In the evening, her friends send her pictures of a petrochemical factory in neighboring Pengzhou, twenty minutes outside Chengdu proper. On this day, there has been an accident. The smokestacks were spitting fire, orange-red flames tens of feet high, and producing dark, billowing clouds of noxious fumes. “This is the poison we’re sucking in every day.… How is the government letting us poison ourselves like this?” she posts to her WeChat, circulating the video. She checks the prices on Taobao of the high-tech air filtration mask she’s seen Tom’s American friend wear when he bikes across the city; she buys it for less than he paid and smiles as she makes a note to tell him. Then, to make herself feel better before she goes to sleep, she sends the video of puppies falling off the furniture to Tom, then watches it again. At no point during her day did Cindy run into censorship.
The type of censorship that the Party practices in China is often described through the analogy of the “anaconda in the chandelier,” described in 2002 by Perry Link, professor emeritus of East Asian studies at Princeton:
[The] Chinese government’s censorial authority in recent times has resembled not so much a man-eating tiger or fire-snorting dragon as a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier. Normally the great snake doesn’t move. It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant silent message is “You yourself decide,” after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments—all quite “naturally.”2
The anaconda in the chandelier was effective censorship of outside opinion in the era before the Internet and before so many Chinese learned English. Cindy and Tom grew up with the Internet and studied English at school for more than ten years.
Despite the censorship, Cindy and Tom have a much better understanding of the outside world than the outside world has of China. They grew up watching Western TV shows that are nonpolitical but jam-packed with cultural content. They grew up reading Western books for class. Tom’s favorite movie is The Matrix—in fact, many would argue that the only reason Keanu Reeves still has a career at all is Chinese fans. Tom’s favorite shows are House of Cards and Breaking Bad. The last book Cindy read was George Orwell’s 1984. I asked Cindy where she found the book. She told me it was preloaded on the Kindle she bought in China from Taobao last Singles’ Day.
Cindy’s experience on the Internet as she goes about her day is hardly that of George Orwell’s 1984. She had read the book and understood the parallels with China but moved on. “We all know what is going on with China’s government,” she said. “We get that we are censored. When we’re surfing the web and see that a site has been blocked, it is like being chided by a parent. ‘No, this site is too dangerous for you!’ It’s annoying, but we get what is going on.”
People often described impingements on freedom of speech, particularly the scattershot censoring of the Internet, as frustrating, not maddening, and certainly not meriting overthrow of the government. Many who use the Chinese forum site Zhihu comment on Westerners’ incredulity that young Chinese don’t riot for democracy. Chinese use the modern Chinese idiom 屁股决定脑袋, pìgu juédìng nǎodai, to explain why they don’t riot. Literally, the idiom means “your butt determines your brain,” or where you sit in the world, the education you got, your personal background, largely determines the way you think. From most seats in China, the case for democracy is not always convincing.
Tom’s generation has seen ample evidence of democracy’s failure as a Western export. Many in China, big media outlets included, point to the Middle East and the Arab Spring and shrug their shoulders. “Maybe democracy doesn’t work for everyone,” people in China say. “Maybe China’s system is better.” In 1993, when Tom was born, India and China had the same annual GDP per capita, about US$350. Chinese textbooks point out that the critical difference between the two was political philosophy: India is democratic, and China is … something unique. Chinese born after 1990 have watched every year as their country becomes wealthier, more powerful, and more relevant faster than any other country in the world, in history. In broad strokes this young generation believes that their government structure can provide opportunities for them to create the lives they desire.
When Donald Trump campaigned and won the American presidency by claiming that the US government and media are corrupt and controlled by politicians who exploit the system to get rich, millions in China thought, “Wait … aren’t a corrupt government and a controlled media supposed to be China’s problems?” As we watched the US presidential debates, Xia Xia, the recent high school graduate who gave me all her history books, said, “Sounds a lot like what people say about China, right?” Then she shrugged and went back to her phone, mumbling, “I guess all governments are the same.”
* * *
One morning in the spring of 2014, before I lived with Tom, I pedaled along the path to the Sichuan University library. Now that the spring semester was over and students had left the university, I was shamelessly using a friend’s university ID to get into the library. Each time I swiped to enter the study room on the second floor, the university librarians would look away from the computer to avoid seeing a lightly bearded American posing as the pretty, smiling Chinese woman they saw on their screens.
As I biked the familiar route to the library beneath the dense canopy of trees lining the campus road, I noticed a gathering of old men in the clearing alongside the library. Nearly every day I had cut through this tree-covered clearing to get dumplings or noodles at the only shop that stayed open when all the students left for vacation. Some called the clearing Old Man Newspaper Alley. The clearing was filled with rows of metal display cases. Tacked on corkboards behind a well-worn plastic covering, the People’s Daily newspaper was posted every day for the public to peruse at their leisure. Now that spring had sprung, the trees were filled with the chirping of robins and the thrum of woodpeckers.
On this day, a crowd had gathered around a corkboard panel that housed front-page news. I dismounted my bike and squeezed into the crowd, reading over the head of a man speaking Sichuanese so quietly it was as if he did not want to disturb the morning dew. The group was pointing at the headline on the front page: “Xi Jin Ping Warns Peking University Students: If You Want to Get Rich, Don’t Go into Government.”
