Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (47 page)

The dynamic changed after Chen’s public abduction in Beijing. The image of hoodlums from Linyi coming to the capital and snatching a blind person off the streets—along with later reports that they had beaten him—galvanized the community. Xu and other
weiquan
lawyers who had been reluctant to get involved now rallied to Chen’s defense. Chen didn’t have a law degree and he wasn’t a lawyer, but the
weiquan
attorneys considered him one of their own—a rights defender. The big Internet firms Sina and Sohu were ordered by censors to keep news about Chen off their sites, but the lawyers and others posted a flurry of open letters condemning the Linyi officials elsewhere on the Web. Meanwhile, officials confined Chen to his farmhouse again, and the government investigation into the abuses in Linyi seemed stalled. The birth planning agency confirmed it had found misconduct, but provincial authorities closed ranks around the Linyi officials and no specific punishments were announced. A series of
weiquan
lawyers and activists traveled to Dongshigu and tried to visit Chen, but local officials and their enforcers blocked the entrance to the village and roughed up those who insisted on trying to get in.

After a while, the lawyers backed off. Chen had not yet been charged with a crime, and they didn’t want to escalate the conflict with the Linyi officials and force their hand. At the same time, the movement had turned its attention to a series of clashes in the countryside between peasants and local officials who had seized farmland from them for development. The case that attracted the most attention involved an attempt by residents of Taishi Village in Guangdong Province to impeach their local leaders. But as
weiquan
lawyers and activists traveled to Taishi and other villages to provide the peasants with legal services, a disturbing trend emerged. With increasing frequency, local party bosses resorted to the use of violence against them, often hiring thugs like the men posted around Chen’s village to do their dirty work. The violence put the “rights defense” movement in a difficult position. These lawyers wanted to force the government to live up to its own laws, one case at a time, without directly challenging the party’s authority. Each case that they won would bring China a step closer to the rule of law, and each case that they lost would damage the party’s reputation. But violence was an outcome they had not fully contemplated, and it left them divided about how to respond. Some said they should back down, arguing that by resorting to violence, the party had already exposed the nature of its political system and damaged itself. Refusing to retreat would change nothing and only get more people hurt. But other lawyers were uncomfortable abandoning the people they were trying to help, and argued that they should stand their ground. They believed in nonviolent resistance, even if it meant that local officials had forced them into a more direct confrontation.

The debate would eventually focus on one of the lawyers who spoke out in Chen’s defense, Gao Zhisheng. A former soldier who passed the bar after taking night classes and studying on his own, Gao first made a name for himself protesting the mass evictions of homeowners in Beijing and other cities by corrupt officials and private developers who refused to pay market rates for land they seized. He was enough of a concern that China’s richest woman, Chen Lihua, tried to buy his silence. He later emerged as one of the most outspoken of the
weiquan
lawyers, and he was the first of them to agree to defend victims of the party’s brutal crackdown on Falun Gong, the popular spiritual movement that the party had banned as a political threat. The government retaliated by shutting down Gao’s law firm in late 2005. A few months later, as the attacks on
weiquan
lawyers grew, Gao launched a “relay hunger strike to oppose violence.” The plan was for individuals across the country to refuse food for one day at a time and share their views online. It immediately attracted support among a diverse collection of people with grievances against the state, from Falun Gong practitioners to residents in Shanghai who had lost their homes to corrupt developers.

The hunger strike seemed relatively harmless, but it split the group campaigning on Chen’s behalf as well as the larger community of people working for political change. The critics argued that Gao was politicizing the “rights defense” movement because the hunger strike amounted to a direct challenge to the party’s authority. The most visible proponent of this view was Ding Zilin, the historian who had lost a son in the Tiananmen massacre and organized the families of other victims to demand redress. She posted an open letter to Gao on the Internet arguing that the party was bound to overreact to his hunger strike just as it did to the 1989 democracy movement. The security services had already begun arresting and beating participants in the strike, and she blamed Gao, saying he shouldn’t have encouraged others to participate in the strike if he couldn’t protect them. Other critics were less strident, but agreed with Ding’s basic point: the hunger strike could provoke a backlash from party hard-liners, jeopardizing the entire “rights defense” movement and the gains it had achieved. Without coverage in the mainstream media and with only limited support from the general public, the strike would have no impact on the party’s willingness to use violence. On the other hand, they hoped, a steady, moderate approach to “rights defense” would foster civil society and build momentum for gradual political change, both inside and outside the party.

