Age of Ambition (31 page)

Gao was driven to an unknown location, and the hood was removed. He was stripped naked. He was beaten and electrocuted with batons. “Then two people stretched out my arms and pinned me to the ground,” he wrote in an account smuggled abroad. “They used toothpicks to pierce my genitals.” The torture continued for fourteen days. He was kept in detention for another five weeks. Finally, he was released with the warning never to describe how he was treated or next time “it will happen in front of your wife and children.” When a reporter visited him a couple of years later, Gao had renounced his life as an activist. He said, simply, “I don't have the capacity to persevere.”

Ai Weiwei looked, again, at the phrase, “There are no dissidents in China.” He typed out a string of messages, to his tens of thousands of followers, that tried to make sense of what the government meant by that:

1. All dissidents are criminals.

2. Only criminals have dissenting views.

3. The distinction between criminals and non-criminals is whether they dissent.

4. If you think China has dissidents, you are a criminal.

5. The reason China has no dissidents is because they are criminals.

6. Now, anyone want to dissent from this view?

The Party was so experienced in containing dissidents, of the classic kind, that it was easy to overlook just how rapidly its information problems were proliferating. Because the Internet had long ago exceeded what the censors in the Department could handle, the work of policing the Web fell to several agencies, including the Internet Affairs Bureau. The bureau was honest about the scale of the challenge. The deputy director, Liu Zhengrong, conceded dolefully, “Our biggest challenge is that the Internet is still growing.”

In the old media system, censors relied on the anaconda in the chandelier—the knowledge that Hu Shuli and fellow editors would censor themselves in order to protect their right to keep printing—but on the Web, you simply didn't know who was going to write something dangerous until it was written. The censors could strike down comments as fast as possible, but that was still too slow to prevent their being forwarded and saved and digested. On a scale unprecedented in Chinese history, words were being expressed first and censored second.

And this created yet another problem: censorship, once an abstract and invisible process confined to secret directives and newsroom discussions, was now plainly visible. Whenever the authorities took down one of Han Han's blog posts, it was not simply the digital equivalent of intercepting one of Liu Xiaobo's manuscripts at the post office. It was an act witnessed by millions of casual Internet users who, otherwise, were happy to live their lives without ever dwelling on the patronizing mechanics of censorship. It was a signal, as Han Han explained to me, that “there is something that you really don't want me to know. So now I
really
want to know it.”

A generation of his fans was growing up to believe that “whatever you're trying to cover up becomes the truth,” he said. In a speech, he said, “I can't write about the police, I can't write about the leaders, I can't write about policies, I can't write about the system, I can't write about the judiciary, I can't write about many pieces of history, I can't write about Tibet, I can't write about Xinjiang, I can't write about mass assemblies, I can't write about demonstrations, I can't write about pornography, I can't write about censorship, I can't write about art.”

The best the Party could hope for was to prevent an Internet conversation before it began—by automatically filtering sensitive words. Because political issues popped up overnight, the censors had to maintain a constantly updated glossary of taboo terms, much like the list of directives to the media I received on my phone. The Internet Affairs Bureau sent out instructions, sometimes several times a day, to websites across the country. A word might be permissible one day and banned the next. Typing it into Baidu, the Chinese version of Google, yielded a message: “Search results are not displayed because they may not suit the corresponding laws, regulations and policies.”

But people adapted just as fast. To get around the filters, they substituted Chinese characters that sounded similar, creating a kind of code, a shadow language, such that when censors blocked Charter 08—
ling ba xianzhang
—people called it “
linba xianzhang.
” (Nobody cared that this meant “county magistrate lymph nodes.”)

The government was in a race against the imagination, and it was forever trying to catch up. There was no more difficult time of year than June, when the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown approached, and people dreamt up oblique ways to discuss it. Beyond the terms always on the blacklist—
democracy protests
,
1989
,
June 4
—the censors clamored to add code words as fast as people invented them. I read the latest list of banned words, and it looked like a commemoration of its own:

Fire

Crush

Redress

Never forget

*   *   *

In the event that these censorship efforts failed, the Party was testing a weapon of last resort: the
OFF
switch. On July 5, 2009, members of China's Muslim Uighur minority in the far western city of Urumqi protested police handling of a brawl between Hans and Uighurs. The protests turned violent, and nearly two hundred people died, most of them Han, who had been targeted for their ethnicity. Revenge attacks on Uighur neighborhoods followed, and in an effort to prevent people from communicating and organizing, the government abruptly disabled text messages, cut long-distance phone lines, and shut off Internet access almost entirely. The digital blackout lasted ten months, and the economic effects were dramatic: exports from Xinjiang, the Uighur autonomous region, plummeted more than 44 percent. But the Party was willing to accept immense economic damage to smother what it considered a political threat. In the event of a broader crisis someday, China probably has too many channels in and out to impose so complete a blackout on a national scale, but even a limited version would have a profound effect.

The Xinjiang uprising was a turning point in many other ways as well. Over the previous year, Hu Shuli and
Caijing
magazine had proved that investigative success could be popular. The more information Chinese people received, the more they seemed to crave. Hu Shuli tripled the size of her newsroom staff, to more than two hundred reporters. The magazine hired a former investment banker, Daphne Wu, to be the business manager, and she tripled ad sales in two years, to 170 million yuan. She and Hu had plans far beyond a print magazine: they envisioned “a whole media information and commentary platform,” Wu told me in her office overlooking Beijing. She sounded less like a Chinese news worker than a Silicon Valley executive. “No matter what kind of device you're using, we want to deliver quality stuff,” she said.

