Age of Ambition (52 page)

In September the Japanese family that owned the islands sold them to their government, and the move triggered protests in Chinese cities; in some places, they grew out of control. In Xian, riot police pushed back a crowd that surrounded a hotel where Japanese tourists were believed to be staying. Elsewhere in town, a Chinese man named Li Jianli was attacked for driving a Japanese car; he was pulled from behind the wheel of his Toyota and beaten with a bicycle lock so severely that he was left partly paralyzed. In Beijing, some shopkeepers hung signs in their windows like this one, in English, at a restaurant:
THIS SHOP DOES NOT RECEIVE THE JAPANESE, THE PHILIPPINES, THE VIETNAMESE AND DOG.

In this climate, expressing doubts about the nationalist cause was dangerous. When the economist Mao Yushi, who was eighty-four years old, questioned why the government was spending taxpayer dollars to defend specks of land that produce “no GDP, no tax revenues,” he was barraged with late-night phone calls and hecklers who called him a “traitor.” A leftist website made a gallery of “Slaves to the West”—a lineup of scholars and journalists, including the editor Hu Shuli and the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, each depicted with a noose around the neck, above the caption
AS LONG AS CHINA IS SAFE, THE SLAVES TO THE WEST WILL BE SAFE; WHEN CHINA IS IN TROUBLE, WE'LL GO STRAIGHT TO THEIR HOMES AND SETTLE THE SCORE.

Another demonstration was scheduled to be held outside the Japanese embassy in Beijing, and I rode my bike across town. This time, Chinese police were ready. Paramilitary troops in camouflage and officers in blue uniforms far outnumbered the protesters. The architecture of the Japanese embassy reflected its grim relationship with the host country. It was an embassy designed to be pelted: a six-story gray fortress set back from the road, with windows shielded by steel grates.

Compared to the riots days earlier, however, this was more like a parade. The police allowed the demonstrators to throw water bottles and trash at the embassy gate before ushering them on. As I moved along the road in the surge of protesters, I was struck by how hard the Chinese government was straining to remind the protesters that they were on the same side. I heard the recorded voice of a woman, and it took me a moment to realize that it wasn't coming from the protesters and it wasn't directed at the Japanese. It was a police megaphone appealing for public support:

We share your feelings. The government's position is clear: It will not tolerate the violation of our national sovereignty. We should support our government, express our patriotic sentiments in a legal, orderly, and rational fashion. We should obey the laws and regulations, and not adopt extreme behavior, or disturb the social order. Please work with us, and obey the instructions of the police.

Up close, among the men and women on the street, Chinese nationalism looked less like an ideology than another way to find meaning in the boom years. My friend Lu Han, a writer and translator who had no interest in the anti-Japan demonstrations, sensed why others were attracted. She told me, “Growing up in China, there are very few chances for you to feel like that—to be lifted spiritually, to be working on something bigger than yourself, more important than your immediate, ordinary life circle.” Nationalism, in that sense, was a kind of religion, and people placed their faith in it just as they did in Confucianism or Christianity or the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The newspaper editor Li Datong told me he believed that the fury of China's young nationalists arose from their “accumulated desire for expression—like a flood that suddenly races into a breach.” Because a flood moves in whatever direction it chooses, the young conservatives were, to China's political leaders, an unnerving new force.

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The outburst of popular nationalism left Tang Jie conflicted. He was pleased to see the sentiment out in the open, but he was repulsed by the violence; it was not only morally wrong, he thought, but counterproductive. He was eager to draw a distinction between his beliefs and the populist rage. “The young people here are more intellectual than those who go out into the street carrying banners,” he told me when I visited him at his headquarters.

It had a roomful of cubicles and a glass-walled office, where we sank into a pair of dusty couches. For all his travels and all the Party's scandals and all his study of Western thought, his conservatism was undimmed. He was eager to make a case for the Chinese political system that it was struggling to make for itself. “In Beijing there are more than ten million commuters crossing the city every day, along with tens of thousands of trucks bringing in food, and bringing out incredible amounts of garbage. When you put all these problems together, it's impossible to do it without a powerful government,” he said, adding, “We must understand ourselves. We mustn't ignore what's special about us. In sixty years we have become the second-largest economy in the world—maybe the first, depending on how you measure it—and in that that time, we never colonized anyone.”

As we talked, he said something that startled me: Tang felt that public opinion was turning against him. He considered the nationalist protests to be unfocused and fleeting; he was increasingly convinced that the majority in China did not agree with him. “Everything is headed in one direction: the American direction,” he said. “It's the mainstream view, and you're not supposed to question it. People say everything has to be more like the United States in economics, law, journalism. That's the conventional wisdom.” To my surprise, Tang had come to believe that most people in the government saw it that way, too, even if they didn't voice it. “Ever since opening up became national policy, most government officials are pro-reform, and it's very difficult for them to accept alternative views.”

A younger, serious man came in and joined our conversation. His name was Li Yuqiang; he had started as Tang's assistant and moved up to running the site day to day. He, too, was a graduate of a top school—Peking University, where he had studied psychology and software development—and as we talked, he picked up on Tang Jie's argument about the shift in ideology. “The mainstream of Chinese media is liberal; that is common knowledge,” Li said, and he ticked off a list of objectives he didn't agree with: “independent legal system, market economy, small government.” The younger man saw things in harsher, more confrontational terms. “These people who control the media say they are liberal, but they act like authoritarians. Alternative views are blocked.” For a second, I thought he was making a joke, but he wasn't: the rising generation of Chinese nationalists was earnestly complaining about the lack of free expression.

