Age of Ambition (42 page)

A Chinese newspaper invoked the exploitation of the American Gilded Age to accuse Cheung of “turning blood into gold.” People pointed out that she had once said, “If a country does not have both the rich and the poor, it will not become strong and affluent.”
Sanlian Shenghuo
, a prominent magazine, wrote that “if she still has any sense,” she will resign from her seat on the government advisory body called the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. “Every piece of paper produced by Nine Dragons,” it wrote, “is soaked with the blood of labor.” Even some of China's most energetic cheerleaders of the free market sensed the passing of an era. In an article about Cheung Yan, the magazine
China Entrepreneur
declared, “In Chinese society five years ago, maybe a company that had achieved success in business, while not being perfect in other respects, would have been tolerated and worshipped. But things have changed.”

When the report appeared, Cheung responded angrily, saying, “We became wealthy because we found the right business model to change used paper into treasure—not by treating workers harshly.” The company gave out more in bonuses than it withheld in penalties, she said. And she questioned the political motives of the labor rights group, suggesting, darkly, that it “received money from Europe.”

When I talked to her about it, Cheung told me that the company had ended the practice of fining workers. A more calculating executive might have stopped there, but Cheung edged forward in her chair to explain that, in fact, she still believed fines were a legitimate tactic under the right conditions. “If you don't impose fines, workers are not careful and they will get injured and come back to ask for more compensation,” she said. After an investigation, the provincial trade union criticized the penalty system and other management practices but pronounced Nine Dragons “a relatively good enterprise.” It was little help: Cheung's comments and the report completed a transformation of her public image. She had become the antihero of an era of unbridled capitalism.

*   *   *

The longer I lived in China, the more it seemed that people had come to see the economic boom as a train with a limited number of seats. For those who found a seat—because they arrived early, they had the right family, they paid the right bribe—progress was beyond their imagination. Everyone else could run as far and fast as their legs would carry them, but they would only be able to watch the caboose shrink into the distance.

At its extremes, the frustration was explosive. By 2010 the number of strikes, riots, and other “mass incidents” had doubled in five years to 180,000 a year—almost 500 incidents a day, according to the government's statistics. On July 24, 2009, steelworkers in Jilin Province, fearing layoffs, attacked the general manager, a young graduate named Chen Guojun, beating him to death with bricks and clubs, and blocking police and ambulances. When the Party broke up disturbances like this, it often said the problem was members of the “masses who didn't know the truth.” But more and more, it seemed that the problem was the truth itself. To some degree, the great national footrace that Deng Xiaoping ordained was rigged. The field was not simply tilted against them. They weren't playing the same game.

In January 2010 a nineteen-year-old named Ma Xiangqian jumped from the roof of his factory dormitory at Foxconn Technology, the maker of iPhones and other electronics. He had worked on the assembly line seven nights a week, eleven hours at a stretch, before being demoted to cleaning toilets. In the months after Ma's death, thirteen other Foxconn workers committed suicide. People wondered if it was spreading like a fever, and they pointed out that the cluster of suicides was still under the rate expected for a factory as large as a city.

Foxconn installed nets around the roofs of its buildings and boosted wages, and the suicides diminished as abruptly as they had begun. Outsiders were quick to imagine a sweatshop, but this explanation was not quite right. When therapists were brought in to Foxconn to meet workers, they found what sociologists had begun to detect in surveys of the new middle class: the first generation of assembly-line workers had been grateful just to be off the farm, but this generation compared themselves to wealthier peers. “What is the most common feeling in China today?” the Tsinghua sociologist Guo Yuhua wrote in 2012. “I think many people would say disappointment. This feeling comes from the insufficient improvement in lives amid rapid economic growth. It also comes from the contrast between the degree to which individual social status is rising and the idea of the ‘rise of a great and powerful nation.'”

