Age of Ambition (45 page)

“It's hard to know exactly, but I think his death was his final act of struggle,” he said. He went on: “Many years later, I came upon an article called ‘Poets,' which he had written in 1941”—a quarter-century before he died. “He wrote, ‘Poets are a strange crowd. When everyone else is happy, the poets can say things that are discouraging. When everyone else is sorrowful, the poets can laugh and dance. But when the nation is in danger, they must drown themselves, and let their deaths be a warning in the name of truth.'”

This sacrifice was a tradition in China, dating to the third century
B.C.E.
, when the poet Qu Yuan drowned himself in protest against corruption. Shu Yi told me, “By doing so, they are fighting back, telling others what the truth really is.” His father, he said, “would rather break than bend.”

After I met Shu Yi, I went back to see Wu Zhiyou, the head of the temple, and I asked him about the story of the writer's final night. He gave a short sigh and said, “It's true. During the Cultural Revolution, there were struggle sessions here. Afterward, Lao She went home and threw himself in the lake. This can be described as a historical fact.”

I asked him why the temple's written history made no mention of it. He struggled to find an answer, and I braced for a bit of propaganda. But then Wu said something that surprised me. “It's too sad,” he said simply. “It makes people too sad. I think it's best not to include this in books. It's factual, it's history, but it was not because of the temple. It was because of the time. It doesn't belong in the records of the Confucius Temple.”

I understood his point, but it felt incomplete. Lao She was beaten in the temple because it was a place of learning, of ideas, of history; the permission to attack one of China's most famous novelists was, like so much of the Cultural Revolution, the permission to attack what it meant to be Chinese, and in the decades since then the Party and the people had never reconciled all that they lost in those moments. Even if someone wanted to mark the site where Beijing's greatest chronicler ended his life, it would be difficult; the Lake of Great Peace was filled in decades ago, during an extension of the subway system. I often marveled at how much people in China had managed to put behind them: revolution, war, poverty, and the upheavals of the present. My neighbor Huang Wenyi lived next door with his mother, who was eighty-eight. When I once asked her if she had old photos of the family, she said, “They were burned during the Cultural Revolution.” And then she laughed, the particular hollow Chinese laugh reserved for awful things.

*   *   *

Every day, groups of civil servants from the hinterlands, and students from around the city, were turning up at the Confucius Temple to get a tour and take in the show. I watched a young guide with a ponytail face a group of middle-aged Chinese women. She held her hands out before her. “This is the gesture for paying respects to Confucius,” she said. Her visitors did their best to copy her. For many people in China, I realized, the gaps in history had made Confucius a stranger.

In that vacuum, some people were eager to put the philosopher to more useful political purposes. After Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize, a group of Chinese nationalists organized what they called the “Confucius Peace Prize,” and awarded it, the next year, to Vladimir Putin for bringing “safety and stability to Russia.” A group of Confucian scholars denounced a plan to build a large Christian church in Confucius's hometown, writing, “We beseech you to respect this sacred land of Chinese culture.”

Others were growing weary of this version of Confucius. The insistence on harmony seemed to leave little room for a politics of negotiation, for an honest clash of ideas. Li Ling, a Peking University professor, took aim at what he called the “manufactured Confucius,” and wrote, “The real Confucius, the one who actually lived, was neither a sage nor a king … He had no power or status—only morality and learning—and dared to criticize the power elite of his day. He traveled around lobbying for his policies, racking his brains to help the rulers of his day with their problems, always trying to convince them to give up evil ways and be more righteous … He was tormented, obsessed, and driven to roam, pleading for his ideas, more like a homeless dog than a sage. This was the real Confucius.”

When the author published this, he was denounced by Confucians as a “prophet of doomsday.” One of his defenders was Liu Xiaobo. Before he went to prison, Liu warned of a mood in which “Confucianism was venerated and all other schools of thought were banned.” Instead of invoking Confucius, Liu wrote, intellectuals should be venerating “independence of thought and autonomy of person.”

