Age of Ambition (19 page)

In the face of those risks, I saw in Hu Shuli's magazine the first Chinese publication with the ambition to become a world-class news organization. “It's different from everything you see in China,” an economist named Andy Xie told me. “Its existence, in a way, is a miracle.”

*   *   *

The first time I visited Hu Shuli at home, I was sure that I was lost. Unlike many of the reporters and editors on her staff, she did not live in one of Beijing's new residential high-rises. She and her husband lived in an old-fashioned concrete housing block, in a three-bedroom apartment with a view of an overgrown garden. The neighborhood was China's old-media stronghold, home to the headquarters of the state radio and to China's film and television censors. In the 1950s, when the building was a privileged residence for Party cadres, the government assigned space in it to Hu's father.

She came from impeccable Communist stock. Her grandfather Hu Zhongchi was a famous translator and editor, and his brother ran a prominent publishing house; Hu's mother, Hu Lingsheng, was a senior editor at
Workers' Daily
in Beijing. Her father, Cao Qifeng, was an underground Communist before taking a post in a trade union. But from a young age, Hu Shuli had instincts that worried her mother. “I always spoke about what I was thinking,” she explained.

The Cultural Revolution engulfed China when she was thirteen, and her classes were suspended. Her family suffered: As a prominent editor, Hu's mother was criticized at her newspaper and placed under house arrest. Her father was shunted into a backroom job. Hu became a Red Guard, with others her age, and they traveled the country proclaiming their love for the “reddest of red suns,” Mao Zedong. As the movement descended into violence, Hu Shuli sought refuge in books, trying to maintain a semblance of an education. “It was a very confusing time, because we lost all values,” she said. A month before her sixteenth birthday, she was sent to the countryside to experience the rural revolution. What she found there astonished her.

“It was ridiculous,” she recalled. Farmers had no reason to work. “They just wanted to stay lying in the field, sometimes for two hours. I said, ‘Should we start work?' They said, ‘How can you think that?'” She went on: “Ten years later, I realized everything was wrong.”

For many in her generation, the rustication campaign was a revelation. Another young believer sent to the countryside, Wu Si, recalled to me his first day at an iron foundry. “We'd always been taught to believe that ‘the proletariat is a selfless class,' and we believed in it completely,” he told me. A few hours after his arrival, a fellow worker approached him and said, “That's enough. You can stop [working] now.”

Wu was puzzled. “I don't have anything else to do, so I might as well keep working.”

The comrade whispered some advice. “People won't be too happy about that.”

If Wu worked a full day, quotas would go up for everyone. He put down his tools. Soon he learned other secrets of survival in the state-owned factories—how to swipe parts from the storeroom, how to build lamps for sale on the black market. For Wu, who would later become a prominent writer and editor, it introduced him to the world of parallel realities. “One narrative was public,” he told me, “and one was real.”

When colleges resumed classes, in 1978, Hu Shuli secured a seat at People's University in Beijing. The journalism department was hardly her first choice, but it was the best that the school offered. After graduation, she joined
Workers' Daily
, and was assigned, in 1985, to a bureau in the coastal city of Xiamen, which had been designated as a laboratory for the growth of a free market. She was a natural networker—she had a regular bridge game with the mayor—and her interviewees included a promising young cadre in city government whose openness to the free market had earned him the nickname the God of Wealth. His name was Xi Jinping, and years later he would become the president of China.

In 1987, Hu won a fellowship from the World Press Institute to spend five months in America. The experience changed her sense of what was possible. Her paper,
Workers' Daily
, was four pages long, but every town she visited in the United States seemed to have a paper ten or twenty times as long. One evening in Minnesota, she said, “I spent the whole night reading the St. Paul
Pioneer Press
.” She returned to China, and in the spring of 1989 the Tiananmen Square movement electrified the Beijing press. Many journalists, including Hu, joined the demonstrations. As soldiers cracked down on the night of June 3, Hu recalls, “I went to the street, then went back to the office and said, ‘We should cover this.'” But the decision had already come down: “We weren't going to publish a word about it.” Many reporters who had spoken out were fired or banished to the provinces. Her husband, Miao Di, a film professor, thought that Hu might get arrested, but in the end she was suspended for eighteen months.

