China Airborne

by James Fallows

  I was one of a small number of outsiders at the dinner, at which the two senior commanders did most of the talking. The entire discussion was off the record, but I can say that in the following days I listened with a sense of familiarity to coverage of the public events of General Chen’s visit to the United States—the first by a senior PLA official in seven years. In nearly every formal statement, response to a question, or impromptu comment in the presence of reporters, he returned to the same note, an insistence on respect. Improved relations must start on the basis of mutual respect, he would say. Or: Our nations must seek ways to work together, but on the platform of respect. Or: Only from a vantage point of mutual respect and equality can we make progress. The tone was affable, and the words might have sounded like pointless officialese. But that reflected something far closer to the heart of Chinese concerns than is often appreciated by outsiders, especially by the historically confident Western world.

  In Chinese governmental culture, respect is not the only issue with the power to raise hackles or close down debate. Another is the fear of disorder that might call the recent decades of material progress into question. A similar important fear involves the specter of “splittism” that could divide the country and challenge the central government’s control. There is simply no point in discussing the merits of autonomy for Taiwan, Tibet, or Xinjiang—the areas of principal “splittist” threat and concern—in any sort of public setting. It’s not just that government policy is resolute on splittist questions; the great majority of the mainland Han Chinese public seems to feel the same way (no doubt because that is the only view offered in schools and from state-controlled media), even though they might dissent from government controls or policies in other realms. Chinese people who are familiar with American history point out the many similarities between the current Han attitude and the drive toward Manifest Destiny thinking in the United States from the nineteenth century onward.

  But the sensitivity about respect comes up even more often than these other concerns. Paradoxically and predictably, the heavy-handed steps that the government takes to demonstrate its control in domestic affairs often undermine the respect it so craves internationally—as with the absurdity of the Catch-22 “authorized” Olympic protest zones in which no real protest was allowed—and impede its progress toward fostering the high-end, high-tech creative and industrial culture that would magnify China’s power all the more.

  May 35

  During our time in China, my wife and I had two encounters with the nervousness of the security state. Both illustrated the government’s nervousness about the kind of openness a fully modern economy would imply. The first was in 2009, on “May 35.”

  In the spring of the previous year, as the Olympic torch made its highly publicized (at least in China) way across Europe to begin a months-long journey to the opening ceremonies, French protesters clogged the route to demonstrate against China’s policy in Tibet. On Chinese TV this received saturation coverage as a shocking and unprovoked affront to national dignity. It also moved police to extra-alert status inside China, lest pro-Tibetan demonstrators managed to stage an “embarrassing” event back home.

  Just before the torch relay, China Southern Airlines reported that it had foiled a terrorist plot to blow up one of its Boeing 757 airplanes, on a route from Urumqi, in the Uighur region of Xinjiang, to Beijing. The airline said that a young Uighur Muslim woman had brought soft-drink cans full of gasoline into the plane and was trying to set the gas alight in the bathroom when a flight attendant stopped her. (The airline gave the attendant a bonus worth $17,000.)1 Until then, airline passengers in China had been able to take drinks or other liquids through security checkpoints without the 3.5-ounce maximum that had become familiar in the United States and Europe. Soon after the incident, Chinese authorities imposed similar limits on liquids or gels. But at most Chinese airports they didn’t require passengers to take off their shoes until another bombing scare in Xinjiang in 2011.

  In those same spring months before the Olympics, subway stations across Beijing were equipped all at once with X-ray screening machines for bags and parcels. In theory, anyone bringing a purse, briefcase, or backpack into the subway was supposed to put it on a conveyor belt for inspection. In practice, people who looked rushed enough, or were intent enough on dodging eye contact with the half-attentive guards, or whose bulky parcels of goods for sale at open-air markets (or bedroll containing clothes and belongings, if they were migrant workers) were too big to fit inside the X-ray machine could often breeze right past the screeners and toward the ticket gate. As a foreigner, I was reluctant to try the same thing myself until I saw that nothing happened to the Chinese commuters who obliviously barged through. Aha! So this was one of the countless “rules” in Chinese life ignored by most people most of the time, but always available for enforcement if the need arose. By the time we left Beijing, a year after the Olympics’ close, I’d perfected the art of hiding a briefcase under my coat or sweater when it was cold, or on warmer days holding it open for a cursory glance by the guards as I quickly strode past the machine.