The activists who supported Gao, though, argued that he and the others participating in the hunger strike were doing nothing illegal. They were merely protesting injustice, and doing so in a quiet, nonviolent fashion. Among those who sympathized with Gao’s cause was a network of Christian lawyers, including Li Heping, who worshipped in underground churches and made up a growing wing of the “rights defense” movement. They likened the hunger strike to the nonviolent campaigns led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mohandas Gandhi, and argued that it was unfair to blame Gao for the government’s response, just as it was unfair to blame the students for the Tiananmen massacre.

The dispute spilled into Chen’s case after Gao declared that one of his days of fasting was intended to protest Chen’s treatment at the hands of the Linyi officials. Chen reciprocated while under house arrest, announcing in late February that he had joined the relay hunger strike for a day. He fasted another day in support of the hunger strike in early March. Just days later, after months of simply holding him in his farmhouse, the police suddenly decided to take Chen into custody. He was later charged with disturbing public order and disrupting traffic.

The key figures in the “rights defense” movement quickly met to discuss Chen’s case. The room was divided roughly into two camps: pragmatists and purists. The pragmatists believed the only way to help Chen was to persuade party leaders in Beijing to intervene on his behalf. The best way to do that, they argued, was to rally public opinion against the Linyi officials and show the leadership that the interests of the Communist Party would be better served if it sided with Chen instead of its local apparatchiks. In the party’s flawed legal system, the men on the Politburo Standing Committee were the ultimate judges and jurors, they said, and local officials were no doubt trying to present Chen to them as a subversive troublemaker, perhaps someone allied with “overseas, anti-China forces” because of the interviews he had given to foreign journalists. It was critical, they said, not to do anything that would alienate the leadership or allow Linyi officials to cast Chen in a negative light. They pointed to the timing of his arrest and argued that these officials had been emboldened by his participation in Gao’s hunger strike. But the purists were skeptical. They argued that it was useless to speculate about the party’s internal politics and foolish to count on a benevolent leader to step in and help them. That kind of thinking would not promote rule of law but instead further entrench the rule of party officials. The better approach, they said, was to stick to the law and take any action permitted by law to help Chen. It was more important to stand up for justice, they argued, than to be worrying all the time about offending party leaders.

The debate stretched on for hours, but eventually a rough consensus emerged. “Localize and depoliticize” was the motto coined by Xu Zhiyong, the young legal scholar. The campaign would focus its attacks on local officials in Linyi, not the one-child policy, party leaders, or the political system. Xu would coordinate the effort, and his colleague Teng Biao would be responsible for disseminating information. A veteran AIDS activist in the room, Wan Yanhai, agreed to help mobilize nongovernmental organizations. As for Gao, the lawyers decided that he should stay out of Chen’s case.

Chen’s actual courtroom defense was left to a “rights defense” lawyer named Li Jinsong. A soft-spoken, mild-mannered man, Li once worked as a tax official in his native Jiangxi Province, and he had originally obtained his law license as a way to expand his accounting practice. Like many others in the “rights defense” movement, he was a Christian, but he had come to his religion much earlier than most of the others, and he worshipped in a state-sanctioned church, not an underground one. In the 1990s, he gained notoriety by filing lawsuits against government agencies in Guangdong Province, suing a local labor bureau for failing to protect a worker’s rights, for example, and a state transportation company for raising ticket prices before the Spring Festival holiday. Once, he even sued a local court, accusing it of failing to pay overtime to one of its security guards. The court put him in jail for fifteen days.

Li had met Chen only once, the day before he was abducted in Beijing. Chen had asked him to help with the Linyi lawsuits, and he had declined. Given the sensitivity of the one-child policy, he thought the cases would be too difficult to pursue without stronger evidence of the abuses, such as video or audio recordings. But he had been impressed enough by Chen to promise to defend him if the police attempted to prosecute him. Now he was keeping that promise.

On his first trip to Linyi, Li was harassed by thugs, threatened with arrest, and blocked from visiting Chen’s wife. Some of the lawyers who accompanied him were beaten. Li was allowed to see Chen in prison, but the guards refused to let them even discuss the case. Other attempts to collect evidence in Linyi were equally fruitless, and with each visit the authorities ratcheted up the violence against the lawyers. On one trip, the thugs overturned Li’s car and rolled it into a ditch while he was still in it.

