Age of Ambition (33 page)

To that end, the Party expanded a corps of what it called “ushers of public opinion,” who wandered the Web masquerading as ordinary users, seeking to steer debate rather than extinguish it. They were paid half a yuan for every comment they posted, and their critics named them the “fifty-cent Party.” Much like the staff of the Department, they were supposed to be ubiquitous but invisible; they were prohibited from acknowledging that they worked for the Party. But Ai Weiwei put out the word that he would give an iPad to any usher of public opinion who was willing to talk about what it was like. A twenty-six-year-old calling himself W. took the offer. He had studied journalism, found occasional employment in television, but made most of his income as a part-time usher of public opinion.

Each assignment, W. explained, began with an order to “influence public understanding” or “stabilize netizens' emotions.” If he openly praised the government, people ignored him or mocked him as a “fifty-center,” so he worked the angles: If there was a gathering crowd, he'd throw in a dumb joke or insert a boring advertisement, to encourage casual readers to wander off. If people were criticizing the Party about, say, rising gas prices, he might lob in a grenade of an idea: “If you're too poor to drive, then it serves you right.” “Once people see that, they start to attack me,” he said, “and gradually the subject moves from gas prices to my comments. Mission accomplished.”

W. didn't pretend to be proud of his work. He did it for money, and he didn't tell his family or friends because, he said, it might “harm my reputation.” “Everyone has the thirst for exploring the truth, including me … We have more freedom of speech than we did. But at the same time, as soon as you get that freedom, you begin to see that certain people have even more freedom. So then we feel unfree again. It's the comparison that's depressing.” Ai Weiwei posted the interview with the usher, and within minutes the censors struck it down. It didn't matter; it was already circulating widely.

Skepticism and criticism were like muscles, and they grew with exercise. One by one, tempests of public criticism, known as “Internet incidents,” swept across the country. At one point, grassroots labor organizers used online forums and cell phones to mobilize a cascade of strikes at more than forty factories in two months—a surge of unrest that was especially unnerving to the Party, because, of anyone, it knew the potential strength of mobilized workers. Every institution, no matter how obscure, was now being evaluated in public. I once visited a tiny vocational college in rural Sichuan, and, a few years later, when I searched for news about the school, the first thing to come up was a student appeal to the local mayor saying the school had “cheated” students by classifying them on their diplomas as “part-time.” “We paid tuition for a full-time degree,” the student wrote. “We don't even have the tears to cry.” When the graduates complained, they were summoned by local authorities and warned not to make a fuss. “We didn't create any trouble or riot or anything. We didn't violate the law or harm social morals,” he wrote. “All we wanted was an explanation.”

In Shanghai, a set of parents discovered that, because they were registered in the countryside, the school would not provide health insurance for their child. So they posted a complaint entitled “We Live in a Rigidly Hierarchical Country.” “How can this school even try to teach our children to love the Party and love the motherland?” they wrote. In another case, which carried a certain awkward symbolism, a screenwriter on a hit television show called
Striving
, about young men and women making it on their own, took to the Web to complain: “How many viewers do I need to reach in order to make ends meet?”

The Party was in a conundrum of its own making: Over the years, it had squeezed off so many avenues of expression that people had little choice but to engage in the kind of unrest that was the Party's greatest fear. So it responded by clamping down even further, and the cycle continued. When homeowners in the prosperous coastal city of Ningbo held several days of street demonstrations against another proposed chemical complex, the city government eventually agreed to abandon the plant, but for good measure the censors blocked, from the Web, the demonstrators' slogan: “We want to survive, we want to get by.”

*   *   *

People even went online to complain when their bribes did not produce the desired effects. A real estate tycoon in Hunan named Huang Yubiao had tried to buy a seat in the provincial legislature, but after handing over fifty thousand dollars, he was told his bribe was too small. (As retribution, he posted a video of the middlemen who had received the money.) Similarly, a young woman named Wang Qian complained that she had offered fifteen thousand dollars to buy a place in the army (a coveted position, because it could open up other patronage options), but her recruiters told her that other cadets had offered more.

Government officials were not the only targets of complaints. Customers complained to the dating entrepreneur Gong Haiyan that they were getting duped by charlatans on her site. People accused her of looking the other way while con men prowled the ranks of the membership. A man was arrested and later sentenced by a Beijing court to two and a half years in jail for swindling a woman he had allegedly met on Jiayuan. The company denied that it bore any responsibility, but its stock nevertheless lost nearly 40 percent of its value. Customers were drifting away. To protect against frauds, the company created a system that let people fortify their profiles by submitting copies of official documents—pay stubs, government IDs, divorce filings—and the more documents you provided, the more stars you earned beside your name. The company hired a team of document experts to hunt for forgeries and ferret out suspicious activity, such as a user who made frequent changes to his name or date of birth.

But more criticism followed.
Jinghua Weekly
, a state-backed newspaper, criticized the company's “V.I.P. High-Level Marriage Hunting Advisers,” a team of special matchmakers who dealt only with the richest members, mostly men, lining them up with the most-sought-after female users. The Diamond Bachelors, as these clients were called, spent up to fifty thousand dollars for six matches, which smacked of a high-tech escort service. When I asked Gong about it, she was unapologetic. It was simple supply and demand, she said. “Diamond Bachelors are looking for pretty young women. And some of these pretty women are looking to marry that kind of man,” she said. “It's a perfect match.”

As a result of all the bad press, Jiayuan's competitors thrived; Internet dating, which hardly existed in China when Gong began, had become an industry worth more than a billion yuan, and the company needed a veteran. In March 2012, with its revenue and its stock price slumping, Jiayuan hired a seasoned tech executive, Linguang Wu, to be co-CEO. The love industry was getting cutthroat. Before Wu joined it, he was running an online shooter game called World of Tanks.

