More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Evan Osnos
Read between
May 20 - June 7, 2021
The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana.
This book is an account of the collision of two forces: aspiration and authoritarianism.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward resulted in the world’s worst famine,
the combination of Deng’s charisma, Chen’s hesitation to move too fast, and Zhao’s competence was startlingly successful. The model they created endured for decades: a “birdcage economy,” as Chen Yun called it, airy enough to let the market thrive but not so free as to let it escape. As young revolutionaries, the elders had overseen the execution of landlords, the seizure of factories, and the creation of people’s communes. But now they preserved their power by turning the revolution upside down: permitting private enterprise and opening a window to the outside world
In 1979 the Party announced that it would no longer tag people as “landlords” and “rich peasants,” and later Deng Xiaoping removed the final stigma: “Let some people get rich first,” he said, “and gradually all the people should get rich together.” The Party extended the economic experiment. Officially, private businesses were permitted to hire no more than eight employees—Marx had believed that firms with more than eight workers were exploitative—but eventually small enterprises began popping up
All over the country, people were exiting the collective farms that had dominated their lives.
The Party would never embrace “individualist democracy.” It would have economic freedom but political control.
After losing China’s civil war to the Communists in 1949, the Nationalist Party fled to the island of Taiwan, where it declared martial law over the islands and prepared, in theory, for the day that it might return to power over China. Life in Taiwan was harsh and circumscribed.
For years, young people in Taiwan had been taught that the mainland was run by “Communist bandits” and “demons.” The Nationalist Party used this threat to justify martial law, and it committed widespread human rights abuses against political opponents and Communist sympathizers.
In December 1978, Jimmy Carter announced that the United States was officially recognizing the Communist government in Beijing, and severing formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The news buried any remaining hope that the island might regain control of the mainland.
The government was offering its people a bargain: prosperity in exchange for loyalty.
People were still adjusting to the idea of a life outside of labor. Only two years had passed since China reduced the workweek from six days to five. Then it had redrawn the old socialist calendar to create something previously unimaginable: three weeks of vacation.
in 2005 the Chicago Tribune asked if I wanted to return to China. I packed up an apartment in Cairo, and landed in Beijing on an airless night in June. China still had a quarter of a billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. The fact that this population, nearly the size of the United States, was often left out of descriptions of the new China was a mistake, but it was an understandable one, given the scale and pace of change going on around it.
China was building the square-foot equivalent of Rome every two weeks. (In 2012 the country became, for the first time, more urban than rural.)
Initially, the Chinese government had regarded the Internet as an opportunity: the country had arrived late to the Industrial Revolution, and Chinese leaders hoped that the information revolution could help the country close the gap with the West. But the enthusiasm cooled. In 2001, President Jiang Zemin identified the Internet as a “political, ideological, and cultural battlefield.”
the Party was erecting what came to be known as the Great Firewall—a vast digital barricade that prevented Chinese users from seeing newspaper stories critical of China’s top leaders or reports from human rights groups; eventually, it blocked social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Chairman Mao was determined to enshrine the idea that “the individual is subordinate to the organization.” The Party, he declared, must “eradicate all tendencies towards disunity.” It organized people into work units and collective farms. Without a letter from your danwei (“work unit”), you couldn’t get married or divorced, you couldn’t buy a plane ticket or stay in a hotel, or, for that matter, visit another danwei. Most days, you lived, worked, shopped, and studied within its confines.
Local women had so little say in whom they married that there was a village tradition of sobbing when you left home on your wedding day.
When sonogram technology spread in China in the 1980s, couples aborted female fetuses in order to wait for a boy. As a result, China has twenty-four million men who will be of marrying age by 2020 but unable to find a spouse—“
Families rearranged their houses so that couples no longer shared a communal bed with grandparents and children, and the generations started sleeping in separate rooms.
Now that the state had phased out the direct assignment of jobs, it had to shepherd college graduates through the unfamiliar experience of choosing a profession.
Shopping, or at least browsing, became a principal hobby.
Money and love had always been linked more explicitly in China than in the West, but the finances were simpler when almost everyone was broke. By tradition, a Chinese bride’s parents paid a dowry, and the groom’s parents paid a larger sum, known as the “bride wealth.” Under Mao, this exchange was usually made in grain, but in the 1980s, couples came to expect “three rounds and a sound”: a bicycle, a wristwatch, a sewing machine, and a radio. Or, in some cases, “thirty legs”: a bed, a table, and a set of chairs. In much of China, the custom persisted (in cash), but the financial stakes were
...more
in 1997 the State Council restored the right for people to buy and sell their homes.
Under socialism, employers had assigned city workers to indistinguishable concrete housing blocks. When the government restored the market, Chinese bureaucrats didn’t even have an official translation for the word mortgage.
Mao dismantled four million private businesses, nationalized assets, and flattened society so thoroughly that China’s income inequality fell to the lowest level in the socialist world.
the military went so far as to eliminate rank, until this created chaos on the battlefield
The Party banned competitive sports, and athletes who had won medals in the past found themselves accused, retroactively, of “trophy mania”—the crime of pursuing victory instead of mass fitness.