In China, one of the most difficult things to do was to gauge public opinion. Polls provided some insight, but only up to a point, because anyone who spent much time in China was reminded that asking citizens of an authoritarian country for their views on politics, over the phone, did not produce candid answers. Viewed from afar, the bursts of nationalism, the occasional violence, could make it appear as if China were boiling with patriotic anger. But, up close, it was not, and it was difficult to know how many people really shared that sentiment. The Party had always prided itself on articulating the “central melody” of Chinese life, but as the years passed, the Party's rendition of that melody seemed increasingly out of tune with the cacophony and improvisation striking up all around it. It was impossible to know what “most Chinese” believed because the state media and the political system were designed not to amplify public opinion but to impose a shape upon it. Nationalism, like any other note in the melody, might surge to the surface at one moment and fade into the background at another, but was it the mainstream view? The nationalists didn't think so.

The shutdown of Tang's site for five months had taken a heavy toll. Tang had failed to find another investor willing to back him. “The money is almost gone,” he said. He was having second thoughts about a career in nationalism. He'd started talking to people about getting back into teaching. A university in his wife's hometown, Chongqing, had a part-time opening in the philosophy department, and he took it, dividing his time between teaching Plato's
Republic
in Chongqing and running a nationalist website in Beijing. “We're worried,” he said after a while. “I'll meet someone next week who might fund us, but I doubt he'll give money to a project that has no guaranteed return.” Tang the scholar had decided he wasn't very good at the business side of things. “It's not me,” he said.

It was getting late. We went back into the video studio with the library backdrop to take a snapshot together. For all his vitriol, I sometimes sensed that Tang Jie envied certain things about the West. He said to me, “The first time I met you, I asked you what is the most fundamental value in America, and you said something like liberty. I thought, wow, this country has a state religion, and it has educated its citizens so well that everyone believes it.” It was an idealized image, but I took his point. He went on, “You Americans have this basic belief—a common value—but for China, this is still a problem. There are different beliefs—liberal and traditional, Maoism, all sorts of things.” I asked how he would describe his own beliefs, and he answered in geopolitical terms. “For several hundred years we've been a prisoner of this Western-centric view, which divided the world into two camps: West and East, democracy and authoritarianism, light and dark. Everything light belonged to the West, and everything dark belonged to the East. This worldview should be overturned.” That was as close as he came to faith. “This is my revolution,” he said.

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As the protests continued that fall, some people pushed back against nationalism. Li Chengpeng, a liberal writer with tens of millions of social media followers, wrote that he'd been a “typical Chinese patriot” until the earthquake in Sichuan. “Patriotism is not about bullying mothers of children who died in the earthquake, while calling for people to stand up to the foreign bullies of our motherland,” Li wrote. “[It] is about speaking more truth about dignity for the Chinese people.” A popular essay by a Nanjing author pointed out that China was defending sacred territory in the East China Sea while migrant laborers were unable to send their children to school in Beijing. “If Chinese kids can't even go to school in China, what use is more territory?” it asked. There were jokes going around about the “fifty-centers,” who could always find a way to defend the Party. If a fifty-center heard someone say, “This egg tastes terrible,” he would answer, “How about you try to lay an egg and see how it tastes?”

It was a surprisingly difficult time to be a true believer. The defector Lin Yifu had wrapped up his term at the World Bank that June and returned to Beijing. He was proud of his tenure; he had nudged the Bank to learn from China's experience, to put more emphasis on infrastructure and industrial policy, and he received a respectful send-off. But, privately, he and the Bank parted ways with mutual mixed feelings. He had arrived as an outsider, and he left as one, still; when he encountered critics inside the Bank who doubted his faith in governments to make the best investment decisions, he avoided debates. He had no chemistry with Robert Zoellick, the president who had recruited him. Lin took to saying that he was not only the first chief economist from a developing country, but also the first “to have a good understanding of developing countries.”

During his years away, Lin had grown only more evangelical about China's economic approach, but when he returned to Beijing, that view put him out of step with many of his peers. For all China's achievements, it still had a per capita income somewhere between Turkmenistan's and Namibia's. China had succeeded in industrializing a very poor, rural country, but economists were divided over how long that could continue. James Chanos, a hedge fund manager who had predicted the fall of Enron, argued that the Chinese economy rested on a bubble that was “Dubai times a thousand.” By 2011 nearly 70 percent of the nation's gross domestic product was going to infrastructure and real estate, a level that no other big country had ever approximated in modern times. Japan, even at the peak of its boom in the 1980s, reached barely half that level. In the rush to invest, companies controlled by provincial and local authorities took out a disproportionately large share of the new loans. Between 2006 and 2010, local authorities opened up for development more than eight thousand square miles of rural land—an area the size of New Jersey. Urbanization was an important part of China's economic success, but it came with costly side effects, including pollution and growing anger over the seizure of valuable land. Local governments' debts ballooned to over a fifth of China's GDP in 2011. The central government would not allow them to issue their own debt, so they raised cash by selling land they already owned or by offering low prices to farmers (the source of many of China's protests).

In Beijing, one of Lin Yifu's former students, a professor named Yao Yang, published a view of China's political and economic future that was strikingly at odds with his mentor's. Yao pointed to the rise of crony capitalism and the gap between rich and poor as evidence that China's economic model had run up against the limit of what was possible without permitting greater political openness “to balance the demands of different social groups.” He cited control of the Internet and labor unions, and unsafe working conditions. “Chinese citizens will not remain silent in the face of these infringements, and their discontent will inevitably lead to periodic resistance,” he warned. “Before long, some form of explicit political transition that allows ordinary citizens to take part in the political process will be necessary.” The article circulated fast; it seemed to capture a mounting frustration among Chinese intellectuals that the state's reluctance to share power had brought reforms to a standstill.