Age of Ambition (55 page)

Michael and I stepped back into the noonday sun. After his claustrophobic room, the outdoors felt cool and wide open. He had wanted me to see his boardinghouse, but now he seemed self-conscious. “I can't stand it there,” he said as we walked away. The conditions embarrassed him. “Next door, ten girls live together, and we go to the same restroom, the same toilets. I hate it.” The problem was not discomfort. “It's a waste of my life,” he said. “I can't stay with this kind of people.” Some of his roommates were unemployed, and they hung around the room sleeping, eating, and playing video games. “It ruins my energy,” he said. “It kills my passion for everything—my life, career.”

As we walked, he seemed suddenly aware of how his life looked to another person, and it stirred a vocabulary question. “What is the English word for someone like this?” he asked.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like me,” he said.

I thought about it for a moment, and before I could answer, he volunteered an idea: “
Low society
?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “We don't really have a good word in English.”

We walked on. “When I need some help in English, I always search the Internet. If I can't find the answer, I ask you,” he said. I felt I owed him an answer to his question about himself. He was far better off than those in the countryside, but he was stuck on the margins of success. “I think we can call you ‘aspiring middle class,'” I said finally. Michael asked me to write it on a piece of paper from my notebook, and he put it in his pocket.

We stopped in front of a low-end real estate office that had advertisements in the window. I scanned the offerings to see if there were any rentals that might get him out of the Ant Tribe. But the cheapest place on offer was 120 square feet for three hundred dollars a month. It was more than Michael usually earned in a month.

*   *   *

In the end, Michael's experience in the capital did not fulfill his expectations. He didn't trust the men at the publishing house. “They just want to take my work and put their names on it,” he said. He decided to go back down south to keep writing a book of his own. Before he left, I took him to lunch. It was partly to say goodbye—I was moving soon—but I also wanted to encourage him to set his sights on a more concrete goal. Rattling around that apartment with his parents in Qingyuan didn't strike me as a perfect plan, and I hoped that he would consider working with other people again. He was careening from one inspiration to another, and his determination to succeed on his own terms only deepened his isolation.

“You don't need to worry about me,” he said. “I'm a tough man.” Toughness was not what I worried about. If anything, he reminded me of a turtle that Steinbeck once described—inching across a highway, “turning aside for nothing”; it got clipped by a truck and it lay still, before it righted itself and trudged on, “drawing a wavy shallow trench in the dust.” When we talked, Michael often seemed torn between wanting to present himself as a success and wanting to admit how difficult things were along the way. He oscillated between bluster and self-pity. One moment, he said, “I hate the English industry,” and cursed the people he thought were trying to take his ideas without giving him credit. The next moment, he said, “I want to teach English as a religion. I have a plan for my career: five years, ten years.” After a moment, his confidence wavered. “Chinese people are so dirty,” he said. “At least forty percent of them.”

The truth was that Michael didn't have much time to ruminate. He felt the ticking of the clock. He was twenty-eight years old. “In China, when you're thirty, you have to be financially independent,” he said. That was an imposing deadline. He thought about it for a second, and then he brightened. “Maybe next year you'll go into a bookstore and see my books on the shelf,” he said. “Can you believe it?” Yes, I said. Somehow I could.

It was a weekend, and for once we lingered at the lunch table. The crowd thinned out. Michael brought up the subject of his father's experience in the coal mines. It had been a supremely dangerous way of life. Once, in Mine Number Five, where Michael grew up, a single accident killed forty-nine miners. It wasn't unusual; despite recent improvements, an average of sixty coal miners still died in China every week. Michael said of his father, “He worked at least fourteen hours a day. He was up at five a.m., and he didn't say a word to my mother and me. I didn't understand why.” Only later did Michael come to understand some of the pressures his father had faced. “He had to support four children going to school,” Michael said. “He never complained.”

There was, however, a part of his father's life that Michael would never be able to understand. “Many of his friends died, but you can't even find their names in books.” For decades the detailed accounting of those who perished in China's mines and work sites and factories—the casualties of China's rise—was classified. The government issued broad statistics, but the details on who died and how remained state secrets. “They just said Mine Number One or Mine Number Two, and that's all,” Michael said. The idea that his father's coworkers had died as invisible individuals was so far outside the realm of Michael's view of himself and the world that he found it impossible to absorb. He spent so much of his time fantasizing about recognition—about publishing his work, about the adoration of a crowd, about becoming known—that the idea of namelessness mystified him. He was repelled by anonymity in a way that reminded me of Ai Weiwei's search for the names of the children killed in the earthquake. Michael wasn't remotely interested in politics, but for him, a name was about dignity, and there was nothing political about that.

The next morning, Michael boarded a homebound train. It would take thirteen hours to reach Qingyuan. He hoped to graduate someday to the high-speed trains running from the flying-saucer-shaped station, but that day hadn't yet arrived. For now, he bore the weight of the past that had defined him and the future he wanted so desperately to create. He was divided between the old-world expectation to accommodate and the modern pressure to stand on his own. As always, he wrote about it in a passage for his students to recite, and it sounded, to my ear, like a mantra, a Hail Mary, an incantation. But it was a prayer only to themselves: “I will completely accept everything I was born with,” they said, “and I will do my best to change it.”

 

EPILOGUE

 

For a fragile moment, in my final months in Beijing, the Communist Party succeeded in transporting a city of twenty million people back to a simpler time. In November 2012 the Party set about cleaning up the capital for its most hallowed occasion in a decade: the Eighteenth Party Congress, a meeting of more than two thousand delegates that would culminate in the unveiling of a new Politburo charged with leading the People's Republic into the future. In preparation, the Central Propaganda Department called on its offices across the country to create an “atmosphere for expression that will facilitate the victorious convening of the Eighteenth Party Congress, and create a mass upsurge of online propaganda.” The censors cut off the latest conversations about corruption and intrigue, they blocked the newest double entendre, and they silenced the sources of intolerable humor: When Zhai Xiaobing, a man who worked at an investment fund in Beijing, tweeted a geeky joke that compared the meeting to a new apocalypse movie, he was arrested and held for three weeks.

