China Airborne (26 page)

That one got through. Then on to the next item of confession. “You should write, ‘I broke Chinese law that I must carry my passport.’ ” “Okay. ‘I broke Chinese law that I should carry my passport, because I was afraid of having it stolen after my wallet was taken by pickpockets last week on the Beijing Metro.’ ”

That was the truth, even though it was the only instance of
even petty crime that had affected us through the previous three years in China. Gangs of Dickensian urchins got on the most crowded cars at the most jammed stations at the peak of Beijing’s rush hour—and “accidentally” stood blocking the doors, so that passengers trying to get off essentially had to swim through a sea of bodies from the car’s interior onto the platform. By the time they escaped the car and reached the platform and could recognize that their purse or wallet had disappeared, the train was already rolling away. A few days earlier I had performed just such a mid-car freestyle routine, losing contact with the car’s floor for several seconds and being suspended by other bodies, as I escaped the train at the super-packed Guomao Station near our apartment. As soon as I got to my feet on the platform and watched the train depart, I could feel the emptiness in my back pocket where my wallet had been. By the time I got back to my apartment and began calling credit-card companies ten minutes later, my Visa card had already been used at a Starbucks two stops down the line—a test transaction, to see if the card worked—and my MasterCard had been used for a small purchase at an art store and then tried (and rejected) for a major buy at a camera store. All this was a nuisance at the time, but it gave me a story to tell the policeman at Tiananmen Square. This departure from his prescribed script, to give my excuse for leaving my passport at home, he also allowed.

A few more sentences, about the importance of respecting China, respecting its laws, respecting its police, and respecting the duties of a foreigner when visiting another country. I told myself that none of the prose I was writing at a Chinese policeman’s direction could ever be used against me outside China, because no native speaker of English would think I had “confessed.” It would be like a hostage photo in which I was giving hand signals of resistance. The police took all the contact info
they could think of—our apartment number, the telephone number of the management, our address in the United States.

At the very end, the boss in the cargo shorts and modish haircut came over, and he watched me erase every photo in my camera that showed police or soldiers. The process was surprisingly delicate. He and his police colleagues didn’t seize or smash my camera. They didn’t confiscate the digital memory card. They didn’t ask that everything on the card be zapped, through a “bulk erase.” One by one, the cop in charge looked at my camera’s view screen to see each of the thirty or forty shots I had taken, and one by one he asked me to push the “erase” button. When we got to an innocuous tourist vista of the square taken just before the troubles began, he said I could stop.

Then, “You should go home.” This time we complied, and fast.

My wife and I were living again in Beijing through the early months of 2011, as the “Arab Spring” movements spread a mixture of promise and turmoil across the Middle East, the prospect of a parallel “Jasmine Revolution” brought increased security and clampdown in much of China. The government’s response again raised doubts about its ability to embrace the openness and experimentation that world leadership in fields like aerospace would demand.

Objectively, there seemed to be very little reason for Hu Jintao and his colleagues to think of themselves in a position anything like that of the quickly deposed Mubarak in Egypt, Ben Ali in Tunisia, or Qaddafi in Libya. Unlike any of those countries, China’s overall economy had not been stagnating. Demographically
the main Chinese fear was that it had the exact opposite problem of many Arab countries: too few young people entering the workforce relative to the jobs that had to be done and the retirees who had to be supported. While the Communist Party of China had a permanent hold on power, its individual leaders were rotated out as they reached retirement age, rather than hanging on as life-tenure autocrats. Despite a range of sources of serious discontent—inflation, corruption, pollution, the gap between collective national wealth and the uncertain position of each specific family—in the living memory of most Chinese people things had overall gotten better rather than worse.

The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, unlike the Arab autocrats, faced problems but not crises. Speculating about how “the Chinese electorate” would vote, if it could vote, is difficult, but all evidence I’ve seen suggests that, if faced with an up-or-down choice on the current regime, more people would vote to stick with it than to throw it out. The economy keeps growing; material circumstances improve for most people in most of the country. And it’s meaningless to ask whether a rival party or slate of candidates would be more popular, since none is allowed to emerge. Even the tens of thousands of protests that erupt across the country each year—yes, that means an average of one hundred to two hundred marches or demonstrations somewhere in the country every day—are more often directed against local abuses than against the legitimacy of the Chinese system as a whole. In all the cases I have seen, people were complaining about the local landlord or factory owner and in fact appealing to the central government to come in and straighten things out.

Yet in these circumstances, so different from the powder keg of economically stagnant societies in North Africa and the Middle East, China’s security system reacted in early 2011 as if
it faced a threat so dire that it dared take no risks at all. Lawyers who had defended those accused of political crimes were themselves arrested, or just disappeared from view.
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Nongovernmental organizations were closed down. The Nobel Committee expressed concern that it could no longer even make contact with Liu Xiaobo to be sure that he was alive and physically well.

After text and Internet messages spread and recommended that Chinese people gather for “Jasmine Protests” in Beijing, Shanghai, and other big cities, the mobile-phone data networks that are urban China’s main communication tools were blocked or interfered with. As each of the appointed days dawned, the public areas were flooded with plainclothes and uniformed police. On the first “Jasmine Sunday” in Beijing, we saw a handful of Chinese demonstrators joined by an equal number of foreign reporters—and five or six times as many Chinese security officials. On the next Sunday, there were virtually no demonstrators, and many of the foreign reporters were roughed up, detained, and warned that under new rules they needed official permission to interview anyone in downtown Beijing. By the following Sunday, the movement had more or less run its course, for now.

