Age of Ambition (32 page)

When the award was announced, most Chinese people had never heard of Liu, so the state media made the first impression; it splashed an article across the country reporting that he earned his living “bad-mouthing his own country.” The profile was a classic of the form: it described him as a collector of fine wines and porcelain, and it portrayed him telling fellow prisoners, “I'm not like you. I don't lack for money. Foreigners pay me every year, even when I'm in prison.” Liu “spared no effort in working for Western anti-China forces” and, in doing so, “crossed the line of freedom of speech into crime.”

For activists, the news of the award was staggering. “Many broke down in tears, even uncontrollable sobbing,” one said later. In Beijing, bloggers, lawyers, and scholars gathered in the back of a restaurant to celebrate, but police arrived and detained twenty of them. When the announcement was made, Han Han, on his blog, toyed with censors and readers; he posted nothing but a pair of quotation marks enclosing an empty space. The post drew one and a half million hits and more than twenty-eight thousand comments.

Two days after Liu won the prize, his wife, Liu Xia, visited him at Jinzhou Prison in the province of Liaoning. “This is for the lost souls of June Fourth,” he told her. Returning to Beijing, she was placed under house arrest. The government barred her, and anyone else, from going to Oslo to pick up the award; the only previous time this had happened was in 1935, when Hitler prevented relatives from going on behalf of Carl von Ossietzky, the German writer and pacifist, who was in a guarded hospital bed after having been in a concentration camp. Liu Xia's telephone and Internet connections were severed, and she was barred from contact with anyone but her mother—the beginning of a campaign of isolation that would last for years.

As the ceremony approached in December, China called on other countries to boycott it. The state press called it “a choosing of sides,” and Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai, a savvy diplomat with a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins, asked of fellow nations, “Do they want to be part of the political game to challenge China's judicial system, or do they want to develop a true friendly relationship with the Chinese government and people?” In the event, forty-five countries showed up, and nineteen stayed away, including Iraq, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam. (The front page of the
China Daily
declared
MOST NATIONS OPPOSE PEACE PRIZE TO LIU
.) Outside Liu's apartment in Beijing, crews hastily erected a blue metal construction fence to prevent photographers from shooting images of Liu Xia under house arrest. When the BBC broadcast the ceremony, television screens in China went black.

Over the years, I'd seen this tactic many times. Decades ago, the black screen had been a fair reflection of China's blinkered view of the world, its backwardness and seclusion. But now the instinct to shield the public from unflattering facts was absurdly at odds with the openness and sophistication in other parts of Chinese life, and it seemed to cheapen what ordinary Chinese people had worked so hard to achieve. China was not Hitler's Germany, but Chinese leaders were willing to let themselves be lumped beside the Nazis in the history of the Nobel Prize. Either the strongest forces in the Chinese government were not wise enough to realize the cost, or the wisest forces were not strong enough to persuade the others.

Ordinary Chinese people never heard much about the ceremony. They never heard the presenter quote Liu's words that political reform should be “gradual, peaceful, orderly and controlled.” They did not see the prize medal and the certificate placed on an empty blue chair onstage. Inside China, the moment was recorded only as a ghost, of sorts. On the Internet blacklist that winter, the censors inscribed a new taboo search: “the empty chair.”

 

FOURTEEN

THE GERM IN THE HENHOUSE

 

The people in sunglasses did not immediately attract attention. When the first portraits appeared on Chinese social media sites in the fall of 2011, they encompassed a few dozen men and women. Soon there were more people in sunglasses, including kids, foreigners, and cartoon avatars. Bloggers noticed, and word spread. By the time the number passed five hundred, the censors were striking them down, but they continued to circulate anyway, and to those who knew what they were seeing, the pictures were a milestone: arguably China's first viral political campaign. It was a tribute to a man whom virtually none of the participants had ever met: the blind peasant lawyer Chen Guangcheng.

