Final essay

EIGHT

DANCING IN SHACKLES

The most intriguing building in Beijing was not celebrated for its architecture. Facing the Avenue of Eternal Peace, next door to China’s equivalent of the White House, was a modern, three-story green office block with a pagoda roof that perched on top like a toupee. What impressed me was that the building did not, on paper at least, exist. It had no address, no sign, and it appeared on no public charts of the Party structure. The first time I asked what it was, the guard said, “I can’t tell you that. It’s a government organ.” Over time, I came to think of it as, simply, the Department.

Every capital has its secret departments, but the odd thing about this one and its aversion to publicity was that it was the Central Publicity Department. The “Publicity” in the title was for English purposes; the Chinese name was the Central Propaganda Department, and it was one of the People’s Republic’s most powerful and secretive organizations—a government agency with the power to fire editors, silence professors, ban books, and recut movies. By the time I settled in China, the Department, and its offices across the country, had control over two thousand newspapers and eight thousand magazines; every film and television program, every textbook, amusement park, video game, bowling club, and beauty pageant was subject to its scrutiny. The propagandists decided what ads could go on every billboard from the Himalayas to the Yellow Sea. They administered the largest fund for the social sciences, which gave them veto power over scholarly research that did not, for instance, heed their ban on the use of certain words to describe China’s political system. (One of the banned words was jiquanzhuyi —“totalitarianism.”) The Department had a breadth of authority over the realm of ideas in China that Anne-Marie Brady, a scholar who studied it,

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compared to the “Vatican’s influence over the Catholic world.” Orwell wrote that political prose, in any country, is intended to “give an

appearance of solidity to pure wind.” During the Truman era, Secretary of State Dean Acheson pruned and massaged his facts until they were, in his words, “clearer than truth.” But no country has devoted more time and care to the art of propaganda than China, where the emperor Qin Shi Huang governed, in the third century B.C.E., with a policy he called “Keep the Masses Ignorant and They Will Follow.” Mao sanctified propaganda and censorship as essential parts of Thought Work, and he relied on them to reframe the Long March as a strategic triumph, not a crushing defeat. Five year after Mao died, his heirs’ final act of devotion was to issue an official declaration on Mao’s tumultuous reign. They said it was 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong—an imponderable calculation that would be studied by schoolchildren for decades to come.

The Department almost disappeared. In 1989 the uprising at Tiananmen Square convinced some Party leaders that propaganda was growing impotent in the modern age. But Deng Xiaoping disagreed, and he made a fateful decision—the Party’s future survival, he declared, would rest, more than ever before, on two pillars: prosperity and propaganda. Of China’s young people who took to the square, he said, “It will take years, not just a couple of months, of education to change their thinking.” But the Soviet approach to propaganda had failed them. Deng and his men urgently needed a new approach, and they found it in the holy land of public relations, America, and in a new, if unlikely, role model: Walter Lippmann, a leading American columnist for much of the twentieth century. They overlooked his early anticommunism and hailed his efforts to prevent mass rule and to sway U.S. public opinion to enter World War I. They studied and cited Lippmann’s belief in the power of pictures to, in his words, “magnify emotion while undermining critical thought,” and they adopted his view that good PR can create a “group mind” and “manufacture consent” for the ruling elite.

To sculpt propaganda for the emerging middle class, they embraced another father of American PR, the late political scientist Harold Lasswell, who wrote, in 1927, “If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept its chains of silver.” Party image makers who began their careers denouncing capitalist stooges now studied the success of Coca-Cola, observing, as one Chinese propaganda textbook put it, that Coke proved that “if you have a

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good image, any problem can be solved.” To learn the art of modern spin, the Communist Party studied the masters: a five-day seminar for top propaganda officials made case studies out of Tony Blair’s response to mad cow disease and the Bush administration’s handling of the U.S. media after 9/11.

In 2004 the Department created a Bureau of Public Opinion, which commissioned surveys and research to measure the pulse of the public without the niceties of voting. Instead of withering away, the world of Thought Work grew in scale and sophistication, until it encompassed, by one estimate, a propaganda officer for every one hundred Chinese citizens. The era of thundering loudspeakers and mimeographed pamphlets was over. Like any competitive enterprise, the Department now measured its effectiveness in page hits and prime-time viewership. It created big-budget advertising campaigns with the help of famous filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou, and it submerged people in a gauzy emotional message that aimed, as one propaganda chief put it, to reach “into their ears, into their heads, and into their hearts.” It was more important than ever, Party scholars pointed out, to “make their thinking conform with the dominant ideology, thereby standardizing people’s behavior.”

* * *

Nothing consumed more of the Department’s attention than the press. “Never again,” President Jiang Zemin vowed after Tiananmen, “would China’s newspapers, radio, and television be permitted to become a battle-front for bourgeois liberalism.” China, Jiang said, would never succumb to what he called “so-called glasnost.” Journalists were still expected to “sing as one voice,” and the Department would help them do so by issuing a vast and evolving list of words that must and must not appear in the news. Some rules never changed: Any mention of Taiwan’s laws was to refer to them as “so- called laws,” while China’s political system was so unique that reporters were never to type the phrase “according to international practice” when drawing comparisons to Beijing. When it came to the economy, they were not to dwell on bad news during the holidays, or on issues that the government classified as “unsolvable,” such as the fragility of Chinese banks or the political influence of the wealthy. The most ardently forbidden subject was Tiananmen itself; no mention of the 1989 protests or the bloodshed appear in

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Chinese textbooks; when the government discusses the events of that year, it describes them as “chaos” or “turmoil” organized by a handful of “black hands.”

Journalists had little choice but to heed those instructions to such a degree that, even as China became more diverse and clamorous, the world of the news was an oasis of calm—a realm of breathtaking sameness. Newspapers on opposite sides of the country often carried identical headlines, in identical font. In May 2008, when a powerful earthquake struck the province of Sichuan, papers across the country proclaimed in near-perfect unison that the earthquake had “tugged at the heartstrings of the Chinese Communist Party.” The next morning, I rounded up the local papers and marveled at their consistency.

One of the few Chinese news sites that had anything different to say was a magazine called Caijing. While the state news service, Xinhua, was hailing the People’s Liberation Army for its rescue efforts, Caijing—the name means “finance and economics”—was ferreting out estimates of the numbers of dead and wounded and reporting that “many disaster victims have yet to receive any relief supplies at all.” I wondered why Caijing’s writing was different, and I sensed that it might have something to do with the person in charge, a woman named Hu Shuli, who had made her name divining the boundaries of free expression in China. I asked to come see her. I wanted to know how you negotiate with a building that does not exist.

* * *

I heard Hu Shuli before I saw her. I was waiting in her office off the newsroom of Caijing, a sleek and open gray-brick space on the nineteenth floor of the Prime Tower, in downtown Beijing, when I heard an urgent click- clack of heels down the hallway. She approached the door and then kept on going, sweeping into the newsroom spouting a series of decrees and ideas, before spinning around and heading back in my direction. In advance of my visit, Qian Gang, an editor whom she had known for years, had warned me that Hu moved at a pace “as sudden and rash as a gust of wind.”

In her mid-fifties, Hu Shuli was five feet two and slim, with a pixie haircut and a wardrobe of color-coordinated outfits. She was so voluble and pugnacious that she seemed like “a female Godfather,” one of her reporters

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thought upon their first meeting. Another of her colleagues compared the experience of chatting with her to being on the receiving end of machine-gun fire. Wang Lang, an old friend of Hu’s and an editor at Economic Daily, a state-run newspaper, repeatedly declined her offers to work together, because, he told me, “keeping some distance is better for our friendship.” Depending on the point of view, being with her was either thrilling or unnerving. Her boss, Wang Boming, the chairman of Caijing’s parent company, SEEC Media Group, told me, half-jokingly, “I’m afraid of her.”

In the world of “news workers,” as journalists are known in Party-speak, Hu Shuli had a singular profile. She was an incurable muckraker, but had cultivated first-name familiarity with some of China’s most powerful Party leaders. Since 1998, when Hu established Caijing, with two computers and a borrowed conference room, she had guided the magazine with near-perfect pitch for how much candor and provocation the Department would tolerate. This meant deciding what to cover (rampant corporate fraud, case after case of political corruption), but also what not to cover (Falun Gong, the Tiananmen Square anniversaries, and many other things). Hu had endured as editor long after other tenacious Chinese journalists had been imprisoned or silenced. She was often described in the Chinese and foreign press as “the most dangerous woman in China,” though she downplayed it, saying that she was just “a woodpecker,” forever hammering at a tree, trying not to knock it down but to make it grow straighter.

Caijing had the glossy feel and design of Fortune. It was heavy with advertising, for Cartier watches, Chinese credit cards, Mercedes SUVs. The writing could be purposefully dense. But China’s propaganda officials were more likely to clamp down on television and mass-market newspapers, which had audiences in the millions, than they were on a magazine that sold only two hundred thousand copies, even if those copies went to many of China’s most important offices in government, finance, and academia, giving the magazine extraordinary influence. It had a pair of websites, in Chinese and English, that together attracted about 3.2 million unique visitors every month. Hu wrote a widely quoted column for the print edition and the Web. Every year, she hosted a conference that drew the economic leadership of the Communist Party.

Hu’s brio stood out in an industry in which truth often succumbed to political priorities. Not long after the earthquake, Xinhua, the state news

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service, published a story on its website, detailing how China’s Shenzhou VII rocket made its thirtieth orbit of the earth. The story had plenty of gripping detail—“The dispatcher’s firm voice broke the silence on the ship.” Unfortunately, the rocket had yet to be launched—the news service later apologized for posting a “draft.”

But failing to put politics before truth could be hazardous. When Reporters Without Borders ranked countries by press freedom in 2008, the year of the earthquake, China ranked 167th out of 173 countries—behind Iran and ahead of Vietnam. Article 35 of the Chinese constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and the press, but regulations gave the government broad powers to imprison editors and writers for “harming national interests” and other offenses. There were twenty-eight reporters in Chinese jails, more than in any other country. (In 2009, Iran overtook China in this, for the first time in ten years.)

In the face of those risks, I saw in Hu Shuli’s magazine the first Chinese publication with the ambition to become a world-class news organization. “It’s different from everything you see in China,” an economist named Andy Xie told me. “Its existence, in a way, is a miracle.”

* * *

The first time I visited Hu Shuli at home, I was sure that I was lost. Unlike many of the reporters and editors on her staff, she did not live in one of Beijing’s new residential high-rises. She and her husband lived in an old- fashioned concrete housing block, in a three-bedroom apartment with a view of an overgrown garden. The neighborhood was China’s old-media stronghold, home to the headquarters of the state radio and to China’s film and television censors. In the 1950s, when the building was a privileged residence for Party cadres, the government assigned space in it to Hu’s father.

She came from impeccable Communist stock. Her grandfather Hu Zhongchi was a famous translator and editor, and his brother ran a prominent publishing house; Hu’s mother, Hu Lingsheng, was a senior editor at Workers’ Daily in Beijing. Her father, Cao Qifeng, was an underground Communist before taking a post in a trade union. But from a young age, Hu Shuli had instincts that worried her mother. “I always spoke about what I was thinking,” she explained.

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The Cultural Revolution engulfed China when she was thirteen, and her classes were suspended. Her family suffered: As a prominent editor, Hu’s mother was criticized at her newspaper and placed under house arrest. Her father was shunted into a backroom job. Hu became a Red Guard, with others her age, and they traveled the country proclaiming their love for the “reddest of red suns,” Mao Zedong. As the movement descended into violence, Hu Shuli sought refuge in books, trying to maintain a semblance of an education. “It was a very confusing time, because we lost all values,” she said. A month before her sixteenth birthday, she was sent to the countryside to experience the rural revolution. What she found there astonished her.

“It was ridiculous,” she recalled. Farmers had no reason to work. “They just wanted to stay lying in the field, sometimes for two hours. I said, ‘Should we start work?’ They said, ‘How can you think that?’” She went on: “Ten years later, I realized everything was wrong.”

For many in her generation, the rustication campaign was a revelation. Another young believer sent to the countryside, Wu Si, recalled to me his first day at an iron foundry. “We’d always been taught to believe that ‘the proletariat is a selfless class,’ and we believed in it completely,” he told me. A few hours after his arrival, a fellow worker approached him and said, “That’s enough. You can stop [working] now.”

Wu was puzzled. “I don’t have anything else to do, so I might as well keep working.”

The comrade whispered some advice. “People won’t be too happy about that.”

If Wu worked a full day, quotas would go up for everyone. He put down his tools. Soon he learned other secrets of survival in the state-owned factories—how to swipe parts from the storeroom, how to build lamps for sale on the black market. For Wu, who would later become a prominent writer and editor, it introduced him to the world of parallel realities. “One narrative was public,” he told me, “and one was real.”

When colleges resumed classes, in 1978, Hu Shuli secured a seat at People’s University in Beijing. The journalism department was hardly her first choice, but it was the best that the school offered. After graduation, she joined Workers’ Daily, and was assigned, in 1985, to a bureau in the coastal city of Xiamen, which had been designated as a laboratory for the growth of a free market. She was a natural networker—she had a regular bridge game

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with the mayor—and her interviewees included a promising young cadre in city government whose openness to the free market had earned him the nickname the God of Wealth. His name was Xi Jinping, and years later he would become the president of China.

In 1987, Hu won a fellowship from the World Press Institute to spend five months in America. The experience changed her sense of what was possible. Her paper, Workers’ Daily, was four pages long, but every town she visited in the United States seemed to have a paper ten or twenty times as long. One evening in Minnesota, she said, “I spent the whole night reading the St. Paul Pioneer Press.” She returned to China, and in the spring of 1989 the Tiananmen Square movement electrified the Beijing press. Many journalists, including Hu, joined the demonstrations. As soldiers cracked down on the night of June 3, Hu recalls, “I went to the street, then went back to the office and said, ‘We should cover this.’” But the decision had already come down: “We weren’t going to publish a word about it.” Many reporters who had spoken out were fired or banished to the provinces. Her husband, Miao Di, a film professor, thought that Hu might get arrested, but in the end she was suspended for eighteen months.

* * *

After her suspension, Hu became the international editor at China Business Times, one of the country’s first national papers dedicated to covering the new frontiers of the economy. In 1992, she stumbled on a small group of Chinese financiers who had trained overseas and returned home to build the Chinese stock markets. Many of them were the children of powerful Chinese leaders. The group called itself the Stock Exchange Executive Council, and in 1992 it rented a cluster of rooms at Beijing’s Chongwenmen Hotel. The members pulled out the beds and set up an office. At one desk was Gao Xiqing, who had earned a law degree at Duke and worked at Richard Nixon’s law firm in New York before returning to China. At another was Wang Boming, the son of a former ambassador and vice foreign minister; Wang had studied finance at Columbia and worked as an economist in the research department of the New York Stock Exchange. They enlisted the support of rising stars in the Party, such as Wang Qishan, who was the son-in-law of a vice-premier, and Zhou Xiaochuan, a reform-minded political scion.

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She began hanging around and ended up with a string of scoops and, eventually, an incomparable Rolodex of names destined for China’s highest offices. (Wang Qishan reached the Standing Committee of the Politburo; Gao Xiqing became head of China’s sovereign wealth fund; Zhou Xiaochuan ran China’s central bank.) Later, many people in Beijing whispered that these connections protected Hu, but she insisted that outsiders overestimated her proximity to power. “I don’t know their birthdays,” she said, of high-ranking officials. “I’m a journalist, and they treat me as a journalist.”

In 1998, Hu received a phone call from Wang Boming, one of the hotel room financiers. He was starting a magazine and wanted her to run it. She had two conditions: Wang would not use her pages to promote his other businesses, and he would give her a budget of a quarter of a million dollars (substantial in those days) to pay salaries that were high enough to prevent reporters from taking bribes. Wang agreed. It was no charity: he and his reform-minded allies in the government believed that, as China’s economy modernized, it could no longer rely on the tottering state-run press. People could no longer afford to be uninformed.

“You need the media to play its function to disclose the facts to the public and, in a sense, help the government detect evils,” Wang told me one morning in his large, cluttered office downstairs from Caijing’s headquarters. He was a chain-smoker with a thick brush of gray-flecked black hair, Ferragamo eyeglasses, and a garrulous sense of humor. For all his Party pedigree, his years abroad had altered his understanding of the value of truth. “When I was studying in the States, I needed to make some money to pay my tuition, so I was working for a newspaper in Chinatown—the China Daily News,” he said. Even as a cub reporter, he relished the chance to follow a trail wherever it led. He laughed. Being a reporter had made him feel like “a king without a crown.”

Hu Shuli wasted no time following the trail; her inaugural issue had an explosive cover story revealing that small-time investors had lost millions when a real estate company called Qiong Min Yuan went bust, even though insiders had been tipped off in time to unload their shares. Regulators were incensed; they accused Hu of flouting the restrictions handed down by the Department, and her bosses had to calm the censors by making self- criticisms. But the defining moment in Caijing’s rise came when a reporter named Cao Haili, visiting Hong Kong in the spring of 2003, noticed that

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every person on the train platform seemed to be wearing a surgical mask. What the hell is that about? she thought, and alerted Hu. The Chinese press had been running reports that health officials had contained the spread of a mysterious new virus called SARS. In fact, the epidemic was growing. Newspaper editors in Guangdong Province had been ordered to publish nothing but reassuring stories about the virus.

But Hu Shuli realized those restrictions did not extend to editors outside the province, and she exploited the opening. “I bought a lot of books about breathing diseases, infections, and viruses,” she said, and her staff began pointing out errors in government statements. Over the course of a month, Caijing produced a series of indispensable reports, and they were planning yet another when the Department put an end to it.

From its headquarters on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the Department issued a daily stream of directives to editors that outlined the latest dos and don’ts. By definition, these reports were secret—the public was not allowed to learn what it couldn’t learn—and when I arrived in 2005, it was less than three months after reporter Shi Tao was sentenced to ten years in prison for describing the contents of a propaganda directive. To prevent further leaks, censors now preferred to deliver instructions orally. Leaders at the headquarters of state television had a special red telephone for this purpose. Other news organizations received instructions at meetings that reporters called “going to class.”

For decades the censors had skillfully suppressed unwelcome news (epidemics, natural disasters, civil unrest), but technology and travel were making this increasingly difficult. When the cover-up of the SARS virus became known, Jiao Guobiao, a journalism professor at Peking University, ignored the taboo against acknowledging the Department’s invisible authority and wrote, “The Central Propaganda Department is the only dead spot in China that does not operate by rules and regulations; it is a dark empire in which the rays of law do not shine.” The university fired him for it.

* * *

When I joined Hu Shuli one afternoon, she was running late for an unusual appointment: she had decided that her top editors needed new clothes, and she had summoned a tailor. As Hu and her reporters grew in prominence,

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they were spending more and more time in front of crowds or overseas. She was sick of seeing her staff in sack suits and stained short-sleeve button- downs. She offered her editors a deal: buy one new suit and the magazine would pay for another. A pudgy, heavy-lidded tailor carried an armful of suits into a conference room, and the staff filed in for a fitting.

“Doesn’t it look baggy here?” Hu said, tugging at the underarm of an elegant gray pin-striped jacket being fitted to Wang Shuo, her thirty-seven- year-old managing editor. With his boss prodding at his midsection, he wore an expression of bemused tolerance that I had seen several times on a dog in a bathtub.

“It is rather tight already,” Wang protested. “He feels tight already,” the tailor said. “Hold on!” Hu said. “Think about the James Bond suit in the movies.

Make it like that!” The change implied by Hu’s flamboyant internationalism ran deeper than

aesthetics. A well-meaning American professor once advised her, “If you stay in China as a journalist, you will never really join the international mainstream.” She was determined to prove him wrong, even if it meant working the angles within the Chinese system.

If a magazine like hers broke the rules, the Department gave it a warning known as a yellow card, as in soccer. Three yellow cards in one year, and she could be shut down. The Department wasn’t reading stories before publication; on the contrary, it was up to editors themselves to guess how far they could go and compute the risk of wandering past an ill-defined limit. That was a specific kind of pressure, which China scholar Perry Link once compared to living beneath an “anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier.” “Normally, the great snake doesn’t move,” he wrote. “It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its silent constant message is ‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadows makes his or her large and small adjustments—all quite ‘naturally.’”

Over the years, Hu learned to live beneath the anaconda by treating China’s government as a living, breathing organism; she constantly measured its moods and sensitivities. Wang Feng, one of her deputies, told me, “You can feel her making adjustments. For example, at Monday’s editorial conference she might aim at something, and the editors and reporters go ahead and do it. And by Wednesday’s editorial conference she will say, ‘You

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know what? I’ve got more information on this and we should not say that. Maybe we should aim lower.’”

In January 2007, Hu Shuli got her first lesson in going too far. The cover story “Whose Luneng?” described a group of investors who paid a pittance for 92 percent of a ten-billion-dollar conglomerate, with assets ranging from power plants to a sports club. A tangle of overlapping boards and shareholders hid the identity of the new owners, and nearly half of the purchasing capital came from an untraceable source. When Caijing attempted to publish a brief follow-up, authorities banned the magazine from newsstands, and Hu’s staff was left to tear up printed copies by hand. “Everybody felt humiliated,” a former editor said. Hu called it her “largest disaster.” (The story had come too close to implicating the children of senior Party leaders—a taboo that trumped even reformists’ desire for a more open press.)

In her office one afternoon, I asked Hu why she thought other publications had been punished while Caijing had not. “We never say a word in a very emotional or casual way, like ‘You lied,’” she said. “We try to analyze the system and say why a good idea or a good wish cannot become reality.” When I posed the same question to Cheng Yizhong, a former editor in chief of the Southern Metropolis Daily, one of China’s liveliest papers, who spent five months in jail for angering authorities, he saw it differently. He drew a distinction between his campaign for limiting police powers and Hu’s focus on raising government performance. “Caijing’s topics haven’t affected the fundamental ruling system, so it is relatively safe,” he said, adding, “I am not criticizing Hu Shuli, but in some ways Caijing is just serving a more powerful or relatively better interest group.”

For all her skepticism and intensity, she used the language of loyal opposition. “Some argue that pushing forward with political reform will be destabilizing,” she wrote in a 2007 column. “Yet, in fact, maintaining the status quo without any reform creates a hotbed for social turbulence.” In other words, political reform was the way to consolidate power, not lose it.

Her approach appealed to reformers in the government who genuinely wanted to solve problems but didn’t want to give up power to do so. Some Chinese journalists said that Hu’s greatest skill was playing interest groups against one another, whether by amplifying the central government’s effort to round up corrupt mayors or by letting one wing of the government thwart a

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rival wing’s agenda. Allow the most powerful group to endure, the theory went, and you could do real, even profitable, journalism. Hu saw censorship as a matter of negotiation; when propaganda officials raged, she tried not to argue. She promised to improve, to pay more attention, to avoid that mistake in the future. “In Chinese, we say that you can bore a hole in a stone by the steady dripping of water,” her friend Qian Gang told me. Other journalists preferred a noisier metaphor: they called it “dancing in shackles.”

* * *

When I asked Hu about the 2008 earthquake, we were in her office, and it was getting late. The afternoon shadows slanted into her windows, and the subject of the disaster, and its epic loss of life, made her pause. She had received the news by text message while hosting a ceremony for scholarship recipients at a hotel in the mountains west of Beijing. She leaned over to her friend Qian Gang, who had covered previous quakes, and asked him for a rough prediction of the damage. He looked at his watch and realized that schools were in session. The casualties among students would be enormous.

Reporting on a disaster of that scale could be politically hazardous. When the country had suffered a previous enormous quake, in 1976, the government silenced news of the death toll for three years. Now, in 2008, Hu Shuli set off for downtown Beijing, working the phone and e-mailing from the car, shouting to her staff to rent a satellite phone and get a crew to Sichuan. Within the hour, the first Caijing journalist was on a flight to the quake zone, followed by nine more. They arrived to discover that many government offices had survived, but hundreds of school buildings had collapsed into piles of concrete and rebar. The buildings had gone up during a surge of funding in the nineties, when a demographic bulge in school-age children required new space. But so much money had been siphoned off that designs that called for steel had, in some cases, been built with bamboo instead.

Thousands of children were trapped or dead in the rubble; nobody could even say for sure how many. The Department swiftly banned coverage of the construction problems at the schools. Several Chinese newspapers reported on them anyway, and were punished. But Hu read the mood differently; she calculated that her magazine’s status as a business publication could give it

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the excuse of simply policing the use of public funds. Its success and bravado had also become self-reinforcing: the magazine had gone so far already that conservative branches of the government could no longer be sure which other officials supported it.

Besides, she was a businesswoman and she had to think about competition; the Internet was expanding, and she had to keep up. She thought that a story could be published if it carried the right tone and facts. “If it’s not absolutely forbidden,” she said, “we do it.” On June 9, Caijing published a twelve-page investigative report on the earthquake, including the school collapses. It was cool and definitive. According to the report, heedless economic growth, squandered public funds, and rampant neglect of construction standards had led to disaster. In a way that had rarely been articulated before, the report peeled away a layer of mythology that usually clung to China’s pursuit of fortune: the boom years were bringing poor stretches of the countryside into a new era, but the costs of that rise were becoming clear. The story detailed how local cadres had cut corners, but it stopped short of assigning responsibility by name. She was called in for criticism but was not punished.

