Age of Ambition (49 page)

For ten years he preached in China's official Protestant Church. Then he had an idea. Instead of a classic “house church,” with believers squeezed into a living room, he wanted to be “open and independent.” “We have nothing to hide,” he said. Authorities urged him “not to go down the illegal path,” as Jin put it, but he reassured them that he had no interest in confrontation. “Originally, we had an enormous government that controlled everything, but the government has been steadily shrinking, and civil society has grown in strength and size,” he told me. “I felt that churches should make good use of that opportunity to expand.” In 2007 he found a fifth-floor office space in a quiet corner of Sauna City; the space was bland but large enough for 150 people. The old unwritten rules of being an unregistered church in China included staying small and avoiding the authorities. Jin, however, hung a sign outside his door, printed business cards, and welcomed the police to his events. He named it the Zion Church.

When it opened, the church had a parish of 20 people. Within a year, it had 350—almost all of them under forty years old and highly educated. I visited one Sunday, and it was standing room only. I could hear kids squealing in a playroom next door. Jin was a performer: he preached beside a choir dressed in hot-pink robes, accompanied by drums and an electric guitar. He offered a nondenominational, conservative brand of evangelical Christianity, and he peppered his sermons with references to pop culture and the economy. That day he ended his sermon with an appeal I'd never heard in a church: “Please leave,” he pleaded, laughing. “We don't have enough seats for the others who want to come, so please stay for only one service a day.”

*   *   *

As I traveled around China, I stopped being surprised by my encounters with Christians. On a trip to the city of Wenzhou, a commercial capital on the eastern seaboard, I went to see the head of the chamber of commerce, one of China's richest men, an industrialist named Zheng Shengtao, who was squired around town in a silver Rolls-Royce. He had ridden the wave of prosperity but had come to believe that when Chinese children were being poisoned by milk, something was wrong. Zheng told me that, since becoming a Christian a decade ago, he had dedicated himself to getting other businessmen to sign an ethical pledge. On his fingers, he ticked off the requirements: no tax evasion; no selling substandard products; no “changing contracts and promises.” “What happens if I am trustworthy and others are not?” he asked me. “Don't I end up the loser?”

For young men and women who had grown up with control over their economic and personal lives, the limits on what they could believe seemed antique. I met Ma Junyan, a twenty-five-year-old member of a Christian singing troupe that earned its keep playing for churches. It was all off the books, and I asked Ma if the local government had to approve her group's applications to perform. She gave me a funny look. “Jesus tells us to preach to everyone,” she told me. “He never said, ‘You have to have this certificate in order to preach.'” The reality was more complicated, but I understood her point: she lived in a world so self-contained that she rarely thought twice about the state. Ma and another fifty or so members of her group shared a dormitory on a small, rutted market street lined with dumpling vendors and vegetable stands. Their group was not legal, strictly speaking, but there was nothing especially furtive about their lives. A banner on the wall read,
BEIJING BELONGS TO GOD
—a slogan that sounded unremarkable until you remembered that Beijing belongs to the Communist Party.

Ma and the others were practicing a dance routine, with a guitar, piano, and drums. The room was humid and filled with bodies, and the boys, in their teens and twenties, bounced up and down shouting, “It's the power of the Holy Spirit! Nothing can stop it!” I had been to settings like this in America—in West Virginia and the South Side of Chicago—but in China it still startled me. Unlike their parents, Ma and her friends were coming of age at a time when Christianity was no longer a dangerous secret. Western religion had a touch of glamour about it because of high-profile converts such as Yao Chen, the television actress who was the most popular person in Chinese social media. When Ma and her friends finished practicing, they lowered their heads and clenched their eyes tight. Tears streamed down their cheeks. In the center of the scrum, a woman tilted her head up and prayed, “China will be a Christian nation.”

That vision—that China would make a wholesale turn toward Western religion—never seemed very likely outside the reveries of the true believers. China seemed more inclined to absorb the most useful parts of Western faiths and philosophies and discard the rest, as it had with Marxism, capitalism, and other imports. But, viewed another way, in the context of its new overlapping identities, China was already a Christian nation—just as it was a lovesick nation, a muckraking nation, and an iconoclastic nation. It was all those things at once, in a way it had never been before. The Party was not allowing the growth of faith as much as it was trying to keep up with it.

 

TWENTY-TWO

CULTURE WARS

 

When I visited Ai Weiwei at his studio, it felt odd—subdued and claustrophobic. His assistants were working, designs were tacked to the walls, but Ai lived in legal purgatory, free to make art but barred from leaving the capital. Police required him to check in every time he left his house. “I have to pronounce to them where I have to go and whom I have to meet,” he told me. “I basically obey their orders because it doesn't mean anything. I also want to tell them I'm not afraid. I'm not secretive. They can follow me.”
ArtReview
magazine had recently published its list of the art world's most powerful players and had ranked Ai Weiwei number one. When a reporter called to ask his reaction, he said it was absurd; he did not “feel powerful at all.” He felt fragile and, for the first time in a long while, captive to forces beyond his control.

Ai Weiwei had stepped out of detention and into a larger battle for influence in China's cultural life. Not long after the artist was released, President Hu Jintao vowed to shore up what he called China's “cultural security.” He warned that “international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China.” The president called on his countrymen to “sound the alarm and remain vigilant.” The Party was awakening to urgent questions: Who was going to define the boundaries of Chinese art, ideas, and entertainment? Who was the public going to trust: the government, the dissidents, the tycoons, the muckrakers?

