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Other diversions are less acceptable to the regime. In some video parlors, where impromptu movie screenings are shown with a video recorder, customers pay 30 times as much to see an imported pornographic movie as a Chinese film. In a sudden crackdown on Peking street vendors last spring, the police confiscated 700,000 copies of lurid tabloids. Even more threatening, perhaps, are trends that amount to outright rejection of the egalitarian ideal. In Peking, more and more families have been hiring housemaids. For a while, lotteries that promised such grand prizes as imported television sets and refrigerators were a national obsession. After one culminated in a televised finale watched by 200 million viewers, the authorities banned the pastime, saying that lotteries are "disgusting."
Critics within the regime, fearful that Western valuables bring Western values, find plenty of ammunition in such excesses to use in sniping at reform. "Money," said former Propaganda Chief Deng Liqun, "has already eroded relations between our people." The great drive for riches, and the diversions they afford, also troubles many party and government bureaucrats --though for less ideological reasons. Their complaint is that the reforms have left them out: with incomes under $35 a month, they earn far less than enterprising peasants and even some urban workers. A vice minister takes home less than Li Yongming, a Peking cabby who chooses to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week. The losses are not only financial. "Party people," says an academician, "are losing their stability as well." Nor are they consoled by the admonition of Hu Qili, secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee and one of Deng Xiaoping's lieutenants, that party members "must be first in suffering hardship and last in enjoying benefits."
In response, some middle-level officials have come up with ingenious racketeering schemes. Earlier this year, the press told the story of Liu Baoqin, a minor county official who dreamed up a ploy to import color television sets from Hong Kong and resell them. By the time the authorities caught up with him, Liu had made a huge profit and was taking it easy in a luxury hotel in Shenzhen. Last month the People's Daily reported that Xiang Dong, an official in Yunnan province, had used state funds to buy pornographic videotapes. At the same time, China's news agency, Xinhua, revealed that some Hainan officials had jointly embezzled about $1.5 billion by importing large quantities of cars, TV sets, video recorders and motorcycles and reselling them at higher prices at government expense.
Nearly half of the 40 million men and women on the party's membership rolls, 4% of the population, signed up during the fervor of the Cultural Revolution. Now they find themselves faced with a new order that seems both hostile and incomprehensible. "It's only natural that there will be disgruntled bureaucrats and party people," says a senior Western diplomat. "They are not sharing in the wealth, and they are losing their positions of control." A story circulating among Chinese intellectuals tells of a group of party veterans wandering along the bustling streets of Shenzhen. After taking stock of the high-rise apartments and the stores jammed with consumer goods, one of the oldtimers bursts into tears. "Is this," he weeps, "what we fought for?"