Age of Ambition (21 page)

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The campus of Fudan University, a top Chinese school, radiates from a pair of thirty-story steel-and-glass towers that could pass for a corporate headquarters. I met Tang Jie at the front gate. He wore a powder-blue oxford shirt, khakis, and black dress shoes. He had bright hazel eyes, rounded baby-face features, and a dusting of a goatee and mustache on his chin and upper lip. As I stepped out of a cab, he bounded over to welcome me and tried to pay my taxi fare.

As we walked across campus, Tang admitted he was glad to have a break from his dissertation, which was on Western philosophy. He specialized in phenomenology—specifically, in the concept of “intersubjectivity,” as theorized by Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher who influenced Sartre, among others. In addition to Chinese, Tang read English and German easily, but he spoke them infrequently, so at times he swerved, apologetically, among languages. He was working on Latin and ancient Greek. He was so self-effacing and soft-spoken that his voice sometimes dropped to a whisper. There was a seriousness about him; he laughed sparingly, as if he were conserving energy. For fun, he listened to classical Chinese music, though he also enjoyed screwball comedies by the Hong Kong star Stephen Chow. Tang was proudly unhip. Unlike Michael Zhang from Crazy English, Tang had not adopted an English name. The screen name CTGZ was an adaptation of two obscure terms from classical poetry:
changting
and
gongzi
, which together translated as a “noble son in the pavilion.” In contrast to other elite Chinese students, Tang had never joined the Communist Party, for fear that it would impugn his objectivity as a scholar.

Tang had invited some friends to join us for lunch, at Fat Brothers Sichuan Restaurant, and afterward we all climbed the stairs to his room. He lived alone in a sixth-floor walk-up, a studio of less than seventy-five square feet that could have been mistaken for a library storage room occupied by a fastidious squatter. Books covered every surface, and great mounds listed from the shelves above his desk. His collections encompassed, more or less, the span of human thought: Plato leaned against Lao-tzu, Wittgenstein, Bacon, Fustel de Coulanges, Heidegger, the Koran. When Tang wanted to widen his bed by a few inches, he laid plywood across the frame and propped up the edges with piles of books. Eventually books overflowed the room, and they stood outside his front door in a wall of cardboard boxes.

Tang slumped into his desk chair. I asked if he had any idea that his video would be so popular. He smiled. “It appears I have expressed a common feeling, a shared view,” he said.

Next to him sat Liu Chengguang, a cheerful, broad-faced PhD student in political science who had recently translated into Chinese a lecture on the subject of “Manliness” by the conservative Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield. Sprawled on the bed, wearing a gray sweatshirt, was Xiong Wenchi, who had earned a PhD in political science before taking a teaching job. And to Tang's left sat Zeng Kewei, a lean and stylish banker who had picked up a master's degree in Western philosophy before going into finance. Each of them was in his twenties, the first in his family to go to college, and had been drawn to the study of Western thought. I asked them why.

“China was backward throughout its modern history, so we were always seeking the reasons for why the West grew strong,” Liu said. “We learned from the West. All of us who are educated have this dream: grow strong by learning from the West.”

Like the Chinese travelers I knew, and the members of Ai Weiwei's
Fairytale
, the young men around me regarded the temptations of the West with a combination of admiration and anxiety. It was a confusing time: they were protesting CNN at the same time that an English study program was running ads in China with the slogan “After a month, you'll be able to understand CNN!”

Tang and his friends were so gracious, so thankful that I'd come to listen to them, that I began to wonder if China's anger that spring should be viewed as an aberration. They implored me not to make that mistake.

“We've been studying Western history for so long, we understand it well,” Zeng said. “We think our love for China, our support for the government and the benefits of this country, is not a spontaneous reaction. It has developed after giving the matter much thought.”