Six years after I'd tried to see Chen at his home in Dongshigu village, his local government had not wavered in its determination to contain the spread of his ideas, even if it meant sequestering him like the carrier of a fever. Around the time of my visit, in the fall of 2005, he was summoned to a meeting with Liu Jie, the local deputy mayor. Liu demanded to know why Chen was speaking to foreign reporters about abuses of the one-child system. “Why could you not address the matter through the normal official channels instead of talking to hostile forces in overseas countries?”

By that point, however, it was becoming clear that, in going public, Chen had crossed a line that the state could no longer tolerate. He was not yet charged with a crime, but he was put under house arrest and his phone was cut. After a couple of months, there was a routine power outage—a common problem in parts of the countryside that were growing fast—and to his surprise, the blackout disabled the phone-jamming equipment that was keeping him in isolation. Chen was able to get a call out to his lawyers in Beijing, who called me, and I dialed Chen's phone. He laughed at the strangeness of the circumstances, and then he paused, as if trying to summon a properly momentous tone for the occasion. “I want to tell the whole world,” he said grandly, “that this local government doesn't obey their own law.” He was mystified that his attempts to alert the government to abuses of the law had landed him in seclusion. I asked him what was the biggest question on his mind. He said, “I am only wondering if the central government doesn't want to stop this, or doesn't have the ability to stop this.”

In March, after Chen had been under house arrest for nearly six months, his brother and fellow villagers fought with police over the conditions of Chen's confinement. Chen was charged with “destruction of property” and “assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic,” though his supporters found this hard to square with his physical limitations. The night before his trial, his lawyer was detained; Chen was represented by court-appointed attorneys, who called no witnesses. He was found guilty of destroying property and disrupting traffic and was sentenced to four years and three months in prison.

*   *   *

In the days of the emperors, one way to seek the attention of Chinese leaders—to appeal a court ruling or expose an abuse of power—was to bang a drum installed for that purpose at the gate of the local court. If this failed to elicit a response, people threw themselves in front of the sedan chairs of passing Mandarins. People who succeeded in lodging their complaints became known officially as
yuanmin
—“People with Grievances”—and they were entitled to pursue their claims, level by level, all the way up to the capital.

When the Communist Party came to power, it retained some of the old system: it established the Bureau of Letters and Visits, to receive the People with Grievances, and to steer their cases to the correct branches of government. But by the twenty-first century, the Bureau of Letters and Visits was an antique; its caseload was crushing, its operations a mystery. A study found that the bureau solved about two-tenths of 1 percent of the cases it received. The cases were rarely given a full airing in court, so when People with Grievances lost their cases, or received no word of progress, it only drove some of them deeper into crusades for justice that stretched for years.

The modern heirs of People with Grievances were known as “petitioners,” and I often received cold calls from them. They tracked me down in the hope that the attentions of a foreign reporter might force the government to resolve their cases. When they reached me, the least I could do was hear them out, but usually there were few ways for me to help. Their cases were intricate and confusing, and the process of petitioning was an odyssey that left thousands of people marooned on the edge of Beijing in shantytowns known as “petitioner villages,” where they stewed amid mountains of wrinkled legal documents. Sometimes I couldn't tell if they were lost in the labyrinth of their disputes because they were unwell, or because they had been driven mad by the odyssey itself.

When the Web appeared, the People with Grievances were some of the first to embrace it. In September 2002 an outbreak of food poisoning in the city of Nanjing killed more than forty people, but the national evening news ignored it; instead, the stories that night included a piece about workers “expressing deep thanks for the compassion” of Party leaders and the opening of a local costume festival. People took to the Web to complain. “Ordinary Chinese people are not human beings?” one asked. Another wrote, “It is more difficult to choke the mouth of the people than to block the flow of a river.”

Before long, People with Grievances were using the new technology to locate one another. When a twenty-five-year-old man named Zhang Xianzhu found he was barred from the civil service because he had tested positive for hepatitis, he located others online who had had the same experience, and together they forced a policy change to prevent such discrimination. Soon there were similar campaigns for greater rights on behalf of gays and lesbians, religious believers, and sufferers of diabetes. The instinct to organize spread further into the mainstream.