From her perch, straddling the line between the inside and the outside, she had made a judgment call; if she dwelled on the names of specific corrupt officials, it might score a point for accountability, but the scoop would leave her vulnerable to retribution. She told me, “We try not to give any excuses to the cadres who don’t want to get criticized.” Ultimately, she said, the important question was not “which person didn’t use good-quality bricks fifteen years ago” but something deeper. “We need further reform,” she said. “We need checks and balances. We need transparency. We say it this way. No simple words. No slogans.” It was a game of a certain, subtle kind, and she had won that round. She would not win others yet to come.

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NINE

LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE

That spring, official China was counting down to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing with the fervor of a state religion. The Party assembled another giant clock beside Tiananmen Square, to tick off the seconds until the games began, and the capital was decked in a slogan that called for unity above all: “One World, One Dream.”

I stepped out my front door one morning and found two city workers slathering cement on the redbrick outer wall of my bedroom. Large swaths of the city were being demolished or refurbished to create a clean, modern backdrop for the games. The workers had laid down a smooth bed of cement and were using a ruler and plumb line to carve crisp lines and corners. It took me a moment to realize that they were drawing the suggestion of fake new bricks on top of real old bricks. Facing my front door, on the alley wall, a faded bit of Cultural Revolution–era graffiti declared, in five blocky characters, LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN MAO! With two swipes of the trowel, the Great Helmsman vanished behind the cement.

The urge for perfection extended to the medal race. Sports officials had vowed to pick up more gold than ever before, under a long-term plan they called “The General Outline for Winning Honor at the Olympics, 2001– 2010.” The plan included the 119 Project, a campaign to win more gold medals in the summer’s most competitive events—a list that by China’s calculation totaled 119 medals. No variable was left to chance: When organizers searched for a young girl to sing a solo in the opening ceremony, they could not find the optimum combination of voice and aesthetics, so they

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created a composite, by training one child to lip-sync to the voice of another. A Chinese pork supplier said it was producing specially pampered pigs, to ensure that hormone-fed meat would not cause Chinese athletes to fail their doping tests—but it caused Chinese citizens to begin wondering about their own pork, and the Beijing Olympic Committee had to issue a “Clarification on Olympic Pig-Related Reports,” denouncing the pork story as an “exaggerated falsehood.”

The more single-minded the Olympic organizers became, the more they encountered things beyond their control. The Olympic torch relay, which China called the Journey of Harmony, would traverse six continents, reach the summit of Mount Everest, and encompass 21,888 runners, more than any previous relay. The Chinese press called the torch the Sacred Flame, and said that once it was lit in Olympia, Greece, it would not be extinguished for five months, until it reached Beijing. At night or on airplanes, when the torch could not be carried, the flame would be kept alight in a set of lanterns.

On March 10, shortly before the Journey of Harmony was to begin, several hundred monks in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, conducted a march to demand the release of Tibetans detained for celebrating the U.S. government’s awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama. Dozens of monks were arrested, and on March 14 a demonstration to protest their detention turned into the worst riots in Tibet since the 1980s; eleven Han civilians and a Tibetan were burned to death after hiding in buildings set on fire by rioters, and a policeman and six civilians died from beatings or other causes, according to the government. The Dalai Lama called for calm, but the Chinese government said the riot had been “premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique.” Security forces moved in with armored vehicles to control the city, and the authorities began a roundup of suspects, leading to hundreds of arrests. Tibetan exile groups alleged that eighty Tibetans were killed in the crackdown in Lhasa and elsewhere, a claim that China denied.

As the torch passed through London, Paris, and San Francisco, protests against the crackdown in Tibet grew so clamorous that organizers had to extinguish the flame or reroute the path to avoid angry crowds. Chinese citizens, especially students abroad, responded to the criticism with rare fury. When the torch reached South Korea, Chinese and rival protesters fought in the streets. Inside China, thousands demonstrated in front of outlets of

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Carrefour, a French supermarket chain, in retaliation for what they considered France’s sympathy for pro-Tibetan activists. Charles Zhang, who holds a PhD from MIT and is the CEO of Sohu, a leading Chinese Web portal, called for a boycott of French products “to make the thoroughly biased French media and public feel losses and pain.”

State-run media revived language from another age. When U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi denounced China’s management of Tibet, Xinhua called her “disgusting.” The magazine Outlook Weekly warned that “domestic and foreign hostile forces have made the Beijing Olympics a focus for infiltration and sabotage.” The Communist Party secretary in Tibet called the Dalai Lama “a wolf wrapped in a monk’s robe; a monster with a human face, but the heart of a beast.” In the anonymity of the Web, decorum deteriorated. “People who fart through the mouth will get shit stuffed down their throats by me!” one commentator wrote, in a forum hosted by a state newspaper. “Someone give me a gun! Show no mercy to the enemy!” wrote another. The comments were an embarrassment to many Chinese, but they were difficult to ignore among foreign journalists who had begun receiving threats. An anonymous letter to my fax machine in Beijing warned, “Clarify the facts on China … or you and your loved ones will wish you were dead.”

* * *

As the protests grew, I began trolling the Chinese Web for the most inventive expressions of patriotism. On the morning of April 15, a short video entitled 2008 China Stand Up! appeared on Sina, the Chinese Web portal. The video’s origin was a mystery: it had no host, no narrator, and no signature except the initials CTGZ.

It was a homespun documentary, and it opened with a Technicolor portrait of Chairman Mao, sunbeams radiating from his head. Out of silence came an orchestral piece, thundering with drums, as a black screen flashed, in Chinese and English, one of Mao’s mantras: “Imperialism will never abandon its intention to destroy us.” Then a cut to present-day photographs and news footage, and a sprint through conspiracies and betrayals—the “farces, schemes, and disasters” confronting China today: the sinking Chinese stock market (the work of foreign speculators who “wildly manipulated” Chinese stock prices and lured rookie investors to lose their fortunes); the dawn of a

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global “currency war,” in which the West intended to “make Chinese people foot the bill” for America’s financial woes.

A cut, then, to another front: rioters looting stores and brawling in Lhasa. Words flashed across the scenes: “So-called peaceful protest!” A montage of foreign press clippings critical of China—all of them “ignoring the truth” and “speaking with one distorted voice.” The screen filled with the logos of CNN, the BBC, and other news organizations, which gave way to a portrait of Joseph Goebbels. The orchestra and the rhetoric climbed toward a final sequence: “Obviously, there is a scheme behind the scenes to encircle China. A new Cold War!” A cut to pictures of Paris and protesters trying to wrest the Olympic torch from its official carrier, forcing guards to fend them off. The film ended with the image of a Chinese flag, aglow in the sunlight, and a solemn promise: “We will stand up and hold together always as one family in harmony!”

The video by CTGZ, which was just over six minutes long, captured the mood of nationalism in the air, and in its first week and a half online, it drew more than a million hits and tens of thousands of favorable comments. It rose to the site’s fourth-most-popular rating. (A television blooper clip of a yawning news anchor was number one.) The film was attracting, on average, two clicks per second, and it became a manifesto for a self-styled vanguard in defense of China’s honor, a patriotic swath of society that the Chinese call the fen qing, “the angry youth.”

I was struck that nineteen years after the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, China’s young elite had risen again, not in pursuit of liberal democracy but in defense of China’s name. Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT’s Media Laboratory and one of the early ideologists of the Internet, had predicted that the global reach of the Web would transform the way we think about ourselves as countries. The state, he predicted, will evaporate “like a mothball, which goes from solid to gas directly,” and “there will be no more room for nationalism than there is for smallpox.” In China, things had gone differently. I was curious about CTGZ. The screen name was connected to an e-mail address. It belonged to a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student in Shanghai named Tang Jie, and this was his first video. He invited me down for a visit.

* * *

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The campus of Fudan University, a top Chinese school, radiates from a pair of thirty-story steel-and-glass towers that could pass for a corporate headquarters. I met Tang Jie at the front gate. He wore a powder-blue oxford shirt, khakis, and black dress shoes. He had bright hazel eyes, rounded baby- face features, and a dusting of a goatee and mustache on his chin and upper lip. As I stepped out of a cab, he bounded over to welcome me and tried to pay my taxi fare.

As we walked across campus, Tang admitted he was glad to have a break from his dissertation, which was on Western philosophy. He specialized in phenomenology—specifically, in the concept of “intersubjectivity,” as theorized by Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher who influenced Sartre, among others. In addition to Chinese, Tang read English and German easily, but he spoke them infrequently, so at times he swerved, apologetically, among languages. He was working on Latin and ancient Greek. He was so self-effacing and soft-spoken that his voice sometimes dropped to a whisper. There was a seriousness about him; he laughed sparingly, as if he were conserving energy. For fun, he listened to classical Chinese music, though he also enjoyed screwball comedies by the Hong Kong star Stephen Chow. Tang was proudly unhip. Unlike Michael Zhang from Crazy English, Tang had not adopted an English name. The screen name CTGZ was an adaptation of two obscure terms from classical poetry: changting and gongzi, which together translated as a “noble son in the pavilion.” In contrast to other elite Chinese students, Tang had never joined the Communist Party, for fear that it would impugn his objectivity as a scholar.

Tang had invited some friends to join us for lunch, at Fat Brothers Sichuan Restaurant, and afterward we all climbed the stairs to his room. He lived alone in a sixth-floor walk-up, a studio of less than seventy-five square feet that could have been mistaken for a library storage room occupied by a fastidious squatter. Books covered every surface, and great mounds listed from the shelves above his desk. His collections encompassed, more or less, the span of human thought: Plato leaned against Lao-tzu, Wittgenstein, Bacon, Fustel de Coulanges, Heidegger, the Koran. When Tang wanted to widen his bed by a few inches, he laid plywood across the frame and propped up the edges with piles of books. Eventually books overflowed the room, and they stood outside his front door in a wall of cardboard boxes.

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Tang slumped into his desk chair. I asked if he had any idea that his video would be so popular. He smiled. “It appears I have expressed a common feeling, a shared view,” he said.

Next to him sat Liu Chengguang, a cheerful, broad-faced PhD student in political science who had recently translated into Chinese a lecture on the subject of “Manliness” by the conservative Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield. Sprawled on the bed, wearing a gray sweatshirt, was Xiong Wenchi, who had earned a PhD in political science before taking a teaching job. And to Tang’s left sat Zeng Kewei, a lean and stylish banker who had picked up a master’s degree in Western philosophy before going into finance. Each of them was in his twenties, the first in his family to go to college, and had been drawn to the study of Western thought. I asked them why.

“China was backward throughout its modern history, so we were always seeking the reasons for why the West grew strong,” Liu said. “We learned from the West. All of us who are educated have this dream: grow strong by learning from the West.”

Like the Chinese travelers I knew, and the members of Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale, the young men around me regarded the temptations of the West with a combination of admiration and anxiety. It was a confusing time: they were protesting CNN at the same time that an English study program was running ads in China with the slogan “After a month, you’ll be able to understand CNN!”

Tang and his friends were so gracious, so thankful that I’d come to listen to them, that I began to wonder if China’s anger that spring should be viewed as an aberration. They implored me not to make that mistake.

“We’ve been studying Western history for so long, we understand it well,” Zeng said. “We think our love for China, our support for the government and the benefits of this country, is not a spontaneous reaction. It has developed after giving the matter much thought.”

In fact, their view of China’s direction, if not their vitriol, was consistent with the Chinese mainstream. Almost nine out of ten Chinese approved of the way things were going in their country—the highest share of any of the twenty-four countries surveyed that spring by the Pew Research Center. (In the United States, by comparison, just two out of ten voiced such approval.) It was hard to know precisely how common the more assertive strain of patriotism was, but scholars pointed to a Chinese petition against Japan’s

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membership in the UN Security Council. At last count, it had attracted more than forty million signatures, roughly the population of Spain. I asked Tang to show me how he had made his film. He turned to face the screen of his Lenovo desktop PC. “Do you know Movie Maker?” he asked, referring to a video-editing program. I pleaded ignorance and asked if he’d learned from a book. He glanced at me pityingly. He’d learned it on the fly from the Help menu. “We must thank Bill Gates,” he said.

* * *

One month before Tang Jie made his Internet video debut, China surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest user of the Internet. It had 238 million people online; it was still only 16 percent of the population, but each day, nearly a quarter of a million Chinese citizens were going online for the first time, and it was transforming the way ideas whipped around the country. The most vibrant online communities grew to millions of registered members, putting them among China’s largest organizations outside the Communist Party.

In a nation divided by dialect, geography, and class, the Web allowed people to find each other in unprecedented ways. A group of Chinese volunteers came together and began translating every word of The Economist magazine each week and offering it free to readers. Explaining their goal, the translators wrote, “In the Internet age, the greatest force is not avarice or love or violence, but devotion to an interest.” They were young and unabashedly utopian in their faith in technology. “The Web will link you with like-minded people, and release unimaginable energy,” they wrote. To avoid the censors, the group was overtly self-censoring. “If the article involves any sensitive topics,” they told newcomers, “and you’re not sure whether it’s permitted, please don’t risk it.” That self-censorship contained a kind of self- governance: Sites recruited volunteers to remove material that would get the site into trouble. They were known as “forum hosts,” and if users thought they were too tough or too lax, they could replace them, a process that became known as “impeachment.”

Among the most zealous early users of the Web were Chinese nationalists. In the spring of 1999, when a NATO aircraft, using American intelligence, mistakenly dropped three bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the

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Chinese Web found its voice. Chinese patriotic hackers plastered the home page of the U.S. embassy in Beijing with the slogan “Down with the Barbarians!” and they caused the White House Web site to crash under a deluge of angry e-mail. “The Internet is Western,” one commentator wrote, “but … we Chinese can use it to tell the people of the world that China cannot be insulted!” For many, nationalism provided what one young patriot called “our first taste of the sacred rights of freedom of speech.”

Like others his age, Tang Jie lived largely online. When the riots erupted in Lhasa in March, he followed the news closely on American and European news sites, in addition to China’s official media. He had no hesitation about tunneling under the government firewall. He used a proxy server—a digital way station overseas that connected a user with a blocked website. He watched television exclusively online, because it had more variety and he didn’t have a TV in his room. He also received foreign news clips from Chinese students abroad, a population that has grown by nearly two-thirds in the previous decade to some sixty-seven thousand people. Tang was baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation were somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship. “Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

All spring, news and opinions about Tibet were swirling on Fudan’s electronic bulletin board system, or BBS. In technology terms, the BBS was an antique—a simple forum with multiple threads of conversation—but Twitter and its Chinese counterparts had yet to take root, and for many Chinese, bulletin boards provided the first experience of entering a digital roomful of strangers and speaking up. On the Fudan BBS, Tang read a range of foreign press clippings deemed by Chinese Web users to be misleading or unfair. A photograph on CNN.com, for instance, had been cropped around military trucks bearing down on unarmed protesters. But an uncropped version showed a crowd of demonstrators lurking nearby, including someone with an arm cocked, hurling something at the trucks. To Tang, the cropping looked like a deliberate distortion.

“It was a joke,” he said bitterly. That photograph and others crisscrossed China by e-mail, scrawled with criticism, while people added more examples

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from the Times of London, Fox News, German television, and French radio. It was a range of news organizations, and to those inclined to see it as such, it smacked of a conspiracy. It shocked people such as Tang who had put their faith in the Western press, but more important, it offended them: Tang thought that he was living in the moment of greatest prosperity and openness in his country’s modern history, and yet the world still seemed to view China with suspicion. As if he needed confirmation, Jack Cafferty, a CNN commentator, called China “the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last fifty years,” a quote that rippled across the front pages in China and for which CNN later apologized. Like many of his peers, Tang couldn’t figure out why foreigners were so agitated about Tibet—an impoverished backwater, as he saw it, that China had tried for decades to civilize. Boycotting the Beijing Games in the name of Tibet seemed as logical to him as shunning the Salt Lake City Olympics to protest America’s treatment of the Cherokee.

He scoured YouTube in search of a rebuttal, a clarification of the Chinese perspective, but found nothing in English except pro-Tibet videos. He was already busy—under contract from a publisher for a Chinese translation of Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics and other essays—but he couldn’t shake the idea of speaking up on China’s behalf.

“I thought, okay, I’ll make something,” he said. Before Tang could start, however, he was obligated to go home for a few

days. His mother had told him to be back for the harvest season. She needed his help in the fields, digging up bamboo shoots.

* * *

Tang was the youngest of four siblings from a farming family near the eastern city of Hangzhou. Neither his mother nor his father could read or write. Until the fourth grade, Tang had no name. He went by Little Four, after his place in the family order. When that became impractical, his father began calling him Tang Jie, an abbreviated homage to his favorite comedian, Tang Jiezhong.

Tang was bookish, and in a large, boisterous household he said little. He took to science fiction. “I can tell you everything about all those movies, like Star Wars,” he told me. He was a good though not a spectacular student, but

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he showed a precocious interest in ideas. “He wasn’t like other kids, who spent their pocket money on food—he saved all his money to buy books,” his older sister Tang Xiaoling told me. None of his siblings had studied past the eighth grade, and they regarded him as an admirable outlier. “If he had questions that he couldn’t figure out, then he couldn’t sleep,” his sister said. “For us, if we didn’t get it, we just gave up.”

In high school, Tang improved his grades and had some success at science fairs as an inventor, but he found the sciences too remote from his daily concerns. He happened upon a Chinese translation of a fanciful Norwegian novel, Sophie’s World, by the philosophy teacher Jostein Gaarder, in which a teenage girl encounters the history of great thinkers. “It was then that I discovered philosophy,” Tang said.

Patriotism was not an overt presence in his house, but it was all around him. To prevent a recurrence of Tiananmen, the Party had redoubled its commitment to Thought Work directed at China’s young people. When Tang Jie was in primary school, president Jiang Zemin sent a letter to the Education Ministry calling for a new approach to explaining China’s history “even to the kids in kindergarten,” the president wrote. The new approach emphasized the bainian guochi—the “century of national humiliation”—an arc of events extending from China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the mid- nineteenth century to the Japanese occupation of Chinese soil during World War II.

By focusing on “patriotic education,” the Party explained, it would “boost the nation’s spirit” and “enhance cohesion.” Students were taught to “never forget national humiliation.” The National People’s Congress approved a holiday called National Humiliation Day, and textbooks were rewritten. The Practical Dictionary of Patriotic Education included a 355-page section on the details of China’s humiliations. Nationalism helped the Party smooth over the paradox of being a socialist vanguard of a free-market economy. The new textbooks transformed the explanation of China’s suffering to deemphasize the role of “class enemies” and to emphasize the role of foreign invaders. In the Mao years, China had whitewashed its defeats, but now students took field trips to places where China had suffered atrocities. To appeal to young men, the Communist Youth League invested in the development of patriotic video games such as Resistance War Online, in which users took on the role of Red Army soldiers machine-gunning Japanese invaders.

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Emotion and policy became harder to separate. When Chinese diplomats denounced the actions of another government, they often said it “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” They invoked this idea with increasing frequency; one journalist, Fang Kecheng, counted up those occasions and found that China’s feelings were hurt only three times between 1949 and 1978, but by the eighties and nineties it was happening an average of five times each year.

* * *

When Tang reached Fudan, he met Wan Manlu, a reserved PhD student in Chinese literature and linguistics. They sat side by side at a dinner with friends but barely spoke. Later, Tang hunted down her screen name (gracelittle) and sent her a private message on Fudan’s bulletin board. They worked up to a first date: an experimental opera based on “Regret for the Past,” a Chinese story.

Their relationship developed in part on the basis of a shared frustration with China’s unbridled Westernization. When I met Wan, she told me, “Chinese tradition has many good things, but we’ve ditched them. I feel there have to be people to carry them on.” She came from a middle-class home, and Tang’s humble roots and old-fashioned values impressed her. “Most of my generation has a smooth, happy life, including me,” she said. “I feel like our character lacks something. For example, love for the country or the perseverance you get from overcoming hardship. Those virtues—I don’t see them in myself and many people my age.” Of Tang Jie, she said, “From that kind of background, with nobody educated in his family, nobody helping him with his schoolwork, with great family pressure, it’s not easy for him to get where he is today.”

After we met, I started going back and forth to Shanghai to spend time with Tang Jie. He was part of a group of students devoted to a charismatic thirty-nine-year-old Fudan philosophy professor named Ding Yun. Professor Ding was a translator of Leo Strauss, the political philosopher whose admirers include Harvey Mansfield and other neoconservatives. In America at that time, Leo Strauss was receiving renewed attention because his arguments against tyranny had been popular among neoconservative architects of the Iraq War. One of Strauss’s former students at the University

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of Chicago, Abram Shulsky, had run the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans before the Iraq invasion; another former student was Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defense.

Professor Ding had close-cropped hair and stylish rectangular glasses and favored the loose-fitting long-sleeve shirt of a Tang dynasty scholar. “During the nineteen-eighties and nineties, most intellectuals had a negative opinion of China’s traditional culture,” he told me. In the early years of reform, the word conservative had still been tantamount to reactionary, but times had changed; he was teaching a Straussian appreciation for the universality of the classics and encouraging his students to revive ancient Chinese thought. He and other scholars were thriving amid a new vein of conservatism that ran counter to China’s drive for integration with the world. Professor Ding had watched with satisfaction as Tang Jie and other students developed an appetite for the classics and pushed back against the onslaught of Westernization.

Tang told me, “The fact is we are very Westernized. Now we started reading ancient Chinese books and we rediscovered the ancient China.” The young neoconservatives in Shanghai invited Harvey Mansfield to dinner when he passed through Shanghai. They “are acutely aware that their country, whose resurgence they feel and admire, has no principle to guide it,” Mansfield wrote in an e-mail to me after his visit. “Some of them see … that liberalism in the West has lost its belief in itself, and they turn to Leo Strauss for conservatism that is based on principle, on ‘natural right.’ This conservatism is distinct from a status-quo conservatism, because they are not satisfied with a country that has only a status quo and not a principle.”

This renewed pride affected the way Tang and his peers viewed the economy. They believed the world profited from China but blocked its attempts to invest abroad. Tang’s friend Zeng ticked off examples of Chinese companies that had tried to invest in America. “Huawei’s bid to buy 3Com was rejected,” he said. “CNOOC’s bid to buy into Unocal and Lenovo’s purchase of part of IBM caused political repercussions. If it’s not a market argument, it’s a political argument. We think the world is a free market—”

Before he could finish, Tang jumped in. “This is what you, America, taught us,” he said. “We opened our market, but when we try to buy your companies, we hit political obstacles. It’s not fair.”

Their view, which was popular in China across ideological lines, had

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some validity: American politicians invoked national security concerns, with varying degrees of credibility, to oppose Chinese direct investment. But Tang’s view, infused with a sense of victimhood, also obscured some evidence to the contrary: China had succeeded in other deals abroad—its sovereign wealth fund had stakes in the Blackstone Group and in Morgan Stanley—and though China had taken steps to open its markets to foreigners, it remained equally inclined to reject an American attempt to buy an asset as sensitive as a Chinese oil company.

Tang’s belief that the United States would seek to obstruct China’s rise —“a new Cold War”—extended beyond economics to broader American policy. Disparate issues of relatively minor importance to Americans, such as support for Taiwan and Washington’s calls to raise the value of the yuan, had metastasized in China into a feeling of strategic containment.

* * *

Tang stayed at his family’s farm for five days before he could return to Shanghai and finish his movie. He scoured the Web for photographs, choosing some that were evocative—a man raising his arm in a sea of Chinese flags reminded him of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People—and others that embodied the political moment: a wheelchair-bound Chinese amputee carrying the Olympic flame in Paris, for instance, fending off a protester who was trying to snatch it away.

For a sound track, he typed “solemn music” into Baidu, a Chinese search engine, and scanned the results. He landed on a piece by Vangelis, a Yanni- style pop composer from Greece who was best known for his score for the movie Chariots of Fire. Tang’s favorite Vangelis track was from a Gerard Depardieu film about Christopher Columbus called 1492: Conquest of Paradise. He watched a few seconds of Depardieu standing manfully on the deck of a tall ship coursing across the Atlantic. Perfect, Tang thought: “It was a time of globalization.”

He collected mistakes from the foreign press—policemen in Nepal identified in a caption as Chinese; Tibetans being arrested in India, not Tibet —and he typed a message: “Stand up to give our voice to the world!” Some title screens in English were full of mistakes, because he was hurrying, but he was anxious to release the video. He posted it to Sina and sent a note to the

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Fudan bulletin board. The video began to climb in popularity, and its success raised his spirits. He had discovered that he was not alone in his quest to project his notion of the truth. All over China, people were watching the video and forwarding it and cheering him on.

Professor Ding rejoiced at what his student had achieved. “We used to think they were just a postmodern, Occidentalized generation,” Ding said. “Of course, I thought the students I knew were very good, but the wider generation? I was not very pleased. To see the content of Tang Jie’s video, and the scale of its popularity among the youth, made me very happy. Very happy.”

Not everyone was as pleased. Young patriots were so polarizing in China that some people, by changing the intonation in Chinese, pronounced “angry youth” as “shit youth.” If the activists thought that they were defending China’s image abroad, there was little sign of success. After weeks of patriotic rhetoric emanating from China, a poll sponsored by the Financial Times showed that Europeans were ranking China as the greatest threat to global stability, surpassing America. But the eruption of the angry youth had been most disconcerting to those interested in furthering democracy. By age and education, Tang and his peers inherited a long legacy of activism that stretched from 1919, when nationalist demonstrators demanded “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science,” to 1989, when students flooded Tiananmen Square and erected a sculpture inspired by the Statue of Liberty. We were one year away from the twentieth anniversary of that movement, but my experiences with Tang Jie and his friends made clear that prosperity, computers, and Westernization had not pushed China’s elite toward democracy in the way that outsiders had expected after Tiananmen. Rather, prosperity and the strength of the Party had persuaded more than a few to postpone idealism as long as life for them kept improving.

