Age of Ambition (41 page)

For years, Li Yang's most persuasive evidence of sanity was the continued support of his wife, Kim Lee, but in September 2011 she accused him of domestic violence and filed for divorce. In a country where victims of spousal abuse rarely go to police, the charge made national news. Li Yang told a local reporter, “I hit her sometimes but I never thought she would make it public since it's not Chinese tradition to expose family conflicts to outsiders.” In the months that followed, Kim Lee emerged as an improbable icon, “a folk hero for China's battered wives,” as the Chinese press put it.

Li Yang's business survived the scandal, but the damage to his reputation was a baffling turn of events for the young men and women who had placed so much faith in him. When the student I'd come to know, Michael Zhang, called me one morning to catch up, he said, “He beat his wife so badly. He's not a good father, he's not a good teacher to follow. I hate—” He stopped himself. “No, I don't have to say that I hate him.” A few weeks later, I was in southern China and I rode the bus out to see Michael and his parents. They had left the apartment on Gold Panning Road in Guangzhou and had moved to Qingyuan, a smaller city nearby. It was only an hour away, but Qingyuan felt sootier and closer to the countryside. Qingyuan didn't yet have a high-speed train link directly to the capital. While I waited at the bus station for Michael, I stood beside a man carrying his luggage on a whittled tree branch balanced across his shoulders. When Michael arrived, he looked out of place with earphones slung stylishly around his neck and wearing a fashionable windbreaker. He took in the scene around me and seemed eager to portray his new location in a more modern light. “Three years from now, this will be an international city,” he said. “I hate Guangzhou. It's full of thieves. I got robbed three times there.”

We took a cab across town. He and his parents lived in what might be called the porcelain district, lined with storefronts selling sinks, toilets, and bathroom tile. The road was littered with tiny broken tiles of every color; they looked like confetti. The apartment was on the eighth floor of a gray cement housing block with no elevator. As we climbed the stairs, I listened to the echoes of construction in the distance. In the apartment, Michael's parents were cooking lunch. It was less polished and cosmopolitan than their place in Guangzhou had been, though this apartment was a bit larger, and Michael had his own room. The motivational sayings on the walls mixed his usual optimism with a tinge of frustration. “I have to mentally change my whole life's destiny!” said one. “I can't stand it anymore!” said another.

On top of his wardrobe was a large cardboard box stenciled with the words “Crazy English.” I asked what it was, and Michael sighed. It held dozens of Crazy English books that he'd once hoped to sell. “Li Yang is very persuasive,” he said. “He persuaded me to fall in love with Crazy English for nine years. He got deep down into my soul. I became totally weird.” He laughed. “The Crazy English method is bad,” he went on. “A lot of students come to me and say that I've spent nine thousand yuan but my pronunciation is still so poor.”

The language business was difficult. After Michael borrowed money to start Basic English, the company operated for two years, but eventually the partnership soured. Michael had been in charge of sales, and he'd struggled to recruit students. By January 2011 the business had collapsed. Michael was broke, and in debt. He spent two miserable weeks in his parents' apartment pacing back and forth, thinking over all that had happened. He told me that the experience had left him with an unforgiving lesson: rely on nobody but yourself.

His family had left Guangzhou to save more money, and now, in the eighth-floor walk-up in Qingyuan, Michael was at work on a solo project: he was writing an English textbook. “My dream is to change the whole Chinese-English education system,” he said. He was convinced he could write a successful book if someone gave him a chance. “I have strengths. I am irreplaceable,” he said, and I heard echoes of his self-help readings. “Can you believe it?” he asked.

*   *   *

When lunch was ready, we crowded around a table in the living room, where the walls held portraits of competing icons: outside Michael's door, he still had a poster of Li Yang, and on an adjacent wall his mother, who had converted to Christianity, had put a banner that read,
CHRIST IS THE PILLAR HOLDING UP THE FAMILY
. (When it came to Christianity, Michael was keeping his options open: “I just take the best parts of every religion,” he said.)

