Age of Ambition (34 page)

By the time he died, weeks later, his story had sparked demonstrations against the authoritarian rule of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Police moved in, cell phone footage spread on YouTube and Facebook, and the protests grew to encompass complaints about corruption, unemployment, inflation, and limits on political freedom. Within a month, the movement had driven the Tunisian president from office and inspired protests across the Arab world. Abroad, people called it the Jasmine Revolution, after Tunisia's national flower, but inside Tunisia, people called it the Dignity Revolution. By any name, the protest drew immediate attention in China. When president Hosni Mubarak fell in Cairo, Ai Weiwei tweeted, “Today, we are all Egyptians.”

Chinese leaders projected nonchalance. Zhao Qizheng, the former head of the government's information office, said, “The idea that a Jasmine revolution could happen in China is extremely preposterous and unrealistic.” The
Beijing Daily
declared, “Everyone knows that stability is a blessing and chaos is a calamity.” In one story, the
China Daily
mentioned the importance of “stability” seven times. But privately, the Party had a different reaction. My phone buzzed. It was a leak from the Department, a message to editors across the country:

Draw no comparisons between political systems in the Middle East and the system in our country. When the names of leaders in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and elsewhere appear in our media, the names of Chinese leaders must never appear nearby.

The Arab Spring unnerved Chinese leaders more than any event in years. “A single spark,” Mao observed, “can start a prairie fire.” It was easy to overstate the power of technology, but it had clearly aided the opponents of authoritarianism. The other reason the Party was displeased was philosophical: it often argued that men and women in the developing world were more interested in building wealth and maintaining stability than in pursuing “Western notions” of democracy and human rights. This argument became more difficult to believe now that men and women in the Arab world were marching for democracy and human rights.

Some of the potentates, such as the king of Jordan, responded to the Arab Spring by promising to loosen up, in the hope of averting an explosion. But China's leaders chose the opposite course. The lesson they took from Mubarak's fall was the same they had taken from the collapse of the Soviet Union: protests that go unchecked lead to open revolt. The Politburo sent out Wu Bangguo, one of its most orthodox conservatives, to dust off his theory of the “Five Nos”: China would have no opposition parties, no alternative principles, no separation of powers, no federal system, and no full-scale privatization. “If we waver,” he told a meeting of three thousand legislators in Beijing, “the state could sink into the abyss.”

*   *   *

On Saturday, February 19, an anonymous notice appeared on an overseas Chinese website calling for people to assemble at 2:00 p.m. the next day, in thirteen Chinese cities, and “stroll silently holding a jasmine flower.” The government mobilized tens of thousands of police and state security agents to stand by in case of trouble. The military newspaper, the
People's Liberation Army Daily
, warned of a “smokeless war” intent on “Westernizing and dismembering the country.”

At the appointed hour of the protests, authorities in Beijing shut down text messaging across much of the city. Most of the people who showed up were foreign journalists. In front of a McDonald's in the shopping district of Wangfujing, a Chinese crowd of about two hundred formed, but it was impossible to know who was protesting, who were police, and who was gawking. One of the people there, to my surprise, was the young nationalist from Shanghai, Tang Jie. “I just wanted to go have a look, and I thought there might be some drama,” he told me. “I didn't think anyone would go except reporters. We took pictures of journalists.” He laughed. “There was no revolution,” he said.

In the three years that I'd known him, Tang had finished his doctorate in philosophy and turned his patriotism into a profession: when his video became a sensation online, it linked him to others with similar ideas, such as Rao Jin, the creator of
Anti-CNN.com
, a site that criticized Western reporting of China. Rao Jin was forming a production company, and Tang moved to Beijing to join it. They called the company April Media (m4, for short), after the month in which they had risen up to defend the Olympic torch. They translated articles between Chinese and English, churned out videos and lectures, and hoped, as they put it, to “give a true and more objective picture of the world.”