The students in 1989 were rebelling against corruption and abuses of power. “Nowadays, these issues haven’t disappeared but have worsened,” Li Datong, a liberal newspaper editor, told me despairingly one afternoon, as the protests expanded. “However, the current young generation turns a blind eye to it. I’ve never seen them respond to these major domestic issues. Rather, they take a utilitarian, opportunistic approach.”

One caricature of young Chinese held that they knew virtually nothing about the crackdown at Tiananmen Square—known in Chinese as “the June

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Fourth Incident”—because the authorities had purged it from the nation’s official history. That wasn’t the full story. In fact, anyone who took a few steps to get on a proxy server could discover as much about Tiananmen as he chose to learn. And yet many young Chinese had adopted the Party’s message that the 1989 movement was misguided and naïve. “We accept all the values of human rights, of democracy,” Tang Jie told me. “We accept that. The issue is how to realize it.”

* * *

I met dozens of urbane students and young professionals that spring, and we often got to talking about Tiananmen Square. In a typical conversation, one college senior asked me whether she should interpret the killing of protesters at Kent State in 1970 as a fair measure of American freedom. Liu Yang, a graduate student in environmental engineering, said, “June Fourth could not and should not succeed at that time. If June Fourth had succeeded, China would be worse and worse, not better.”

Liu, who was twenty-six, had once considered himself a liberal. As a teenager, he and his friends happily criticized the Communist Party. “In the 1990s, I thought that the Chinese government is not good enough. Maybe we need to set up a better government,” he told me. “The problem is that we didn’t know what a good government would be. So we let the Chinese Communist Party stay in place. The other problem is we didn’t have the power to get them out. They have the army!”

When Liu got out of college, he found a good job as an engineer at an oil services company. He was earning more money in a month than his parents, retired laborers living on a pension, had earned in a year. Eventually he saved enough money that, with scholarships, he was able to enroll in a PhD program at Stanford. He had little interest in the patriotic pageantry of the Olympics until he saw the fracas around the torch in Paris. “We were furious,” he said, and when the torch came to San Francisco, he and other Chinese students surged toward the relay route to support it.

I was in San Francisco later that spring, and Liu and I arranged to meet at a Starbucks near his dorm, in Palo Alto. He arrived on his mountain bike, wearing a Nautica fleece pullover and jeans. The date, we both knew, happened to be June 4, nineteen years since soldiers put down the Tiananmen

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uprising. The overseas Chinese students’ bulletin board had been alive all afternoon with discussions of the anniversary. Liu mentioned the famous photograph of an unknown man standing in front of a tank—the most provocative image in modern Chinese history.

“We really acknowledge him. We really think he was brave,” Liu told me. But of that generation, he said, “They fought for China, to make the country better. And there were some faults of the government. But finally, we must admit that the Chinese government had to use any way it could to put down that event.”

Sitting in the cool quiet of a California night, sipping his coffee, Liu said that he was not willing to risk all that his generation enjoyed at home in order to hasten the liberties he had come to know in America. “Do you live on democracy?” he asked me. “You eat bread, you drink coffee. All these are not brought by democracy. Indian guys have democracy, and some African countries have democracy, but they can’t feed their own people.

“Chinese people have begun to think, ‘One part is the good life, another part is democracy,’” Liu went on. “If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But without democracy, if we can still have the good life, why should we choose democracy?”

* * *

When the Olympic torch finally returned to China, in May, for the last leg to Beijing, the Chinese seemed determined to make up for its woes abroad. Crowds overflowed along the torch’s route. One afternoon, Tang Jie and I set off to watch the torch traverse a suburb of Shanghai.

At the time, the country was still in a state of shock following the earthquake in Sichuan. It was the worst disaster in three decades, but it also produced a rare moment of national unity. Donations poured in, revealing the positive side of the patriotism that had erupted weeks earlier. But the burst of nationalism that spring had contained a spirit of violence that anyone old enough to remember the Red Guards—or the rise of skinheads in Europe— could not casually dismiss. At Duke University, Grace Wang, a Chinese freshman, tried to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protesters on campus. But online she was branded a “traitor to the race.” People ferreted out her mother’s address, in the seaside city of Qingdao, and vandalized their

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home. Nothing came of the threats to foreign journalists. No blood was shed. After the chaos around the torch in Paris, the Chinese efforts to boycott the French chain Carrefour fizzled. China’s leaders, awakening to their deteriorating image abroad, ultimately reined in the students with a call for only “rational patriotism.”

In the cab on the way to see the torch, I sensed that Tang Jie was uneasy about how fierce the conflict had become. “We do not want any violence,” he told me. What he wanted was to persuade his peers in China that finding the truth of the world around them was no longer simply a matter of accepting what they were told by the media, foreign or domestic. “We aren’t limited to only two choices. We have our own media, too. We now have people with cameras and recordings. They have the truth.” He believed his generation had learned something vital that spring. “Now they know: I must use my own brain.”

From far away, it was easy to trivialize China’s young nationalists as the pawns of the state, but up close, that image was less persuasive. The government treated online patriots warily because it sensed that they placed their pride in the Chinese nation, not necessarily in the Party. Their passion could swerve in unpredictable ways. After a nationalist website was shut down by censors in 2004, one commentator wrote, “Our government is as weak as sheep!” The government permitted nationalism to grow at some moments but strained to control it at others. The following spring, when Japan approved a new textbook that critics claimed glossed over its wartime atrocities, patriots in Beijing drafted protest plans and broadcast them via chat rooms, bulletin boards, and text messages. As many as ten thousand demonstrators took to the streets, hurling paint and bottles at the Japanese embassy. Despite government warnings to stop, thousands more marched in Shanghai the following week—one of China’s largest demonstrations in years—and vandalized the Japanese consulate. At one point, Shanghai police cut off cell phone service in downtown Shanghai to prevent the crowd from organizing.

Xu Wu, a professor at Arizona State University, studied the rise of online nationalism. “Up to now, the Chinese government has been able to keep a grip on it,” he told me. “But I call it the ‘virtual Tiananmen Square.’ They don’t need to go there. They can do the same thing online and sometimes be even more damaging.”

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As Tang Jie and I approached the torch-relay route, he gazed across the crowd and said, “Look at the people. Everyone thinks this is their own Olympics.” Vendors were selling T-shirts, headbands, and Chinese flags. Tang told me to wait until the torch passed, because hawkers would cut the prices in half. He was carrying a small plastic bag and fished around in it for a bright red scarf of the kind that Chinese children wear to signal membership in the Young Pioneers, a kind of socialist Boy Scouts. He tied it around his neck and grinned. He offered one to a passing teenager, who politely declined.

The air was stagnant and thick beneath a canopy of haze, but the mood was exuberant. Time was ticking down to the torch’s arrival, and the town was coming out for a look: a man in a dark suit, sweating and smoothing his hair; a construction worker in an orange helmet and farmers’ galoshes; a bellboy in a uniform with so many gold buttons and epaulets that he looked like an admiral. Some of the younger spectators were wearing T-shirts inspired by China’s recent troubles: “Anti-Riot & Explore the Truth” read a popular English message. All around us, people strained for a better view. A woman hung off a lamppost. A young man in a red headband climbed a tree.

The crowd’s enthusiasm brightened Tang’s mood, reminding him that China’s future belonged to him and to those around him. “When I stand here, I can feel, deeply, the common emotion of Chinese youth,” he said. “We are self-confident.”

Police blocked the road. A frisson swept through the crowd. People surged toward the curb, straining to see over one another’s heads. But Tang Jie hung back. He was a patient man.

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TEN

MIRACLES AND MAGIC ENGINES

Lin Yifu, the soldier who defected by swimming from Quemoy, was studying at Peking University in 1980 when the University of Chicago economist Theodore Schultz visited Beijing to deliver a speech. Lin was assigned to translate because he spoke English from his years in Taiwan. Schultz, who had recently won the Nobel, was impressed; he returned to Chicago and helped arrange a scholarship. Lin Yifu would, again, be a first: the first Chinese student since the Cultural Revolution to study for an American PhD in economics. If that wasn’t enough to make him stand out, he was choosing to go to Chicago, the crucible of free-market thought. In 1982, Lin arrived in the United States, and it allowed him to reunite with his wife and children, who went there, too. Since his defection, he and his wife, Chen Yunying, had maintained occasional secret contact. She even sent him a poem that included the line “I understand you, I understand what you did.” Once in America, Chen studied for a doctorate at George Washington University.

While in Chicago, Lin embarked on the study of China’s rebirth that would captivate him for decades, and his conclusions would prove controversial. After receiving their PhDs, Lin and his wife returned to Beijing in 1987, where he confronted a delicate problem. As a returnee from America, how was he supposed to explain Milton Friedman to socialists?

“I went to all the meetings and I didn’t say anything,” he told me. Eventually, he found his voice. “They were surprised, because I said words in terms similar to theirs, in a language they can understand,” he said. For instance, when, in the late nineties, Chinese warehouses filled up with unsold

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televisions, refrigerators, and other consumer goods, many economists blamed low income for the problem, but Lin disagreed. “People didn’t have the infrastructure for consuming those kinds of products,” he said. He became one of the most vocal advocates of heavy investment in rural electricity, running water, and roads, a proposal embraced by the Party in a package of reforms that it rolled out under the slogan “The New Socialist Countryside.”

The end of the Cold War, and the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, shook the Chinese establishment politically and economically. Zhao Ziyang, the reformist member of Deng Xiaoping’s original economic brain trust, was blamed for not suppressing the demonstrations earlier; think tanks that he had created were dissolved, and several economists went to jail for supporting the protests. Zhao was put under house arrest, where he lived for fifteen years, hitting golf balls into a net in his yard and tape-recording a secret memoir, until his death. The Chinese government effaced him from the official history of the nation’s success.

In economic terms, it was a reckoning point: in the two years after Tiananmen, economic growth slumped more dramatically than at any time since 1976; Deng saw his successes slipping away, and he put China’s economists back to work. Reform resumed, but to prevent a repeat of Tiananmen, the Party offered its people the essential bargain: greater freedom in economic activities in exchange for less freedom in political life. It had the makings of a paradox: the Party was sparking individual ambition and self- creation in one half of life and suppressing those tendencies in the other. As an economic strategy, the approach put China at odds with the dominant economists in the West who recommended that the collapsing Soviet bloc undertake “shock therapy”: cut spending, privatize state-owned companies, and open borders to foreign trade and investment, a recipe that became known as the Washington Consensus.

In 1994, in a small office borrowed from the geography department at Peking University, Lin and four other economists founded the China Center for Economic Research, a think tank designed to attract foreign-trained Chinese scholars. He worked like a man possessed, often hunched over his desk until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., and back the next morning by 8:00. Among colleagues, he was known as furiously driven and, on some level, unreachable. Over the years, he wrote eighteen books and dozens of papers, and he told his students, “My ambition is to die at my desk.” His research

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center expanded, and as it did, Lin acquired an influential voice, becoming an adviser on the government’s five-year plans and other projects. He was not a member of the innermost circle of Party decision-making—he could never be —but it was a remarkable trajectory for a migrant once suspected of being a Taiwanese spy.

* * *

Year by year, Lin was becoming increasingly critical of the mainstream Western view—which had promoted shock therapy reforms in the former Soviet Union—and he became ever more convinced that the key to China’s rise was the fusion of the market and strong government. In the decade after the Soviet collapse, much of Eastern Europe that had raced to the free market encountered unemployment, stagnation, and political instability, which weakened support for the shock-therapy approach. At the same time, in the 1990s, China’s economy, a hybrid that fit into neither end of the spectrum, began to surge. It had unchecked capitalism in some areas and heavy government control in others. The focus on growth was relentless. Whenever the Party faced a choice between growth or the environment, growth won; between social security and growth, growth won. The costs of transformation were harsh. Health insurance and retirement funds evaporated; environmental pollution ravaged the landscape; urban real estate developers demolished large sections of cities to put up new housing. Public discontent grew, but the Party used force and the steady march of prosperity to keep discontent at bay.

Yet, the measurements were clear: In 1949 the average life expectancy was thirty-six, and the literacy rate was 20 percent. By 2012, life expectancy was seventy-five, and the literacy rate was above 90 percent. Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs wrote, “China is likely to be the first of the great poverty-stricken countries of the twentieth century to end poverty in the twenty-first century.” When China formulated a stimulus plan to combat the effects of the global financial crisis in 2008, so many new airports and highways had been built already that the planners could not immediately decide what else to build.

Lin was forming opinions about the role that political reform plays in economic success, and it was not a position that endeared him to Chinese liberals who called for democratization. He published The China Miracle, a

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book coauthored with Fang Cai and Zhou Li that zeroed in on the disarray produced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and concluded, “The more radical the reform, the more violent will be the destructive social conflicts, and opposition to reform.” Lin promoted China’s “tinkering gradualist approach.” In a lecture at Cambridge University in the fall of 2007, he pointed to “the failure of the Washington Consensus reforms.” He joked that the shock therapy policies ordained by the IMF seemed more like “shock without therapy,” and were destined to lead to “economic chaos.” He reminded people that the proponents of the Washington Consensus had warned that China’s slow-reform approach would be, in his words, “the worst possible transition strategy,” doomed to “result in unavoidable economic collapse.” He had become China’s most prominent evangelist for its own story of prosperity.

In November 2007, Lin received a phone call from the World Bank, which provides loans and expertise to combat poverty. Its president, Robert Zoellick, was coming to Beijing and wanted to hear Lin’s take on China’s economy. They met in Zoellick’s hotel room, and two months later, the Bank called and offered Lin the job of chief economist. It was another first: he would be the first Chinese citizen—the first of any developing country, in fact—to serve in a post previously occupied only by high-profile Westerners, including the Nobel laureate and Columbia professor Joseph Stiglitz and the former treasury secretary and head of President Obama’s National Economic Council Lawrence Summers.

Chairman Mao had considered the World Bank a tool of imperialist aggression, but now China was its third-largest shareholder and openly determined to acquire a greater say in international economic institutions. In June 2008, Lin and his wife moved to Washington, D.C. Everything he brought fit in two suitcases. They rented a house on the edge of Georgetown, with a patio where Lin could write in the open air. They put a treadmill in the kitchen. On business trips, when colleagues went out to socialize, he went up to his hotel room and worked late into the night.

* * *

When I visited Lin in Washington, on a broiling August afternoon, I found him in a roomy corner office on the fourth floor of the World Bank

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headquarters, a thirteen-story edifice a few blocks from the White House. He pushed back from his desk. He was at work, as always, on a paper. “How can a developing country catch up to developed countries?” he asked. It was the polarizing question at the center of his life’s work, and he was now in a position to act on his answer. “We see a lot of failures and only a few successes,” he said. Lin had a staff of almost three hundred economists and other researchers, whose work helped the Bank and the governments of poor countries decide on strategies for raising income levels, a subject that had been riven for decades by ideological debate.

Within weeks of his arrival, the planet was hit by the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis posed a conundrum for Lin: Officials from the United States, Europe, and the IMF called on China to raise the value of its currency, to boost the buying power of Chinese consumers and make products from other countries relatively cheaper. Sen. Charles Schumer, Democrat from New York, told reporters, “China’s currency manipulation is like a boot to the throat of our recovery.” But Lin saw the issue very differently. Forcing China to raise its currency “won’t help this imbalance and can deter the global recovery,” he told an audience in Hong Kong, arguing that such a move would only depress U.S. consumer demand, because raising the value of the currency would make Chinese exports more expensive, and it would not help the U.S. economy, because Americans don’t produce many of the things they buy from China.

The financial crisis was fundamentally altering the formula at the heart of China’s boom: demand from America and Europe for Chinese exports was slumping, so, to ward off a slowdown, the government in Beijing tilted the balance toward investment. It pumped public money into railways, roads, ports, and property. The government lowered real estate taxes and urged the banks to lend, and the surge in loans in 2009 was larger than India’s entire GDP. Among government officials, the construction craze unleashed vast ambitions: the city of Wuhan planned to build 140 miles of new subway lines in the seven years that New York City set aside to build 2 miles of the Second Avenue subway.

The recession also gave Lin an opportunity to implement his vision. Not long before that, Chinese intellectuals and officials were reluctant to hold up the country’s experience as an alternative to the Western way of doing things, for fear that it would fuel rivalry or distract from the fact that most Chinese

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people are still very poor. While Western countries struggled, China suffered far less damage. A Western diplomat in Beijing told me, “One lesson of the crisis is that we economists should all be humbler. I think we have to accept the possibility that China may become something close to a fully developed economic state without substantial political reform.” When World Bank officials visited Beijing to celebrate thirty years since China resumed its Bank membership, Zoellick praised China’s reductions in poverty and said, “We, and the world, have much to learn from this.”

At the Bank, Lin churned out a series of papers intended to “revisit” the understanding of how poor countries get rich, much if it anathema to the Washington Consensus that prevailed in the 1990s. Writing with the Cameroonian economist Célestin Monga, he argued that governments must “regain center stage.” Industrial policy, in which governments seek to support certain sectors, known to critics as “picking winners,” has a bad name in the West, he said, and for good reason: it has failed far more often than it has succeeded. But he argued that the only thing worse was not having an industrial policy. He pointed to a recent study of thirteen fast-growing economies. “In all the successful countries, the governments play a very proactive role,” he told me. He argued for a “soft” industrial policy in which a clamorous free market produced new industries and firms, and the government spotted the best prospects and helped them grow by giving them tax breaks and building infrastructure such as the ports and highways going up all over the Chinese mainland. It was the marriage of Chicago and Beijing: to rise out of poverty, he and Monga wrote, markets were “indispensable,” but government would be “equally indispensable.”

He used his perch at the World Bank to argue that China’s approach had fundamental strengths that other countries could emulate. When he visited developing countries, he made a point to say they reminded him of China three decades ago. “Can other developing countries achieve a performance similar to that achieved by China over the past three decades?” he asked in a speech he called “The China Miracle Demystified.” “The answer is clearly yes.” He advised poor countries that if they want to get richer, they needed to delay political reform or fall victim to the chaos of post–Soviet Russia. He argued for the virtues of being free not from repression but “from the fear of poverty and hunger, of which I hold vivid childhood memories.” When he wrote in his own name, not on behalf of the Bank, he was even more strident:

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he dismissed the “optimistic, and perhaps naïve, argument put forward by some scholars that democracies … are more likely to undertake economic reforms.” He quoted Deng Xiaoping, who once said, “The United States brags about its political system, but the president says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm, and something else when he leaves.”

* * *

On a warm night in Beijing, a couple of months later, Lin was back in the Chinese capital for several days, and he took a chauffeur-driven black Audi sedan across town to a reception in honor of the tenth anniversary of an MBA program that he had cofounded. It was held in a traditional Chinese courtyard, shaded by wisteria and crab apple trees, which had once been home to the Empress Dowager Cixi. For this evening, however, it had been done up with a red carpet and klieg lights worthy of a fashion show. Wine was flowing, and a hundred or so guests—mostly middle-aged couples, former students and colleagues—were in a festive mood by the time Lin walked in with his wife, who was by now a leading expert on special education in China and a member of the National People’s Congress. When the couple arrived, the well-heeled crowd cheered, and guests swarmed them, taking turns giddily posing for photographs with Lin. A television crew moved in for an interview. A teenager requested an autograph. Lin reached a quiet table, but then a guest buttonholed him with news of an exciting opportunity in the golf course construction business. Lin’s facial expression was polite but desperate, and the hosts hustled him and his wife off to the refuge of a private area, where he prepared to give a speech.

Lin stepped up to the stage and peered out over the guests. He began by noting the “earth-shaking transformations” in China’s economy over the past decade, and he declared, “The next ten or fifteen years are going to be even more spectacular.” The crowd applauded. He pointed out that when the Beijing International Executive MBA program began, in 2000, China had fewer than a dozen companies in the Fortune Global 500, while America had nearly two hundred. “I believe that by 2025, when the Chinese economy has become the largest in the world, and shares the stage with America, the Chinese economy will make up twenty percent of the global economy,” he

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said. “There will probably be one hundred Chinese companies in the Fortune 500.” He ended with an exhortation: “I hope that as you build China’s economy you will also help to build a better, more harmonious society in China.”

“Harmonious society” was not a phrase that all Chinese intellectuals were quick to use. It was the slogan favored by President Hu Jintao to signify the goal of a fair and stable society, but Hu’s critics had come to use it as a byword for repression and the silencing of dissent. (A website that got shut down was said to have been “harmonized.”) Lin meant it in positive terms, which was consistent with his enduring faith in the power of government. In 1999, Yang Xiaokai, a prominent liberal economist, gave a lecture arguing that “without political reform there is no fairness, which leads to public dissatisfaction.” Yang was asking if China could become a strong country without democracy. But, in a response, Lin pointed to China’s economic lead over India, writing, “Whether it’s the pace or quality of economic growth, China is doing better than India.” In Lin’s view, China was already becoming a strong country without democracy, and he saw little evidence for making a change. When I asked Lin about the debate, he said that he and Yang, who died in 2004, were good friends but disagreed. “He thought that if China wants to be successful, China needs to adopt the British- or U.S.-style constitution first,” he said. “I take a different view: I think that we do not know what kind of governance structure is the best in the world.”

As Lin’s prominence grew, his life was clouded by an extraordinary fact: more than three decades after his swim, he still faced an arrest warrant, issued by the Ministry of Defense in Taiwan for “defecting to the enemy.” After so many years, much of the Taiwanese public had come to view his success with hometown pride, and prominent Taiwanese politicians had asked the military to drop the case, but the minister of defense reiterated that if Lin stepped back on Taiwanese soil, he would be arrested and would face military charges of treason.

His older brother, Lin Wang-sung, told reporters, “I don’t understand why people regard him as a villain. My brother just wanted to pursue his ambitions.” When Lin’s father died, in 2002, Lin’s family asked for permission for him to attend the funeral, but the military rejected the request, saying he “should bear disgrace throughout his life.” He had no choice but to watch the funeral from Beijing via videoconference. He built an altar inside

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his office and knelt before it. In a eulogy read aloud, he wrote, “When mother was dying, I couldn’t be there to help. When father was bedridden, there was still no route home. I can’t send them off on the road to the afterworld … How great the sin of being unfilial! May the heavens punish me!”

* * *

Lin had thrived in the People’s Republic by becoming its most ardent economic spokesman. For those who departed from that view, China was becoming a more difficult place to be. A few days after watching Lin’s speech about the bright economic future, I went to see Wu Jinglian, who had emerged as one of China’s leading economic advisers in the decade after reform began. He was now close to eighty years old, a gnomish man with lively eyes peering out from beneath a thatch of white hair. He worked from a tiny office on the fringe of the city. He remained an official adviser to China’s cabinet, but he sounded more like a gadfly. “It’s entirely obvious that the biggest problem China faces right now is corruption,” he told me. “Corruption is the reason for the gap between rich and poor. Where did this corruption come from? From the fact that government continues to control too many resources.”

In a furious stream of essays and books, Wu pointed to crony capitalism and the gap between rich and poor as evidence that China’s economic model had run up against the limit of what was possible without the government’s permitting greater political openness to mediate competing demands. In recent years, he had gone so far as to argue that China needed to adopt a Western-style democracy, and nationalists had blasted him for apostasy. At one point, the debate turned personal: the People’s Daily published Internet rumors that Wu was being investigated for spying for the United States. The claim was absurd—the cabinet eventually put out a statement supporting Wu and disputing the charge—but the prominence of the attack made it clear that his critique had inflamed powerful people with access to the People’s Daily.

I asked Wu if things had settled down. He sighed. “A month or so ago there was an item on a website saying that someone had knocked me unconscious with a brick, but I had survived,” he said. There was no truth to the item, and I asked him what he made of it. “It was giving people the hint to use violence,” he said. The item was signed “The China Association for the

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Elimination of Traitors.” Wu had no idea who was behind the effort to demonize him, but the various suspects were proliferating: The right-wing nationalist fringe? Powerful figures opposed to reform?

In China, the financial stakes had grown so large that even arcane economic debates became laced with a sense of intense opposition. Wu had recently argued for allowing China’s currency to rise in value, and then he read the reaction online. “One of the commentators on that article mentioned where I live and the fact that security is lax,” he said. He gave a weak laugh. “Writing that would be against the law in America. In China, no one cares.”

As the debate widened, words once benign took on a political edge. Lin Yifu liked to describe the economic boom as the “China miracle,” but the liberal writer and critic Liu Xiaobo took issue with the phrase; he wrote that all he could see was “the ‘miracle’ of systemic corruption, the ‘miracle’ of an unjust society, the ‘miracle’ of moral decline, and the ‘miracle’ of a squandered future.” The boom was becoming “a robber baron’s paradise,” he wrote. “Only with money can the Party maintain control of China’s major cities, co-opt elites, satisfy the drive of many to get rich overnight and crush the resistance of any nascent rival group. Only with money can the Party wheel and deal with Western powers; only with money can it buy off rogue states and purchase diplomatic support.”