In 2007 a text message swept through the city of Xiamen denouncing a proposed chemical plant. The language of the message was dire: “The production of this highly poisonous chemical will be like dropping an atomic bomb on the city … For the sake of our grandchildren, take action! Join a ten-thousand-person march at 8 a.m. on June 1. Send this message to all your friends in Xiamen.” But instead of a rowdy demonstration, organizers called for a “strolling protest,” a low-key march that would not provoke a police crackdown. Thousands of men and women turned up—urban, well-heeled members of the New Middle-Income Stratum, some with children in their arms—all strolling calmly in the name of protest. The local government was taken aback: it had always calculated, as Mencius had predicted, that “those with a constant livelihood have a constant heart.” But Mencius never mentioned a strolling protest. Was this an attempt to preserve stability or to disrupt it? It certainly wasn't a riot, but it wasn't legal, either. After several days, and back-and-forth with the crowd, the local government agreed to postpone the plan for the chemical plant pending “reevaluation.”

*   *   *

The new spirit of protest, both coordinated and moderate, posed a delicate new problem for the authorities. As Jerome Cohen, a China specialist at New York University Law School, put it, “Are they going to have a legal system that can really handle these things and reduce tensions and satisfy wants, or is it all just a sham that will lead people into the streets and into all kinds of protests and a lack of stability and harmony?” Cohen saw Chen Guangcheng's struggle as a test of whether the authoritarian system could accommodate the rising tide of ambitions. Chen once asked Cohen, “What do they want me to do? Go into the streets? I want to go into the courts.” In that sense, Cohen said, Chen was “not a dissident, although they may be making him one.”

Cohen had known Chen since 2003, when the U.S. State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program invited Chen on a tour of the United States. When the State Department asked Cohen if he had time to see a Chinese lawyer, the professor was on a deadline and asked, “Where'd he go to law school?'”

“He didn't go to law school,” the caller said.

“Then why are you bothering me?” Cohen asked.

“This fellow's special. I think you're going to want to see him.”

They met, and Cohen told me, “After half an hour, it was clear to me that I was dealing with someone unusual.” It was the beginning of an unlikely alliance. At seventy-three, Cohen was tall and bald, with a brilliant white mustache and a fondness for bow ties; he'd clerked for two U.S. Supreme Court justices before he became the first Western lawyer to practice in the People's Republic. He was regarded as the dean of foreign experts on Chinese law. When he and Chen met for a second time, in Beijing, Cohen bought him a stack of law books, and Chen told him, “You'll never understand what I'm up against or what I'm trying to do if you don't come down to Dongshigu village.”

Cohen and his wife, Joan (the art historian who, incidentally, had befriended Ai Weiwei in New York), made the trip from New York to Dongshigu. Even after decades of work in China, they were taken aback by the depth of poverty. Cohen met Chen's clients. “You never saw a sadder bunch,” Cohen said. “The lame, the beaten down, dwarfs—all kinds of people—denied the license to open a shop if they didn't bribe the authorities, or subject to unfair taxation or police abuse.” Cohen spotted the books he had brought for Chen: they were dog-eared. “His wife and his oldest brother had been reading them to him.”

Before Cohen left, Chen mapped out his plan: he wanted to spread the law by word of mouth, by training two hundred villagers in the basics of the courts, so that they could take on cases as he had. Cohen asked, “Do you really think the local authorities are going to allow us to hire a hall in the county seat to train people who are going to subvert them and make them miserable?”

“Yes,” Chen said.

*   *   *

By the time Chen Guangcheng went to prison, the Party had concluded that its approach to controlling the spread of ideas was too weak. In the spring of 2007, President Hu Jintao told his fellow members of the Politburo that digital filters and human censors were no longer enough. The Party needed to “use” the Web, he said. It must “assert supremacy over online public opinion.”