A few hours after the attempted protest, Tang Jie heard from a pair of fellow activists who had returned from McDonald's with video of an unusual scene: the U.S. ambassador to Beijing, Jon Huntsman, Jr., had made a brief appearance among the crowds. The ambassador insisted it was a coincidence—he said he was out for a stroll after lunch—but to Chinese nationalists, it was proof that the United States was seeking to foment a “Chinese Jasmine Revolution.” In the video, a man in the crowd asks Huntsman, “You want to see China in chaos, don't you?” The ambassador said no, and made a hasty exit, but Tang Jie saw the makings of a hit. He got to work, adding subtitles and overlaying his argument in exploding red bubbles: “Sure, China has many kinds of problems!” he wrote. “But we don't want to be another Iraq! We don't want to be another Tunisia! We don't want to be another Egypt! If the nation descends into chaos, will America and the so-called ‘reformers' feed our 1.3 billion people? Don't fucking mess this up!”

By the time he was done, it was three o'clock in the morning, and before he posted the video to the public, he hesitated; his site had been warned by authorities not to comment on the protests or the unrest in the Middle East. “But then I figured I really have to post it,” he told me. “Any media organization that had this kind of material on its hands would know it was news.” He hit the button, and by day's end, it was a diplomatic incident. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs complained about Huntsman's visit, and Tang was fielding calls from reporters from as far away as Salt Lake City, Huntsman's hometown.

The following week, I visited Tang Jie at his new office in Beijing, in an office complex not far from the Olympic stadium. He looked energized. He had been sleeping on a broken red sofa in the office while he looked for a place to live in Beijing, but the new venture thrilled him. The office had the Ikea aesthetic that I saw at many Chinese start-ups, and there were posters on the walls with inspirational photos: flags in the wind, wheat in fields. The company slogan was “Our Stage. Our Hope. Our Story. Our Faith.”

We went downstairs to a cafeteria. Over lunch, I mentioned that I'd gotten to know Han Han, the writer and entrepreneur who was about the same age as Tang. Tang Jie snorted. “He's too simple, sometimes naïve,” he said. “He points out some of China's problems, but they are all very shallow observations. He only says things like ‘The government is bad.'” I said that Tang's site talked about many of the same issues—corruption, pollution, the need for political reform—but Tang saw it differently. “The difference between us and Han Han is that we're trying to be constructive. For example, he talks about corruption and high housing prices, and that gets people all riled up. What we're saying is, let's do things step by step. There has to be a process.”

*   *   *

Despite the failure of the jasmine protests, organizers called for another attempt the following weekend. A notice on overseas Chinese sites said, “The rights of the Chinese people are something the Chinese people themselves must fight for.” It called on the Party to create an independent judiciary, to fight income inequality and corruption, and if it could not, to “exit the stage of history.” In their choice of slogans, the organizers combined the practical (“We want to work, we want housing!”) with the abstract (“We want fairness, we want justice!”).

Just as Chinese students abroad had played a vital role in the nationalist uprising a few years earlier, now another side of that cohort was speaking up. Students in Seoul, Paris, Boston, and elsewhere, writing in the name of what they called the Jasmine Movement, set up a blog and a Facebook page, Google groups, and a Twitter feed. They appealed to “laid-off workers and victims of forced evictions to participate in demonstrations, shout slogans, and seek freedom, democracy, and political reform, to end ‘one-party rule.'”

On the ground, however, there was little sign that the activism went beyond the Web. When it was time for the next scheduled protest, the authorities took no chances. They sent hundreds of police officers in plainclothes and in uniform; a SWAT team in body armor were equipped with automatic rifles and attack dogs. Police phoned foreign journalists in advance, warning them to stay away, but scores showed up anyway, and police forcibly dispersed them. Stephen Engle, a reporter for Bloomberg Television, was pinned to the ground, dragged by a leg, and kicked and beaten. A cameraman was set upon by officers and punched and kicked in the face. Later, when reporters asked the Foreign Ministry to investigate, a spokeswoman dispensed with the usual diplomatic assurances and said, bluntly, if journalists seek “to create trouble for China,” then “no law can protect them.” The protests were over. In a final effort, organizers called on people to go to McDonald's at a designated hour and simply order Set Meal No. 3.

