Age of Ambition (25 page)

Only after he submitted his first piece of writing by e-mail did he awaken to the possibilities of technology. “Within a few hours, I had a response from the editor—and the marvelous power of the Internet suddenly struck me.” His wife never got her computer back. Liu had lived through the old rituals of dissent, the “bicycle-and-telephone era,” as he called it, when intellectuals had to wait for a funeral or an anniversary in order to convene without arousing the government's suspicion of large groups. The Web slashed across dialect, class, and geography such that the editors of China's first online magazine,
Tunnel
, wrote in 1997, “The reason why autocrats could seal our ears and eyes and fix our thoughts is that they monopolize the technology of disseminating information. Computer networks have changed this equation.”

That idealism was hardly universal. Around the world, critics of “cyber-utopianism” argued that the Web provided only an illusion of openness, and a weak sense of community; that it strengthened authoritarian governments by creating a safety valve and defusing the pressure for deeper change. But for Liu, those factors did not outweigh the practical benefits of activism in the digital age. For years, the post office had intercepted his manuscripts when he tried to send them abroad; if he was preparing an open letter of protest, he would spend a month crisscrossing the city to find enough like-minded people to sign it. “Then it took several days (at the very least) to reach consensus on questions of content and wording and timing,” he wrote. “Next, one had to find a place where a handwritten letter could be typeset and printed. Then copies had to be made.” Liu Xiaobo had become an unapologetic cyber-utopian. “A few clicks of a mouse, the exchange of a few emails, and it's done,” he wrote. “The Internet is like a magic engine, and it has helped my writing to erupt like a geyser.”

By the fall of 2008, behind the door of his fifth-floor walk-up in Beijing, Liu Xiaobo was writing something that he suspected would have more impact than anything he'd ever done. Exactly what he was writing had to remain a secret for the moment, but, when it was ready, he would let it loose, abetted by the technology he called “God's gift to China.”

*   *   *

One afternoon the previous winter, Liu and I were at a teahouse near his apartment. He looked gaunter than usual, his belt wrapped nearly twice around his waist; his winter coat drooped across his shoulders as if it were on a hanger. His stutter, always in the background, was strong. He coughed over his tea. He was, by now, the country's most prominent dissident, which meant that he was a celebrity among Chinese intellectuals, but almost unknown to the broader Chinese population. His writings had been banned in China for years, and online censors struck down his essays. He published abroad, but he didn't speak English, and he had turned down offers to resettle overseas. China was his home whether the government liked that or not.

I was struck that day by an unexpected calmness about him. His years behind bars had mellowed his rancor, and he was technical and unhurried as he walked me through the arguments in a new open letter—a warning to Chinese leaders that they risked “a legitimacy crisis” if they did not heed growing calls for political reform.

“Western countries are asking the Chinese government to fulfill its promises to improve the human rights situation, but if there's no voice from inside the country, then the government will say, ‘It's only a request from abroad; the domestic population doesn't demand it,'” he told me. “I want to show that it's not only the hope of the international community, but also the hope of the Chinese people to improve their human rights situation.”

Liu startled me with his optimism. As China knitted itself into the world, he suspected the “current regime might become more confident,” he said, and leaned back into his seat, enjoying the sound of his prediction. “It might become milder, more flexible, more open.” His duty, as he saw it, was to keep writing and arguing. “Regardless of whether it works or not, I will keep on asking the government to fulfill its promises.”

And so he did, growing more ambitious as the months passed. As fall gave way to winter, he and a small group of collaborators were nearing the end of their secret project—a detailed declaration calling for human rights and political reform. “The political reality, which is plain for anyone to see, is that China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a constitution but no constitutional government,” they wrote. “The ruling elite continues to cling to its authoritarian power and fights off any move toward political change.”

