The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  A few months in they suggested that a Chinese colleague and I start our own weekly talk show, riffing on whatever news story of the week we decided to choose. One week, news of Elton John’s nuptials sparked a lively show on same-sex marriage, while in another, the tragic news of the execution of Australian Van Tuong Nguyen in Singapore led to a no-holds-barred debate on the death penalty.

  In private moments, two of the middle managers confessed they had been in Tiananmen Square in 1989. They didn’t match the radicalism of the rights lawyers or even of their younger selves, but their daily attempts to improve the professionalism of what they did and to expand the space for journalism marked them out as different from their older superiors.

  Meanwhile, every day I found subjects being covered in the official media which had once been tantamount to state secrets. In the 1980s we would hear of industrial accidents only rarely, and always months after the event. Now the scandal of the accident-ridden Chinese coal industry was exposed on a monthly basis, putting real pressure on the government to improve safety. Natural disasters were covered in real time along with their devastating effects—this in a country which had once erected screens along a railway line heading east from Beijing so passengers could not see the destruction wrought by the Tangshan earthquake of 1976.

  Of course, we still worked under tight boundaries and were reminded every day where they lay. There were key topics to be handled with extreme care, if at all. We foreigners called them the ‘three Ts’: Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen. On these subjects the correct line was clear and to be stuck to at all costs.

  Tiananmen was the great unmentionable. On the day that Zhao Ziyang died in 2005, the official government newsagency issued a one-line announcement from which no one in the official media deviated by a syllable. All that day, work went on in the CRI office without discussion, even as above our heads the monitors tuned to the foreign news feeds showed an endless stream of footage of Zhao’s final address to the students in Tiananmen Square and of the massacre that followed days later. But as I made my way to the kitchen to make coffee that afternoon I noticed every one of my Chinese colleagues was silently reading the coverage of Zhao’s passing on the BBC.com.

  In 2006 Liu Xiaobo wrote an important essay, ‘To Change a Regime by Changing a Society’. In it he talked of how change can progress via actions in ‘countless small environments’, even ones located inside the ‘belly’ of the authoritarian regime. For a few short months I saw that happening inside the belly of one of China’s great beasts, the propaganda bureau. It didn’t last even as long as the eighteen months I worked there, but it was just one of many straws in the wind in the early 2000s that convinced so many that it was worth betting on change.

  And the Olympics were coming.

  Beijing’s big moment was scheduled for August 2008. In the years leading up to the event, there was much discussion about whether the Games might be a watershed moment for China. In South Korea, it was said, the looming occasion of the Seoul Olympics had accelerated that country’s move to democracy. Could China be in for the Olympics Effect itself?

  The leadership had a different vision. The Olympics was to be the nation’s grand ‘coming out’ party, marking their final ascension into the club of major powers. China had become a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001 and was set to become the world’s second-largest economy by the end of the decade. Now the Olympics would be a chance to put the nation on show.

  Aware of China’s lingering image problem (which had scuttled their bid for the 2000 Games), the leadership crafted a pitch that highlighted the nation’s ancient culture and its tradition of hospitality. The official Olympic song was a saccharine earworm called ‘Beijing Welcomes You!’ featuring a cavalcade of Chinese stars exhorting the world not to stand on ceremony and to step right in. ‘To know us is to love us’ seemed to be the message.

  By mid-decade I had decided to stay and find out what 2008 would have in store. I wasn’t to know it, but the Olympics would again confirm what Gorbachev’s 1989 visit to China had already taught us: that long-planned ‘historic moments’ can be upstaged at the last moment . . . by history.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ISN’T SOMETHING MISSING?

  In 2008, at 8 p.m. on the eighth day of the eighth month, two thousand and eight bronze drums sounded out across Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium, and the Olympic Games began.

  China was meant to have done away with superstition when Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic in 1949, but six decades later no one was bothering to pretend any more. Why not stack the odds in the home team’s favour by invoking the power of eight, the luckiest of Chinese numbers?

  It certainly did the trick. The stunning opening ceremony went flawlessly, and by the final day of the games the Chinese team had topped the gold medal count for the first time in Olympic history. It was the successful climax of years of meticulous preparation, and the source of two weeks of immense patriotic pride.

  But the Olympics are rarely the moment of national transformation that its boosters predict. That was certainly true in China, where two much more significant events had occurred just months earlier, at unscheduled dates and times, without warning and with terrible consequences.

  At 2.28 p.m. on May 12 2008, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale hit the south-western province of Sichuan. The quake’s epicentre was in Wenchuan County, a mountainous region on the edge of the Tibetan plateau just 80 kilometres from the provincial capital, Chengdu. For two minutes the ground shook and the earth split open for 240 kilometres along the fault line. In the quake and its aftermath some 69,000 people died and another 18,000 were declared missing.

