Age of Ambition (15 page)

I asked Siu if he thought the triads were still after him, and he said, “I'm in my mid-fifties, and I'll live to be, what, seventy? So I've got only another decade or so. What do I have to lose? I'm not afraid.” He fell silent for a moment, then flashed a weird smile and said, “Besides, if they come for me, I can go for them, too.”

He'd stopped going to Macau because of his children, he said. “I don't want them to gamble. Two of them have bachelor's degrees, one has a master's. They don't swear. They're good kids.” He went on, “You have to be highly sensitive to be a good gambler. I don't recommend it to everybody. Everyone called me Inveterate Gambler Ping. But I never liked that, because I was never addicted. I gambled because I knew I could win.”

As night fell, Siu offered me a lift back to the train station in his black Lexus SUV, parked in the dirt beside us. It was buffed to a shine so bright that it glowed in the streetlights—the only visible sign of his fortune. The sky was purple with twilight. “There used to be a helicopter taking me to the Venetian anytime I wanted to go,” Siu said. “Now I'm getting my feet dirty. Real estate is even more lucrative. It's better than gambling or drugs or anything.” He nodded toward the new houses in progress. “It costs a few million to build one of these, and then I can sell it for ten million.”

 

SEVEN

ACQUIRED TASTE

 

Once the Got Rich First Crowd had the trappings of fortune—a child in the Ivy League, a reading team to stay up on new books—they wanted the habits of mind. The men and women who had struggled to reach the top of China's Industrial Revolution craved the chance to extend their exercise of choice to a wider world, to matters of taste, art, and the good life—to see, at last, what they had been missing.

In May 1942, Chairman Mao, in his talks on the future of art and literature, said, “There is, in fact, no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics.” For Mao, culture was a “weapon for uniting and educating the people and for crushing and destroying the enemy.” The Party would make sure that art, literature, and other expressions of taste adhered to what it later called the
zhuxuanlu—
“the central melody”—of Chinese society, the Party's distilled understanding of values, priorities, and desires.

The People's Republic became known for paintings of apple-cheeked peasants, films of determined soldiers, and poems about soaring heroism. The style was called “revolutionary realism combined with revolutionary romanticism,” and it was shaped by the Party's belief, as culture czar Zhou Yang put it, that “today's ideal is tomorrow's reality.” In some cases, artists who focused too much on unflattering facts about the present were accused of “writing about reality,” and punished for it.

After Mao died in 1976, the first group of avant-garde artists to step forward named themselves the “Stars,” as a rebuttal to what the member Ma Desheng called the “drab uniformity” of what had come before, as a way “to emphasize our individuality.” When their first exhibition was excluded from the national museum in 1979, they hung their work on the fence outside and staged a march beneath the slogan “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom.” For much of the nineties, authorities arrested performance artists for appearing in the nude, shut down experimental shows, and bulldozed underground artists' villages.

But the influx of money transformed the relationship between artists and the government. By 2006, Chinese painters such as Zhang Xiaogang were selling pieces for close to a million dollars, and a younger generation of artists, raised in the boom years, let it be known that they were tired of addressing authoritarianism and politics. Like artists elsewhere, they trained their sights on consumerism, culture, and sex, and they encountered a new generation of speculators and collectors.

Li Suqiao, a curator and collector in Beijing, told me, “I say to my friends, ‘Instead of gambling four thousand dollars on a round of golf, you can get a work of art.'” We were at a gallery called New Millennium, and Li had a yellow sweater tied around his neck. At forty-four years old, he had been collecting for five years, after making money in the petroleum industry. He estimated that he spent about two hundred thousand dollars a year on work by young artists. “I have friends who live in villas north of Beijing, and when it comes time to decorate, they'll spend one hundred thousand renminbi on a couch, and one hundred renminbi on a print to hang above it. Sometimes they don't care about the price; they just care about the measurements.” As far as Li was concerned, the avant-garde “has nothing do with politics.” He said, “Chinese collectors are more interested in current things than in memory and tragedy.”

The Party discovered that the best way to deprive Chinese art of its rebellious energy was to embrace it: in 2006, after years of threatening to demolish Factory 798, a former military electronics plant in Beijing that had been turned into a cluster of galleries and studios, the municipal government designated it as a “creative industry area,” and tour buses filled the streets around it.

The commercial art market ballooned. Hundreds of contemporary art museums were built across the country. Artists who had lived hand to mouth now sold their work around the world and built dachas beside the Great Wall. The artist Ai Weiwei opened his own restaurant, where he could hold court late into the evening with friends and critics and hangers-on. For Ai Weiwei, the national pursuit of fortune became a subject itself. He commissioned a series of colossal crystal chandeliers that mocked China's new aesthetics. He hung one inside a rusty scaffolding, a cartoon of China's new disparities.

In his first two decades as an artist, Ai Weiwei had produced a fitful, if influential, stream of work: while gambling and trading antiques, he created installations, photographs, furniture, paintings, books, and films. He had been a member of the early avant-garde group the Stars, and he helped establish experimental artist communities on the edge of the capital. Though he had no training as an architect, he founded one of China's most sought-after architecture practices, before moving on to other obsessions.

In
The New York Times
, in 2004, Holland Cotter called him an “artist whose role has been the stimulating, mold-breaking one of scholar-clown.” Now, in his early fifties, he had found a rich new vein in China's aspirations. For his contribution to Documenta 12, in 2007, he arranged an expedition to send a thousand and one ordinary Chinese citizens to the site of the festival, in Kassel, Germany. He named the project
Fairytale
, a reference both to Kassel, which was the home of the Brothers Grimm, and to the allure that the outside world had always held for generations of Chinese who were never able to see it.

