Age of Ambition (20 page)

In her office one afternoon, I asked Hu why she thought other publications had been punished while
Caijing
had not. “We never say a word in a very emotional or casual way, like ‘You lied,'” she said. “We try to analyze the system and say
why
a good idea or a good wish cannot become reality.” When I posed the same question to Cheng Yizhong, a former editor in chief of the
Southern Metropolis Daily
, one of China's liveliest papers, who spent five months in jail for angering authorities, he saw it differently. He drew a distinction between his campaign for limiting police powers and Hu's focus on raising government performance. “
Caijing
's topics haven't affected the fundamental ruling system, so it is relatively safe,” he said, adding, “I am not criticizing Hu Shuli, but in some ways
Caijing
is just serving a more powerful or relatively better interest group.”

For all her skepticism and intensity, she used the language of loyal opposition. “Some argue that pushing forward with political reform will be destabilizing,” she wrote in a 2007 column. “Yet, in fact, maintaining the status quo without any reform creates a hotbed for social turbulence.” In other words, political reform was the way to consolidate power, not lose it.

Her approach appealed to reformers in the government who genuinely wanted to solve problems but didn't want to give up power to do so. Some Chinese journalists said that Hu's greatest skill was playing interest groups against one another, whether by amplifying the central government's effort to round up corrupt mayors or by letting one wing of the government thwart a rival wing's agenda. Allow the most powerful group to endure, the theory went, and you could do real, even profitable, journalism. Hu saw censorship as a matter of negotiation; when propaganda officials raged, she tried not to argue. She promised to improve, to pay more attention, to avoid that mistake in the future. “In Chinese, we say that you can bore a hole in a stone by the steady dripping of water,” her friend Qian Gang told me. Other journalists preferred a noisier metaphor: they called it “dancing in shackles.”

*   *   *

When I asked Hu about the 2008 earthquake, we were in her office, and it was getting late. The afternoon shadows slanted into her windows, and the subject of the disaster, and its epic loss of life, made her pause. She had received the news by text message while hosting a ceremony for scholarship recipients at a hotel in the mountains west of Beijing. She leaned over to her friend Qian Gang, who had covered previous quakes, and asked him for a rough prediction of the damage. He looked at his watch and realized that schools were in session. The casualties among students would be enormous.

Reporting on a disaster of that scale could be politically hazardous. When the country had suffered a previous enormous quake, in 1976, the government silenced news of the death toll for three years. Now, in 2008, Hu Shuli set off for downtown Beijing, working the phone and e-mailing from the car, shouting to her staff to rent a satellite phone and get a crew to Sichuan. Within the hour, the first
Caijing
journalist was on a flight to the quake zone, followed by nine more. They arrived to discover that many government offices had survived, but hundreds of school buildings had collapsed into piles of concrete and rebar. The buildings had gone up during a surge of funding in the nineties, when a demographic bulge in school-age children required new space. But so much money had been siphoned off that designs that called for steel had, in some cases, been built with bamboo instead.

Thousands of children were trapped or dead in the rubble; nobody could even say for sure how many. The Department swiftly banned coverage of the construction problems at the schools. Several Chinese newspapers reported on them anyway, and were punished. But Hu read the mood differently; she calculated that her magazine's status as a business publication could give it the excuse of simply policing the use of public funds. Its success and bravado had also become self-reinforcing: the magazine had gone so far already that conservative branches of the government could no longer be sure which other officials supported it.

Besides, she was a businesswoman and she had to think about competition; the Internet was expanding, and she had to keep up. She thought that a story could be published if it carried the right tone and facts. “If it's not absolutely forbidden,” she said, “we do it.” On June 9,
Caijing
published a twelve-page investigative report on the earthquake, including the school collapses. It was cool and definitive. According to the report, heedless economic growth, squandered public funds, and rampant neglect of construction standards had led to disaster. In a way that had rarely been articulated before, the report peeled away a layer of mythology that usually clung to China's pursuit of fortune: the boom years were bringing poor stretches of the countryside into a new era, but the costs of that rise were becoming clear. The story detailed how local cadres had cut corners, but it stopped short of assigning responsibility by name. She was called in for criticism but was not punished.