As the trial date approached, the public campaign on Chen’s behalf was also faltering. All of the lawyers believed public opinion was critical to saving Chen, and they agreed it was necessary to shine a light on his case, exposing injustice and putting pressure on the leadership to respond. But the mere act of speaking out on Chen’s behalf could be viewed as a challenge to the party, or presented as such by the Linyi officials, and even the pragmatists disagreed among themselves about how to handle that problem. The lawyers tried to hold a press conference about Chen’s case, but police in Beijing shut it down, and some of the pragmatists argued that it had been a mistake to try at all. Others objected when Chen’s supporters printed t-shirts and buttons with photos of him on them, saying that would anger party leaders, and they complained that the near-daily reports that Li wrote about the case and posted on the Internet were counterproductive. Still others objected when activists who directly challenged the party leadership, including dissidents overseas, issued statements to support Chen. The problem for the pragmatist camp was that it was impossible to know for certain what kind of advocacy would help Chen, and what kind of advocacy might be used by the Linyi officials against him. At the same time, it was easy to disagree and criticize one another.

Tensions over these questions came to a head in late July, when the courts abruptly postponed Chen’s trial a day before it was scheduled to open. Gao Zhisheng and a crowd of activists, villagers, and people with disabilities showed up outside the courthouse anyway, many of them wearing the t-shirts with Chen’s photo. Local thugs quickly attacked them, injuring several people and scattering the crowd. After the clash, the split in the “rights defense” movement widened further. The purists defended Gao and the others, saying they had done nothing illegal and were just trying to show their support for Chen. The pragmatist were furious. They argued that the incident had given local officials the excuse they needed to persuade the leadership to imprison Chen. A few suggested that some of those who had gone to the courthouse were sacrificing Chen to further their own political agendas. Chen’s lawyer, Li Jinsong, was stuck in the middle, awkwardly arguing that he didn’t support such aggressive campaigning for his client while also insisting that he was powerless to stop it and defending the flood of statements he himself had issued about the case.

Another trial date was set a few weeks later. The legal scholar Xu Zhiyong planned to represent Chen in court, but on the eve of the trial, police in Linyi detained him on trumped-up theft charges. Li then refused to attend the trial, in protest. None of the “rights defense” lawyers were in the courtroom when Chen was tried, convicted, and sentenced to four years in prison.

Less than a year later, the party quietly rewarded the man behind the birth planning crackdown in Linyi. Li Qun, the party chief who once served as an assistant to an American mayor, was promoted and named the provincial director of propaganda.

N
ot long after I left China in December 2007, police arrested a young dissident in Beijing named Hu Jia. He had been involved in the campaign to free Chen Guangcheng, but he was an unlikely enemy of the state—a scrawny thirty-four-year-old vegetarian computer wiz who wore baggy t-shirts and was either unwilling or unable to hold down a regular job. I first met Hu nearly seven years earlier, while working on a story about environmentalists who refused to use disposable chopsticks because of the damage they caused the nation’s forests. Hu brought his own chopsticks to restaurants instead, carrying them in a little cloth bag. At the time, he struck me as an ordinary fellow, perhaps more civic-minded than most college graduates, but over the years I watched him evolve into one of the nation’s most outspoken human rights advocates. His efforts on behalf of the endangered Tibetan antelope had led him to speak out for Tibetan rights, and later, he became one of the country’s first AIDS activists. When the “rights defense,” or
weiquan
movement began, Hu served as a one-man clearinghouse for news about government abuses. He was fearless, issuing statements and sending cell phone messages while others hesitated. When I last saw him in the summer of 2007, he was sheltering Chen’s wife in his apartment and trying to help her draw more attention to her husband’s plight.

In the debate between the purists and the pragmatists, Hu was one of the purists. Some people thought he was too much of a self-promoter, too willing to confront and provoke the authorities. When police put him under surveillance, he filmed the officers assigned to keep an eye on him and posted a documentary about his experience online. When they put him under house arrest, he used his Webcam to testify in a European parliamentary hearing on human rights. But if he sometimes behaved recklessly, he also never backed down. Xu Zhiyong, the pragmatic legal scholar who led the campaign to free Chen, disagreed with Hu’s tactics but called him “modern China’s conscience.” Hu’s stubborn insistence on speaking out against wrongdoing finally got him arrested two days after Christmas. Officers dragged him away as his wife was giving their two-month-old daughter a bath in another room. Not long before his arrest, Hu had written an essay challenging the government to improve its human rights record before the Olympics opened in Beijing the coming summer. Police charged him with incitement to subversion, and a court later sentenced him to three and a half years in prison.

