Age of Ambition (6 page)

In his office one afternoon, I mentioned to Lin that people in Taiwan speculated that he had given military secrets to the People's Liberation Army, to prove that he was trustworthy. He had heard this, too. He laughed wearily. “That's nonsense,” he said. “I didn't come with anything other than what I wore.” He noted that by the time he fled, China was calling for reunification, and a junior officer's secrets would have been of limited use. He disputed the military investigators' reports that he'd defected partly out of professional frustration, and that he had misled the sentries in order to conceal his departure. He framed his swim as an act of idealism. “I still believe that my friends in Taiwan had the same aspiration to make a contribution to China. I respect their aspiration. This is just the way I think I can contribute to China's history. It was my personal choice.”

It was, by mainland Chinese standards, a radical act: historically, personal choice was a low priority for the Chinese, for reasons both modern and ancient, including, in the beginning, the land itself. Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who studies cultural differences in how people see the world, found that in ancient China, fertile plains and rivers lent themselves to rice farming that required irrigation and compelled people “to cultivate the land in concert with one another.” By contrast, the ancient Greeks, who lived amid mountains and coastlines, relied on herding, trading, and fishing, and they were able to be more independent. In that history, Nisbett saw the makings of Greek ideas about personal freedom, individuality, and objective thought.

The sense that an individual was embedded in larger forces ran through Chinese art, politics, and society. The philosopher Xunzi, in the third century
B.C.E.
, believed that only social rituals and models could control individual “wayward” appetites, just as steam and pressure could straighten a warped slab of wood. One of China's most famous classical paintings, an eleventh-century scroll by Fan Kuan entitled
Travelers Among Mountains and Streams
, is often called China's Mona Lisa. But compared to Leonardo's full-frame portrait, Fan Kuan's work depicts a tiny figure of a horseman enveloped by vast, misty mountains. In imperial Chinese law, the courts considered not only motive but also the damage to the social order, so a defendant received a harsher sentence if he murdered someone of a higher social rank than someone of a lower rank. Punishment was collective: judges sentenced not just the guilty individual but also family members, neighbors, and community leaders.

Liang Qichao, one of China's leading reformers of the early twentieth century, hailed the importance of the individual in national development, but renounced that view after he visited San Francisco's Chinatown in 1903 and concluded that the competition between separate Chinese clans and families was preventing Chinese people from prospering. “If we were to adopt a democratic system of government now,” he wrote, “it would be nothing less than committing national suicide.”

He dreamed of what he called a Chinese Cromwell, “to carry out harsh rule, and with iron and fire to forge and temper our countrymen for twenty, thirty, even fifty years. After that we can give them the books of Rousseau and tell them about the deeds of Washington.” Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary who became president after the fall of the empire in 1911, concluded that China was weak because its people were a “sheet of loose sand.” His prescription? “The individual should not have too much liberty,” he said, “but the nation should have complete liberty.” He encouraged people to think of the government as a “great automobile” and its leaders as essential “chauffeurs and mechanics” who require a free hand to operate.

China had always had poets, writers, and revolutionaries—whom the authors Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin have called the “unbound feet” of Chinese history—but Chairman Mao was determined to enshrine the idea that “the individual is subordinate to the organization.” The Party, he declared, must “eradicate all tendencies towards disunity.” It organized people into work units and collective farms. Without a letter from your
danwei
(“work unit”), you couldn't get married or divorced, you couldn't buy a plane ticket or stay in a hotel, or, for that matter, visit another
danwei
. Most days, you lived, worked, shopped, and studied within its confines. To identify and correct individualistic thinking, Mao relied on propaganda and education—“Thought Reform,” as he called it, which became known colloquially as
xinao
, or “mind-cleansing.” (In 1950, a CIA officer who learned of it coined the term
brainwashing
.)