In fact, their view of China's direction, if not their vitriol, was consistent with the Chinese mainstream. Almost nine out of ten Chinese approved of the way things were going in their country—the highest share of any of the twenty-four countries surveyed that spring by the Pew Research Center. (In the United States, by comparison, just two out of ten voiced such approval.) It was hard to know precisely how common the more assertive strain of patriotism was, but scholars pointed to a Chinese petition against Japan's membership in the UN Security Council. At last count, it had attracted more than forty million signatures, roughly the population of Spain. I asked Tang to show me how he had made his film. He turned to face the screen of his Lenovo desktop PC. “Do you know Movie Maker?” he asked, referring to a video-editing program. I pleaded ignorance and asked if he'd learned from a book. He glanced at me pityingly. He'd learned it on the fly from the Help menu. “We must thank Bill Gates,” he said.

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One month before Tang Jie made his Internet video debut, China surpassed the United States to become the world's largest user of the Internet. It had 238 million people online; it was still only 16 percent of the population, but each day, nearly a quarter of a million Chinese citizens were going online for the first time, and it was transforming the way ideas whipped around the country. The most vibrant online communities grew to millions of registered members, putting them among China's largest organizations outside the Communist Party.

In a nation divided by dialect, geography, and class, the Web allowed people to find each other in unprecedented ways. A group of Chinese volunteers came together and began translating every word of
The Economist
magazine each week and offering it free to readers. Explaining their goal, the translators wrote, “In the Internet age, the greatest force is not avarice or love or violence, but devotion to an interest.” They were young and unabashedly utopian in their faith in technology. “The Web will link you with like-minded people, and release unimaginable energy,” they wrote. To avoid the censors, the group was overtly self-censoring. “If the article involves any sensitive topics,” they told newcomers, “and you're not sure whether it's permitted, please don't risk it.” That self-censorship contained a kind of self-governance: Sites recruited volunteers to remove material that would get the site into trouble. They were known as “forum hosts,” and if users thought they were too tough or too lax, they could replace them, a process that became known as “impeachment.”

Among the most zealous early users of the Web were Chinese nationalists. In the spring of 1999, when a NATO aircraft, using American intelligence, mistakenly dropped three bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the Chinese Web found its voice. Chinese patriotic hackers plastered the home page of the U.S. embassy in Beijing with the slogan “Down with the Barbarians!” and they caused the White House Web site to crash under a deluge of angry e-mail. “The Internet is Western,” one commentator wrote, “but … we Chinese can use it to tell the people of the world that China cannot be insulted!” For many, nationalism provided what one young patriot called “our first taste of the sacred rights of freedom of speech.”

Like others his age, Tang Jie lived largely online. When the riots erupted in Lhasa in March, he followed the news closely on American and European news sites, in addition to China's official media. He had no hesitation about tunneling under the government firewall. He used a proxy server—a digital way station overseas that connected a user with a blocked website. He watched television exclusively online, because it had more variety and he didn't have a TV in his room. He also received foreign news clips from Chinese students abroad, a population that has grown by nearly two-thirds in the previous decade to some sixty-seven thousand people. Tang was baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation were somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship. “Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

All spring, news and opinions about Tibet were swirling on Fudan's electronic bulletin board system, or BBS. In technology terms, the BBS was an antique—a simple forum with multiple threads of conversation—but Twitter and its Chinese counterparts had yet to take root, and for many Chinese, bulletin boards provided the first experience of entering a digital roomful of strangers and speaking up. On the Fudan BBS, Tang read a range of foreign press clippings deemed by Chinese Web users to be misleading or unfair. A photograph on
CNN.com
, for instance, had been cropped around military trucks bearing down on unarmed protesters. But an uncropped version showed a crowd of demonstrators lurking nearby, including someone with an arm cocked, hurling something at the trucks. To Tang, the cropping looked like a deliberate distortion.