* * *

At fifty-one, Liu Xiaobo was as lean and bony as a greyhound, with short hair that narrowed to a widow’s peak. He was a chain-smoker with a wry, knowing sense of humor. He had grown up in Manchuria. When he was eleven, his school shut down for the Cultural Revolution—a “temporary emancipation,” he called it—and the taste of independence launched him on a life of unconventional thinking. He earned a PhD in literature at Beijing Normal University but did not excel at the genuflections required to thrive in Chinese academia. He believes that Chinese writers “can’t write creatively because their very lives don’t belong to them.” He was not much kinder about Western sinologists, observing that “ninety-eight percent are useless.” He did not set out to offend, but he did not shy away from it. “Perhaps my personality means I will crash into brick walls wherever I go,” he wrote to the scholar Geremie Barmé. “I can accept it all, even if in the end I crack my

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skull open.” Liu was the author of seventeen books and hundreds of poems, articles,

and essays. Much of his work was fiercely political, and that came with a price: by the spring of 2008, he had served three jail terms, beginning with a conviction for “counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement” for his role in the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. He rejected the charges but embraced the label of “black hand,” saying it was a “medal of honor” and one of the few things he could keep with him behind bars. In a jailhouse poem, he wrote, “Besides a lie / I own nothing.”

Over the years, Liu Xiaobo stopped drawing sharp distinctions between prisons, detention centers, and labor camps. “When I was in prison, I was kept in a small pen with a wall,” he told me by phone, during a spell under house arrest. “Since leaving prison, I’m simply kept in a bigger pen that has no wall.” While he was in a labor camp in 1996, on charges of “disturbing social order,” he married his longtime companion, the artist Liu Xia. Camp guards double-checked that the bride knew what she was doing. “Right!” she replied. “That ‘enemy of the state’! I want to marry him!”

When he was released in 1999, after three years away, he returned to their apartment and discovered that it now contained a computer. “A friend had given it to my wife,” he recalled in an essay, “and she was already using it to learn typing and go online. She showed me how to use it, and practically every friend who came by to see us in the next few days kept urging me to get on the computer. I tried it a few times, but composing sentences in front of a machine just felt wrong. I avoided it, and kept on writing with a fountain pen.”

Only after he submitted his first piece of writing by e-mail did he awaken to the possibilities of technology. “Within a few hours, I had a response from the editor—and the marvelous power of the Internet suddenly struck me.” His wife never got her computer back. Liu had lived through the old rituals of dissent, the “bicycle-and-telephone era,” as he called it, when intellectuals had to wait for a funeral or an anniversary in order to convene without arousing the government’s suspicion of large groups. The Web slashed across dialect, class, and geography such that the editors of China’s first online magazine, Tunnel, wrote in 1997, “The reason why autocrats could seal our ears and eyes and fix our thoughts is that they monopolize the technology of disseminating information. Computer networks have changed this equation.”

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That idealism was hardly universal. Around the world, critics of “cyber- utopianism” argued that the Web provided only an illusion of openness, and a weak sense of community; that it strengthened authoritarian governments by creating a safety valve and defusing the pressure for deeper change. But for Liu, those factors did not outweigh the practical benefits of activism in the digital age. For years, the post office had intercepted his manuscripts when he tried to send them abroad; if he was preparing an open letter of protest, he would spend a month crisscrossing the city to find enough like-minded people to sign it. “Then it took several days (at the very least) to reach consensus on questions of content and wording and timing,” he wrote. “Next, one had to find a place where a handwritten letter could be typeset and printed. Then copies had to be made.” Liu Xiaobo had become an unapologetic cyber-utopian. “A few clicks of a mouse, the exchange of a few emails, and it’s done,” he wrote. “The Internet is like a magic engine, and it has helped my writing to erupt like a geyser.”

By the fall of 2008, behind the door of his fifth-floor walk-up in Beijing, Liu Xiaobo was writing something that he suspected would have more impact than anything he’d ever done. Exactly what he was writing had to remain a secret for the moment, but, when it was ready, he would let it loose, abetted by the technology he called “God’s gift to China.”

* * *

One afternoon the previous winter, Liu and I were at a teahouse near his apartment. He looked gaunter than usual, his belt wrapped nearly twice around his waist; his winter coat drooped across his shoulders as if it were on a hanger. His stutter, always in the background, was strong. He coughed over his tea. He was, by now, the country’s most prominent dissident, which meant that he was a celebrity among Chinese intellectuals, but almost unknown to the broader Chinese population. His writings had been banned in China for years, and online censors struck down his essays. He published abroad, but he didn’t speak English, and he had turned down offers to resettle overseas. China was his home whether the government liked that or not.

I was struck that day by an unexpected calmness about him. His years behind bars had mellowed his rancor, and he was technical and unhurried as he walked me through the arguments in a new open letter—a warning to

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Chinese leaders that they risked “a legitimacy crisis” if they did not heed growing calls for political reform.

“Western countries are asking the Chinese government to fulfill its promises to improve the human rights situation, but if there’s no voice from inside the country, then the government will say, ‘It’s only a request from abroad; the domestic population doesn’t demand it,’” he told me. “I want to show that it’s not only the hope of the international community, but also the hope of the Chinese people to improve their human rights situation.”

Liu startled me with his optimism. As China knitted itself into the world, he suspected the “current regime might become more confident,” he said, and leaned back into his seat, enjoying the sound of his prediction. “It might become milder, more flexible, more open.” His duty, as he saw it, was to keep writing and arguing. “Regardless of whether it works or not, I will keep on asking the government to fulfill its promises.”

And so he did, growing more ambitious as the months passed. As fall gave way to winter, he and a small group of collaborators were nearing the end of their secret project—a detailed declaration calling for human rights and political reform. “The political reality, which is plain for anyone to see, is that China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a constitution but no constitutional government,” they wrote. “The ruling elite continues to cling to its authoritarian power and fights off any move toward political change.”

Unlike the usual dissident manifestos, theirs did not confine their argument to a single case or an obscure provision; they called for nineteen fundamental political reforms, including regular elections, independent courts, a ban on political control of the military, and an end to the practice of, as they put it, “viewing words as crimes.” They were inspired by Charter 77, a manifesto that Václav Havel and fellow Czech activists had issued more than three decades earlier, united, as they wrote at the time, “by the will to strive individually and collectively for respect for human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world.” In China’s case, Liu and his coauthors ended their introduction with the suggestion of a ticking clock: “The decline of the current system has reached the point where change is no longer optional.”

Among themselves, they resolved to release it to the public that winter, on December 10, 2008—the sixtieth anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They called it Charter 08. They had 303 initial

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signers, but someone needed to be the primary sponsor, and Liu agreed to take that role. To most, it would have been an unappealing prospect. “The first bird that lifts its neck” the Chinese liked to say, “is the one that gets shot.”

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ELEVEN

A CHORUS OF SOLOISTS

The real estate boom swept across Beijing from east to west, from new to old —past the Global Trade Mansion and on to the Drum Tower, and in the fall of 2008, I got priced out of my neighborhood. I found a cheaper place a mile farther west, on a street that had yet to be redeveloped, called Cotton Flower Alley. It was lined with poplar trees and run-down courtyards popular with migrant workers from Shandong, Anhui, and elsewhere, who stuck out because they were shorter, darker, and more alert than city people. The migrants shared bunk beds in tiny rented rooms, except on the hottest nights, when they pulled their mattresses into the street and hoped for wind.

You could learn a fair bit about the economy without leaving the hutong. I could eyeball unemployment by the number of day laborers huddled at the corner of Cuttlefish Alley looking for work. They were middle-aged men in dusty, patched-up sport coats and pleather loafers, shifting their weight from foot to foot. As the financial crisis deepened, their numbers tripled. Watching them, I could see why Home Depot had struggled to romanticize DIY home improvements in China. The men held signs that advertised their skills, and each listed his offerings in a way that struck me as the flip side of the young daters who itemized their demands, CAN BUILD SMALL HOMES, DRYWALL, TILE FLOORS, BRICK FLOORS, WATERPROOFING, INTERIOR WALLS, PAINTING, UNCLOG DRAINS, MOLDINGS, DECORATIONS, WATER, ELECTRIC.

Life was fluid, and nobody ever seemed too far from success or failure. A few doors down from my house, a tiny stall selling sesame biscuits opened in February. It had a deli counter facing the street; steam poured out of the opening into the cold. A middle-aged woman in a paper hat and blue apron was barking valiantly to passersby about free samples. Her name was Mrs.

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Guo and she had a strong Henan accent; she worked the counter while her husband, a tall quiet guy, pounded dough behind her in a cloud of flour and steam. It was a twenty-four-hour operation, if you didn’t count the seven hours at night that they slung a sheet across the front and bedded down on the tables.

But after a few weeks, I stopped by for breakfast and found that they’d taped a FOR RENT sign in the window. “We aren’t making any money,” Mrs. Guo said. Rent was $150 a month, and that was too much. “People just cycle by. This location is no good for walking,” she added, and I tried not to look at all the people walking by as we talked. I was stumped. The bra vendor across the alley was doing fine, and the convenience store with the one-yuan hot dogs on a rotisserie did okay. “We’re moving down to Fuxingmen”—another old Beijing neighborhood a mile or so south—“and we’ll see what happens,” she said. A couple of days later, I went back, and their place was already empty. Through the window, I could see nothing but final footprints left in flour. They had opened and closed in seven weeks.

Soon, Mr. Ye arrived. He was a nervous twenty-five-year-old from Fujian Province who had learned the basics of making Beijing-style crêpes and was trying to contend in a competitive market. (The street was lousy with crêpes.) He didn’t even last the spring. Before long, the stall got an impressive new sign—THE GREAT MYTHICAL BIRD CONSTRUCTION SUPPLY SHOP—and I prepared to bring them my hardware needs. But when it opened, it turned out to be a brothel. It had only a single employee—she sat warily in the window, where the biscuit vendor once stood—but the brothel lasted only two weeks. By fall, the place was dark, its fancy sign still perched overhead. It was hard to know what to blame: the financial crisis perhaps, or the location, or simply the relentless churn of modern hutong life.

* * *

At night, the busiest place on Cotton Flower Alley was the Internet café, a vast, low-ceilinged expanse with row after row of rickety PCs, where glassy- eyed young men sat for hours smoking and playing games. I could find a place like that in almost any town I visited, no matter how remote. The windows were almost always blacked out, like at a casino, and they struck me as the only places in China where people weren’t racing the clock.

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For all the energy that the Web gave to intellectuals such as Liu Xiaobo, and the nationalist fever it stirred among Tang Jie and his friends, most of China’s online life, as in any country, concerned matters less grave. When researchers noticed a spike, in April 2010, in the number of Chinese users taking steps to get around censors, the cause might have been a surge in political awareness; actually it was a Japanese porn star, Sola Aoi, who had opened a Twitter account, and young Chinese men were sparing no effort to reach it. But there were many ways to get attention on the Chinese Web. Bloggers started identifying photos that had been doctored by Party propagandists to make the crowds look larger or the officials more important. Techniques that had served the Department well for decades were now open to ridicule: a blogger noticed that a state news report on China’s newest fighter jet included footage from Top Gun. Look closely, and there was Tom Cruise destroying a Soviet MiG.

Online, people were shedding the habit that Orwell called “blackwhite”— the “loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.” Time-honored rituals were losing their effectiveness. When state television showed President Hu Jintao visiting a low-income family in subsidized housing on New Year’s Day, the mother told him, “I am so grateful that the Party and the government have built such a great country.” But people online promptly discovered that the mother was a civil servant in the city’s traffic police; her image as a member of a low-income family was undermined when it was discovered that she had posted photos of herself on vacation, with her daughter, in Shanghai and the resort island of Hainan.

The establishment media was being undermined by the Web. The blogger Ran Yunfei called it a “parallel language system,” and the tension between the languages was reviving a strain of irreverence that had languished in China for decades. Autocrats rarely do well with irony, and these were especially hostile to humor: shortly after the revolution in 1949, the Party set up a committee to evaluate Chinese comedy; the committee officially concluded that stand-up comedians should replace satire with “praise.” Online, people were less inclined to praise. When the government unveiled the new headquarters of China Central Television—a pair of tall, slanted towers joined at the top—people started calling it the Big Underpants. Flustered, the Party suggested, the “Window on Knowledge,” or zhichuang, which people embraced but pronounced slightly differently, so that it meant

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“hemorrhoid.” Online, Chinese teenagers were watching free subtitled episodes of

Friends at the very moment that a state-television apparatchik named Qin Mingxin was fuming to reporters that he had considered putting Friends on Chinese TV until he watched it. “I had thought the play focused on friendship. But after a careful preview I found each episode had something to do with sex,” he said. Even when the Party could control what people saw, it was unnerved by how people reacted. It blessed a big-budget drama about itself called The Founding of a Party, and recruited a long list of movie stars to volunteer their participation. But when people started to rate the film on a pop culture site called Douban, it got so many bad reviews that the site abruptly shut down the rating system.

Fundamentally, the culture of the Web was an almost perfect opposite of the culture of the Communist Party: Chinese leaders cherished solemnity, conformity, and secrecy; the Web sanctified informality, newness, and, above all, disclosure. Four years after the journalist Shi Tao went to prison for revealing a censorship order, those orders were now leaking onto the Web within hours of being issued by the Department, the State Council Information Office, and other agencies. Censors pulled them down as fast as possible, but other people collected and reposted them beyond the firewall, where censors couldn’t reach them. China Digital Times, an overseas news site, created an archive it called “Directives from the Ministry of Truth,” in homage to Orwell. The directives were often as brief and punchy as a tweet, as if the state had adopted the cadences of the technology that bedeviled it. Each read like a reverse mirror image of a headline in the state press:

All websites are requested to delete without delay the essay entitled “Many Massively Corrupt High Officials Receive Stays of Execution.”

I signed up to receive Directives from the Ministry of Truth delivered by e-mail, and they came through on my phone with the same buzz that accompanied the text messages.

Bzzzzz.

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All websites are requested to remove immediately the article entitled, “In China, 94% Unhappy with Wealth Disproportionately Concentrated at the Top.”

Bzzzzz.

Announcement: the Sunshine Yu Lin Golf Club is offering an unprecedented deal: “Buy One Business Membership, Get Two Free.”

Bzzzzz.

All media are not to exaggerate the pay raise received by the People’s Liberation Army.

Bzzzzz.

All kinds of receipts at great prices. Don’t get scammed on the Web. Whatever you need, call 13811902313.

* * *

The Web was a clamor of new voices, and one of the first I noticed was that of Han Han, a twenty-six-year-old living in Shanghai. His blog had a teenybopper look to it, with a powder-blue background and a photograph of a yellow Lab puppy in the corner. But day after day, he lampooned the self- importance and hypocrisies of officialdom. Where an older generation had used euphemism and allegory to hint at the truth, Han asked directly why the government lowered the flags for the deaths of politicians but not for disasters that claimed large numbers of civilian lives. (“I have a Chinese-style solution,” he wrote. “Flagpoles should be doubled in height. This will satisfy all sides.”) He flicked around the edges of rumors that senior leaders had high-priced mistresses. (“If you spend a hundred yuan on a woman’s intimate services, it’s obscene; if you spend a million, it’s refined.”) He mocked the Party strategy of trying to drum up support by plastering the Web with pro- government messages. (“Just because you see a crowd of people standing on a street corner eating shit doesn’t make you want to elbow your way in for a

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bite.”) Han Han was no dissident. On the spectrum of Chinese politics, he held a

highly ambiguous position. At times his was one of China’s most outspoken voices. “How many evil things has China Central Television done in the past? Replacing truth with lies, manipulating public opinion, desecrating culture, abusing facts, concealing wrongdoing, covering up problems, and creating fake images of harmony.” (That post, like many of his, was struck down by censors, though readers reached it first and circulated it broadly.) His criticism placed him in frequent combat with the “angry youth.” When Tang Jie and his friends were circulating nationalist videos in the spring of 2008, Han Han wrote, “How can our national self-respect be so fragile and shallow?… Somebody says you’re a mob, so you curse him, attack him, and then you say, ‘We’re not a mob.’ This is as if someone says you’re a fool, so you hold up a big sign in front of his girlfriend’s brother’s dog saying ‘I Am Not a Fool.’ The message will get to him, but he’ll still think you’re a fool.” A pro-government website once listed Han Han among the “slaves of the West” and superimposed a noose on his picture. But he could also be calculatingly elliptical: when he needed to mention a sensitive word that was sure to trigger the Web’s automatic filters, he wrote, “sensitive word,” and let his readers figure it out.

In September 2008, not long after the Olympics ended, he edged past a movie star to become China’s most popular personal blogger, based on the total number of readers he had accumulated. He had attracted more than a quarter of a billion visitors since he began; only China’s stock tip blogs were drawing more. I was going to be in Shanghai, and I asked Han Han if I could come by. He suggested I join him on the road. Once or twice a week, he left downtown Shanghai to return to the village where he grew up, in a farmhouse now occupied by his grandparents.

* * *

He picked me up in a black GMC van with tinted windows, driven by his friend Sun Qiang. Han had the van for long trips because he was afraid of flying. He was five feet eight inches tall and weighed less than a hundred and thirty pounds. He had the high cheekbones of a Korean soap star and black eyes shaded by sheepdog bangs. He favored a uniform of grays and whites

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and denim—Chinese pop culture’s prevailing aesthetic. His manicured, swaggering persona was a world apart from Liu Xiaobo and the rumpled archetype of the Chinese intellectual. Han Han had a look, and it owed equal debts to Kerouac and Timberlake. In person, he was warm and laconic, and he spoke through a smile that tended to camouflage the searing edge of his comments.

The Web had altered the course of Han Han’s life. When he was in tenth grade, in 1998, he failed seven courses and dropped out. The next year, he sent a handwritten manuscript to a publisher; it was a novel called Triple Door, about a Chinese high school student slogging through “hours of endless emptiness,” copying lessons “from the blackboard to the notebook to the exam,” while his mother fed him pills intended to boost his IQ. Han compared China’s school system to the manufacture of chopsticks—a system designed to yield products of “exactly the same length.” Another publisher had pronounced the novel gloomy and out of step with the times; successful books about Chinese youth were more often akin to Harvard Girl, with the ambitious Ivy Leaguer clenching ice cubes to build fortitude. But an editor was enthusiastic about Han’s novel and printed thirty thousand copies. They sold out in three days. Another thirty thousand copies were printed, and they sold out, too.

In the global canon of teen-angst literature, the novel was tame, but in China it was unprecedented: a scathingly realistic satire of education and authority, written by a nobody. State television moved to tamp down the frenzy with an hour-long discussion on its national broadcast, but the strategy backfired. On TV, Han Han projected insolent glamour, with a boy-band shag haircut that swept down and across his left eye. When educators in tweeds and ties fulminated against “rebelliousness” that “might contribute to social instability,” Han smiled, cut them off, and said, “From the sound of it, your life experience has been even shallower than mine.” He was instantly famous—a seductive spokesman for a new brand of youthful defiance. The Chinese press proclaimed “Han Han fever.”

Triple Door went on to sell more than two million copies, putting it among China’s bestselling novels of the past two decades. In the next several years, Han published four more novels and several essay collections faithful to the subjects he knew best: teenagers, girls, and cars. They sold millions more, though even his publisher, Lu Jinbo, president of Guomai Culture and

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Media, did not hail them as literature. “His novels usually had a beginning but no end,” Lu told me. In 2006, Han Han started blogging, and his focus took an unmistakable turn toward some of China’s most sensitive matters: party corruption, censorship, the exploitation of young workers, pollution, the gap between the rich and the poor. It was as if Stephenie Meyer, the teen- vampire author, had abandoned the Twilight series and started directing fans’ attention to the misuse of public funds. Han Han was the patron saint of young strivers who saw in him a way to reconcile their dawning sense of skepticism with the material gratification they coveted. In his world, being political no longer meant being poor.

“As soon as I started making money from writing, I started buying sports cars” and racing, he told me, as we inched through rush-hour traffic. “Other drivers looked down on me, because they thought, ‘You’re a writer; you’re supposed to be driving into walls,’” he said.

For nearly a decade, Han had maintained a parallel career as a race car driver with a respectable record in circuit competition for Shanghai’s Volkswagen team and in off-road rally races for Subaru. It was a world of sponsorships and champagne showers, disorientingly at odds with his writing life. By and large, his readers cared nothing for auto racing, but the overlapping identities yielded a singular celebrity: he was on the covers of style magazines while independent websites—Han Han Digest, Danwei, ChinaGeeks—translated and analyzed his utterances. He once began a television interview by saying, “If you speak Chinese, you know who I am”—a boast not quite as ridiculous as it sounds.

He was the only government critic with corporate sponsorship, and he was an enthusiastic pitchman attuned to Bobo sensibilities. A low-cost clothing chain called Vancl put his face on ads with the slogan “I am Vancl.” Johnnie Walker paired his picture with the line “Dreaming is realizing every idea that flashes through one’s mind.” He had lent his name to a one-of-a-kind luxury Swiss watch by Hublot, which was auctioned for charity and inscribed, in English, “For Freedom.”

* * *

Approaching his hometown, Tinglin, we branched off onto smaller roads until we confronted a creek spanned by a concrete bridge that was only

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inches wider than the van. At the wheel, Sun Qiang hesitated. Han peered through the gap between the front seats and adopted a mock-serious tone: “This bridge is the test!” We crossed intact. “I’ve had mishaps there many times,” Han said.

The fringe of Shanghai was a steadily eroding ring of small farms and factories a short drive from staggering wealth. Mist hung over fallow fields crisscrossed by footpaths. We reached a two-story brick farmhouse fronted by a narrow plot. Han’s grandparents—small, swaddled in padded cotton clothes—ambled out to greet us. A golden retriever went berserk. We passed through a living room that contained the cold damp of the countryside, and reemerged in a small courtyard, where Han smiled and indicated for me to climb through a window into his wing of the house. “A small design flaw,” he said. “We didn’t put a door on this side.”

Within was a rural Chinese teenager’s fantasy lair: a beat-up Yamaha motorcycle leaned against one wall, a mammoth television screen graced another. A second giant screen was accessorized with a steering wheel and pedals set up for driving games. In the center of the room was a pool table, and Han racked up the balls and broke. He was in constant, restless motion. To indicate his rare and full attention, he turned both his phones facedown as they buzzed and bleated in protest. On the pool table, I made a shot, then flubbed the second. He sank the rest.

The transformation of his hometown figured prominently in Han’s view of China. He pointed out an industrial compound in the distance, a chemical manufacturer, which he blamed for fouling the stream where he used to hunt for crawfish. On his blog, he wrote:

My grandfather can identify the day of the week by the color of the water. The stench is everywhere. The Environmental Protection Bureau says the water quality is normal, though the river is full of dead fish … At various points, my hometown has planned to build Asia’s largest industrial harbor, and Asia’s largest outdoor sculpture garden, and Asia’s largest electronics shopping center. So far, all it has produced is thousands of acres of rubble, unfinished and wasted.

Han was often described as a symbol of China’s youth, which was not

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meant entirely as a compliment. He hailed from the first generation born after the death of Mao and the start of the one-child policy—the baling hou, or “post-eighty generation”—which served as a reference point in Chinese discussions of values and the national character much the way baby boomers did for Americans: a generation that came of age amid radical social transformations that alienated its members from their parents and left them either newly self-aware or self-indulgent, depending on who was talking.

In his writings, Han jabbed at the official truth about China’s rise, urging workers not to cheer headlines of new prosperity when their “low-wage labor adds up to nothing but a single screw in the boss’s Rolls-Royce.” After a forty-seven-year-old woman burned herself to death to stop a crew that was trying to demolish her home, he wrote, “If you have not burned yourself to ashes … if all your family members are alive, that’s the standard of a happy life.”

We wandered outside into the cold, and I mentioned that his criticism seemed to underplay the benefits of the most prosperous period in Chinese history. He gave me a dubious sideways look. He said the scale of China’s growth obscured the details of how the spoils were being divided. “For rally races we travel widely, because they’re on dirt roads, often in small, poor places. Young people there don’t care about literature or art or film or freedom or democracy, but they know they need one thing: justice. What they see around them is unfair.”

To illustrate his point, he mentioned a news clip he’d seen recently about a seventeen-year-old migrant worker who stood in the aisle of a train for sixty- two hours to get home. It was the kind of ordeal that Chinese papers had always featured as portraits of fortitude. But Han had a different view of the man’s experience of standing on the train for two and a half days. “The guy had to wear adult diapers,” Han said, appalled. It became the basis of his next blog post. Young Chinese, he wrote, were increasingly being “used by the process of urbanization.” He laid out the deal that the boom was offering his generation: “Work for a whole year, stand in line for a whole day, buy a full- price ticket, wear diapers, and stand the whole way home—how dignified!”

* * *

On the days that Han was writing, he slept until midday and usually worked,

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fast and alone, into the predawn hours. He was married to Lily Jin, a high school friend who served as his assistant and gatekeeper. “Han Han trusts people very easily, almost credulously,” she told me. “In the past, he’s been cheated by publishers, and lost money because of it.” When they had a daughter, the event was greeted by the Chinese gossip magazines with all the ceremony of a royal siring (“Han Han Becomes a Father, Talks for First Time about Daughter”).

He was a proudly self-described “country bumpkin.” Unlike other prominent Chinese critics of the government, he had few ties to the West; he had visited Europe but not America, and he cared little for Western literature. He long ago recognized his “rebel” identity as a cliché—“If I were a rebel, I wouldn’t drive an Audi or a BMW,” he liked to say—and he kept to quiet rhythms: he didn’t smoke, barely drank, and had no interest in nightclubs.

Han’s parents had worked for the government: his mother, Zhou Qiaorong, dispensed benefits at a local welfare office; his father, Han Renjun, once wanted to write fiction but dead-ended at a local Party newspaper, and he resented the path of advancement. “He didn’t like the kind of life in which you have to drink every day and kiss your leaders’ asses,” his son told me. Before the parents knew if they were having a boy or a girl, they agreed to name the baby Han Han, the father’s abandoned pen name. As the son’s work became recognized, his heckling of the establishment complicated their government jobs; he offered to support them financially, and they took early retirement.