To enliven its message, the Party promoted models of sacrifice. In 1959, newspapers highlighted a soldier named Lei Feng who was five feet tall and called himself a “tiny screw” in the revolutionary machine. He appeared in a traveling photo exhibition, with images such as “Shoveling Manure to Help the Liaoning People's Commune” and “Lei Feng Darning Socks.” After the army announced that the young soldier had died in an accident (struck by a falling telephone pole), Chairman Mao advised people to “learn from Comrade Lei Feng,” and for decades to come, local museums displayed replicas of his sandals, his toothbrush, and other effects—like the bones of saints.

The pressure to conform was profound. A doctor who was terrorized during the Cultural Revolution—exiled to the western desert, where his wife committed suicide—later said, “To survive in China you must reveal nothing to others. Or it could be used against you … That's why I've come to think the deepest part of the self is best left unclear. Like mist and clouds in a Chinese landscape painting, hide the private part behind your social persona. Let your public self be like rice in a dinner: bland and inconspicuous, taking on the flavors of its surroundings while giving off no flavor of its own.”

*   *   *

As change gathered speed in the 1980s, Chinese leaders warned that the nation must cross the river by “feeling for the stones.” In reality, many people swept into the current of China's transformation found they had no choice but to plunge in and swim as fast as possible, with only the vaguest sense of what might lie on the other side.

On paper, China remained suspicious of the individual; even after reforms were under way, the 1980 edition of the country's authoritative dictionary,
The Sea of Words
, defined
individualism
as “the heart of the Bourgeois worldview, behavior that benefits oneself at the expense of others.” And nothing was more abhorrent to the Communist Party than the language of Thatcherist free-market fundamentalism. But China was enacting some of its most basic ideas: the retreat of public services, hostility to trade unions, national and military pride.

All over China, people were embarking on journeys, joining the largest migration in human history. China's extraordinary growth relied on a combination of abundant cheap labor and a surge of investment in factories and infrastructure—a recipe that uncorked economic energy stored up during the years of turmoil under Mao. Party leader Zhao Ziyang surrounded himself with economists who sought to emulate the growth of South Korea and Japan. To thrive, they had to be flexible. Wu Jinglian, a researcher in a state think tank, had begun his career as an orthodox socialist who persuaded his high school to give up teaching English and Western economics. But during the Cultural Revolution, his wife, the director of a kindergarten, was labeled a “capitalist roader” because her father had been a general in the Nationalist Army; Red Guards shaved half of her head. Wu himself was tagged an “antirevolutionary” and sent off to “reform through labor.” “I experienced a drastic change in ideology,” he told me. By the eighties, Wu was a leading expert on the free market, even though that term was too controversial to utter. Wu had to call it “the commodity economy.”

Beginning in 1980, China designated special economic zones, which used tax advantages to attract foreign investment, technology, and links to customers abroad. The zones needed workers. Since the fifties, the Party had controlled where people lived by dividing households into two types: rural and urban. The distinction ordained where you were born, schooled, employed, and, most likely, buried. With few exceptions, only the Public Security Bureau could change your household registration, or
hukou.
But new machines and fertilizers demanded fewer hands in the fields, and in 1985 the government officially permitted rural people to live and work temporarily in cities. In the next eight years, the number of rural migrants reached a hundred million. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping let it be known that prosperity was paramount: “Development,” he said, after visiting a refrigerator factory that had expanded sixteenfold in seven years, “is the only hard truth.” Between 1993 and 2005, state-owned enterprises cut more than seventy-three million jobs, sending another flood of workers off to find a new source of income. Chinese leaders kept their currency undervalued, which made exports cheap, and these soared. In 1999, China's exports had been less than a third of America's. A decade later, China was the world's largest exporter.