  The Olympics came and went, but the machines in Beijing stayed on—and soon they had spread to the Shanghai subways, in anticipation of its 2010 World Expo. By 2011 they appeared to be a permanent fixture in both cities, and at many subway stops attendants grew more dutiful about making sure all incoming bags went on the belts. I learned later that the screening machines were made by a company owned by Hu Jintao’s son-in-law; that business, plus what always looked like make-work for the young women who staffed most of the checkpoints, gave this form of security theater an economic logic in China.

  The sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, on October 1, 2009, required extra security for the mass rallies and parade of military equipment that day. Shortly thereafter so did the liang hui (), or annual “Dual Meetings” of political leaders from around the country, and the visit of President Barack Obama a few weeks after that.

  But of all the moments of lockdown in Beijing itself that year, the most palpably tense came on May 35. This was the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown, which had occurred on the fourth day of June of 1989—or the thirty-fifth of May, as Chinese students put it in blog posts and text messages to avoid screening by automated censors. Day by day in late spring security officials were more and more obviously on guard for anything that could constitute a “surprise” or “incident” on the anniversary.

  By the evening of May 34, or June 3, when my wife and I went from our apartment near the Guomao intersection two miles west toward Tiananmen Square, along with our Chinese-speaking Belgian friend Peter Claeys—the same friend with whom I’d flown the Cirrus to Zhuhai—the layers of security were already more elaborate than we had seen in our previous three years in the country. We took the Beijing Metro Line 1 to the Tiananmen Square East Station, and as we trudged up the stairs toward the street, we discovered that we would need to pick our way around large numbers of People’s Liberation Army troops, in their familiar light green shirts and dark green trousers. Once outside, on the main Chang’An Road that runs between Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, we also saw regular police and security forces, in light blue shirts with dark blue pants. Then scores of blatantly plainclothes policemen—fit young men, looking as if they’d just come in from the parade yard and switched out of uniform into identical-looking “casual” pants and shirts. Then a contingent the likes of which we had not ever seen before, or at least not ever noticed. These were plainclothesmen trying a little harder to be plain-clothed. They looked like the counterparts of the undercover narco detail in a Mod Squad–type American police movie: young men with hip-looking fauxhawks or extra-long hairstyles, some dressed in cargo shorts with Hawaiian shirts, or black T-shirts, or white “wife-beater” sleeveless T-shirts, all looking as if they had nothing particular to do—but all scanning the crowd every second, in the fashion of Secret Service agents
on an American presidential trip.

  As we looked across a broad boulevard to Tiananmen Square itself, we saw that its paved expanses, capable of holding tens of thousands of tourists on a normal day, were empty except for the army and police troops. Waist-high aluminum crowd barriers were on all sides, to keep anyone out—and police were confining all visitors to sidewalks on the far sides of the square. Knowing that dozens of officials’ eyes were on us, we looked as innocently as we could toward the monuments, and like the few Chinese tourists there took pictures toward the setting sun.

  I heard a commotion behind us, and saw a young Chinese-looking man being hustled away by some of the “informal” plainclothesmen. He was calling out—in Chinese, English, and a language I didn’t immediately recognize—asking people for help. We turned to look, and immediately found a short and very toughly built Chinese man, with a shag-cut hairdo and shorts and a wife-beater T-shirt, standing right in front of us. “This does not concern you,” he said to us in English. “This is the police’s business. It is not your concern. Go on your way.”

