Age of Ambition (4 page)

*   *   *

Two years later, I returned to China to study at Beijing Normal University. Most of what I knew about the school was from the history of 1989, when it was one of China's most active campuses during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations; there were days when 90 percent of the student body marched to the square to protest. But by the time I arrived, the most urgent priority for practically everyone I met that summer was a pent-up desire to consume. It's hard to overstate how large a change this was. In the heyday of socialism, there had been a movie called
Must Never Forget
, which told the story of a man whose lust for a new wool suit drives him insane. Now there was a Chinese magazine called the
Guide to Purchasing Upscale Goods
, with features such as “After the Divorce, Who Gets the House?” An article on beverages had an entry called “Men Who Choose Club Soda,” which explained that they were known to have “strong self-respect, ideals, and ambitions, and a low tolerance for mediocrity.”

The government was offering its people a bargain: prosperity in exchange for loyalty. Chairman Mao had railed against bourgeois indulgences, but now Chinese leaders were actively promoting the pursuit of the good life. The first winter after the democracy demonstrations, work units in Beijing gave employees overcoats, blankets, Coke, instant coffee, and extra meat. There was a new government slogan around town: “Borrow Money to Realize Your Dreams.”

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. Chinese academics greeted it with a new genre called “leisure studies,” dedicated to this “important stage in the social evolution of mankind.” One weekend, I joined Chinese classmates on a trip to Inner Mongolia. The train was overcrowded, and the ventilation system inhaled diesel exhaust and exhaled it into the cabins. But nobody complained, because it was a small pleasure simply to be on the move.

After college, I went to work as a newspaper reporter in Chicago, New York, and the Middle East, and 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. The city was unrecognizable to me. I went looking for the night stalls and the sheep of Xinjiang Village, but they had been swept away in a bout of beautification. Income had begun to soar at a rate never experienced in a big country. The last time I had been in China, per capita income was three thousand dollars a year—equivalent to the United States in 1872. The United States took fifty-five years to get to seven thousand dollars. China did it in ten.

Every six hours, the People's Republic was exporting as much as it did in the calendar year 1978, just before Captain Lin Zhengyi swam to the mainland. Economics led me to Lin's front door. I was tracking down academics, trying to unravel what was driving China's changes. By that point, Lin was a prominent economist in his late fifties with a gray brush cut, thick eyebrows, and wire-rim glasses that slipped down his nose. I knew nothing of his background. When I mentioned his name to another economist, he suggested that Lin's own path might tell me more about the engine of China's boom than my stack of books could.

When I first asked Lin about it, he said politely, “This is an old story.” He rarely spoke about his defection. I understood, though my curiosity lingered. After our first meeting, I visited Lin many times; we'd catch up on his latest writings, and eventually he resigned himself to my questions about his past. I collected documents about his case, and I visited the shoreline where he started his swim. When he left Taiwan, he said, he had simply wanted to “evaporate.”

*   *   *

In the hope of finding the China that I recognized, I clung at first to the countryside. It was the China of literature and ink paintings. One month, I did nothing but walk and hitch rides beside the rivers of Sichuan Province. I slept in small towns that felt half-abandoned, because the call of the city had swept away everyone who was not too old or too young to feel its pull. The village ancients liked to joke that, when they died, there would be nobody strong enough to carry their casket.

But if there was a time when Chinese cities felt like exceptions, like islands in a sea of impoverished countryside, this was less true all the time. 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.) I began to sense something charged about entering an instant city, with its miles of unlined, untrammeled black asphalt, flanked by buildings with nobody yet inside. The endless churn was the only constant. When a Chinese friend asked which American cities to visit on his next trip to the United States, I suggested New York, and he responded as tactfully as he could, “Every time I go, it looks the same.” In Beijing, I never passed up an invitation, because places, and people, vanished before you had a chance to see them again.

When I went looking for somewhere to live, there were advertisements for Merlin Champagne Town and Venice Water Townhouses and Moonriver Resort Condo. I chose the Global Trade Mansion. It was an outcropping in a sea of construction, and whoever had built it had installed soundproof windows, since it would be surrounded, for the foreseeable future, by constant noise. I was on the twenty-second floor, and in the mornings before work, I studied Chinese beside the window, peering down on a small army of workers in orange hard hats moving beneath a restless crane. At night, another shift took their place, and the light from the welders' torches flared in the windows. The Global Trade Mansion seemed as good a place as any to figure out what the Communist Party meant by “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Nine years after the
Times
had heralded the Communist Party's long march to irrelevance, the Party was richer and larger than ever, with eighty million members—one in every twelve adults—and no organized opposition. It was opening Party cells inside even the most Westernized technology companies and hedge funds. China was a high-functioning dictatorship—a dictatorship without a dictator. The government answered to the Party; the Party appointed CEOs and Catholic bishops and newspaper editors. It advised judges how to decide sensitive court cases, and it directed the nation's military generals. At the lowest levels, the Party felt like a professional network. A talented young journalist I knew in Beijing told me that she became a Party member in college because it doubled the number of jobs available, and because one of her favorite professors had pleaded with her to help fill a quota for female recruits.

