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

by Evan Osnos

Boycotting the Beijing Games in the name of Tibet seemed as logical to him as shunning the Salt Lake City Olympics to protest America’s treatment of the Cherokee.

The new approach emphasized the bainian guochi—the “century of national humiliation”—an arc of events extending from China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century to the Japanese occupation of Chinese soil during World War II.

Leo Strauss was receiving renewed attention because his arguments against tyranny had been popular among neoconservative architects of the Iraq War.

They “are acutely aware that their country, whose resurgence they feel and admire, has no principle to guide it,”

Year by year, Lin was becoming increasingly critical of the mainstream Western view—which had promoted shock therapy reforms in the former Soviet Union—and he became ever more convinced that the key to China’s rise was the fusion of the market and strong government.

Yet, the measurements were clear: In 1949 the average life expectancy was thirty-six, and the literacy rate was 20 percent. By 2012, life expectancy was seventy-five, and the literacy rate was above 90 percent.

Li that zeroed in on the disarray produced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and concluded, “The more radical the reform, the more violent will be the destructive social conflicts, and opposition to reform.”

He pointed to a recent study of thirteen fast-growing economies. “In all the successful countries, the governments play a very proactive role,” he told me. He argued for a “soft” industrial policy in which a clamorous free market produced new industries and firms, and the government spotted the best prospects and helped them grow by giving them tax breaks and building infrastructure such as the ports and highways going up all over the Chinese mainland.

“Harmonious society” was not a phrase that all Chinese intellectuals were quick to use. It was the slogan favored by President Hu Jintao to signify the goal of a fair and stable society, but Hu’s critics had come to use it as a byword for repression and the silencing of dissent.

“It’s entirely obvious that the biggest problem China faces right now is corruption,” he told me. “Corruption is the reason for the gap between rich and poor. Where did this corruption come from? From the fact that government continues to control too many resources.” In a furious stream of essays and books, Wu pointed to crony capitalism and the gap between rich and poor as evidence that China’s economic model had run up against the limit of what was possible without the government’s permitting greater political openness to mediate competing demands.

“Only with money can the Party maintain control of China’s major cities, co-opt elites, satisfy the drive of many to get rich overnight and crush the resistance of any nascent rival group. Only with money can the Party wheel and deal with Western powers; only with money can it buy off rogue states and purchase diplomatic support.”

That idealism was hardly universal. Around the world, critics of “cyber-utopianism” argued that the Web provided only an illusion of openness, and a weak sense of community; that it strengthened authoritarian governments by creating a safety valve and defusing the pressure for deeper change.

Unlike the usual dissident manifestos, theirs did not confine their argument to a single case or an obscure provision; they called for nineteen fundamental political reforms, including regular elections, independent courts, a ban on political control of the military, and an end to the practice of, as they put it, “viewing words as crimes.”

When researchers noticed a spike, in April 2010, in the number of Chinese users taking steps to get around censors, the cause might have been a surge in political awareness; actually it was a Japanese porn star, Sola Aoi, who had opened a Twitter account,

China Digital Times, an overseas news site, created an archive it called “Directives from the Ministry of Truth,” in homage to Orwell.

In September 2008, not long after the Olympics ended, he edged past a movie star to become China’s most popular personal blogger, based on the total number of readers he had accumulated. He had attracted more than a quarter of a billion visitors since he began;

Han Han was the patron saint of young strivers who saw in him a way to reconcile their dawning sense of skepticism with the material gratification they coveted.

In his writings, Han jabbed at the official truth about China’s rise, urging workers not to cheer headlines of new prosperity when their “low-wage labor adds up to nothing but a single screw in the boss’s Rolls-Royce.”

In 2008 a milk producer, Sanlu, discovered that farmers had been adding melamine to boost the protein levels, but the company did not order a recall; instead, it persuaded the local government to bar the press from reporting it. By the time the Ministry of Health warned the public, three hundred thousand infants had been sickened; six of them died.

When, in 2009, authorities declared their intention to rid the Web of “online vulgarity,” people responded by inventing a smiling cartoon symbol—a mythical creature that resembled an alpaca—named the Grass Mud Horse, which, in Mandarin, was a homonym for “Fuck Your Mother.”

That December 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.

Ai Weiwei always sensed that he was born into the wrong family—or, at least, an inauspicious one. His father, Ai Qing, was among China’s foremost literary figures. He had joined the Communist Party as a young man and earned a reputation for accessible verse imbued with the spirit of the revolution.

At a poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, he met Allen Ginsberg, and they struck up an unlikely friendship. But nobody affected him as deeply as Duchamp, whose subversion of orthodoxy was thrilling to Chinese artists raised on academic realism.

The Chinese website Sina invited him to host a blog, and at first he used it in an odd way—putting his own life under surveillance by posting dozens, sometimes hundreds, of snapshots each day, depicting his visitors, his cats, his wanderings.