Chinese people came to the Holy Land of National Studies on a quest for some kind of moral continuity. But it rarely ended their search. The Party, to maintain its hold over history, offered a caricature of Confucius. Generations of Chinese had grown up being told to condemn China's ethical and philosophical traditions, only to find that the Party was now abruptly resurrecting them, without granting permission to discuss what had happened in the interim. A neighborhood devoted to protecting the “essence of the country” only seemed to reinforce the reality that there was no single “essence” anymore.

There were signs that liberal intellectuals were not the only ones losing patience with such a forceful embrace of Confucius. In January 2011 a giant statue of the wise man appeared beside Tiananmen Square, the first new addition to such a sensitive spot since Mao's mausoleum was erected a generation ago. Philosophers and political scientists wondered if this meant a change in the Party platform. But then, it was gone. In the middle of the night, three months after it arrived, the statue was moved to a low-profile location in the courtyard of a museum. Why? It remained a mystery: the Central Propaganda Department banned any discussion of it. People were left to joke that Confucius, the itinerant teacher from Shandong Province, had been caught trying to live in Beijing without the proper permit.

 

TWENTY

PASSING BY

 

There are moments in the life of a country when people stop and look at themselves and wonder if they have lost their way. In China's case, one of those moments arrived on the afternoon of October 13, 2011, in the city of Foshan, in the far southern reaches of the country. Foshan is a market town, the home of enormous open-air emporiums, one after another: Iron and Steel World and Flower and Plant World and Children's Clothing Town, which sells enough clothes each year to dress every kid in America, twice.

One of the biggest, Hardware City, has a permanent population of thirty thousand. It specializes in the unforgiving artifacts of construction: steel chains, power tools, drums of chemicals, and spools of electric cable as thick as a man's wrist. It is a labyrinth of storefronts and alleyways, sprawled across a hundred acres, beneath a rambling roof of tin and plastic that shadows the world beneath in a permanent twilight. Hardware City smells of sawdust and diesel. There are two thousand shops, block after block, and the market has grown so fast and erratically, with no street signs or traffic lights, that it's easy to get lost there.

Just after two o'clock that afternoon, a young mother and shopkeeper named Qu Feifei picked up her daughter from nursery school a few blocks away and turned back toward her home in Hardware City. As a mother, Qu was unabashedly doting: she spent four times as much on a dress for her toddler as she did on one for herself. She and her husband had a tiny storefront called Auspicious Prosperity Rolling Mill Ball Bearings. They lived upstairs, with their kids, aged two and seven, in a dimly lit converted storage space where the ceiling was just high enough for an adult to stand upright.

Qu's husband, Wang Chichang, had worked in Hardware City for eight years. At thirty years old, he had large wide-set eyes and overgrown bangs that reached past his brows. He hailed from a county in Shandong Province once famous for its pears and peaches and now devoted to the production of chemicals. He had studied animal husbandry in vocational school, before trying his luck in Beijing, where he had worked construction, and in a pet shop, before finding his way to Hardware City. After the couple married, Qu had a boy they named Wang Shuo. (It means “Wang the Scholar.”) When she had a girl, they paid the fines and named her Wang Yue; everyone called her Little Yueyue, which means “Little Joy.” By the time she was two, she was precocious, quick to pick up words from the cartoon program
Smart Tiger
, and content to fuss around with her fake cooking while her parents made dinner in the shop. When mother and daughter returned from school that afternoon, Qu went upstairs to bring in the laundry from the line, while Wang Yue played downstairs. When the mother came back, her daughter was gone. It was nothing unusual—she always flitted back and forth among the neighbors—and Qu went out to find her. As dusk approached, the skies opened, and the autumn rain drummed hard on the roof of the market.

A few blocks away, another young vendor, named Hu Jun, was setting off on the final errands of the day. Like the Wang family, Hu Jun and his wife had a young daughter, and a ball-bearing shop, and they, too, hailed from Shandong Province, though the market was so big that the two families didn't know each other. Hu Jun climbed into a small inexpensive van, which the Chinese call a “bread loaf,” and snaked through the crowded alleyways. He was picking up a payment in an unfamiliar part of Hardware City, and he scanned the shop signs as he drove.

Little Yueyue had not gone to see the neighbors. She had gone wandering, and soon she was two and a half blocks from home. To attract customers, the shops that lined the alleys liked to keep some of their goods out front, even though it cluttered the roadside with mounds of merchandise. She passed bundles as tall as she was. The little girl, dressed in a dark shirt and pink trousers, passed a shop on the corner, where a banged-up old computer monitor was recording sixteen different angles from the surveillance cameras out front. The cameras chronicled what happened next. At 5:25, Little Yueyue peered over her shoulder but continued walking. When she turned back to face the road ahead, it was just in time to see the van but too late to avoid being hit by it. Hu Jun would later say that he felt only a slight bump against the tire—a hiccup so small that he assumed that it was market detritus in the road: a bundle of rags, a cardboard box. He never stopped to check.

*   *   *

Little Yueyue was struck twice, first by the front wheel, then by the rear, her upper body, then her lower. She came to rest beside a bale of merchandise, and she lay motionless except for the faint movement of her left arm.

Twenty seconds after she was struck, a man on foot, wearing a white shirt and dark trousers, approached. He looked in her direction and slowed. Then he walked on. Five seconds later, a motorbike passed; the driver peered over his shoulder, toward the child, but did not slow down. Ten seconds after that, another man passed, looked in her direction, and kept walking. Nine seconds later, a small truck approached and it, too, hit Little Yueyue, rolling over her legs and continuing on.

More people passed—a figure in a blue raincoat, a rider in a black T-shirt, a worker loading goods at the intersection. A man on a motorbike stared at her and talked to a shop owner, before they hurried away. Four minutes after the initial collision, the eleventh person to approach was a woman holding the hand of a little girl. She ran a store nearby, and she, too, had picked up her daughter from school. She stopped, asked a shopkeeper about the child in the road, and then darted off, hurrying her daughter away from the scene. On they came: a rider on a motorbike, a man on foot, a worker from the shop on the corner.

At 5:31, six minutes after the girl was hit, a small woman carrying bags of salvaged cans and bottles approached. She was the eighteenth passerby. But she did not pass. She dropped her bags and tried to lift Little Yueyue in her arms. She heard the child groan, and her small body crumpled like dead weight. The woman was an illiterate grandmother named Chen Xianmei, who recycled trash and scrap metal for a living. She pulled the child's body closer to the curb, and then she peered around for help. She approached nearby shopkeepers, but one was busy with a customer; another told her, “That child is not mine.” Chen tried the next block, shouting for help, and there she encountered the mother, Qu Feifei, who was searching desperately for her daughter. Chen led her to the roadside. The mother crouched on the asphalt, wrapped Little Yueyue in her arms, and began to run.

Ambulances are rare in China, so mother and father loaded their daughter into the small family Buick. When they reached Huangqi Hospital, fifteen minutes away, nurses in pink uniforms were attending to a stream of arrivals. The waiting room was clean and well built, but the signs on the walls warned people of the perils that cling to China's health care system. One sign advised them against trying to bribe a doctor for better care; another warned against “Appointment Scalpers.” It said,
IF A STRANGER CLAIMS TO HAVE A CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH A SPECIALIST, AND TRIES TO LEAD YOU OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL, DON'T BE FOOLED
.

Doctors discovered that Little Yueyue had a skull fracture and serious damage to the brain. At first, local reporters figured it was a typical hit-and-run. Then they saw the surveillance video. Instantly, the story of the seventeen passersby began to spread across China, and it provoked a surge of self-recrimination. The writer Zhang Lijia asked, “How can we possibly win respect and play the role of a world leader if this is a nation with 1.4 billion cold hearts?” The video played endlessly on television and online, a morality play about big-city apathy and a coarsening of the spirit. For many, the moment crystallized the sense that the great national competition was leaving some of China's most vulnerable people underfoot. It tapped a well of collective guilt—over infants sickened by contaminated formula, over children trapped in collapsing schools, and over a string of cases in which people had neglected strangers in need. Chinese papers had recently reported the death of an eighty-eight-year-old man who fell at a vegetable market and suffocated from a nosebleed because nobody turned him over.