Autonomy was creeping into daily life. In Mao's day, it had been considered immoral to take a second job, because spare time belonged to the state. By the nineties, so many people were moonlighting that there was a boom in the business of printing business cards. The state media, which had once encouraged everyone to be “a rustless screw” in the machine, now acknowledged the new reality of competition: “You must rely on yourself,” the
Hebei Economic Daily
wrote. “Blaze your own path, and fight.” People made money in whatever ways they could. In poor areas, door-to-door blood buyers offered to help cover the cost of taxes and school fees. Jing Jun, a Harvard-trained anthropologist, found that people were donating so often that they ran up against physical limits. “So the blood contractors would hang people upside down by their feet against a wall to make the blood flow down into the arms,” he wrote. (The business proved disastrous; by the mid-nineties, the blood collectors had caused China's worst outbreak of HIV. An estimated fifty-seven thousand people were infected.)

The language of the individual filtered out through movies and fashions and music. Jia Zhangke, a filmmaker, recalled to me that when he was growing up in Shanxi coal country in the eighties, he would ride the bus for four hours just to buy a cassette of mushy pop ballads by Deng Lijun, a Taiwanese star so popular that Lin Yifu's military unit on Quemoy had played her music over the radio to attract defectors. Since she had the same surname as Deng Xiaoping, the soldiers on the mainland joked that they listed to Old Deng all day and Young Deng all night. “Before that, the songs we sang were ‘We Are the Heirs of Communism' and ‘We Workers Have Power.' It was always ‘we,'” Jia told me. “But in Deng Lijun's song ‘The Moon Represents My Heart,' it was about ‘me.'
My
heart. And of course we loved it!”

Companies reinforced that message. China Mobile sold cell phone service aimed at people under twenty-five, using the slogan “My Turf, My Decision.” Even in rural areas, where things changed slowly, people spoke of themselves in different ways. Mette Halskov Hansen, a Norwegian sinologist who spent four years in a countryside school, found that teachers were trying to prepare their students for a world in which survival required “self-reliance, self-promotion, and the self-made individual.” Hansen watched a pep rally in 2008 in which students recited a pledge: “Ever since God created all things on earth, there has not been one person like me. My eyes and my ears, my brain and my soul, all are exceptional. Nobody speaks or behaves like me, no one before me and no one will after me. I am the biggest miracle of nature!”

The desire to leave—to “go out,” as it was known—swept through villages. It didn't necessarily engulf the men and women who were most successful or confident. On the contrary, it often settled on the misfits—the restless, the willful, the unblessed. On the day the teenager Gong Hainan was seized by the desire to leave, her mother and her father hesitated. She was their only daughter, and they were country people with no knowledge of the city. But once their daughter had an idea in her mind, she drove it like a mule. “They had no choice but to agree,” Gong told me.

*   *   *

Gong Hainan was born at the foot of a mountain in the village of Waduangang, in Hunan, the home province of Chairman Mao. Her parents met under benighted circumstances. During the Cultural Revolution, they were paired with each other because they shared a political affliction: their families had been classified as “well-off peasants.” A village matchmaker put them together. Gong's family raised peanuts and cotton and chickens and pigs. She was the elder of two children, and she was small and sickly. She had narrow shoulders and thin lips, and her face at rest carried a wary expression. In the hierarchy of village life, this did her no favors. The local boys wanted girls with plump cheeks, and lips in the shape of a rosebud. “If anyone ever liked me, I have yet to hear about it,” Gong told me years later, when we got to know each other in Beijing.

But even as a child, Gong had a restless energy. When her neighbors began to open tiny businesses, Gong badgered her parents to let her join the trend. They laughed. “We have three neighbors, and a mountain behind us. Who is going to shop here?” they asked. Undeterred, Gong enlisted her little brother, Haibin, into a business proposition: They would buy ice pops and resell them door-to-door. After one day of lugging a thirty-pound Styrofoam cooler around the rutted village paths, her brother quit. “I could've beaten him half to death and he wouldn't go out again,” she said. But Gong made a map of the village that identified which parents were known to cave in to their kids' demands, and she charted the optimal route. Soon she was selling two boxes a day. “Whatever you're doing,” she concluded, “you have to be strategic.”