  We walked away from the altercation for thirty or forty seconds, enough to indicate that we were not making trouble and would do as we were told. At that point, when we convinced ourselves that we were a safe distance away, I turned around, to look back to the scene of the police action we’d just watched. And, inconspicuously, I thought, took a picture of the man we’d seen earlier, still struggling with plainclothes police. As soon as I’d snapped the picture, I turned back around, and we quickened our pace toward the south end of the vast plaza. Within a few more strides we were surrounded on all sides by a group of police in mufti.

  They waited until a young supervisor who spoke some English appeared. Peter Claeys, who had lived in China for years and was always complimented by Chinese people on his mastery of Mandarin, played dumb about understanding what the rest of the policemen were saying to one another.

  “Did you take a picture?” the supervisor asked me. I could see no payoff in dissembling. “Yes.” “Why did you do that?” “I don’t know.” The young questioner stepped away and spoke into a police walkie-talkie. Fifty yards away, we saw the man who’d originally warned us talking on a walkie-talkie too. He seemed to be in charge and to be running the investigation from afar. We could hear both ends of their conversation, which was of course in Chinese. Our Belgian friend listened and gave us quiet updates in French—his first language, and one my wife and I could handle but the Chinese cops could not.

  “Are you here on a journalist visa?” the young man said when he had finished his walkie-talkie consultation. I was relieved to be able to say forcefully and honestly, “No.” I’d been denied a journalist visa when I first applied at the Washington, D.C., embassy back in 2005—and through the years since then I’d made do with a variety of business, academic, and tourist visas to remain in China. I introduced myself freely to officials as a reporter when requesting interviews; I gave them copies of books and articles after they appeared. No one in Chinese officialdom (except, conveniently, this policeman) had any doubt about my role. And as long as no one I interviewed had to take official responsibility for approving a visa that could conceivably lead to trouble, no one cared whether I was following the letter of the law.

  “We’re here on tourist visas,” I added, helpfully, telling him the literal truth but inviting him to draw the wrong conclusion. “Where are your passports?” he asked. We said we didn’t have them—for fear of losing them or having them stolen, we didn’t carry them around on the street.

  Now we had a problem, since in principle foreigners are supposed to carry passports at all times. And this was the opening for the police: We were in direct and admitted violation of yet another law that was generally ignored but could be applied when useful. After consultation with the boss in cargo shorts, the local sublieutenant began to give us a stern lecture about the importance of showing respect for Chinese law while enjoying the privilege of traveling in Chinese territory, about Chinese laws deserving the same respect any other country’s did, about China’s refusal to tolerate signs of disrespect, and so on.

  At times over the next near-hour, I was worried—within limits. The blunt truth is that in most cases, the worst punishment a foreigner in China will face is to be made to leave the country. That is of course not the worst thing that can happen to local Chinese citizens who cooperate with journalists and other outsiders, a reality that both the Chinese and the foreigners need constantly to weigh. Peter Claeys, who had recently moved from Shanghai to Taiwan, was near the end of his planned visit to China anyway—but my wife and I had trips booked through rural China for the next few weeks. What would we do if we were forced to leave? Would we be able to come back?

  After much fretting and consultation over the walkie-talkie, a solution was found. I would write a confession, and an apology—requests redolent of the “self-criticism” that the communist leadership had asked of dissenters through its history. Then we could be sent on our way. I pulled a notebook out of my back pocket and ripped out a sheet of paper, trying to close it before the policeman had a chance to think about the words REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK in big print across its cover. And what should I write?

  Sentence by sentence, the young policeman got instructions over the walkie-talkie from his boss and relayed them to me. “You write, ‘I am sorry for interfering with the police during their work,’ ” he told me. “Okay,” I said, and started writing some words. I said them aloud to him as I wrote: “I understand that the police feel I interfered with them in their work.” He took the paper from me and read it back to his captain, who noticed the difference. “No,” the young policeman said. “You will say ‘I am sorry.’ ” “Okay.” I crossed out the original words and started again. “I am sorry that the police feel I interfered with them at their work.”

