Age of Ambition (18 page)

His sentiment didn't inspire much optimism about China's future alongside the West. On some level, it was hard to argue with him; the prospect that a richer China would naturally become a more Western, democratic China was no longer as convincing to me as it had been in my student days, when I was drawn to Beijing by the tragic potential of Tiananmen Square. The China that I inhabited now was, by turns, inspiring and maddening, home to both Bare-Handed Fortunes and black jails, a fierce curiosity about the world and a defensive pride in China's new place in it. My busmates had answered the call to go West, but if they struggled to make sense of what they found, I could sympathize; I was struggling to make sense of a land “unfettered” but subject to the Party in Power.

If it was naïve to imagine that China's opening would simply draw it closer to the West, it was also naïve, perhaps, to dismiss the power of more subtle changes. Modern Chinese travel, like the modern Chinese state, was predicated on the fragile promise that it would impose order on a chaotic world, by shepherding its citizens and keeping them safe from threats that could include Western thieves, Western cuisine, and Western culture. In the flesh, the West that our group encountered was, indeed, more Europe than “Europe”—unkempt and unglamorous in ways they hadn't expected. And yet, behind the prosperity gospel about Chinese one-party efficiency, my busmates caught unredacted flickers of insight, glimpses of humaneness and openness and a world once forbidden. By declaring, in effect, an end to the revolution, the Party in Power had hoped that its people would now step beyond politics and get on with living. But it would never be that easy.

When Promise finally put down his wilted copy of
The Wall Street Journal
, there were no trumpets. He said simply, “When I read a foreign newspaper, I see lots of things I don't know about.” On this first trip, there was much they would never see, but mile by mile, they were discovering how to see it at all.

 

PART II

TRUTH

 

EIGHT

DANCING IN SHACKLES

 

The most intriguing building in Beijing was not celebrated for its architecture. Facing the Avenue of Eternal Peace, next door to China's equivalent of the White House, was a modern, three-story green office block with a pagoda roof that perched on top like a toupee. What impressed me was that the building did not, on paper at least, exist. It had no address, no sign, and it appeared on no public charts of the Party structure. The first time I asked what it was, the guard said, “I can't tell you that. It's a government organ.” Over time, I came to think of it as, simply, the Department.

Every capital has its secret departments, but the odd thing about this one and its aversion to publicity was that it was the Central Publicity Department. The “Publicity” in the title was for English purposes; the Chinese name was 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. They administered the largest fund for the social sciences, which gave them veto power over scholarly research that did not, for instance, heed their ban on the use of certain words to describe China's political system. (One of the banned words was
jiquanzhuyi
—“totalitarianism.”) The Department had a breadth of authority over the realm of ideas in China that Anne-Marie Brady, a scholar who studied it, compared to the “Vatican's influence over the Catholic world.”

Orwell wrote that political prose, in any country, is intended to “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” During the Truman era, Secretary of State Dean Acheson pruned and massaged his facts until they were, in his words, “clearer than truth.” But no country has devoted more time and care to the art of propaganda than China, where the emperor Qin Shi Huang governed, in the third century
B.C.E.
, with a policy he called “Keep the Masses Ignorant and They Will Follow.” Mao sanctified propaganda and censorship as essential parts of Thought Work, and he relied on them to reframe the Long March as a strategic triumph, not a crushing defeat. Five year after Mao died, his heirs' final act of devotion was to issue an official declaration on Mao's tumultuous reign. They said it was 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong—an imponderable calculation that would be studied by schoolchildren for decades to come.

The Department almost disappeared. In 1989 the uprising at Tiananmen Square convinced some Party leaders that propaganda was growing impotent in the modern age. But Deng Xiaoping disagreed, and he made a fateful decision—the Party's future survival, he declared, would rest, more than ever before, on two pillars: prosperity and propaganda. Of China's young people who took to the square, he said, “It will take years, not just a couple of months, of education to change their thinking.” But the Soviet approach to propaganda had failed them. Deng and his men urgently needed a new approach, and they found it in the holy land of public relations, America, and in a new, if unlikely, role model: Walter Lippmann, a leading American columnist for much of the twentieth century. They overlooked his early anticommunism and hailed his efforts to prevent mass rule and to sway U.S. public opinion to enter World War I. They studied and cited Lippmann's belief in the power of pictures to, in his words, “magnify emotion while undermining critical thought,” and they adopted his view that good PR can create a “group mind” and “manufacture consent” for the ruling elite.

To sculpt propaganda for the emerging middle class, they embraced another father of American PR, the late political scientist Harold Lasswell, who wrote, in 1927, “If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept its chains of silver.” Party image makers who began their careers denouncing capitalist stooges now studied the success of Coca-Cola, observing, as one Chinese propaganda textbook put it, that Coke proved that “if you have a good image, any problem can be solved.” To learn the art of modern spin, the Communist Party studied the masters: a five-day seminar for top propaganda officials made case studies out of Tony Blair's response to mad cow disease and the Bush administration's handling of the U.S. media after 9/11.

