The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (9 page)

I had arrived in China ten days after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. Journalists and television crews were still walking the streets that led to Tahrir Square, capturing first-person accounts of how the Egyptian people had risen up and forced an end to a dictator’s rule. The revolution that had begun in Tunisia and then spread to Egypt was now ricocheting
across the Middle East and North Africa. Each day there were new reports of popular rebellions cropping up in Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Jordan, Iran, and elsewhere.

In China, there had been little more than a whisper. A few days earlier, an anonymous call for a Chinese Jasmine Revolution—a reference to the popular rebellion that had begun in Tunisia—had spread over social media sites and the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. It had not gone any further. The Arab world’s revolutions had not inspired marches, rallies, or protests against the Chinese Communist Party. Still, despite being far removed from the epicenter of those protests, Beijing was on edge. The sheer fact that a growing wave of people thousands of miles away were rising up to challenge authoritarian regimes made the Chinese leadership nervous.
In a special meeting the day after Mubarak was toppled, China’s senior leaders discussed the need to tighten control of all media and online discussion of the events in the Middle East. Any mention of “jasmines” was scrubbed from Web sites, chat rooms, and discussion boards. A week later, Hu Jintao brought together top party leaders for a special “study session” in which he reminded them of the need to maintain the country’s stability in the face of rising social demands.

I saw evidence of the regime’s anxiety as soon as I checked into my hotel room. I turned on CNN International as I unpacked my suitcase, listening as the anchor interviewed an analyst on the rebellions that were erupting in Libya and elsewhere. As soon as the anchor asked how China’s leaders might be interpreting events, my television’s screen went dark. Roughly a minute later, the TV screen came back, just in time for me to see the anchor thank her guest for his analysis. The regime did not mind if CNN reported on events in the Arab world, but it did not want anyone speculating about what those events could mean for China.

It was clear what this crackdown could mean for Pu. Scores of lawyers and activists—people he considered colleagues, people he admired—had already been detained, and he fully expected he could be next. The wide scope of the arrests had surprised people inside and outside China and suggested that the regime was looking to redefine the red lines of what was permissible. In the weeks that followed, the government would round up even more people, including prominent
dissidents like the artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei. But despite the risks, Pu was determined we meet. At 9:00 p.m., he walked into the teahouse in the Fengtai District, about thirty minutes from downtown Beijing, on the city’s Fourth Ring Road. He strode across the room and greeted me with a firm handshake.

Pu has a powerful presence. With a crew cut and a strong jaw, this rights lawyer is large and solidly built. His shoulders and limbs seemed to occupy his entire side of the booth. With a cigarette and a wry grin, he speaks in short declarative bursts, with more of a growl than a voice. Of course, the secret police know we are meeting, he told me straightaway. His phones are tapped, so they heard every word. And they are never very far away. In Shanghai, Pu’s minders stayed in the same hotel as he did, and they flew back to Beijing on the same plane. Knowing that they had listened in on the phone call, Pu informed them of our meeting a day earlier, although he tried to allay their concerns. “I told them we set this appointment a long time ago, that it has nothing to do with the thing you care about, the jasmines,” says Pu. “If you try to stop me from meeting someone, that’s illegal. You can do your job, but you cannot stop me from doing what I’m doing. If you disagree, detain me, take me away.”

I had never met Pu, so I was surprised to hear how brazenly he addressed the security officers who tailed him everywhere. What did they say? I asked. “They didn’t say anything,” Pu replied, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “I told them without asking them. I meet my friends with their permission? Bullshit.”

The parking lot outside the teahouse was pitch-black. Whether they were watching us from outside, we had no way of knowing. Pu didn’t think so, but he couldn’t be sure. Either way, one of China’s top free speech attorneys wanted to talk, and he wasn’t going to be told otherwise.

Today’s twenty-first-century authoritarians crave the type of legitimacy that only the law can provide. For regimes that seek to mask their true nature behind a democratic facade, the law is one of the most powerful weapons they can wield. It offers the government the
pretense it requires to accomplish its aims, all without stepping out of the shadows. Thus, if you seek to disband an NGO, you don’t arrest its membership. You send health inspectors to temporarily close its headquarters, pending a review of a series of alleged health code violations. If you are troubled by what a radio station is broadcasting, you don’t have the Ministry of Telecommunication force it off the airwaves. Rather, you send tax inspectors to audit the station’s books and find financial irregularities that require the station’s temporary closure. In fact, even this step may be unnecessary. The mere threat of legal sanctions or administrative review may encourage the radio station’s management to engage in the very self-censorship that accomplishes the regime’s ends—all without ever inflicting the punishment. Law, regulation, and procedure can be a dictator’s most effective tools for strangling an opponent, precisely because these weapons appear to be benign, apolitical, and objective.

The picture is made more complicated by the regimes’ dependence on law for stability and development. Most governments—whether authoritarian or not—appreciate the value of an impartial judicial system. Reliable and professionally administered courts offer a way for citizens to resolve conflicts and reduce the desire to seek redress through protests or public demonstrations. They encourage business and foreign investment, while tamping down corruption and graft. But a reliable legal system becomes problematic once it begins to threaten the regime’s political monopoly. Authoritarian regimes that enlist the law to facilitate their rule open themselves up to a small but real vulnerability: if the regime can seek refuge in the law, so too can its opponents. Zhang Jingjing is sometimes referred to as the “Erin Brockovich of China.” An environmental attorney, she has won some of the largest class action suits against Chinese companies and has often found herself at odds with Chinese Communist Party officials. “
The Communist Party always talks about law; they want to rule the country by law,” Zhang told me in her Beijing office. “I advocate for the rule of law, but it is different. My law is different from the party’s law.”

Across authoritarian regimes, lawyers, activists, and political organizations have proven adept at using a regime’s own rules against it. In China, rights attorneys like Pu Zhiqiang have taken up the cases of
the society’s most defenseless and forced the regime to defend itself on exposed ground. Chinese officials may still violate the law, but the fact that they attempt to appear to be working within the confines of legal procedure offers weaknesses for others to exploit. The Russian government may regularly ignore its own legal code, but its desire to maintain close ties to European countries has opened it up to the rulings of international courts like the European Court of Human Rights. Political organizers and protesters understand that authoritarian regimes often base themselves on legal fictions. But by acting as if these legal fictions are genuine, they can stymie a regime’s efforts to run roughshod over its citizenry. Even if the regime is seemingly all-powerful, its own laws—and the hypocrisy of flouting them—can constrain its ability to act, and thereby embolden others to challenge the regime. None of these lawyers or activists have any illusions about the corruption of the courts or the integrity of the political systems they seek to change. Nevertheless, they work patiently, brick by brick, to expose legal inconsistencies and deceits, creating minor victories that ripple throughout the system. Yevgenia Chirikova, one of Russia’s most outspoken and effective environmental activists, explained it to me this way. In her view, whether she wins or loses, almost any result could be used to her advantage in an authoritarian system. “
Sometimes the losses produce the bigger impressions on society. I would accept almost any outcome because they would be equally good for me,” she told me. “We will show that our government lies.”

For authoritarians seeking the legitimacy that only the law can offer, the law—even their own twisted version of it—can leave them appearing naked and utterly illegitimate. Ultimately, it may come down to no more than that.

Pu Zhiqiang credits two fathers for making him who he is today—“the father who gave me life, and the father who raised me.” When Pu was growing up in a rural village in Hebei Province, his family was of modest means but relatively well-off compared with most of their neighbors. He described his biological father as honest and of “stubborn blood.” “I’m stubborn too, and I have this persistent character
that even if I think things stand in the way, I will not change my attitude,” Pu told me as we waited for our tea. He was raised by his uncle, who was an entrepreneur and businessman before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Although he had supported the revolution, Pu’s uncle was persecuted by the Communists after they came to power. It was a bitter lesson he passed on to his nephew. “He would tell me, ‘The Communist Party doesn’t keep their promises. They don’t have morals.’ ”