Hu’s arrest was part of a broad government crackdown on dissent ahead of the 2008 Summer Games—a crackdown that continues to unfold as I write. The party wants to use the Olympics to highlight its achievements over the past three decades and appears determined to stop people like Hu from spoiling the celebration, even if it means breaking the promises it made to win the honor of hosting the Games. In the early 1990s, Beijing had lost to Sydney in the competition for the Games because of Western criticism of its human rights record, and the government had reacted indignantly, denouncing its detractors for interfering with China’s “internal affairs.” But when it applied again in 2001, it made a new pitch: Our human rights record has improved. Give us the Olympics, and we will do even better. “Eight years is a long time,” Liu Jingmin, the deputy mayor responsible for the Olympic bid, told me at the time. “If people have a target like the Olympics to strive for, it will help us establish a more just and harmonious society, a more democratic society, and help integrate China into the world.” The argument seemed to resonate, and Beijing was awarded the Games a few months later. Then, as now, people wanted to believe that prosperity and engagement with the international community would soften China’s authoritarian political system.

China has changed in remarkable and often unexpected ways since celebrating its winning bid to host the Olympics. The government has largely withdrawn from the workplace as well as from the personal lives of its citizens, and rising incomes have given people more control over their lives. The labor camps of the
shourong
detention system, which had been singled out by critics of China’s Olympic bid, have been shut down. Newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations have won more freedom from the censors, and some nongovernmental organizations in fields such as environmental protection have managed to flourish despite the party’s controls. Widespread access to the Internet has opened up new channels for citizens to obtain news and information, to express themselves, and to build civil society. Conditions have even improved for foreign correspondents. I asked Deputy Mayor Liu in 2001 about regulations that made it illegal for foreign journalists to travel and interview people without the government’s permission. He said he didn’t believe they would still be in place in 2008, and he was right. The government has suspended the regulations for the Olympics.

Still, the arrests of individuals like Hu Jia and Chen Guangcheng are a reminder of how much remains the same. The Communist Party continues to enjoy a monopoly on power, refusing to tolerate any organized opposition. Independent labor unions and churches are still illegal, and the party still exercises firm control over the courts. The
shourong
system is gone, but police have found other ways to detain people arbitrarily and force undesirables out of the cities, including the use of extralegal “black jails” to hold the seemingly endless stream of peasants traveling to Beijing with grievances against local officials. The vast propaganda apparatus of censors remains in place, working overtime to sanitize the Internet as well as mainstream media, and officials continue to harass and bully journalists, both domestic and foreign. It is one of the paradoxes of living and working in China that the country can feel one moment as if it is changing almost too quickly to comprehend, and another moment as though it is running in place. Society is racing forward, emerging from decades of violence and turmoil, but the political system is stuck in the past, with party officials struggling to preserve their power and privileges.

The libel case filed by the rural party boss Zhang Xide against the authors of the banned bestseller
An Investigation of China’s Peasantry
is an example of this disconnect. Nearly three years after that remarkable trial in the courthouse in Fuyang, the judges have yet to issue a verdict. They probably never will. A ruling in Zhang’s favor would have angered the public and sent the wrong signal to corrupt local officials, but a decision for the authors would have encouraged further challenges to the party’s authority. Party leaders decided to solve the problem by just doing nothing. The stalemate is a victory for the authors and their lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, because everyone expected a swift verdict against them, but it is far from a resounding triumph. Pu continues to thrive as a lawyer, but Zhang has retired with a full pension, and the authors remain blacklisted. Meanwhile, much of the countryside remains a powder keg. The party has nearly succeeded in eliminating the agricultural taxes that fueled peasant resentment for so long, but the gap between rich and poor continues to widen and the seizure of farmland for development by local officials has emerged as a new source of conflict. In Wangying Village, residents also complain that officials have tried to make up for lost taxes by collecting even more punishing fines for violations of the one-child policy.

Chen Guangcheng, who led the legal crusade against abuses of the one-child policy in Linyi, remains in prison and is not scheduled to be released until late 2010. The lawyers who rallied to defend him are a demoralized and divided bunch, and the greater
weiquan
movement is foundering and on the verge of collapse. The optimism that followed the successful campaign to abolish the
shourong
detention system has been replaced with a profound sense of despair over the arrest of activists such as Chen, Hu Jia, and the lawyer Gao Zhisheng. The authorities continue to hire thugs and criminals for the dirty work of assaulting and intimidating lawyers, and the lawyers and their allies have been unable to agree on an effective response. Despite its promises and the public’s rising expectations, the party remains above the law.