In 2004 the Department created a Bureau of Public Opinion, which commissioned surveys and research to measure the pulse of the public without the niceties of voting. Instead of withering away, the world of Thought Work grew in scale and sophistication, until it encompassed, by one estimate, a propaganda officer for every one hundred Chinese citizens. The era of thundering loudspeakers and mimeographed pamphlets was over. Like any competitive enterprise, the Department now measured its effectiveness in page hits and prime-time viewership. It created big-budget advertising campaigns with the help of famous filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou, and it submerged people in a gauzy emotional message that aimed, as one propaganda chief put it, to reach “into their ears, into their heads, and into their hearts.” It was more important than ever, Party scholars pointed out, to “make their thinking conform with the dominant ideology, thereby standardizing people's behavior.”

*   *   *

Nothing consumed more of the Department's attention than the press. “Never again,” President Jiang Zemin vowed after Tiananmen, “would China's newspapers, radio, and television be permitted to become a battle-front for bourgeois liberalism.” China, Jiang said, would never succumb to what he called “so-called glasnost.” 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.”

Journalists had little choice but to heed those instructions to such a degree that, even as China became more diverse and clamorous, the world of the news was an oasis of calm—a realm of breathtaking sameness. Newspapers on opposite sides of the country often carried identical headlines, in identical font. In May 2008, when a powerful earthquake struck the province of Sichuan, papers across the country proclaimed in near-perfect unison that the earthquake had “tugged at the heartstrings of the Chinese Communist Party.” The next morning, I rounded up the local papers and marveled at their consistency.

One of the few Chinese news sites that had anything different to say was a magazine called
Caijing
. While the state news service, Xinhua, was hailing the People's Liberation Army for its rescue efforts,
Caijing
—the name means “finance and economics”—was ferreting out estimates of the numbers of dead and wounded and reporting that “many disaster victims have yet to receive any relief supplies at all.” I wondered why
Caijing
's writing was different, and I sensed that it might have something to do with the person in charge, a woman named Hu Shuli, who had made her name divining the boundaries of free expression in China. I asked to come see her. I wanted to know how you negotiate with a building that does not exist.

*   *   *

I heard Hu Shuli before I saw her. I was waiting in her office off the newsroom of
Caijing
, a sleek and open gray-brick space on the nineteenth floor of the Prime Tower, in downtown Beijing, when I heard an urgent click-clack of heels down the hallway. She approached the door and then kept on going, sweeping into the newsroom spouting a series of decrees and ideas, before spinning around and heading back in my direction. In advance of my visit, Qian Gang, an editor whom she had known for years, had warned me that Hu moved at a pace “as sudden and rash as a gust of wind.”

In her mid-fifties, Hu Shuli was five feet two and slim, with a pixie haircut and a wardrobe of color-coordinated outfits. She was so voluble and pugnacious that she seemed like “a female Godfather,” one of her reporters thought upon their first meeting. Another of her colleagues compared the experience of chatting with her to being on the receiving end of machine-gun fire. Wang Lang, an old friend of Hu's and an editor at
Economic Daily
, a state-run newspaper, repeatedly declined her offers to work together, because, he told me, “keeping some distance is better for our friendship.” Depending on the point of view, being with her was either thrilling or unnerving. Her boss, Wang Boming, the chairman of
Caijing
's parent company, SEEC Media Group, told me, half-jokingly, “I'm afraid of her.”

In the world of “news workers,” as journalists are known in Party-speak, Hu Shuli had a singular profile. She was an incurable muckraker, but had cultivated first-name familiarity with some of China's most powerful Party leaders. Since 1998, when Hu established
Caijing
, with two computers and a borrowed conference room, she had guided the magazine with near-perfect pitch for how much candor and provocation the Department would tolerate. This meant deciding what to cover (rampant corporate fraud, case after case of political corruption), but also what not to cover (Falun Gong, the Tiananmen Square anniversaries, and many other things). Hu had endured as editor long after other tenacious Chinese journalists had been imprisoned or silenced. She was often described in the Chinese and foreign press as “the most dangerous woman in China,” though she downplayed it, saying that she was just “a woodpecker,” forever hammering at a tree, trying not to knock it down but to make it grow straighter.

Caijing
had the glossy feel and design of
Fortune
. It was heavy with advertising, for Cartier watches, Chinese credit cards, Mercedes SUVs. The writing could be purposefully dense. But China's propaganda officials were more likely to clamp down on television and mass-market newspapers, which had audiences in the millions, than they were on a magazine that sold only two hundred thousand copies, even if those copies went to many of China's most important offices in government, finance, and academia, giving the magazine extraordinary influence. It had a pair of websites, in Chinese and English, that together attracted about 3.2 million unique visitors every month. Hu wrote a widely quoted column for the print edition and the Web. Every year, she hosted a conference that drew the economic leadership of the Communist Party.

Hu's brio stood out in an industry in which truth often succumbed to political priorities. Not long after the earthquake, Xinhua, the state news service, published a story on its website, detailing how China's Shenzhou VII rocket made its thirtieth orbit of the earth. The story had plenty of gripping detail—“The dispatcher's firm voice broke the silence on the ship.” Unfortunately, the rocket had yet to be launched—the news service later apologized for posting a “draft.”

But failing to put politics before truth could be hazardous. When Reporters Without Borders ranked countries by press freedom in 2008, the year of the earthquake, China ranked 167th out of 173 countries—behind Iran and ahead of Vietnam. Article 35 of the Chinese constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and the press, but regulations gave the government broad powers to imprison editors and writers for “harming national interests” and other offenses. There were twenty-eight reporters in Chinese jails, more than in any other country. (In 2009, Iran overtook China in this, for the first time in ten years.)