Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

by Evan Osnos

Tang’s belief that the United States would seek to obstruct China’s rise—“a new Cold War”—extended beyond economics to broader American policy. Disparate issues of relatively minor importance to Americans, such as support for Taiwan and Washington’s calls to raise the value of the yuan, had metastasized in China into a feeling of strategic containment.

prosperity, computers, and Westernization had not pushed China’s elite toward democracy in the way that outsiders had expected after Tiananmen. Rather, prosperity and the strength of the Party had persuaded more than a few to postpone idealism as long as life for them kept improving.

the Party offered its people the essential bargain: greater freedom in economic activities in exchange for less freedom in political life.

He advised poor countries that if they want to get richer, they needed to delay political reform

he dismissed the “optimistic, and perhaps naïve, argument put forward by some scholars that democracies … are more likely to undertake economic reforms.”

Fundamentally, the culture of the Web was an almost perfect opposite of the culture of the Communist Party: Chinese leaders cherished solemnity, conformity, and secrecy; the Web sanctified informality, newness, and, above all, disclosure.

For two decades since Tiananmen, Chinese young people had been apolitical, not simply because the basic conditions of life had improved but also because the alternative was frightening and hopeless.

in 2009, authorities declared their intention to rid the Web of “online vulgarity,”

Ten months after the earthquake in Sichuan, and nine months after Hu Shuli’s investigation of the collapsing schools, Ai Weiwei found himself fixated on one detail in particular: the government had declined to count or name the students who had died.

he launched what he called a citizens’ investigation of the quake, an attempt to document how and why so many schools collapsed—and to collect as many names as possible. He signed up volunteers and sent them to Sichuan to investigate.

there had never been more money available for the arts in China, but receiving those spoils required tolerating the limits on expression.

In the months after the surgery, Ai fully recovered, though he tired easily and had trouble summoning words. At the same time, he began to notice signs that the government was watching him more closely. His Gmail accounts were hacked and the settings altered to forward his messages to an unfamiliar address. His bank received official inquiries to review his finances. A pair of surveillance cameras appeared on utility poles outside his front gate,

He was jailed for criticizing the government’s handling of the law, but he refused to stop, and in September 2007 he saw a group of men approaching him on the sidewalk, and he felt a sharp blow to the neck. A hood was pulled over his head. Gao was driven to an unknown location, and the hood was removed. He was stripped naked. He was beaten and electrocuted with batons.

The best the Party could hope for was to prevent an Internet conversation before it began—by automatically filtering sensitive words. Because political issues popped up overnight, the censors had to maintain a constantly updated glossary of taboo terms, much like the list of directives to the media I received on my phone. The Internet Affairs Bureau sent out instructions, sometimes several times a day, to websites across the country. A word might be permissible one day and banned the next. Typing it into Baidu, the Chinese version of Google, yielded a message: “Search results are not displayed because they may not suit the corresponding laws, regulations and policies.”

In the event that these censorship efforts failed, the Party was testing a weapon of last resort: the OFF switch. On July 5, 2009, members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority in the far western city of Urumqi protested police handling of a brawl between Hans and Uighurs. The protests turned violent, and nearly two hundred people died, most of them Han, who had been targeted for their ethnicity. Revenge attacks on Uighur neighborhoods followed, and in an effort to prevent people from communicating and organizing, the government abruptly disabled text messages, cut long-distance phone lines, and shut off Internet access almost entirely. The digital blackout lasted ten months, and the economic effects were dramatic: exports from Xinjiang, the Uighur autonomous region, plummeted more than 44 percent. But the Party was willing to accept immense economic damage to smother what it considered a political threat. In the event of a broader crisis someday, China probably has too many channels in and out to impose so complete a blackout on a national scale, but even a limited version would have a profound effect.

For years, China had coveted a Nobel Prize as a validation of the nation’s progress and a measure of the world’s acceptance. The obsession with the prize was so intense that scholars had named it the “Nobel complex,” and each fall they debated China’s odds of winning it, like sports fans in a pennant race. There was once a television debate called “How Far Are We from a Nobel Prize?” When the award was announced, most Chinese people had never heard of Liu, so the state media made the first impression; it splashed an article across the country reporting that he earned his living “bad-mouthing his own country.”

