Not long after I left China in December 2007, police arrested a young dissident in Beijing named Hu Jia. He had been involved in the campaign to free Chen Guangcheng, but he was an unlikely enemy of the state—a scrawny thirty-four-year-old vegetarian computer wiz who wore baggy t-shirts and was either unwilling or unable to hold down a regular job. I first met Hu nearly seven years earlier, while working on a story about environmentalists who refused to use disposable chopsticks because of the damage they caused the nation’s forests. Hu brought his own chopsticks to restaurants instead, carrying them in a little cloth bag. At the time, he struck me as an ordinary fellow, perhaps more civic-minded than most college graduates, but over the years I watched him evolve into one of the nation’s most outspoken human rights advocates. His efforts on behalf of the endangered Tibetan antelope had led him to speak out for Tibetan rights, and later, he became one of the country’s first AIDS activists. When the “rights defense,” or weiquan movement began, Hu served as a one-man clearinghouse for news about government abuses. He was fearless, issuing statements and sending cell phone messages while others hesitated. When I last saw him in the summer of 2007, he was sheltering Chen’s wife in his apartment and trying to help her draw more attention to her husband’s plight.
In the debate between the purists and the pragmatists, Hu was one of the purists. Some people thought he was too much of a self-promoter, too willing to confront and provoke the authorities. When police put him under surveillance, he filmed the officers assigned to keep an eye on him and posted a documentary about his experience online. When they put him under house arrest, he used his Webcam to testify in a European parliamentary hearing on human rights. But if he sometimes behaved recklessly, he also never backed down. Xu Zhiyong, the pragmatic legal scholar who led the campaign to free Chen, disagreed with Hu’s tactics but called him “modern China’s conscience.” Hu’s stubborn insistence on speaking out against wrongdoing finally got him arrested two days after Christmas. Officers dragged him away as his wife was giving their two-month-old daughter a bath in another room. Not long before his arrest, Hu had written an essay challenging the government to improve its human rights record before the Olympics opened in Beijing the coming summer. Police charged him with incitement to subversion, and a court later sentenced him to three and a half years in prison.
Hu’s arrest was part of a broad government crackdown on dissent ahead of the 2008 Summer Games—a crackdown that continues to unfold as I write. The party wants to use the Olympics to highlight its achievements over the past three decades and appears determined to stop people like Hu from spoiling the celebration, even if it means breaking the promises it made to win the honor of hosting the Games. In the early 1990s, Beijing had lost to Sydney in the competition for the Games because of Western criticism of its human rights record, and the government had reacted indignantly, denouncing its detractors for interfering with China’s “internal affairs.” But when it applied again in 2001, it made a new pitch: Our human rights record has improved. Give us the Olympics, and we will do even better. “Eight years is a long time,” Liu Jingmin, the deputy mayor responsible for the Olympic bid, told me at the time. “If people have a target like the Olympics to strive for, it will help us establish a more just and harmonious society, a more democratic society, and help integrate China into the world.” The argument seemed to resonate, and Beijing was awarded the Games a few months later. Then, as now, people wanted to believe that prosperity and engagement with the international community would soften China’s authoritarian political system.
China has changed in remarkable and often unexpected ways since celebrating its winning bid to host the Olympics. The government has largely withdrawn from the workplace as well as from the personal lives of its citizens, and rising incomes have given people more control over their lives. The labor camps of the shourong detention system, which had been singled out by critics of China’s Olympic bid, have been shut down. Newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations have won more freedom from the censors, and some nongovernmental organizations in fields such as environmental protection have managed to flourish despite the party’s controls. Widespread access to the Internet has opened up new channels for citizens to obtain news and information, to express themselves, and to build civil society. Conditions have even improved for foreign correspondents. I asked Deputy Mayor Liu in 2001 about regulations that made it illegal for foreign journalists to travel and interview people without the government’s permission. He said he didn’t believe they would still be in place in 2008, and he was right. The government has suspended the regulations for the Olympics.
Still, the arrests of individuals like Hu Jia and Chen Guangcheng are a reminder of how much remains the same. The Communist Party continues to enjoy a monopoly on power, refusing to tolerate any organized opposition. Independent labor unions and churches are still illegal, and the party still exercises firm control over the courts. The shourong system is gone, but police have found other ways to detain people arbitrarily and force undesirables out of the cities, including the use of extralegal “black jails” to hold the seemingly endless stream of peasants traveling to Beijing with grievances against local officials. The vast propaganda apparatus of censors remains in place, working overtime to sanitize the Internet as well as mainstream media, and officials continue to harass and bully journalists, both domestic and foreign. It is one of the paradoxes of living and working in China that the country can feel one moment as if it is changing almost too quickly to comprehend, and another moment as though it is running in place. Society is racing forward, emerging from decades of violence and turmoil, but the political system is stuck in the past, with party officials struggling to preserve their power and privileges.