The Party was no less vigilant against threats in the physical realm. Taxi companies ordered drivers to remove the hand cranks from the rear windows of their cabs, to prevent passengers from distributing what the orders called “balloons that bear slogans or Ping-Pong balls bearing reactionary messages.” The windows of public buses were taped shut. The city banned pleasure boats from the lakes, barred the sale of remote-control children's airplanes, and ordered pet pigeons to be confined to their cages—perhaps, though it was never explained, to prevent them from carrying explosives. In front of the Great Hall of the People, special firefighting crews were posted, because Tibetans had taken to lighting themselves on fire in protest of Beijing's political and religious policies in their homeland. As long as the meeting was in session, the only Tibetans at the Great Hall were members of the official Tibetan delegation, who brought news that Lhasa, their capital, had been voted “the happiest city in China” four times in the last five years.

To welcome the gathering, outgoing president Hu Jintao delivered his final public speech. He titled it, “Firmly March on the Path of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and Strive to Complete the Building of a Moderately Prosperous Society in all Respects.” The most memorable line was pithier: “We will never copy a Western political system,” he said. The state news service reported on a delegate who was so moved by the speech that she “wept five times”; another said her hands went numb from thirty-five rounds of applause.

After the congress had been in session for a week, I wedged into a crowd of reporters for the moment that everyone had been waiting for: the unveiling of the new Standing Committee of the Politburo. It consisted of seven men: five who would serve for five years, and the president and premier, who were expected to serve for ten. The occasion was called a “Meet the Press” opportunity, though the press was not permitted to ask questions. First onstage was the man who would become president: general secretary of the Party Xi Jinping. He hailed from a fine revolutionary family—his father had been one of the Party's hallowed elders, known as the “Eight Immortals”—and in person, he was a striking contrast to his predecessor. Xi was a ruddy-cheeked bear of a figure, with a rich radio voice and a penchant for roomy Western suits. The full picture evoked Jackie Gleason more than Zhou Enlai. “Our people love life,” he said. “They hope for better education, more stable jobs, more satisfactory incomes, more reliable social guarantees, higher-level medical and health services, more comfortable living conditions, a more beautiful environment, and they hope that their children can grow up better, work better, and live better. The wishes of our people for better lives are the goals of our struggles.”

His language was refreshing and largely free of Party hymns. And yet the tableau of Xi and the men by his side testified to the Party's determination to prevent its future from looking very different from its past: four out of the seven men who would now lead the country were members of aristocratic Communist families; the Party had once taken pains to avoid the perception of nepotism, but now it placed political reliability above all, and the incoming generation included a larger share of hereditary rule at the top than any time in the history of the People's Republic. Outwardly, the Party had vowed to select officials in a “democratic, open, competitive and merits-based” way, but political watchers had been able to predict the lineup by tracking the backroom negotiations among families, Party elders, and powerful factions. Reform-minded candidates had not been chosen; the winners were committed conservatives. Liu Yunshan was a seasoned propagandist. Zhang Dejiang had received his economics training in North Korea. Their faith in precedent and conformity extended to their looks: All but one of them took the stage in dark suits and red ties. Without exception, their hair was dyed to the same featureless black sheen.

*   *   *

When the seven men appeared together for the first time outside the Great Hall, two weeks later, they chose as a symbolic backdrop not a picture of the future—a technology company, say, or a university—but rather, an exhibit at the National Museum: “The Road to Rejuvenation,” a political showcase that depicted, as the museum put it, China's “downfall into an abyss of semi-imperial and semi-feudal society” and its rescue at the hands of the Party. Standing before the exhibit, Xi said, “Everyone has his own ideals, aspirations and dreams … The greatest dream of the Chinese people in recent times has been to realize the great revival of the Chinese nation … No one will be well-off unless the state and the nation are well-off.”

Soon his reference to the “Chinese Dream” was a slogan on billboards and television. In one week, the Chinese Dream appeared twenty-four times on the front page of the
People's Daily
. There was a new talent show called the
Voice of the Chinese Dream
, and the Party dispatched “Spirit Explanation Teams” to nonsocialist countries to spread the word. Scientists were encouraged to submit Chinese Dream research proposals, and artists were urged to make Chinese Dream “masterworks.” Xi encouraged the military to have a “strong-army dream,” and the Party's propaganda chief, Liu Yunshan, ordered it written into textbooks to ensure that it “enters students' brains.”

The Chinese Dream was partly a statement of fact—China
was
reviving—and partly an acknowledgment of China's ambitions. Some aspirations would be easier to fulfill than others. To remain the Party in Power, the Communist Party knew it must continue to allow people to prosper. It planned to build another hundred thousand miles of highways, another fifty new airports, and more than five thousand additional miles of high-speed rail. But the new administration knew that ordinary people had more immediate concerns, and once it was in office, it vowed to boost the lowest incomes and allow depositors to earn more on their savings.

Satisfying the pursuit of truth looked to be more difficult. In its first six decades in power, the Communist Party maintained stability with the help of censorship, secrecy, and intimidation, but it now faced a culture of skepticism and disclosure, and growing freedom from fear. The Central Propaganda Department, with its modern walls and pagoda roof, still stood on the Avenue of Eternal Peace—a monument to doublethink. Riding by for the last time, it occurred to me that I would know that Chinese leaders had absorbed the reality around them if the Department got a sign on its headquarters.