People in China joke that foreigners are direct, whereas Chinese tend to be indirect, suggesting or asking or even demanding only through implication. Nothing that Xi said was roundabout: if you want to get rich, don’t be a government cadre. But it implied something else: if you are getting rich as a cadre, you’re doing something wrong.
“Those officials must be wetting their pants!” one elderly man guffawed, tapping the plastic protector with a bony finger. The group of elderly men belly-laughed their approval.
What did being a Party member mean? The perks of joining the Party in the past were lavish—money, power, and job security. Government cadres were the linchpins of China’s “I-know-a-guy economy,” the men controlling where economic stimulus flowed on a local and national level. Someone who wanted to start a business had to go through a Party member to get a license. Someone who wanted to build a factory had to go through a Party member to get a government contract. The first millionaires in developing China were the bosses of concrete, steel, and wire companies. Their clients were the government. China’s massive infrastructure overhaul after it instituted the reform and opening-up policies meant that Chinese officials controlled who received the infrastructure contracts that all but guaranteed enormous wealth. Brothers, cousins, and then the network of “brothers and cousins” that is created by doing business in China most often received preferential treatment when submitting contract bids. Much of the wealth created by those contracts would circle back to the official. The Beijing-based Horizon Research Consultancy group conducted a survey in 2011, before President Xi Jinping came to power, that showed nearly two-thirds of respondents believed that knowing people with political connections was
the primary factor in determining success or failure. John Lee, a professor at the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney, wrote, “It is no accident that more than 80 percent of the approximately eighty-five million CCP members make up the Chinese middle class and elite.”3
In addition to wealth, government officials enjoyed tremendous job security. Those with government jobs were said to eat out of an iron rice bowl because they rarely, if ever, got fired. An attitude of “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down”* bred a culture of mediocrity, according to Tom’s mother. In a time of notorious social unpredictability, working in government ensured the essentials of life—food, clothing, housing, and a humble though steady salary were all but guaranteed. Then, as the system became bloated with corruption, the iron rice bowl became the golden rice bowl.
The Chinese people loathed the corruption. Chinese regarded corrupt officials—more than crime, pollution, and wealth inequality—as the worst problem in China, according to the most recent Pew Research Center data. People perceived that government officials were withholding autonomy from the common person. When connections, not ability, determine whether you can succeed, what is the point of working hard? However, the same Pew data that said corruption was China’s largest problem also found that corruption was the problem Chinese most expected to be reduced in the near future. People believed they were witnessing a change in the way Chinese government works, and that is largely thanks to President Xi.4
When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he declared that ferreting out corruption would be one of his top priorities. Two days after he assumed the presidency and became head of China’s Communist Party, Xi warned the Party that its legitimacy as the country’s governing authority was in jeopardy because of what he saw as “endemic corruption eating away at the Party’s authority and effectiveness.”5 Xi proclaimed that he would begin an anticorruption campaign, which was dubbed by the media “Tigers and Flies”—the effort to take down corrupt officials big and small alike.6
When Xi began his anticorruption campaign, many within China believed catching tigers and swatting flies was a power play, a pretense for Xi to weed out competing political factions within the Party and consolidate his power at the top. Few knew the argument better than those in Sichuan and Chongqing.
* * *
“Do you know Mr. Bo?” asked Old Wang, my landlord, as we sat in the courtyard of his old apartment complex. I looked around at the aunties doing calisthenics led by an iPad propped up on a bamboo stool by the gate. Music echoed off the tile sides of the apartment buildings. Old Wang fanned himself under the hard rays of the summer sun.
“Does he live here?” I asked.
Old Wang threw his hands in the air, a look of exasperation on his face.
He was talking about Bo Xilai. Bo Xilai had been a member of the Central Politburo and secretary of the Communist Party’s Chongqing branch. Bo was Xi Jinping’s political rival and competition for role of president, the other major politician positioning himself for China’s highest point of leadership. Handsome, affable, and well liked in Chongqing and neighboring Sichuan, Bo was a formidable threat to Xi. When Xi came to power, Bo almost immediately became embroiled in a bribery, embezzlement, and abuse-of-power scandal. It represented a display of the Communist Party’s teeth and ended with a British businessman found dead in a French villa and Bo’s wife convicted of the Brit’s murder and sentenced to death.
“We all liked him [Bo],” Old Wang asserted, nodding and fanning himself. “He got things done for us.” Sichuan Province and Chongqing had lagged behind the coastal cities economically but had experienced tremendous growth since 2007. In 1997, Chongqing was made one of the four municipalities in China (the others are Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin) that are controlled directly by the central government. Chongqing and surrounding Sichuan Province were prospering, and many attributed the change to Bo’s “Chongqing model” of governance, his ability to attract business and government stimulus to the area, and his emphasis on rooting out corruption.
“What happened to Mr. Bo?” I asked.
