Age of Ambition (40 page)

I had trouble staying up-to-date. There was a local Shanxi official caught with four wives and ten kids in the land of the one-child policy. And there was the memorable footage of a Party secretary named Lei Zhengfu in strenuous exertion with a woman one-third his age who, in an added twist, had been hired by a local real estate developer to seduce Lei for blackmail. (He was a portly, ranine figure, and Chinese Web users paired his photo with that of Jabba the Hutt, the blubbery villain from
Star Wars
films.)

The last case I saw before I gave up bothering to keep track of such reports was about the police chief in the county of Usu. When he was found to be in a pair of simultaneous love affairs with women whom he had promoted through the ranks of the police force—while keeping them in a luxurious apartment funded by taxpayers—his office released a clarification that must have felt like good news under the circumstances: the police chief's two mistresses were not
twin
sisters, they were
just sisters
. When I read this detail, I stopped chewing my lunch and looked up, blinking, while I absorbed the full scale of it; the “just sisters” defense seemed to set a new watermark for the image of Chinese public servants.

*   *   *

The ephemera was so absurd that it was easy to overlook that it undermined one of the pillars of Party rule: for thousands of years, Chinese leaders had relied on the notion of
de zhi
—“rule by virtue.” “When a prince's personal conduct is correct,” Confucius said, “his government is effective without the issuing of orders. If his personal conduct is not correct, he may issue orders, but they will not be followed.” Similarly, the Communist Party's authority rested on the notion that even if local bureaucrats were corrupt, its top leaders so exemplified wisdom, justice, and meritocracy that dissent and direct elections were superfluous and obsolete. President Hu Jintao said that “the cultivation of personal moral integrity is considered the most basic quality for an honest official.” When the government was seen to be violating the principle of “rule by virtue,” public reaction could be intense: in the eighties, the uprising at Tiananmen Square was fed in large part by an upswell in corruption.

In the more recent upswell, the Party's virtue problem was reflected most acutely, perhaps, in a video that captivated people in China even more than the tawdriest clips: when local reporters asked a group of six-year-olds what they wanted to be when they grew up, the kids ran through the usual list—firefighters, pilots, artists—until one small boy said, “I want to be an official.”

“What sort of official?” the reporter asked.

“A corrupt official,” the boy said, “because they have lots of things.”

The news of extraordinary wealth reached ever higher in the ranks. In June 2012, Bloomberg News used corporate documents and interviews to calculate that the extended family of China's incoming president, Xi Jinping, had accumulated assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That wealth was hard for the Party to explain, so it decided not to try: within twenty-four hours, the government blocked the Bloomberg website—it would stay blocked in China for the foreseeable future—and it barred Chinese banks and companies from signing new contracts for use of Bloomberg terminals. It would cost the company millions in lost sales and advertising.

As pressure built on China's leaders, some of their supporters raged against the revelations—and the rage burst through in strange ways that trickled into our lives. One afternoon my wife, Sarabeth, who worked for a nonprofit education organization, received a call from a woman she knew professionally, the wife of a Chinese professor with close ties to the Party. They were a worldly couple—a child in the Ivy League and deep connections with senior leaders—and she asked Sarabeth for a chat at a nearby mall. At Starbucks, beside the Apple Store, the woman asked about my work as a journalist, and if I was friends with Michael Forsythe, a Bloomberg reporter who had published the details about Xi Jinping's family fortune. She had a warning for Sarabeth to relay to me, and for me to relay to Mike. “He and his family can't stay in China. It's no longer safe,” she said. “Something will happen. It will look like an accident. Nobody will know what happened. He'll just be found dead.”

Sarabeth, whose experience in such matters was limited, was mystified. Was this for real? Why was this woman talking to her about it? Sarabeth absorbed what she could and asked the woman who was behind the threat. “Not his family directly,” the woman said, referring to the president. “It's people around him who want to show their loyalty.”

I called Mike and reached him in Europe, where he was on vacation with his wife and sons. He told me that he had received the threat, through another intermediary. He had previously met the professor's wife, because she was working as a public relations consultant for members of the president's family. Now he didn't know what to think. Was she trying to help him? Or was she trying to drive him out of the country? The news of their wealth had been a PR disaster, and forcing him to leave might prevent further disclosures. It was the intersection of modern media and gangland politics.

Security experts working for Bloomberg investigated the threat—conducting interviews, examining connections—and in the end they decided that Mike and his family could safely return to Beijing. But the incident was difficult to forget. Within a year, he and his family left the mainland and moved to Hong Kong. (In 2013, he left Bloomberg.)

If the threats and retaliation were intended to suppress the hunt for unwelcome information, they did not succeed. In October
The New York Times
relied on corporate records to calculate that in the years that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was in office, his family amassed assets worth $2.7 billion. The family was not previously known for its wealth; the father had been a pig farmer, the mother a teacher. But the family fortune was now large enough to rank it on the
Forbes
list of the world's richest families.

The news made a mockery of one of the Party's mantras: before the Communists arrived, they liked to say, China was run by four dominant families, and the Party had handed those fortunes back to the people. Now it was becoming clear that China, on the one hundredth anniversary of the end of the last dynasty, was returning to a form of aristocracy. The scale of privilege and self-dealing struck an especially awkward blow to Wen Jiabao's reputation, because he had put himself forward as one of the Party's liberal standard-bearers. Nicknamed Grandpa Wen for his attentions to the poor, he had declared, “I often say that we should not only let people have the freedom of speech, we, more importantly, must create conditions to let them criticize the work of the government.” And yet, by six o'clock on the morning that his family fortune was revealed, his government had blacked out the
Times
—and it, like Bloomberg, would stay blocked.

