4.

Authorities

The spirit of change was not unlimited. In selecting Beijing to host the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had given its approval to the capital of a one-party police state, a place where capitalism and prosperity showed no signs of ushering in liberal democracy behind them.

It was easy enough to be alarmed and appalled by this, in a city that was supposed to be an emblem of the future. An American visitor arriving in the People’s Republic would be rewarded, at first, by the spectacle of uniformed men at every turn: gray uniforms, pale-blue uniforms, navy-blue uniforms, olive-drab ones, green, black, blue-tinged camouflage. Upon inspection, though, more often than not a dark greatcoat would be missing a button or two, and a pair of white basketball shoes would be poking out of the bottom. The majority of the uniforms belonged to people employed as rent-a-cop guards, if not parking attendants. After that letdown, it would sink in that the same is true in the United States, but we don’t even notice all the uniforms.

Living with the genuine machinery of the security state was more like living with a sore tooth: easy enough to ignore for weeks or even months on end, until it flared up—until someone decided to make a visa application more difficult, or closed a previously open event to the public, or censored the incoming news—at which point it would become impossible to think about anything else. And as with a sore tooth, you could never be sure what might trigger it. The workings of the system were opaque, even bafflingly so. It was never clear whether or not anyone was paying attention to anything I did or to any stories I wrote.

I was not, after all, a foreign correspondent. I had friends who were, in Beijing. They had drivers and clerks, and they had government agents who shadowed them. Sometimes they would be detained by provincial police, or firmly invited to the Foreign Ministry so officials could complain about their coverage. They carried spare SIM cards in their cell phones, so they could switch to an untapped line in a pinch.

It was possible, or even probable, that our own phone was tapped—not for my sake, but because my wife was working for an international nonprofit. When she arrived in 2004, China had not come up with an official procedure for recognizing foreign nonprofits and permitting them to operate, but certain allowances were made. Her office, in one of the “diplomatic compounds” where all foreigners had once been required to live, was almost certainly bugged, by definition.

Closer to the Olympics, when I would call the Foreign Ministry with questions about reporting, the officers seemed to be unaware that I was even in the country; on the other hand, an Olympic media-credentialing staffer would tell me, when I called to check on my application, that a Chinese woman had already inquired about my application that day.

Uncertainty is itself an effective strategy. I lost count of how many chatty English-speaking Chinese people approached me on Tian’anmen Square to ask me how I liked China, how long I had been there, what I did for a living, where I was staying . . . It was true that ordinary Chinese people who’d studied English had a habit of buttonholing foreigners at tourist spots to practice on them, and that these people’s idea of conversation consisted of blunt personal inquiries. But it was also true that this always, always happened if I showed up on Tian’anmen Square alone. It definitely kept me from spontaneously interviewing English-speaking Chinese strangers.

Nowhere was the feeling of uncertain interference more pervasive than on the Internet. The Great Firewall of China did not exist, formally speaking. Your computer would simply be unable to get a response from certain servers. Maybe those servers happened to be down. Maybe something was wrong with the DSL connection (often enough, something was). Nor did the system block out all of the same sites all of the time. Wikipedia was unavailable, then available, then gone again, then available again. Blogspot came and went. Flickr was there, and then Flickr was gone, and then Flickr came back, with all its layout and links and tags intact, but none of the photographs would load. The BBC was always off. The New York Times was almost always on. Philly.com, for some reason beyond all guessing, was absolutely locked out; even working through an anonymizer site, I could never read a word about Donovan McNabb.

Eventually, the censorship rules became internal. I wouldn’t even try to read news about Taiwan, or Tibet, or the Philadelphia Eagles. If a link had “blog” anywhere in the URL, it was not for me to read. This developed into a half-conscious, magical belief that information access was, like DVD formats or particular food items, something that just happened to be different from place to place—some parts of the Internet you couldn’t get in China, and others you couldn’t get in America. To a small extent, this was even true: in New York, it was usually difficult to log on to the website of the Chinese consulate. I presumed this was through the efforts of a particular spiritual movement, mutually antagonistic to the Chinese government, whose name people took pains not to mention aloud even in jest, the way you don’t joke about bombs in the airport.

 

 

I should say here that there was, in my time in China, one incident in which the security state did make itself manifest—not to me directly, but uncomfortably close. Because of it, I scrapped some reporting plans and then, on reflection, took a thick marker and blacked out the contents of several pages of one of my pocket notebooks.

It would be a good anecdote to tell in this book. It had bearing on another anecdote that is in this book. And that is as close as I’m going to come to telling it, even by analogy or by changing the names or circumstances. Here:

 

 

 

 

Let that stand for the redacted material. At one point in this book, you have gotten or you will get a less than complete account of something, and (I hope and believe, or I wouldn’t be doing even this much) you will never know what it is. This fact can be the parable.

 

 

Why did the International Olympic Committee grant the Olympics to a country like this? Before settling on a verdict about the character or performance of the Chinese government—the ways in which it may be reactionary or forward-looking, amorally pragmatic or inhumanely ideological, and so on—it might help to consider that 1.3 billion number again: more people live under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party than under any other government in the world.

So above all, the Chinese system is normal. Or, statistically speaking, modal. America had a habit of seeing the People’s Republic of China as a temporary phenomenon. For nearly a quarter-century, the United States viewed the revolution of 1949 as a momentary aberration, something that would go away if we refused to accept it. Even after diplomatic recognition of China, the idea was that sooner or later, our idea of freedom would win out. During the Tian’anmen protests in 1989, Americans still believed that a wave of reform was about to wash away the sand-castles of Communist tyranny all over the globe.