When Han was young, his father stacked the literature on low shelves, where the boy could reach it, and kept the orthodox political tracts up high. The more he read, the more he found gaps between “the textbooks and the truth,” as Han put it. “I don’t believe anyone who truly loves literature can also love Mao Zedong,” he told me. “These two things are incompatible. Even putting aside his political performance, or how many bad things he did, or how many people starved to death because of him, or how many people he killed, there is one thing for sure: Mao Zedong was the enemy of writers.”

As a student at Songjiang No. 2 High School, he wrote occasionally, and when he was sixteen a Shanghai magazine was looking for young writers to enter the New Concept Essay Contest. He’d entered contests before. “You’d be asked to write about something that you’d done that was good—say, helping an old lady across the street or returning a lost wallet. Never mind

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that the more realistic scenario would be you putting the wallet in your pocket.” But New Concept intended to be different, and Han’s assignment in the final round was abstract: a judge dropped a plain piece of paper into an empty glass—that was the topic. “I had some random idea about how the paper falling to the bottom of the glass tells you about life,” he told me, adding, “All bullshit.” He took first place.

Then he failed his courses and was held back. On the verge of failing again, he dropped out, which made him desperate to publish his manuscript —“to prove myself,” he said. “I had told my classmates and teacher that I was a good writer and I could make a living from it, but they said I was crazy.” Just a couple of decades earlier, Han could easily have been jailed for his criticisms of the state, but when Triple Door was finally released, it electrified young people not just because it was an honest critique of China’s education system. In the words of the Shanghai writer Chen Cun, Han’s very existence gave them “the right to choose their own idol.”

The publisher Lu Jinbo believed that Han’s fans gravitated to him for a simple reason: They saw in his life and writings a rare kind of truth. “In China, our culture forces us to say things that we don’t really think. If I say, ‘Please come over to my place for dinner today,’ the truth is I don’t really want you to come. And you’ll say, ‘You’re too kind, but I have other arrangements.’ This is the way people are used to communicating, whether it’s leaders in the newspaper or regular people. All Chinese people understand that what you say and what you think often don’t match up. But Han Han isn’t like this. He doesn’t consider other people’s feelings and just says what’s on his mind, or he’ll say nothing.” In short, Lu said, “If Han Han says, ‘This is true,’ then ten million fans will say, ‘This is true.’ If he says, ‘This is fake,’ then it’s fake.”

Authenticity, or the appearance of it, had become the rarest of assets in China. In the five years since Gong Haiyan encountered fake bachelors online, the epidemic of fraudulence had reached into every corner of life, most dramatically in the case of the dairy industry. In 2008 a milk producer, Sanlu, discovered that farmers had been adding melamine to boost the protein levels, but the company did not order a recall; instead, it persuaded the local government to bar the press from reporting it. By the time the Ministry of Health warned the public, three hundred thousand infants had been sickened; six of them died. Chinese parents who could afford to travel started buying so

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much baby formula in Hong Kong that the city imposed a legal limit of two cans per person.

* * *

Among intellectuals, Han Han was a polarizing figure. Leung Man-tou, a Hong Kong writer and television commentator, raved that Han had the makings of “another Lu Xun,” China’s most celebrated social critic. The artist Ai Weiwei went a step further, telling a reporter that “Han is more influential than Lu Xun, because his writing can reach more people.” But others recoiled at the comparison. When I asked Lydia H. Liu, a literature and media scholar at Columbia University, about him, she said, “Han Han is only a mirror image of the people who like him. So in what ways will that reflection transform them? It will not.” She added, “The first thing you see on his blog is not his writing but a Subaru advertisement.”

But serving as a mirror for his fans was perhaps his greatest strength. He articulated what others thought but didn’t say. While China’s boldest intellectuals and dissidents stood out for being flamboyantly atypical, Han excelled at being typical, for allowing his fans to relate to him enough that the principles he espoused felt within reach. His biography bore all the minor victories and humiliations, the reasons for aspiration and cynicism, that accompanied being young and restless in China—and that made him powerful. For two decades since Tiananmen, Chinese young people had been apolitical, not simply because the basic conditions of life had improved but also because the alternative was frightening and hopeless. Han’s writing did not reorder the political life of Chinese youth, or force the hand of policymakers, but he was a powerful spokesman for the joys of skepticism.

For all his conflicts with the angry youth, Han Han had something in common with Tang Jie: both were looking for outlets to channel their discontent, and to express an idea of China. They saw themselves as occupying opposing sides of an emerging culture war inside China and yet both were indulging in the new habits of self-creation, and the tentative chance to cultivate political taste. And both were doing it online, unlike an earlier generation of activists who had filled Tiananmen Square. Han Han and Tang Jie had grown up in an era of fortune and aspiration, and despite their disagreements, neither one of them could imagine abandoning the

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determination to be heard. When Han Han outgrew the confines of a blog, he started a magazine

called Duchangtuan, which means “A Chorus of Soloists.” His publisher, fearing political repercussions, forced him to cut 50 percent of the contents in the first issue, but some interesting bits stayed in. The cleverest feature was called “Everyone Asks Everyone,” a farcical meditation on the way information was withheld in China; readers dreamed up questions—for boyfriends, for government agencies—and editors tried to find the answers, no matter how difficult this was. Ten hours after it went on sale, the magazine was number one in the rankings of Amazon China. Bookstores dedicated separate sales counters to handle the crush. The censors were unnerved. A few days later, my phone buzzed. It was a directive to news editors from the Shanghai office of the Propaganda Department:

All activities and comments related to Han Han, other than car racing, are not to be reported.

Han prepared a second issue, in December 2010, but the publisher was ordered to stop. Mountains of magazines were pulped. “People got worried,” Han told me afterward. We were in the office he’d rented, now half empty. “Maybe they thought, ‘Well, you started out as a writer published in our magazines, which we control. Now are you trying to take control?’” He wondered what the shutdown said about the future of Chinese culture. “We can’t always use pandas and tea,” he said. “What else do we have? Silk? The Great Wall? That isn’t China.”

When Time magazine collected candidates for its annual list of the world’s most influential people in 2010, Han Han made the list. Chinese authorities were not pleased. They blocked the combination of “Han Han” and “Time” from Chinese search engines, and People’s Daily asked in a headline, IS TIME MAGAZINE SEVERELY NEARSIGHTED? Han was not feeling triumphant; he had no illusions about what an individual was facing in China. He wrote:

Maybe my writings help people vent some anger or resentment. But beyond that what use are they? This “influence” is an illusion. In China, influence belongs only to those with power, those who can

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make rain from clouds, who can decide if you live or die, those who can keep you somewhere between life and death. They are the people with real influence … The rest of us are just small characters under a spotlight on the stage. They own the theater, and they can always bring down the curtain, turn off the lights, close the door, and turn the dogs loose inside.

When he posted this, he received twenty-five thousand comments, some laced with desperate devotion (“I’m willing to give my life to defend Han Han—a man with courage and integrity”). The Time list had hinged on a public vote, and in the final tally, Han had come in number two worldwide, behind the Iranian opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

One afternoon, after watching Han compete in a car race, I found a small, exuberant crowd of fans waiting to catch a glimpse of him. Among them was Wei Feiran, a wiry, spiky-haired nineteen-year-old from Anhui Province, who seemed on the verge of levitating with anticipation. He’d read Triple Door when he was in tenth grade and was deeply affected by it. He was inspired by Han’s attempt to publish a magazine, and now he and some friends were trying to launch one, too, in the city of Changsha. “I really want to do it well. I’m sort of an idealist,” Wei said. “We are doing it by ourselves, with no company or anybody behind us.” For the inaugural issue, they wanted to interview Han, so Wei had ridden fourteen hours on a train to find him.

Whenever Han’s fans talked to me about his work, they described it as a revelation—“a shot of adrenaline that awakens us from our apathy,” as a blogger put it. For a while, Wei Feiran had helped run a fan site that collected and commented on Han’s blog posts. “We were forced to shut down by the Ningxia Internet Patrol,” Wei said. “Our site had every post he’d ever written, and they said that’s too sensitive.” Overhearing our conversation, a shy girl in an orange sweater interjected, “Han Han represents the person that all of us want to become, and the things that we all want to do but are never brave enough to try.”

Spending time around Han’s young admirers often made me think of Michael, the student from Li Yang Crazy English. Michael was a fan of Han’s, too, and the next time I saw him, he pulled out his phone to show me

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an app that he had downloaded with all of Han Han’s books in one place.

* * *

Not long after I met Michael, he started teaching classes outside Crazy English. To attract students, he bought a small amplifier and delivered free lessons in a park in Guangzhou beneath a twenty-five-foot banner that he had worded to suggest some kind of official position: WELCOME THE OLYMPICS, CONVENE THE ASIAN GAMES. ENGLISH VOLUNTEER OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES. Michael borrowed fifty thousand yuan from a neighborhood credit union, over the objections of his parents, who worried that it was too risky. “My whole family was opposed to it,” he told me. But, after a couple of months, he had attracted paying students. He also finagled a small contract with the local Olympic propaganda campaign, for recording a hundred sample sentences that volunteers could memorize. “I was so proud,” he wrote in his journal. “I made enough money to buy new suits and a tie.”

In January 2009 he left Crazy English and teamed up with another teacher to form a company they called Beautiful Sound English. Michael was in charge of sales, and his partner was the head teacher. Michael started booking talks in other cities, and his business gained traction.

The quality of Michael’s English always startled me. For someone who had never left China, he was clear and articulate, and he made relatively few mistakes in conversation and in writing—largely because there was almost nothing he wouldn’t do in the name of improvement. When a music teacher suggested he hone his pronunciation by holding up a mirror and making exaggerated movements of his mouth, Michael did it even while riding the bus. It attracted strange looks. When another teacher told him to shout even louder than Li Yang recommended, Michael tried that, too. “I didn’t obtain my goal,” he wrote in his journal. “All I obtained was chronic pharyngitis.” A doctor had to prescribe inhalation treatments to repair the damage.

Most of all, Michael scoured the Internet to find English recordings that appealed to him, and then he recited them over and over to hone his accent. He read me one of his favorites: “Something amazing is happening at Verizon Wireless that will change the way America talks. Something big. Something bold. Something new.” Listening to him, I realized there was a universal quality to the sound of salesmanship, even if you didn’t care what

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you were selling. He continued: “Introducing nationwide unlimited talk from Verizon Wireless. Now thirty dollars less than ever before, on America’s largest and most reliable wireless network. Verizon.” Michael grinned.

He especially loved the voices from commercials and radio broadcasters; he switched his tone of voice and reeled off a news flash: “Five people suffered minor injuries when an earthquake measuring six-point-two on the Richter scale struck Taiwan this morning … James Pomfret reports.” He was working on emulating a particular southern accent. “Hello, this is Vic Johnson. The year before I encountered Bob Proctor’s teaching, I earned fourteen thousand twenty-seven dollars.” Michael couldn’t remember where he’d found it, but he loved the speaker’s twang. “Within a handful of years I was earning that in a week. And now it’s not uncommon for me to earn that —and a lot more—in a matter of minutes. I don’t even want to imagine where my life would be if I hadn’t met Bob Proctor.”

One part of his life where Michael was not making progress was with girls. Since college, he had had two serious relationships, but they had foundered in part because of his infatuation with studying. “They usually decide that a person who wakes up in the middle of the night to listen to English recordings is kind of ridiculous,” he wrote. He was, at heart, a romantic—“If your wife really loves you, she won’t care about anything but your soul,” he told me—and he was out of step with his generation’s attention to finances. He showed me a set of scenes he wrote for his students to practice, and his perspective came through in his classroom exercises:

A: You look good today. B: Thanks. A: Do you love me? B: No, I only love money.

Now and then, Michael asked me to take a look at his Chinese writing, or to polish the grammar of the English passages he wrote for his students. I was often struck by how comfortable he was putting himself at the center of the story. Earlier generations in China were less comfortable doing this. I asked his father to talk about the three decades he spent working in a coal mine. He said, “All mines are dangerous. It was very hard at that time. We earned

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about sixty yuan per month.” And that was all he had to say on the subject. Michael, by contrast, saw his own life as an epic fable of frustration and triumph. He wrote, “I was extremely lonely and confused from 2002 to 2007. I wanted to be someone great. I didn’t want a commonplace life … Was I really destined to be a failure? What should I do? Maybe I was doomed to be an ordinary person.” The prospect of conformity offended him. He wrote, “Why should I be like everyone else, just because I was born to a poor family?”

He framed the study of English as a matter of moral entitlement. He told his students, “You are the master of your destiny. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be different in this world.”

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TWELVE

THE ART OF RESISTANCE

The harder the Party struggled against the unruly culture of the Chinese Internet, the more unruly that culture became. When, in 2009, authorities declared their intention to rid the Web of “online vulgarity,” people responded by inventing a smiling cartoon symbol—a mythical creature that resembled an alpaca—named the Grass Mud Horse, which, in Mandarin, was a homonym for “Fuck Your Mother.” Overnight, the Grass Mud Horse was galloping and grazing all over the Internet, singing in music videos and appearing in animated shorts—often cavorting with another cartoon creature, the River Crab, a play on the Party’s beloved concept of “harmony,” which Lin Yifu had touted to his audience. Each new satire and double entendre was, in effect, a middle finger in the face of the state. The censors issued urgent instructions:

Any content related to the “Grass Mud Horse” must not be promoted or exaggerated (this goes for any mythical creatures or river crabs as well).

It did no good. Soon, the Grass Mud Horse was on T-shirts and in the form of kid-friendly stuffed animals. Nobody embraced the symbolism as rapturously as the artist Ai Weiwei, who posted a photo of himself nude, leaping into the air, clutching a stuffed Grass Mud Horse over his genitals. He titled the photo “Grass Mud Horse Covering the Middle”—a near-perfect homonym for “Fuck Your Mother, Party Central Committee.”

In the years since Ai Weiwei created chandeliers to spoof China’s new opulence, and explored the relationship with the West by sending people to

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Germany, he’d attracted growing recognition as an artist and an architect. His work on public projects put him in contact with politics in a way he had rarely experienced, and he began to see “how it functions, how it works,” he said at the time, adding, “Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.” As his criticism grew, Ai Weiwei became China’s most determined innovator of provocation. By the time he was hired to serve as artistic consultant to Herzog and De Meuron, the Swiss firm that was designing China’s National Stadium for the Olympics in Beijing, his views had begun to take a sharp turn. Before the stadium was completed, he disowned the games as a “fake smile” concealing China’s problems.

Ai Weiwei was a Falstaffian figure: capacious belly; meaty, expressive face; and a black-and-white beard that stretched to his chest. The full picture was imposing, until he revealed a whimsical view of the world. “His beard is his makeup,” his brother, Ai Dan, told me. The artist lived and worked on the northeast edge of Beijing, in a studio complex that he had designed for himself, a hive of eccentric creativity that one friend called “a cross between a monastery and a crime family.” Behind a metal gate painted turquoise, a courtyard planted with grass and bamboo was surrounded by airy buildings in brick and concrete. He and his wife, Lu Qing, also an artist, inhabited one side of the yard, and several dozen assistants occupied the other. Visitors roamed unhindered, as did a geriatric cocker spaniel named Danni and a tribe of semiferal cats that occasionally destroyed Ai’s architectural models.

He and his wife had no children. He had an infant son from an extramarital relationship with a woman who worked on one of his films. They lived nearby, and he spent part of every day with them. He had never intended to be a father. “She said, ‘Yes, I want to have the baby,’” he told me. “I said, ‘I don’t normally think I should have a baby, but if you insist, of course, it’s your right, and I will bear the full responsibility as a father.’” He was enjoying being wrong about fatherhood. “So-called human intelligence —we shouldn’t overestimate it,” he told me. “When an accident happens, that can be nice.”

Ai spent much of his time on the road; he owned an apartment in Manhattan, in Chelsea. But when he was in China his orbit revolved tightly around his studio, which acquired a role in the cultural life of Beijing akin to that of Andy Warhol’s Factory. He wandered among the buildings day and night, which made it difficult to discern when he was working and when he

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was not, a distinction that had eroded further in recent years as the line between his art and his life became increasingly indistinguishable. Since discovering Twitter, he had become one of China’s most active users, often spending eight hours a day on it. I asked him if it was taking away from his art. “I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art,” he said. “Those other works might be collectible, something you can hang on the wall, but that’s just a conventional perspective. We shouldn’t do things a certain way just because Rembrandt did it that way. If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter.” He enjoyed the spontaneity, but he also saw a deeper significance in it for Chinese people; it was, he concluded, their “first chance in a thousand years to exercise their personal freedom of expression” without the state standing between their words and the public.

* * *

Ten months after the earthquake in Sichuan, and nine months after Hu Shuli’s investigation of the collapsing schools, Ai Weiwei found himself fixated on one detail in particular: the government had declined to count or name the students who had died. Despite repeated requests, it had produced no list, no tally of the casualties, no report on what went wrong. When some parents demanded information too insistently, they were detained. This galvanized and infuriated Ai in a way that more abstract political issues rarely had. “We started to ask very simple questions: Who’s dead? What are their names?” he told me. In a blog post that was unusually harsh even for him, Ai wrote of the officials in charge of the disaster area, “They hide the facts in the name of maintaining stability. They intimidate, they jail, they persecute parents who demand the truth, and they brazenly stomp on the constitution and the basic rights of man.”

That December he launched what he called a citizens’ investigation of the quake, an attempt to document how and why so many schools collapsed— and to collect as many names as possible. He signed up volunteers and sent them to Sichuan to investigate. They collected 5,212 names and cross- checked them with parents, insurance companies, and other sources. The results filled eighty pieces of paper plastered on a wall of his office—a spreadsheet containing thousands of names and birth dates. Each day, Ai’s

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office posted to Twitter a list of the students who were born on that day who had died in the earthquake. “Today, there are seventeen,” Ai told me one winter morning at the studio. “The most of any day yet.”

We were sitting in his office, and he was, as usual, at the keyboard tweeting. As we talked, he checked the clock and announced that it was time to go to the courthouse. Over the past year, his office had sent more than 150 letters to government agencies seeking information about earthquake victims and construction problems, under the Freedom of Government Information Law. He had yet to receive a substantive response. Today he planned to file suit against the Ministry of Civil Affairs for not responding to his requests.

He slid into the passenger seat of a small black sedan, with a driver and a woman named Liu Yanping, who was overseeing the letter-writing campaign. “According to the policy, they have to respond within fifteen working days,” she said, clutching a sheaf of papers on her lap. I asked Liu if she was a lawyer, and she laughed. “For a long time, I was at home raising my child,” she said. “On his blog, Ai Weiwei asked for volunteers, so I wrote him an e- mail. The work looked interesting, and I was curious.” It led to a full-time job and other new experiences: not long after Liu joined Ai’s staff, she was arrested in Sichuan, where she was publicizing the trial of an earthquake activist; she spent two days in police custody for “disturbing the social order.”

We reached the Second Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing, a tall modern tower with a grand arched entry and a modest office at the back for processing new cases. We passed through a metal detector, where two young men in guards’ uniforms were engrossed in a comic book. There was a line of bank teller–style windows, and at the one closest to us, a tiny old woman in a pink padded jacket was bellowing into a rectangular opening in the glass. “How could the other side win without any evidence?” she shouted. “Did they bribe the head of the court?” On the opposite side of the glass, two women in uniform were listening with resigned expressions suggesting that the old woman had been at it for a while.

Ai and Liu lined up in front of window No. 1 and, when it was their turn, slid the papers through the opening to a middle-aged man in a tan blazer. He looked glassy-eyed and exhausted. He read the papers carefully and identified a problem: “You say that you need the Ministry of Civil Affairs to make this information public, but why are you taking an interest in this?”

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Ai leaned over to speak into the opening in the window. “Actually, according to the policy,” he said, “everyone has a right to ask for this information—not that you have to agree.” After some back-and-forth, Ai and Liu consented to write out a description of their goals, and they found seats in a waiting area full of people holding similar sheaves of paper. “They don’t want to accept this,” Ai said, “because once it is in the legal pipeline, they have to make some kind of judgment.” By the time Ai and Liu reached the window again, an hour had passed. Now they learned that they were using the wrong color ink. Written materials had to be in black, and they had used blue. They sat down again to rewrite them. They got in line again.

“Kafka’s castle,” Ai murmured. Two hours stretched into three, and I asked him why he was bothering with this if he did not expect a response. “I want to prove that the system is not working,” he said. “You can’t simply say that the system is not working. You have to work through it.” Twenty minutes before closing time, the man behind the glass finally accepted the filing, and Ai and Liu, satisfied, turned to leave. The old woman was still yelling.

* * *

Ai Weiwei always sensed that he was born into the wrong family—or, at least, an inauspicious one. His father, Ai Qing, was among China’s foremost literary figures. He had joined the Communist Party as a young man and earned a reputation for accessible verse imbued with the spirit of the revolution. He was especially impressed with Chairman Mao, for whom he wrote a poem of praise that began, “Wherever Mao Zedong appears / thunderous applause erupts.”

In 1957, when Ai Qing was forty-seven, he and his wife, Gao Ying, a young staff member at the writers’ association, had a son. At the time, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, one of Mao’s purges of intellectuals, was gathering force, and Ai Qing’s devotion to the Party was called into question. He had written a fable, “The Gardener’s Dream,” that highlighted the need to permit a broader range of creative opinions. In it, a gardener who cultivates only Chinese roses realizes that he is “causing discontent among all the other types of flowers.” A fellow poet, Feng Zhi, attacked Ai Qing, saying that he had fallen “into the quagmire of reactionary formalism.”

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Ai Qing was stripped of his titles and ejected from the writers’ association. At night he would bang his head against the wall and demand, “Do you think I am against the Party?” In those wretched weeks, the couple had to name their infant son. The father simply opened the dictionary and dropped his finger onto a character: , pronounced wei, which means “power.” The irony was too great, given the circumstances, so he altered the tone slightly to make it into a different wei, , which means “not yet.” Their son thus became “Not yet, not yet.”

The family was ordered out to a remote western stretch of Xinjiang, where Ai Qing was assigned the job of cleaning public toilets, thirteen a day. For extra food, the family collected the severed hooves of sheep discarded by butchers, and piglets that had frozen to death. When the Cultural Revolution began, things worsened. Ai Qing’s tormentors poured ink on his face, and children threw stones at him. The family was assigned to live in an underground cavern that had been used as a birthing place for farm animals. They were there for five years. Of his father, Ai told me, “That period in his life was the absolute bottom, the most painful. He attempted suicide several times.”

As a child, Ai Weiwei distracted himself by working with his hands, making ice skates and gunpowder. Ai’s parents could not shield their sons from what Ai Dan called “the pressure and humiliation and hopelessness.” Speaking of his brother, Ai Dan said, “He was a sensitive, fragile child, so he saw and heard more than other people.” In his teens, Ai Weiwei wrote a letter to his brother that recalled their childhood: “The sound of smashing furniture and people begging for mercy; the cat being hanged until it was dead … the bullying and cursing in front of people. We were so young but we had to bear all the crimes.” He resolved never to be a prisoner of the fate his nation might ordain. “I want a better life for myself to control my own destiny.”

Ai graduated from high school the year the family was allowed to return to Beijing. He had already awakened to art, and a translator friend of the family gave him banned books on Degas and van Gogh, which he circulated like talismans among his friends. (He also received a book about Jasper Johns, but the images of maps and flags baffled him, and it went “straight into the garbage.”) He gravitated to the group of avant-garde artists known as the Stars, but their activism was circumscribed. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping put an end to an incipient political movement called Democracy Wall; its central

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figure, Wei Jingsheng, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, on charges of leaking state secrets. After that, Ai Weiwei recalled, “I felt I can no longer live in this country.” His girlfriend at the time was moving to the United States to go to school, and in February 1981 he joined her.

* * *

In New York, Ai studied English and found a cheap basement apartment near East Seventh Street and Second Avenue. He spent his weekends haunting the galleries, roaming the city, as his brother put it, like “a mud-fish burrowing wherever there is muck.” He was intoxicated by the raw energy of the East Village, which to him felt “like a volcano with smoke always billowing out of the top.” Joan Lebold Cohen, a historian of Chinese art who got to know many Chinese artists in New York at the time, recalls visiting Ai’s building. “The whole place reeked of urine,” she said. “His apartment was a single room, no furniture, just a bed on the floor, and a television. And he was riveted to the television.” She went on, “It was, I think, the Iran-Contra hearings. And he was so excited about the idea that the government would go through this cleansing, this agony, this ripping itself apart. He just couldn’t believe that this was all done publicly.”

He did odd jobs—housekeeper, gardener, babysitter, construction worker —but mostly he played blackjack in Atlantic City. (He was such a frequent visitor that, years later, the gaming press reported that gamblers who knew him were stunned to discover that he was also into art.) He earned some money as a sidewalk portrait painter, avoiding customers who were immigrants, like him, because they tried to bargain down the price. Soon, Ai abandoned painting and began exploring the possibilities in objects. He took a violin from a friend, pried off the neck and strings, and replaced them with the handle of a shovel. (The friend was not pleased.)

Ai was accumulating influences. At a poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, he met Allen Ginsberg, and they struck up an unlikely friendship. But nobody affected him as deeply as Duchamp, whose subversion of orthodoxy was thrilling to Chinese artists raised on academic realism. Ai took to photography and sold breaking-news pictures to the Times. He documented protests in Tompkins Square Park, and had his first run-ins with the police. “Being threatened is addictive,” he later told a

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Chinese interviewer. “When those in power are infatuated with you, you feel valued.”