*   *   *

After her suspension, Hu became the international editor at
China Business Times
, one of the country's first national papers dedicated to covering the new frontiers of the economy. In 1992, she stumbled on a small group of Chinese financiers who had trained overseas and returned home to build the Chinese stock markets. Many of them were the children of powerful Chinese leaders. The group called itself the Stock Exchange Executive Council, and in 1992 it rented a cluster of rooms at Beijing's Chongwenmen Hotel. The members pulled out the beds and set up an office. At one desk was Gao Xiqing, who had earned a law degree at Duke and worked at Richard Nixon's law firm in New York before returning to China. At another was Wang Boming, the son of a former ambassador and vice foreign minister; Wang had studied finance at Columbia and worked as an economist in the research department of the New York Stock Exchange. They enlisted the support of rising stars in the Party, such as Wang Qishan, who was the son-in-law of a vice-premier, and Zhou Xiaochuan, a reform-minded political scion.

She began hanging around and ended up with a string of scoops and, eventually, an incomparable Rolodex of names destined for China's highest offices. (Wang Qishan reached the Standing Committee of the Politburo; Gao Xiqing became head of China's sovereign wealth fund; Zhou Xiaochuan ran China's central bank.) Later, many people in Beijing whispered that these connections protected Hu, but she insisted that outsiders overestimated her proximity to power. “I don't know their birthdays,” she said, of high-ranking officials. “I'm a journalist, and they treat me as a journalist.”

In 1998, Hu received a phone call from Wang Boming, one of the hotel room financiers. He was starting a magazine and wanted her to run it. She had two conditions: Wang would not use her pages to promote his other businesses, and he would give her a budget of a quarter of a million dollars (substantial in those days) to pay salaries that were high enough to prevent reporters from taking bribes. Wang agreed. It was no charity: he and his reform-minded allies in the government believed that, as China's economy modernized, it could no longer rely on the tottering state-run press. People could no longer afford to be uninformed.

“You need the media to play its function to disclose the facts to the public and, in a sense, help the government detect evils,” Wang told me one morning in his large, cluttered office downstairs from
Caijing
's headquarters. He was a chain-smoker with a thick brush of gray-flecked black hair, Ferragamo eyeglasses, and a garrulous sense of humor. For all his Party pedigree, his years abroad had altered his understanding of the value of truth. “When I was studying in the States, I needed to make some money to pay my tuition, so I was working for a newspaper in Chinatown—the
China Daily News
,” he said. Even as a cub reporter, he relished the chance to follow a trail wherever it led. He laughed. Being a reporter had made him feel like “a king without a crown.”

Hu Shuli wasted no time following the trail; her inaugural issue had an explosive cover story revealing that small-time investors had lost millions when a real estate company called Qiong Min Yuan went bust, even though insiders had been tipped off in time to unload their shares. Regulators were incensed; they accused Hu of flouting the restrictions handed down by the Department, and her bosses had to calm the censors by making self-criticisms. But the defining moment in
Caijing
's rise came when a reporter named Cao Haili, visiting Hong Kong in the spring of 2003, noticed that every person on the train platform seemed to be wearing a surgical mask. What the hell is that about? she thought, and alerted Hu. The Chinese press had been running reports that health officials had contained the spread of a mysterious new virus called SARS. In fact, the epidemic was growing. Newspaper editors in Guangdong Province had been ordered to publish nothing but reassuring stories about the virus.

But Hu Shuli realized those restrictions did not extend to editors outside the province, and she exploited the opening. “I bought a lot of books about breathing diseases, infections, and viruses,” she said, and her staff began pointing out errors in government statements. Over the course of a month,
Caijing
produced a series of indispensable reports, and they were planning yet another when the Department put an end to it.