Unlike the usual dissident manifestos, theirs did not confine their argument to a single case or an obscure provision; they called for nineteen fundamental political reforms, including regular elections, independent courts, a ban on political control of the military, and an end to the practice of, as they put it, “viewing words as crimes.” They were inspired by Charter 77, a manifesto that Václav Havel and fellow Czech activists had issued more than three decades earlier, united, as they wrote at the time, “by the will to strive individually and collectively for respect for human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world.” In China's case, Liu and his coauthors ended their introduction with the suggestion of a ticking clock: “The decline of the current system has reached the point where change is no longer optional.”

Among themselves, they resolved to release it to the public that winter, on December 10, 2008—the sixtieth anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They called it Charter 08. They had 303 initial signers, but someone needed to be the primary sponsor, and Liu agreed to take that role. To most, it would have been an unappealing prospect. “The first bird that lifts its neck” the Chinese liked to say, “is the one that gets shot.”

 

ELEVEN

A CHORUS OF SOLOISTS

 

The real estate boom swept across Beijing from east to west, from new to old—past the Global Trade Mansion and on to the Drum Tower, and in the fall of 2008, I got priced out of my neighborhood. I found a cheaper place a mile farther west, on a street that had yet to be redeveloped, called Cotton Flower Alley. It was lined with poplar trees and run-down courtyards popular with migrant workers from Shandong, Anhui, and elsewhere, who stuck out because they were shorter, darker, and more alert than city people. The migrants shared bunk beds in tiny rented rooms, except on the hottest nights, when they pulled their mattresses into the street and hoped for wind.

You could learn a fair bit about the economy without leaving the
hutong
. I could eyeball unemployment by the number of day laborers huddled at the corner of Cuttlefish Alley looking for work. They were middle-aged men in dusty, patched-up sport coats and pleather loafers, shifting their weight from foot to foot. As the financial crisis deepened, their numbers tripled. Watching them, I could see why Home Depot had struggled to romanticize DIY home improvements in China. The men held signs that advertised their skills, and each listed his offerings in a way that struck me as the flip side of the young daters who itemized their demands,
CAN BUILD SMALL HOMES, DRYWALL, TILE FLOORS, BRICK FLOORS, WATERPROOFING, INTERIOR WALLS, PAINTING, UNCLOG DRAINS, MOLDINGS, DECORATIONS, WATER, ELECTRIC
.

Life was fluid, and nobody ever seemed too far from success or failure. A few doors down from my house, a tiny stall selling sesame biscuits opened in February. It had a deli counter facing the street; steam poured out of the opening into the cold. A middle-aged woman in a paper hat and blue apron was barking valiantly to passersby about free samples. Her name was Mrs. Guo and she had a strong Henan accent; she worked the counter while her husband, a tall quiet guy, pounded dough behind her in a cloud of flour and steam. It was a twenty-four-hour operation, if you didn't count the seven hours at night that they slung a sheet across the front and bedded down on the tables.

But after a few weeks, I stopped by for breakfast and found that they'd taped a
FOR RENT
sign in the window. “We aren't making any money,” Mrs. Guo said. Rent was $150 a month, and that was too much. “People just cycle by. This location is no good for walking,” she added, and I tried not to look at all the people walking by as we talked. I was stumped. The bra vendor across the alley was doing fine, and the convenience store with the one-yuan hot dogs on a rotisserie did okay. “We're moving down to Fuxingmen”—another old Beijing neighborhood a mile or so south—“and we'll see what happens,” she said. A couple of days later, I went back, and their place was already empty. Through the window, I could see nothing but final footprints left in flour. They had opened and closed in seven weeks.

Soon, Mr. Ye arrived. He was a nervous twenty-five-year-old from Fujian Province who had learned the basics of making Beijing-style crêpes and was trying to contend in a competitive market. (The street was lousy with crêpes.) He didn't even last the spring. Before long, the stall got an impressive new sign—
THE GREAT MYTHICAL BIRD CONSTRUCTION SUPPLY SHOP
—and I prepared to bring them my hardware needs. But when it opened, it turned out to be a brothel. It had only a single employee—she sat warily in the window, where the biscuit vendor once stood—but the brothel lasted only two weeks. By fall, the place was dark, its fancy sign still perched overhead. It was hard to know what to blame: the financial crisis perhaps, or the location, or simply the relentless churn of modern
hutong
life.