The libel case filed by the rural party boss Zhang Xide against the authors of the banned bestseller An Investigation of China’s Peasantry is an example of this disconnect. Nearly three years after that remarkable trial in the courthouse in Fuyang, the judges have yet to issue a verdict. They probably never will. A ruling in Zhang’s favor would have angered the public and sent the wrong signal to corrupt local officials, but a decision for the authors would have encouraged further challenges to the party’s authority. Party leaders decided to solve the problem by just doing nothing. The stalemate is a victory for the authors and their lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, because everyone expected a swift verdict against them, but it is far from a resounding triumph. Pu continues to thrive as a lawyer, but Zhang has retired with a full pension, and the authors remain blacklisted. Meanwhile, much of the countryside remains a powder keg. The party has nearly succeeded in eliminating the agricultural taxes that fueled peasant resentment for so long, but the gap between rich and poor continues to widen and the seizure of farmland for development by local officials has emerged as a new source of conflict. In Wangying Village, residents also complain that officials have tried to make up for lost taxes by collecting even more punishing fines for violations of the one-child policy.
Chen Guangcheng, who led the legal crusade against abuses of the one-child policy in Linyi, remains in prison and is not scheduled to be released until late 2010. The lawyers who rallied to defend him are a demoralized and divided bunch, and the greater weiquan movement is foundering and on the verge of collapse. The optimism that followed the successful campaign to abolish the shourong detention system has been replaced with a profound sense of despair over the arrest of activists such as Chen, Hu Jia, and the lawyer Gao Zhisheng. The authorities continue to hire thugs and criminals for the dirty work of assaulting and intimidating lawyers, and the lawyers and their allies have been unable to agree on an effective response. Despite its promises and the public’s rising expectations, the party remains above the law.
Journalists, on the other hand, are making progress in their fight for greater freedoms. Despite the censors’ best efforts and crackdowns such as the one at the Southern Metropolis Daily, state newspapers and magazines continue to find ways to expand the
boundaries of what they can report. The commercialization of the industry has resulted in more gossip and entertainment—and more reporters accepting bribes in exchange for positive coverage—but also more serious journalism that speaks truth to power. The exploding popularity of the Internet, too, has transformed the media landscape. Since the Southern Metropolis Daily’s investigative report about Sun Zhigang’s death ricocheted across Chinese cyberspace, the Internet has acted again and again as a catalyst that amplifies voices and accelerates events. More people are online now in China than in the United States, and the Web has become the leading source of news for most of them, eclipsing the party’s propaganda outlets. When editors refuse to print their stories, reporters post them on the Web. When journalists tire of the censors or lose their jobs in state media, they launch blogs or take new positions at Internet companies. At the same time, the Internet has emerged as an important venue for people with shared interests—or grievances—to gather, talk, and organize. The government is investing in new software and building new bureaucracies to rein in the Internet, but increasingly, information—about history as well as current events—is available to people who look for it.
The hard truth, however, is that many people aren’t looking and that the Communist Party is winning the battle for the nation’s future. Its propaganda efforts and its “patriotic education” classes in the schools have dulled the public’s curiosity, and its attempts to filter the Web are just effective enough to discourage people from trying to get around them. The government has grown expert at manipulating public opinion, especially at rallying nationalist sentiment to its side. The party’s most important advantage, of course, is the wave of prosperity that it has been riding for more than a quarter century, and that has lifted average incomes threefold in the past eight years. The extended boom has enhanced the party’s reputation and filled its coffers with resources that can be used to buy support and defuse opposition. Because party officials can often determine who succeeds and fails in the new capitalist economy, they wield tremendous leverage over the emerging class of private businessmen and entrepreneurs that might otherwise support political change. The wealthiest and most influential tycoons, people such as Chen Lihua, are the most likely to owe their wealth to the one-party system and the least likely to challenge it. Meanwhile, funding for the People’s Armed Police, the paramilitary force used to suppress domestic protest, has climbed sharply, far exceeding budget outlays for courts and prosecutors. Given the resources and determination of the government, given the temptations and distractions of the booming economy, given a half century of Communist rule in which people have been taught that the consequences of challenging the state can be severe, it is no wonder that many in China choose not to concern themselves with politics.
What is surprising—and inspiring—is that so many others continue to push for political change, in so many different ways, despite these circumstances. If prosperity has helped the Communist Party forestall democratization, it has also made it more corrupt and warped its values. The fusion of capitalism and authoritarianism has resulted in a government that can resemble a Mafia organization and a political system obsessed with profits at the expense of other social goals—public health, environmental protection, economic justice. The Chinese people want and deserve better. With rising incomes and national pride have come higher expectations. People have seen how other countries are governed, they have greater access to information about their own nation, and they have more time and money to devote to civic affairs. Prosperity has also given them more to defend and fight for. When their lives are touched by the state—when judges refuse to protect their property, when factories spew pollutants into the air and water, when police restrict their right to worship, when corrupt officials squeeze them for taxes and bribes—they manage to find a way to express their discontent and demand change despite the risks. In the months before the Summer Games, residents in the seaport city of Xiamen were marching in the streets against a proposed chemical plant. In Shanghai, they were campaigning against the extension of a high-speed magnetic rail line. In Lhasa, they were rioting against the government’s hard-line colonial policies in Tibet. In Guangdong, they were facing off against police with an illegal strike against exploitative conditions at a wood-processing factory. And in rural communities across Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, and Shaanxi provinces, tens of thousands of peasants were fighting to take ownership of the land they till and block local officials from seizing and selling their farms to developers.