From its headquarters on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the Department issued a daily stream of directives to editors that outlined the latest dos and don'ts. By definition, these reports were secret—the public was not allowed to learn what it couldn't learn—and when I arrived in 2005, it was less than three months after reporter Shi Tao was sentenced to ten years in prison for describing the contents of a propaganda directive. To prevent further leaks, censors now preferred to deliver instructions orally. Leaders at the headquarters of state television had a special red telephone for this purpose. Other news organizations received instructions at meetings that reporters called “going to class.”

For decades the censors had skillfully suppressed unwelcome news (epidemics, natural disasters, civil unrest), but technology and travel were making this increasingly difficult. When the cover-up of the SARS virus became known, Jiao Guobiao, a journalism professor at Peking University, ignored the taboo against acknowledging the Department's invisible authority and wrote, “The Central Propaganda Department is the only dead spot in China that does not operate by rules and regulations; it is a dark empire in which the rays of law do not shine.” The university fired him for it.

*   *   *

When I joined Hu Shuli one afternoon, she was running late for an unusual appointment: she had decided that her top editors needed new clothes, and she had summoned a tailor. As Hu and her reporters grew in prominence, they were spending more and more time in front of crowds or overseas. She was sick of seeing her staff in sack suits and stained short-sleeve button-downs. She offered her editors a deal: buy one new suit and the magazine would pay for another. A pudgy, heavy-lidded tailor carried an armful of suits into a conference room, and the staff filed in for a fitting.

“Doesn't it look baggy here?” Hu said, tugging at the underarm of an elegant gray pin-striped jacket being fitted to Wang Shuo, her thirty-seven-year-old managing editor. With his boss prodding at his midsection, he wore an expression of bemused tolerance that I had seen several times on a dog in a bathtub.

“It is rather tight already,” Wang protested.

“He feels tight already,” the tailor said.

“Hold on!” Hu said. “Think about the James Bond suit in the movies. Make it like that!”

The change implied by Hu's flamboyant internationalism ran deeper than aesthetics. A well-meaning American professor once advised her, “If you stay in China as a journalist, you will never really join the international mainstream.” She was determined to prove him wrong, even if it meant working the angles within the Chinese system.

If a magazine like hers broke the rules, the Department gave it a warning known as a yellow card, as in soccer. Three yellow cards in one year, and she could be shut down. The Department wasn't reading stories before publication; on the contrary, it was up to editors themselves to guess how far they could go and compute the risk of wandering past an ill-defined limit. That was a specific kind of pressure, which China scholar Perry Link once compared to living beneath an “anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier.” “Normally, the great snake doesn't move,” he wrote. “It doesn't have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its silent constant message is ‘You yourself decide,' after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadows makes his or her large and small adjustments—all quite ‘naturally.'”

Over the years, Hu learned to live beneath the anaconda by treating China's government as a living, breathing organism; she constantly measured its moods and sensitivities. Wang Feng, one of her deputies, told me, “You can feel her making adjustments. For example, at Monday's editorial conference she might aim at something, and the editors and reporters go ahead and do it. And by Wednesday's editorial conference she will say, ‘You know what? I've got more information on this and we should not say that. Maybe we should aim lower.'”

In January 2007, Hu Shuli got her first lesson in going too far. The cover story “Whose Luneng?” described a group of investors who paid a pittance for 92 percent of a ten-billion-dollar conglomerate, with assets ranging from power plants to a sports club. A tangle of overlapping boards and shareholders hid the identity of the new owners, and nearly half of the purchasing capital came from an untraceable source. When
Caijing
attempted to publish a brief follow-up, authorities banned the magazine from newsstands, and Hu's staff was left to tear up printed copies by hand. “Everybody felt humiliated,” a former editor said. Hu called it her “largest disaster.” (The story had come too close to implicating the children of senior Party leaders—a taboo that trumped even reformists' desire for a more open press.)