Age of Ambition (53 page)

In the years after the financial crisis, most economists had come to believe that, as China's workforce aged, its growth would slow. How soon and how far would depend on how China's government behaved: whether it could control corruption, maintain public support, curb pollution, narrow the gap between rich and poor, and unleash another surge of its people's potential. By 2012 the signs of a slowdown were clear. Many economists were predicting a hard landing—but Lin never wavered. He insisted that China had the potential to keep growing at 8 percent a year until 2030, a position that endeared him to the Foreign Ministry, which arranged press briefings for him to rebut gloomier predictions. A columnist nicknamed him “Ever Increasing Lin” and accused him of “satellite talk”—an unflattering reference to Mao's loyal aides who compared the bogus harvest reports to the success of
Sputnik
. An economics website set up a page with a question across the top: “Can Lin Yifu 3.0 Come Back to Earth?” The
South China Morning Post
wrote, “You don't need to be an eminent international economist to spot the holes in his argument.”

I visited Lin at Peking University. He had a large, handsome office in a restored, tile-roofed building in a traditional courtyard, on a remote corner of campus. Since returning from Washington, he was relishing being back at his desk, where he was happiest. Though, seeing him in his office, I was struck by how isolated he seemed. I mentioned the criticism of his firm belief in the current system. He smiled, and acknowledged that his optimism made him a target. “China did very well, but income distribution became an issue, and also corruption became an issue,” he said. “And income distribution related to corruption, in a sense, makes it worse. And so people tend to look at it more negatively because of those kind of experiences. They're frustrated.”

More than thirty years after Lin had washed ashore as Captain Lin Zhengyi—the suspected spy, the man with “origins unclear”—he had dedicated himself so completely to his new hosts that nothing would steer him from his certainty. He had always described national success as a matter of determination, not unlike the path of his own life. “Success or failure,” he wrote, “need not be a matter of destiny.” Among his favorite passages was a line from Arthur Lewis, the economist and Nobel laureate, who held that all “nations have opportunities which they may grasp if only they can summon up the courage and the will.” But now his views clashed with the mood around him, the sense of narrowing opportunity—the inequality, the passive
. Lin's views, wrote Huo Deming, a fellow economist at Peking University, “have no market in China.”

After seeing Lin in Washington, and now back in Beijing, I sensed that he might always be an outsider. When he had returned to China from Washington, the government in Beijing formally asked Taiwan if it might finally allow Lin to return home, as a gesture of better relations. But Taiwan said no. If Lin stepped back on its soil, he would face military charges of treason. “I have to console my husband all the time, telling him to wait, wait just a little longer,” his wife said at the time. “Maybe we can go home when we are a hundred years old.”

Lin's response was to pour himself even more deeply into his work. He published three books in three years, and the last time I saw him he gave me the bound galleys for a fourth. I read them, and I enjoyed our conversations. But part of him would remain unknowable to me. I had been drawn to him years earlier by the audacity of his decision to defect. I had imagined it to be the act of an idealist. But over the years, I had come to see a practical side to his choice as well. He was a man who believed, above all, in his own power to achieve his ambitions, and he would do whatever it took to do so. And that, I realized, was fitting. It was the energy of China's boom distilled to its hardest truth: a solitary man who decided that he could realize his future only by going to the People's Republic. Soon I would meet another who believed he could realize his future only by leaving it.

 

TWENTY-FOUR

BREAKING OUT

 

When the moment arrived, it was at the hour of his choosing. Fifteen months after the blind, self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng was locked in his home, seven years after I first tried to visit him, he made up his mind to go. On the morning of April 20, 2012, he lingered in bed. For weeks he had been lying around like this, in the hope of lulling his guards into the false idea that he had fallen ill or resigned himself to his circumstances. By now, he and his wife, Yuan Weijing, knew the guards' rhythms and the angles of their cameras. As morning drifted into the drowsy hours of early afternoon, Chen began to crawl.

He crawled out of the back of the house and across the yard until he reached the base of a stone wall. He clambered and hoisted himself to the top. It was desperate and messy, and when he spilled over the other side, he broke his right foot. He dragged himself into a neighbor's pigsty and burrowed in deep to wait out the daylight. Once darkness was on his side, he began to move again, groping his way toward the edge of the village marked by the waters of the Meng River. It was a route inscribed in his memory from childhood. He limped and stumbled, and when he heard a sound, he flattened himself to the ground. He knew of a bend in the river where he once swam as a boy with his brothers, a point where the water was shallow. And in the dead of night, he waded in.

By the time he reached the other side, Chen was cold and caked in mud, but he was out of the village of Dongshigu. When dawn broke, a villager spotted him and took him to the home of one of Chen's former clients, a peasant named Liu Yuancheng, who pulled him inside and contacted Chen's brother. Word began to spread among his sympathizers. He Peirong, the English teacher involved in the sunglasses campaign online, learned of the escape in a coded e-mail that read, “The bird has left the cage.” It was only a matter of time before local police realized Chen was missing, so the teacher and others set off in two cars, for Shandong, to pick him up and bring him to Beijing.

The drive took twenty hours, and once he was in the capital, he moved constantly, and secretly, from home to home. This was not a solution. The activists who were sheltering him appealed to the U.S. embassy for help. American diplomats weighed the issue—Was it legal? Was it wise?—and concluded that Chen's broken foot was a justification to shelter him on humanitarian grounds. Getting him into the embassy was another matter. They arranged a rendezvous on the edge of the city, and an embassy car went out to meet the car that was carrying Chen from place to place. They discovered that both cars were being tailed by Chinese security. They scrapped the rendezvous point and turned abruptly into an alleyway. The embassy car drew up alongside and opened its doors. The Americans pulled Chen into their car “by the lapels,” as one of them later put it to me, and took off for the embassy.