As a reflection of decision-making, blocking some of the world's most influential news sources was a vivid measure of how much the Party was willing to isolate its people in order to protect itself: it was now barring them from viewing Facebook, Twitter,
The New York Times
, Bloomberg News, and many other sites. Online, the censors raced to protect the image of Premier Wen by screening out new combinations of words, including
prime minister
+
family
and
Wen
+
hundreds of millions
.

There was more than money at stake. People documented ways in which official life was healthier than ordinary life. A manufacturer of air purifiers unwittingly sparked an uproar when it released promotional materials crowing that China's officials breathed with the help of two hundred high-grade purifiers installed inside cloistered offices around the capital. “Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people,” the company said. Just as the people were getting their minds around that blessing, they learned of a network of “special farms” dedicated to providing Party leaders with safe ingredients. (An Asian Development Bank report estimated in 2007 that three hundred million people in China suffered from food-borne illnesses every year.) After journalists at
Southern Weekly
wrote about the farms, editors across the country were warned never to let them do so again.

*   *   *

The last thing Hu Gang taught me about bribing a judge was that it was worth it. After five years, he was picked up in a routine crackdown on courtroom corruption. In all, 140 judges were caught, including the head of the provincial supreme court. Hu Gang was convicted and served one year in jail.

When he got out, he published a novel under the name Fu Shi, then another book, and when I met him in 2012, he was working on a television script. He had reached conclusions about his experience. “Even though we have a legal system with all kinds of laws and regulations, enforcement is selective,” he told me, settling deep into his chair, glassy-eyed from lunch. “When the rules favor the rule-makers, they are applied; when they do not, they are ignored. The rule-maker says, ‘I am the only real rule, and I am the most powerful.' Everyone knows this.” He laughed. China, he said, functions by “unwritten rules.” He continued: “It has always been this way; the problem has just become more pronounced in recent years.”

In most countries, the long-term effects of kleptocracy are easy to predict: economists calculate that for every point that a nation's corruption rises on a scale of one to ten, its economic growth drops by 1 percent. (Think Haiti under François Duvalier or Zaire under Mobutu.) But the exceptions are important. In Japan and Korea, corruption accompanied each nation's rise, not its collapse. There is no more conspicuous case than the United States. When promoters of the first transcontinental railroad were found to have secretly paid themselves to build it—the 1872 scandal known as Crédit Mobilier—the scale of plunder was described by the press as “the most damaging exhibition of official and private villainy and corruption ever laid bare to the gaze of the world.” Between 1866 and 1873 the country put down thirty-five thousand miles of track, minting enormous fortunes but also, as Mark Twain put it, displaying “shameful corruption.” The excesses of the railroad boom led to the Panic of 1873 and subsequent financial crises, before political pressure to curb abuses gained momentum during the Progressive Era.

There were two basic views of how corruption could affect China's future. The optimistic scenario was that it was part of the transition from socialism to the free market, and it nevertheless produced highways and trains that inspired envy even in the developed world. “The Chinese are more successful,” then U.S. transportation secretary Ray LaHood told a reporter, “because in their country only three people make the decision. In our country, three thousand people do.” The scholar Minxin Pei was less sanguine. He told me that the Party prosecuted only 3 to 6 percent of its members who were engaged in wrongdoing, and only a third of those convicted ever received jail time. When Andrew Wedeman, a political scientist at Georgia State University who studies China, examined patterns of bribes and prosecutions, he expected to find that the mechanics of Chinese corruption followed the hierarchical patronage system found in Japan and Korea. Instead, Wedeman concluded, “the evidence suggests that corruption in contemporary China is essentially anarchy.” He wrote that “corruption in China more closely resembled corruption in Zaire than it did corruption in Japan.” But unlike Zaire, China punished many people for it; in a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption, and Wedeman concluded, “At a very basic level, it appears to have prevented corruption from spiraling out of control.”

The darker scenario held that the threat posed by Chinese corruption was not economic; it was political. In this view, the compact between the people and their leaders was fraying, the ruling class was scrambling to get what it could in the final years of frenzied growth, and the Party would be no more capable of reforming itself from within than were the Soviets. After the Bo Xilai scandal, some of the Party rank and file had begun to wonder about the Party's health. Four retired officials signed an open letter that asked, “What kind of shape is the Party in when even its highest echelon is embroiled in a story more sinister than any in
One Thousand and One Nights
?” The new leaders, they wrote, “must disclose … their private and family wealth.” Chinese leaders believed political reform would lead to instability, but did they believe that doing nothing would as well? When an economy thrives, citizens can tolerate even flagrant corruption. But when it slows, that same level of corruption can become intolerable.

I asked Hu Gang if he thought China would grow past its corruption boom, just as America and Korea did. He was quiet for a while, and then he said, “I see our society as an enormous pond. For years, people have been using it as a restroom, just because we could. And we enjoyed the freedom of that, even as the pond got filthier and filthier. Now we need someone who can stand up and tell everyone that the pond has been fouled and if you continue to pollute it, nobody will survive.”

 

EIGHTEEN

THE HARD TRUTH

 

The English guru Li Yang was going to pieces. In the years after I met him, I'd watched legions of students devote themselves to Crazy English, and all the while he'd grown more bizarre and belligerent. When a tsunami killed tens of thousands of people in Japan in 2011, he called it “God's little punishment” for Japan's invasion of China during World War II. A blogger in Shanghai pronounced him a “superstar whackjob.”