Age of Ambition (17 page)

Back on the gold bus, rolling west across the wintry scrub of Champagne-Ardenne, Li wanted to add an important exception to his demands for efficiency. “We have to get used to the fact that Europeans sometimes move slowly,” he said. When shopping in China, he went on, “we're accustomed to three of us putting our items on the counter at the same time, and then the old lady gives change to three people without making a mistake. Europeans don't do that.” He continued, “I'm not saying that they're stupid. If they were, they wouldn't have developed all this technology, which requires very subtle calculations. They just deal with math in a different way.”

He ended with some advice: “Let them do things their way, because if we're rushing, then they'll feel rushed, and that will put them in a bad mood, and then we'll think that they're discriminating against us, which is not necessarily the case.”

At times, Guide Li marveled at Europe's high standard of living—bombarding us with statistics on the price of Bordeaux wines or the average height of a Dutchman—but if there was ever a time when Chinese visitors marveled at Europe's economy, this was not that time. Li made a great show of acting out a Mediterranean lifestyle: “Wake up slowly, brush teeth, make a cup of espresso, take in the aroma.” The crowd laughed. “With a pace like that, how can their economies keep growing? It's impossible.” He added, “In this world, only when you have diligent, hardworking people will the nation's economy grow.”

I dozed off, and awoke on the outskirts of Paris. We followed the Seine west and passed the Musée d'Orsay just as the sun bore through the clouds. Li shouted, “Feel the openness of the city!” Cameras whirred, and he pointed out that central Paris had no skyscrapers. At a dock beside the Pont de l'Alma, we boarded a double-decker boat, and as it chugged upriver, I chatted with Zhu Zhongming, a forty-six-year-old accountant who was traveling with his wife and daughter. He had grown up in Shanghai and had ventured into real estate just as the local market was surging. “Whenever you bought something, you could make a ton of money,” he said. He was charismatic, with large, dimpled cheeks framing a permanent mischievous smile, and he'd been going abroad since 2004, so others in the group deferred to him. The boat reached Pont de Sully, and turned slowly against the whitecaps on the Seine to head back downriver.

Zhu said that Chinese interest in Europe was motivated in part by a need to understand their own history: “When Europe was ruling the world, China was strong as well. So why did we fall behind? We've been thinking about that ever since,” he said. Indeed, the question of why a mighty civilization slumped in the fifteenth century runs like a central nerve through China's analysis of its past and its prospects for the future. Zhu offered an explanation: “Once we were invaded, we didn't respond quickly enough.” It was a narrative of victimhood and decline that I'd often heard in China. (Historians also tend to blame the stifling effects of bureaucracy and authoritarianism, among other factors.) But Zhu did not trace all China's troubles to foreign invaders. “We cast aside our three core ideas—Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism—and that was a mistake. We were taught Marxist revolutionary ideas from 1949 to 1978.” He paused and watched his wife and daughter snapping photographs at the boat's railing, an orange sun sinking behind the buildings. “We spent thirty years on what we now know was a disaster,” he said.

The boat docked, and we headed to dinner, walking through the crowds amid the din of the city for the first time. We passed a young couple in a doorway making out. Karen hugged Handy's arm, their heads swiveling. We followed Li into a small Chinese storefront, down a flight of stairs, and into a hot, claustrophobic hallway flanked by windowless rooms jammed with Chinese diners. It was a hive of activity invisible from the street—a parallel Paris. There were no empty seats, so Li motioned for us to continue out the back door, where we turned left and entered a second restaurant, also Chinese. Down another staircase, into another windowless room, where dishes arrived: braised pork, bok choy, egg-drop soup, spicy chicken.

Twenty minutes later, we climbed the stairs out into the night, hustling after Li to the Galeries Lafayette, the ten-story department store on the Boulevard Haussmann. The store appeared happily poised for an onslaught from the East: it was decked in red bunting and cartoon bunnies for the Year of the Rabbit. We received Chinese-language welcome cards promising happiness, longevity, and a 10 percent discount.