I often hear people say that political change is inevitable in China. When incomes rise above a certain level, they argue, the nation will follow Taiwan, South Korea, and other authoritarian countries that evolved into democracies as their capitalist economies developed. But rarely have people anywhere in the world gained political freedom without pain and sacrifice, and the Chinese Communist Party has shown it will not surrender power without a fight. It held on after the disasters of Mao’s rule, and it outlasted its brethren in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after the Tiananmen massacre. In the years since, it has demonstrated its resilience again and again, nimbly adapting to new challenges and reasserting itself as a rising world power. What progress has been made in recent years—what freedom the Chinese people now enjoy—has come only because individuals have demanded and fought for it, and because the party has retreated in the face of such pressure. What the leadership doesn’t seem to understand is that it is not a zero-sum battle and that these concessions strengthen the nation and, at least in the short term, also the party’s rule. The more democratic and responsive they make the political system, after all, the more effectively they will be able to govern. But the party’s aging technocrats are more worried about losing their privileged place in the one-party system than governing well, and they tell themselves that democratic reform only weakens China.
The Chinese Communist Party could make a strong case for the advantages of authoritarian rule. It could point to the nation’s stunning economic achievements and argue explicitly that none of it would have been possible in a messy, multiparty system. But instead of proudly defending its record and its political system, it denies its autocratic nature and tries to argue that it, too, leads a democracy. “Democracy doesn’t belong just to the Western world,” the People’s Daily intoned in an editorial in advance of the Olympics, complaining in all seriousness of “a narrowed definition of democracy” imposed by the Western media that excludes China and other countries. It is not unusual for authoritarian states, especially Communist ones, to try to hide their true colors. But rarely has a government had a better case for authoritarianism than this one. By refusing to make it, the party has in effect conceded that, in the struggle for China’s future, it is on the wrong side of the fight.
When I visited Linyi with Chen Guangcheng before his arrest, the blind legal advocate asked me how long I thought the Communist Party could survive. The sun had set, and we were sitting in a car, driving in the pitch dark along a country road toward a village where we had received reports of forced abortions and other birth planning abuses. I told him that when I was studying Chinese in Beijing in the early 1990s, I honestly thought the party’s fall from power might be imminent, perhaps after the death of Deng Xiaoping, who was aging and in poor health at the time. I was reluctant to leave the country at the end of the semester because I didn’t want to miss it, I recalled. But now I felt foolish for being so naive and told Chen that I believed the party could hold on for quite some time and that I planned to leave Beijing as scheduled before the Olympics. Chen smiled and joked that I was abandoning the Chinese people, but agreed it made no sense for me to wait. He had his digital voice recorder in his hand, and he was still wearing his dark sunglasses. It had been a long day and I could tell he was tired. After a moment, Chen turned toward me and said, “I hope it happens in our lifetime.” He said it almost cheerfully, without a hint of sadness.
NOTE ON SOURCES
The main sources of informati
on for this book were interviews that I conducted and documents that I obtained while working in China between late 2000 and early 2008. Because many of those interviewed speak for themselves in the text and many others have requested anonymity to protect themselves, I have not listed them here. I also drew on my own reports in the Washington Post and those of my colleague John Pomfret. The following notes highlight other important sources that may not be apparent in the text.
CHAPTER 1
In addition to interviewing Wang Junxiu and several other participants, I attended Zhao Ziyang’s funeral myself, staying for more than an hour before police identified me and forced me to leave. The account of the negotiations over his funeral arrangements is based on interviews with members of Zhao’s family and information from other sources close to the family. In describing Zhao’s career, I drew on interviews with several former aides, the two volumes of commemorative essays published in Hong Kong after his death, interviews he gave to others while under house arrest, and other materials.
Gorbachev, Mikhail, Memoirs, Doubleday, 1996.
Jin Ren, Ruhe zai zhongguo shixing minzhu zhengzhi—Zhao Ziyang wannian tanhualu, published in Ming Pao Monthly, May 2005.
Wang Yangsheng, Kouwen fuqiang hutong liuhao—Zhao Ziyang shengqian fangtanlu, posted online January 2005.
Wu Guoguang, Zhang Weiguo, and Bao Pu, eds., Ziyang qiangu—Zhao Ziyang jinian wenji (Zhao Lives: A Collection of Commemorative Essays), Pacific Century Press, 2005.
Wu Guoguang, Zhang Weiguo, and Bao Pu, eds., Ziyang qiangu—Zhao Ziyang jinian wenji xubian (Zhao Lives: An Additional Collection of Commemorative Essays and Poems), Pacific Century Press, 2006.
Yang Jisheng, Zhongguo gaige shiqi de zhengzhi douzheng, Excellent Culture Press, 2004.
Zong Fengming, Zhao Ziyang nuanjin Zhong de tanhua (Zhao Ziyang: Captive Conversations), Open Books, 2007.
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