Age of Ambition (56 page)

Most difficult, perhaps, will be satisfying the pursuit of faith. China is in an ideological stalemate; no political wing can claim to be in the ascendance. There will be more outbursts of nationalism, and new demagogues to play on the feelings of humiliation, but that sentiment could harm the Party more than it fortifies it. By setting China against “universal values,” the Party is ensuring that it will face more snubs, more protests, more reminders of Liu Xiaobo's empty chair. Yet it is raising its people to believe that humiliation, and those responsible for it, must not be tolerated.

Thirty years after China embarked on its fitful embrace of the free market, it has no single unifying doctrine—no “central melody”—and there is nothing predestined about what kind of country it is becoming. When the president unveiled the Chinese Dream, he intended it to be unifying, but instead, his people interpreted it as Chinese “Dreams”—plural. I bumped into my neighbor the widow Jin Baozhu, who'd been sued by my landlord for stealing sunlight. Jin had seen the new slogan on the news, and she told me, “What's my Chinese Dream? To live a few more years in my house.”

Soon the censors were racing to strike down photos of people holding handwritten signs reading,
MY CHINESE DREAM IS JUSTICE AND FAIRNESS
and
MY CHINESE DREAM IS THAT XI JINPING PROTECTS MY PERSONAL SAFETY AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
. When a website run by the
People's Daily
conducted a “Chinese Dream” survey, asking whether people supported one-party rule and believed in socialism, 80 percent of the three thousand respondents replied “no” to both questions, and the survey was abruptly withdrawn. People used to say that their censored work had been “harmonized.” Now they said it had been “dreamed away.”

*   *   *

Shortly after Xi took office, he acknowledged what many had come to believe: unless the Party beat back the tide of corruption, that corruption would “inevitably lead the Party and the nation to perish.” He compared it to “worms breeding in decaying matter,” and he vowed to punish not only low-ranking “flies” but also powerful “tigers.” He called on his comrades to be “diligent and thrifty,” and when Xi took his first official trip, state television reported that he checked into a “normal suite” and dined not at a banquet, but at a buffet—a revelation so radical in Chinese political culture that the word
buffet
took on metaphysical significance. The state news service ran a banner headline:
XI JINPING VISITS POOR FAMILIES IN HEBEI: DINNER IS JUST FOUR DISHES AND ONE SOUP, NO ALCOHOL
.

Xi called for officials to forgo their motorcades, fresh-cut flowers, and long-winded speeches. Local bureaucrats raced to enshrine his orders into new rules, but this only, unwittingly, illuminated the prior state of affairs: The city of Yinchuan declared that officials must no longer “accept money in envelopes while celebrating weddings, moving into new houses, or during their children's enrollment in school.” The “Four Dishes and One Soup” campaign was followed by “Operation Empty Plate,” a campaign to encourage officials to finish what they ordered. It didn't take long for the abrupt drop-off in gluttony to affect the economy: sales of shark fin (de rigueur for banquets) sank more than 70 percent; casinos in Macau recorded a drop in VIPs, and Swiss watch exports dropped by a quarter from the year before. Luxury goods makers mourned.

Wang Qishan, the Party warhorse who had been named the president's new anticorruption czar, was trained as a historian, and he told his peers to read Alexis de Tocqueville's
The Ancien Régime and the Revolution
. When word got out, it became a best seller, and Chinese readers saw much that they recognized in the tale of indulgent aristocrats, a frustrated merchant class, and a government led by rulers who assumed the middle class would be its backbone of support right up until the moment it helped deprive the king of his head. Tocqueville wrote, “Though it took the world by surprise, it was the inevitable outcome of a long period of gestation.” Wang never specified exactly what message he wanted people to draw from the book, though discussion gravitated to Tocqueville's observation that a nation is not unstable when it's poor but, rather, when “it suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure.”

