. Just after they were liberated, the returned Fujianese were essentially made into hostages again-- this time by their own government. Beijing, which had not sent troops to Iraq, was alarmed that regular Chinese were going on their own to the war zone and decided to clamp down on its overly adventurous citizens. The instant Lin and his townsmen touched down on Chinese soil, the government took away their passports. Lin Zhong, who had been one of the first of the group to go to Iraq, was thrown in jail. "They made an excuse that he had spent some money that another guy gave him for a plane ticket, but they really just wanted to keep people from copying us," Lin Qiang explains. The state-run press put out reports portraying the group as having been smuggled to Iraq and forced into labor. Since their return, without explanation, none of the residents of Ao Dong who have applied for passports (a prerequisite for leaving the country) have had their applications accepted, Lin says. He and his buddies hang out in a friend's fertilizer store, playing mahjong and smoking cigarettes. Men in faux leather jackets loiter on motorbikes in front of the shop on the street corner, waiting for passengers. Lin has been helping out with the fertilizer business, but he is restless and dissatisfied. In Iraq, he could sometimes send back $1,250 per month. Here, he earns a fraction of that, if he's lucky. "I have no goal now. I don't know what to do. I don't want to go back to my work unit. I've been overseas; I've opened a business.... Now, going back to my old life would be boring," he says. "If they hadn't taken our passports, I would go back to Iraq--but maybe wait until a government was established, with laws and stuff. " Some of the others in the group came back to Pingtan but then left for other parts of China. One is a construction manager for a tunnel project in Zhejiang, a coastal boom province near Shanghai. Another is in Beijing, doing sundry contracting jobs. Zhou Sunqin, who is now 19, remains. His parents are both hairdressers, and, before he left for Iraq, that was what he was studying to do as well. But, since he got back, he has been trying to break out of the family business by learning how to build using tiles, so he can get into construction work. He has one Iraqi friend, Alam, with whom he still keeps in touch. "Alam told me to leave Iraq, but I never thought it was so bad," says Zhou. "Now, if given the chance, I would like to leave China again, but maybe not back to Iraq- -I might try America next." Three years after the end of major hostilities and three years after the Chinese first responded to the pronouncements of Bush and Blair on the radio, Iraq is stuck in the middle of an increasingly insular sectarian war. The focus is no longer the occupation; though American soldiers are still being targeted, the majority of the violence is visited by Iraqis on Iraqis. It is not just the U.S. export of liberal ideology that failed to take root in the country, but the very concept of modern capitalism, which was China's export. Once upon a time, these Chinese workers thought they were simply the vanguard of a regular, working, foreign presence in Iraq, whose very will to introduce a market economy might bring about a semblance of normalcy. But the pioneers have been turned back, and, for now, it seems no more are coming. When I get into the taxi to drive back to my hotel, Lin Qiang waves goodbye and puts a hand on his heart, Iraqi style.

By bay fang