Age of Ambition (10 page)

Hu looked out over a sea of two thousand loyal delegates. It was a tableau of conformity, bathed in the color of communism: a wall-to-wall red carpet, red drapes, and an enormous red star shining down from the ceiling. Behind him, rows of VIP officials were seated in hierarchical order, many of them wearing red ties, just as he was. The choreography was flawless: every few minutes, a team of young women carrying thermoses of hot water passed through the rows of VIPs, pouring tea with the precision of synchronized swimmers. Hu spoke for two and a half hours in a vocabulary removed from the language of the public. He spoke of “socialist harmonious society” and the “scientific outlook on development” and, as always, “Marxist-Leninism.” He vowed to permit only incremental political change. The Party, he said, must remain “the core” that “coordinates the efforts of all quarters.”

*   *   *

Outside the Great Hall, China embraced the return of class. In 1998 a local publisher translated Paul Fussell's 1982 cultural satire,
Class: A Guide Through the American Status System
, which makes such observations as “the more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.” In Chinese, the satire fell away, and the book sold briskly as a field guide for the new world. “Just having money will not win you universal acclaim, respect, or appreciation,” the translator wrote in the introduction. “What your consumption reveals about you is the more critical issue.”

David Brooks's book
Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
was translated into Chinese in 2002, and it became a best seller. It describes a distant world—one of American bourgeois bohemians, who mix sixties counterculture with Reagan-era economics—but, in China, it captured the strivers' self-perception, and “Bobos,” or “
bubozu
,” became one of the year's most-searched-for terms on the Chinese Internet. Soon there were
bubozu
bars,
bubozu
book clubs, and a laptop with ads that promised to give the
bubozu
“a jazzy sense of romance.” Then the Chinese press tired of the
bubozu
and moved on to DINK—
ding ke
, in Mandarin—“Double Income, No Kids,” followed by a succession of other new labels and identities: netizens, property kings, mortgage slaves. A popular Chinese essay by an anonymous author carved out an archetype of the young white-collar class, the men and women who

sip cappuccino, date online, have a DINK family, take subways and taxis, fly economy, stay in nice hotels, go to pubs, make long phone calls, listen to the blues, work overtime, go out at night, celebrate Christmas, have one-night-stands … keep
The Great Gatsby
and
Pride and Prejudice
on their nightstands. They live for love, manners, culture, art, and experience.

In the age of ambition, life sped up. Under socialism, there had rarely been any reason to rush. Except for Mao's fantasies of leaping forward, people worked at the pace of the bureaucracy and the seasons. Moving faster or more efficiently, taking greater risks, would add little to the dinner table. Like the imperial court in the days of the Drum Tower, the socialist central planners decided when to turn on the central heating in the fall and when to turn it off in the spring. But all of a sudden, China was gripped by a sense that the country was running late. He Zhaofa, a sociologist at Sun Yat-sen University, published a manifesto in favor of speed, reporting that, in Japan, pedestrians were walking at an average speed of 1.6 meters per second. He criticized his fellow Chinese. “Even American women in high heels walk faster than young Chinese men.” He called on his countrymen to adopt an urgent appreciation of every second. “The nation that wastes time,” he wrote, “will be abandoned by time itself.”

Some of the strivers achieved extraordinary fortune before they knew exactly what to do with it. In 2010, China was experiencing “Foreign IPO Fever,” and in May of the following year, the dating entrepreneur Gong Haiyan took her company public on the NASDAQ. By the end of the day, her shares were worth more than seventy-seven million dollars. Her husband left his job researching fruit flies.

She invited me over for dinner. They had bought a place in the suburbs north of Beijing. The sun was setting as we pulled off the highway. We passed a Pet Spa and a compound called Chateau de la Vie, and turned into a lush gated community that evoked New Jersey more than Hunan. Her house was beige stucco with Tuscan details. Her two-year-old daughter, in pajamas, bounded out the front door and hugged her mother's legs. Gong's husband ushered us to the dining room, where her parents and her grandmother, who lived with them, were sitting down.