Through those same Arab Spring weeks in 2011, the government signaled in countless other ways that between the risks of cracking down too hard, and those of not cracking down hard enough, it would always err on the side of being tough. Leading Chinese papers published editorials saying that, as China continued through a difficult economic transition, people had to understand that political disagreements needed to be contained.
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Peking University announced that it would screen incoming students for “radical thoughts,” to prevent trouble before it happened.
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On a Friday in early April, Beijing municipal authorities ordered the cancellation of a prestigious annual
debate tournament among teams from sixteen leading Chinese universities that was scheduled to begin the next day. The tournament had run every year since 2002, with no previous interference or problems. But the topic for the 2011 tournament, a retroactive assessment of the 1911 revolution led by Sun Yat-sen, was deemed “too sensitive” for public discussion a century later.

Through the previous five years in which my wife and I had been living in or traveling to China, it had been moving toward a condition of “permanent emergency.” By analogy: For most of the decade after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had persisted with its meaningless color-coded “threat level” system, which for years on end was set constantly at “orange.”
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Society was in a state of permanent threat; it was as if the National Weather Service, on learning that a tornado might strike Kansas, put the entire country on an open-ended alert.

A similar security ratchet has been in effect in China. Month by month, the specific reason that conditions were “unusually sensitive” varied. But, as enumerated earlier, there was always some reason, and special security measures were always called for. There was a year’s buildup of special security for the Olympics, and then a year for the Expo in Shanghai. In the early springtime of each year the Dual Meetings of political leaders, or
liang hui
, required special controls, especially in Beijing. One indication that the Dual Meetings were under way: Many of the pirated-video shops near Tiananmen Square and the central government headquarters closed for the week. It was a sign of propriety, or something. In the fall, National Day and its associated meetings and parades has a similar effect.

There was upset in Tibet. There was upset in Xinjiang. Then upset in Inner Mongolia. And the Arab Spring. There had been
a year or two of “unusual” sensitivity before Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao leave the top two party leadership positions in 2012. There will be a year or two of special sensitivity after that.

In the first three decades after China’s great opening in 1979, the government’s level of nervousness and consequent hyper-control might vary month by month. But year by year, and certainly decade by decade, the trend had been toward opening. When the 1980s are compared with the 1970s, and then the 1990s with the 1980s, and then the early 2000s with the 1990s, it is clear that over each of these periods life within China was becoming freer, more predictable, more connected to the outside world, more bound by the rule of law. The China of the Beijing Olympic era was unrecognizably more open and internationalized than the one I had first visited in 1986. But as I write at the end of 2011, things have been moving the other way. For how long?

The clearest modern indication of a society’s confidence or insecurity, and by extension its readiness for modern creative industries like aviation, is its policy toward the Internet. The Chinese government’s steady attempt to throttle its people’s connection with the outside world is a dramatic sign of its nervousness, and a profound threat to the future of any advanced industry, including aerospace.

What matters to expats, especially in still-developing countries, is an unreliable guide to what matters to local citizens. While living in China, I hated the beer, which like most beer in Asia is “light,” weak, and watery. But my taste was clearly at odds with that of Chinese customers, who bought the beer so avidly
that China has become by far the world’s leading beer-drinking nation. Craft breweries, tailored to expats’ taste, keep opening up in big Chinese cities, and most often keep closing down.

A similar-sounding foreign complaint in China—that Internet access is so slow, unreliable, and often interfered with—might seem to be similarly detached from locally important reality. Many Internet problems in China arise from attempts to reach sites located somewhere else. If, like most Chinese users, you are mainly looking for information that is written in Chinese and is on sites and servers within China, you have fewer complaints. Over the past decade, the Chinese media have consistently presented the message that the “uncontrolled” Internet is a wild and dangerous place, full of criminals, perverts, and other threats to the well-being of “netizens,” notably youths. Surveys of mass Chinese opinion, as opposed to outspoken “netizen” minorities, have consistently shown large majorities saying that they are grateful for government monitoring of this potential menace.

But even from a purely Chinese perspective, the increasing state controls on electronic communication represent something important. They symbolize an increasing divergence in the post-Olympic years between China’s path and that of most other “first rate” nations, and they matter in practical terms.

At the time of the Olympic Games, the genius of China’s “Great Firewall” system might have been described as its flexible repression.
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The guiding principle seemed to be that Chinese censorship would make it just difficult enough to find unauthorized material that the great majority of Chinese citizens wouldn’t bother—but would allow enough loopholes and pressure valves that people who really cared about finding something could manage to do so. The loophole mainly took the form of the government’s turning a blind eye toward VPNs—virtual private networks, which were in effect ways that anyone willing
to spend one or two dollars per week could buy safe passage through, under, over, or around the Great Firewall. You signed up for a VPN service, you made your connection, and from that point on you prowled through the Internet just as if your computer were logged on from London or New York. (Indeed, the VPN worked by making the computer’s connection appear to be in one of those cities outside China.)

Why did the government allow the loophole? For a long while, the confident assumption by most foreigners was that the government didn’t really care what the foreigners or even the English-fluent Chinese elite might read. In fact, the creator of the Great Firewall, a computer scientist—and university president—named Fang Binxing, made waves in February, 2011 by telling a leading Chinese newspaper that he had six VPNs running on his computers at home. (Within a few hours, that report was removed from the paper’s Web site. Foreseeing this possibility, like a number of other foreigners I saved a copy of the page as soon as I saw it.)

Moreover, truly interfering with VPN operations would make it simply impossible for banks and big industrial firms to do their work in China. The survival of their business depends on the integrity of their data. Financial firms rely on accurate and secure transmission trades, transfers, and account information among their offices worldwide. Manufacturing firms are constantly exchanging shipping and production data. The threat that data will be intercepted, monitored, or altered is worrisome enough in the best of circumstances, which is why companies use VPNs for their private data even in Europe or North America. To entrust their information to the “public” Internet in China, for screening by the Great Firewall, would be inconceivable.