The next day, at the Louvre, we picked up another Chinese-speaking guide, a hummingbird of a woman, who shouted, “We have lots to see in ninety minutes, so we need to pick up our feet!” She darted ahead beneath a furled purple umbrella, which she used as a rallying flag, and without breaking stride, she taught us some French using Chinese sounds:
bonjour
could be approximated by pronouncing the Chinese characters
ben
and
zhu
, which mean, fittingly, “to chase someone.” We raced after her through the turnstile, and Wang Zhenyu, the pants manufacturer, tried out his new French on the security guard: “
Ben zhu
,
ben zhu
!”

The guide advised us to focus most on the
san bao
(“the three treasures”): the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, and the
Mona Lisa
. We crowded around each in turn, flanked by other Chinese tour groups as identifiable as rival armies: red pins for the U-Tour travel agency, orange windbreakers for the students from Shenzhen. We'd been going nonstop since before dawn, but the air was charged with diligent curiosity. When we discovered that the elevators were a long detour from our route, I wondered how Huang Xueqing, in her wheelchair, would get to see much of the museum. Then I saw that her relatives hoisted her chair while she hobbled up and down each marble stairway, and rolled her in front of the masterpieces.

By nightfall, another day of touring Europe's sights had kindled a sense of appreciation, albeit with a competitive streak. While we waited for tables, at a Chinese restaurant, Zhu brought up the Zhou dynasty (1046–256
B.C.E.
), the era that produced Confucius, Lao-tzu, and other pillars of Chinese thought. “Back then, we were damn good!” Zhu told a group of us. His wife, Wang Jianxin, rolled her eyes. “Here we go again,” she said. Her husband was wearing a recently purchased Eiffel Tower baseball cap with blinking battery-powered lights. He turned to me in search of a fresh audience. “Really, during the Zhou dynasty we were practically the same as ancient Rome or Egypt!”

*   *   *

In the middle of a seven-hour drive from Paris to the Alps, my seatmate Promise rooted around in his backpack and pulled out a crumpled edition of
The Wall Street Journal
that he'd picked up at the hotel in Luxembourg. He studied each page in silence and elbowed me for help when he came across a headline related to China:
EU FINDS HUAWEI GOT STATE SUPPORT
. The story said that European trade officials believed that the big Chinese technology company Huawei was receiving unfairly cheap loans from state banks. “Does the American Constitution prevent companies from receiving government support?” Promise asked. I asked Promise if he used Facebook, which was officially blocked in China but reachable with some tinkering. “It's too much of a hassle to get to it,” he said. Instead, he used Renren, a Chinese version, which, like other domestic sites, censored any sensitive political discussion. I asked what he knew about Facebook's being blocked. “It has something to do with politics,” he said, and paused. “But the truth is I don't really know.”

This kind of remove among urbane Chinese students was familiar. They lived with unprecedented access to technology and information, but also with the Great Firewall, the vast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors that blocked politically objectionable content from reaching computers in China. Many young Chinese regarded the notion of the firewall as insulting, but the barriers were just large enough to keep many people from bothering to get around them. The information about the outside world that filtered through was erratic: Promise could talk to me at length about the latest Sophie Marceau film or the merits of various Swiss race car drivers, but the news of Chinese leaders accruing large private fortunes had not reached him. So many foreign ideas were flooding China at once that people made sense of them partly by grouping the world into manageable pieces. In Beijing, a Chinese dining guide called Dianping offered eighteen separate categories of Chinese cuisine, but everything outside of Asia (Italian, Moroccan, Brazilian) was grouped under one heading: “Western Food.”

That night, we stayed in the Swiss town of Interlaken, where Guide Li had promised us “truly clean air,” a treat for residents of any large Chinese city. I stepped outside to look around town with Zheng Dao and her daughter, Li Cheng, a nineteen-year-old art major. We strolled past luxury watch shops, a casino, and the Höhematte, a vast green where locals put on yodeling and Swiss wrestling events. Midway through the trip, the daughter was politely unmoved. “Other than different buildings, the Seine didn't look all that different from the Huangpu,” she said. “Subway? We have a subway. You name it, we've got it.” She laughed.

As Li Cheng walked on ahead with friends, her mother told me that she wanted her daughter to see differences between China and the West that ran deeper than “hardware.” Our guide had mocked Europe's stately pace, but Zheng said her countrymen had come to believe that “if you don't elbow your way on to everything you'll be last.” A car paused for us at a crosswalk, and Zheng drew a contrast: “Drivers at home think, ‘I can't pause. Otherwise, I'll never get anywhere,'” she said.

