Age of Ambition (5 page)

I peered up at the woman and asked, “How long have you been there?”

“Three weeks,” she said.

“How many of you are up there?”

“Fifteen,” she said.

It was an odd arrangement for an interview. I was standing beneath the window, and she was looking down through the fence. I looked up and down the block, where people were going about their lives. There was a hair salon on one side and a fruit stand on the other.

The local family-planning office occupied a storefront across the street. I walked in and asked about the people detained above the fertilizer store. A man behind a desk named Wan Zhendong, the head of the office's statistics department, said he knew nothing about any detention center, adding that people who complain about being detained are usually trying to avoid paying fines for having too many children. “The policy,” Wan said, “is accepted by ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people here.”

Once I returned to Beijing, I called Chen Guangcheng, the blind masseur. Every time I dialed, the line was dead. I didn't get through for months. A lawyer named Teng Biao wasn't surprised when I described the scene in Nigou. People were beginning to call these detention centers “black jails.” It was difficult to figure out how many there were or where they were located. You had to look for them, town by town. “It is very hard for people there to get information to lawyers and the media,” he told me. “The local authorities will try their best to make sure nobody knows about it.”

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The Internet was largely a mystery in Dongshigu village, but no longer in Beijing. Initially, the Chinese government had regarded the Internet as an opportunity: the country had arrived late to the Industrial Revolution, and Chinese leaders hoped that the information revolution could help the country close the gap with the West. But the enthusiasm cooled. In 2001, President Jiang Zemin identified the Internet as a “political, ideological, and cultural battlefield.” The week I returned from Shandong, the Ministry of Public Security expanded a list of information officially “prohibited” from the Web. Whenever possible, the government liked to organize the world by category, and it had already banned a list of nine types of information, including “rumors” and anything that “damages the credibility” of the state. Now it expanded the list from nine to eleven, including “information inciting illegal assemblies” and “information concerning activities of illegal civic associations.”

The scale of available information was soaring. At the beginning of 2005, China had about one million bloggers; by the end, this figure had quadrupled, and the government ordered Internet companies to set up a system of “self-discipline” to censor and monitor the way people used the Web. Bit by bit, the Party was erecting what came to be known as the Great Firewall—a vast digital barricade that prevented Chinese users from seeing newspaper stories critical of China's top leaders or reports from human rights groups; eventually, it blocked social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Unlike the physical Great Wall, the digital version grew or shrank to meet new challenges or convey a sense of openness. Often, I didn't know something was off-limits until I typed it in and received an error code such as HTTP 404—the page cannot be found.

The Party grew more determined to punish those who tried to undermine its control of information. The previous year, 2004, a journalist named Shi Tao, who worked at Contemporary Business News in Hunan Province, attended a staff meeting in which an editor relayed the latest instructions about what subjects could not be published around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. That night, Shi logged on to his e-mail account ([email protected]) and sent a summary of the Party document to an editor of Democracy Forum, a pro-democracy website based in New York. Two days later, the Beijing State Security Bureau contacted Yahoo! China and asked for the name behind the account, the contents of the e-mail, and the locations from which the e-mail was accessed. Yahoo! complied, and on November 23, 2004, Shi Tao was arrested and later charged with “leaking state secrets.” His trial lasted two hours; he was found guilty and sentenced to ten years.

The case was the clearest demonstration of the force with which the government would seek to maintain control over an uncertain new challenge. When human rights groups criticized Yahoo! for handing over the information, the company's cofounder Jerry Yang replied, “If you want to do business there you have to comply.” Members of the U.S. Congress took note. At a subcommittee hearing on the Internet in China, Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, wondered, “If the secret police a half century ago asked where Anne Frank was hiding, would the correct answer be to hand over the information in order to comply with local laws?” Yahoo! held firm, and when Shi Tao's mother sued the company for exposing her son to harm, Yahoo! filed a motion to dismiss.

Over time, the pressure on the company became unbearable. In the fall of 2007, Rep. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to have served in Congress, called Yang and other Internet executives before the House Foreign Relations Committee and said, “Morally you are pygmies.” Shi Tao's mother gave tearful testimony, and when it was over, Yang bowed to her three times and said, “I want to personally apologize.” Yahoo! settled with her family, but the son remained in jail. Inside China, the message was indelible: the Internet would never be a domain of free expression.

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The Global Trade Mansion was too quiet and too expensive, and I needed more chances to practice Chinese: When I called my landlord to suggest that he keep the security deposit as my final month's rent, I mistakenly told him to keep the security deposit as my final month's “menstruation.”

Large parts of the city had been demolished and rebuilt in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. The Beijing-born author Zha Jianying, who returned to the capital after studying in the United States, quoted a friend describing the city as a place where it was becoming impossible to find a place “to hang up one's birdcage.” The few surviving sections of old Beijing consisted mostly of tiny alleyways lined by single-story homes of gray brick, wood, and tile. The arrangement had remained more or less the same for seven centuries, when sections of the city were laid out under the Yuan dynasty, which gave these streets the name
hutong
, a Mongolian term that came to mean “alley” in Chinese. The Mongols had designed the
hutong
to uniform widths of twelve or twenty-four paces. In 1980 the city had six thousand
hutong
; over the years, all but a few hundred were leveled to make way for office buildings and apartment complexes. Only one of the city's forty-four princely palaces had survived intact.

I asked around and found a one-story house for rent at No. 45 Caochang Bei Xiang. Most people in these old homes used a communal public toilet around the corner from my front door. But this house had been fitted with indoor plumbing, and renovated to comprise four modern rooms surrounding a small courtyard that contained a date tree and a persimmon tree. When I reported my new address to the
Chicago Tribune
's driver, Old Zhang, he did not approve. “You're going the wrong direction,” he said. “You should be moving from the ground into an apartment up in the air, not the other way around.”