*   *   *

At night, the busiest place on Cotton Flower Alley was the Internet café, a vast, low-ceilinged expanse with row after row of rickety PCs, where glassy-eyed young men sat for hours smoking and playing games. I could find a place like that in almost any town I visited, no matter how remote. The windows were almost always blacked out, like at a casino, and they struck me as the only places in China where people weren't racing the clock.

For all the energy that the Web gave to intellectuals such as Liu Xiaobo, and the nationalist fever it stirred among Tang Jie and his friends, most of China's online life, as in any country, concerned matters less grave. When researchers noticed a spike, in April 2010, in the number of Chinese users taking steps to get around censors, the cause might have been a surge in political awareness; actually it was a Japanese porn star, Sola Aoi, who had opened a Twitter account, and young Chinese men were sparing no effort to reach it. But there were many ways to get attention on the Chinese Web. Bloggers started identifying photos that had been doctored by Party propagandists to make the crowds look larger or the officials more important. Techniques that had served the Department well for decades were now open to ridicule: a blogger noticed that a state news report on China's newest fighter jet included footage from
Top Gun
. Look closely, and there was Tom Cruise destroying a Soviet MiG.

Online, people were shedding the habit that Orwell called “blackwhite”—the “loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.” Time-honored rituals were losing their effectiveness. When state television showed President Hu Jintao visiting a low-income family in subsidized housing on New Year's Day, the mother told him, “I am so grateful that the Party and the government have built such a great country.” But people online promptly discovered that the mother was a civil servant in the city's traffic police; her image as a member of a low-income family was undermined when it was discovered that she had posted photos of herself on vacation, with her daughter, in Shanghai and the resort island of Hainan.

The establishment media was being undermined by the Web. The blogger Ran Yunfei called it a “parallel language system,” and the tension between the languages was reviving a strain of irreverence that had languished in China for decades. Autocrats rarely do well with irony, and these were especially hostile to humor: shortly after the revolution in 1949, the Party set up a committee to evaluate Chinese comedy; the committee officially concluded that stand-up comedians should replace satire with “praise.” Online, people were less inclined to praise. When the government unveiled the new headquarters of China Central Television—a pair of tall, slanted towers joined at the top—people started calling it the Big Underpants. Flustered, the Party suggested, the “Window on Knowledge,” or
zhichuang
, which people embraced but pronounced slightly differently, so that it meant “hemorrhoid.”

Online, Chinese teenagers were watching free subtitled episodes of
Friends
at the very moment that a state-television apparatchik named Qin Mingxin was fuming to reporters that he had considered putting
Friends
on Chinese TV until he watched it. “I had thought the play focused on friendship. But after a careful preview I found each episode had something to do with sex,” he said. Even when the Party could control what people saw, it was unnerved by how people reacted. It blessed a big-budget drama about itself called
The Founding of a Party
, and recruited a long list of movie stars to volunteer their participation. But when people started to rate the film on a pop culture site called Douban, it got so many bad reviews that the site abruptly shut down the rating system.

Fundamentally, the culture of the Web was an almost perfect opposite of the culture of the Communist Party: Chinese leaders cherished solemnity, conformity, and secrecy; the Web sanctified informality, newness, and, above all, disclosure. Four years after the journalist Shi Tao went to prison for revealing a censorship order, those orders were now leaking onto the Web within hours of being issued by the Department, the State Council Information Office, and other agencies. Censors pulled them down as fast as possible, but other people collected and reposted them beyond the firewall, where censors couldn't reach them. China Digital Times, an overseas news site, created an archive it called “Directives from the Ministry of Truth,” in homage to Orwell. The directives were often as brief and punchy as a tweet, as if the state had adopted the cadences of the technology that bedeviled it. Each read like a reverse mirror image of a headline in the state press: