Age of Ambition (47 page)

When people discovered her role in helping Little Yueyue, she became a minor celebrity. News photographers came and posed her in a field harvesting crops to dramatize her humble origins—no matter how many times she tried to explain to them that it wasn't the harvest season. She received six invitations to Beijing, for official celebrations of “good deeds,” though, in truth, the experiences in Beijing only made her uncomfortable. “I can't understand what people are saying, and they can't understand what I'm saying,” she said.

Local officials and private companies were eager to be photographed with her, and she received about thirteen thousand dollars in rewards. But as her name spread, the experience took an unhappy turn. People in her village saw the publicity she was getting and concluded that she had received far more money than she actually had. Neighbors began asking
her
for loans. No matter what she said, they persisted. They even asked her to pave the road into the village.

Chen Xianmei told me she was grateful for the rewards, but she would have preferred that the local government simply allow her grandson to go to public school: he had a rural
hukou
, which made him ineligible for public kindergarten in the city, so his parents were spending seven hundred yuan a month on a private school, and her reward money wouldn't last forever.

The curious consequences of her good deed spilled over into her son's life. No matter how many times he told his coworkers that he wasn't rich, people were convinced that his mother was hiding a fortune. The pressure became so strong that he left his job. The best new work he could find was exhausting; he was driving a bread loaf van thirteen hours a day.

*   *   *

For the parents of Little Yueyue, donations arrived from around the country. A classroom of local kids sent a cookie tin brimming with small bills. A well-meaning newspaper in the father's home province encouraged people to call him, and he was deluged by the response. In a single five-minute stretch, he counted fifty-one missed calls.

At the same time, a crackpot theory took root on the Web: the whole case was a fraud. The video, the girl, the doctors—it was all a scam, people said. Hannah Arendt once identified a “peculiar kind of cynicism” that takes hold in societies prone to the “consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth.” The response, she wrote, was “the absolute refusal to believe the truth of anything.” In an effort to put an end to the rumors, the father invited local reporters to watch him count the donations and put them in a bank. The total came to nearly forty-four thousand dollars. But the suggestion of fraud did not go away. By the end of October, Wang was desperate to be rid of the money as fast as he could. He donated it to two patients in need, and then he and his wife receded from view. The father loathed going out. At night, the parents had recurring dreams about their daughter; in his, he was hugging her and hoisting her on his back; in the mother's dream, Little Yueyue was always wearing a yellow dress, and always laughing. Before long, the family left Hardware City.

In the end, prosecutors decided that Hu Jun did not knowingly flee the scene of the accident. Police had staged a re-creation—spraying the roof of Hardware City from a fire engine to simulate rain—and Hu pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. He apologized to the family, and the lawyer asked for leniency; he submitted snapshots of Hu Jun cradling his own ten-month-old daughter. I noticed that instead of traditional split-back pants, his baby girl wore diapers, perhaps the clearest sign in China of a family's first steps into the middle class. When the video played in the courtroom, Hu Jun hung his head. He was sentenced to two years and six months in prison.

Several weeks after Yueyue died, the city of Shenzhen drafted China's first regulation to protect Good Samaritans from legal liability. It shifted the burden of proof to the accusers, and it laid out punishments for false accusations ranging from a public apology to detention. The law stopped short of requiring passersby to get involved—as they are required to do in Japan, France, and elsewhere—but it was nevertheless China's greatest step yet to amend the law. Over time, I came to feel sorry for the men and women of Hardware City—including, I must say, the ones who passed by. They were conscripted into a parable, but the morality play did not do justice to the layers of their lives. The Chinese public had read the death of Little Yueyue much the way sixties-era Americans had accepted the story of Kitty Genovese, even though, up close, there was more to it.