To show its commitment to fighting corruption, the government put the railway boss Liu Zhijun on trial in June 2013. At first, the stagecraft went smoothly. The trial took less than four hours, and Great Leap Liu played his part: he wept, he confessed, and he even found a way to plug the president's new slogan, saying that temptation had distracted him from advancing the goal of the Chinese Dream. To avoid gratuitous discussion of cronyism and graft, prosecutors charged him modestly: abuse of power and taking only $10.6 million in bribes. But when he was given a “suspended death sentence,” which would likely be commuted to a prison term of perhaps thirteen years, people called that a whitewash. The
South China Morning Post
asked, “How was he allowed to climb up and carry on for so long? Who were his protectors in the leadership and how much money did they receive? Those are the interesting questions anti-graft investigators have never bothered to explore.” To ensure that nobody investigated on their own, the Central Propaganda Department put an end to the discussion. “The Liu Zhijun case is now closed,” it told editors. “Media coverage must use only the Xinhua story. Do not produce detailed reports, do not comment, and do not sensationalize.”

Great Leap Liu had parting words of his own; he gave his lawyer a message to convey to his daughter: “No matter what you do—stay out of politics.” It was a tough business, and it was about to get tougher. Xi Jinping confronted a political problem that his predecessors had not: in the era of cynicism and information, Xi was not elected, but he had to figure out a way to be liked. Chairman Mao once compared his comrades to the fish and the public to the water: “The fish can't survive without the water,” Mao said. But now, without ideology, the legitimacy of the Chinese government rested evermore on its satisfying and pleasing the public.

By some essential measures—eliminating hunger, illiteracy, and medical neglect—the public was more satisfied than in most countries. When sociologist Martin Whyte of Harvard first asked people, in 2004, if they were receiving coverage under public medical insurance plans, only 15 percent of those in the countryside said yes; when he asked again in 2009, that share had grown to 90 percent. People still faced wide gaps in coverage, and their insurance provided only the most basic care, but the progress was clear.

Ranking China's approval ratings alongside those of other governments was always flattering for the Party: in May 2013, the Chinese media reported that the Pew Research Center had found that 88 percent of the Chinese it polled were feeling good about the economy—a higher share than any of the countries it polled. But there was more to that story. When a team led by Richard Easterlin, a professor of economics at the University of Southern California, analyzed five long-term studies conducted in China over two decades, the results showed “no evidence that the Chinese people are, on average, any happier … If anything, they are less satisfied than in 1990, and the burden of decreasing satisfaction has fallen hardest on the bottom third of the population in wealth. Satisfaction among Chinese in even the upper third has risen only moderately.” Overall, they found, “economic growth is not enough; job security and a social safety net are also critical to people's happiness.” When polls reported, as they did in 2013, that 93 percent of the Chinese “believed their country's best days lay ahead of them,” the results said less about satisfaction than about expectation. “Hope is like a path in the countryside,” Lu Xun had said. “Originally there was no path, but once people begin to pass, a way appears.”

By fixating on corruption, the president was gambling that if the Party declared war on its own iniquity, the public would focus more on the war than on the iniquity. It was risky: for decades, Party leaders had said, “Fight corruption too little and you'll destroy the country. Fight it too much and you'll destroy the Party.” The anticorruption campaign was immediately popular. New grassroots websites such as I Made a Bribe let people report whoever had asked them for baksheesh. Xu Zhiyong, a lawyer who had previously served in Beijing's city legislature, organized a petition calling for high officials to disclose their wealth, and his work attracted several thousand supporters to what he called a New Citizens' Movement.

Soon, the Party grew uneasy with this enthusiasm. My phone buzzed with a notice from the Department:

When reporting on officials suspected of graft or bribery, or those who have become degenerate, strictly adhere to information from the authorities. Do not speculate, do not exaggerate, do not investigate, and do not quote from things on the Internet.

By summer, the government had seen enough; it shut down I Made a Bribe and detained nearly a hundred people who had embraced the campaign to clean up. Among them was Xu Zhiyong, who was detained and accused of “gathering people to disrupt social order.” When people stood up on Xu's behalf, they, too, were arrested; an investor named Wang Gongquan, who had made billions in venture capital, organized a petition for Xu's release but was arrested on charges of disturbing public order. Wang's bare-handed fortune and outspoken comments had attracted a large following online, but the authorities were especially uneasy when plutocrats linked up with activists or took an interest in politics.