“He lost,” Old Wang replied. He rummaged through the wellspring of Chinese dynastic idioms and reminded me, “A change of sovereign brings a change of ministers.”*
Months before Xi became president, Bo was removed from his position as the Party chief for the city. Many Chinese regard Bo’s downfall as politically motivated, with Xi consolidating his power by implicating, or simply bringing to light, the involvement of his political adversaries in vast networks of bribery and scandal. Although Bo was removed from office before Xi began his anticorruption campaign, many consider Bo the first big political tiger (senior official) caught by it. However, that does not mean Bo had clean hands. The New York Times, reporting on the life sentence handed to a Bo associate in 2016, noted that, in 2012, before Bo was dismissed from the Party and his position, “the police chief of Chongqing had told American diplomats that Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, had murdered a British businessman by poisoning him, and the police chief later turned himself in to senior party officials. Evidence provided by the police chief, Wang Lijun, was then used to bring down Mr. Bo, who had many enemies in the party.”7 “It is government,” Old Wang countered. “Show me one official with clean hands!” By 2016, 185 tigers had been “caught” and prosecuted for corruption said to amount to nearly three billion RMB, or US$430 million, combined.8 Most Western media outlets, a significant number of Chinese forum sites, and the casual street gossips were skeptical of these moves; the new sovereign was merely changing his ministers and consolidating his power, they said.9
The media and pundits focused on political tigers because they are big news. But how many people actually see a tiger? For the average person, the flap about corruption was nothing more than fodder for the tabloids.
But flies? Flies—low-level officials—pester everyone.
“When my parents wanted to open a restaurant in Guangzhou, they spent half of their start-up money sending gifts—bottles of Maotai baijiu, cartons of expensive cigarettes. In a word, palm greasing,” a friend had explained as we walked along a fish market in China’s third-most-productive city, Guangzhou. “Now you couldn’t beg a permit official to accept a bottle of Maotai,” he said chuckling. “They’re all scared shitless they’ll get swept up in the anticorruption campaign.”
Xi’s catching tigers and flies campaign had a very real effect at the local level, significantly slowing the prohibitively expensive palm greasing typically demanded by local township officials. In China the tools of business had more often been extravagant dinners and cartons of cigarettes than sound business models and precise timing. Currying favor with local officials often had determined whether one sank or swam. Now local entrepreneurs believed this was changing. Alongside the anticorruption campaign, the Party led a media campaign trumpeting the success of the catching tigers and swatting flies program. A major part of the anticorruption campaign was being seen by the public as taking down corrupt officials. Whether Xi’s anticorruption campaign was merely a power play or not, catching tigers and swatting flies was having a major impact on the way people viewed the Party.
Tom’s mother was not impressed by the government’s efforts to change. Tom had tried to help his family start an online version of their bakery on Alibaba’s Taobao. They had passed all the health and safety tests that would authorize them to ship their goods within the province, but a local official had held up their plans.
“He’s a low-level official trying to assert himself, to exercise power over somebody. He wants a small gift or something like that,” she said. Still, the family’s online shop could not open because of this bureaucrat’s demand.
Over the years I met many Party officials, both low level and high ranking. At a conference on the aging of the population of Shenyang, the fastest-aging city in China, the mayor gave a speech to open the proceedings. Without saying a word, her two closest lieutenants were immediately identifiable t
hrough their demeanor and the style of their business suits. “Chinese value 城府—chéngfǔ,” Tom had explained. It means “subtle, shrewd”—a mind hard to fathom. One of its secondary definitions is “sophisticated.” When we argued about the details of what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he chided me for allowing my face to reveal what I was thinking. “You can’t show your emotions on your face in China, for business,” Tom had told me, “and especially if you’re going to work in government.” Other Chinese friends also often chided me for being too easy to read. “Like a child,” Tom said. At the aging conference I attended, the Party officials’ faces were like masks, rarely moving or betraying any emotion, and their suits were meticulously tailored to appear totally unremarkable.
One of Tom’s mentors, a professor, had arranged for us to meet with the regional head of development for the Chinese Communist Party in Chengdu. It was a big deal. This man was responsible for much of the government’s investment in industry in what Milken ranked as the best performing city economy in China in 2015, Chengdu.10 Tom was nervous; this man could make or break his career.
We met in a Starbucks. The regional head of industrial development lived in a new development in the southern part of Chengdu, just south of the New Century Global Center, the largest single building in the world, in an area not yet served by the subway system. But Chengdu was building toward the south, away from Pengzhou to the north and toward the regional head’s apartment complex. Among real estate professionals his area was known as the best investment in Chengdu. The shopping district where we met was so busy that we had to leave Starbucks and meet in a private room in a nearby Japanese teahouse.
The head of industrial development had a doctoral degree. He was intelligent and relaxed, almost informal. Tom, normally forthcoming with his ideas, clammed up as soon as we entered the teahouse. He took on the role of underling, pouring tea for the cadre and me. In turn, the regional head of industrial development was cold to Tom. When the government official spoke, he rarely looked at Tom. Sometimes the man interrupted Tom, as if he did not realize Tom was speaking. The man also did not acknowledge Tom for pouring the tea. The power dynamic was clear. The functionary knew Tom wanted to work in government, and therefore Tom was at the bottom of the food chain.
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