Age of Ambition (3 page)

When he announced that he was transferring to a military academy, he told reporters, “If my decision to join the military can arouse nationalism in every youth … then its impact will be immeasurable.” He had practical reasons as well: at the military academy he could study for free and receive a stipend.

At a friend's house one day during college, Lin met a young woman named Chen Yunying, an activist who was studying literature at National Chengchi University. After they graduated, they married and had a son. Lin spent two years studying for an MBA and then he was assigned to lead a company on the island of Quemoy, known during the Cold War as the “lighthouse of the free world,” because it was the final spit of land before the Communist shoreline. The two sides had once shelled each other so ferociously that Taiwan's military honeycombed the island with bunkers, underground restaurants, and a hospital carved so deep into the mountain that it was designed to survive a nuclear strike.

By the time Lin arrived in 1978, the war was more psychological than physical. The armies still shelled each other, but only on schedule: the mainland fired on odd-numbered days; Taiwan returned fire the rest of the week. Mostly they dueled with propaganda. They blasted each other with enormous, high-powered speakers, and they dropped leaflets from hot-air balloons. They floated softball-sized glass containers to the opposing shores packed with bundles of goods intended to lure defectors with glimpses of prosperity. Taiwan sent pinups and miniature newspapers describing the outside world, clean underwear, pop music cassettes, instructions on how to build a simple radio, and promises of gold coins and glory for anyone willing to defect. The mainland replied with liquor, tea, sweet melons, and pamphlets with photos of smiling Taiwanese diplomats and scientists who had defected to the mainland—or, as the Party put it, “traded darkness for light.”

*   *   *

In December 1978, Jimmy Carter announced that the United States was officially recognizing the Communist government in Beijing, and severing formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The news buried any remaining hope that the island might regain control of the mainland. In Taiwan, as a correspondent put it, people were “as nervous as a cat trying to cross a busy road with the traffic getting worse by the moment.” On New Year's Day 1979, the Beijing government announced that it was ending its military bombardment of Quemoy, and broadcast an appeal to the people of Taiwan that “the bright future … belongs to us and to you. The reunification of the motherland is the sacred mission that history has handed to our generation.” It boasted that “construction is going ahead vigorously on the motherland.”

On February 16, Lin was reassigned even closer to the mainland; he was put in charge of a tiny command post on a lonesome, windswept outcropping called Mount Ma, known among the soldiers as “the front line of the universe.” It was a prestigious post, but, according to military investigators, Lin resented the assignment because he was marooned on the outer islands when he could be teaching at the military academy, or taking the exam for senior military office. His post was a favorite stop for political grandees who wanted to be photographed on the front line with the young patriots in uniform. In April he took a leave to see family and friends; one night, he told an old college classmate, Zhang Jiasheng, that he believed Taiwan could prosper only if the mainland thrived.

When he returned to Mount Ma, Lin was so close to the mainland that he could see the faces of People's Liberation Army soldiers through his binoculars. His thinking had already begun to take a sharp turn. Although Taiwan and the Communists were enemies, ordinary people considered them two halves of the same clan, with a shared history and destiny. As in the American Civil War, some families were physically divided. In one case, a man sent by his mother to go shopping on the mainland just before the Communists cut off boat traffic did not get home for forty years.

In the first years after the separation, some soldiers had tried to swim to the mainland, but fierce currents swirled around the islands, and the defectors washed back up, exhausted, and were arrested as traitors. To deter others, the army destroyed most of the island's fishing boats, and the few that remained were required to lock up their oars at night. Over the years, anything that might be turned into a flotation device—a basketball, a bicycle tire—had to be registered, like a weapon, and the army conducted spot checks around the island, knocking on doors and demanding to see that all balls and inner tubes were accounted for.

