Age of Ambition (60 page)

Contemporary cases of corruption, including the downfall of Bo Xilai, are widely covered in Chinese and foreign media. Bloomberg News analyzed and compared the net worth of China's National People's Congress to that of U.S. officials. Details on corruption in the People's Liberation Army were reported by John Garnaut in “Rotting from Within: Investigating the Massive Corruption of the Chinese Military,”
Foreign Policy
, April 16, 2012. Mao Yushi described the practice of gift giving at the National Development and Reform Commission on his Weibo account,
http://weibo.com/1235457821/yibTdoQsS
, and it was first reported by Shanghaiist.

For more on the history and evolution of corruption in China, I relied on Melanie Manion,
Corruption by Design: Building Clean Government in Mainland China and Hong Kong
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 114–15; Paolo Mauro, “Corruption and Growth,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
111, no. 3 (1995): 681–712; Minxin Pei,
China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Minxin Pei, “Corruption Threatens China's Future,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Policy Brief no. 55 (2007); and Andrew Wedeman,
Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

18. THE HARD TRUTH

To understand the changes in opportunity and mobility in China, I relied on many studies, including Cathy Honge Gong, Andrew Leigh, and Xin Meng, “Intergenerational Income Mobility in Urban China,” Discussion Paper no. 140, National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, University of Canberra, 2010; James J. Heckman and Junjian Yi, “Human Capital, Economic Growth, and Inequality in China,” NBER Working Paper no. 18100, May 2012; John Knight, “Inequality in China: An Overview,” World Bank, 2013; Yingqiang Zhang and Tor Eriksson, “Inequality of Opportunity and Income Inequality in Nine Chinese Provinces, 1989–2006,”
China Economic Review
21, no. 4 (2010): 607–16. I am thankful for Martin Whyte's advice and judgment on this subject.

19. THE SPIRITUAL VOID

For background on faith in China before and after 1949, including the lost temples of Beijing, Mao's cult of personality, and the violence that stemmed from it, I relied on Geremie Barmé,
Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader
(Armonk, NY, and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996); Jasper Becker,
City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer,
The Religious Question in Modern China
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Melissa Schrift,
Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge: The Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult
(New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Daniel Leese,
The Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Alfreda Murck,
Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution
(Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess, 2013).

The translation of Confucius—“when the prince is prince”—is from James Legge. For discussion of “National Studies” and the debates around the Confucian revival, I benefited from several essays in “The National Learning Revival,”
China Perspectives
2011/1, published by the French Center for Research on Contemporary China.

I owe a debt to Lao She's son, Shu Yi, who invited me to his home and discussed his father's death, and to the scholar Fu Guangming, whose oral history of the death of Lao She was invaluable.

20. PASSING BY

The story of Little Yueyue was reconstructed through interviews, security camera footage, and accounts in the Chinese press. I am especially grateful to Li Wangdong, the attorney for driver Hu Jun, who shared with me his investigative notes and photographs. The anthropologist Zhou Runan provided his detailed report on the social dynamics and history of Hardware City, and his reflections on the case.

For analysis of Good Samaritanism in China, see Yunxiang Yan, “The Good Samaritan's New Trouble: A Study of the Changing Moral Landscape in Contemporary China,”
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale
17, no. 1 (February 2009): 19–24.

In revisiting the Kitty Genovese case, I received help from Kevin Cook, the author of
Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2014). I also relied upon Rachel Manning, Mark Levine, and Alan Collins, “The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping: The Parable of the 38 Witnesses,”
American Psychologist
, September 2007: 555–62.

21. SOULCRAFT

In China, allowing a reporter into communities of faith is not without risk. I was fortunate to have those opportunities during my work for the
Chicago Tribune
and for
The New Yorker
. For background, in addition to Goossaert and Palmer's
The Religious Question in Modern China
, I also relied upon Fenggang Yang,
Religion in China: Survival and Revival Under Communist Rule
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

22. CULTURE WARS

Murong Xuecun's “Open Letter to a Nameless Censor” was first posted to the Chinese edition of
The New York Times
; the English version is by an anonymous translator. The conflict between Han Han and Fang Zhouzi was widely covered by Chinese journalists and bloggers. Fang's comments that were not from my interview are mostly available on his site:
http://fangzhouzi.blog.hexun.com/
. A valuable analysis by Joel Martinsen was published at
www.danwei.com/blog-fight-of-the-month-han-han-the-novelist-versus-fang-zhouzi-the-fraud-buster/
.

