China Airborne (28 page)

When the Royal Society emphasized the output of research papers from scientists at Chinese universities, it counted only the volume of the work, not its quality. This same Royal Society paper showed that while China had nearly matched the United States in total output of papers, it barely registered in international standings of
cited
work—papers significant enough to be referred to by scientists in other laboratories and other countries.
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An increasing number of domestic Chinese and international reports have underscored what anyone teaching classes in Chinese universities has noticed: that Western complaints about “publish or perish” pressures are nothing compared with the imperative for industrial-scale output among many Chinese scholars. In 2010, a British scientific journal revoked seventy papers it had received from two scientists at the same university in China; the journal said that the laboratory “findings” had simply been faked. “Academic fraud, misconduct and ethical violations are very common in China,” Rao Yi, a professor and dean of the life sciences school at Peking University, told the Associated Press after that episode.
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Another Chinese
professor, Zhang Ming of Renmin University in Beijing, told
The New York Times
, “If we don’t change our ways, we will be excluded from the global academic community.”
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A culture of copying shows up in many ways in China, as it has in other societies during periods of catch-up. As my Chinese friends who have studied American history frequently point out, through much of the nineteenth century American “inventors” and industrialists relied heavily on copying and stealing British and European designs. The most emotional note in Charles Dickens’s dispatches from America in the 1840s is his irritation about pirated U.S. copies of his works.

The United States outgrew this phase; the question for China is whether it will do so too, and, if so, when. Thirty years after China’s opening to world commerce, more than a decade after its entry into the World Trade Organization, nearly all software and videos used in China are pirated. In 2011, Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, pointed out that almost as many personal computers were sold in China as in the United States, but Chinese customers bought only one twentieth as many licensed copies of Windows as Americans did.
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Nearly every day the foreign and local Chinese press in China carries accounts of patients who suffer after taking faked medicines, or pilots who have flown for airlines with faked flight-training certificates.

In my experience, many Chinese students believe that sharing homework (or copying essays or “research” papers from the Internet) is not any sort of cheating but is perfectly standard behavior. Before its climactic showdown with the Chinese government disrupted its mainland operations, Google had made arrangements with Chinese publishers to avoid copyright complaints about the books it indexed in its Google Books program. As it has done in other countries, Google scanned the books’ contents and allowed users to search for selected passages,
but it did not make the entire contents available for bulk download. Meanwhile its Chinese counterpart, Baidu, had uploaded complete versions of millions of Chinese books, and many non-Chinese works as well, and made them available in their entirety for free download, as if no copyright laws applied. They stopped only after the unusual intervention of a group of Chinese authors, who complained to Baidu’s founder and CEO, the billionaire Li Yanhong—known as Robin Li in his days as a computer-science grad student at SUNY Buffalo and as an online developer for
The Wall Street Journal
in New York. In 2011, Li agreed to close the pirated book depository down.

“The reason Li and Baidu are in this public relations mess now is because, for years, they behaved like many Chinese businesses, consumers and government officials,” the Beijing correspondent for
Forbes
, Gady Epstein, wrote during the controversy.
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“They exhibited a casual disregard for piracy, in a culture and economy that did not value intellectual property.… Robin Li’s problem, in other words, is China’s problem.” Epstein also quoted the widespread Chinese crack that Baidu should take as its motto the reverse of Google’s, or, simply, “Be evil.”

The Chinese system strains mightily toward ultimate recognition of its achievements through Nobel Prizes, which was one reason the selection of Liu Xiaobo was so galling. Clearly Chinese scientists are capable of world-leading work, and many Chinese-born or ethnically Chinese scientists have been recognized with Nobel Prizes for their research. But as of 2011, all such awards have been for work conducted in American, British, French, or other foreign laboratories. No one of any ethnicity has won an award for scientific work within a Chinese institution.

A system this vast has many areas of excellence, which will expand; it will certainly win prizes and continue to improve;
and if funding and other inequalities drive Western systems into a tailspin, it is possible that the Chinese system will catch up. If so, that will say as much about what the West is doing wrong, as what China is doing right.

The Chinese system is a resounding thirty-year demonstration that ever-growing economic output can coexist with tight political control. But the commercial and technological achievements that would represent China’s next great step, including leadership in aviation, create new complications. Everywhere else those achievements have occurred, they have required a “soft infrastructure” of customs, laws, procedural protections, and bureaucratic order. They don’t necessarily require fully functioning democracy. Japan’s decades of post–World War II development occurred in a system that was democratic yet in which the same party always won; Singapore’s system is still a paternalistic-guided democracy; South Korea developed under a military dictatorship; and the established political systems of Europe and North America have struggled to stay on a democratic keel. But through the centuries of industrialization, they have moved continually to build this soft infrastructure—through protection of contracts, rule of law, efforts to provide some equality of treatment and opportunity.

Without these protections, China will ultimately fail to flourish. It won’t have leading Internet industries, or biotech companies, or aerospace innovation centers, or whatever field the most ambitious young dreamers are drawn to twenty years from now. It will fail because the world’s most talented people will choose to work somewhere other than China—a freedom more
and more available to the world’s talented elite with each passing year. Thus the nature of China’s civil society—not whether its people can count on protections from business competitors, and from the police—will play an enormous part in whether dreamers, like those portrayed in this book, can make their dreams come true.

The foreigners who say that today’s China is totalitarian are not paying attention. There are too many people, doing too many inventive things, across too great a stretch of territory to be under direct governmental supervision and control. The system is instead authoritarian and decentralized, with the government cracking down where it feels it must, and observing points of discontent and pressure among the population to address them if it can.