From her perch, straddling the line between the inside and the outside, she had made a judgment call; if she dwelled on the names of specific corrupt officials, it might score a point for accountability, but the scoop would leave her vulnerable to retribution. She told me, “We try not to give any excuses to the cadres who don't want to get criticized.” Ultimately, she said, the important question was not “which person didn't use good-quality bricks fifteen years ago” but something deeper. “We need further reform,” she said. “We need checks and balances. We need transparency. We say it this way. No simple words. No slogans.” It was a game of a certain, subtle kind, and she had won that round. She would not win others yet to come.

 

NINE

LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE

 

That spring, official China was counting down to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing with the fervor of a state religion. The Party assembled another giant clock beside Tiananmen Square, to tick off the seconds until the games began, and the capital was decked in a slogan that called for unity above all: “One World, One Dream.”

I stepped out my front door one morning and found two city workers slathering cement on the redbrick outer wall of my bedroom. Large swaths of the city were being demolished or refurbished to create a clean, modern backdrop for the games. The workers had laid down a smooth bed of cement and were using a ruler and plumb line to carve crisp lines and corners. It took me a moment to realize that they were drawing the suggestion of fake new bricks on top of real old bricks. Facing my front door, on the alley wall, a faded bit of Cultural Revolution–era graffiti declared, in five blocky characters,
LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN MAO
! With two swipes of the trowel, the Great Helmsman vanished behind the cement.

The urge for perfection extended to the medal race. Sports officials had vowed to pick up more gold than ever before, under a long-term plan they called “The General Outline for Winning Honor at the Olympics, 2001–2010.” The plan included the 119 Project, a campaign to win more gold medals in the summer's most competitive events—a list that by China's calculation totaled 119 medals. No variable was left to chance: When organizers searched for a young girl to sing a solo in the opening ceremony, they could not find the optimum combination of voice and aesthetics, so they created a composite, by training one child to lip-sync to the voice of another. A Chinese pork supplier said it was producing specially pampered pigs, to ensure that hormone-fed meat would not cause Chinese athletes to fail their doping tests—but it caused Chinese citizens to begin wondering about their own pork, and the Beijing Olympic Committee had to issue a “Clarification on Olympic Pig-Related Reports,” denouncing the pork story as an “exaggerated falsehood.”

The more single-minded the Olympic organizers became, the more they encountered things beyond their control. The Olympic torch relay, which China called the Journey of Harmony, would traverse six continents, reach the summit of Mount Everest, and encompass 21,888 runners, more than any previous relay. The Chinese press called the torch the Sacred Flame, and said that once it was lit in Olympia, Greece, it would not be extinguished for five months, until it reached Beijing. At night or on airplanes, when the torch could not be carried, the flame would be kept alight in a set of lanterns.

On March 10, shortly before the Journey of Harmony was to begin, several hundred monks in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, conducted a march to demand the release of Tibetans detained for celebrating the U.S. government's awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama. Dozens of monks were arrested, and on March 14 a demonstration to protest their detention turned into the worst riots in Tibet since the 1980s; eleven Han civilians and a Tibetan were burned to death after hiding in buildings set on fire by rioters, and a policeman and six civilians died from beatings or other causes, according to the government. The Dalai Lama called for calm, but the Chinese government said the riot had been “premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique.” Security forces moved in with armored vehicles to control the city, and the authorities began a roundup of suspects, leading to hundreds of arrests. Tibetan exile groups alleged that eighty Tibetans were killed in the crackdown in Lhasa and elsewhere, a claim that China denied.