Before long, the retribution began. People who had spoken up in favor of the protests began to vanish, at least temporarily. Some answered their doorbells and disappeared; others were on the sidewalk when they were swept into waiting cars. On the morning of Sunday, April 3, 2011, the artist Ai Weiwei was at the Beijing Capital International Airport, preparing to board a flight to Hong Kong, when he was ushered out of line and into an office. At his studio across town, an assistant peered out of the turquoise gate and found a crowd of police. Officers had also arrived at the home of Ai's son, who lived with his mother not far from the studio. And elsewhere in Beijing, a reporter named Wen Tao, who often chronicled Ai's activities, was wrestled into a black sedan. Three more of Ai's associates were detained in similar scenes.

At the studio, police carried away dozens of computers and hard drives. They took eight assistants into custody, and kept Ai's wife, Lu Qing, at the studio for questioning. As night fell on Beijing, police released the studio assistants, but there was no word on Ai Weiwei or the others. As the news of their arrests began to spread, Internet censors updated the blacklist to include:

Ai Weiwei

Weiwei

Ai Wei

Ai the Fatty

Some more elliptical references escaped the censors and spread rapidly, including one that reimagined the words of theologian Martin Niemöller:

When a fat man lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I am skinny.” When a bearded man lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I am not bearded.” When a man who sold sunflower seeds lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I don't sell sunflower seeds.” But when they come for the skinny, beardless ones who never sold sunflower seeds, there will be nobody left to speak up for you.

By the middle of April, human rights groups were calling it the largest crackdown on expression since Tiananmen Square two decades earlier. Two hundred people had been questioned or placed under house arrest; another thirty-five were presumed to be in detention. The list included not only old-line dissidents, but also social media celebrities and journalists. When some were released, they described a range of experiences. A lawyer named Jin Guanghong said he was tied to a bed in a psychiatric facility, beaten, and given injections that he could not identify. Some said police encouraged them to remember the fate of Gao Zhisheng, the lawyer who had written of his torture. In the case of activist Li Tiantian, interrogators required her to narrate the details of her sexual history to a roomful of guards. She was also warned never to say how she had been treated. But she published an account online anyway. “Deep down I was so ashamed,” she wrote, “as if I was being beaten but remained smiling, saying that I felt no pain. Deprived of choices. Helpless.”

As the crackdown deepened, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused Chinese leaders of “trying to stop history, which is a fool's errand.” The
People's Daily
replied by citing a Pew Research Center poll of twenty countries in which Chinese people expressed the highest level of satisfaction—87 percent. In the midst of this, it was easy to overlook a routine budget report that revealed a surprising milestone: for the first time in history, the People's Republic was spending more on domestic security than on foreign defense; it was devoting more money to policing and surveilling its own people than it was on defending against threats from abroad. But the
People's Daily
said the protests had failed because a “formerly backward and impoverished nation has been turned into the second biggest economy … and the whole world holds it in high esteem.”

*   *   *

Days passed with no word on Ai's whereabouts. Eventually his mother and older sister did what occurred to them: they posted a handwritten flyer around the neighborhood, buried amid
FOR RENT
signs and
LOST DOG
posters. Across the top, they wrote
MISSING PERSON
:

AI WEIWEI, MALE, 53 YEARS OLD.

On April 3, 2011 around 8:30 a.m., at Beijing Capital International Airport, before boarding a flight to Hong Kong, he was taken away by two men. More than fifty hours have passed, and his whereabouts remain unknown.

Later that afternoon, the Foreign Ministry announced that Ai was under investigation for “economic crimes,” which, it added, had “nothing to do with human rights or freedom of expression.”
Global Times
, the Party tabloid, denounced Ai as “a maverick of Chinese society” who must “pay a price” for his defiance. “China as a whole is progressing and no one has power to make a nation try to adapt to his personal likes and dislikes.”