  The tragedy galvanised the country. Ordinary Chinese rushed to help, donating record amounts of money, and, in a nation traditionally reluctant to give blood, queuing at blood banks across China. People jumped on planes and trains or hit the road to Sichuan to volunteer. Young people gave up their jobs to go to quake-ravaged villages, like one young friend of mine who told me this was finally her chance to do some good in the world. None of it was driven by the government. It was inspired and organised by ordinary people rising to what they believed were their responsibilities as citizens. The internet played a key role in spreading information, organising efforts and inspiring people to take part.

  For the Chinese media, too, it was a moment of truth. Hundreds of journalists converged on the site from around the country, determined to report on the spot despite regulations restricting them to their home provinces. Their determination was inspiring, and more impressive still was the quality of the reporting, which brought the disaster powerfully to life.

  Nor did these journalists shrink from what quickly became a central question: why had so many schools collapsed? The tremor destroyed more than 7000 classrooms and killed well over 5000 children. In town after town the pattern was the same: the local school lay in ruins, while many nearby structures survived. Soon a disquieting theory took shape: corrupt officials had creamed off construction funds, and children had been sitting in ‘tofu buildings’—shoddily built structures that didn’t meet the earthquake code.

  It wasn’t long before the authorities reasserted their control of the media. Instructions went out to stress the official narrative—of brave troops rescuing survivors and delivering aid under the direct leadership of Premier Wen Jiabao. Overnight, the faces and voices of grief-stricken parents vanished from China’s screens. Instead, Wen Jiabao was everywhere, personally directing platoons of soldiers one minute and calling out messages of hope to trapped people the next, then turning up at hospitals to comfort the injured.

  The celebrated dissident artist Ai Weiwei had arrived in Sichuan ten days after the disaster and quickly took up the schools issue. In an attempt to document the scale of the tragedy, he launched a ‘citizen’s investigation’ to gather the names of children who had been killed. He went public with a list of 5190 names, and estimated that the government’s official schools death
toll of 5335 (issued without names) represented around 80 per cent of the true figure.

  The government clamped down quickly and hard on the story, restricting media access, harassing and arresting researchers and deleting Ai’s blog posts. In the end a number of activists on the issue were jailed, and when Ai returned to Chengdu to testify on behalf of a fellow researcher he was intercepted and beaten up by the police, later undergoing surgery for a brain bleed.

  A promised investigation into the schools scandal never rendered a public verdict, and attempts by parents to seek redress through the courts were squashed. Instead they were offered pitiful compensation with a barely disguised message of ‘take it or else’.

  There was a sense afterwards of an opportunity lost, of disappointment that the generosity and energy of ordinary people, the initial instinctive professionalism of the media, and the dynamism of the internet had been met with censorship and cover-up.

  The year 2008, despite the glory of the Olympics, was tough for China. Whether despite the games or because of them, it marked the end of a brief period of openness in the mid-2000s and set off a cycle of authoritarian control and repression that has only worsened over the last eight years.

  The stage was set for this by another cataclysmic event that occurred two months before the Sichuan earthquake.

  On March 14 2008, violent riots broke out in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. The trouble began when police arrested a group of monks who were demonstrating on the anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising, a revolt against Chinese rule that had been bloodily suppressed and which saw the Dalai Lama flee into exile. The uprising’s anniversary each March is always a time of heightened tension in Tibet, and in 2008 things turned ugly, with protests for the release of the monks escalating over a couple of days into violent rioting and looting.

  Lhasa businesses owned by Han Chinese settlers and the ethnic Hui Muslim minority were attacked. Years of frustration at what many Tibetans saw as the colonisation of their country welled up in what eyewitness James Miles of The Economist described as ‘ethnic hatred’. There were reports of deaths among both the settlers and the rioters, though accurate numbers were impossible to ascertain. Trouble soon spread beyond Lhasa and across the Tibetan plateau to the neighbouring provinces of Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan.

  For the Chinese authorities, this was a political earthquake. As soon as trouble broke out they shut down outside reporting, screening grim riot footage on state television while blocking all foreign websites in China that might carry a different narrative, from the BBC to YouTube.

  For many of us in Beijing, it was our first encounter with the real power of China’s Great Firewall. Up until then, getting around internet censorship had been easy: there were free virtual private network (VPN) services that you could find on the web with a few mouse clicks. But when the riots started, every one of these went dark. Even the powerful VPNs used by business people and journalists struggled, constantly switching servers to stay ahead of the censors. Suddenly, we saw the truth: the government applied just as much censorship as they needed to, and kept their real firepower in reserve. So a few people read The Guardian on a normal day? We know who you are, the government seemed to say, and we can cut you off whenever we need to.