Journalists, on the other hand, are making progress in their fight for greater freedoms. Despite the censors’ best efforts and crackdowns such as the one at the
Southern Metropolis Daily,
state newspapers and magazines continue to find ways to expand the boundaries of what they can report. The commercialization of the industry has resulted in more gossip and entertainment—and more reporters accepting bribes in exchange for positive coverage—but also more serious journalism that speaks truth to power. The exploding popularity of the Internet, too, has transformed the media landscape. Since the
Southern Metropolis Daily
’s investigative report about Sun Zhigang’s death ricocheted across Chinese cyberspace, the Internet has acted again and again as a catalyst that amplifies voices and accelerates events. More people are online now in China than in the United States, and the Web has become the leading source of news for most of them, eclipsing the party’s propaganda outlets. When editors refuse to print their stories, reporters post them on the Web. When journalists tire of the censors or lose their jobs in state media, they launch blogs or take new positions at Internet companies. At the same time, the Internet has emerged as an important venue for people with shared interests—or grievances—to gather, talk, and organize. The government is investing in new software and building new bureaucracies to rein in the Internet, but increasingly, information—about history as well as current events—is available to people who look for it.

The hard truth, however, is that many people aren’t looking and that the Communist Party is winning the battle for the nation’s future. Its propaganda efforts and its “patriotic education” classes in the schools have dulled the public’s curiosity, and its attempts to filter the Web are just effective enough to discourage people from trying to get around them. The government has grown expert at manipulating public opinion, especially at rallying nationalist sentiment to its side. The party’s most important advantage, of course, is the wave of prosperity that it has been riding for more than a quarter century, and that has lifted average incomes threefold in the past eight years. The extended boom has enhanced the party’s reputation and filled its coffers with resources that can be used to buy support and defuse opposition. Because party officials can often determine who succeeds and fails in the new capitalist economy, they wield tremendous leverage over the emerging class of private businessmen and entrepreneurs that might otherwise support political change. The wealthiest and most influential tycoons, people such as Chen Lihua, are the most likely to owe their wealth to the one-party system and the least likely to challenge it. Meanwhile, funding for the People’s Armed Police, the paramilitary force used to suppress domestic protest, has climbed sharply, far exceeding budget outlays for courts and prosecutors. Given the resources and determination of the government, given the temptations and distractions of the booming economy, given a half century of Communist rule in which people have been taught that the consequences of challenging the state can be severe, it is no wonder that many in China choose not to concern themselves with politics.

What is surprising—and inspiring—is that so many others continue to push for political change, in so many different ways, despite these circumstances. If prosperity has helped the Communist Party forestall democratization, it has also made it more corrupt and warped its values. The fusion of capitalism and authoritarianism has resulted in a government that can resemble a Mafia organization and a political system obsessed with profits at the expense of other social goals—public health, environmental protection, economic justice. The Chinese people want and deserve better. With rising incomes and national pride have come higher expectations. People have seen how other countries are governed, they have greater access to information about their own nation, and they have more time and money to devote to civic affairs. Prosperity has also given them more to defend and fight for. When their lives are touched by the state—when judges refuse to protect their property, when factories spew pollutants into the air and water, when police restrict their right to worship, when corrupt officials squeeze them for taxes and bribes—they manage to find a way to express their discontent and demand change despite the risks. In the months before the Summer Games, residents in the seaport city of Xiamen were marching in the streets against a proposed chemical plant. In Shanghai, they were campaigning against the extension of a high-speed magnetic rail line. In Lhasa, they were rioting against the government’s hard-line colonial policies in Tibet. In Guangdong, they were facing off against police with an illegal strike against exploitative conditions at a wood-processing factory. And in rural communities across Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, and Shaanxi provinces, tens of thousands of peasants were fighting to take ownership of the land they till and block local officials from seizing and selling their farms to developers.

I often hear people say that political change is inevitable in China. When incomes rise above a certain level, they argue, the nation will follow Taiwan, South Korea, and other authoritarian countries that evolved into democracies as their capitalist economies developed. But rarely have people anywhere in the world gained political freedom without pain and sacrifice, and the Chinese Communist Party has shown it will not surrender power without a fight. It held on after the disasters of Mao’s rule, and it outlasted its brethren in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after the Tiananmen massacre. In the years since, it has demonstrated its resilience again and again, nimbly adapting to new challenges and reasserting itself as a rising world power. What progress has been made in recent years—what freedom the Chinese people now enjoy—has come only because individuals have demanded and fought for it, and because the party has retreated in the face of such pressure. What the leadership doesn’t seem to understand is that it is not a zero-sum battle and that these concessions strengthen the nation and, at least in the short term, also the party’s rule. The more democratic and responsive they make the political system, after all, the more effectively they will be able to govern. But the party’s aging technocrats are more worried about losing their privileged place in the one-party system than governing well, and they tell themselves that democratic reform only weakens China.