As the torch passed through London, Paris, and San Francisco, protests against the crackdown in Tibet grew so clamorous that organizers had to extinguish the flame or reroute the path to avoid angry crowds. Chinese citizens, especially students abroad, responded to the criticism with rare fury. When the torch reached South Korea, Chinese and rival protesters fought in the streets. Inside China, thousands demonstrated in front of outlets of Carrefour, a French supermarket chain, in retaliation for what they considered France's sympathy for pro-Tibetan activists. Charles Zhang, who holds a PhD from MIT and is the CEO of Sohu, a leading Chinese Web portal, called for a boycott of French products “to make the thoroughly biased French media and public feel losses and pain.”

State-run media revived language from another age. When U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi denounced China's management of Tibet, Xinhua called her “disgusting.” The magazine
Outlook Weekly
warned that “domestic and foreign hostile forces have made the Beijing Olympics a focus for infiltration and sabotage.” The Communist Party secretary in Tibet called the Dalai Lama “a wolf wrapped in a monk's robe; a monster with a human face, but the heart of a beast.” In the anonymity of the Web, decorum deteriorated. “People who fart through the mouth will get shit stuffed down their throats by me!” one commentator wrote, in a forum hosted by a state newspaper. “Someone give me a gun! Show no mercy to the enemy!” wrote another. The comments were an embarrassment to many Chinese, but they were difficult to ignore among foreign journalists who had begun receiving threats. An anonymous letter to my fax machine in Beijing warned, “Clarify the facts on China … or you and your loved ones will wish you were dead.”

*   *   *

As the protests grew, I began trolling the Chinese Web for the most inventive expressions of patriotism. On the morning of April 15, a short video entitled
2008 China Stand Up!
appeared on Sina, the Chinese Web portal. The video's origin was a mystery: it had no host, no narrator, and no signature except the initials CTGZ.

It was a homespun documentary, and it opened with a Technicolor portrait of Chairman Mao, sunbeams radiating from his head. Out of silence came an orchestral piece, thundering with drums, as a black screen flashed, in Chinese and English, one of Mao's mantras: “Imperialism will never abandon its intention to destroy us.” Then a cut to present-day photographs and news footage, and a sprint through conspiracies and betrayals—the “farces, schemes, and disasters” confronting China today: the sinking Chinese stock market (the work of foreign speculators who “wildly manipulated” Chinese stock prices and lured rookie investors to lose their fortunes); the dawn of a global “currency war,” in which the West intended to “make Chinese people foot the bill” for America's financial woes.

A cut, then, to another front: rioters looting stores and brawling in Lhasa. Words flashed across the scenes: “So-called peaceful protest!” A montage of foreign press clippings critical of China—all of them “ignoring the truth” and “speaking with one distorted voice.” The screen filled with the logos of CNN, the BBC, and other news organizations, which gave way to a portrait of Joseph Goebbels. The orchestra and the rhetoric climbed toward a final sequence: “Obviously, there is a scheme behind the scenes to encircle China. A new Cold War!” A cut to pictures of Paris and protesters trying to wrest the Olympic torch from its official carrier, forcing guards to fend them off. The film ended with the image of a Chinese flag, aglow in the sunlight, and a solemn promise: “We will stand up and hold together always as one family in harmony!”

The video by CTGZ, which was just over six minutes long, captured the mood of nationalism in the air, and in its first week and a half online, it drew more than a million hits and tens of thousands of favorable comments. It rose to the site's fourth-most-popular rating. (A television blooper clip of a yawning news anchor was number one.) The film was attracting, on average, two clicks per second, and it became a manifesto for a self-styled vanguard in defense of China's honor, a patriotic swath of society that the Chinese call the
fen qing
, “the angry youth.”

I was struck that nineteen years after the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, China's young elite had risen again, not in pursuit of liberal democracy but in defense of China's name. Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT's Media Laboratory and one of the early ideologists of the Internet, had predicted that the global reach of the Web would transform the way we think about ourselves as countries. The state, he predicted, will evaporate “like a mothball, which goes from solid to gas directly,” and “there will be no more room for nationalism than there is for smallpox.” In China, things had gone differently. I was curious about CTGZ. The screen name was connected to an e-mail address. It belonged to a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student in Shanghai named Tang Jie, and this was his first video. He invited me down for a visit.