Age of Ambition (9 page)

Western companies raced to add choices they hoped would appeal to Chinese tastes. Wrigley created cucumber-mint-flavored gum; Häagen-Dazs sold mooncakes. Not every angle succeeded: Kraft tried, and failed, to make a Ritz cracker flavored with fish boiled in spicy Sichuan peppercorn oil. The toy company Mattel opened a six-story Barbie megastore in downtown Shanghai, with a spa and a cocktail bar—only to discover that Chinese parents did not approve of Barbie's study habits. Home Depot found that the last thing the sons and daughters of farmers and laborers wanted was DIY.

Some of the choices that Chinese consumers made did not translate easily to outsiders. A brand of stylish eyeglass frames appeared on the market, named “Helen Keller.” Reporters asked the company why it had chosen to advertise its eyeglasses with the world's most famous blind person. The company replied that Chinese schools teach the story of Helen Keller primarily as an icon of fortitude, and sure enough, sales of the frames were brisk. Helen Keller glasses were selling under the slogan “You see the world, and the world sees you.”

*   *   *

Money and love had always been linked more explicitly in China than in the West, but the finances were simpler when almost everyone was broke. By tradition, a Chinese bride's parents paid a dowry, and the groom's parents paid a larger sum, known as the “bride wealth.” Under Mao, this exchange was usually made in grain, but in the 1980s, couples came to expect “three rounds and a sound”: a bicycle, a wristwatch, a sewing machine, and a radio. Or, in some cases, “thirty legs”: a bed, a table, and a set of chairs. In much of China, the custom persisted (in cash), but the financial stakes were growing.

The greatest shock to the marriage tradition came from an unlikely source: in 1997 the State Council restored the right for people to buy and sell their homes. Under socialism, employers had assigned city workers to indistinguishable concrete housing blocks. When the government restored the market, Chinese bureaucrats didn't even have an official translation for the word
mortgage
. Before long, the world's largest accumulation of real estate wealth was under way.

Traditionally, young Chinese couples moved in with the groom's parents, but by the twenty-first century less than half of them stayed very long, and the economists Shang-Jin Wei and Xiaobo Zhang discovered that parents with sons were building ever larger and more expensive houses for their offspring, to attract better matches—a real estate phenomenon that became known as the “mother-in-law syndrome.” Newspapers encouraged it with headlines such as
A HOUSE IS MAN'S DIGNITY
. In some villages, a real estate arms race began, as families sought to outdo one another by building extra floors, which sat empty until they could afford to furnish them. Between 2003 and 2011, home prices in Beijing, Shanghai, and other big cities rose by up to 800 percent.

The age of ambition sorted people not by their pasts, but by their futures. In the socialist era, the Chinese had evaluated the “political reliability” of parents and ancestors, but now men and women evaluated each other based on their potential, especially their earning potential. But it was becoming clear that, in the new marriage market, general expectations and reality did not coincide: only 10 percent of the men in Gong's dating service owned a home, but in an outside survey, nearly 70 percent of the women polled said they would not marry a man without one. The precise details of housing were so central to the prospect of romance that I was asked to choose from the following options:

1. I do not own a home.

2. I will buy a home when necessary.

3. I already own a home.

4. I rent with others.

5. I rent alone.

6. I live with my parents.

7. I live with friends and relatives.

8. I live in the dorm of my work unit.

Of all the questions, this was the most important. “If you're a man who rents or shares a place with roommates, you're almost out of the game from the beginning,” Gong told me. Men who had a good answer did not bother with subtlety: in their singles ads, they adopted a new phrase:
chefang jibei
, which meant “car-and-home-equipped.”

The pressure to keep up created a kind of language inflation. A few years earlier, a “triple without” was a migrant worker without shelter, a job, or a source of income. By the time I started hanging around Gong Haiyan's office, a “triple without” referred to a man without his own house, car, or nest egg. If a triple without got married, it was called a “naked wedding.” In 2011 this was the title of a Chinese miniseries about a privileged young bride who married her working-class husband over the objections of her parents, and moved in with his family. It became the most popular show in China. If it had been a novel in the 1930s, it would have been listed under Tragic Love: by the series' end, the couple had divorced. Another popular program was a “choice show” called
If You Are the One
, in which single young men and women evaluated each other. On screen, pop-up bubbles indicated if the man was car-and-home-equipped. In one episode, a Triple Without offered a woman a ride on his bicycle, but she brushed it off, saying, “I'd rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle.” That line was too much for the censors. They soon restructured the show by adding a matronly cohost who counseled virtue and restraint.

*   *   *

Once or twice a week, Gong's company held singles mixers, and one night I filed into a ballroom in Beijing with three hundred carefully groomed men and women. They had been issued battery-powered blinking lights, in the shape of puckered lips, to be pinned to their clothing. An emcee bounded onstage and summoned the crowd's attention. “Please put your hand over your heart and repeat after me … ‘I swear that I do not come here with any deceptive or ill intent.'”

Twelve women assembled onstage in a game show setup, each holding a red wand with a heart-shaped light on top: on, interested; off, not interested. It was a lineup of accomplished people: engineers, graduate students, and bankers in their late twenties and early thirties.

One by one, men took the stage to be questioned, but in the exchanges, I sensed the gulf of expectation. A barrel-chested bank employee in a cotton sweater attracted considerable interest until he said that he would be stuck in the office six and a half days a week. Next up was a physics professor in a tweed jacket, who generated little excitement by describing his life's ambition as “no marvelous accomplishment, just nothing I'll regret.” Last came a laconic criminal lawyer with a fondness for hiking, who was doing well until he informed the panelists that he would place a heavy emphasis on “obedience.” Lights blinked off. He left the stage alone.

The New Year holiday, days away, loomed like a deadline. That evening, I met a man named Wang Jingbing, a thirty-year-old with a friendly national-character face, who was bracing for the encounter with his family. “They will give me pressure. That's the reason I came here tonight,” he told me as we sat along one wall. After college, Wang had become a salesman, exporting napkins and other paper products. The work had left an imprint on his English vocabulary; when he described a bad date, he would say he'd been “returned.” The singles events baffled his relatives in the countryside. “My sister doesn't agree with my coming here,” he told me. “She said, ‘You'll never find a girl here.'” What did he think? “I have to follow my heart. My sister had a different educational background and life experience, so we have different ideas.”

His sister, who never studied beyond junior high school, still lived in their home village, where she sold soda and noodles out of a storefront. When she was twenty, she married a man she'd been introduced to by relatives; he was from a neighboring village. Wang, by contrast, had studied English at Shandong University and migrated to Beijing for work. By the time we met, he had been in the capital for five years. He was on the verge of climbing out of the working class. As we chatted, I filled out his questionnaire in my mind:
1. A dutiful son … 4. A penny-pinching family man … 14. Gutsy.

Wang had told himself he would attend at least one mixer a week until he found someone. “To tell you the truth, yesterday I was returned by a girl because she said I'm not as tall as she hoped,” he said. I asked him if he agreed with the idea that he should have a house and a car before he marries. “Yes, because a house and a car are the signs of civility,” he said. “A woman marrying a man is partly marrying his house and his car. I'm a renter, so I feel a lot of pressure.” He was quiet for a moment, and said, “But I have potential, you know? In my opinion, to buy a house and a car will take me about five more years. Five more years.”

 

FIVE

NO LONGER A SLAVE

 

When Deng Xiaoping declared that it was time to “let some people get rich first,” he didn't say
which
people. It was up to them to figure it out.

Before that, the Party's first and most enduring target had been the tyranny of class. Mao dismantled four million private businesses, nationalized assets, and flattened society so thoroughly that China's income inequality fell to the lowest level in the socialist world. Students were taught that the bourgeoisie and other “class enemies” were “blood suckers” and “vermin.” The zeal reached its greatest intensity during the Cultural Revolution, when the military went so far as to eliminate rank, until this created chaos on the battlefield and soldiers had to identify one another by the number of pockets on their uniforms. (Officers had two more than enlisted men.) Any effort to improve one's lot was not only pointless but dangerous. The Party banned competitive sports, and athletes who had won medals in the past found themselves accused, retroactively, of “trophy mania”—the crime of pursuing victory instead of mass fitness. People took to saying, “You'll earn less building rockets than you'll earn selling eggs.”

But nowadays one of the running themes in the local papers was the dream to
baishou qijia
, to build a “bare-handed” fortune. Over lunch, I liked to spread out the pages on the kitchen table and read about street food vendors who became fast-food barons and other first-generation tycoons. There was nothing uniquely Chinese about rags-to-riches tales, but they had become central to China's self-image. The Chinese now talked about them the way that Americans mythologized garage start-ups in Silicon Valley. The first to make good on Deng's declaration became known as the
xianfu qunti—
the “Got Rich First Crowd.” Despite the new reverence for bare-handed fortunes, China had spent so many decades railing against landlords and “capitalist roaders” that most of the Got Rich First Crowd chose to remain ciphers. “A man getting famous is like a pig fattening up,” they liked to say, and when
Forbes
published its list of China's richest people in 2002, it illustrated their secrecy with a photograph of men and women wearing paper bags on their heads. Lottery winners were so worried about attention that Chinese newspapers published photos of the winners picking up their oversize checks while disguised in hoods and sunglasses.

For the Communist Party, the return of class presented an opportunity: the Party came to believe that co-opting those with property would buttress it against agitation toward democracy. Officials took to quoting the ancient sage Mencius, who said, “Those with a constant livelihood have a constant heart, those lacking a constant livelihood lack a constant heart.” But relying on prosperity to ensure a “constant heart” posed a problem that would grow into the Chinese Communist Party's essential paradox: How could the heirs of Marx and Lenin, the rulers of the People's Republic, who had risen to power denouncing bourgeois values and inequality, baldly embrace the new moneyed class? How could it retain its ideological claim to rule?

This, however, was a time of self-creation, and so it was for the Party as well. The task fell to the president and general secretary of the Party, Jiang Zemin. At the Party's most important meeting, in 2002, he executed a major rhetorical contortion: he couldn't bring himself to use the term
middle class
, but he declared that, from then on, the Party would dedicate itself to the success of the “New Middle-Income Stratum.” The New Middle-Income Stratum was everywhere, hailed by apparatchiks and enshrined in new slogans. An author at China's Police Academy described the New Middle-Income Stratum as “the moral force behind civilized manners. It is the force necessary to eliminate privilege and curb poverty. It is everything.”

At the same meeting, the Party also made an important change to its constitution: it stopped calling itself a “revolutionary party” and started calling itself the “Party in Power.” China's rulers had altered their reason for being; by becoming the Party in Power, the former rebels who'd spent decades lambasting their enemies as “counterrevolutionaries” turned themselves into such ardent defenders of the status quo that even the word
revolution
was now problematic. The Museum of Revolutionary History, beside Tiananmen Square, lost its name and was absorbed into the National Museum of China. In 2004, the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said, “Unity and stability are really more important than anything else.”

If the change struck ordinary Chinese as hypocritical, they didn't have much choice but to accept it. What's more, people had been so deprived for so long that they had little love for the old dogma. The Party and the people were now facing in opposite directions: Chinese society was becoming more diverse, raucous, and freewheeling, and the Party was becoming more homogenous, buttoned-down, and conservative.

In October 2007, I filed into the Great Hall of the People to watch the opening of the Seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party—the most hallowed event on the political calendar, a week of speeches and ceremonies convened once every five years. Officially, the Congress would decide the leadership of the People's Republic. (In fact, those decisions had been reached already in private.) Onstage, the president and general secretary of the Party, Hu Jintao, stepped to the lectern. Like many of his peers at the top of the Party, he was an engineer by training, a technocrat who had imbibed the belief that “development is the only hard truth.” At sixty-five, he was such a muted, affectless presence that his citizens had nicknamed him Wooden Face. This was only partly his fault: After the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, the Party had dedicated itself to preventing its leaders from developing a cult of personality. It succeeded. When Hu was younger, his official biography had included the fact that he enjoyed ballroom dancing; but once he reached the top of the Party, that detail, the only color about his likes or dislikes, was removed.