The walls of the house were porous; when it rained, the ceiling leaked, and when the winter overwhelmed the heating, I wore a ski hat around the house. Underfoot, there was a steady traffic of mice and beetles and geckos, and now and then I had to wallop a scorpion with a magazine. But it was a relief to live with the windows open, and I loved it. Across the alley, my neighbor kept a pigeon coop on his roof, as a hobby. He attached wooden pipettes to the birds' feet so they whistled as they flew in great circles above our heads.

The window above my desk was filled with a view of Beijing's ancient Drum Tower, a soaring wooden pavilion built in 1272. For hundreds of years the Drum Tower, and its neighbor the Bell Tower, kept time for the people of the city, telling them when to sleep and when to rise. They were the tallest buildings for miles around. The Drum Tower contained twenty-four giant leather-covered drums, large enough that their thundering could be heard in the farthest reaches of the capital.

Chinese emperors were obsessed with controlling the passing of the seasons and the hours of the day. In the spring, the emperor decreed the precise moment when members of the court could change out of their furs and into their silk; in the fall, the emperor decreed the right moment for the raking of leaves. Controlling time was so closely associated with imperial power that when foreign armies invaded Beijing in 1900, they made a point to climb the Drum Tower and slash the leather drums with bayonets. For a while, the Chinese renamed it the Realizing Humiliation Tower.

 

THREE

BAPTIZED IN CIVILIZATION

 

The soldiers hauled Lin Zhengyi from the water and onto the beach. It was the dead of night, May 16, 1979. They suspected he was a spy; they had never encountered a soldier who had swum from Taiwan.

Back in Taiwan, Lin's commanders didn't know what to think. They suspected he had tried to defect, but had he succeeded, the loudspeakers across the water, they thought, would be gloating about his arrival. Perhaps he had drowned. Or perhaps he had been a mainland spy all along. Regardless, the abrupt disappearance of one of Taiwan's most celebrated soldiers was humiliating. The army classified Lin as missing, then dead, and awarded his wife, Chen, the equivalent of thirty thousand dollars in benefits. She was pregnant and alone, raising their three-year-old son. To protect her from retaliation, Lin had told her nothing of his plans. At the family shrine, Lin's parents added a memorial tablet inscribed with his name.

On the mainland, Lin was held in custody and questioned for three months. Once he had persuaded them that he was not a spy, he was released and allowed to travel. In a country where most people were still reeling from the Cultural Revolution, he regarded Mao's legacy with the passion of the convert, and he made a pilgrimage to Yan'an, the wartime headquarters of the Communist Party, “to be educated,” he told me.

He also went to Sichuan to see the ancient dam built by his hero Li Bing. From a ledge overlooking the roiling waters, he peered into the channel, which was often described as a symbol of how far China had fallen in the two thousand years since the dam was built. But Lin took it as a source of inspiration to do something bold. “I think that if we do something, we can change the fate of people, change the fate of the nation for a thousand years.”

The exhilaration of defection was tempered by the shameful fact that he had left his family behind. “I love my wife. I love my children. I love my family. I feel responsibility for them,” he told me. “As an intellectual, I also feel strongly my responsibility for the culture and the prosperity in China. If I have a strong belief in what is right, then I need to follow that.”

In the months after he arrived, contacting his wife was out of the question. Taiwan's military government was undoubtedly monitoring her for clues about Lin's fate. He remembered a cousin who was studying in Tokyo and he wrote him a letter: “You are now the only relative I can contact. But you must be careful. Don't give the Nationalists any evidence they could use against you. I have a message to pass along, but you must deliver it verbally, and leave no traces.” Lin asked him to buy birthday presents for Chen and the children, and to sign them “Fangfang,” his family nickname. In his letter, Lin confessed, “Even though a man must have great aspirations, and be aware of his duties beyond emotions and attachments to family, I am more and more homesick by the day.” He worried about his parents, his son, and his newborn daughter. Of his son, he said, “Xiao Long is three years old now, the age when he most needs a father, but he only has his mother. Xiao Lin has never even laid eyes on her father … To all of them, words cannot express my apology.” He remained bitter that Taiwan's government had assigned him tasks that were more about propaganda than advancement. “The Nationalists were only using me, never nurturing me,” he wrote. He gushed about the changes under way in China in the early months of the economic boom unleashed by Deng: “Almost everyone has enough food and clothing these days … Things are flying ahead in leaps of progress. People are full of vitality and confidence. I truly believe that China's future is bright. Someday you'll be proud to be Chinese, to stand up in the world with your head held high and your chest puffed out.”

But once the novelty wore off, life for defectors was hard. Huang Zhi-cheng, a Taiwanese pilot who landed his plane on the mainland in 1981, recalled, “At first, it's hello, hello, and then they leave you to fend for yourself.”

Lin applied to study economics at People's University in Beijing and was rejected. His official file, the
dang'an
, contained every suspicion ever raised about his political history. For Lin, defection would always be a cause for suspicion; in the language of the day, people said he had “origins unclear.” After the rejection, he applied to Peking University. Dong Wenjun, an administrator, worried that Lin might turn out to be a spy, but ultimately decided, as he put it later, that there was “no intelligence to be gathered in the economics department anyway.” Lin was accepted.

Lin told his classmates that he was a student from Singapore. In return for his defection, he had asked the People's Liberation Army not to publicize his story for propaganda purposes. He had seen the brochures that washed up in Quemoy, heralding defectors, but he didn't want to be featured that way. He gave up the name Lin Zhengyi. From now on he would be Lin Yifu, which meant “a persistent man on a long journey.”

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