To recruit travelers, Ai Weiwei turned to the Web with more intensity, and it revealed a vast world he had never known. He realized that “the Internet could be a very powerful tool,” he told me. He raised money from foundations and others for the air travel, and his office designed every detail of the experience, down to matching suitcases, bracelets, and dormitory-style living spaces outfitted with a thousand and one restored wooden chairs from the Qing dynasty. It was social sculpture on a Chinese scale, and the logistics would have staggered Joseph Beuys, the German conceptualist who declared that “everyone is an artist.” Yet, to Chen Danqing, a painter and social critic, the project carried a special resonance in China, where validation from the West, including visas, once carried near-mythic value. “For the past hundred years, we were always the ones waiting for the Americans or the Europeans or whomever to call our names.
You. Come
.”

*   *   *

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.”

In 1877, when the Qing dynasty was decaying and Western powers were rising, Chinese reformers dispatched a young scholar named Yan Fu to England to investigate the source of British naval power. He concluded that Britain's strength lay not in its weapons but in its ideas, and he returned to China with a trunkful of books by Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, and other Western thinkers. His translations were not perfect—
natural selection
took on a harsher edge as
natural elimination
—but their impact was vast. To Yan and others, evolution was not simply biology; it was political science. Liang Qichao, one of China's leading reformers, concluded that China must “make itself one of the fittest.” Admiring the West too zealously was a liability; when activists in the early twentieth century embraced European notions of the individual, they were mocked as “fake foreign devils.” Until the final years of Mao's reign, when he established ties with the United States, admiring the West was a punishable offense.

But by the eighties, the West was increasingly seen as a place of possibility and self-creation. A popular soap opera on Chinese television called
Into Europe
told the story of a penniless man from Fujian who arrives in Paris wearing a tattered T-shirt and, within months, becomes a real estate developer. In the climactic scene, he faces a French audience and asks, “What will be different on the new map of Paris two years from now?” He tears away a cloth covering an architectural model and declares, “The beautiful banks of the Seine will be full of Oriental splendor: the Chinatown Investment and Trade Center!” In the show, the French crowd bursts into applause.

The ambivalence in the Chinese view of the West did not go away; it deepened. Young Chinese were growing up watching the NBA and Hollywood movies, while bookstore shelves carried titles such as
China Can Say No
, the bestselling polemic during my first visit to China. The combination could be confounding. When three researchers asked Chinese high school students, in 2007, for the first five words that came to mind when they thought of America, their answers suggested a kaleidoscopic portrait:

Bill Gates, Microsoft, the N.B.A., Hollywood, George W. Bush, Presidential Elections, Democracy, War in Iraq, War in Afghanistan, 9/11, Bin Laden, Harvard, Yale, McDonald's, Hawaii, Police Officer to the World, Oil, Overbearing-ness, Hegemony, Taiwan

When I arrived in China, the closest that most Chinese people would ever come to setting foot in the West was “World Park,” a Disney-style attraction on the edge of the capital, where tourists could climb miniature Egyptian pyramids, behold a scale model of the Eiffel Tower, and stroll through an ersatz Manhattan. But as people had more money to spend, they explored more ways to spend it. When the Chinese travel industry surveyed the public on its dream destinations, no place scored higher than Europe. Asked what they liked about it, the Chinese put “culture” at the top of the list. (On the negative side, respondents complained of “arrogance” and “poor-quality Chinese food.”)

Local newspapers grew dense with ads for exotic holiday travel. It began to feel as if everyone were getting away, and I decided to join them. China's travel agents competed by carving out tours that conformed less to Western notions of a grand tour than to the likes and dislikes of their customers. I scanned some deals online: “Big Plazas, Big Windmills, Big Gorges” was a four-day bus tour that emphasized photogenic countryside in the Netherlands and Luxembourg; “Visit the New and Yearn for the Past in Eastern Europe” had a certain Cold War charm, but I wasn't sure I needed that in February.

I chose the “Classic European,” a popular bus tour that would traverse five countries in ten days. Payment was due up front. Airfare, hotels, meals, insurance, and assorted charges came to the equivalent in yuan of about $2,200. In addition, every Chinese member of the tour was required to put up a bond amounting to $7,600—more than two years' salary for the average worker—to prevent anyone from disappearing before the flight home. I was the thirty-eighth and final member of the group. We would depart the next morning at dawn.

I was told to proceed to Door No. 25 of Terminal 2 at Shanghai's Pudong International Airport, where I found a slim forty-three-year-old man with floppy, parted hair. He wore a gray tweed overcoat and rectangular glasses. He introduced himself as Li Xingshun, our guide. To identify us in crowds, each of us received a canary-yellow lapel badge bearing a cartoon dragon with smoke curling from its nostrils, striding in hiking boots above our group's motto: “The Dragon Soars for Ten Thousand Li.” (A
li
is about a third of a mile.)

We settled into coach on an Air China nonstop flight to Frankfurt, and I opened a Chinese packet of “Outbound Group Advice,” which we'd been urged to read carefully. The specificity of the instructions suggested a history of unpleasant surprises: “Don't travel with knockoffs of European goods, because customs inspectors will seize them and penalize you.” There was an intense focus on staying safe in Europe. “You will see Gypsies begging beside the road, but do not give them any money. If they crowd around and ask to see your purse, yell for the guide.” Conversing with strangers was discouraged. “If someone asks you to help take a photo of him, watch out: this is a prime opportunity for thieves.”

I had been in and out of Europe over the years, but the instructions put it in a new light, and I was oddly reassured to be traveling with three dozen others and a guide. The notes concluded with a piece of Confucius-style advice that framed our trip as a test of character: “He who can bear hardship will carry on.”