The clearest evidence against the theory that Chinese people no longer cared about one another was that they
did
care: for every video of people ignoring each other, there were examples of people risking themselves to protect others. When a disturbed man with a knife burst into a primary school in Henan in December 2012 and wounded twenty-two children, surveillance footage showed another man dashing after him, armed with nothing but a broom. For all the atomizing effects of the market age, the culture of giving was not shrinking; it was growing. Private philanthropic organizations, which had been shuttered or taken over by the Party, were returning. Blood donations had grown so much that the old blood merchants who used to go door-to-door, standing peasants on their heads, all but disappeared. After the earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, more than a quarter of a million volunteers went to help; most of them were young and most of them paid their own way to get there. Zhou Runan, the anthropologist, told me, “Young people are training to become fully rounded individuals, not selfish isolated people. That's where the hope is: in the young.”

The Party's efforts to promote morality rang ever hollower. When I was talking to people about the case of Little Yueyue, state television was reporting on the sixtieth anniversary of Chairman Mao's discovery of the soldier Lei Feng, that icon of socialist dedication. Lei Feng was all over the bus shelters and posters. The Party had blessed three new movies about him, but the propaganda blitz was a disaster. Nobody wanted to see the Lei Feng movies; the
Global Times
reported the story of a theater that was showing a Lei Feng movie to empty seats, “in case anyone showed up.” Online, people mocked Lei Feng; they ran the numbers and concluded that, for Lei to have collected as much manure as he proclaimed, he would have had to encounter a piece of dung every eleven steps for nine hours. Another post suggested that Lei might've been corrupt, spending more on his outfit than his salary would have supported. The two men who posted it were detained. A police statement read, “The glorious image of Lei Feng was being questioned by some Web users. Many Web users reported this to the police, demanding a thorough investigation of the creators of the rumors defaming Lei Feng's image.”

I sometimes wondered how things might be different in China if its leaders, instead of flying the flags of Lei Feng and a harmonious society, offered credible signs that they were trying to make their institutions more ethical and trustworthy and honest. In its actions, and its inactions, a state enacts a moral view, at least according to Confucius. “The moral character of the ruler is the wind,” he said, “the moral character of those beneath him is the grass. When the wind blows, the grass bends.” In its abuses and deceptions, the Chinese government was failing to make a persuasive argument for what it meant to be Chinese in the modern world. The Party had rested its legitimacy on prosperity, stability, and a pantheon of hollow heroes. In doing so, it had disarmed itself in the battle for the soul, and it sent Chinese individuals out to wander the market of ideas in search of icons of their own.

 

TWENTY-ONE

SOULCRAFT

 

At some point along the way, I lost touch with a friend named Lin Gu. He was a well-connected reporter and self-described social butterfly who took pride in never having turned on the stove in his apartment. When I asked around, a friend told me that Lin had moved to the mountains to begin training as a monk. It was not unheard of; China had recently passed a milestone to become the world's largest Buddhist nation. When Lin returned to Beijing on a break, we had dinner. I met him outside the subway. He was dressed in loose brown cotton, and his head was shaved. He was living in a remote community of two dozen people, about two hours from the nearest city. “It's a cliché, right?” he said and laughed. “The middle-class Chinese monk?”

As a journalist in China, Lin had lived by what he called “a golden rule”: doubt everything. At thirty-eight, he grew up after the Cultural Revolution, in the time of plenty, when politics was of little interest. His mother had been a devout member of the Party when she was young, but Lin was put off by devotion. He had an unflattering image of Buddhism: “Old grannies and grandpas getting on their knees and burning incense,” he said. In the winter of 2009, Lin splurged on a trip to Thailand for himself and his mother. Before he flew, he visited a bookstore in Chengdu and happened on the memoir of a monk. He was not prepared for the effect it had on him. “I found Buddha to be an inspiration. He invited me to think bravely about this world,” Lin said. “Buddha could challenge any social norms, such as the caste system of India,” he went on. “He rethought the conceptual framework he had from day one.”