In September the government adopted a novel approach to taming the unruly power of the Web: the Supreme People's Court issued a rule stating that any “false defamatory” comment viewed five thousand times, or forwarded five hundred times, could result in a prison sentence of up to three years. Now that the state was struggling to prevent people from speaking out, it would try to prevent them from repeating what they heard. In a speech, Lu Wei, the director of the State Internet Information Office, declared “freedom without order does not exist.” In the months that followed, discussions unfolding on Weibo became less provocative, the number of users declined, and people searched for safer platforms.

The official campaign against corruption had its limits. Instead of splurging in public, some government departments moved their banquets in-house by hiring the cooks from luxury hotels. An unofficial new slogan took root: “Eat Quietly, Take Gently, Play Secretly.”

*   *   *

The Party's long-term objective was no mystery: if Xi Jinping fulfilled his duty to lead the Party until 2023, China would surpass the record held by the Soviet Union as history's most durable one-party state. The Soviets had been in power for seventy-four years, and Chinese leaders openly feared the Soviet fate. Shortly after taking office, Xi Jinping gave a speech to Party members and asked, “Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered. Eventually, all it took was a quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and the great party was gone. In the end nobody was man enough to come out and resist.”

Xi's “man enough” speech opened a new propaganda push: in case people wondered what would happen in the absence of the Party, the
People's Daily
painted a dire picture. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it said, Russians discovered that their “GDP fell by half … their ships aged and rusted and collapsed into heaps of scrap metal; oligarchs emerged to plunder state assets; Russians lined up on the sidewalk to face supply shortages; war veterans had to sell their medals in order to buy bread.” The paper asked what posed a similar threat to China today. Its answer: the Internet. “Every day, microbloggers and their mentors spread rumors, fabricate bad news about society, create an apocalyptic vision of China's demise, and denigrate the socialist system—all to promote the Euro-American model of capitalism and constitutionalism.”

Under Xi Jinping, the Party showed no sign that it saw a way out of its ideological gymnastics. It continued to carry the banner of socialism and the ideas that came with it (Thought Reform, the primacy of the Party in Power), while, on all sides, the Party was confronting unbridled Wild West capitalism and a clamorous market of ideas. If there was an enlightened view within the Party élite about how to resolve this tension, that view was not getting out. Instead, a Party memo leaked in August suggested that at least part of the leadership was getting paranoid. Document No. 9, as it was known, called for eradicating seven subversive strains of thinking. Beginning with “Western constitutional democracy,” the list included press freedom, civic participation, “universal values” of human rights, and what it described as “nihilist” interpretations of the Party's history. The “seven taboos” were delivered to university professors and social media celebrities, who were warned not to cross the line. The
People's Daily
summoned the language of another era and warned that constitutionalism, the call to put the Party under the rule of law, was “a weapon for information and psychological warfare used by the magnates of American monopoly capitalism and their proxies in China to subvert China's socialist system.”

The Party had reasons to be nervous: it was trapped in a predicament of its own creation. It had recommitted itself to the suppression of heretical ideas and the maintenance of stability, but that approach was producing more heresy and instability. The Party was rightly convinced that China's future depended on innovating ideas that would be felt around the globe, and yet it feared the reverse: absorbing “global values” was a threat to its survival.

Chinese leaders were facing a choice: to continue growing, they could adopt a more democratic form of government, as South Korea did in the 1980s, or they could recommit themselves to authoritarianism. Historically, the latter approach was risky. Over the long term, authoritarian states do not grow as reliably as democracies; they are fragile, and they tend to thrive only in the hands of visionary individual leaders. “For every Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, there are many like Mobutu Sese Seko, of the Congo,” according to the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik. In the short term, the Party could succeed at silencing its critics, but in the long term, that was less clear, especially if segments within the Party recalculated their own risks and rewards for loyalty and decided that they had more to gain by siding with the people.