23. TRUE BELIEVERS

Tang Jie's site, Dujiawang, hosted most of his commentary and videos. I interviewed several World Bank employees familiar with Lin's tenure at the bank. Yao Yang's article on China's economic future was published in
Foreign Affairs
in February 2010 and was titled “The End of the Beijing Consensus: Can China's Model of Authoritarian Growth Survive?” Chen Yunying described her hope that her husband could return to Taiwan in answer to questions from the Taiwan press in March 2012.

24. BREAKING OUT

I am indebted to He Peirong and several U.S. officials involved in the events who shared their perspectives on Chen's escape from Dongshigu Village. Other details in this account draw on Chen's interviews with Spiegel Online and iSUN AFFAIRS, and reports by Human Rights in China, Global Voices, and China Digital Times.

For background on the secrecy surrounding coal mine deaths, see Tu Jianjun, “Coal Mining Safety: China's Achilles' Heel,”
China Security
3, no. 2 (2007): 36–53.

EPILOGUE

The detention of Zhai Xiaobing was reported by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. A copy of the prohibition against Ping-Pong balls and balloons was first posted on Weibo by the user Luhuahua. Liu Zhijun's defense attorney Qian Lieyang agreed to an interview that clarified some of the charges in the case. Many of Qi Xiangfu's poems and his memoir are available at several sites, including
http://hi.baidu.com/abc87614332
.

For background on poll results and satisfaction levels, see Richard A. Easterlin, Robson Morgan, Malgorzata Switek, and Fei Wang, “China's Life Satisfaction, 1990–2010,”
PNAS Early Edition
, April 6, 2012.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

None of my grandparents lived to see this book, but they are responsible for its inception. My father's parents, Joseph and Marta Osnos, fled Warsaw when Hitler invaded in 1939. They traveled through Romania, Turkey, Iraq, and India before landing in New York and starting over. (My father, Peter, was born on the way, in Mumbai.) Joseph Osnos went into the air-conditioning business; Marta was a biochemist. I was given a middle name, Richard, from a cousin I never knew—Jan Ryszard—who died as a navigator in the Polish squadron of Britain's Royal Air Force. On my mother's side, my grandfather, Albert Sherer, was an American diplomat, posted with his wife, Carroll, to the Eastern bloc. In Budapest in 1951, the Soviet-backed government accused Albert of spying and gave the family twenty-four hours to leave the country.
The
Chicago Daily News
ran the story under the headline
REDS BOOT YANKS
. Those experiences lingered in our household memory, and I grew up wondering about the unrecorded experiences of life under authoritarianism.

In China, I am indebted, above all, to the people whose lives I have followed in these pages. Revealing too much of oneself—the vulnerabilities, the passions, the private choices—can be perilous in China. But these men and women welcomed me back, year after year, even when it was difficult for them to imagine that there was more to ask. There were, of course, many others in China, some in government, others in remote villages, who need to remain anonymous, and I thank them for the courage to speak to me.

One of the great pleasures of these years has been the companionship of talented friends who work on China: Andrew Andreasen, Stephen Angle, Michael Anti, Angie Baecker, Bill Bishop, Tania Branigan, Chris Buckley, Laurie Burkitt, Cao Haili, Leslie Chang, Clifford Coonan, Edith Coron, Max Duncan, Simon Elegant, Leta Hong Fincher, Jaime Florcruz, Peter Ford, Michael Forsythe, Paul French, Alison Friedman, John Garnaut, John Giszczak, Tom Gold, Jeremy Goldkorn, Jonah Greenberg, Elizabeth Haenle, Paul Haenle, Peter Hessler, Isabelle Holden, John Holden, Lucy Hornby, Andrew Jacobs, Ian Johnson, Joseph Kahn, Tom Kellogg, Alison Klayman, Elizabeth Knup, Arthur Kroeber, Kaiser Kuo, Christina Larson, Tom Lasseter, Dan Levin, Louisa Lim, Phil Lisio, Julia Lovell, H.S. Liu, Jo Lusby.