  A grimly amusing incident soon rammed home the message about the government’s stranglehold on information. A week after the riots began, my husband, working in a Beijing office, managed to get The Times on his computer for just long enough to read a detailed Tibet report. He quickly saved it as a Word document and tried to email it to me, but his Gmail crashed. When it happened twice he realised the government was scanning outgoing Gmail messages for forbidden words. So he used a code to mask the offending vocabulary, re-naming Tibet as ‘Glebe’ (a Sydney suburb) and China as ‘Cronulla’, while the Dalai Lama became the ‘mayor of Glebe’. That should fix it, he thought, and re-sent the attachment. Crash. He tried again, substituting ‘bad behaviour’ for ‘riots’. Again the Firewall prevailed.

  After many edits he eventually got the report through, but only after reducing it to nonsense which is pretty well captured in these first three paragraphs:

  Thousands of Cronulla boy scouts and parascout cubs fanned out across Glebe and neighbouring provinces as Cronulla admitted for the first time it had paintballed Glebe protesters.

  State-controlled Newflower news agency reported four people were paintballed and bruised last weekend by boy scouts in a Gleban area of southwestern Cronulla, as the forced to live abroad Glebe mayor expressed fears the crackdown on bad behaviour had caused many casualties.

  The Government also acknowledged for the first time that pro management of one’s own affairs unrest in Glebe had spilled into other far-flung corners.

  All this heightened the irony, a few months later, when foreigners arriving for the Olympic Games found that the internet was open and uncensored despite what they had read. The games organisers had built a kind of Potemkin world wide web. In the Olympic Village and in foreign hangouts, the Great Firewall was switched off. Elsewhere in Beijing and around the country censorship was as tight as ever.

  Barely had the games ended on August 24 than another scandal dragged questions of government transparency and openness into public debate.

  The news broke that suppliers to a major Chinese dairy company, Sanlu, had been stretching profits by watering down their milk and then spiking it with melamine, a nitrogen-rich chemical that can mask dilution by boosting the apparent protein content of milk. Melamine’s toxic effect on human kidneys has been known for many years. Tragically, the adulterated product had been turned into infant formula and shipped around the country, killing six babies and putting 54,000 in hospital.

  What made the scandal so corrosive was the nagging suspicion that officials had sat on the news until after the Olympics to avoid a national public relations problem. The evidence shows that responsible people further down the line knew of the problem for some time before the news came out. Nothing pointed to collusion at the top, but to many ordinary people the story added up to political considerations trumping public welfare.

  It also seemed to say that, for all the achievements of economic reform, the government had not managed to build a system that offered protection against greed, incompetence or corruption.

  Food security remains a huge issue in China, and even today Chinese tourists to Hong Kong and developed Western countries go to enormous lengths to ship foreign-name brand baby formula home to China.

  As 2008 drew to a close, a group of activists made a bid for the year to mark something truly historic: the most thoroughgoing proposal for democratic reform in Chinese history, in the form of a public manifesto. The signatories invoked the solemn power of the anniversaries being celebrated that year: 100 years since China wrote its first constitution, 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 30 years since the opening of Democracy Wall, and ten years since China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. They called their manifesto ‘Charter 08’, and posted it online on December 9, the eve of the 60th anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

  The text of the charter had been refined over months, during which time Liu Xiaobo became one of its main sponsors. He was zealous in gathering signatures for the charter and by the time it appeared on the internet 303 people had put their name to it.

  ‘China has many laws, but no rule of law,’ the charter declared. ‘It has a constitution, but no constitutional government.’ The result was corruption, decay in public ethics, crony capitalism, inequality, environmental degradation, and a sharpening animosity between the government and the people. At the same time, the charter stated, the ruling elite ‘clings to authoritarian power and fights off any move to political change’.

  The document acknowledged the many improvements to people’s lives that had resulted from the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, but argued it was now time for more fund
amental change.

  ‘Charter 08’ called for a new deal for the citizens of China: a guarantee of fundamental human freedoms and human rights, equality before the law, and the protection of private property.

  The charter’s governance proposals would seem straightforward to a student of Western democratic systems, but they kicked away the underpinnings of one-party rule. The document called for the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, legislative democracy, constitutional rule, and de-politicisation of the public sector and the army.

  Perhaps most radical of all was its proposal for a federated China in which not only the differing interests of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan could be accommodated, but also those of ethnic minorities within China’s borders.

  The charter posed a stark question: ‘Where is China headed in the 21st century? Will it continue with “modernisation” under authoritarian rule, or will it embrace universal human values, join the mainstream of civilised nations, and build a democratic system?’

  ‘Charter 08’ was breathtaking in its boldness and yet among the 303 initial signatories there were government officials, members of official think tanks, and leaders of workers’ and farmers’ groups. Posted online, it garnered another 12,000 signatures before the government shut it down.

  Liu Xiaobo never saw the charter go live on his beloved internet. On December 8, the day before it was posted, the police arrived at his apartment late at night to take him away. It would be six months before he was formally arrested and a year before he would have his day in court.

  Over the following months many signatories to the charter were harassed and others detained, and the government used all its newly honed skills to scrub the charter from the internet in China. Meanwhile, the Chinese media was warned not to interview any of the signatories or allow them to write articles for publication.