The government barred her, and anyone else, from going to Oslo to pick up the award; the only previous time this had happened was in 1935, when Hitler prevented relatives from going on behalf of Carl von Ossietzky, the German writer and pacifist, who was in a guarded hospital bed after having been in a concentration camp. Liu Xia’s telephone and Internet connections were severed, and she was barred from contact with anyone but her mother—the beginning of a campaign of isolation that would last for years.

When the Communist Party came to power, it retained some of the old system: it established the Bureau of Letters and Visits, to receive the People with Grievances, and to steer their cases to the correct branches of government. But by the twenty-first century, the Bureau of Letters and Visits was an antique; its caseload was crushing, its operations a mystery.

The Party was in a conundrum of its own making: Over the years, it had squeezed off so many avenues of expression that people had little choice but to engage in the kind of unrest that was the Party’s greatest fear. So it responded by clamping down even further, and the cycle continued.

When Chen Guangcheng was released in September 2009, he had served his full term. There were no more charges against him. And yet he returned to Dongshigu village to find that the local government had prepared for his arrival. They had installed steel shutters on the windows of his house, floodlights around the dirt yard, and cameras to keep an eye on the place twenty-four hours a day. They formed a revolving crew of guards to work in shifts. At one point, Cohen and Chen did their best to estimate the cost of the guards, meals, and other expenses required to keep the blind lawyer isolated from the world around him, and it came to seven million dollars. But as far as Chen was concerned, most of the punishment was mental: now and then, the guards would carry every object from the house out into the courtyard and leave them there for him and his family to bring back in. The guards confiscated his phone and computer and bent the prongs of the television plug so that it was unusable. At one point, Chen managed to smuggle out a short video describing his conditions, but when that was discovered, the guards punished him by rolling him in a blanket and beating him. The tactic of isolation that worried Chen the most, however, was not about him; the guards barred his six-year-old daughter from going to

school.

on December 17, a twenty-six-year-old unemployed graduate in Tunisia named Mohammed Bouazizi was selling fruit without a permit when a police officer confiscated his produce and slapped him for complaining. Bouazizi was the sole earner in an extended family of eleven. He visited the provincial headquarters for help, but nobody would see him. Desperate and humiliated, he doused himself in paint thinner and lit a match.

The Arab Spring unnerved Chinese leaders more than any event in years.

The Politburo sent out Wu Bangguo, one of its most orthodox conservatives, to dust off his theory of the “Five Nos”: China would have no opposition parties, no alternative principles, no separation of powers, no federal system, and no full-scale privatization.

The stereotype of Western journalists was that we paid too much attention to dissidents. It was, we were told, because we sympathized with their hopes for liberal democracy, because they spoke English and knew how to give a sound-bite. Indeed, the inherent drama of an individual standing up to the state was obviously seductive, and it helped explain why the most famous image from China in the past thirty years was not of its economic rise but of the man standing in front of the tank near Tiananmen Square. Whenever I wrote about human rights abuses, I knew to expect that often the most critical reactions came from other expatriates in China. I understood that: foreigners with no reason to probe could spend years in China without ever interviewing someone who had been tortured or locked up without trial, and to them, my focus was misplaced. Dissidents who were famous in New York or Paris were unknown to ordinary Chinese citizens, which suggested that the discussion of democracy and rights was at odds with the everyday concerns of ordinary people.

In 2003, China’s minister of railways, Liu Zhijun, took charge of plans to build seventy-five hundred miles of high-speed railway—more than could be found in the rest of the world combined.

to help ward off the global recession, Chinese leaders more than doubled spending on high-speed rail and upped the target to ten thousand miles of track by 2020, the equivalent of building America’s first transcontinental route five times over.

In November 2011 a former cook with no engineering experience was found to be building a high-speed railway bridge using a crew of unskilled migrant laborers who substituted crushed stones for cement in the bridge’s foundation.

Local media reported that Zhang, on an annual salary of less than five thousand dollars, had acquired a luxury home near Los Angeles, stirring speculation that he had been preparing to join the growing exodus of officials who were taking their fortunes abroad. In recent years, corrupt cadres who sent their families overseas had become known in Chinese as “naked officials.” In 2011 the central bank posted to the Web an internal report estimating that, since 1990, eighteen thousand corrupt officials had fled the country, having stolen $120 billion—a sum large enough to buy Disney or Amazon.