But as the magazine became more profitable, and adventurous, Hu Shuli's relations with her patron Wang Boming were fraying. The more she traveled, and studied publications abroad, the larger her aspirations became. She wanted her own media enterprise, one that could function at international standards. Wang, by contrast, had other priorities; he had gone into publishing to make some money and to enjoy the minor glamour of life as a media mogul—not to become a political martyr. He was uneasy. When I had talked to him about Hu, a weary look crossed his face that suggested he had gotten more than he bargained for. “We didn't know that this level of risk would come along with it,” he said.

In the spring of 2009, the government warned
Caijing
not to investigate financial corruption within the state television system, or a list of other acutely sensitive topics. “But they do it anyway!” Wang said. He dragged hard on a cigarette. Muckraking, he added, was popular with readers but not with advertisers. “On one page is their advertisement, and on the next page is an article saying their company is a fake,” he said. “You can't imagine the phone calls we get.
Caijing
never does a positive report. All the corporations talk to Shuli hoping it will be a good article, and it's always negative!”

By the summer, the relationship between the editor and publisher was deteriorating sharply. When the riots broke out in Xinjiang, and the Internet was shut down, propaganda officials allowed only officially approved journalists to get online. Hu Shuli had dispatched three reporters to the scene, though authorities had given her permission to send only two. The third reporter borrowed a friend's press pass to sneak into the press center that had Internet access. He was caught, and officials attempted to search his laptop. He resisted, and scuffled with a guard. Authorities put him on a plane back to Beijing.

The news of that run-in reached the highest ranks of the government. Propaganda authorities had already scolded
Caijing
that year, and now Hu Shuli's patrons drew up a list of measures to put her back under control: from now on, the magazine would submit every cover story for approval; it would accept instructions “without question”; and most important, it would abandon coverage of politics and “return to positive reporting on finance and economics.”

Hu Shuli was outraged. “What is the definition of ‘political news'?” she demanded of Wang Boming. “And ‘positive news'? Who would be the judge of that?” For the next few weeks, she tried to accommodate the new rules. But her bosses rejected one cover story after another. After the third rejection, she feared that her best young editors were ready to quit. When the bosses rejected a fourth story, she published it anyway.

*   *   *

As word spread in Beijing that Hu Shuli was clashing with her backers, she glimpsed a way out. Investors approached her, and she realized that their backing might allow her to wrest away greater control of the magazine. Her tensions with Wang Boming were about more than just editorial freedom. Hers was the most profitable magazine he owned, and she wanted more of the profits to go into expanding the operation, or she feared she would be left behind in the new era of the Web.

She approached Wang with an audacious plan for a management buyout that would divvy up control of the company: 40 percent for investors; 30 percent for her and her editors; and 30 percent for Wang's company. Most important, she wanted ultimate control over editorial decisions. If anyone was going to negotiate with the Department, she wanted to be that person. “I think, as a professional editor, I should be the one to make the last decision,” she said.

But in Wang Boming's eyes, the proposal was a betrayal. He had helped her carve out more freedom to practice journalism than anyone else in China—and instead of being grateful, she was asking for more, just as Chinese citizens were asking for more from a ruling class that believed it had already delivered enough. She was being naïve, Wang thought. Or, worse, grandstanding—draping herself in the flag of free speech to disguise her desire to gain control of the company. He rejected the deal.

By September the arrangement was falling apart: the business manager, Daphne Wu, and sixty members of her staff resigned, while, in the newsroom, editors announced that they, too, were leaving, and together they would start over. “Come with us,” Hu's deputy, Wang Shuo, told a group of young editors and reporters. The truth was that it wasn't clear what or how they would start again, but each of them had a choice to make. The departing editors, in the hope of encouraging a full-scale walkout, gave their colleagues three days to decide whether to join them.

To the reporters facing the decision, it was a dilemma: Who would provide political protection to Hu Shuli now? Would investors ever gamble on her again? Besides, her reporters had a range of complaints about her management: for all her talk of transparency and checks and balances, she had a dictatorial streak; some of her investigative reporters thought she pulled punches for high-powered friends; and the high salaries she provided in the early days of
Caijing
had failed to keep up with China's surging economy. Her reporters could have tripled their salaries by joining the industries they covered.

And yet, for all this uncertainty, Hu's very existence had a powerful effect on the rising younger journalists around her. “We like to say that every hundred years you have a person like Shuli,” Cao Haili, the reporter who worked on the SARS virus, told me. “She is really, really unique. In the States you might have tons of people like that, but in China it's really rare.”

On November 9, Hu Shuli left the magazine, and 140 members of the newsroom walked out with her. For Hu, leaving was a choice, even if it was not one she had sought. “You can say we were driven out. You can say we left. It's very hard to say,” she told me. She strained to put a positive spin on it. “Maybe we can do something bigger and more interesting,” she said. But among Chinese intellectuals, few saw reason for optimism. “She's got blood on her sword and gunpowder on her clothes,” Hecaitou, a blogger, wrote. “It will be hard to find another Hu Shuli.”

*   *   *

On October 8, 2010, ten months after Liu Xiaobo was convicted, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights.” He was the first Chinese citizen to receive the award, not counting the Dalai Lama, who had lived for decades in exile. The award to Liu Xiaobo drove Chinese leaders into a rage; the government denounced Liu's award as a “desecration” of Alfred Nobel's legacy. For years, China had coveted a Nobel Prize as a validation of the nation's progress and a measure of the world's acceptance. The obsession with the prize was so intense that scholars had named it the “Nobel complex,” and each fall they debated China's odds of winning it, like sports fans in a pennant race. There was once a television debate called “How Far Are We from a Nobel Prize?”