Earlier in the spring of 1979, a soldier had made the rare attempt to defect, but he, too, was caught. Lin was undeterred. He believed his plan was better, but he wanted to minimize the effects on his commanding officers. He was scheduled to move from one command to another in May; he believed that if he defected at the time of the transition, senior officers could plausibly blame each other for missing the clues and avoid much blame. What's more, spring on the island was the season of fog, when the humid air met the cold water of the sea and draped the shoreline in a curtain of gray, a shroud that just might be heavy enough to conceal a figure slipping into the waves.

With each spring day, the currents were growing, and by summer they would be strong enough to push a man back to shore, no matter how hard he fought against the waves. If Lin was going to swim to mainland China, he had to go immediately.

*   *   *

On the morning of May 16 he was at his command post. He asked the company secretary Liao Zhenzhu for the latest tide chart. High tide would come at four o'clock in the afternoon and then begin to withdraw.

That night, after sunset, Lin attended a meeting at battalion headquarters and returned to Mount Ma for dinner. At 8:30 a company secretary named Tung Chin-yao visited his table to say he was going over to the battalion headquarters to pick up a new soldier. Tung returned an hour later, but Lin was no longer in the dining hall.

He wasn't in the barracks, either. At 10:50 p.m., two captains from the division recorded his absence in the log and organized a search party. By midnight, commanders had launched a full-scale search of the island—a Thunderbolt Operation, as they called it—involving a hundred thousand people, including soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children. They tore open farmers' storehouses and probed the ponds with bamboo poles. Then searchers found the first clue: at the end of the mine-laden trail, from Mount Ma to the shore, were his sneakers, stenciled with the characters for “Company Commander.” They searched his room and discovered that items were missing: a canteen, a compass, a first-aid kit, the company flag, and a life jacket.

By then, Lin was far ahead of them. From the command post, he had to cross just three hundred yards to reach the gray-brown boulders on the shore. From there, he slid into the waves. He had calculated that he needed to enter the water before low tide at 10:00 p.m., so that the force of the sea would draw him away from the land. He had taken one other crucial step: According to military investigators, two days before he swam, Lin inspected the sentry posts along the coast, and he addressed the young recruits assigned to watch the horizon. He told them an odd joke: if, at night, you see swimmers who show no signs of attacking, don't bother to shoot; they're probably just “water spirits,” and if you shoot, you'll tempt them into retribution. Superstitions about omens and spirits thrived in Taiwan, and an offhand comment from a commander might have been just enough to make a nervous teenager think twice before raising the alarm over a mysterious flutter on the night sea.

In the water, Lin swam hard and fast. The current tugged at him, but soon he was clear of the shallows and alone on the black depths, enveloped in water and sky. He needed only to make it to the middle of the channel, and then the rising tide would carry him the rest of the way.

He swam freestyle until he was exhausted, and then floated on his back to regain energy. After three hours, with his legs throbbing and numb with cold, he was nearing land. It was the easternmost edge of Chinese soil—Horn Islet. It was just sixty acres of sand and palmetto scrub, home to nothing but Chinese guard posts and artillery guns. The shore, he knew, was laced with land mines. He reached into his clothing, where, sealed in a plastic bag, he had stowed a flashlight. His frozen fingers fumbled with the button. He flicked it on and signaled to Chinese troops, who began to mass on the shore.

Lin reached the shallows. He had much to look forward to: the Communist pamphlets had promised a hero's welcome and rewards of gold and cash. But in the darkness, a lone Chinese soldier waded into the water, edged toward Lin Zhengyi, and placed him under arrest.

 

TWO

THE CALL

 

Every journey into China begins with a story of gravitational pull. The American writer John Hersey, who was born to missionaries in Tianjin, named it “the Call.”