The Party decided to take the recipe that had worked for the economy—planning, investment, and rule-making—and apply it to the world of culture. Some of the first targets were the choice shows that had come to dominate local television. The state ordered stations to remove “repetitive, excessive, and overabundant programs, including those about love, marriage, and friendship; talent shows; emotional stories; game shows; variety shows; talk shows and reality shows.” In three months, it cut the number of them by two-thirds and pledged to return television to the work of promoting “socialist core values.”

*   *   *

Artists, writers, and filmmakers were running out of patience. China was opening ten new movie screens a day, but its filmmakers were suffocating. The director Jia Zhangke complained that, to get a movie released in China, “I have to portray all the Communists as superheroes.” China churned out more television programming than any other country—more than fourteen thousand shows a year—but other countries didn't want them, so China imported fifteen times as much television content as it exported. When the campy Korean music video called “Gangnam Style” became a surprise hit—the most watched clip in the history of the Internet—Chinese artists complained that they could never have created it because the culture officials that preside over their work would never have permitted a silly spoof of Beijing's high-living elite and would, instead, have insisted that a music video for export be grand and impressive. The artists circulated a bitter comic strip called
Shanghai Style
, in which the creator of a Gangnam-style dance move is not showered in fortune but is, instead, incarcerated for “running crazily all over the place.”

Cultural figures were increasingly bitter. The film director Lu Chuan once agreed to produce a short film for the Beijing Olympics, but he was inundated with so many official “directions and orders” that he simply abandoned the project and coined a new term: the
Kung Fu Panda
problem. This describes the fact that the most successful film ever made about two of China's national symbols, kung fu and pandas, had to be made by a foreign studio (DreamWorks), because no Chinese filmmaker would ever have been allowed to have fun with such solemn subjects.

The censors at the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television had always worked in secrecy; they never publicized their orders, but now directors were taking their complaints to the public. In April 2013 the filmmaker Feng Xiaogang was giving a mundane acceptance speech for the Director of the Year award when he seized the chance to make a bold statement; he cut short his list of thank-yous and said, “For the last twenty years, every director in China has faced a kind of tremendous torment, and that torment is censorship.” Feng was no dissident; he'd made a bare-handed fortune on romantic comedies and big-budget epics, but the decades of compromises and concessions were rubbing a raw spot on his professional pride. “To get approval, I have to cut my films in ways that actually make them
worse
,” he told the audience. If his point wasn't clear enough, the censors unwittingly drove it home to viewers: while he was speaking, someone in the control booth hit a button just in time to censor Feng's reference to censorship; viewers at home heard him say, “that torment is [beep].”

Some of China's most creative people were concluding that the costs of playing by the rules outweigh the benefits. A few weeks after the director's outburst, the novelist and essayist Murong Xuecun reached his limits. When censors deleted his Weibo account, he published an essay called “Open Letter to a Nameless Censor.” “I am fully aware that this letter will cause me nothing but grief,” he wrote. “I once had fear, but from now on, I am no longer afraid … That is the difference between you and me, my dear nameless censor—I believe in the future, while all you have is the present.”

The struggle over creativity extended far beyond films and novels. China's economy was at a turning point: the age of cheap labor was ending, and Chinese leaders were desperately trying to foster innovation that could push the country beyond the assembly line. It was investing more in research and development than any country but the United States, and it had surpassed the United States and Japan to become the largest filer of patents. But many of them had little value; they had been filed to meet political targets or attract funding. China was producing more scientific papers than anywhere but the United States, but on measurements of quality (how often the average paper was cited by others), China was not even in the top ten. Academic fraud was rampant; a journal at the University of Zhejiang used CrossCheck software to scan for plagiarism and found that nearly a third of all the papers it received contained plagiarism or sections copied from previous papers. In a government-backed study of six thousand Chinese scientists, one-third admitted that they had fabricated data or plagiarized.

On the lush campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing, Xue Lan, the dean of the school of public policy, lamented that many of China's institutions were standing in the way of some of the country's most talented young people. For example, he said, in the era that cried out for risk-taking, the time of Bare-Handed Fortunes and Peasant da Vincis, the government launched a small-business innovation fund in 1999, but its bureaucratic DNA told it to place only safe bets. “They are concerned that, given that it's a public fund, if their failure rate is very high, the review will not be very good and the public will say, ‘Hey, you're wasting money,'” the dean told me. “But a venture capitalist would say, ‘It is natural that you'll have a lot of failures.'” Fostering the development of radical new ideas would take more than declaring the ambition to do so; it would require strong courts insulated from political interference and capable of protecting intellectual property, so that entrepreneurs could trust each other enough to put forward innovations and collaborate; it would require university labs where creative thinkers were free to challenge their bosses without fear of retribution or the interference of the Central Propaganda Department. Zhao Jing, a blogger and analyst who wrote under the name Michael Anti, asked, “If you can become a billionaire by blatantly plagiarizing an American website and then putting it on the market, who's going to go out and innovate?”

At times, the institutional reflex to exert control was breathtakingly counterproductive. At one point, Chinese programmers were barred from updating a popular software system called Node.js because the version number, 0.6.4, corresponded with June 4, the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. In another case, a digital design project named for the Swedish town of Falun ran aground because the Great Firewall interpreted the name as a reference to Falun Gong. A few days before Facebook went public, an investment banker and Harvard Business School graduate named Wang Ran, the founder of China eCapital, flipped through the company prospectus and saw a sentence reminding investors that Facebook was blocked in four countries: Iran, North Korea, Syria, and China. Seeing China listed among some of the world's most dysfunctional states was startling. “I don't know about you,” he wrote to his millions of social media followers, “but I'm beginning to think this state of affairs is insulting.” Behind the sting of that embarrassment was a question—a deep question about China's future: How could China ever hope to invent the next big thing, the next Facebook, if it didn't dare to let its people use this one?