But Tian’anmen happened when the People’s Republic was only forty years old. By the time the 2008 Olympics came, the government had lasted another two decades, and was a year away from its sixtieth birthday. China was one-quarter as old as the United States of America, and had four times the population—so as experiments in mass governance went, it made up in scale what it may have lacked in longevity.

By granting Beijing’s Olympic bid, was the IOC inviting China to join the ranks of leading nations? Or was it acknowledging the facts that were already there? There would be much argument as the games approached about China’s fitness to host them, and whether the Chinese government had honored the environmental and human-rights promises it had made in the bidding. How clean was clean enough? How open was open enough? How free was free enough?

When it came to these questions, China showed a sharp eye for hypocrisy—particularly for the sincere-minded hypocrisy of Western liberalism, in which the bad parts of history are regrettable errors, correctable had people only known better at the time. We Americans didn’t really mean to make slave labor the backbone of agriculture, or to plow under the whole virgin prairie, or to send the Pinkertons to machine-gun unruly workers. We certainly couldn’t accept that sort of thing in modern times. Or could we?

In the buildup to the Olympics, as activists urged athletes to protest China’s various misdeeds, the memory of 1968 was invoked again and again: John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising gloved fists in the Black Power salute from the medal stand in Mexico City. But Carlos and Smith were protesting their own country’s policies, not their hosts’. This point becomes more relevant in light of the fact that ten days before those Olympics, the Mexican authorities had sent tanks and troops into the public square to quash pro-democracy protests, slaughtering hundreds of demonstrators. With the peace secured, the Games went on.

Or even closer to home, it was hard to judge China’s guilt over Tian’anmen without recalling Michael Korda’s account of dinner at Richard Nixon’s house, with Chinese officials as the guests of honor, shortly after the bloodshed of June 1989. “We too had so-called student riots, protests, anarchy in the streets of Washington,” Nixon told his visitors. Then he lapsed from the first-person plural into a deranged but apt third-person singular, the voice of the objective historian: “When Nixon was President and Leader of the Free World, he found that firmness paid.” And he would know; Richard Nixon, at least, remembered Kent State.

 

 

Still, it would have been bad manners for China to ignore every democratic norm. Late in 2006, the government announced that it would be easier for foreign journalists to get visas and to travel within the country. It sounded better than being afoul of the law, furtively scribbling notes while worrying about losing my tourist visa. So after a series of bureaucratic false starts, the Olympic organizing committee agreed to invite me to stay on a string of short-term reporter’s visas, expiring every ninety days. I could get the first of the visas at the Public Security Bureau.

The Public Security Bureau, or Gong An, was the police department, among other things. Its visa office was a newish building with an open stairwell and polished stone surfaces, on the Second Ring, not far from the apartment. It was a quick cab ride, except that taxis were forbidden to drop off or pick up passengers within a block of the Public Security building.

The visa department was on the second floor, in a space ringed with stations behind counters—like a giant, well-kept bank branch, staffed by uniformed police officers. I had been told to report to Window 19. The officer there asked for my document. Having nothing but my passport, I handed it over. She studied my visa. “This is not a journalist’s visa,” she said. I explained I was there to change it to a journalist’s visa. She asked me to wait while she summoned a case officer to deal with me.

While we waited, the officer at Window 19 said she had another question. What was the difference, she asked, between a “journalist” and a “correspondent”? Well, I said, a correspondent is a journalist, but specifically one who works somewhere other than where his or her employer is based. Satisfied, she turned back to her work.

The case officer arrived. Had I filled out a form? (What form?) Did I have an ID photo? (A what, now?) Photos were taken in the back, he said. And I could get the form at Window 38, across the room.

Window 38, when I got there, was empty. I retreated to Window 19. In the half-minute it had taken to go back and forth, both officers there had vanished, replaced by a different set of people in the same uniforms. Everything else was as before.

I turned around again, to Window 38. To one side was an unattended stack of application forms. I took out a pen and began to fill one out. I was halfway through when the case officer reappeared, now inside Window 38, looking down at me. Did I have a residence registration form? he asked. I did not. Then the local police would have to issue me one, he said, and I would have to come back with it.

Also, he said, you can’t fill out the form with that pen. He pointed to the instructions at the top of the form, which said, in English, to use “blue or black ink pen.” My pen was black, a medium-point Paper-Mate, the pen I always carried. The ink was black; the plastic casing was black. I held it up. See, I said, it’s a black ink pen.

That’s not a black ink pen, the officer said.

I handed it over. He took it and made a few test scribbles, black marks on the paper. He handed the pen back dismissively.

This is not a black ink pen, he said. This is a ballpoint.

I was defeated. Back in our neighborhood, I stopped in the corner store by the alley mouth and bought a roller-ball—which did count, in the Chinese hierarchy of pens, as an “ink pen.” And I went to the local police station to report myself as an unregistered foreigner.

Did I have a copy of my lease? the neighborhood policeman asked. I did not; the lease was a word-of-mouth extension of one signed by my wife three years earlier. Without the lease, he said, I couldn’t register. I was not allowed to turn myself in.

Luckily, we were almost due for a new lease. The landlord worked one up on paper, with my name on it. The neighborhood cops issued me a residence certificate, which I delivered to the visa office. I filled out the form, in black roller-ball, and attached an ID photo, and handed in the papers at a now staffed Window 38. For the next ninety days, I would be a legal journalist. I went out and interviewed people, visited places, attended official press conferences. No one ever asked to see my visa.