In my first year of college, I wandered into an introductory class on modern Chinese politics: revolution and civil war; the tragic, protean force of Chairman Mao; the fall and rise of Deng Xiaoping, who led China out of seclusion and into the world. Only five years had passed since the 1989 democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, when students, barely older than I was, built a tent city in the very citadel of Party power, a mini-state-within-a-state, alive with impulsive idealism. On television, they looked torn between East and West; they had shag haircuts and boom boxes and quotes from Patrick Henry, but they sang the Internationale and knelt to deliver their demands to men who were still buttoned up in Mao suits. A student protester told a reporter, “I don't know exactly what we want, but we want more of it.” Their movement ended in bloodshed on the night of June 3–4, when official loudspeakers blared, “This is not the West; it is China,” and the Politburo turned the People's Liberation Army on their people for the first time since the revolution. The Party was proud of suppressing the challenge but aware of the damage to its image, and in the years that followed, the Party scrubbed those events so systematically from its history that only the ghostliest outline has remained.

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me. Cameras had failed to convey how much closer it was, in spirit and geography, to the windswept plains of Mongolia than to the neon lights of Hong Kong. Beijing smelled of coal and garlic and work-stained wool and cheap tobacco. In a claptrap taxi, with the windows sealed and the heat cranked up, the smell stuck to the roof of your mouth. Beijing was cradled by mountains, high on the North China plain, and in the winter the wind that rose in the land of Genghis Khan whistled down and lashed your face.

Beijing was a clanging, unglamorous place. One of the nicest buildings in town was the Jianguo Hotel, which the architect proudly described as a perfect replica of a Holiday Inn in Palo Alto, California. China's national economy was smaller than that of Italy. The countryside felt near: most nights, I ate in a Muslim neighborhood known as Xinjiang Village, which belonged to the Uighurs, an ethnic group from far western China. Their tiny gray-brick restaurants had jittery sheep tied out front, and the animals vanished in the kitchens, one by one, at dinner-time. After the crowds thinned out each day, the waiters and cooks climbed on the tables and went to sleep.

*   *   *

The Internet had reached China two years earlier, but there were just five telephone lines for every hundred people. I had brought a modem from the United States, and plugged it into my dorm room wall; the machine let out a sharp
pop!
and never stirred again.

When I visited Tiananmen Square for the first time, I stood in the center and saw, on three sides, Mao's mausoleum, the Great Hall of the People, and the Gate of Heavenly Peace. There was no trace of the demonstrations, of course, and nothing in the square had changed since Mao's remains were embalmed in a glass case in 1977. As a foreigner, I found it tempting to look at the Stalinist monuments built by the Party and conclude that the Party was doomed. That summer,
The New York Times
ran a piece headlined
THE LONG MARCH TO IRRELEVANCE
, in which it observed that “the once-omnipresent party has almost no presence at all.”

One side of the square was dedicated to the future: a giant digital clock, fifty feet tall and thirty feet long, counted down the seconds until, as it read across the top, “The Chinese Government Regains Sovereignty over Hong Kong.” In less than a year, Great Britain was scheduled to return the islands of Hong Kong, which it had controlled ever since China's defeat in the First Opium War in 1842. The Chinese bitterly resented the history of invasion, of being, as they put it, “cut up like a melon” by foreign powers, so the return of Hong Kong was to be a symbolic restoration of Chinese dignity. Underneath the clock, Chinese tourists were taking photos, and the local paper carried stories about couples who stood at the base of it to take their wedding photos.

The return of Hong Kong fed a burst of patriotism. After nearly two decades of reform and Westernization, Chinese writers were pushing back against Hollywood, McDonald's, and American values. A best seller that summer was entitled
China Can Say No.
Written by a group of young intellectuals, it decried China's “infatuation with America,” which, they argued, had suppressed the national imagination with a diet of visas, foreign aid, and advertising. If China didn't resist this “cultural strangulation,” it would become “a slave,” extending the history of humiliating foreign incursions. The Chinese government, wary of volatile, fast-spreading ideas even when they were supportive, eventually pulled the book off the shelves, but not before a raft of knockoffs sought to exploit the same mood:
Why China Can Say No
,
China Still Can Say No
, and
China Should Always Say No
. I was there that fall when China celebrated its National Day on October 1. An editorial in the
People's Daily
, the flagship of the state-run media, reminded people, “Patriotism requires us to love the socialist system.”