The market for Chinese contemporary art, however, was dismal. Joan Cohen recalled, “One curator I approached said to me, ‘We don’t show Third World art.’” When Cohen contacted the Guggenheim, she says, “not only would the curator not see me but his secretary wouldn’t see me.” When, in April of 1993, Ai got word that his father was ill, he returned to Beijing. Upon arrival, he discovered that, in the years after Tiananmen, many young Chinese intellectuals had disengaged from public life. A popular T-shirt had a picture of three monkeys covering their ears, eyes, and mouths, and the phrase “Keeping Out of Harm’s Way.”

In 1999, Ai Weiwei leased some vegetable fields in the village of Caochangdi, on the fringe of Beijing, and sketched out a studio complex in an afternoon. He had no training as an architect, but the design was distinctive, and it attracted a flurry of commissions for buildings and public art installations. Before long, he had one of China’s most influential architecture practices, which he named FAKE Design—a nod to his accidental success and his fascination with questions of authenticity. (“I know nothing about architecture,” he liked to say.)

As years went by, Ai Weiwei spent more and more of his time on the intersection of politics, free expression, and technology. The Chinese website Sina invited him to host a blog, and at first he used it in an odd way—putting his own life under surveillance by posting dozens, sometimes hundreds, of snapshots each day, depicting his visitors, his cats, his wanderings. The blog gave him a far wider audience than he had ever encountered. He took to commenting on subjects ranging far beyond art. He wrote of a country called “C,” ruled by “chunky and witless gluttons” who “spend two hundred billion yuan on drinking and dining and an equal amount on the military budget every year.” Unlike journalists who had to heed the directives from the Department, Ai Weiwei was something new; he had no job from which to be fired for speaking out.

He became engrossed in one sensitive issue after another. “He’d be reading the news and he’d say, ‘How can this be?’” Zhao Zhao, a younger artist who was working as one of Ai’s assistants, told me. “And then the next day, and the day after that, he’d still be saying the same thing.” By May 2009 he was one of China’s most outspoken voices, and police officers visited Ai

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and his mother to ask him about his activities. He responded with an open letter, posted online: “Tapping my phone I tolerated. Surveillance of my residence I tolerated. But charging into my house and threatening me in front of my seventy-six-year-old mother I cannot tolerate. You don’t understand human rights, but do you know anything about the constitution?” The next day, his blog was shut down.

* * *

The intersection of wealth and authoritarianism posed a predicament for members of China’s new creative class. They were not the first artists forced to reckon with a society that supported the arts but suppressed free expression. Mies van der Rohe worked with the Nazis and was criticized for it. In China during the Cultural Revolution, artists were barred from playing Bach, Beethoven, and other composers, and had to perform only the permissible “revolutionary operas.” The current pressures were more subtle: there had never been more money available for the arts in China, but receiving those spoils required tolerating the limits on expression. Writers, painters, and filmmakers had to decide how much of their work was activism and how much of it was to produce a commodity. They had to balance the pressures from an overheated commercial market, foreign expectations of artists toiling in the People’s Republic, and of course the Party.

To understand how that felt, I visited Xu Bing, who rose to prominence in the eighties when he produced some highly controversial work, including A Book from the Sky, a set of hand-printed books and scrolls composed entirely of fake pictograms—a critique of China’s hidebound literary culture. Xu moved to America and thrived, earning a MacArthur “genius grant” and commanding high prices for his art. Then, in 2008, he startled the Chinese art world by shedding his outsider status and returning to Beijing to become the vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the nation’s top official art school. I met up with Xu Bing at a Beijing museum, where he was installing a set of giant steel phoenixes that dangled from construction cranes. We got a drink and I asked him why he had returned to China in the way he had. “This place, in fact, still has a lot of problems, like the disparity between rich and poor, and migrant labor issues, and on and on. But it really has solved many problems. China’s economy is developing so quickly. I’m

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interested in why that has happened. “My school has meetings constantly,” he went on. They are a fact of life

in a state-run organization. “The meetings, you discover, are really boring and useless. Sometimes, in meetings, I write literary essays, and people think I’m taking notes, that I’m especially dedicated.” He laughed, and continued, “But then sometimes I think about the fact that China is holding meetings every day, and even though these meetings are meaningless, China has still developed so fast. How has this happened? There must be some reason. This is what interests me.”

Ai Weiwei occupied an especially awkward niche in the world of Chinese contemporary art: overseas, his reputation (and prices) was growing—he received a coveted commission to fill the cathedral-like Turbine Hall, at Britain’s Tate Modern—but, in China, he was never invited to hold a major exhibition, and his relations with fellow artists were tepid. Zhao Zhao told me, “Galleries and magazines send him things, and he doesn’t even open them.”

I asked Feng Boyi, a curator and critic who had worked with Ai over the years, to describe how other intellectuals regarded Ai. “Some really admire him, especially young people outside of art circles,” Feng told me. But among some artists another view prevailed. “They attack him,” Feng said. “They say he simply wants to make a fuss. They don’t acknowledge his approach.”

Many Chinese artists, like other elites, have explored Western liberalism or lived abroad, but as with Tang Jie or the Stanford engineer I met in Palo Alto, the exposure heightened their patriotism and made them suspicious of Western critiques of China. To his detractors, Ai Weiwei was too quick to satisfy Western expectations of “the dissident,” too willing to reduce the complexity of today’s China into black-and-white absolutes that appealed to foreign sympathies. They accused him of hypocrisy—for criticizing others’ passivity in the face of injustice, though his own famous family name and his profile in the West seemed to afford him a level of protection that others did not enjoy. The fact that Ai exhibited mostly abroad fueled criticism that he was happier allowing foreigners to project their moral longings onto him than engaging with China’s ambiguities. (At one point, so many commentators online were speculating that he had renounced his Chinese citizenship that Ai felt compelled to post images of his Chinese passport.)

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At one point, Ai Weiwei was close friends with Xu Bing, the MacArthur fellow who had joined the Central Academy. But they had grown apart, and I asked Xu what he made of Ai’s political activities. “He has held on to certain ideals, like democracy and freedom, that made a deep impression on him— things inherited from the Cold War era,” Xu said. “These things are not without value—they have value—and in today’s China he has his function. It is meaningful and necessary. But when I came back to China I thought that China is very different than it was when he came back to China.” He added, “We can’t hold on to a Cold War attitude, particularly in today’s China, because China today and China during the Cold War are worlds apart.”

Xu said, “Not everyone can be like Ai Weiwei, because then China wouldn’t be able to develop, right? But if China doesn’t permit a man like Ai Weiwei, well, then it has a problem.”

* * *

A couple of months after his blog was shut down, Ai Weiwei went to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, to attend the trial of Tan Zuoren, an earthquake activist who had been accused of inciting subversion of the state. At 3:00 a.m. on August 12, while Ai was asleep in his hotel, police knocked on the door and ordered him to open it. He replied that he had no way to know if they were who they said they were, and he picked up the phone to dial the police. (He also turned on an audio recorder to capture the scene.) Before his call could go through, the police broke down the door. A struggle ensued, and he was punched in the face, above the right cheekbone. “It was three or four people,” he told me. “They were just dragging me. They tore my shirt and hit my head.”

The police took him and eleven of his volunteers and assistants to another hotel and detained them there until the end of the day, when Tan’s trial was over. Four weeks later, Ai, in Munich to install a show, felt a persistent headache and weakness in his left arm. He went to a doctor, who discovered a subdural hematoma—a pool of blood on the right side of his brain—caused by blunt force trauma. The doctor considered it life-threatening and performed surgery that night. From his hospital bed as he recovered, Ai posted to Twitter copies of his brain scans, the doctor’s statements, and photographs of himself in the hospital with a drain protruding from his scalp.

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Then he went ahead with the biggest exhibition of his career: a vast installation that blanketed an exterior wall of the Munich Haus der Kunst with a mosaic of nine thousand bright-colored custom-made children’s backpacks. In giant Chinese characters, the bags spelled out a statement from the mother of a child killed in the quake: “She Lived Happily on This Earth for Seven Years.”

In the months after the surgery, Ai fully recovered, though he tired easily and had trouble summoning words. At the same time, he began to notice signs that the government was watching him more closely. His Gmail accounts were hacked and the settings altered to forward his messages to an unfamiliar address. His bank received official inquiries to review his finances. A pair of surveillance cameras appeared on utility poles outside his front gate, focused on the traffic going in and out—notwithstanding the redundancy of monitoring someone who already broadcast the minutiae of his life. When he tried to make DVDs of his documentaries, duplicating services worried that they would be punished for associating with him. “Not even the porno producers will do it,” Zuoxiao Zuzhou, a rock musician who works on Ai’s media productions, told me.

Ai Weiwei had come to abhor the mode of oblique dissent in China. Traditionally, intellectuals were expected to couch their criticisms of the government in a way that preserved the appearance of unity. As one saying had it, they should “point at the mulberry bush to disparage the ash tree.” Ai Weiwei had lost patience with this. When a group of lesser-known artists who were protesting plans to demolish their studios in the name of development approached him for advice, he told them, “If you protest and fail to publish anything about it, you might as well have protested inside your own house.” Ai and the other artists staged a march down the Avenue of Eternal Peace, in the center of Beijing—an immensely symbolic gesture, because of the street’s proximity to Tiananmen Square. Police blocked them peacefully after a few hundred yards, but their bravado drew attention far beyond the art world. Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent legal activist, told me, “For twenty years, I have thought that protesting on Chang’an Avenue was absolutely off-limits. He did it. And what could they do about it?”

In China, the subversive dynamics of the Internet age—the rebirth of irony, the search for community, the courage to complain—had stirred a hunger for a new kind of critical voice. The editor Hu Shuli and her

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journalists couldn’t satisfy it; they had neither the independence nor the desire to channel popular outrage. Classic dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo were too earnest and elitist to speak for the broader public. Tang Jie and the nationalists alienated people with their ferocity, and Han Han was usually too glib to share a stage with his elders. But Ai Weiwei combined ironclad Red credentials with a populist flair; he spoke in a vernacular that mixed irony, imagination, and rage.

“There are people who say that he is doing some kind of performance art,” Chen Danqing, a Chinese painter and social critic, told me. “But I think he long ago surpassed that definition. He is doing something more interesting, more ambiguous.” Chen added, “He wants to see how far an individual’s power can go.”

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THIRTEEN

SEVEN SENTENCES

The technology that Liu Xiaobo called “God’s gift to China” eventually led the police to his front door. For months, authorities had been monitoring his e-mail and online chats. By December 2008 he and his coauthors had collected the first three hundred signatures for the declaration they called Charter 08, and they were preparing to release it. Two days before they could, a team of officers assembled on the landing outside Liu’s apartment.

When the authorities led him away, Liu did not resist. His wife, Liu Xia, was not told where he was going or why. Days passed. Liu’s lawyer, Mo Shaoping, tried to find out who in the government had custody of his client, or where he had been taken, but the local agency that dealt with political dissidents—the General Affairs Office of the Beijing Public Security Bureau —was, like the Central Propaganda Department, a building that did not exist. It had no listed address and no known phone number. When the lawyer resorted to showing up, in person, at the front door, the staff refused to acknowledge that it was the office he was seeking. Mo was at a loss for what else to do, so he reverted to an older technology: he typed out his request for information, addressed it to the secret office, and slid it into the mailbox.

When Charter 08 was finally released, a few days after Liu’s arrest, it turned out that the statement called for gradual, not abrupt change; the authors had modulated their message on purpose. They wanted to reach beyond marginal intellectuals in order to appeal to ordinary men and women who would recoil from the prospect of full-scale instability but might see something of their own struggles in a call for reform. “The decline of the current system has reached the point where change is no longer optional,” Liu and his coauthors had written, and they proposed nineteen reforms, such as

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independent courts and elections for higher office. On paper, their calls for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law bore similarities to the government’s own language: the national constitution contained assurances such as Article 35, which guaranteed “freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.” In practice, however, the constitution had no legal authority over the Party, so it was largely meaningless. When the Party praised “democracy,” it meant “democratic centralism,” the concept of debate within its own ranks, and unquestioning adherence to final decisions.

Four months passed without any word of Liu’s whereabouts. Then, on June 23, 2009, authorities informed his wife that her husband would be prosecuted for “incitement to subvert state power.” His trial would begin two days before Christmas. “Incitement to subvert state power” was a crime with Chinese characteristics. Other authoritarian governments generally preferred to jail dissidents for more concrete reasons; in the Soviet Union, Natan Sharansky was imprisoned for being a spy. (He was not.) In Myanmar, the former junta kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for years for, in their words, “her own safety.” But the Chinese government saw no need for those contrivances, and it indicted Liu Xiaobo on the basis of precisely seven sentences from his writings—words that, prosecutors charged, contained “rumor and slander” against the “people’s democratic dictatorship.” In the case of one of his offending articles, the title alone became a count in the indictment: he had titled an essay, “Change a Regime by Changing a Society.”

What the Party did not say was that it considered Liu a special kind of threat. His contacts overseas and his embrace of the Internet merged two of the Party’s most neuralgic issues: the threat of a foreign-backed “color revolution” and the organizing potential of the Web. The previous year, President Hu Jintao told the Politburo, “Whether we can cope with the Internet” will determine “the stability of the state.”

At Liu’s trial that December, the prosecution needed just fourteen minutes to present its case. When it was Liu’s turn to speak, he denied none of the charges. Instead, he read a statement in which he predicted that the ruling against him would not “pass the test of history”:

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I look forward to the day when our country will be a land of free expression: a country where the words of each citizen will get equal respect; a country where different values, ideas, beliefs, and political views can compete with one another even as they peacefully coexist; a country where expression of both majority and minority views will be secure, and, in particular, where political views that differ from those of the people in power will be fully respected and protected; a country where all political views will be spread out beneath the sun for citizens to choose among, and every citizen will be able to express views without the slightest of fears; a country where it will be impossible to suffer persecution for expressing a political view. I hope that I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crimes.

Midway through Liu’s statement, the judge abruptly cut him off, saying the prosecution used only fourteen minutes and so the defense must do the same. (Chinese lawyers had never encountered this principle before.) Two days later, on Christmas Day 2009, the court sentenced Liu to eleven years in prison. This was lengthy by Chinese standards; local activists interpreted it as a deterrent to others, in the spirit of the old saying “Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.”

The severity of the sentence was surprising in part because the charter had produced very little public response. Censors had struck it down as soon as it appeared, and it had been poorly timed: Chinese people were still enjoying the afterglow of the Olympics; earlier that spring, the video by the philosophy student Tang Jie had tapped into Chinese sensitivity to Western criticism. Moreover, the financial crisis was expanding, and Chinese leaders’ performance on the economy looked skillful compared with that of many Western leaders. Roland Soong, an author and translator, wrote, “Charter 08 was dead on arrival on account of George W. Bush.” The new members of the middle class, he predicted, “won’t bet their apartments, cars, television sets, washing machines and hopes on a prayer.”

At first the government seemed to agree; it scarcely bothered to acknowledge Charter 08 in public. But in the months that followed, the charter began to attract signatures from intellectuals, farmers, teenagers, and former officials. Eventually the number reached twelve thousand—an

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infinitesimal minority in China’s population, but symbolically significant: it was the largest coordinated campaign against one-party rule since 1949. It reflected a community of ordinary people unafraid to sign their names, people who had been living until then, as one of the signers wrote, “in a certain kind of separate and solitary state.” The Party could not stay silent. In October 2010 the state press denounced the charter as “totally obsolete,” written to “confuse people’s thoughts” and bring about “violent revolution.” It called on people to remember the Century of Humiliation: “Adopting this kind of charter would reduce China to an appendage of the West; it would put an end to the progress of Chinese society and the happiness of the people.”

* * *

Two months after Liu’s conviction, he appealed his sentence. The appeal was denied. When foreign reporters asked the Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu for information about the ruling, he objected to the question because, he said, “There are no dissidents in China.” Then he tried to lighten the mood: Chinese New Year was approaching, and at the end of the press conference he wished everyone a happy Year of the Tiger, and he held up a stuffed toy tiger. He urged the reporters to be “very careful when asking questions” or the “tiger here might not be very happy with you.”

Across town, at his studio, Ai Weiwei read that line—“There are no dissidents in China”—and it lingered with him. Ai’s visitors were increasingly using it to describe him, but the word dissident struck him as too simple to encompass the new range of dissent that was taking root in China. In the West, it had the ring of defiant moral clarity in the face of repressive power, but in China, becoming a “dissident” was complicated in ways that outsiders often underestimated.

For one thing, China’s government didn’t provide a simple target; it had succeeded in improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people, even as it deprived them of political liberty. When the government encountered a critic, it often tried to make this argument in the most practical terms: Wen Kejian, a human rights activist who had also been a successful businessman, recalled being visited by police who tried to steer him away from politics by saying, “Look at your shabby car, already seven or eight years old. All your friends already have Benzes.” Wen heard them out but considered the police officers’

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argument as laughable as they considered his. Each side was trying to persuade the other, but they spoke different languages. It was the kind of conversation the Chinese call a “chicken talking to a duck.” Cluck, cluck. Quack, quack. Neither side understood a thing.

Beyond the obvious pressures from the security forces, becoming a dissident could torpedo your relationships with friends and patrons. In China, intellectuals were often suspicious of dissidents among them who had too many foreign admirers or who appeared less interested in achieving practical gains than in fueling the kind of overt political conflict shunned by classical Chinese thought. Ai Weiwei reveled in confrontation. Now that he was being followed by plainclothes state security agents, he started calling the cops on them, setting off a Marx Brothers muddle of overlapping police agencies: “an absurdist novel gone bad,” as he put it. He inverted the usual logic of art and politics: instead of enlisting art in the service of his protest, he enlisted the apparatus of authoritarianism into his art.

At times, he seemed congenitally incapable of cooperation. At one point, he was asked to create a piece that could fill a prominent site in Copenhagen usually occupied by Edvard Eriksen’s statue of the Little Mermaid, which was being loaned to Shanghai. Instead of replacing it with a statue, Ai decided to install a live closed-circuit video of the mermaid in her temporary home in China. The Danes thought the oversize surveillance camera that he designed was unattractive. “That’s our real life,” he said. “Everybody is under some kind of surveillance camera. It’s not beautiful.”

Whenever a Chinese activist weighed the costs and benefits of dissent, there was always, in the background, the knowledge of what could happen if the government ran out of patience. You just had to recall the name Gao Zhisheng. In 2005, Gao was a lawyer and a rising star; he had been ranked as one of the country’s ten best attorneys by the Ministry of Justice in 2001. The more he succeeded in court, the more pugnacious he became, and the more willing he was to take on sensitive cases for practitioners of Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement. He was jailed for criticizing the government’s handling of the law, but he refused to stop, and in September 2007 he saw a group of men approaching him on the sidewalk, and he felt a sharp blow to the neck. A hood was pulled over his head.

Gao was driven to an unknown location, and the hood was removed. He was stripped naked. He was beaten and electrocuted with batons. “Then two

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people stretched out my arms and pinned me to the ground,” he wrote in an account smuggled abroad. “They used toothpicks to pierce my genitals.” The torture continued for fourteen days. He was kept in detention for another five weeks. Finally, he was released with the warning never to describe how he was treated or next time “it will happen in front of your wife and children.” When a reporter visited him a couple of years later, Gao had renounced his life as an activist. He said, simply, “I don’t have the capacity to persevere.”

Ai Weiwei looked, again, at the phrase, “There are no dissidents in China.” He typed out a string of messages, to his tens of thousands of followers, that tried to make sense of what the government meant by that:

1. All dissidents are criminals. 2. Only criminals have dissenting views. 3. The distinction between criminals and non-criminals is whether

they dissent. 4. If you think China has dissidents, you are a criminal. 5. The reason China has no dissidents is because they are criminals. 6. Now, anyone want to dissent from this view?

The Party was so experienced in containing dissidents, of the classic kind, that it was easy to overlook just how rapidly its information problems were proliferating. Because the Internet had long ago exceeded what the censors in the Department could handle, the work of policing the Web fell to several agencies, including the Internet Affairs Bureau. The bureau was honest about the scale of the challenge. The deputy director, Liu Zhengrong, conceded dolefully, “Our biggest challenge is that the Internet is still growing.”

In the old media system, censors relied on the anaconda in the chandelier —the knowledge that Hu Shuli and fellow editors would censor themselves in order to protect their right to keep printing—but on the Web, you simply didn’t know who was going to write something dangerous until it was written. The censors could strike down comments as fast as possible, but that was still too slow to prevent their being forwarded and saved and digested. On a scale unprecedented in Chinese history, words were being expressed first and censored second.

And this created yet another problem: censorship, once an abstract and

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invisible process confined to secret directives and newsroom discussions, was now plainly visible. Whenever the authorities took down one of Han Han’s blog posts, it was not simply the digital equivalent of intercepting one of Liu Xiaobo’s manuscripts at the post office. It was an act witnessed by millions of casual Internet users who, otherwise, were happy to live their lives without ever dwelling on the patronizing mechanics of censorship. It was a signal, as Han Han explained to me, that “there is something that you really don’t want me to know. So now I really want to know it.”

A generation of his fans was growing up to believe that “whatever you’re trying to cover up becomes the truth,” he said. In a speech, he said, “I can’t write about the police, I can’t write about the leaders, I can’t write about policies, I can’t write about the system, I can’t write about the judiciary, I can’t write about many pieces of history, I can’t write about Tibet, I can’t write about Xinjiang, I can’t write about mass assemblies, I can’t write about demonstrations, I can’t write about pornography, I can’t write about censorship, I can’t write about art.”

The best the Party could hope for was to prevent an Internet conversation before it began—by automatically filtering sensitive words. Because political issues popped up overnight, the censors had to maintain a constantly updated glossary of taboo terms, much like the list of directives to the media I received on my phone. The Internet Affairs Bureau sent out instructions, sometimes several times a day, to websites across the country. A word might be permissible one day and banned the next. Typing it into Baidu, the Chinese version of Google, yielded a message: “Search results are not displayed because they may not suit the corresponding laws, regulations and policies.”

But people adapted just as fast. To get around the filters, they substituted Chinese characters that sounded similar, creating a kind of code, a shadow language, such that when censors blocked Charter 08—ling ba xianzhang— people called it “linba xianzhang.” (Nobody cared that this meant “county magistrate lymph nodes.”)

The government was in a race against the imagination, and it was forever trying to catch up. There was no more difficult time of year than June, when the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown approached, and people dreamt up oblique ways to discuss it. Beyond the terms always on the blacklist—democracy protests, 1989, June 4—the censors clamored to add

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code words as fast as people invented them. I read the latest list of banned words, and it looked like a commemoration of its own:

Fire Crush Redress Never forget

* * *

In the event that these censorship efforts failed, the Party was testing a weapon of last resort: the OFF switch. On July 5, 2009, members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority in the far western city of Urumqi protested police handling of a brawl between Hans and Uighurs. The protests turned violent, and nearly two hundred people died, most of them Han, who had been targeted for their ethnicity. Revenge attacks on Uighur neighborhoods followed, and in an effort to prevent people from communicating and organizing, the government abruptly disabled text messages, cut long- distance phone lines, and shut off Internet access almost entirely. The digital blackout lasted ten months, and the economic effects were dramatic: exports from Xinjiang, the Uighur autonomous region, plummeted more than 44 percent. But the Party was willing to accept immense economic damage to smother what it considered a political threat. In the event of a broader crisis someday, China probably has too many channels in and out to impose so complete a blackout on a national scale, but even a limited version would have a profound effect.

The Xinjiang uprising was a turning point in many other ways as well. Over the previous year, Hu Shuli and Caijing magazine had proved that investigative success could be popular. The more information Chinese people received, the more they seemed to crave. Hu Shuli tripled the size of her newsroom staff, to more than two hundred reporters. The magazine hired a former investment banker, Daphne Wu, to be the business manager, and she tripled ad sales in two years, to 170 million yuan. She and Hu had plans far beyond a print magazine: they envisioned “a whole media information and commentary platform,” Wu told me in her office overlooking Beijing. She sounded less like a Chinese news worker than a Silicon Valley executive.

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“No matter what kind of device you’re using, we want to deliver quality stuff,” she said.

But as the magazine became more profitable, and adventurous, Hu Shuli’s relations with her patron Wang Boming were fraying. The more she traveled, and studied publications abroad, the larger her aspirations became. She wanted her own media enterprise, one that could function at international standards. Wang, by contrast, had other priorities; he had gone into publishing to make some money and to enjoy the minor glamour of life as a media mogul—not to become a political martyr. He was uneasy. When I had talked to him about Hu, a weary look crossed his face that suggested he had gotten more than he bargained for. “We didn’t know that this level of risk would come along with it,” he said.

In the spring of 2009, the government warned Caijing not to investigate financial corruption within the state television system, or a list of other acutely sensitive topics. “But they do it anyway!” Wang said. He dragged hard on a cigarette. Muckraking, he added, was popular with readers but not with advertisers. “On one page is their advertisement, and on the next page is an article saying their company is a fake,” he said. “You can’t imagine the phone calls we get. Caijing never does a positive report. All the corporations talk to Shuli hoping it will be a good article, and it’s always negative!”

By the summer, the relationship between the editor and publisher was deteriorating sharply. When the riots broke out in Xinjiang, and the Internet was shut down, propaganda officials allowed only officially approved journalists to get online. Hu Shuli had dispatched three reporters to the scene, though authorities had given her permission to send only two. The third reporter borrowed a friend’s press pass to sneak into the press center that had Internet access. He was caught, and officials attempted to search his laptop. He resisted, and scuffled with a guard. Authorities put him on a plane back to Beijing.