I noticed that people were still invoking
The Great Gatsby
as an analogy for their moment in China's rise, but now the reference carried a sinister new connotation. They pointed to a study known as the Great Gatsby curve, conducted by labor economist Miles Corak, which produced further evidence that China had one of the world's lowest levels of social mobility. A Chinese blogger read it and wrote, “The sons of rats will only dig holes … Birth determines class.”
The Great Gatsby
no longer read as a tale of a self-made man. A blogger wrote, “Mobsters running wild, farmers leaving their land rushing towards the big cities on the east coast, farming life declining. Money inscribing itself on morality … These are the very things China faces today.” The Central Propaganda Department let it be known that reports that suggested a shortage of happiness were not to receive attention. In April 2012 my phone buzzed:

All websites are not to repost the news headlined, “UN Releases World Happiness Report, and China Ranks No. 112.”

*   *   *

When I returned to Beijing from my time with Michael, it was a brilliant winter day, and I took my bike out for a long lap around the neighborhood. I pedaled down to the Avenue of Eternal Peace. I turned right to head north again, and I passed the Central Propaganda Department, squatting beneath its pagoda roof.

In the years since I'd first noticed it, the quest for truth in China had expanded in ways once unimaginable, and the Department had adapted. The Department had helped the Party weather the financial crisis and silence the admirers of the Arab Spring. The Party had jailed Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei, and blunted the publishing ambitions of Han Han. Even the muckraking editor Hu Shuli—the woodpecker who wanted to make the system grow straighter—had run up against the limits of what it could bear. And those efforts reinforced the Party's determination to contain and control the pursuit of truth. China's highest-ranking censor, Liu Binjie, was asked that spring to evaluate his performance over the previous six years. “Objectively speaking,” Liu said of his performance, “it was outstanding.”

His confidence struck me as premature. In China the affairs of state had always been kept out of view of the public, and been unveiled only at the end as a fait accompli. But now the uncooked ingredients—the deals, the feuds, the peccadillos, the betrayals—were tumbling into the open air to be judged and evaluated. People were assessing whether the values of the system now on display lived up to their own moral aspirations. By 2012 a Chinese person was going online for the first time every two seconds—still, barely half the population was using the Web. Before he went to prison, Liu Xiaobo pointed out that his inspiration, Havel's Charter 77, had appeared more than two decades before the political system around it evolved in the way its authors envisioned. In Havel's view, the key to life under a Communist Party was the maintenance of a double life—the willingness to say one thing in public and another in private, because of fear or interest or a combination of the two. Eventually that double life became untenable.

In China, the double life was eroding. The reality of extreme inequality was now inescapable: one part of China lived in a different material universe from the rest of the country. This was true in many countries, of course, including my own, but in China it was especially deeply felt; the nation was just one generation removed from bitter sacrifices in the name of egalitarianism. Moreover, the gap between the society's meritocratic myth and its oligarchic reality was becoming clear and measurable. In 2012 a team of political scientists (Victor Shih, Christopher Adolph, and Mingxing Liu) challenged one of the essential shibboleths surrounding China's rise: the Party had always maintained that its ruthless devotion to development—“the hard truth,” as Deng put it—ensured meritocracy because it rewarded cadres who made the shrewdest economic decisions. But the researchers found no evidence to support this; on the contrary, Chinese officials with good economic track records were no more likely to be promoted than those who performed poorly. What mattered most was their connections with senior leaders.

As the Party's monopoly on information gave way, so did its moral credibility. For people such as the philosophy student Tang Jie, the pursuit of truth did not satisfy their skepticism; it led them to deeper questions about who they wanted to be and whom they wanted to believe. In the summer of 2012, people noticed that another search word had been blocked. The anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations had just passed, and people had been discussing it, in code, by calling it “the truth”—
zhenxiang.
The censors picked up on this, and when people searched Weibo for anything further, they began receiving a warning: “In accordance with relevant laws, regulations, and policies, search results for ‘the truth' have not been displayed.”