The modern Chinese system of “informal accountability” relies on governmental monitoring of the Internet and other channels of communication, to learn about sources of discontent before they become extreme. It comes from rewarding mayors and provincial governors for calm and prosperity in their areas, rather than just for cracking down. If peasants or migrant workers are about to revolt, the government’s Plan B is to send in troops to repress them. Plan A is to placate them, if possible, with jobs, schools, or other benefits.

For instance: After the financial crash late in 2008, many millions of Chinese workers suddenly lost their jobs in export factories that depended on customers in North America or Europe. They went home, in droves, to their villages in the countryside. (From our apartment in Beijing, which directly overlooked a long-distance-bus station, we saw crowds of migrants, all their possessions in big sacks over their shoulders, line up to take the buses home each day.) Rather than let them fester there, the government launched large-scale public-works programs to
give them jobs and income, as well as inaugurating health-care programs in rural villages. When traveling through Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in early 2009, we passed along rural roadways teeming with hoe- and shovel-wielding laborers, dozens per mile employed on repaving projects.

But even the most sensitive network of informal accountability is different from a predictable, transparent set of rules, just as the informal system of training and checking pilots was different from the formal check airman system that Joe T helped introduce. Full modernization depends on the predictability that is another term for the rule of law. It is the sense that personal or company assets, once developed, won’t be arbitrarily seized; that a society’s basic operating principles won’t be changed capriciously so that what was taken for granted yesterday is a serious crime today; that the various interests affected by policies and plans won’t be entirely ignored as policies change. Capitalist development—for that matter, communist too—depends on some sense that efforts today will have a predictable outcome tomorrow.

Month by month, connection by connection, liberalization by liberalization, since 1979 the Chinese system has moved in this direction. How much further will it move? And how fast?

China has moved generally but not consistently ahead. The biggest jolt backward was of course in 1989, at Tiananmen Square. Minor disruptions have happened repeatedly since then, including the Jasmine upheavals of 2011. An influential essay in
The Wall Street Journal
argued that the increasing crackdowns of the Jasmine era were ominous precisely because authorities barely bothered to pretend that they were following preexisting rules.
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“Signs of tightening control have been visible for several years,” the author, a human-rights activist named Joshua Rosenzweig, wrote. “But the authorities are now employing
a range of new, illegal methods to silence their critics.” During the few weeks after the Jasmine threat, some fifty prominent civic figures—writers, lawyers, bloggers, professors—were either arrested or simply vanished.
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In reflecting on these and other crackdowns, a law professor named Carl Minzner wrote that China was “turning against the law.”
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The argument was that regularized legal procedures had been convenient during China’s decades of expanded trade. But now they were proving inconvenient and so would be ignored. The treatment of Google was as significant on this score as for what it signified about free speech. Google’s big showdown over censorship occurred early in 2010, when it chose to move its search systems out of mainland China rather than continue to comply with orders to “filter” the results. Not long afterward, the Chinese government began “discovering” that Google had been breaking various tax laws all along—and that its mapping software also violated various Chinese security rules.
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The shifting landscape of “rules” is mainly discussed in China as it affects political activists and foreign groups. Those consequences are important, but the more challenging question for the people and leaders of the country is what the Chinese system is giving up because of the unaccountable nature of its political power.

One other question about China’s soft infrastructure will be answered in the next stage of its development. That is whether life in this communist country has begun to seem intolerably unequal and unfair. The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure, usually taught in courses in economics or sociology, that gauges the degree of economic inequality within a society. The lower
the Gini coefficient, the more equal the income distribution; the higher, the less equal. The scale runs from zero to one. In a society whose Gini coefficient was zero, every person would have exactly the same assets as every other person. In a society at the other extreme, with a Gini coefficient of one, one person would own everything, and no one else would have anything.

The Gini coefficient of American society has risen steadily over the past half century, as both income (annual money coming in) and wealth (accumulated earnings through the years) have become more unequal. China’s has risen higher, faster. China has dozens of billionaires, and hundreds of millions of peasants. Every day in China brings sights like one I glimpsed in 2011 in Beijing: a chauffeur-driven Bentley, its plutocrat passenger behind darkened windows in the backseat, brushing past a man pulling a cart by the wooden yoke across his shoulders. After a while you stop noticing, or at least marveling. But such extremes have a cumulative effect inside China, especially combined with a growing sense that the rules for achieving success have been rigged.

“It is hard to get anyone in Beijing under the age of thirty to indicate anything but contempt for the government,” a professor at one of the city’s most famous universities wrote to me during the crackdowns of 2011. “There really is a sense among young people and college students that everyone is grabbing everything they can.” The professor mentioned a survey prepared by the consulting firm Bain & Company, as part of its annual “China Wealth Report” for a major Chinese bank, whose results were being hotly discussed in China at about that time. It covered the richest people in China, those with investable assets worth more than $1.5 million, and found that almost half of them had considered leaving the country.

China’s most precious assets, the aspiring next generation of
the best-positioned families, were more and more being sent overseas. Nearly every member of the ruling State Council has a son or daughter with an Ivy League—or Oxford/Cambridge or Berkeley/MIT—degree. Through the final years of the Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabo era, the mayor of Chongqing, a flamboyant speaker named Bo Xilai, had drawn the nation’s attention with his “red” campaigns, designed to recall the patriotism and sacrifice of the Mao era. He sent his son to Harrow, then Oxford, then to Harvard for a graduate degree. In 2011, the Chinese personality magazines had features on the young Bo’s romance with Chen Xiaodan, daughter of the head of the China Development Bank. This “golden couple” met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was at the Harvard Business School.