I was struck by the presence of four generations of women in the house. Gong's grandmother, who was ninety-four, had been brutalized during the Cultural Revolution because she was classified as a well-off peasant. She was born just after China ended the practice of foot binding, and while we ate I made a mental inventory of all the drama that she had survived in China's twentieth century, on the way to her granddaughter's mansion in the suburbs. “Women used to say, ‘If you want clothes on your back and food to eat, get married,'” Gong said, poking at her rice with her chopsticks. “As long as you had the most basic requirements, I'd marry you. But not anymore. Now I can live a good life, an independent life. I can be picky. If there's anything I don't like about you, well, you're out of luck.”

For years, the family had bounced between rented apartments, six people in two bedrooms. Now they were in a home sandwiched between European diplomats and Arab businessmen. Nine months after they moved in, the walls of the villa were still bare and white. They had yet to buy any art or decorations, but those would come. A moped was parked in the front hall, in the village tradition, to protect the bike from thieves, though I didn't expect Gong's neighbors posed much of a threat. It looked as if the family had packed up its belongings from a farmhouse in Hunan and unloaded them at a CEO's villa in Beijing.

*   *   *

The age of ambition demanded new skills and knowledge. To help rookie entrepreneurs navigate the heavy toasting that comes with building a business in China, a night school called the Weiliang Institute of Interpersonal Relations, in the city of Harbin, offered a “drinking strategy” course. (One tip: after a toast, discreetly spit the liquor into your tea.) What could not be learned could be bought: Zhang Dazhong, a home electronics tycoon, employed a three-member “reading staff” to summarize the books he wished he had read.

Long before Westerners were reading about the habits of hard-driving “tiger moms,” the most popular Chinese parenting guide was
Harvard Girl
, in which a mother named Zhang Xinwu documented how she got her daughter into the Ivy League. The regimen had begun before birth, when Zhang forced herself to eat a high-nutrition diet, though it made her sick. By eighteen months, Zhang was helping her daughter memorize Tang dynasty poems. In primary school, Zhang took her to study in noisy settings to hone her concentration, and kept her on a schedule: for every twenty minutes of studying, five minutes of running stairs. To build fortitude, Zhang had her daughter clench ice cubes in her hands for fifteen minutes at a time. It was easy to see it as absurd, but for a population still fighting its way out of poverty, virtually any sacrifice sounded reasonable.

Nobody coveted the cultural capital of an elite education more assiduously than members of the Got Rich First Crowd. Many of them had come from nothing, and they knew that urban intellectuals considered them rubes. The size of China's population made college admissions so brutally competitive that people compared it to “ten thousand horses crossing a river on a single log.” To create more opportunities, the government doubled the number of colleges and universities, in just ten years, to 2,409. Even so, only one in every four aspiring college students was able to earn a place.

An American education carried extra cachet, and Got Rich First parents channeled their anxieties into their children. In the fall of 2008, I had lunch with a woman named Cheung Yan, better known to the public as the Queen of Trash. Every year, the
Hurun Report
, a Shanghai magazine, released a ranking of China's richest people. In the 2006 list, Cheung was the first woman to rank number one. She was the founder of Nine Dragons Paper, China's largest paper manufacturer, and had earned her nickname by conquering an obscure niche that tuned global trade to peak efficiency: she bought mountains of filthy American wastepaper, hauled it to China at cheap rates, recycled it into cardboard boxes bearing goods marked “Made in China,” and sold those goods to America. The 2006 rich list estimated her fortune at $3.4 billion. The following year, Cheung's wealth ballooned further, to more than $10 billion, and the magazine calculated that she was the richest self-made woman in the world, ahead of Oprah and J. K. Rowling.