“It was a joke,” he said bitterly. That photograph and others crisscrossed China by e-mail, scrawled with criticism, while people added more examples from the
Times
of London, Fox News, German television, and French radio. It was a range of news organizations, and to those inclined to see it as such, it smacked of a conspiracy. It shocked people such as Tang who had put their faith in the Western press, but more important, it offended them: Tang thought that he was living in the moment of greatest prosperity and openness in his country's modern history, and yet the world still seemed to view China with suspicion. As if he needed confirmation, Jack Cafferty, a CNN commentator, called China “the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last fifty years,” a quote that rippled across the front pages in China and for which CNN later apologized. Like many of his peers, Tang couldn't figure out why foreigners were so agitated about Tibet—an impoverished backwater, as he saw it, that China had tried for decades to civilize. Boycotting the Beijing Games in the name of Tibet seemed as logical to him as shunning the Salt Lake City Olympics to protest America's treatment of the Cherokee.

He scoured YouTube in search of a rebuttal, a clarification of the Chinese perspective, but found nothing in English except pro-Tibet videos. He was already busy—under contract from a publisher for a Chinese translation of Leibniz's
Discourse on Metaphysics
and other essays—but he couldn't shake the idea of speaking up on China's behalf.

“I thought, okay, I'll make something,” he said.

Before Tang could start, however, he was obligated to go home for a few days. His mother had told him to be back for the harvest season. She needed his help in the fields, digging up bamboo shoots.

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Tang was the youngest of four siblings from a farming family near the eastern city of Hangzhou. Neither his mother nor his father could read or write. Until the fourth grade, Tang had no name. He went by Little Four, after his place in the family order. When that became impractical, his father began calling him Tang Jie, an abbreviated homage to his favorite comedian, Tang Jiezhong.

Tang was bookish, and in a large, boisterous household he said little. He took to science fiction. “I can tell you everything about all those movies, like
Star Wars
,” he told me. He was a good though not a spectacular student, but he showed a precocious interest in ideas. “He wasn't like other kids, who spent their pocket money on food—he saved all his money to buy books,” his older sister Tang Xiaoling told me. None of his siblings had studied past the eighth grade, and they regarded him as an admirable outlier. “If he had questions that he couldn't figure out, then he couldn't sleep,” his sister said. “For us, if we didn't get it, we just gave up.”

In high school, Tang improved his grades and had some success at science fairs as an inventor, but he found the sciences too remote from his daily concerns. He happened upon a Chinese translation of a fanciful Norwegian novel,
Sophie's World
, by the philosophy teacher Jostein Gaarder, in which a teenage girl encounters the history of great thinkers. “It was then that I discovered philosophy,” Tang said.

Patriotism was not an overt presence in his house, but it was all around him. To prevent a recurrence of Tiananmen, the Party had redoubled its commitment to Thought Work directed at China's young people. When Tang Jie was in primary school, president Jiang Zemin sent a letter to the Education Ministry calling for a new approach to explaining China's history “even to the kids in kindergarten,” the president wrote. The new approach emphasized the
bainian guochi
—the “century of national humiliation”—an arc of events extending from China's defeat in the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century to the Japanese occupation of Chinese soil during World War II.

By focusing on “patriotic education,” the Party explained, it would “boost the nation's spirit” and “enhance cohesion.” Students were taught to “never forget national humiliation.” The National People's Congress approved a holiday called National Humiliation Day, and textbooks were rewritten.
The Practical Dictionary of Patriotic Education
included a 355-page section on the details of China's humiliations. Nationalism helped the Party smooth over the paradox of being a socialist vanguard of a free-market economy. The new textbooks transformed the explanation of China's suffering to deemphasize the role of “class enemies” and to emphasize the role of foreign invaders. In the Mao years, China had whitewashed its defeats, but now students took field trips to places where China had suffered atrocities. To appeal to young men, the Communist Youth League invested in the development of patriotic video games such as
Resistance War Online
, in which users took on the role of Red Army soldiers machine-gunning Japanese invaders.