Age of Ambition (24 page)

The recession also gave Lin an opportunity to implement his vision. Not long before that, Chinese intellectuals and officials were reluctant to hold up the country's experience as an alternative to the Western way of doing things, for fear that it would fuel rivalry or distract from the fact that most Chinese people are still very poor. While Western countries struggled, China suffered far less damage. A Western diplomat in Beijing told me, “One lesson of the crisis is that we economists should all be humbler. I think we have to accept the possibility that China may become something close to a fully developed economic state without substantial political reform.” When World Bank officials visited Beijing to celebrate thirty years since China resumed its Bank membership, Zoellick praised China's reductions in poverty and said, “We, and the world, have much to learn from this.”

At the Bank, Lin churned out a series of papers intended to “revisit” the understanding of how poor countries get rich, much if it anathema to the Washington Consensus that prevailed in the 1990s. Writing with the Cameroonian economist Célestin Monga, he argued that governments must “regain center stage.” Industrial policy, in which governments seek to support certain sectors, known to critics as “picking winners,” has a bad name in the West, he said, and for good reason: it has failed far more often than it has succeeded. But he argued that the only thing worse was
not
having an industrial policy. He pointed to a recent study of thirteen fast-growing economies. “In all the successful countries, the governments play a very proactive role,” he told me. He argued for a “soft” industrial policy in which a clamorous free market produced new industries and firms, and the government spotted the best prospects and helped them grow by giving them tax breaks and building infrastructure such as the ports and highways going up all over the Chinese mainland. It was the marriage of Chicago and Beijing: to rise out of poverty, he and Monga wrote, markets were “indispensable,” but government would be “equally indispensable.”

He used his perch at the World Bank to argue that China's approach had fundamental strengths that other countries could emulate. When he visited developing countries, he made a point to say they reminded him of China three decades ago. “Can other developing countries achieve a performance similar to that achieved by China over the past three decades?” he asked in a speech he called “The China Miracle Demystified.” “The answer is clearly yes.” He advised poor countries that if they want to get richer, they needed to delay political reform or fall victim to the chaos of post–Soviet Russia. He argued for the virtues of being free not from repression but “from the fear of poverty and hunger, of which I hold vivid childhood memories.” When he wrote in his own name, not on behalf of the Bank, he was even more strident: he dismissed the “optimistic, and perhaps naïve, argument put forward by some scholars that democracies … are more likely to undertake economic reforms.” He quoted Deng Xiaoping, who once said, “The United States brags about its political system, but the president says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm, and something else when he leaves.”

*   *   *

On a warm night in Beijing, a couple of months later, Lin was back in the Chinese capital for several days, and he took a chauffeur-driven black Audi sedan across town to a reception in honor of the tenth anniversary of an MBA program that he had cofounded. It was held in a traditional Chinese courtyard, shaded by wisteria and crab apple trees, which had once been home to the Empress Dowager Cixi. For this evening, however, it had been done up with a red carpet and klieg lights worthy of a fashion show. Wine was flowing, and a hundred or so guests—mostly middle-aged couples, former students and colleagues—were in a festive mood by the time Lin walked in with his wife, who was by now a leading expert on special education in China and a member of the National People's Congress. When the couple arrived, the well-heeled crowd cheered, and guests swarmed them, taking turns giddily posing for photographs with Lin. A television crew moved in for an interview. A teenager requested an autograph. Lin reached a quiet table, but then a guest buttonholed him with news of an exciting opportunity in the golf course construction business. Lin's facial expression was polite but desperate, and the hosts hustled him and his wife off to the refuge of a private area, where he prepared to give a speech.

Lin stepped up to the stage and peered out over the guests. He began by noting the “earth-shaking transformations” in China's economy over the past decade, and he declared, “The next ten or fifteen years are going to be even more spectacular.” The crowd applauded. He pointed out that when the Beijing International Executive MBA program began, in 2000, China had fewer than a dozen companies in the Fortune Global 500, while America had nearly two hundred. “I believe that by 2025, when the Chinese economy has become the largest in the world, and shares the stage with America, the Chinese economy will make up twenty percent of the global economy,” he said. “There will probably be one hundred Chinese companies in the Fortune 500.” He ended with an exhortation: “I hope that as you build China's economy you will also help to build a better, more harmonious society in China.”

“Harmonious society” was not a phrase that all Chinese intellectuals were quick to use. It was the slogan favored by President Hu Jintao to signify the goal of a fair and stable society, but Hu's critics had come to use it as a byword for repression and the silencing of dissent. (A website that got shut down was said to have been “harmonized.”) Lin meant it in positive terms, which was consistent with his enduring faith in the power of government. In 1999, Yang Xiaokai, a prominent liberal economist, gave a lecture arguing that “without political reform there is no fairness, which leads to public dissatisfaction.” Yang was asking if China could become a strong country without democracy. But, in a response, Lin pointed to China's economic lead over India, writing, “Whether it's the pace or quality of economic growth, China is doing better than India.” In Lin's view, China was already becoming a strong country without democracy, and he saw little evidence for making a change. When I asked Lin about the debate, he said that he and Yang, who died in 2004, were good friends but disagreed. “He thought that if China wants to be successful, China needs to adopt the British- or U.S.-style constitution first,” he said. “I take a different view: I think that we do not know what kind of governance structure is the best in the world.”

As Lin's prominence grew, his life was clouded by an extraordinary fact: more than three decades after his swim, he still faced an arrest warrant, issued by the Ministry of Defense in Taiwan for “defecting to the enemy.” After so many years, much of the Taiwanese public had come to view his success with hometown pride, and prominent Taiwanese politicians had asked the military to drop the case, but the minister of defense reiterated that if Lin stepped back on Taiwanese soil, he would be arrested and would face military charges of treason.