Michael was eager to tell me about his book idea: he wanted to address the problem that he described dismissively as “exam English,” the kind of stilted language that many Chinese students acquired in order to pass the college entrance test. Instead, he wanted to teach the kind of real-world phrases that tend to confuse foreign speakers. He rattled off examples: “Get it. Get up. Knock up. Cheer up. Gimme a break, man. I don't get it, man. I have no idea, man. Shut your mouth, man.” He had also identified eight hundred words for his students to repeat, over and over, to hone their pronunciation. When he demonstrated his technique, it sounded like a one-sentence history of modern China: “I can, I can, I can, I can. Suffered, suffered, suffered, suffered. Have, have, have, have.”

I watched his parents watching him, and I got the sense that they were used to this. He had turned their home into an ESL classroom, even though, like most of their generation, they spoke no English. They had little choice but to trust that their son was doing something worthwhile. Later that afternoon, Michael and his parents and I went to see their proudest new possession: an apartment under construction for Michael and the wife he hopes to find someday. We walked across the porcelain district; Michael's father wore camouflage army-surplus shoes that blended in with the broken tiles. We reached a tall and slender modern high-rise, with a modern lobby, sleek and clean, and the camouflage shoes suddenly looked out of place. In the middle of the lobby was a scale model of the complex, with tiny working lights and plastic figurines under palm trees. The lobby doubled as a sales center, but there were no buyers that day; China's economy was slowing, and the real estate market in Qingyuan was not what it once was. We planned to visit their new apartment, but that tower was not yet finished, and the elevator panel dangled from wires in a way that didn't look especially safe. Michael poked at the lifeless buttons for a moment and then suggested we visit a model apartment instead.

The walls of the showroom were bare concrete, suggesting either a promising future or a construction project in trouble. We walked out to the balcony and peered down on a lake. From the eighteenth floor, the people below looked as tiny as the figurines in the lobby. The apartment that Michael and his parents could afford was on the other side of the complex, beside the tile stores, not the lake. We stepped back into the elevator, and Michael seemed uncomfortable. Speaking in English, so his parents couldn't understand, he said, “I won't live here. I will put my parents here. I need to be back in a big city like Shenzhen or Beijing or Shanghai. Qingyuan is countryside. Second tier. They just learn ‘exam English.' They don't have big dreams here.”

As the years passed, I sensed that other young strivers like Michael were growing frustrated as well. Low-skilled jobs weren't the problem—those wages were climbing—but there weren't enough white-collar jobs to employ each year's crop of more than six million new college graduates. Between 2003 and 2009, the average starting salary for migrant workers had grown by nearly 80 percent, but for college graduates, starting wages were flat. When you considered inflation, their income had declined. The young Chinese strivers desperate to become “car-and-home-equipped”—to find a mate and elbow their way into the New Middle-Income Stratum—now knew the truth: China's new fortunes were wildly out of balance. By 2012 a typical apartment in a Chinese city was selling for eight to ten times the average annual income nationwide. (Even at the heights of the American property bubble, the ratio peaked at five to one.) Young men adopted a self-mocking nickname: a man without the connections to get rich or the cash to get married would call himself a
diaosi
—“a thread penis.” These young people had been raised in the era of self-creation, with cell phones marketed as “My Turf, My Decision,” and school chants that told them “I am the biggest miracle of nature!” They had reasons to be disenchanted. When it came time to select a single Chinese character to describe the year 2009, people online chose
(pronounced
bei
), a passive preposition, as in “to be fired by” or “to be abused by.”

A new mood was setting in: China's boom had made almost everyone better off to some degree—average incomes had more than tripled over the past decade—but the gap between rich and poor had ballooned more than the Party ever intended. In 2001 the blunt-spoken premier Zhu Rongji had been asked if he worried that the growing divide might lead to social unrest. “Not yet,” Zhu said. He pointed to the measurement of income equality known as the Gini coefficient, which ranges from 0 to 1, with one being extreme disparity in wealth. Chinese officials predicted that China would be stable as long as its Gini stayed below what he called a “danger line” of 0.4. Eleven years later, the number had grown so large that the government simply stopped publishing it, saying the wealthy hid too much of their income to make the statistic credible.