98 percent of Chinese trials end in conviction—

In case after case, the disasters that enraged the Chinese public were traced back to graft, fraud, embezzlement, and patronage: The schools that collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake had been compromised by kickbacks; the train that crashed in Wenzhou was managed by one of the country’s most corrupt agencies. In the case of the tainted infant formula that killed children in 2008, dairy farmers and dealers first bribed state inspectors to ignore the presence of chemicals. Then, when children fell ill, the dairy company bribed news organizations to suppress the story.

On paper, Chinese public education was free and guaranteed, but parents knew to pay “sponsorship fees” to gain entry to top schools; in Beijing, the fees reached sixteen thousand dollars—more than double the average annual salary.

By 2012 the richest seventy members of China’s national legislature had a net worth of almost ninety billion dollars—more than ten times the combined net worth of the entire U.S. Congress.

the government had prosecuted a computer science professor who lived with his mother and, in his spare time, organized group sex—a community in which he was known by the Internet handle Roaring Virile Fire. He was arrested and sentenced to three and a half years for “crowd licentiousness,” a relic of the days when the government charged people with “hooliganism” for sex outside of marriage.

In June 2012, Bloomberg News used corporate documents and interviews to calculate that the extended family of China’s incoming president, Xi Jinping, had accumulated assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That wealth was hard for the Party to explain, so it decided not to try: within twenty-four hours, the government blocked the Bloomberg website—it would stay blocked in China for the foreseeable future—and it barred Chinese banks and companies from signing new contracts for use of Bloomberg terminals. It would cost the company millions in lost sales and advertising.

in a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption,

Low-skilled jobs weren’t the problem—those wages were climbing—but there weren’t enough white-collar jobs to employ each year’s crop of more than six million new college graduates. Between 2003 and 2009, the average starting salary for migrant workers had grown by nearly 80 percent, but for college graduates, starting wages were flat.

China’s boom had made almost everyone better off to some degree—average incomes had more than tripled over the past decade—but the gap between rich and poor had ballooned

in other developing countries, parents’ education was the most decisive factor in determining how much a child would earn someday. But in China, the decisive factor was “parental connections.” A separate study of parents and children in Chinese cities found “a strikingly low level of intergenerational mobility.” Writing in 2010, the authors ranked “urban China among the least socially mobile places in the world.”

The longer I lived in China, the more it seemed that people had come to see the economic boom as a train with a limited number of seats. For those who found a seat—because they arrived early, they had the right family, they paid the right bribe—progress was beyond their imagination. Everyone else could run as far and fast as their legs would carry them, but they would only be able to watch the caboose shrink into the distance.

China had one of the world’s lowest levels of social mobility.

the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, fled China in 1959 after rejecting the Communist Party’s claims to his homeland and trekking over the mountains to India. In exile, he won the Nobel Peace Prize

The government opened more than four hundred “Confucius Institutes” around the world to teach Mandarin language and history.

the Party barred people from discussing the crackdown at Tiananmen or the famine of the Great Leap Forward because it had never repudiated or accepted responsibility for them,

In November 2006 an elderly woman in Nanjing fell at a bus stop, and a young man named Peng Yu stopped to help her get to the hospital. In recovery, she accused Peng of causing her fall, and a local judge agreed, ordering him to pay more than seven thousand dollars—a judgment based not on evidence, but on what the verdict called “logical thinking”: that Peng would never have helped if he hadn’t been motivated by guilt.

To live in China in the early years of the twenty-first century was to witness a spiritual revival that could be compared to America’s Great Awakening in the nineteenth century.

Officially, China recognized five religions—Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism—and believers could worship in state-controlled settings. More than twenty million Catholics and Protestants attended churches run by the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, and its counterpart the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. But more than twice that number worshipped in unregistered “house churches,” which ranged in size from small farmhouse study groups to large semipublic congregations in the cities.

The state ordered stations to remove “repetitive, excessive, and overabundant programs, including those about love, marriage, and friendship; talent shows; emotional stories; game shows; variety shows; talk shows and reality shows.” In three months, it cut the number of them by two-thirds and pledged to return television to the work of promoting “socialist core values.”

coined a new term: the Kung Fu Panda problem. This describes the fact that the most successful film ever made about two of China’s national symbols, kung fu and pandas, had to be made by a foreign studio (DreamWorks), because no Chinese filmmaker would ever have been allowed to have fun with such solemn subjects.

China’s economy was at a turning point: the age of cheap labor was ending, and Chinese leaders were desperately trying to foster innovation that could push the country beyond the assembly line. It was investing more in research and development than any country but the United States, and it had surpassed the United States and Japan to become the largest filer of patents.