Lin spent the trip to Thailand in his hotel room, absorbed in the book—“I never even went to the pool”—and when he returned, he began frequenting a Buddhist institute near his apartment in Beijing. His moment of transformation came when he grasped the idea, as he put it, that “this world is a fantasy.” He found it impossible to imagine going back to the work he had before. He asked, “Why should we attach ourselves to money and fame and social status?” He went on, “As a journalist in China you have to dance in chains. You have to maneuver in whatever space you get. You have to play the game with the government and the propaganda officials, and the subject of your stories … We waste a lot of energy and time trying to bypass all the obstacles of the propaganda machine. By that time, you are exhausted and the deadline is there. So you don't feel satisfied with the professionalism of your stories, and you envy your Western colleagues who can focus on the writing itself.” Buddhism gave him answers that journalism never could. “I've been searching for the truth for a long time,” he said.

To live in China in the early years of the twenty-first century was to witness a spiritual revival that could be compared to America's Great Awakening in the nineteenth century. The stereotype of the Chinese citizen content to delay moral questions until he was car-and-home-equipped looked increasingly out of date. The more people satisfied their basic needs, the more they uncovered the truth, the more they challenged the old dispensation. For new sources of meaning, they looked not only to religion but also to philosophy, psychology, and literature for new ways of orienting themselves in a world of ideological incoherence and unrelenting ambition. What obligation did an individual have to a stranger in a hypercompetitive, market-driven society? How much responsibility did a citizen have to speak the truth when speaking the truth was dangerous? Was it better to try to change an authoritarian system from within, or to oppose it from outside, at the risk of having no effect at all?

The search for answers awakened and galvanized people in a way that the pursuit of fortune once had. One night in December 2012, I was on the campus of Xiamen University, on China's southeastern coast, when students massed outside the auditorium—far more of them than the building could handle. I stood inside the doors and watched the growing crowd of young, flushed faces on the other side of the glass. Jittery security guards appealed to the crowd to keep calm. The president of the university had phoned the organizers of that evening's event and cautioned them not to lose control. The object of such fervent anticipation—a figure who had acquired a level of popularity in China “usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and NBA players,” as the
China Daily
put it—was an introverted Minnesota native named Michael J. Sandel. At Harvard, where Sandel was a professor of political philosophy, he taught a popular course called Justice, which introduced students to the pillars of Western thought: Aristotle, Kant, Rawls, and others.

He framed their theories of moral decision-making in real-world dilemmas.
Is torture ever justified? Would you steal a drug that your child needs to survive?
The classes had been filmed for an American public television series and put online. As they began to circulate in China, Chinese volunteers came forward to provide subtitles, and after two years, Sandel had acquired an almost preposterous level of celebrity. His Chinese lectures on Western political philosophy had been watched at least twenty million times.
China Newsweek
magazine named him the “most influential foreign figure” of 2010.

Sandel was a cerebral, meticulous man in his late fifties, with vanishing gray hair and pale blue eyes that regarded the world with a vaguely apprehensive expression. He was more accustomed to life in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons, but he was learning to expect extraordinary reactions abroad, especially in East Asia. In Seoul he lectured to fourteen thousand people in an outdoor stadium; in Tokyo the scalpers' price for tickets to his talks was five hundred dollars. But in China, he had inspired near-religious devotion, and his visits plunged him into an alternative dimension of celebrity. Once, at the airport in Shanghai, the passport-control officer stopped him to gush that he was a fan.

Outside the auditorium in Xiamen, the crowd kept growing, until the organizers finally decided that they had a better chance of keeping the peace if they threw open the doors. So, fire codes notwithstanding, they let the crowd pour into the aisles, until young men and women covered every inch of floor space. Sandel climbed the stage. Behind him, an enormous plastic banner carried the Chinese title of his latest book,
What Money Can't Buy
, in which he asked whether too many features of modern life were becoming what he called “instruments of profit.” In a nation where everything seemed to have a price tag—a military commission, a marriage, a seat in kindergarten—his audience was rapt. “I am not arguing against markets as such,” he told the crowd. “What I am suggesting is that in recent decades we have drifted, almost without realizing it, from having a market economy to becoming a market society.”