When I arrived, the Party was freshening itself up with what it called the “Educational Campaign to Maintain the Advanced Nature of the Chinese Communist Party.” This was upbeat by Party standards. Unlike the public denunciations and confrontations of the 1960s and '70s, the Party was encouraging people to celebrate their “Red birthday” (the anniversary of the day they joined), and every member was expected to write a two-thousand-word self-evaluation. The market sensed an opportunity, and soon there were websites offering to sell “model” self-evaluations. They came drafted with the requisite apologies, such as “I didn't pay enough attention to establishing a scientific worldview.” My journalist friend who joined the Party while in college tried to write her own self-evaluation, but when she read it aloud at the monthly meeting, she was criticized for failing to include the approved phrases, so she went back to the standard list.

In the seven years I had been gone, the language had changed. The word for “comrade,”
tongzhi
, had been wryly adopted by gays and lesbians to describe one other. I was in line at the bank one afternoon when an old man, peering ahead impatiently, said, “
Tongzhi
, let's hurry up!” and two teenagers cracked up. The word for waitresses and shopgirls,
xiaojie
, had been repurposed to refer mostly to prostitutes. And the new kind of
xiaojie
were suddenly everywhere in a country overrun with cash-rich new entrepreneurs on business trips.

But the change that startled me most surrounded the word for “ambition,”
ye xin—
literally, “wild heart.” In Chinese, a wild heart had always carried the suggestion of savage abandon and absurd expectations—a toad who dreams of devouring a swan, as an old saying had it. More than two thousand years ago, a collection of political advice called the
Huainanzi
had warned rulers to “keep powerful positions out of the hands of the ambitious, just as one keeps sharp tools out of the hands of the foolish.” But suddenly I was seeing references to “wild hearts” everywhere—on television talk shows and in the self-help aisles. Bookstores carried titles such as
Great Wild Hearts: The Ups and Downs of Pioneering Entrepreneurial Heroes
and
How to Have a Wild Heart in Your Twenties
.

*   *   *

When the summer heat began to break, I set off to see a man I had read about named Chen Guangcheng. Chen was the youngest of five brothers in a peasant family in the village of Dongshigu, which had a population of five hundred. A childhood illness had left him blind, and he received no schooling until he was seventeen years old. His family read literature and adventure novels to him. He listened to the radio, and he took inspiration from his father, who had been illiterate until adulthood, when he went to school and earned a job as a teacher.

Chen studied massage and acupuncture—virtually the only education available to the blind in China—but he was more interested in the law, and he applied to audit legal courses. His father gave him a copy of
The Law Protecting the Disabled
, and he asked his parents and siblings to read it to him repeatedly. Chen discovered that his family was not receiving the tax breaks that it deserved. Chen ventured to Beijing to file his grievance, and to everyone's astonishment, he won. Not long after that, he married a woman he heard speaking on a radio call-in show. Her parents, like most in China, did not approve of her marrying a blind man, but she did it anyway.

In Dongshigu village, where people grew wheat, soybeans, and peanuts, the masseur knew about the law, so people turned to him for help. In one case, he prevented local leaders from gaining control of land and renting it back to peasants at higher prices. In another, he closed a paper mill that was polluting the local river. When a reporter visited him, he said, “The most important thing is for ordinary people to know that they have the right” to complain. Chen was an oddity in the world of Chinese politics, not only because of the circumstances of his life but because he was a new kind of activist, something more ambiguous than a conventional dissident.

When I heard about him in 2005, he was collecting accounts of women forced to undergo abortions and sterilizations after defying China's one-child policy. When they refused or fled, the local government locked up their parents and siblings in an attempt to force the women out of hiding. When Chen helped the women file a suit, local officials locked him in his house.

One day in late summer, I took a plane to Shandong, and then one taxi after another until I reached Dongshigu village. It was a drowsy afternoon by the time I reached the narrow dirt road into town. I left the cab and continued up the sloping path on foot. Chen lived in a single-story farmhouse, with a weeping willow over the front gate and flowering vines that reached up the home's stone walls. There were faded red paper holiday banners hung beside the gate. Just before I reached it, a pair of men blocked my path. One was lean and bony, with red chapped cheeks; the other was stout and smiling.

“He's not home,” the stout man said. He smiled and stepped close enough that I could smell the remnants of his lunch.

“I think he might be,” I said. “He's expecting me.”

Even if Chen was home, he said, Chen did not want any visitors. Other men began to arrive, in groups of two and three. One took my wrist and walked me back toward the taxi. A police car pulled up, and the officers asked for my passport. I was not permitted to be there, they said. They gave me a choice: I could go to the station with them “to rest for a while,” as they put it, or I could leave town.

The stout fellow was no longer smiling. He wanted to know where I had heard about the blind man in Dongshigu village. “From the Internet,” I said. He blinked back at me, and from his expression, I sensed that the Internet meant as much to him as if I'd said I had been led there by fairies. He opened the door of the taxi and pressed me toward it.

I slumped back into the cab, and we inched out of town, trailed by the police. The taxi driver was curious about the fuss. I explained that Chen was collecting complaints about abuses of the one-child policy, and the driver said he knew of another place nearby where people had similar complaints. He took me to a town called Nigou, where we pulled up beside a line of shops on the main street. There was a fertilizer store on the first floor, and above it, a fenced-in window. When I got out of the taxi and stood beneath the window, a woman stepped to the inside of the fence and peered down at me.

I asked why she was there. “We cannot leave. We have no freedom,” she said. She was calm. She said that local family-planning officials had locked her there, above the fertilizer store, because her daughter-in-law would not agree to a forced sterilization or pay the fees for having too many children, the equivalent of about a year's income.