China Airborne (25 page)

In Chinese governmental culture, respect is not the only issue with the power to raise hackles or close down debate. Another is the fear of disorder that might call the recent decades of material progress into question. A similar important fear involves the specter of “splittism” that could divide the country and challenge the central government’s control. There is simply no point in discussing the merits of autonomy for Taiwan, Tibet, or Xinjiang—the areas of principal “splittist” threat and concern—in any sort of public setting. It’s not just that government policy is resolute on splittist questions; the great majority of the mainland Han Chinese public seems to feel the same way (no doubt because that is the only view offered in schools and from state-controlled media), even though they might dissent from government controls or policies in other realms. Chinese people who are familiar with American history point out the many similarities between the current Han attitude and the drive toward Manifest Destiny thinking in the United States from the nineteenth century onward.

But the sensitivity about respect comes up even more often than these other concerns. Paradoxically and predictably, the heavy-handed steps that the government takes to demonstrate its control in domestic affairs often undermine the respect it so craves internationally—as with the absurdity of the Catch-22 “authorized” Olympic protest zones in which no real protest was allowed—and impede its progress toward fostering the high-end, high-tech creative and industrial culture that would magnify China’s power all the more.

During our time in China, my wife and I had two encounters with the nervousness of the security state. Both illustrated the government’s nervousness about the kind of openness a fully modern economy would imply. The first was in 2009, on “May 35.”

In the spring of the previous year, as the Olympic torch made its highly publicized (at least in China) way across Europe to begin a months-long journey to the opening ceremonies, French protesters clogged the route to demonstrate against China’s policy in Tibet. On Chinese TV this received saturation coverage as a shocking and unprovoked affront to national dignity. It also moved police to extra-alert status inside China, lest pro-Tibetan demonstrators managed to stage an “embarrassing” event back home.

Just before the torch relay, China Southern Airlines reported that it had foiled a terrorist plot to blow up one of its Boeing 757 airplanes, on a route from Urumqi, in the Uighur region of Xinjiang, to Beijing. The airline said that a young Uighur Muslim woman had brought soft-drink cans full of gasoline into the plane and was trying to set the gas alight in the bathroom when a flight attendant stopped her. (The airline gave the attendant a bonus worth $17,000.)
¹
Until then, airline passengers in China had been able to take drinks or other liquids through security checkpoints without the 3.5-ounce maximum that had become familiar in the United States and Europe. Soon after the incident, Chinese authorities imposed similar limits on liquids or gels. But at most Chinese airports they didn’t require passengers
to take off their shoes until another bombing scare in Xinjiang in 2011.

In those same spring months before the Olympics, subway stations across Beijing were equipped all at once with X-ray screening machines for bags and parcels. In theory, anyone bringing a purse, briefcase, or backpack into the subway was supposed to put it on a conveyor belt for inspection. In practice, people who looked rushed enough, or were intent enough on dodging eye contact with the half-attentive guards, or whose bulky parcels of goods for sale at open-air markets (or bedroll containing clothes and belongings, if they were migrant workers) were too big to fit inside the X-ray machine could often breeze right past the screeners and toward the ticket gate. As a foreigner, I was reluctant to try the same thing myself until I saw that nothing happened to the Chinese commuters who obliviously barged through. Aha! So this was one of the countless “rules” in Chinese life ignored by most people most of the time, but always available for enforcement if the need arose. By the time we left Beijing, a year after the Olympics’ close, I’d perfected the art of hiding a briefcase under my coat or sweater when it was cold, or on warmer days holding it open for a cursory glance by the guards as I quickly strode past the machine.

The Olympics came and went, but the machines in Beijing stayed on—and soon they had spread to the Shanghai subways, in anticipation of its 2010 World Expo. By 2011 they appeared to be a permanent fixture in both cities, and at many subway stops attendants grew more dutiful about making sure all incoming bags went on the belts. I learned later that the screening machines were made by a company owned by Hu Jintao’s son-in-law; that business, plus what always looked like make-work for the young women who staffed most of the
checkpoints, gave this form of security theater an economic logic in China.

The sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, on October 1, 2009, required extra security for the mass rallies and parade of military equipment that day. Shortly thereafter so did the
liang hui
(
), or annual “Dual Meetings” of political leaders from around the country, and the visit of President Barack Obama a few weeks after that.

But of all the moments of lockdown in Beijing itself that year, the most palpably tense came on May 35. This was the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown, which had occurred on the fourth day of June of 1989—or the thirty-fifth of May, as Chinese students put it in blog posts and text messages to avoid screening by automated censors. Day by day in late spring security officials were more and more obviously on guard for anything that could constitute a “surprise” or “incident” on the anniversary.

By the evening of May 34, or June 3, when my wife and I went from our apartment near the Guomao intersection two miles west toward Tiananmen Square, along with our Chinese-speaking Belgian friend Peter Claeys—the same friend with whom I’d flown the Cirrus to Zhuhai—the layers of security were already more elaborate than we had seen in our previous three years in the country. We took the Beijing Metro Line 1 to the Tiananmen Square East Station, and as we trudged up the stairs toward the street, we discovered that we would need to pick our way around large numbers of People’s Liberation Army troops, in their familiar light green shirts and dark green trousers. Once outside, on the main Chang’An Road that runs between Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, we also saw regular police and security forces, in light blue shirts
with dark blue pants. Then scores of blatantly plainclothes policemen—fit young men, looking as if they’d just come in from the parade yard and switched out of uniform into identical-looking “casual” pants and shirts. Then a contingent the likes of which we had not ever seen before, or at least not ever noticed. These were plainclothesmen trying a little harder to be plain-clothed. They looked like the counterparts of the undercover narco detail in a
Mod Squad
–type American police movie: young men with hip-looking fauxhawks or extra-long hairstyles, some dressed in cargo shorts with Hawaiian shirts, or black T-shirts, or white “wife-beater” sleeveless T-shirts, all looking as if they had nothing particular to do—but all scanning the crowd every second, in the fashion of Secret Service agents on an American presidential trip.