The income gap was not an abstraction: a child born on the remote Qinghai Plateau was seven times more likely to die before the age of five than a child born in the capital. The government was under pressure to act. It could have reformed the tax system—it still had no capital gains or inheritance taxes—but instead it adopted a more immediate strategy: in April 2011, Beijing banned companies from using the word
luxury
in their names and ads. The “Black Swan Luxury Bakery,” which was selling wedding cakes for $314,000, had to call itself the “Black Swan Art Bakery.” (The ban did not last.)

After years of not daring to measure the Gini coefficient, in January 2013 the government finally published a figure, 0.47, but many specialists dismissed it; the economist Xu Xiaonian called it “a fairy tale.” (An independent calculation put the figure at 0.61, higher than the level in Zimbabwe.) Yet, for all the talk about income, it was becoming clear that people cared most of all about the gap in opportunity. When the Harvard sociologist Martin Whyte polled the Chinese public in 2009, he discovered that people had a surprisingly high tolerance for the rise of the plutocracy. What they resented were the obstacles that prevented them from joining it: weak courts, abuses of power, a lack of recourse. Two scholars, Yinqiang Zhang and Tor Eriksson, tracked the paths of Chinese families from 1989 to 2006 and found a “high degree of inequality of opportunity.” They wrote, “The basic idea behind the market reforms was that by enabling some citizens to become rich this would in turn help the rest to become rich as well. Our analysis shows that at least so far there are few traces of the reforms leveling the playing field.” They found that in other developing countries, parents' education was the most decisive factor in determining how much a child would earn someday. But in China, the decisive factor was “parental connections.” A separate study of parents and children in Chinese cities found “a strikingly low level of intergenerational mobility.” Writing in 2010, the authors ranked “urban China among the least socially mobile places in the world.”

Even before they had statistics to prove it, people described new divisions emerging in their society; they no longer simply parsed the distinctions between Bobos and DINKs (double income, no kids) and the New Middle-Income Stratum. There was now a line between the white-collar class and what people called the “black-collar class.” An anonymous author circulated an essay that defined it: “Their clothes are black. Their cars are black. Their income is hidden. Their life is hidden. Their work is hidden. Everything about them is hidden—like a man wearing black, standing in the dark.”

*   *   *

As the sense of opportunity narrowed, the Bare-Handed Fortunes lost some of their luster. Huang Guangyu, an electronics mogul who had ranked as the richest person in China, was sentenced to fourteen years for insider trading and other offenses. In all, authorities executed at least fourteen yuan billionaires in the span of eight years, on charges ranging from pyramid schemes to murder for hire. (Yuan Baojing, a former stockbroker who made three billion yuan before his fortieth birthday, was convicted of arranging the killing of a man who tried to blackmail him.) The annual rich list was nicknamed the “death list.”

The Queen of Trash ran into trouble of a different kind. Less than a year after Cheung Yan was celebrated as the richest self-made woman in the world, her reputation in China began to deteriorate. A labor rights group called Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour released “Sweatshop Paper,” an investigation that accused her company, Nine Dragons Paper, of labor abuses, including industrial accidents, inadequate safety equipment, and discrimination against carriers of hepatitis B, a common ailment in China. The group published parts of the
Nine Dragons Paper Employee Handbook
, whose dos and don'ts included “Respect the leaders. Stop walking when meeting senior leaders and greet them. Stand behind senior leaders when walking together.” Workers were subject to a wide range of fines, such as three hundred yuan for spitting out the window of a company bus or cutting the line in the cafeteria; five hundred yuan for napping, permitting an outsider to view the factory, or playing mah-jongg; a thousand yuan and dismissal for organizing a strike or “spreading rumors which cause harm to the company.” The handbook also noted that wages were confidential, and that “revealing one's salary” or “asking others” about theirs was grounds for dismissal.