The news of that run-in reached the highest ranks of the government. Propaganda authorities had already scolded Caijing that year, and now Hu Shuli’s patrons drew up a list of measures to put her back under control: from now on, the magazine would submit every cover story for approval; it would accept instructions “without question”; and most important, it would abandon coverage of politics and “return to positive reporting on finance and economics.”

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Hu Shuli was outraged. “What is the definition of ‘political news’?” she demanded of Wang Boming. “And ‘positive news’? Who would be the judge of that?” For the next few weeks, she tried to accommodate the new rules. But her bosses rejected one cover story after another. After the third rejection, she feared that her best young editors were ready to quit. When the bosses rejected a fourth story, she published it anyway.

* * *

As word spread in Beijing that Hu Shuli was clashing with her backers, she glimpsed a way out. Investors approached her, and she realized that their backing might allow her to wrest away greater control of the magazine. Her tensions with Wang Boming were about more than just editorial freedom. Hers was the most profitable magazine he owned, and she wanted more of the profits to go into expanding the operation, or she feared she would be left behind in the new era of the Web.

She approached Wang with an audacious plan for a management buyout that would divvy up control of the company: 40 percent for investors; 30 percent for her and her editors; and 30 percent for Wang’s company. Most important, she wanted ultimate control over editorial decisions. If anyone was going to negotiate with the Department, she wanted to be that person. “I think, as a professional editor, I should be the one to make the last decision,” she said.

But in Wang Boming’s eyes, the proposal was a betrayal. He had helped her carve out more freedom to practice journalism than anyone else in China —and instead of being grateful, she was asking for more, just as Chinese citizens were asking for more from a ruling class that believed it had already delivered enough. She was being naïve, Wang thought. Or, worse, grandstanding—draping herself in the flag of free speech to disguise her desire to gain control of the company. He rejected the deal.

By September the arrangement was falling apart: the business manager, Daphne Wu, and sixty members of her staff resigned, while, in the newsroom, editors announced that they, too, were leaving, and together they would start over. “Come with us,” Hu’s deputy, Wang Shuo, told a group of young editors and reporters. The truth was that it wasn’t clear what or how they would start again, but each of them had a choice to make. The departing

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editors, in the hope of encouraging a full-scale walkout, gave their colleagues three days to decide whether to join them.

To the reporters facing the decision, it was a dilemma: Who would provide political protection to Hu Shuli now? Would investors ever gamble on her again? Besides, her reporters had a range of complaints about her management: for all her talk of transparency and checks and balances, she had a dictatorial streak; some of her investigative reporters thought she pulled punches for high-powered friends; and the high salaries she provided in the early days of Caijing had failed to keep up with China’s surging economy. Her reporters could have tripled their salaries by joining the industries they covered.

And yet, for all this uncertainty, Hu’s very existence had a powerful effect on the rising younger journalists around her. “We like to say that every hundred years you have a person like Shuli,” Cao Haili, the reporter who worked on the SARS virus, told me. “She is really, really unique. In the States you might have tons of people like that, but in China it’s really rare.”

On November 9, Hu Shuli left the magazine, and 140 members of the newsroom walked out with her. For Hu, leaving was a choice, even if it was not one she had sought. “You can say we were driven out. You can say we left. It’s very hard to say,” she told me. She strained to put a positive spin on it. “Maybe we can do something bigger and more interesting,” she said. But among Chinese intellectuals, few saw reason for optimism. “She’s got blood on her sword and gunpowder on her clothes,” Hecaitou, a blogger, wrote. “It will be hard to find another Hu Shuli.”

* * *

On October 8, 2010, ten months after Liu Xiaobo was convicted, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights.” He was the first Chinese citizen to receive the award, not counting the Dalai Lama, who had lived for decades in exile. The award to Liu Xiaobo drove Chinese leaders into a rage; the government denounced Liu’s award as a “desecration” of Alfred Nobel’s legacy. For years, China had coveted a Nobel Prize as a validation of the nation’s progress and a measure of the world’s acceptance. The obsession with the prize was so intense that scholars had named it the “Nobel

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complex,” and each fall they debated China’s odds of winning it, like sports fans in a pennant race. There was once a television debate called “How Far Are We from a Nobel Prize?”

When the award was announced, most Chinese people had never heard of Liu, so the state media made the first impression; it splashed an article across the country reporting that he earned his living “bad-mouthing his own country.” The profile was a classic of the form: it described him as a collector of fine wines and porcelain, and it portrayed him telling fellow prisoners, “I’m not like you. I don’t lack for money. Foreigners pay me every year, even when I’m in prison.” Liu “spared no effort in working for Western anti-China forces” and, in doing so, “crossed the line of freedom of speech into crime.”

For activists, the news of the award was staggering. “Many broke down in tears, even uncontrollable sobbing,” one said later. In Beijing, bloggers, lawyers, and scholars gathered in the back of a restaurant to celebrate, but police arrived and detained twenty of them. When the announcement was made, Han Han, on his blog, toyed with censors and readers; he posted nothing but a pair of quotation marks enclosing an empty space. The post drew one and a half million hits and more than twenty-eight thousand comments.

Two days after Liu won the prize, his wife, Liu Xia, visited him at Jinzhou Prison in the province of Liaoning. “This is for the lost souls of June Fourth,” he told her. Returning to Beijing, she was placed under house arrest. The government barred her, and anyone else, from going to Oslo to pick up the award; the only previous time this had happened was in 1935, when Hitler prevented relatives from going on behalf of Carl von Ossietzky, the German writer and pacifist, who was in a guarded hospital bed after having been in a concentration camp. Liu Xia’s telephone and Internet connections were severed, and she was barred from contact with anyone but her mother—the beginning of a campaign of isolation that would last for years.

As the ceremony approached in December, China called on other countries to boycott it. The state press called it “a choosing of sides,” and Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai, a savvy diplomat with a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins, asked of fellow nations, “Do they want to be part of the political game to challenge China’s judicial system, or do they want to develop a true friendly relationship with the Chinese government and people?” In the event, forty-five countries showed up, and nineteen stayed

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away, including Iraq, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam. (The front page of the China Daily declared MOST NATIONS OPPOSE PEACE PRIZE TO LIU.) Outside Liu’s apartment in Beijing, crews hastily erected a blue metal construction fence to prevent photographers from shooting images of Liu Xia under house arrest. When the BBC broadcast the ceremony, television screens in China went black.

Over the years, I’d seen this tactic many times. Decades ago, the black screen had been a fair reflection of China’s blinkered view of the world, its backwardness and seclusion. But now the instinct to shield the public from unflattering facts was absurdly at odds with the openness and sophistication in other parts of Chinese life, and it seemed to cheapen what ordinary Chinese people had worked so hard to achieve. China was not Hitler’s Germany, but Chinese leaders were willing to let themselves be lumped beside the Nazis in the history of the Nobel Prize. Either the strongest forces in the Chinese government were not wise enough to realize the cost, or the wisest forces were not strong enough to persuade the others.

Ordinary Chinese people never heard much about the ceremony. They never heard the presenter quote Liu’s words that political reform should be “gradual, peaceful, orderly and controlled.” They did not see the prize medal and the certificate placed on an empty blue chair onstage. Inside China, the moment was recorded only as a ghost, of sorts. On the Internet blacklist that winter, the censors inscribed a new taboo search: “the empty chair.”

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FOURTEEN

THE GERM IN THE HENHOUSE

The people in sunglasses did not immediately attract attention. When the first portraits appeared on Chinese social media sites in the fall of 2011, they encompassed a few dozen men and women. Soon there were more people in sunglasses, including kids, foreigners, and cartoon avatars. Bloggers noticed, and word spread. By the time the number passed five hundred, the censors were striking them down, but they continued to circulate anyway, and to those who knew what they were seeing, the pictures were a milestone: arguably China’s first viral political campaign. It was a tribute to a man whom virtually none of the participants had ever met: the blind peasant lawyer Chen Guangcheng.

Six years after I’d tried to see Chen at his home in Dongshigu village, his local government had not wavered in its determination to contain the spread of his ideas, even if it meant sequestering him like the carrier of a fever. Around the time of my visit, in the fall of 2005, he was summoned to a meeting with Liu Jie, the local deputy mayor. Liu demanded to know why Chen was speaking to foreign reporters about abuses of the one-child system. “Why could you not address the matter through the normal official channels instead of talking to hostile forces in overseas countries?”

By that point, however, it was becoming clear that, in going public, Chen had crossed a line that the state could no longer tolerate. He was not yet charged with a crime, but he was put under house arrest and his phone was cut. After a couple of months, there was a routine power outage—a common problem in parts of the countryside that were growing fast—and to his surprise, the blackout disabled the phone-jamming equipment that was keeping him in isolation. Chen was able to get a call out to his lawyers in

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Beijing, who called me, and I dialed Chen’s phone. He laughed at the strangeness of the circumstances, and then he paused, as if trying to summon a properly momentous tone for the occasion. “I want to tell the whole world,” he said grandly, “that this local government doesn’t obey their own law.” He was mystified that his attempts to alert the government to abuses of the law had landed him in seclusion. I asked him what was the biggest question on his mind. He said, “I am only wondering if the central government doesn’t want to stop this, or doesn’t have the ability to stop this.”

In March, after Chen had been under house arrest for nearly six months, his brother and fellow villagers fought with police over the conditions of Chen’s confinement. Chen was charged with “destruction of property” and “assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic,” though his supporters found this hard to square with his physical limitations. The night before his trial, his lawyer was detained; Chen was represented by court-appointed attorneys, who called no witnesses. He was found guilty of destroying property and disrupting traffic and was sentenced to four years and three months in prison.

* * *

In the days of the emperors, one way to seek the attention of Chinese leaders —to appeal a court ruling or expose an abuse of power—was to bang a drum installed for that purpose at the gate of the local court. If this failed to elicit a response, people threw themselves in front of the sedan chairs of passing Mandarins. People who succeeded in lodging their complaints became known officially as yuanmin—“People with Grievances”—and they were entitled to pursue their claims, level by level, all the way up to the capital.

When the Communist Party came to power, it retained some of the old system: it established the Bureau of Letters and Visits, to receive the People with Grievances, and to steer their cases to the correct branches of government. But by the twenty-first century, the Bureau of Letters and Visits was an antique; its caseload was crushing, its operations a mystery. A study found that the bureau solved about two-tenths of 1 percent of the cases it received. The cases were rarely given a full airing in court, so when People with Grievances lost their cases, or received no word of progress, it only drove some of them deeper into crusades for justice that stretched for years.

The modern heirs of People with Grievances were known as “petitioners,”

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and I often received cold calls from them. They tracked me down in the hope that the attentions of a foreign reporter might force the government to resolve their cases. When they reached me, the least I could do was hear them out, but usually there were few ways for me to help. Their cases were intricate and confusing, and the process of petitioning was an odyssey that left thousands of people marooned on the edge of Beijing in shantytowns known as “petitioner villages,” where they stewed amid mountains of wrinkled legal documents. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if they were lost in the labyrinth of their disputes because they were unwell, or because they had been driven mad by the odyssey itself.

When the Web appeared, the People with Grievances were some of the first to embrace it. In September 2002 an outbreak of food poisoning in the city of Nanjing killed more than forty people, but the national evening news ignored it; instead, the stories that night included a piece about workers “expressing deep thanks for the compassion” of Party leaders and the opening of a local costume festival. People took to the Web to complain. “Ordinary Chinese people are not human beings?” one asked. Another wrote, “It is more difficult to choke the mouth of the people than to block the flow of a river.”

Before long, People with Grievances were using the new technology to locate one another. When a twenty-five-year-old man named Zhang Xianzhu found he was barred from the civil service because he had tested positive for hepatitis, he located others online who had had the same experience, and together they forced a policy change to prevent such discrimination. Soon there were similar campaigns for greater rights on behalf of gays and lesbians, religious believers, and sufferers of diabetes. The instinct to organize spread further into the mainstream.

In 2007 a text message swept through the city of Xiamen denouncing a proposed chemical plant. The language of the message was dire: “The production of this highly poisonous chemical will be like dropping an atomic bomb on the city … For the sake of our grandchildren, take action! Join a ten-thousand-person march at 8 a.m. on June 1. Send this message to all your friends in Xiamen.” But instead of a rowdy demonstration, organizers called for a “strolling protest,” a low-key march that would not provoke a police crackdown. Thousands of men and women turned up—urban, well-heeled members of the New Middle-Income Stratum, some with children in their arms—all strolling calmly in the name of protest. The local government was

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taken aback: it had always calculated, as Mencius had predicted, that “those with a constant livelihood have a constant heart.” But Mencius never mentioned a strolling protest. Was this an attempt to preserve stability or to disrupt it? It certainly wasn’t a riot, but it wasn’t legal, either. After several days, and back-and-forth with the crowd, the local government agreed to postpone the plan for the chemical plant pending “reevaluation.”

* * *

The new spirit of protest, both coordinated and moderate, posed a delicate new problem for the authorities. As Jerome Cohen, a China specialist at New York University Law School, put it, “Are they going to have a legal system that can really handle these things and reduce tensions and satisfy wants, or is it all just a sham that will lead people into the streets and into all kinds of protests and a lack of stability and harmony?” Cohen saw Chen Guangcheng’s struggle as a test of whether the authoritarian system could accommodate the rising tide of ambitions. Chen once asked Cohen, “What do they want me to do? Go into the streets? I want to go into the courts.” In that sense, Cohen said, Chen was “not a dissident, although they may be making him one.”

Cohen had known Chen since 2003, when the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program invited Chen on a tour of the United States. When the State Department asked Cohen if he had time to see a Chinese lawyer, the professor was on a deadline and asked, “Where’d he go to law school?’”

“He didn’t go to law school,” the caller said. “Then why are you bothering me?” Cohen asked. “This fellow’s special. I think you’re going to want to see him.” They met, and Cohen told me, “After half an hour, it was clear to me that I

was dealing with someone unusual.” It was the beginning of an unlikely alliance. At seventy-three, Cohen was tall and bald, with a brilliant white mustache and a fondness for bow ties; he’d clerked for two U.S. Supreme Court justices before he became the first Western lawyer to practice in the People’s Republic. He was regarded as the dean of foreign experts on Chinese law. When he and Chen met for a second time, in Beijing, Cohen bought him a stack of law books, and Chen told him, “You’ll never

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understand what I’m up against or what I’m trying to do if you don’t come down to Dongshigu village.”

Cohen and his wife, Joan (the art historian who, incidentally, had befriended Ai Weiwei in New York), made the trip from New York to Dongshigu. Even after decades of work in China, they were taken aback by the depth of poverty. Cohen met Chen’s clients. “You never saw a sadder bunch,” Cohen said. “The lame, the beaten down, dwarfs—all kinds of people—denied the license to open a shop if they didn’t bribe the authorities, or subject to unfair taxation or police abuse.” Cohen spotted the books he had brought for Chen: they were dog-eared. “His wife and his oldest brother had been reading them to him.”

Before Cohen left, Chen mapped out his plan: he wanted to spread the law by word of mouth, by training two hundred villagers in the basics of the courts, so that they could take on cases as he had. Cohen asked, “Do you really think the local authorities are going to allow us to hire a hall in the county seat to train people who are going to subvert them and make them miserable?”

“Yes,” Chen said.

* * *

By the time Chen Guangcheng went to prison, the Party had concluded that its approach to controlling the spread of ideas was too weak. In the spring of 2007, President Hu Jintao told his fellow members of the Politburo that digital filters and human censors were no longer enough. The Party needed to “use” the Web, he said. It must “assert supremacy over online public opinion.”

To that end, the Party expanded a corps of what it called “ushers of public opinion,” who wandered the Web masquerading as ordinary users, seeking to steer debate rather than extinguish it. They were paid half a yuan for every comment they posted, and their critics named them the “fifty-cent Party.” Much like the staff of the Department, they were supposed to be ubiquitous but invisible; they were prohibited from acknowledging that they worked for the Party. But Ai Weiwei put out the word that he would give an iPad to any usher of public opinion who was willing to talk about what it was like. A twenty-six-year-old calling himself W. took the offer. He had studied

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journalism, found occasional employment in television, but made most of his income as a part-time usher of public opinion.

Each assignment, W. explained, began with an order to “influence public understanding” or “stabilize netizens’ emotions.” If he openly praised the government, people ignored him or mocked him as a “fifty-center,” so he worked the angles: If there was a gathering crowd, he’d throw in a dumb joke or insert a boring advertisement, to encourage casual readers to wander off. If people were criticizing the Party about, say, rising gas prices, he might lob in a grenade of an idea: “If you’re too poor to drive, then it serves you right.” “Once people see that, they start to attack me,” he said, “and gradually the subject moves from gas prices to my comments. Mission accomplished.”

W. didn’t pretend to be proud of his work. He did it for money, and he didn’t tell his family or friends because, he said, it might “harm my reputation.” “Everyone has the thirst for exploring the truth, including me … We have more freedom of speech than we did. But at the same time, as soon as you get that freedom, you begin to see that certain people have even more freedom. So then we feel unfree again. It’s the comparison that’s depressing.” Ai Weiwei posted the interview with the usher, and within minutes the censors struck it down. It didn’t matter; it was already circulating widely.

Skepticism and criticism were like muscles, and they grew with exercise. One by one, tempests of public criticism, known as “Internet incidents,” swept across the country. At one point, grassroots labor organizers used online forums and cell phones to mobilize a cascade of strikes at more than forty factories in two months—a surge of unrest that was especially unnerving to the Party, because, of anyone, it knew the potential strength of mobilized workers. Every institution, no matter how obscure, was now being evaluated in public. I once visited a tiny vocational college in rural Sichuan, and, a few years later, when I searched for news about the school, the first thing to come up was a student appeal to the local mayor saying the school had “cheated” students by classifying them on their diplomas as “part-time.” “We paid tuition for a full-time degree,” the student wrote. “We don’t even have the tears to cry.” When the graduates complained, they were summoned by local authorities and warned not to make a fuss. “We didn’t create any trouble or riot or anything. We didn’t violate the law or harm social morals,” he wrote. “All we wanted was an explanation.”

In Shanghai, a set of parents discovered that, because they were registered

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in the countryside, the school would not provide health insurance for their child. So they posted a complaint entitled “We Live in a Rigidly Hierarchical Country.” “How can this school even try to teach our children to love the Party and love the motherland?” they wrote. In another case, which carried a certain awkward symbolism, a screenwriter on a hit television show called Striving, about young men and women making it on their own, took to the Web to complain: “How many viewers do I need to reach in order to make ends meet?”

The Party was in a conundrum of its own making: Over the years, it had squeezed off so many avenues of expression that people had little choice but to engage in the kind of unrest that was the Party’s greatest fear. So it responded by clamping down even further, and the cycle continued. When homeowners in the prosperous coastal city of Ningbo held several days of street demonstrations against another proposed chemical complex, the city government eventually agreed to abandon the plant, but for good measure the censors blocked, from the Web, the demonstrators’ slogan: “We want to survive, we want to get by.”

* * *

People even went online to complain when their bribes did not produce the desired effects. A real estate tycoon in Hunan named Huang Yubiao had tried to buy a seat in the provincial legislature, but after handing over fifty thousand dollars, he was told his bribe was too small. (As retribution, he posted a video of the middlemen who had received the money.) Similarly, a young woman named Wang Qian complained that she had offered fifteen thousand dollars to buy a place in the army (a coveted position, because it could open up other patronage options), but her recruiters told her that other cadets had offered more.

Government officials were not the only targets of complaints. Customers complained to the dating entrepreneur Gong Haiyan that they were getting duped by charlatans on her site. People accused her of looking the other way while con men prowled the ranks of the membership. A man was arrested and later sentenced by a Beijing court to two and a half years in jail for swindling a woman he had allegedly met on Jiayuan. The company denied that it bore any responsibility, but its stock nevertheless lost nearly 40 percent of its

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value. Customers were drifting away. To protect against frauds, the company created a system that let people fortify their profiles by submitting copies of official documents—pay stubs, government IDs, divorce filings—and the more documents you provided, the more stars you earned beside your name. The company hired a team of document experts to hunt for forgeries and ferret out suspicious activity, such as a user who made frequent changes to his name or date of birth.

But more criticism followed. Jinghua Weekly, a state-backed newspaper, criticized the company’s “V.I.P. High-Level Marriage Hunting Advisers,” a team of special matchmakers who dealt only with the richest members, mostly men, lining them up with the most-sought-after female users. The Diamond Bachelors, as these clients were called, spent up to fifty thousand dollars for six matches, which smacked of a high-tech escort service. When I asked Gong about it, she was unapologetic. It was simple supply and demand, she said. “Diamond Bachelors are looking for pretty young women. And some of these pretty women are looking to marry that kind of man,” she said. “It’s a perfect match.”

As a result of all the bad press, Jiayuan’s competitors thrived; Internet dating, which hardly existed in China when Gong began, had become an industry worth more than a billion yuan, and the company needed a veteran. In March 2012, with its revenue and its stock price slumping, Jiayuan hired a seasoned tech executive, Linguang Wu, to be co-CEO. The love industry was getting cutthroat. Before Wu joined it, he was running an online shooter game called World of Tanks.

Where people were once dazzled to be online, now their expectations had soared, and they did not bother to hide their contempt for those who sought to curtail their freedom on the Web. Nobody was more despised than a computer science professor in his fifties named Fang Binxing. Fang had played a central role in designing the architecture of censorship, and the state media wrote admiringly of him as the “father of the Great Firewall.” But when Fang opened his own social media account, a user exhorted others, “Quick, throw bricks at Fang Binxing!” Another chimed in, “Enemies of the people will eventually face trial.” Censors removed the insults as fast as possible, but they couldn’t keep up, and the lacerating comments poured in. People called Fang a “eunuch” and a “running dog.” Someone Photoshopped his head onto a voodoo doll with a pin in its forehead. In digital terms, Fang

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had stepped into the hands of a frenzied mob. Less than three hours after Web users spotted him, the Father of the Great

Firewall shut down his account and recoiled from the digital world that he had helped create. A few months later, in May 2011, Fang was lecturing at Wuhan University when a student threw an egg at him, followed by a shoe, hitting the professor in the chest. Teachers tried to detain the shoe thrower, a science student from a nearby college, but other students shielded him and led him to safety. He was instantly famous online. People offered him cash and vacations in Hong Kong and Singapore. A female blogger offered to sleep with him.

Asked why he’d done it, the student described it as an act of desperation: “I do not have a platform where we can equally debate with Fang Binxing,” he told a Chinese reporter. “Therefore, I can only resort to this somehow extreme way to express my discontent.”

* * *

When Chen Guangcheng was released in September 2009, he had served his full term. There were no more charges against him. And yet he returned to Dongshigu village to find that the local government had prepared for his arrival. They had installed steel shutters on the windows of his house, floodlights around the dirt yard, and cameras to keep an eye on the place twenty-four hours a day. They formed a revolving crew of guards to work in shifts. At one point, Cohen and Chen did their best to estimate the cost of the guards, meals, and other expenses required to keep the blind lawyer isolated from the world around him, and it came to seven million dollars.

But as far as Chen was concerned, most of the punishment was mental: now and then, the guards would carry every object from the house out into the courtyard and leave them there for him and his family to bring back in. The guards confiscated his phone and computer and bent the prongs of the television plug so that it was unusable. At one point, Chen managed to smuggle out a short video describing his conditions, but when that was discovered, the guards punished him by rolling him in a blanket and beating him.

The tactic of isolation that worried Chen the most, however, was not about him; the guards barred his six-year-old daughter from going to school. And it

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was this, it seemed, that galvanized the tech-savvy citizens of Beijing, Shanghai, and other big cities. On October 23, 2011, thirty of them tried to visit Chen, but guards took their cell phones and cameras, pelted them with stones, and forced them out of town. This drama attracted interest from people such as He Peirong, an English teacher in Nanjing, who had never heard of Chen before a friend mentioned the case that fall. “The first thing I did was check the facts of what Chen Guangcheng was saying,” she told me. The more she learned about the conditions of his confinement, the more they offended her. “Even if he once broke the law in the course of his work on human rights, I think he already paid his price. The way he was treated after his release shocked me. I never imagined brutality like that was happening in China now. My friends—even some who were police officers—didn’t believe what I described to them.”

He Peirong posted a photograph of herself in sunglasses, joining the online campaign. She began to blog about Chen’s case, and about her intention to visit him on his birthday, November 5. The police, it seemed, were reading; five days before that date arrived, police started following her, driving her to work and advising her not to try to make the trip to the village. At one point, she said, they offered to pay for her to go on vacation if it would keep her away. When she refused, they put her under house arrest until the birthday passed. She was undeterred; along with other Chen supporters, she distributed four thousand bumper stickers bearing Chen’s face in the style and colors of an advertisement for KFC, beneath the words “Free CGC.” (If police asked, they said it was an ad for free chicken.) The mode of protest was revealing about those who joined it. “Compared to previous human rights activities in China, it was a different kind of support,” He Peirong told me. “I think the Chen Guangcheng bumper sticker movement represented the view of the middle class because the only people who could take part were people with cars.”

The campaign made international news, and after two weeks, the local government made a concession; it allowed Chen’s daughter to go to school. But Chen was still locked in his house. The case was an embarrassment to the government, but the more that Chen and his supporters complained, the more reluctant the government became to show that it was responding to pressure. When a foreign reporter asked about Chen’s conditions, during a press conference at the National People’s Congress, the question was stricken from

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the transcript.