Cheung, and her husband, Liu Ming Chung, a former dentist who worked as her company's CEO, met me in the managers' cafeteria at the largest paper mill in the world, one of Cheung's factories in the southern city of Dongguan. At fifty-two, Cheung was an unreconstructed factory boss. She spoke no English, and her Chinese carried a heavy Manchurian accent. She was barely five feet tall; in conversation, she was propelled by bursts of exuberance and impatience, as if she were channeling China's industrial id. “The market waits for no one,” she said. “If I don't develop today, if I wait for a year, or two or three years, to develop, I will have nothing for the market, and I will miss the opportunity. And we will just be ordinary, like any other factory!”

As we ate, she didn't want to talk about business; they wanted to talk about their two sons. The older one was in New York, getting a master's degree in engineering at Columbia. The younger boy was at a prep school in California, and at one point mid-meal, her assistant passed her a copy of a college recommendation a teacher had written on her son's behalf. Cheung examined it and handed it back.

“His GPA is four-point-zero to four-point-three,” she told me. Then, with the pride of an autodidact, she added, “His head is full of American education. He needs to accept some Chinese education as well. Otherwise, he'll be out of balance.”

When I'd arrived in China in 2005, there were only sixty-five Chinese students in American private high schools, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Five years later, there were nearly seven thousand. I stopped being surprised when Communist Party grandees told me their offspring were at Taft or Andover. (Eventually, a group of elite Chinese parents cut out the commute and sent their kids to a lavish new prep school in Beijing. They hired former headmasters of Choate and Hotchkiss to run it.)

*   *   *

Of all the pathways to self-creation, nothing galvanized people as broadly as the study of English. “English fever” settled on waiters, CEOs, and professors, and elevated the language into a defining measure of life's potential—a force strong enough to transform your résumé, help attract a spouse, or vault you out of a village. Men and women on Gong's dating site often included their English proficiency in descriptions of themselves, alongside mention of cars and houses. Every college freshman had to meet a minimal level of English comprehension, and it was the only foreign language tested. In a novel called
English
, the author, Wang Gang, a teacher in a rural school, says, “If I rearranged the words in the [English] dictionary, the entire world would open up before me.”

This was a sharp reversal from the past. In nineteenth-century China, English was held in contempt as the language of the middlemen who dealt with foreign traders. “These men are generally frivolous rascals and loafers in the cities and are despised in their villages and communities,” the reformist scholar Feng Guifen wrote in 1861. But Feng knew that China needed English for diplomatic purposes, and he called for the creation of special language schools. “There are many brilliant people in China; there must be some who can learn from the barbarians and surpass them,” he wrote. Mao favored Russian for the country, and he expelled so many English teachers that, by the sixties, China had fewer than a thousand high school English teachers nationwide. After Deng opened China's doors to the world, English fever took hold. Eighty-two percent of those polled in 2008 thought it was vital to learn English. (In America, 11 percent thought it was vital to learn Chinese.) By 2008 an estimated 200 million to 350 million Chinese were studying English. China's largest English school system, New Oriental, was traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

I wanted to meet a man named Li Yang, China's most popular English teacher and perhaps the world's only language instructor known to bring students to tears of excitement. Li was the head teacher and editor in chief of his own company, Li Yang Crazy English. His students recited his biography with the consistency of an incantation: he grew up the son of Party propagandists whose harsh discipline left him too shy to answer the telephone; he nearly flunked out of college but then he prepared for an English exam by reading aloud and found that the louder he read, the bolder he felt and the better he spoke; he became a campus celebrity and turned it into an empire. In the two decades since he began teaching, he had appeared in person before millions of Chinese adults and children.

In the spring of 2008, I visited him when he was overseeing an intensive daylong seminar at a small college on the outskirts of Beijing. He arrived accompanied by his photographer and his personal assistant. He stepped into a classroom and shouted, “Hello, everyone!” The students applauded. Li wore a dove-gray turtleneck and a charcoal-colored car coat. He was thirty-eight years old, and his black hair was set off by a faint silver streak.