Age of Ambition (48 page)

Sandel mentioned a story from the headlines: Wang Shangkun was a seventeen-year-old high school student from a poor patch of Anhui province who was illegally recruited in a chat room to sell his kidney for $3,500, a transaction his mother discovered when he returned home with an iPad and an iPhone and then went into renal failure. The surgeon and eight others—who had resold the kidney for ten times what they paid—were arrested. “There are one-point-five million people in China who need an organ transplant,” Sandel told the crowd, “but there are only ten thousand available organs in any year.” How many here, he asked, would support a legal free market in kidneys?

A young Chinese man named Peter, in a white sweatshirt and chunky glasses, raised his hand and made a libertarian argument that legalizing the kidney trade would squeeze out the black market. Others disagreed, and Sandel upped the stakes. Say a Chinese father sold a kidney and then, “a few years later, he needs to send a second child to school, and a person comes and asks if he would sell his other kidney—or his heart, if he is willing to give up his life. Is there anything wrong with that?”

Peter thought it over, and said, “As long as it's free and transparent and open, rich people can buy life, and it's not immoral.” A ripple of agitation passed over the crowd; a middle-aged man behind me shouted, “No!” Sandel settled the room. “The question of markets,” he said, “is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale?”

*   *   *

“Of the various countries I've visited,” Sandel told me the next day, “the free-market assumptions and convictions are more present in China among young people than anywhere, with the possible exception of the United States.” What interested him most, however, was the countervailing force—the ripple through the crowd at the idea of selling the second kidney. “If you groped and probed, you found one example after another of the limits of extending market logic to everything,” he said.

In China, foreign ideas had a history of sparking fevers. After World War I, John Dewey toured the country and inspired legions of followers. Later, it was Freud and Habermas. When Sandel visited for the first time, in 2007, the timing was ripe. Introducing him at Tsinghua University in Beijing, professor Junren Wan said China had a “crying heart.” Sandel had spent much of his career considering what he called “the moral responsibility we have to one another as fellow citizens.” After growing up in Hopkins, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, until he was thirteen, he moved with his family to Los Angeles, where classmates cut school to go surfing. It grated against his midwestern reserve. “The formative effect of Southern California,” he told me, “was seeing the unencumbered self in practice.” He took an early interest in liberal politics, went to Brandeis, then Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and over a winter break, he and a classmate planned to collaborate on an economics paper. “My friend had very strange sleeping habits,” Sandel said. “I would go to bed, maybe around midnight, and he would stay up until all hours … That gave me the mornings to read these philosophy books.” By the time school resumed, he had read Kant, Rawls, Nozick, and Arendt, and he set aside economics for philosophy.

In the years that followed, he argued for a more direct conversation about morality in public life. He said, “Martin Luther King drew explicitly on spiritual and religious sources. Robert Kennedy, when he ran for president in 1968, also articulated a liberalism with moral and spiritual resonance.” But by 1980, American liberals had put aside the language of morality and virtue because it came to be seen as “what the religious right does,” he said. “I began to feel that something was missing in this kind of value-neutral politics, and I think it was no accident that there was a stretch of time from 1968 until 1992 when American liberalism was more or less moribund, when it had lost its capacity to inspire.”

In China in 2010 a group of volunteers calling itself Everyone's Television had come together to subtitle foreign programs. When it ran out of sitcoms and police procedurals, it turned to American college courses, which were becoming available online. Sandel had visited China once before, to speak to small groups of philosophy students, but when he returned, after his course was online, he found that something had happened. “They told me that, for a seven p.m. lecture, kids were starting to stake out seats at one thirty,” he said. “They had overflow rooms, and I waded into this spirited mass of people.” Sandel had seen his work ignite in other countries, but never as abruptly as it had in China. As we talked, we tried to make sense of this phenomenon. The Harvard brand didn't hurt, and the professional polish of the public television production made it more fun to watch than other courses. But for Chinese students, his style of teaching was also a revelation: he called upon students to make their own individual moral arguments, to engage in vigorous debate in which there was no single right answer, to think creatively and independently about complex, open-ended issues in a way that was largely unheard of in Chinese classrooms.

Beyond style, however, Sandel sensed a deeper explanation for the intense Chinese interest in moral philosophy. “In the societies where it has caught fire, there has not been the occasion—for whatever reason—for serious public discussion of big ethical questions,” he said. Young people especially “sense a kind of emptiness in terms of public discourse, and they want something better.” China, in the era of Bobos and Bare-Handed Fortunes, was the land of the unencumbered self, a place in which individuals could unfetter themselves from social bonds and history and make their decisions based on self-interest in a way that was previously impossible. It was ruled by technocrats who publicly espoused a discredited ideology while, in practice, they placed their faith in economics and engineering with pitiless efficiency. When Deng identified prosperity as “the only hard truth,” he put China on the path toward abundance on a scale it had never known, but also toward counterfeit medicine, piles of moldering cash, and bachelors who stayed alone as long as they were Triple Withouts. Sandel, and the political philosophy he taught, offered Chinese young people a vocabulary that they found useful and challenging but not subversive, a framework in which to talk about inequality, corruption, and fairness without sounding political. It was a way to talk about morality without having to mention the “just sisters” defense or the ambitions on display in Macau.

Sandel never explicitly challenged the taboos of Chinese politics: the separation of powers, the Party's superiority over law. But occasionally the Chinese authorities brushed him back. Once, a salon of Chinese scholars and writers in Shanghai arranged for him to give a public talk to a crowd of eight hundred, but on the eve of the lecture, the local government canceled it. Sandel asked the organizers, “Did they give a reason?”

“No,” they said. “They never give a reason.”

At times, Sandel encountered skepticism from Chinese critics. For some, his argument against markets was fine in theory, but gauzy notions of equity triggered Chinese flashbacks of ration coupons and empty store shelves. Others argued that, in China, money was the only way to defend yourself against abuses of power, so limiting markets would only fortify the hand of the state. But after the Xiamen lecture, I watched him speak to several more college groups in Beijing, and it was clear that when Sandel described the “skyboxification” of life—the division of America into a world for the affluent and a world for everyone else—Chinese listeners heard much in common. After thirty years of marching toward a future in which everything was for sale, many people in China were reconsidering.

On his last night in Beijing, Sandel gave a lecture at the University of Business and Economics, and then met with a group of student volunteers who were working on perfecting the translations of his “Justice” lectures. One young woman gushed, “Your class saved my soul.” Before Sandel could ask her what she meant, the crowd swept him away for photos and autographs. I hung back and introduced myself. Her name was Shi Ye and she was twenty-four years old. She was getting a master's degree in human resources, and when she came upon Sandel's work, it was “a key to open my mind and doubt everything,” she told me. “After a month, I began to feel different. That was one year ago. And today, I often ask myself, what is the moral dilemma here?”

Her parents had been farmers, until her father went into the seafood trade. “I accompanied my mom to visit the Buddha to pray and to put some food on the table as an offering. In the past, I didn't think anything was wrong with that. But a year later, when I accompanied my mom, I asked her, ‘Why do you do this?'” Her mother was not pleased by all the questions. “She thinks I am posing a very stupid question. I began to question everything. I didn't say it's wrong or right; I'm just questioning.”

Shi Ye had stopped buying train tickets from a scalper because, she said, “when he sells them at a price he chooses, it limits my choices. If he wasn't setting the price, I could decide to buy economy or first class, but now he is taking away my choice. It's unfair.” She had begun lobbying her friends to do the same. “I'm still young and I don't have much power to change much, but I can influence their thinking,” she said.

Shi Ye was getting ready to graduate, but her discovery of political philosophy had made things more complicated. “Before I encountered these lectures, I was sure I was going to be become an HR specialist and an HR manager and serve the employees in a big company. But now I'm confused; I doubt my original dreams. I hope to do something more meaningful.” She didn't dare tell her parents, but secretly she was hoping she wouldn't get a job in human resources. “I might take a gap year and go abroad and travel and take a part-time job to see the world. I want to see what I can do to contribute to society. I would like to travel by myself because in China many travel groups are very commercial. And anyway, travel is all about your own experience.”

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“New Zealand. The air in Beijing is terrible, and I want to escape to a pure and clean place and rest for a while. And then I will think about the next place. Maybe Tibet.”

*   *   *

I grew accustomed to meeting people who had drifted into new realms of belief almost by accident. An economist named Zhao Xiao told me, “If eating Chinese cuisine will make me stronger, then I'll eat it, and if Western food makes me stronger, then I'll eat that.” Zhao's pragmatism had served him well; by his mid-forties, he had joined the Party, earned a doctorate at Peking University, and was teaching at prominent schools in the capital when he embarked on a study of whether there were policy lessons to draw from predominantly Christian societies. Zhao concluded that Christianity could help China fight corruption, reduce environmental pollution, and stimulate the kind of philanthropy that led early American Christians to found Harvard and Yale Universities. Then he converted. “We see that the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and all of Eastern Europe have collapsed, and their countries have collapsed with them,” Zhao told me. But in China, the Party survived, he said, “precisely because it continues to change.”

The Party was under increasing pressure to change the way it regarded the desire for faith. The Chinese constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, but the right was narrowed by regulations against proselytizing and other activities. Officially, China recognized five religions—Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism—and believers could worship in state-controlled settings. More than twenty million Catholics and Protestants attended churches run by the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, and its counterpart the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. But more than twice that number worshipped in unregistered “house churches,” which ranged in size from small farmhouse study groups to large semipublic congregations in the cities. The house churches were not legally protected, so authorities could tolerate them one day and shut them down the next, if political orders came down to tighten up. In recent years, the Party had taken haltering steps toward tolerance: unofficially, it had allowed the growth of house churches, though it remained uncompromising in its campaign against Falun Gong, and in the ethnic regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, constraints on Buddhism and Islam sparked frequent unrest.

Despite the risks, the ranks of the faithful were soaring, especially among intellectuals. Over lunch, a human rights lawyer named Li Jianqiang ticked off a long list of his colleagues who had converted and were using the courts to try to win greater recognition for their faith. “They don't care who is in power: Caesar, Mao Zedong, the Communist Party,” he told me. “Whoever is in power is in power. But don't hinder my belief in Jesus.” Li Fan, a secular liberal writer, told me, “Christianity has probably become China's largest nongovernmental organization.” House churches that once stayed out of sight were setting themselves up wherever they could find enough space. I attended an especially rousing sermon in the otherwise impious environment of Sauna City, a nightclub-and-massage complex decked in neon. When I asked the pastor, Reverend Jin Mingri, about it, he grinned and said, “The rent was good.”

At thirty-nine, Jin had a shock of wavy gray hair and a lively televangelist flair. Not long ago he was destined for the comforts of quiet, suburban Chinese life: raised in a secular family, he joined the Communist Party and studied at Peking University. But in his junior year, the crackdown at Tiananmen shook his faith in the state. “College students in the eighties were groomed by the country; our fees and living expenses were paid for,” he said. All of a sudden he felt “an immense sense of hopelessness.” The church was a way out; it promised moral clarity and a sense of being part of an enterprise larger than China. He told his parents he was converting. “They thought I'd gone crazy,” he said.