Where people were once dazzled to be online, now their expectations had soared, and they did not bother to hide their contempt for those who sought to curtail their freedom on the Web. Nobody was more despised than a computer science professor in his fifties named Fang Binxing. Fang had played a central role in designing the architecture of censorship, and the state media wrote admiringly of him as the “father of the Great Firewall.” But when Fang opened his own social media account, a user exhorted others, “Quick, throw bricks at Fang Binxing!” Another chimed in, “Enemies of the people will eventually face trial.” Censors removed the insults as fast as possible, but they couldn't keep up, and the lacerating comments poured in. People called Fang a “eunuch” and a “running dog.” Someone Photoshopped his head onto a voodoo doll with a pin in its forehead. In digital terms, Fang had stepped into the hands of a frenzied mob.

Less than three hours after Web users spotted him, the Father of the Great Firewall shut down his account and recoiled from the digital world that he had helped create. A few months later, in May 2011, Fang was lecturing at Wuhan University when a student threw an egg at him, followed by a shoe, hitting the professor in the chest. Teachers tried to detain the shoe thrower, a science student from a nearby college, but other students shielded him and led him to safety. He was instantly famous online. People offered him cash and vacations in Hong Kong and Singapore. A female blogger offered to sleep with him.

Asked why he'd done it, the student described it as an act of desperation: “I do not have a platform where we can equally debate with Fang Binxing,” he told a Chinese reporter. “Therefore, I can only resort to this somehow extreme way to express my discontent.”

*   *   *

When Chen Guangcheng was released in September 2009, he had served his full term. There were no more charges against him. And yet he returned to Dongshigu village to find that the local government had prepared for his arrival. They had installed steel shutters on the windows of his house, floodlights around the dirt yard, and cameras to keep an eye on the place twenty-four hours a day. They formed a revolving crew of guards to work in shifts. At one point, Cohen and Chen did their best to estimate the cost of the guards, meals, and other expenses required to keep the blind lawyer isolated from the world around him, and it came to seven million dollars.

But as far as Chen was concerned, most of the punishment was mental: now and then, the guards would carry every object from the house out into the courtyard and leave them there for him and his family to bring back in. The guards confiscated his phone and computer and bent the prongs of the television plug so that it was unusable. At one point, Chen managed to smuggle out a short video describing his conditions, but when that was discovered, the guards punished him by rolling him in a blanket and beating him.

The tactic of isolation that worried Chen the most, however, was not about him; the guards barred his six-year-old daughter from going to school. And it was this, it seemed, that galvanized the tech-savvy citizens of Beijing, Shanghai, and other big cities. On October 23, 2011, thirty of them tried to visit Chen, but guards took their cell phones and cameras, pelted them with stones, and forced them out of town. This drama attracted interest from people such as He Peirong, an English teacher in Nanjing, who had never heard of Chen before a friend mentioned the case that fall. “The first thing I did was check the facts of what Chen Guangcheng was saying,” she told me. The more she learned about the conditions of his confinement, the more they offended her. “Even if he once broke the law in the course of his work on human rights, I think he already paid his price. The way he was treated after his release shocked me. I never imagined brutality like that was happening in China now. My friends—even some who were police officers—didn't believe what I described to them.”

He Peirong posted a photograph of herself in sunglasses, joining the online campaign. She began to blog about Chen's case, and about her intention to visit him on his birthday, November 5. The police, it seemed, were reading; five days before that date arrived, police started following her, driving her to work and advising her not to try to make the trip to the village. At one point, she said, they offered to pay for her to go on vacation if it would keep her away. When she refused, they put her under house arrest until the birthday passed. She was undeterred; along with other Chen supporters, she distributed four thousand bumper stickers bearing Chen's face in the style and colors of an advertisement for KFC, beneath the words “Free CGC.” (If police asked, they said it was an ad for free chicken.) The mode of protest was revealing about those who joined it. “Compared to previous human rights activities in China, it was a different kind of support,” He Peirong told me. “I think the Chen Guangcheng bumper sticker movement represented the view of the middle class because the only people who could take part were people with cars.”

The campaign made international news, and after two weeks, the local government made a concession; it allowed Chen's daughter to go to school. But Chen was still locked in his house. The case was an embarrassment to the government, but the more that Chen and his supporters complained, the more reluctant the government became to show that it was responding to pressure. When a foreign reporter asked about Chen's conditions, during a press conference at the National People's Congress, the question was stricken from the transcript.

 

FIFTEEN

SANDSTORM

 

Spring is sandstorm season in Beijing. The wind sweeps down from the Mongol Steppe, drawing up loose grains as it travels. Before a storm hits the capital, you can see it coming: the sky turns a pale, otherworldly yellow, and then sand begins to accumulate at the base of the windowpanes, like tiny embankments of snow. By March 2011 the
hutong
house where I lived with Sarabeth Berman (then my fiancée, later my wife) was desiccated after the winter. My neighbors were making their first trips of the season to the flower markets on the edge of the capital, to bring home some color. But recently the flower sellers of Beijing had received an unusual order: do not sell jasmine. It was a Chinese favorite, perfect for tea, with small white petals that classical poets associated with innocence. But this year, the police told the vendors, no matter what price you are offered,
no jasmine.
And if anyone comes around asking to buy it, jot down the license plate number and call it in.

In Chinese politics, the flower had acquired the aroma of subversion. A few weeks earlier, on December 17, a twenty-six-year-old unemployed graduate in Tunisia named Mohammed Bouazizi was selling fruit without a permit when a police officer confiscated his produce and slapped him for complaining. Bouazizi was the sole earner in an extended family of eleven. He visited the provincial headquarters for help, but nobody would see him. Desperate and humiliated, he doused himself in paint thinner and lit a match.