  That one got through. Then on to the next item of confession. “You should write, ‘I broke Chinese law that I must carry my passport.’ ” “Okay. ‘I broke Chinese law that I should carry my passport, because I was afraid of having it stolen after my wallet was taken by pickpockets last week on the Beijing Metro.’ ”

  That was the truth, even though it was the only instance of even petty crime that had affected us through the previous three years in China. Gangs of Dickensian urchins got on the most crowded cars at the most jammed stations at the peak of Beijing’s rush hour—and “accidentally” stood blocking the doors, so that passengers trying to get off essentially had to swim through a sea of bodies from the car’s interior onto the platform. By the time they escaped the car and reached the platform and could recognize that their purse or wallet had disappeared, the train was already rolling away. A few days earlier I had performed just such a mid-car freestyle routine, losing contact with the car’s floor for several seconds and being suspended by other bodies, as I escaped the train at the super-packed Guomao Station near our apartment. As soon as I got to my feet on the platform and watched the train depart, I could feel the emptiness in my back pocket where my wallet had been. By the time I got back to my apartment and began calling credit-card companies ten minutes later, my Visa card had already been used at a Starbucks two stops down the line—a test transaction, to see if the card worked—and my MasterCard had been used for a small purchase at an art store and then tried (and rejected) for a major buy at a camera store. All this was a nuisance at the time, but it gave me a story to tell the policeman at Tiananmen Square. This departure from his prescribed script, to give my excuse for leaving my passport at home, he also allowed.

  A few more sentences, about the importance of respecting China, respecting its laws, respecting its police, and respecting the duties of a foreigner when visiting another country. I told myself that none of the prose I was writing at a Chinese policeman’s direction could ever be used against me outside China, because no native speaker of English would think I had “confessed.” It would be like a hostage photo in which I was giving hand signals of resistance. The police
took all the contact info they could think of—our apartment number, the telephone number of the management, our address in the United States.

  At the very end, the boss in the cargo shorts and modish haircut came over, and he watched me erase every photo in my camera that showed police or soldiers. The process was surprisingly delicate. He and his police colleagues didn’t seize or smash my camera. They didn’t confiscate the digital memory card. They didn’t ask that everything on the card be zapped, through a “bulk erase.” One by one, the cop in charge looked at my camera’s view screen to see each of the thirty or forty shots I had taken, and one by one he asked me to push the “erase” button. When we got to an innocuous tourist vista of the square taken just before the troubles began, he said I could stop.

  Then, “You should go home.” This time we complied, and fast.

  A recent sign of nervousness: the “Jasmine” movement

  My wife and I were living again in Beijing through the early months of 2011, as the “Arab Spring” movements spread a mixture of promise and turmoil across the Middle East, the prospect of a parallel “Jasmine Revolution” brought increased security and clampdown in much of China. The government’s response again raised doubts about its ability to embrace the openness and experimentation that world leadership in fields like aerospace would demand.

  Objectively, there seemed to be very little reason for Hu Jintao and his colleagues to think of themselves in a position anything like that of the quickly deposed Mubarak in Egypt, Ben Ali in Tunisia, or Qaddafi in Libya. Unlike any of those countries, China’s overall economy had not been stagnating. Demographically the main Chinese fear was that it had the exact opposite problem of many Arab countries: too few young people entering the workforce relative to the jobs that had to be done and the retirees who had to be supported. While the Communist Party of China had a permanent hold on power, its individual leaders were rotated out as they reached retirement age, rather than hanging on as life-tenure autocrats. Despite a range of sources of serious discontent—inflation, corruption, pollution, the gap between collective national wealth and the uncertain position of each specific family—in the living memory of most Chinese people things had overall gotten better rather than worse.