Age of Ambition (57 page)

China, once known for its conformity, was home to fiercely opposing forces: Western-style liberals against nationalist conservatives; incumbent apparatchiks against restless plutocrats; Ant Tribes against Bobos; propagandists against cyber-utopians. The question was whether the tensions would be channeled outward, at the West, or inward, at the state. For the moment, it was difficult to envision a coherent challenge to the Party: though the Chinese middle class was galvanized by many of the issues that had animated its peers at the advent of democracy in Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea (consumer rights, the environment, labor rights, housing prices, free speech), in China there were very few formal organizations in which people could assemble and produce a coordinated alternative to Party rule.

So far, China's middle-class activists generally sought to reform the government, not replace it. In many countries, a more educated and entrepreneurial middle class has demanded greater control over its affairs. China had already passed the threshold into what political scientists call the “zone of democratic transition”—when a country's per capita income exceeds four thousand dollars, and the correlation with regime change rises sharply. By 2013, China was at a level of eight thousand five hundred dollars. The China scholar Minxin Pei examined the twenty-five autocracies with higher levels of income and a resistance to democratization. He found that twenty-one of them were oil states. China was not.

When it became clear that Xi Jinping was placing his bet on fortifying the status quo, another Party aristocrat, Hu Dehua, the sixty-three-year-old son of a previous Party chief, Hu Yaobang, used the protection afforded by his family name and pedigree to openly criticize the president. The real reason the Soviets fell, Hu Dehua argued, was that they couldn't stop themselves from “appropriating public property by graft and bribery.” The Party, Hu said, was indeed facing a crisis. “There are two options: to suppress the opposition or to reach reconciliation with the people,” he said. It had faced this choice once before, in 1989; and in an astonishing acknowledgment of the bloodshed at Tiananmen, he asked, “What does this mean: ‘man enough'? Is driving battle tanks against your own people ‘man enough'?”

*   *   *

From afar, China was often described as marching inexorably toward better days. But inside the country, people were more circumspect. Everything the Chinese had ever gained was by iron and sweat and fire, and they, better than anyone, knew the impermanence of it all—“the unreality of reality,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, “a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.” In my final months in Beijing, that feeling of fragility took hold more deeply. In July 2013, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, wrote in his column in
The New York Times
, “The country's whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits.”

The economy had slowed to its worst performance since 1990, and some of the ingredients in the recipe of its success were running low. The one-child policy had sharply reduced the number of young workers who had once made Chinese factories so inexpensive. Between 2010 and 2030, China's labor force would shrink by sixty-seven million people, the equivalent of the population of France. What's more, China was devoting half its GDP to investment—a higher level than any big country in modern times—but growth was still slowing, which meant that investments in new equipment and other capital weren't yielding as much growth as before. China was probably not at risk of an imminent economic collapse. Beijing had three trillion dollars in foreign exchange reserves, and it restricted the flow of money in and out of the country, so a run on the banks was unlikely. The larger danger was that China's local governments had spent so much on building that their debt had doubled since 2010, to almost 39 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. So, instead of putting money into the hands of consumers, China was spending it on staving off municipal defaults, a scenario that reminded people of Japan-style stagnation.

For those inclined to find reminders of eighties-era Japan—its loose credit and its ice cubes chipped from the Arctic—the moment arrived in July, when developers in the Chinese city of Changsha broke ground for the world's tallest building, Sky City. Economists point to a historic correlation between “world's tallest” debuts and economic slowdowns. There is no cause and effect, but such projects are a sign of easy credit, excessive optimism, and inflated land prices—a pattern that dates to the world's first skyscraper, the Equitable Life Building. Built in New York at the height of the Gilded Age, it was completed in 1873, the start of a five-year slump that became known as the Long Depression, and the pattern repeated in decades to follow.
Skyscraper
magazine, a Shanghai publication that treated tall buildings like celebrities, reported in 2012 that China would finish a new skyscraper every five days for the next three years; China was home to 40 percent of the skyscrapers under construction in the world.

*   *   *

In the summer of 2013, Sarabeth and I packed up our house on the Alley of National Studies. When I told the widow Jin Baozhu that we were moving back to America, she advised caution. Though she had never set foot outside China, she was a close watcher of the news. “America is rich, but it has many guns,” she said. I booked a pair of one-way tickets to Washington, D.C. We handed off our air purifier to friends, and I knew I was getting nostalgic when I began to contemplate life without the weasel in the ceiling. That spring it gave birth to four cubs, and the five of them would climb out onto the roof at dusk to tumble around. I mentioned this to my neighbor Huang Wenyi, who said it was a very auspicious sign for our move back to America.

I was outside in the alley chatting with Huang one day when a man in a fluorescent orange jumpsuit approached us. Around the neighborhood, the men and women in the orange jumpsuits worked for the district sanitation department. Many were migrants from the countryside; they swept the alleys, cleaned the public restrooms, and collected the trash. Some wore straw farmers' hats that cast a shadow across their faces, and the matching uniforms made it difficult for me to keep them straight. I didn't know if there were three of them or thirty. The man who approached us had tousled hair, sun wrinkles around his eyes, and a smile of jumbled teeth. He pointed to a gray flagstone at our feet.

“Can you see the emperor on that rock?” the sweeper asked.

I thought I'd misheard.

“I can see an image of the emperor right there on that rock,” he said.

Huang and I looked at the rock and back at the sweeper. Huang was not interested. “What are you bullshitting about?” he asked. “You have no idea what you're talking about.”

The sweeper smiled. “Are you saying you think I'm not a cultured man?” he asked.

“What I'm saying is that you're not making sense,” Huang said.

The sweeper gave him a look and turned, instead, to face me. “I can look at anything and pull the essence from it,” he said. “It doesn't matter how ordinary something is; in my eyes, it becomes a treasure. Do you believe me?”