Once they were back inside, and an embassy doctor began to work on Chen's broken foot, the diplomats confronted what might lie ahead. In 1989 a Chinese dissident named Fang Lizhi had taken refuge in the embassy, with his wife, and they spent thirteen months in a secret, windowless room until negotiators could broker a deal to get them to the United States. (The longest embassy guest in State Department history was the Hungarian cardinal József Mindszenty, an opponent of the Soviet-backed government; he entered the U.S. embassy in Budapest in 1956 and stayed for fifteen years.) To make matters more complicated, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton was scheduled to arrive in Beijing in a few days for strategic and economic talks, and both sides were desperate to prevent her trip from colliding with a diplomatic crisis.

American and Chinese negotiators met at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to find a solution. They began at positions far apart: The Americans suggested Chen could study in Shanghai, where New York University was preparing to open a law school. The Chinese suggested that he should be charged with treason. After three days of talks, the two sides agreed to offer Chen the option of studying in the city of Tianjin. He agreed, and was driven to Beijing's Chaoyang Hospital to be reunited with his family. But that night, when he and his wife and children found themselves alone in the hospital, with no American protection, Chen regretted leaving the embassy. For help, he called friends in the United States. Over the years, Chen's campaign against forced abortions had attracted the support of religious conservatives, including Bob Fu, a Chinese American who headed a Christian advocacy group called ChinaAid. Fu, who had a keen sense of American politics, sounded the alarm: he told reporters that “the U.S. government has abandoned Chen,” and Mitt Romney, who was running for president at the time, pronounced it a “day of shame” for his opponent, President Obama. Then Fu orchestrated a memorable scene: at a hearing on Capitol Hill, he held his iPhone up to the microphone for the world to hear Chen Guangcheng speak from his hospital room in Beijing. “I fear for my family's lives,” he said, and pleaded for refuge in America. “I have not had a rest in ten years.”

A hurried new deal was struck: Chen would go to New York City as a visiting fellow at New York University. When it was announced, Nicholas Becquelin, a China specialist at Human Rights Watch, couldn't help but marvel. “One man managed to make the entire Chinese government bend,” he said. On May 19, still on crutches, Chen boarded a flight bound for Newark, accompanied by his wife and kids, aged six and ten. Upon arrival, they were met by a group that included Chen's old friend Jerome Cohen, who was dressed, as always, in a bow tie and blazer. They rode to NYU, where a crowd was waiting. Chen stepped to the microphone and thanked Chinese officials for “dealing with the situation with restraint and calm.” In China, the Central Propaganda Department forbade coverage of his arrival; it expanded the online blacklist to include the new search words people were using to discuss Chen's situation:

Blind Man

Shawshank Redemption

Light
+
Truth

Sunglasses Brother

*   *   *

About six months later, on a mild morning in New York, I crossed Washington Square Park and turned south on MacDougal Street. At the US-Asia Law Institute at NYU Law School, Chen was standing in the door of his office when I arrived. It was odd to meet him for the first time in a place so much closer to my hometown than his. His office was immaculate, in gray and white, the air-conditioning humming faintly in the background. He was wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt and sunglasses with small, silver oval lenses. The walls of the office were bare, and the shelves were largely empty, except for plants and an “I
♥
NY” coffee mug.

Since arriving, Chen had focused mostly on giving speeches, writing a memoir, and coping with the differences between Dongshigu Village and Greenwich Village. Many of his early impressions were sensory: the nautical aroma off the rivers, the tang of pollution. His favorite place was the Botanic Garden, which was a feast for the nose. He'd had some surprises: Unlike the Beijing metro, New York subway stations had no air-conditioning. He'd gone to Washington and visited House Speaker John Boehner, who didn't say much, though Boehner's office had the most comfortable leather chair that Chen had ever felt.

He told me that his greatest concern, at the moment, was for his relatives in China. When police discovered that Chen was missing, they came for his brother, Chen Guangfu; they beat him and put a hood over his head and took him for interrogation. In the midst of it, the man's son, Chen Kegui, cut a police officer with a kitchen knife; he claimed self-defense, but he was sentenced to more than three years in prison. In his office Chen said, “Anyone will protect his own rights if they are violated, or if he sees injustice. It's impossible for people in that situation to go without a fight.”

For years I wondered how Chen's ideas of justice and citizenship had taken root, and I asked him now about the connection between his blindness and his activism. “The more inequality you experience, the more you crave equality, the more you want justice,” he said. But I sensed that he was bored by the question, by the suggestion that his body had ordained his beliefs, and I realized my assumption ignored his curiosity. “When I was little, I liked to ask older people the questions I couldn't answer,” he said. “If the first person didn't have an answer, I asked another, and another, and I would collect different explanations. And then I would think about which seemed the closest to correct.”

He recalled riding a tractor as a child and groping every piece of the machine that he could reach. His curiosity extended beyond the physical. He was once with his mother on a train when the conductor confiscated a container of propane from a passenger on the grounds that it was flammable. “I asked, ‘Will they give this guy his money back after they resell it?' But my mom wouldn't answer me; she stayed silent, and after a while she got angry and said, ‘How can you honestly think they will give him his money back?' But I thought, how can they take someone's property and resell it, and not give him anything?”