Pu and his siblings were quick studies. Of the six people in their village who made it to college, three of them came from the Pu family. Pu was particularly bright. On the college entrance examinations, he had the highest score from the county and was ranked in the top hundred for the whole province. (Nearly two million students stood for the exams nationally that year.) On those scores, Pu was accepted into Nankai University, one of China’s most prestigious universities, where he studied history and classical Chinese. Once there, he attracted the interest of the Communist Youth League, which was eager to recruit promising young students. One of Pu’s professors approached him and asked him if he wanted to join the Communist Party. If he did, the professor could help. “I told him, ‘Give me a week to think about it.’ ” Seven days later Pu came back with his answer. He told his professor, “I will never join this party.” He was nineteen at the time. He understood the costs of making such a decision, as well as the benefits he was forgoing by not joining. Membership in the party would potentially offer privileges, and it would certainly be good for his career. But he hadn’t forgotten his uncle’s lesson: the party couldn’t be trusted. In Pu’s opinion, even as a young history student, the Communist Party’s chief skill was its ability to fabricate history. “They make people and things disappear according to their needs,” he told me. He felt strongly enough to make the decision that he did. And, once he did, his “persistent character” ensured he never looked back. As he put it, “I closed my door when I was nineteen.”

He may have closed a door, but he had not paid his biggest price until several years later, in 1989. As a graduate student at the China University of Political Science and Law, Pu organized his fellow classmates and led the first group of students from his university to Tiananmen Square. He participated in the hunger strike in the square, and
he remained there until June 4, when Chinese soldiers opened fire on the protesters and sent the students running for their lives. In the aftermath of the massacre, Pu refused to cooperate with authorities or recant his role in the protests. In fact, far from recanting, he honored the students who died that night by returning to the square on the anniversary. In the scramble to dodge the soldiers’ bullets, Pu had made a promise. “I promised myself that if I make it out alive tonight, I’ll come back every year,” he told me. For the past three years, he has been detained by police, who keep the square under tight security as the anniversary approaches.

But his refusal to help the party cleanse this stain on its history by recanting is what has caused him the most trouble. Pu had planned on becoming a professor, but when he graduated, no one would hire the star pupil. “If you refuse to admit things, you cannot be a teacher,” he explained. “I’ve been paying the price over the years.”

Pu struggled to find work after graduation. He drifted from one dead-end job to the next. With an elderly mother and a young family to care for, he felt the pressure of providing for others, but he didn’t want a job that required him to compromise on his beliefs. “I didn’t want to change my mind about what the Communist Party had done in 1989,” says Pu. One of his former teachers recommended he try becoming an attorney. Pu studied the law in his spare time and passed the bar in 1995.

The law was the perfect refuge. Pu could take on commercial work that helped him provide for his family, but he eventually found a higher purpose in the law. He believed that if he took the right cases, he could challenge the very party whose methods he detested. Pu told me how he had been deeply influenced by two things he read: the Chinese dissident Hu Ping’s essays on free speech and the U.S. Supreme Court decision
New York Times v. Sullivan
, a landmark case for freedom of the press. The man with the “stubborn blood,” who refused the party’s invitation and then refused to help cover up its crimes, would work to help others hold on to their beliefs and speak their minds. “We hoped to change the system on June 4, 1989,” Pu told me. “I used to think that I could turn the sky and the ground around. [Now] I think maybe I can do one or two things that matter in my lifetime.”

One of the earliest free speech cases Pu took on was the defense of
China Reform
magazine. In an article titled “Who Is Splitting the Fat?,” a journalist named Liu Ping reported on how a Chinese real estate development company’s business dealings had resulted in massive losses that led to workers being laid off. Liu based his reporting on official documents, as well as the corporation’s own filings. Outside China, it would be a fairly unremarkable story. Nevertheless, in what is a familiar tactic, the company sued the magazine for libel, seeking more than $700,000 in damages, a sum that would have effectively shuttered the publication. After hearing Pu’s defense of Liu and his reporting, the Guangzhou court ruled that journalists could not be held liable for news stories that were based on credible sources. One of Pu’s first defamation cases became a milestone for Chinese free speech protections.