*   *   *

By the final days of the trip, the advice and efficiency that had been so reassuring in the beginning were wearing thin. On the bus, people asked if we could stop at a Western restaurant; we had been in Europe for a week and had yet to sit down to a lunch or a dinner that was not Chinese. (Nearly half of all Chinese tourists in one market survey reported eating no more than one “European-style” meal on a trip to the West.) But Li warned us that Western food can take too long to serve, and if we ate it too fast, it would give us indigestion. “Save it for your next trip,” he said, and everyone consented. In Milan, he reminded us again to be on guard against thieves, but Handy the sanitation specialist was dubious. “Italy is not as chaotic as they made it seem,” he said. “It sounded really terrifying.”

I had begun to wonder how much longer tours like this might endure. Solo tourism was already growing in popularity among young people, and even in the course of our time together my fellow tourists had wearied of hustling so much. In Milan, we had thirty minutes on our own, so Karen and Handy and I stepped into the cool interior of the Duomo. Handy peered up at soaring sheets of brilliant stained glass. “That looks exhausting,” he said. “But it's beautiful.”

The Italian papers were full of news that Prime Minister Berlusconi was about to be charged with sleeping with a teenager. Guide Li was diplomatic. “What a unique man he is!” he said. The drive across Italy that day had put him in a reflective mood about life at home. “You might wonder now and then whether it would be good to promote democracy,” he said. “Of course, there are benefits: people enjoy freedom of speech and the freedom to elect politicians. But doesn't the one-party system have its benefits, too?” He pointed out the window to the highway and said that it had taken decades for Italy to build it, because of local opposition. “If this were China, it would be done in six months! And that's the only way to keep the economy growing.” Li was so boosterish that I might have taken him for a government spokesman, except that his comments were familiar from my day-to-day conversations in Beijing. “Analysts overseas can never understand why the Chinese economy has grown so fast,” he said. “Yes, it's a one-party state, but the administrators are selected from among the elites, and elites picked from one-point-three billion people might as well be called super-elites.”

Li's portrait of the West contained at least one feature of unalloyed admiration. He mentioned a Western friend who had quit his job to go backpacking and find his calling in life. “Would our parents accept that? Of course not! They'd point a finger and say, ‘You're a waste!'” he said. But in Europe, “young people are allowed to pursue what they want to pursue.”

He went on: “Our Chinese ancestors left us so many things, but why do we find it so difficult to discover new things? It's because our education system has too many constraints.” Our group was even more attentive than usual. At the very moment that American parents were wondering if they had something to learn from China's hard-nosed “tiger mothers,” Chinese parents were trying to restore creativity to the country's desiccated education system. One mother, Zeng Liping, told me that teachers had frowned upon her bringing her sixth grader to Europe. “Before every school vacation, the teachers tell them, ‘Don't go out. Stay at home and study, because very soon you'll be taking the exam to get into middle school.'” But Zeng had made her peace with being out of step. She had quit a stable job as an art teacher and put her savings into starting her own fashion label. “My bosses all said, ‘What a shame that you're leaving a good workplace.' But I've proved to myself that I made the right choice.”

*   *   *

In Rome the next day, we stopped at the Trevi Fountain and strolled up to the vast splendor of St. Peter's Square. Zhu said the scale reminded him of Beijing. “It's just like the old days, when Chinese people used to go to Beijing just to catch a glimpse of the Communist Party.” He laughed.

We wandered down the block and sat down on a windowsill to rest. Zhu lit a cigarette. He'd been thinking about the varying fortunes of great powers. I asked if he believed American politicians who say they have no objections to China's rise. He shook his head. “No way. They'll let us grow, but they'll try to limit it. Everyone I know thinks that.” Ultimately, he said, in the politest way he could think of, Americans would need to adjust to a weaker position in the world, just as China once did. “You are so used to being on top, but you will drop to second place. It won't be immediately—it'll take twenty or thirty years—but our GDP will eventually surpass yours.” I was struck that, for all his travels, Zhu saw an enduring philosophical divide between China and the West: “two different ways of thinking,” as he put it. “We will use their tools and learn their methods. But fundamentally, China will always maintain its own way,” he said.