Mary Kay Magistad, Mark MacKinnon, Simon Montlake, Richard McGregor, Andrew Meyer, Paul Mooney, Allison Moore, David Murphy, Jeremy Page, Jane Perlez, Nick Platt, Sheila Platt, John Pomfret, Qin Liwen, Simon Rabinovitch, April Rabkin, Austin Ramzy, Chris Reynolds, Tiff Roberts, Andy Rothman, Gilles Sabrie, Michael Schuman, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, Susan Shirk, Karen Smith, Kumi Smith, Megan Stack, Anne Stevenson-Yang, Anya Stiglitz, Joseph Stiglitz, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, Philip Tinari, Wang Wei, Joerg Wuttke, Lambert Yam, Eunice Yoon, Kunkun Yu, Jianying Zha, Zhang Lijia, Mei Zhang, and Yuan Li. The late Richard Baum, of UCLA, founded ChinaPol as a resource for the China community, and made us all smarter.

For counsel and expertise, I am especially grateful to Geremie Barmé, Nicholas Bequelin, Ira Belkin, Annping Chin, Don Clarke, Jerome Cohen, Paul Gewirtz, Huang Yasheng, Bill Kirby, Roderick MacFarquhar, Victor Mair, David Moser, Barry Naughton, Minxin Pei, Victor Shih, Xiaofei Tian, Sophie Volpp, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom.

It is hard to imagine life in Beijing without our dearest: Amy Ansfield, Jonathan Ansfield, Hannah Beech, Fannie Chen, Eleanor Connolly, John Delury, Barbara Demick, Michael Donohue, Gady Epstein, Ed Gargan, Deb Fallows, James Fallows, Michelle Garnaut, Jorge Guajardo, Susan Jakes, Jonathan Landreth, Brook Larmer, Dune Lawrence, Woo Lee, Leo Lewis, Jen Lin-Liu, Melinda Liu, Jane Macartney, James McGregor, Alexa Olesen, Philip Pan, Hervé Pauze, Hyeon-Ju Rho, Lisa Robins, Jeff Prescott, Paola Sada, Sarah Schafer, Baifang Schell, Orville Schell, Carla Snyder, Nick Snyder, Craig Simons, Comino Tamura, Tang Di, Alistair Thornton, Tini Tran, Alex Travelli, Alex Wang, Alan Wheatley, Edward Wong, Zhang Xiaoguang.

I extend thanks to the Overseas Press Club and the Asia Society for their support of the work of foreign correspondents, including mine. I owe a special thanks to Herbert Allen III for his support and curiosity; in the years since he first invited me to discuss China, I have learned more from his community than I have provided.

In the course of this book, I received invaluable help at various times from terrific young journalists and researchers, including Gareth Collins, Devin Corrigan, Jacob Fromer, Gu Yongqiang, Houming Jiang, Jordan Lee, Faye Li, Max Klein, Wendy Qian, Amy Qin, Gary Wang, Debby Wu, Xu Wan, and Yang Xiao. They did research, transcriptions, and translations. But nobody spent more time with these subjects, and with me, than Lu Han, and I am indebted to her for her expertise and cool, fair-minded judgment.

Portions of this book draw on reporting I did at the
Chicago Tribune
, where I arrived as a summer intern and stayed for nine extraordinary years, mostly overseas. For sending me abroad, and for friendship, I am grateful to Lisa Anderson, George de Lama, Ann Marie Lipinski, Kerry Luft, Tim McNulty, Paul Salopek, Jim O'Shea, and Howard Tyner.

At
The New Yorker
, my professional home for the last six years, David Remnick, Dorothy Wickenden, and John Bennet made me a writer; their own extraordinary skills and judgment set the standard. Peter Canby's fact-checkers, especially Jiangyan Fan, improve and protect us. Pam McCarthy makes it all possible. Nick Thompson and Amy Davidson provided a place to write and think even when I was immersed in the book. John is an editor with perfect pitch. David and Dorothy, assisted by Anna Altman, read the manuscript when I most needed their eyes. Other friends who read along the way, including Barbara Demick, Gady Epstein, Ian Johnson, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom will see their smart observations reflected throughout.

Before I went to China, I visited Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and he offered a piece of advice: to find the right book, be patient. When I found the book, he replied with a gift: the chance to work with the brilliant Eric Chinski, who is everything an author could want: meticulous, analytical, tireless, and funny. At FSG, I am grateful as well for the creativity and care of Nayon Cho, Gabriella Doob, Debra Helfand, Chris Peterson, Jeff Seroy, and Sarita Varma.