Huang was irritated. “Old man,” he said, “I'm trying to have a chat with our foreign friend here. Can you not disturb us and go back to your work?”

The sweeper kept talking—faster now, about ancient Chinese poetry, and the writer Lu Xun—some of it too fast, and the references too obscure, for me to understand. He sounded somewhere between interesting and bonkers. Huang, the proud Beijinger, had had enough, and he poked fun at the man's countryside accent. “Come back after you've learned to speak Beijing dialect,” he said.

Under his breath, the sweeper said, “As long as it's a dialect of human beings, it's legitimate.” But Huang didn't hear him. He'd waved him away and wandered into his house. I introduced myself. The sweeper's name was Qi Xiangfu. He was from Jiangsu Province, and he said he had come to Beijing three months earlier. Why did you come? I asked.

“To explore the realm of culture,” he said grandly.

“What kind of culture?”

“Poetry, mainly. Ancient Chinese poetry. During the Tang dynasty, when poetry was the best, every poet wanted to come to Chang'an,” he said, invoking the name of the ancient capital, the predecessor to Beijing. “I wanted a bigger stage,” Qi told me. “It doesn't matter whether I succeed or fail. I'm here. That's what matters.” His explanation reminded me of “the call.” When I had arrived in China, it felt as if most of the men and women who were hearing that call were young and hungry, people such as Gong Haiyan and Tang Jie. But in the years since then, the call had drawn in many others. Much as the writer Lu Xun had written, “Once people begin to pass, a way appears.”

Qi told me that he competed in poetry competitions. “I won the title of ‘Super King of Chinese Couplets.'” In his spare time, he had taken to hosting an online forum about modern Chinese poetry. “You can go online and read about me,” he said.

That night, I typed his name into the Web, and there he was: Qi Xiangfu, the Super King of Chinese Couplets. In the photo, he was handsomely dressed in a bow tie and a jacket; he looked young and confident. Chinese poems were hard for me to understand, and many of his especially were impenetrably weird. But I appreciated some moments of grace: “Earth knows the lightness of our feet,” he wrote. “We meet each other there / Between heaven and earth.”

To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir, in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers. He wrote that his father died young, and Qi was raised by his uncle. He wrote, of himself, “The first time Qi read Mao's poem ‘The Long March,' he resolved that Mao would be the teacher to show him the way. Later, he studied the poetry of Li Bai, Du Fu, Su Dongpo, Lu You, and others, and he made a promise to himself: Become a master of literature.”

He described the first time he ever presented one of his poems to a large group—it was played on a speaker at a construction site—and he described a bus trip in which he met, as he put it, “a girl who sympathized.” They married, and it “ended his life of vagrancy.” There were hints of trouble in his life—at one point, he wrote a plea for donations, saying, “Alas, Comrade Qi is having a difficult time”—but something in the spirit of his online persona captivated me. So much of it would have been impossible just a few years ago: the journey to the city, the online identity, the interior life so at odds with the image he projected to the world. Anybody who scratched beneath the surface of Chinese life discovered a more complicated conception of the good life that had made room for the pursuit of values and dignity alongside the pursuit of cars and apartments.

After I met the street sweeper Qi Xiangfu, I started bumping into him frequently. We swapped phone numbers, and he would send me a poem, now and then, by text message. He typed out the characters on his phone, with the help of a magnifying glass to aid his vision. Many of his poems were heavy with Communist fervor; others were oracular and strange. But I sympathized with anyone trying to make sense of this place in writing, and I admired his persistence. “I've experienced every kind of coldness and indifference from people,” he told me, “but I've also given myself knowledge, all the way up to the university level. I don't have a diploma. People look down on me when they see me.”

Two weeks before I left China, I bumped into Qi on the street for the last time. He wasn't wearing his uniform; he was in street clothes—a crisp white shirt and a black jacket—on his way to see his daughter, who worked at a restaurant nearby. He had a book under his arm:
Ten Contemporary Authors of Prose
. For the first time, I saw the two personae, online and real-world, in one. What inspires you? I once asked him. “When I write,” he said, “anything becomes material. In life, I must be practical, but when I write, it is up to me.”

 

NOTES ON SOURCES

 

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This book is the result of eight years of reporting and living in China. I moved to Beijing in June 2005 and stayed until July 2013, when my wife, Sarabeth Berman, and I moved to Washington, D.C. The vast majority of my research relied on personal experience and interviews, but I am indebted to a range of scholars, journalists, artists, and authors for their work. In researching and writing this narrative, I conducted hundreds of interviews, read personal journals from my subjects, and obtained hundreds of pages of court documents that explain some of the legal dramas I describe. For news, I relied on foreign and Chinese publications, especially BBC, Bloomberg,
Caijing
,
Caixin
,
The Economic Observer
,
The Economist
,
Financial Times
,
The New York Review of Books
,
The New York Times
,
South China Morning Post
,
The Wall Street Journal
, and
The Washington Post
. It would not have been possible to keep track of the changes in China's Internet culture without several websites that provide translation and analysis of journalism, leaked government documents, and social media commentary: Beijing Cream, China Digital Times, ChinaFile, China Media Project, chinaSMACK, Danwei, GreatFire, Shanghaiist, and Tea Leaf Nation.

PROLOGUE

I am indebted to Yunxiang Yan for sharing with me his recollections of the village of Xiajia, where he was a farmer during the Cultural Revolution and where he later returned, as an anthropologist, for a series of long-term studies. He has documented changes in Xiajia, which is located in Heilongjiang Province, in several detailed works, including
Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949–1999
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and
The Individualization of Chinese Society
(Oxford, UK: Berg, 2009).