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FIFTEEN

SANDSTORM

Spring is sandstorm season in Beijing. The wind sweeps down from the Mongol Steppe, drawing up loose grains as it travels. Before a storm hits the capital, you can see it coming: the sky turns a pale, otherworldly yellow, and then sand begins to accumulate at the base of the windowpanes, like tiny embankments of snow. By March 2011 the hutong house where I lived with Sarabeth Berman (then my fiancée, later my wife) was desiccated after the winter. My neighbors were making their first trips of the season to the flower markets on the edge of the capital, to bring home some color. But recently the flower sellers of Beijing had received an unusual order: do not sell jasmine. It was a Chinese favorite, perfect for tea, with small white petals that classical poets associated with innocence. But this year, the police told the vendors, no matter what price you are offered, no jasmine. And if anyone comes around asking to buy it, jot down the license plate number and call it in.

In Chinese politics, the flower had acquired the aroma of subversion. A few weeks earlier, on December 17, a twenty-six-year-old unemployed graduate in Tunisia named Mohammed Bouazizi was selling fruit without a permit when a police officer confiscated his produce and slapped him for complaining. Bouazizi was the sole earner in an extended family of eleven. He visited the provincial headquarters for help, but nobody would see him. Desperate and humiliated, he doused himself in paint thinner and lit a match.

By the time he died, weeks later, his story had sparked demonstrations against the authoritarian rule of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Police moved in, cell phone footage spread on YouTube and Facebook, and the protests grew to encompass complaints about corruption, unemployment, inflation, and limits on political freedom. Within a month, the movement had

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driven the Tunisian president from office and inspired protests across the Arab world. Abroad, people called it the Jasmine Revolution, after Tunisia’s national flower, but inside Tunisia, people called it the Dignity Revolution. By any name, the protest drew immediate attention in China. When president Hosni Mubarak fell in Cairo, Ai Weiwei tweeted, “Today, we are all Egyptians.”

Chinese leaders projected nonchalance. Zhao Qizheng, the former head of the government’s information office, said, “The idea that a Jasmine revolution could happen in China is extremely preposterous and unrealistic.” The Beijing Daily declared, “Everyone knows that stability is a blessing and chaos is a calamity.” In one story, the China Daily mentioned the importance of “stability” seven times. But privately, the Party had a different reaction. My phone buzzed. It was a leak from the Department, a message to editors across the country:

Draw no comparisons between political systems in the Middle East and the system in our country. When the names of leaders in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and elsewhere appear in our media, the names of Chinese leaders must never appear nearby.

The Arab Spring unnerved Chinese leaders more than any event in years. “A single spark,” Mao observed, “can start a prairie fire.” It was easy to overstate the power of technology, but it had clearly aided the opponents of authoritarianism. The other reason the Party was displeased was philosophical: it often argued that men and women in the developing world were more interested in building wealth and maintaining stability than in pursuing “Western notions” of democracy and human rights. This argument became more difficult to believe now that men and women in the Arab world were marching for democracy and human rights.

Some of the potentates, such as the king of Jordan, responded to the Arab Spring by promising to loosen up, in the hope of averting an explosion. But China’s leaders chose the opposite course. The lesson they took from Mubarak’s fall was the same they had taken from the collapse of the Soviet Union: protests that go unchecked lead to open revolt. The Politburo sent out Wu Bangguo, one of its most orthodox conservatives, to dust off his theory of

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the “Five Nos”: China would have no opposition parties, no alternative principles, no separation of powers, no federal system, and no full-scale privatization. “If we waver,” he told a meeting of three thousand legislators in Beijing, “the state could sink into the abyss.”

* * *

On Saturday, February 19, an anonymous notice appeared on an overseas Chinese website calling for people to assemble at 2:00 p.m. the next day, in thirteen Chinese cities, and “stroll silently holding a jasmine flower.” The government mobilized tens of thousands of police and state security agents to stand by in case of trouble. The military newspaper, the People’s Liberation Army Daily, warned of a “smokeless war” intent on “Westernizing and dismembering the country.”

At the appointed hour of the protests, authorities in Beijing shut down text messaging across much of the city. Most of the people who showed up were foreign journalists. In front of a McDonald’s in the shopping district of Wangfujing, a Chinese crowd of about two hundred formed, but it was impossible to know who was protesting, who were police, and who was gawking. One of the people there, to my surprise, was the young nationalist from Shanghai, Tang Jie. “I just wanted to go have a look, and I thought there might be some drama,” he told me. “I didn’t think anyone would go except reporters. We took pictures of journalists.” He laughed. “There was no revolution,” he said.

In the three years that I’d known him, Tang had finished his doctorate in philosophy and turned his patriotism into a profession: when his video became a sensation online, it linked him to others with similar ideas, such as Rao Jin, the creator of Anti-CNN.com, a site that criticized Western reporting of China. Rao Jin was forming a production company, and Tang moved to Beijing to join it. They called the company April Media (m4, for short), after the month in which they had risen up to defend the Olympic torch. They translated articles between Chinese and English, churned out videos and lectures, and hoped, as they put it, to “give a true and more objective picture of the world.”

A few hours after the attempted protest, Tang Jie heard from a pair of fellow activists who had returned from McDonald’s with video of an unusual

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scene: the U.S. ambassador to Beijing, Jon Huntsman, Jr., had made a brief appearance among the crowds. The ambassador insisted it was a coincidence —he said he was out for a stroll after lunch—but to Chinese nationalists, it was proof that the United States was seeking to foment a “Chinese Jasmine Revolution.” In the video, a man in the crowd asks Huntsman, “You want to see China in chaos, don’t you?” The ambassador said no, and made a hasty exit, but Tang Jie saw the makings of a hit. He got to work, adding subtitles and overlaying his argument in exploding red bubbles: “Sure, China has many kinds of problems!” he wrote. “But we don’t want to be another Iraq! We don’t want to be another Tunisia! We don’t want to be another Egypt! If the nation descends into chaos, will America and the so-called ‘reformers’ feed our 1.3 billion people? Don’t fucking mess this up!”

By the time he was done, it was three o’clock in the morning, and before he posted the video to the public, he hesitated; his site had been warned by authorities not to comment on the protests or the unrest in the Middle East. “But then I figured I really have to post it,” he told me. “Any media organization that had this kind of material on its hands would know it was news.” He hit the button, and by day’s end, it was a diplomatic incident. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs complained about Huntsman’s visit, and Tang was fielding calls from reporters from as far away as Salt Lake City, Huntsman’s hometown.

The following week, I visited Tang Jie at his new office in Beijing, in an office complex not far from the Olympic stadium. He looked energized. He had been sleeping on a broken red sofa in the office while he looked for a place to live in Beijing, but the new venture thrilled him. The office had the Ikea aesthetic that I saw at many Chinese start-ups, and there were posters on the walls with inspirational photos: flags in the wind, wheat in fields. The company slogan was “Our Stage. Our Hope. Our Story. Our Faith.”

We went downstairs to a cafeteria. Over lunch, I mentioned that I’d gotten to know Han Han, the writer and entrepreneur who was about the same age as Tang. Tang Jie snorted. “He’s too simple, sometimes naïve,” he said. “He points out some of China’s problems, but they are all very shallow observations. He only says things like ‘The government is bad.’” I said that Tang’s site talked about many of the same issues—corruption, pollution, the need for political reform—but Tang saw it differently. “The difference between us and Han Han is that we’re trying to be constructive. For example,

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he talks about corruption and high housing prices, and that gets people all riled up. What we’re saying is, let’s do things step by step. There has to be a process.”

* * *

Despite the failure of the jasmine protests, organizers called for another attempt the following weekend. A notice on overseas Chinese sites said, “The rights of the Chinese people are something the Chinese people themselves must fight for.” It called on the Party to create an independent judiciary, to fight income inequality and corruption, and if it could not, to “exit the stage of history.” In their choice of slogans, the organizers combined the practical (“We want to work, we want housing!”) with the abstract (“We want fairness, we want justice!”).

Just as Chinese students abroad had played a vital role in the nationalist uprising a few years earlier, now another side of that cohort was speaking up. Students in Seoul, Paris, Boston, and elsewhere, writing in the name of what they called the Jasmine Movement, set up a blog and a Facebook page, Google groups, and a Twitter feed. They appealed to “laid-off workers and victims of forced evictions to participate in demonstrations, shout slogans, and seek freedom, democracy, and political reform, to end ‘one-party rule.’”

On the ground, however, there was little sign that the activism went beyond the Web. When it was time for the next scheduled protest, the authorities took no chances. They sent hundreds of police officers in plainclothes and in uniform; a SWAT team in body armor were equipped with automatic rifles and attack dogs. Police phoned foreign journalists in advance, warning them to stay away, but scores showed up anyway, and police forcibly dispersed them. Stephen Engle, a reporter for Bloomberg Television, was pinned to the ground, dragged by a leg, and kicked and beaten. A cameraman was set upon by officers and punched and kicked in the face. Later, when reporters asked the Foreign Ministry to investigate, a spokeswoman dispensed with the usual diplomatic assurances and said, bluntly, if journalists seek “to create trouble for China,” then “no law can protect them.” The protests were over. In a final effort, organizers called on people to go to McDonald’s at a designated hour and simply order Set Meal No. 3.

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Before long, the retribution began. People who had spoken up in favor of the protests began to vanish, at least temporarily. Some answered their doorbells and disappeared; others were on the sidewalk when they were swept into waiting cars. On the morning of Sunday, April 3, 2011, the artist Ai Weiwei was at the Beijing Capital International Airport, preparing to board a flight to Hong Kong, when he was ushered out of line and into an office. At his studio across town, an assistant peered out of the turquoise gate and found a crowd of police. Officers had also arrived at the home of Ai’s son, who lived with his mother not far from the studio. And elsewhere in Beijing, a reporter named Wen Tao, who often chronicled Ai’s activities, was wrestled into a black sedan. Three more of Ai’s associates were detained in similar scenes.

At the studio, police carried away dozens of computers and hard drives. They took eight assistants into custody, and kept Ai’s wife, Lu Qing, at the studio for questioning. As night fell on Beijing, police released the studio assistants, but there was no word on Ai Weiwei or the others. As the news of their arrests began to spread, Internet censors updated the blacklist to include:

Ai Weiwei Weiwei Ai Wei Ai the Fatty

Some more elliptical references escaped the censors and spread rapidly, including one that reimagined the words of theologian Martin Niemöller:

When a fat man lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I am skinny.” When a bearded man lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I am not bearded.” When a man who sold sunflower seeds lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I don’t sell sunflower seeds.” But when they come for the skinny, beardless ones who never sold sunflower seeds, there will be nobody left to speak up for you.

By the middle of April, human rights groups were calling it the largest

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crackdown on expression since Tiananmen Square two decades earlier. Two hundred people had been questioned or placed under house arrest; another thirty-five were presumed to be in detention. The list included not only old- line dissidents, but also social media celebrities and journalists. When some were released, they described a range of experiences. A lawyer named Jin Guanghong said he was tied to a bed in a psychiatric facility, beaten, and given injections that he could not identify. Some said police encouraged them to remember the fate of Gao Zhisheng, the lawyer who had written of his torture. In the case of activist Li Tiantian, interrogators required her to narrate the details of her sexual history to a roomful of guards. She was also warned never to say how she had been treated. But she published an account online anyway. “Deep down I was so ashamed,” she wrote, “as if I was being beaten but remained smiling, saying that I felt no pain. Deprived of choices. Helpless.”

As the crackdown deepened, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused Chinese leaders of “trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand.” The People’s Daily replied by citing a Pew Research Center poll of twenty countries in which Chinese people expressed the highest level of satisfaction —87 percent. In the midst of this, it was easy to overlook a routine budget report that revealed a surprising milestone: for the first time in history, the People’s Republic was spending more on domestic security than on foreign defense; it was devoting more money to policing and surveilling its own people than it was on defending against threats from abroad. But the People’s Daily said the protests had failed because a “formerly backward and impoverished nation has been turned into the second biggest economy … and the whole world holds it in high esteem.”

* * *

Days passed with no word on Ai’s whereabouts. Eventually his mother and older sister did what occurred to them: they posted a handwritten flyer around the neighborhood, buried amid FOR RENT signs and LOST DOG posters. Across the top, they wrote MISSING PERSON:

AI WEIWEI, MALE, 53 YEARS OLD. On April 3, 2011 around 8:30 a.m., at Beijing Capital International

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Airport, before boarding a flight to Hong Kong, he was taken away by two men. More than fifty hours have passed, and his whereabouts remain unknown.

Later that afternoon, the Foreign Ministry announced that Ai was under investigation for “economic crimes,” which, it added, had “nothing to do with human rights or freedom of expression.” Global Times, the Party tabloid, denounced Ai as “a maverick of Chinese society” who must “pay a price” for his defiance. “China as a whole is progressing and no one has power to make a nation try to adapt to his personal likes and dislikes.”

* * *

From the airport, the artist had been loaded into the back of a white van, flanked by officers who held his arms. A black hood had been dropped over his head. When the van rolled to a stop, Ai was brought indoors and placed in a chair. The hood was pulled away. A well-muscled man with short hair was standing over him. Ai braced for a beating. Instead, the guards emptied his pockets, removed his belt, and handcuffed his right hand to the arm of the chair. He waited in the chair for eight hours. Then, two interrogators arrived. One opened a laptop. The other lit a cigarette. The smoker was a middle-aged man in a pin-striped sport coat with elbow patches. Ai would come to know him as Mr. Li. Over the next two hours, Mr. Li asked Ai Weiwei about his contacts overseas, the sources of his income, and the political messages contained in his artwork. He reviewed years’ worth of Ai’s blog posts and tweets, line by line. He asked him if the artist knew who was behind the calls for a Jasmine Revolution. Ai asked to see a lawyer. “The law is not going to help you,” he was told. “Just obey the orders, and you can make it easier.”

For all his anxiety, Ai was also fascinated. After trying to describe the Party from so many different angles, he was now face-to-face with it. His questioners seemed to be struggling to understand the world Ai Weiwei inhabited: Mr. Li quizzed him about the mechanics of arranging a nude portrait. When they asked him about his finances, the artist said a single sculpture could sell for eighty thousand dollars, and the interrogator did not initially believe him.

Mr. Li told him that this arrest had been a year in the making. “We had a

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very difficult decision: whether to arrest you or not. But we decided we had to.” He went on, “You made the Chinese government embarrassed, which is against national interests,” he told him, adding, “You became a part of the foreign strategy of ‘peaceful evolution.’” Ultimately, Li said, the state had to “smash you.” Li said the artist would likely be charged with “incitement to subvert state power,” the same charge that had been brought against the writer Liu Xiaobo.

In the days that followed, Ai was never alone. He was transferred to a military compound and placed in a narrow windowless room with padded walls, like a mental hospital. Two young guards in olive-green uniforms were never more than three feet from him; at times, they sat four inches from his face. They accompanied him to the toilet and the shower. When he paced in his cell, they paced with him. They ordered him to sleep with his hands in full view and to ask permission to touch his own face. Ai often wondered about these men around him. Did they picture themselves as defenders of China’s quest for fortune? Did they see themselves as thwarting the selfish, ruinous acts of individuals like him? Or did they see themselves in a darker light, as the muscles of a body racked by fears of mortality?

The interrogation continued, but Ai was never physically abused. Fear gave away to exhaustion. His weight dropped. He took medicine for diabetes, high blood pressure, a heart condition, and the head injury. A doctor checked him constantly—sometimes every three hours. He began to lose track of time. He would forget why he was there. He felt as if he were stumbling around alone, “in a sandstorm,” as he put it.

After six weeks, Ai was abruptly given a clean white shirt and ordered to take a shower. He was about to see his wife. Rumors were circulating that Ai was being tortured, and the government was under pressure to refute them. The stagecraft enraged him. He said, “I don’t want to see her, because you told me I have no chance to see a lawyer, and what can I tell her about what happened this past month and a half?” The offer was not negotiable. He was told what he could say: He was being investigated for “economic crimes,” and he was in good health. He was to say nothing more.

* * *

Ai Weiwei’s arrest attracted a level of international notoriety that his art

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never had. Overnight he became one of the world’s most famous dissidents. Supporters demonstrated outside Chinese embassies. His portrait—the beard and hooded eyes and ham hock cheeks—was projected onto building facades and silkscreened onto T-shirts for sale in Europe and America. The British sculptor Anish Kapoor called for a worldwide protest and dedicated his latest work to Ai—a colossal purple installation inflated inside the Grand Palais in Paris and named Leviathan. In The New York Times, Salman Rushdie invoked the great battles between art and tyranny—Augustus and Ovid, Stalin and Mandelstam—and wrote, “Today the government of China has become the world’s greatest threat to freedom of speech, and so we need Ai Weiwei.”

Inside China, the reactions were more complicated. At dinner a few days after Ai disappeared, an American dealer of Chinese art, who had deep roots in the capital, scolded me for writing about the arrest. “Now is the time to back off,” she said. She cited a Chinese legal provision that allowed police to hold a suspect for thirty days without charges, and she predicted that Ai would be released according to the letter of the law. “Stop embarrassing China,” she said. “Allow the thirty-day process to run its course.” Our hostess, a longtime foreign resident who had less confidence in Chinese courts, told the art dealer, “I’ve spent twenty years being an apologist for China, but there is no way to defend this. You’re just fucking wrong.” Dinner did not last long.

The truth was that I struggled with the question of how much to write about Ai Weiwei—or, for that matter, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng or the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. How much did their ordeals really tell us about China? If the average news consumer in the West read (or watched or heard) no more than one China story a week, should it be about people with dramatic lives or typical lives? The hardest part about writing from China was not navigating the authoritarian bureaucracy or the occasional stint in a police station. It was the problem of proportions: How much of the drama was light and how much was dark? How much was about opportunity and how much was about repression? From far away it was difficult for outsiders to judge, but I found that up close it wasn’t much easier, because it depended on where you were looking.

The stereotype of Western journalists was that we paid too much attention to dissidents. It was, we were told, because we sympathized with their hopes

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for liberal democracy, because they spoke English and knew how to give a sound-bite. Indeed, the inherent drama of an individual standing up to the state was obviously seductive, and it helped explain why the most famous image from China in the past thirty years was not of its economic rise but of the man standing in front of the tank near Tiananmen Square. Whenever I wrote about human rights abuses, I knew to expect that often the most critical reactions came from other expatriates in China. I understood that: foreigners with no reason to probe could spend years in China without ever interviewing someone who had been tortured or locked up without trial, and to them, my focus was misplaced. Dissidents who were famous in New York or Paris were unknown to ordinary Chinese citizens, which suggested that the discussion of democracy and rights was at odds with the everyday concerns of ordinary people.

But those arguments wore thin with me. Popularity always struck me as an odd way to measure the importance of an idea in a country that censored ideas. (A team of Harvard researchers later discovered that news of Ai’s arrest was one of the most heavily censored items of the year, which undermined the notion that people in China paid no attention to his arrest.) Global Times argued that Ai’s worldview was not the “mainstream perception among Chinese society.” And in a sense, the paper was right: Ai Weiwei’s lifestyle was emphatically outside the mainstream. But when it came to his ideas, this was less clear than it used to be: the collapse of the schools in the earthquake had captivated the attention of ordinary Chinese, not just the urban elite, and in seeking to dignify the deaths of some of China’s most vulnerable people, Ai Weiwei was enacting an idea that many others supported. Even if it was a minority, ignoring the impact of a small group of impassioned people struck me as a misreading of Chinese history, in which small groups had often exerted large forces.

Understanding why Ai Weiwei was arrested—or why Gao Zhisheng was abused, or why Liu Xiaobo was in prison—was vital to understanding China. The degree to which it could accept a figure such as Ai Weiwei was a measure of how far China had or had not moved toward a modern, open society.

* * *

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As one month of detention stretched into two, the arrest of Ai Weiwei proved divisive in China’s creative circles: Many were alarmed by his arrest because it indicated that nobody was too famous or well connected to be insulated. But many others had resented his criticisms of fellow intellectuals, and regarded his approach as vain and confrontational. In Beijing, people rolled their eyes at the international outcry. It became fashionable to whisper that Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo were messianic.

Even among those who were aghast, the arrest was clarifying; it allowed them to stake out the limits of what they imagined they could accomplish. When I saw the writer Han Han, he told me, “For Ai Weiwei’s disappearance, we can do nothing.” We were in a strange venue for a political conversation: an auto racetrack in the suburbs of Shanghai. Gangly fashion models loped by dressed in fractional vinyl outfits: Volkswagen miniskirts, Kia crop tops. Han Han was wearing a silvery racing suit that advertised Volkswagen across his midsection, Red Bull along his cuffs, and Homark Aluminum Alloy Wheels on his right biceps. We were in the team tent, where the air carried the scent of oil and rubber and the sound of cars buzzing through turns like angry bees. Race car drivers strutted in and out, flicking open the tent flaps like the sultans in old movies.

In recent years, Han and Ai Weiwei had maintained a sympathetic but distant relationship. The artist had praised Han’s work, and the writer, in his magazine, had published the radiological scan of Ai Weiwei’s skull after his brain injury. But now Han chose his words carefully: “If the government thinks Ai is a big problem, it should say so; they have the power if they want to arrest him. It’s okay if everybody knows what’s happening. The reason they gave was ‘economic crimes.’ Ai is an artist and he is famous, so if you want to say he committed ‘economic crimes,’ you need to show us the evidence.” But Han Han would not be blogging about it. That was “useless,” he told me. “The system can automatically block the name.”

As we spoke, I was reminded how easy it was to overlook the distinctions between Chinese individuals who appeared, at first glance, to share ideas. A few days earlier, the London-based writer Ma Jian had speculated in an op-ed piece printed outside China that, with Ai Weiwei under arrest, the next targets would be Han Han and three other prominent critics. “The regime will not stop the persecution until the only voices to be heard are its own ‘official’ artists,” Ma wrote. But lumping Han Han and Ai Weiwei together as liberals

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seeking political reform obscured deep differences. Han told me, “Ai’s criticism is more direct, and he is more persistent on a single issue. For me, I criticize one thing, make them feel terrible, and if they ask me to stop talking about it, then I’ll criticize something else. We have a hundred things to talk about.”

Divining how far any individual could go in Chinese creative life was akin to carving a line in the sand at low tide in the dark; the political terrain shifted constantly. Ground that was solid one minute could be swamped the next. Han Han maintained a fitful détente with the government, but he permitted few illusions about his willingness to stay on the safe side of lines he could see. He had never made a move to take his activism from the Web to the street, and he opposed the call for multiparty elections. “The Party will win anyway, because they are rich and they can bribe people,” he told me. “Let culture be more vibrant and the media be more open.” Outsiders often mistook his demand for openness with the outright demand for democracy, but the difference was essential.

* * *

On June 22, his eighty-first day in custody, Ai Weiwei was informed that he was going to prison for ten years—or he could be released that afternoon, if he agreed to accept a charge of “tax evasion.” He was given a statement to sign. He asked for a lawyer, but the request was denied. “If you don’t sign,” one of the interrogators told him, “we can never let you go, because we can’t finish our job.” That moment was a revelation. “You’re not really fighting a system,” he realized. “You’re really dealing with these two persons, very low-ranking, who don’t believe you are a criminal but just can’t finish their job. And they are very frustrated, too.”

The most important term of his release was that he could not talk to foreigners or write on the Web for a year. He signed the statement. Then he was driven to a police station, where his wife was waiting for him. His case would continue, but for now he was free to go. He was astonished. Why had he been released? He could only guess. Was it diplomatic pressure? Premier Wen Jiabao was preparing to visit Britain and Germany, where people were going to protest Ai’s arrest, but the only official explanation came from the state news service, which reported that Ai Weiwei’s company had evaded “a

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huge amount of taxes and intentionally destroyed accounting documents.” Ai was released on bond, it said, “because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease.”

By the time he reached the studio, a crush of television cameras was waiting in the sweltering summer night. His skinny arms poked out of a worn blue T-shirt, and he clutched the waist of his trousers to hold them up. He had lost twenty-eight pounds, and the police still had his belt. Reporters closed in, and he pleaded for understanding. He was not allowed to talk. The mood in the air was strange; it was not clear if this was a victory or a defeat. Like Hu Shuli’s departure from Caijing, Ai Weiwei’s release thrust him into a costly kind of freedom. In the years since the Party had dedicated itself to a “harmonious society”—the vision of a nation without differences—I had watched as the voices within China grew more demanding, and the Party had risen to meet the challenge. The pursuit of truth, which had begun within the confines of institutions such as Hu Shuli’s magazine, had expanded over the years to draw in individuals such as Ai Weiwei and Chen Guangcheng, who represented no institutions and were harder for the government to control. Then the pursuit had expanded further to encompass the opinions on the street, now amplified with the help of technology.

With so many voices clamoring at once, the Party’s vision of a “central melody,” an ideological consensus, was breaking down. Chinese people were turning to one another not only for information but for trust as well. One year after the arrival of the microblogging site Weibo, a study found that 70 percent of Chinese social media users relied on social media as their main source of news; in America, that number was 9 percent.

The Party’s ultimate authority, of course, was physical: the ability to lock up its critics. Watching a humbled Ai Weiwei slip past the turquoise gate and into his house—to await the government’s next move—I wondered if the Party had recovered the authority that it was losing over expression in China. Through sheer force, it seemed, the Party was setting the terms of expression again. It would take less than a month for me to realize how wrong I was.

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