As we looked across a broad boulevard to Tiananmen Square itself, we saw that its paved expanses, capable of holding tens of thousands of tourists on a normal day, were empty except for the army and police troops. Waist-high aluminum crowd barriers were on all sides, to keep anyone out—and police were confining all visitors to sidewalks on the far sides of the square. Knowing that dozens of officials’ eyes were on us, we looked as innocently as we could toward the monuments, and like the few Chinese tourists there took pictures toward the setting sun.

I heard a commotion behind us, and saw a young Chinese-looking man being hustled away by some of the “informal” plainclothesmen. He was calling out—in Chinese, English, and a language I didn’t immediately recognize—asking people for help. We turned to look, and immediately found a short and very toughly built Chinese man, with a shag-cut hairdo and shorts and a wife-beater T-shirt, standing right in front of us. “This does not concern you,” he said to us in English. “This
is the police’s business. It is not your concern. Go on your way.”

We walked away from the altercation for thirty or forty seconds, enough to indicate that we were not making trouble and would do as we were told. At that point, when we convinced ourselves that we were a safe distance away, I turned around, to look back to the scene of the police action we’d just watched. And, inconspicuously, I thought, took a picture of the man we’d seen earlier, still struggling with plainclothes police. As soon as I’d snapped the picture, I turned back around, and we quickened our pace toward the south end of the vast plaza. Within a few more strides we were surrounded on all sides by a group of police in mufti.

They waited until a young supervisor who spoke some English appeared. Peter Claeys, who had lived in China for years and was always complimented by Chinese people on his mastery of Mandarin, played dumb about understanding what the rest of the policemen were saying to one another.

“Did you take a picture?” the supervisor asked me. I could see no payoff in dissembling. “Yes.” “Why did you do that?” “I don’t know.” The young questioner stepped away and spoke into a police walkie-talkie. Fifty yards away, we saw the man who’d originally warned us talking on a walkie-talkie too. He seemed to be in charge and to be running the investigation from afar. We could hear both ends of their conversation, which was of course in Chinese. Our Belgian friend listened and gave us quiet updates in French—his first language, and one my wife and I could handle but the Chinese cops could not.

“Are you here on a journalist visa?” the young man said when he had finished his walkie-talkie consultation. I was relieved to be able to say forcefully and honestly, “No.” I’d been denied a
journalist visa when I first applied at the Washington, D.C., embassy back in 2005—and through the years since then I’d made do with a variety of business, academic, and tourist visas to remain in China. I introduced myself freely to officials as a reporter when requesting interviews; I gave them copies of books and articles after they appeared. No one in Chinese officialdom (except, conveniently, this policeman) had any doubt about my role. And as long as no one I interviewed had to take official responsibility for approving a visa that could conceivably lead to trouble, no one cared whether I was following the letter of the law.

“We’re here on tourist visas,” I added, helpfully, telling him the literal truth but inviting him to draw the wrong conclusion. “Where are your passports?” he asked. We said we didn’t have them—for fear of losing them or having them stolen, we didn’t carry them around on the street.

Now we had a problem, since in principle foreigners are supposed to carry passports at all times. And this was the opening for the police: We were in direct and admitted violation of yet another law that was generally ignored but could be applied when useful. After consultation with the boss in cargo shorts, the local sublieutenant began to give us a stern lecture about the importance of showing respect for Chinese law while enjoying the privilege of traveling in Chinese territory, about Chinese laws deserving the same respect any other country’s did, about China’s refusal to tolerate signs of disrespect, and so on.

At times over the next near-hour, I was worried—within limits. The blunt truth is that in most cases, the worst punishment a foreigner in China will face is to be made to leave the country. That is of course not the worst thing that can happen to local Chinese citizens who cooperate with journalists and other outsiders, a reality that both the Chinese and the foreigners need
constantly to weigh. Peter Claeys, who had recently moved from Shanghai to Taiwan, was near the end of his planned visit to China anyway—but my wife and I had trips booked through rural China for the next few weeks. What would we do if we were forced to leave? Would we be able to come back?

After much fretting and consultation over the walkie-talkie, a solution was found. I would write a confession, and an apology—requests redolent of the “self-criticism” that the communist leadership had asked of dissenters through its history. Then we could be sent on our way. I pulled a notebook out of my back pocket and ripped out a sheet of paper, trying to close it before the policeman had a chance to think about the words
REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK
in big print across its cover. And what should I write?

Sentence by sentence, the young policeman got instructions over the walkie-talkie from his boss and relayed them to me. “You write, ‘I am sorry for interfering with the police during their work,’ ” he told me. “Okay,” I said, and started writing some words. I said them aloud to him as I wrote: “I understand that the police feel I interfered with them in their work.” He took the paper from me and read it back to his captain, who noticed the difference. “No,” the young policeman said. “You will say ‘I am sorry.’ ” “Okay.” I crossed out the original words and started again. “I am sorry that the police feel I interfered with them at their work.”