The size of China’s population made college admissions so brutally competitive that people compared it to “ten thousand horses crossing a river on a single log.” To create more opportunities, the government doubled the number of colleges and universities, in just ten years, to 2,409. Even so, only one in every four aspiring college students was able to earn a place.
nothing galvanized people as broadly as the study of English. “English fever” settled on waiters, CEOs, and professors, and elevated the language into a defining measure of life’s potential—a force strong enough to transform your résumé, help attract a spouse, or vault you out of a village.
Every college freshman had to meet a minimal level of English comprehension, and it was the only foreign language tested.
In nineteenth-century China, English was held in contempt as the language of the middlemen who dealt with foreign traders.
Mao favored Russian for the country, and he expelled so many English teachers that, by the sixties, China had fewer than a thousand high school English teachers nationwide. After Deng opened China’s doors to the world, English fever took hold.
Li had made his name with an ESL technique that a Hong Kong newspaper called English as a Shouted Language. Shouting, Li argued, was the way to unleash what he called the “international muscles.”
Chairman Mao banned gambling in China long ago, but it endures in Macau because of a historical wrinkle: for nearly five hundred years, the city was a Portuguese colony, and when it returned to Chinese control, in 1999, it was entitled to retain some of the flamboyantly libertine traditions
“The growth of gambling in Macau, fueled by money from mainland Chinese gamblers and the growth of U.S.-owned casinos, has been accompanied by widespread corruption, organized crime, and money laundering,”
Macau became a vital stop between India and Japan, but eventually nearby Hong Kong built a better port, and Macau had to find alternative specialties: opium, prostitution, and gambling.
replicate the Las Vegas Strip on a stretch of open sea between two islands in Macau. His company constructed a landfill out of three million cubic meters of sand and opened the $2.4 billion Venetian Macao, a supersize replica of the Las Vegas Venetian, with the largest casino floor in the world.
Sheldon adel-son opened this casino
Unlike Las Vegas, where most of the profits came from coins fed into slot machines, three-quarters of the revenue in Macau was derived from enormous bets made in VIP rooms, where high rollers played around the clock.
corruption of one kind or another was costing China 3 percent of its gross domestic product—more than the national budget for education.
Chinese attitudes toward Western culture were a mix of pity, envy, and resentment: pity for the barbarians outside the Middle Kingdom, envy for their strength, and resentment for their incursions into China. “Chinese have never looked at foreigners as human beings,” Lu Xun wrote. “We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals.”
Mao considered tourism antisocialist. It wasn’t until 1978, after his death, that most Chinese gained approval to go abroad for anything other than work or study. First they were permitted to visit relatives in Hong Kong, and later, to tour Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. The government remained acutely wary of the outside world. In 1996, my first year in Beijing, it reformed migration laws to make it easier for Chinese to go abroad, though the rules still required people to be “politically reliable” and explicitly excluded anyone found to be “highly individualistic, corrupt, degenerate, or
...more
the Central Propaganda Department, and it was one of the People’s Republic’s most powerful and secretive organizations—a government agency with the power to fire editors, silence professors, ban books, and recut movies. By the time I settled in China, the Department, and its offices across the country, had control over two thousand newspapers and eight thousand magazines; every film and television program, every textbook, amusement park, video game, bowling club, and beauty pageant was subject to its
scrutiny. The propagandists decided what ads could go on every billboard from the Himalayas to the Yellow Sea.
Journalists were still expected to “sing as one voice,” and the Department would help them do so by issuing a vast and evolving list of words that must and must not appear in the news. Some rules never changed: Any mention of Taiwan’s laws was to refer to them as “so-called laws,” while China’s political system was so unique that reporters were never to type the phrase “according to international practice” when drawing comparisons to Beijing. When it came to the economy, they were not to dwell on bad news during the holidays, or on issues that the government classified as “unsolvable,”
such as the fragility of Chinese banks or the political influence of the wealthy. The most ardently forbidden subject was Tiananmen itself; no mention of the 1989 protests or the bloodshed appear in Chinese textbooks; when the government discusses the events of that year, it describes them as “chaos” or “turmoil” organized by a handful of “black hands.”
If a magazine like hers broke the rules, the Department gave it a warning known as a yellow card, as in soccer. Three yellow cards in one year, and she could be shut down. The Department wasn’t reading stories before publication; on the contrary, it was up to editors themselves to guess how far they could go and compute the risk of wandering past an ill-defined limit.
On March 10, shortly before the Journey of Harmony was to begin, several hundred monks in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, conducted a march to demand the release of Tibetans detained for celebrating the U.S. government’s awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama. Dozens of monks were arrested, and on March
14 a demonstration to protest their detention turned into the worst riots in Tibet since the 1980s; eleven Han civilians and a Tibetan were burned to death after hiding in buildings set on fire by rioters, and a policeman and six civilians died from beatings or other causes, according to the government. The Dalai Lama called for calm, but the Chinese government said the riot had been “premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique.” Security forces moved in with armored vehicles to control the city, and the authorities began a roundup of suspects, leading to hundreds of arrests.
...more
Their view, which was popular in China across ideological lines, had some validity: American politicians invoked national security concerns, with varying degrees of credibility, to oppose Chinese direct investment.