His older brother, Lin Wang-sung, told reporters, “I don't understand why people regard him as a villain. My brother just wanted to pursue his ambitions.” When Lin's father died, in 2002, Lin's family asked for permission for him to attend the funeral, but the military rejected the request, saying he “should bear disgrace throughout his life.” He had no choice but to watch the funeral from Beijing via videoconference. He built an altar inside his office and knelt before it. In a eulogy read aloud, he wrote, “When mother was dying, I couldn't be there to help. When father was bedridden, there was still no route home. I can't send them off on the road to the afterworld … How great the sin of being unfilial! May the heavens punish me!”

*   *   *

Lin had thrived in the People's Republic by becoming its most ardent economic spokesman. For those who departed from that view, China was becoming a more difficult place to be. A few days after watching Lin's speech about the bright economic future, I went to see Wu Jinglian, who had emerged as one of China's leading economic advisers in the decade after reform began. He was now close to eighty years old, a gnomish man with lively eyes peering out from beneath a thatch of white hair. He worked from a tiny office on the fringe of the city. He remained an official adviser to China's cabinet, but he sounded more like a gadfly. “It's entirely obvious that the biggest problem China faces right now is corruption,” he told me. “Corruption is the reason for the gap between rich and poor. Where did this corruption come from? From the fact that government continues to control too many resources.”

In a furious stream of essays and books, Wu pointed to crony capitalism and the gap between rich and poor as evidence that China's economic model had run up against the limit of what was possible without the government's permitting greater political openness to mediate competing demands. In recent years, he had gone so far as to argue that China needed to adopt a Western-style democracy, and nationalists had blasted him for apostasy. At one point, the debate turned personal: the
People's Daily
published Internet rumors that Wu was being investigated for spying for the United States. The claim was absurd—the cabinet eventually put out a statement supporting Wu and disputing the charge—but the prominence of the attack made it clear that his critique had inflamed powerful people with access to the
People's Daily.

I asked Wu if things had settled down. He sighed. “A month or so ago there was an item on a website saying that someone had knocked me unconscious with a brick, but I had survived,” he said. There was no truth to the item, and I asked him what he made of it. “It was giving people the hint to use violence,” he said. The item was signed “The China Association for the Elimination of Traitors.” Wu had no idea who was behind the effort to demonize him, but the various suspects were proliferating: The right-wing nationalist fringe? Powerful figures opposed to reform?

In China, the financial stakes had grown so large that even arcane economic debates became laced with a sense of intense opposition. Wu had recently argued for allowing China's currency to rise in value, and then he read the reaction online. “One of the commentators on that article mentioned where I live and the fact that security is lax,” he said. He gave a weak laugh. “Writing that would be against the law in America. In China, no one cares.”

As the debate widened, words once benign took on a political edge. Lin Yifu liked to describe the economic boom as the “China miracle,” but the liberal writer and critic Liu Xiaobo took issue with the phrase; he wrote that all he could see was “the ‘miracle' of systemic corruption, the ‘miracle' of an unjust society, the ‘miracle' of moral decline, and the ‘miracle' of a squandered future.” The boom was becoming “a robber baron's paradise,” he wrote. “Only with money can the Party maintain control of China's major cities, co-opt elites, satisfy the drive of many to get rich overnight and crush the resistance of any nascent rival group. Only with money can the Party wheel and deal with Western powers; only with money can it buy off rogue states and purchase diplomatic support.”

*   *   *

At fifty-one, Liu Xiaobo was as lean and bony as a greyhound, with short hair that narrowed to a widow's peak. He was a chain-smoker with a wry, knowing sense of humor. He had grown up in Manchuria. When he was eleven, his school shut down for the Cultural Revolution—a “temporary emancipation,” he called it—and the taste of independence launched him on a life of unconventional thinking. He earned a PhD in literature at Beijing Normal University but did not excel at the genuflections required to thrive in Chinese academia. He believes that Chinese writers “can't write creatively because their very lives don't belong to them.” He was not much kinder about Western sinologists, observing that “ninety-eight percent are useless.” He did not set out to offend, but he did not shy away from it. “Perhaps my personality means I will crash into brick walls wherever I go,” he wrote to the scholar Geremie Barmé. “I can accept it all, even if in the end I crack my skull open.”

Liu was the author of seventeen books and hundreds of poems, articles, and essays. Much of his work was fiercely political, and that came with a price: by the spring of 2008, he had served three jail terms, beginning with a conviction for “counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement” for his role in the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. He rejected the charges but embraced the label of “black hand,” saying it was a “medal of honor” and one of the few things he could keep with him behind bars. In a jailhouse poem, he wrote, “Besides a lie / I own nothing.”

Over the years, Liu Xiaobo stopped drawing sharp distinctions between prisons, detention centers, and labor camps. “When I was in prison, I was kept in a small pen with a wall,” he told me by phone, during a spell under house arrest. “Since leaving prison, I'm simply kept in a bigger pen that has no wall.” While he was in a labor camp in 1996, on charges of “disturbing social order,” he married his longtime companion, the artist Liu Xia. Camp guards double-checked that the bride knew what she was doing. “Right!” she replied. “That ‘enemy of the state'! I want to marry him!”

When he was released in 1999, after three years away, he returned to their apartment and discovered that it now contained a computer. “A friend had given it to my wife,” he recalled in an essay, “and she was already using it to learn typing and go online. She showed me how to use it, and practically every friend who came by to see us in the next few days kept urging me to get on the computer. I tried it a few times, but composing sentences in front of a machine just felt wrong. I avoided it, and kept on writing with a fountain pen.”