Age of Ambition (22 page)

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.”