At Liu’s trial that December, the prosecution needed just fourteen minutes to present its case. When it was Liu’s turn to speak, he denied none of the charges. Instead, he read a statement in which he predicted that the ruling against him would not “pass the test of history”:

Eventually the number reached twelve thousand—an infinitesimal minority in China’s population, but symbolically significant: it was the largest coordinated campaign against one-party rule since 1949.

Whenever a Chinese activist weighed the costs and benefits of dissent, there was always, in the background, the knowledge of what could happen if the government ran out of patience. You just had to recall the name Gao Zhisheng. In 2005, Gao was a lawyer and a rising star; he had been ranked as one of the country’s ten best attorneys by the Ministry of Justice in 2001. The

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.

On the Internet blacklist that winter, the censors inscribed a new taboo search: “the empty chair.”

The night before his trial, his lawyer was detained; Chen was represented by court-appointed attorneys, who called no witnesses. He was found guilty of destroying property and disrupting traffic and was sentenced to four years and three months in prison.

The modern heirs of People with Grievances were known as “petitioners,” and I often received cold calls from them. They tracked me down in the hope that the attentions of a foreign reporter might force the government to resolve their cases.

To that end, the Party expanded a corps of what it called “ushers of public opinion,” who wandered the Web masquerading as ordinary users, seeking to steer debate rather than extinguish it. They were paid half a yuan for every comment they posted, and their critics named them the “fifty-cent Party.”

W. didn’t pretend to be proud of his work. He did it for money, and he didn’t tell his family or friends because, he said, it might “harm my reputation.” “Everyone has the thirst for exploring the truth, including me … We have more freedom of speech than we did. But at the same time, as soon as you get that freedom, you begin to see that certain people have even more freedom. So then we feel unfree again. It’s the comparison that’s depressing.”

A few months later, in May 2011, Fang was lecturing at Wuhan University when a student threw an egg at him, followed by a shoe, hitting the professor in the chest. Teachers tried to detain the shoe thrower, a science student from a nearby college, but other students shielded him and led him to safety. He was instantly famous online. People offered him cash and vacations in Hong Kong and Singapore. A female blogger offered to sleep with him.

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. “If we waver,” he told a meeting of three thousand legislators in Beijing, “the state could sink into the abyss.”

When a fat man lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I am skinny.” When a bearded man lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I am not bearded.” When a man who sold sunflower seeds lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I don’t sell sunflower seeds.” But when they come for the skinny, beardless ones who never sold sunflower seeds, there will be nobody left to speak up for you.

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.

“If you don’t sign,” one of the interrogators told him, “we can never let you go, because we can’t finish our job.” That moment was a revelation. “You’re not really fighting a system,” he realized. “You’re really dealing with these two persons, very low-ranking, who don’t believe you are a criminal but just can’t finish their job. And they are very frustrated, too.”

Ding’s given name, Shumiao, betrayed her rural roots, so she changed it to Yuxin, at the suggestion of her feng shui adviser. She was easy to lampoon—Daft Mrs. Ding, people called her—but she had a genius for cultivating business relationships. A longtime colleague told me, “When I tried to teach her how to analyze the market, how to run the company, she said, ‘I don’t need to understand this.’” The Chinese press chronicled her audacious social ascent. To gain foreign contacts, she backed a club “for international diplomats,” which managed to attract a visit in 2010 by Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair.

Liao Ran, an Asia specialist at Transparency International, told the International Herald Tribune that China’s high-speed railway was shaping up to be “the biggest single financial scandal not just in China, but perhaps in the world.”

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. (The report was promptly removed.)

Three years had been set aside for construction of one of the longest bridges in North China, but it was finished in eighteen months, and nine months later, in August 2012, it collapsed, killing three people and injuring five. Local officials blamed overloaded trucks, though it was the sixth bridge collapse in a single year.

For all the talk about corruption in China, the details about how it actually worked—the subtle mechanics, the rituals, the taboos—remained mysterious to me.

High office remained such a reliable path to riches that when a courtier named Heshen was finally brought low in 1799, he was found to have amassed a fortune worth ten times the entire government’s annual budget.

The larger the deal, the higher the cadre needed to approve it, and the bribes moved straight up the ranks. Officials and businessmen looked out for one another by organizing themselves into “protective umbrellas,” a step in what Chinese scholars

Alcohol was such a reliable choice that the state media conceded that sales of the country’s most famous liquor, Kweichow Moutai, was “an index for China’s corruption.” It was selling so well in 2011 that the company paid the largest dividend in the history of China’s stock markets.

The victim was a local British businessman named Neil Heywood, a forty-one-year-old man of pale linen suits and a guarded manner, a “character in a Graham Greene novel—always immaculate, very noble, very erudite,” as a friend of Heywood’s put it to the British press.

he sensed an opportunity to outmaneuver liberal rivals, and he reinvented himself as the closest China had to Huey Long.

When Han Feng’s journal leaked to the Web—he never discovered how—it chronicled a life replete with banquets, extramarital affairs, and leisurely business trips, interspersed with Communist Party rituals.

In this view, the compact between the people and their leaders was fraying, the ruling class was scrambling to get what it could in the final years of frenzied growth, and the Party would be no more capable of reforming itself from within than were the Soviets.