 

PART III

FAITH

 

NINETEEN

THE SPIRITUAL VOID

 

“Mao Badge Fever” struck China in the summer of 1966, when the Shanghai United Badge Factory produced a simple aluminum pin—a half inch in diameter, bearing the face of the Chairman. The Cultural Revolution was gathering, and the badges were a sensation. Within weeks, they were in production nationwide; men, women, and children were pinning them above their hearts as testaments to devotion, the more badges the better, spilling down their chests and across their arms.

The Chairman was pictured facing forward or in profile, but never to the right, which was the counterrevolutionary direction. There were badges that glowed in the dark and badges made from U.S. fighter planes downed in Vietnam. The inscriptions hailed the Chairman as the “Messiah of the Working People” and the “Great Savior” and the “Red Sun in Our Hearts.”

The Cultural Revolution was Mao's final play for power. After the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, his rivals had pushed him aside, so Mao unleashed China's youth to “bombard the headquarters.” It gave him a new aura: “Let Mao Zedong's thought control everything,” the media declared, and people confessed their sins at the foot of his statues. His
Little Red Book
of quotations became known for mysterious powers: the state press reported that the book had enabled a team of surgeons to remove a ninety-nine-pound tumor; it had helped workers in Shanghai raise the sinking city by three-quarters of an inch.

Mao's touch acquired otherworldly significance: when a Pakistani delegation gave Mao a basket of mangoes in 1968, he regifted them to workers, who wept and placed them on altars; crowds lined up and bowed before the fruit. A mango was flown to Shanghai on a chartered plane, so that workers such as Wang Xiaoping could see it. “What is a ‘mango'? Nobody knew,” she recalled in an essay. “Knowledgeable people said it was a fruit of extreme rarity, like Mushrooms of Immortality.” When the mangoes spoiled, they were preserved in formaldehyde, and plastic replicas were created. A village dentist who observed that one of the mangoes resembled a sweet potato was tried for malicious slander and executed.

At the very moment that Mao was becoming a god, his believers were dismantling China's ancient infrastructure of faith. Karl Marx had considered religion an “illusory happiness” incompatible with the struggle for socialism, and the
People's Daily
called upon the young to “Smash the Four Olds”—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Red Guards demolished temples and smashed sacred objects in a surge of violence that the scholars Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer describe as the “most thorough destruction of all forms of religious life in Chinese and, perhaps, human history.” In some cases, the deification of Mao and the destruction of his enemies became indistinguishable.
The Little Red Book
was used as a “demon-exposing mirror” that could unmask “class enemies,” and in two provinces, the fervor descended into cannibalism: class enemies were disemboweled, and their organs were consumed at communal banquets.

By 1969 the cult of Mao was out of control and threatening China's future. The death toll was rising, temples were in ruins, and even the badges had become a problem: China was manufacturing so many of them (between two and five billion in all) that they were diverting aluminum from industrial production. Mao finally ended the craze by saying the metal had to be used to “make airplanes to protect the nation.”

After the Chairman died in 1976, collectors and speculators saw a profit-making opportunity, and they accumulated badges as an investment. But the trade was so lucrative that the badge market was swamped with counterfeits. The talismans became a commodity, and I found them buried in the bric-a-brac at the Beijing flea markets. Online, factories now sold them in bulk for seven cents apiece.

Mao's Cultural Revolution destroyed China's old belief systems, but Deng's economic revolution could not rebuild them. The relentless pursuit of fortune had relieved the deprivation in China's past, but it had failed to define the ultimate purpose of the nation and the individual. The truth now lay in plain view: the Communist Party presided over a land of untamed capitalism, graft, and rampant inequality. In sprinting ahead, China had bounded past whatever barriers once held back the forces of corruption and moral disregard. There was a hole in Chinese life that people named the
jingshen kongxu
—“the spiritual void”—and something was going to fill it.