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please only do No.2 the second essay in the instruction, and i have also uploaded the readings for the essay. 3 pages long required! please do a great job!

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The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. To Sarabeth, who lived it all CONTENTS Title Page Copyight Notice Dedication Epigraph Prologue Part I: Fortune   1. Unfettered   2. The Call   3. Baptized in Civilization   4. Appetites of the Mind   5. No Longer a Slave   6. Cutthroat   7. Acquired Taste Part II: Truth   8. Dancing in Shackles   9. Liberty Leading the People 10. Miracles and Magic Engines 11. A Chorus of Soloists 12. The Art of Resistance 13. Seven Sentences 14. The Germ in the Henhouse 15. Sandstorm 16. Lightning Storm 17. All That Glitters 18. The Hard Truth Part III: Faith 19. The Spiritual Void 20. Passing By 21. Soulcraft 22. Culture Wars 23. True Believers 24. Breaking Out Epilogue Notes on Sources Acknowledgments Index Map A Note About the Author Copyright Why should I be like everyone else, just because I was born to a poor family? —Michael Zhang, teacher The commander of a mighty army can be captured, but the aspiration of an ordinary man can never be seized. —Confucius PROLOGUE Whenever a new idea sweeps across China—a new fashion, a philosophy, a way of life—the Chinese describe it as a “fever.” In the first years after the country opened to the world, people contracted “Western Business Suit Fever” and “Jean-Paul Sartre Fever” and “Private Telephone Fever.” It was difficult to predict when or where a fever would ignite, or what it would leave behind. In the village of Xiajia (population 1,564) there was a fever for the American cop show Hunter, better known in China as Expert Detective Heng Te. When the show appeared on Chinese television in 1990, the villagers of Xiajia started to gather to watch Det. Sgt. Rick Hunter of the Los Angeles Police Department go undercover with his partner, Det. Sgt. Dee Dee McCall. And the villagers of Xiajia came to expect that Det. Sgt. Rick Hunter would always find at least two occasions to utter his trademark phrase, “Works for me”—though, in Chinese, he came across as a religious man, because “Works for me” was mistranslated as “Whatever God wants.” The fever passed from one person to the next, and it affected each in a different way. Some months later, when the police in Xiajia tried to search the home of a local farmer, the man told them to come back when they had a warrant—a word he had learned from Expert Detective Heng Te. When I moved to China in 2005, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China’s metamorphosis told in vast, sweeping strokes involving one-sixth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics. But, up close, the deepest changes were intimate and perceptual, buried in daily rhythms in ways that were easy to overlook. The greatest fever of all was aspiration, a belief in the sheer possibility to remake a life. Some who tried succeeded; many others did not. More remarkable was that they defied a history that told them never to try. Lu Xun, China’s most celebrated modern author, once wrote, “Hope is like a path in the countryside: originally there was no path, but once people begin to pass, a way appears.” I lived in China for eight years, and I watched this age of ambition take shape. Above all, it is a time of plenty— the crest of a transformation one hundred times the scale, and ten times the speed, of the first Industrial Revolution, which created modern Britain. The Chinese people no longer want for food—the average citizen eats six times as much meat as in 1976—but this is a ravenous era of a different kind, a period when people have awoken with a hunger for new sensations, ideas, and respect. China is the world’s largest consumer of energy, movies, beer, and platinum; it is building more high-speed railroads and airports than the rest of the world combined. For some of its citizens, China’s boom has created stupendous fortune: China is the world’s fastest-growing source of new billionaires. Several of the new plutocrats have been among the world’s most dedicated thieves; others have been holders of high public office. Some have been both. For most of the Chinese people, however, the boom has not produced vast wealth; it has permitted the first halting steps out of poverty. The rewards created by China’s rise have been wildly inconsistent but fundamentally profound: it is one of the broadest gains in human well-being in the modern age. In 1978, the average Chinese income was $200; by 2014, it was $6,000. By almost every measure, the Chinese people have achieved longer, healthier, more educated lives. Living in Beijing in these moments, I found that confidence in one’s ideas, especially about China’s future, seems to vary inversely with the time one spends on the ground. The complexities blunt the impulse to impose a simple logic on them. To find order in the changes, we seek refuge, of a kind, in statistics: in my years in China, the number of airline passengers doubled; cell phone sales tripled; the length of the Beijing subway quadrupled. But I was less impressed by those numbers than by a drama that I could not quantify: two generations ago, visitors to China marveled most at the sameness of it all. To outsiders, Chairman Mao was the “Emperor of the Blue Ants,” as one memorable book title had it—a secular god in a land of matching cotton suits and “production teams.” Stereotypes about the Chinese as collectivist, inscrutable drones endured in part because China’s politics helped sustain them; official China reminded its guests that it was a nation of work units and communes and uncountable sacrifice. But in the China that I encountered, the national narrative, once an ensemble performance, is splintering into a billion stories—stories of flesh and blood, of idiosyncrasies and solitary struggles. It is a time when the ties between the world’s two most powerful countries, China and the United States, can be tested by the aspirations of a lone peasant lawyer who chose the day and the hour in which to alter his fate. It is the age of the changeling, when the daughter of a farmer can propel herself from the assembly line to the boardroom so fast that she never has time to shed the manners and anxieties of the village. It is a moment when the individual became a gale force in political, economic, and private life, so central to the self-image of a rising generation that a coal miner’s son can grow up to believe that nothing matters more to him than seeing his name on the cover of a book. Viewed one way, the greatest beneficiary of the age of ambition is the Chinese Communist Party. In 2011 the Party celebrated its ninetieth birthday—a milestone unimaginable at the end of the Cold War. In the years after the Soviet Union collapsed, Chinese leaders studied that history and vowed never to suffer the same fate. When Arab dictatorships fell in 2011, China’s endured. To survive, the Chinese Communist Party shed its scripture but held fast to its saints; it abandoned Marx’s theories but retained Mao’s portrait on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, peering down on Tiananmen Square. The Party no longer promises equality or an end to toil. It promises only prosperity, pride, and strength. And for a while, that was enough. But over time the people have come to want more, and perhaps nothing more ardently than information. New technology has stirred a fugitive political culture; things once secret are now known; people once alone are now connected. And the more the Party has tried to prevent its people from receiving unfiltered ideas, the more they have stepped forward to demand them. China today is riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Louis Vuitton, second only to the United States in its purchases of Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, yet ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party that seeks to ban the word luxury from billboards. The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana. China has two of the world’s most valuable Internet companies, and more people online than the United States, even as it redoubles its investment in history’s largest effort to censor human expression. China has never been more pluralistic, urban, and prosperous, yet it is the only country in the world with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in prison. Sometimes China is compared to the Japan of the 1980s, when a hundred square feet in downtown Tokyo sold for a million dollars, and tycoons were sipping cocktails over ice cubes shipped from Antarctica. By 1991, Japan was in the largest deflation of assets in the modern history of capitalism. But the similarities run thin; when Japan’s bubble burst, it was a mature, developed economy; but China, even overheated, remains a poor country in which the average person earns as much as a Japanese citizen in 1970. At other moments, China’s goose-stepping soldiers, its defectors and its dissidents, recall the Soviet Union or even Nazi Germany. But those comparisons are unsatisfying. Chinese leaders do not threaten to “bury” America, the way Khrushchev did, and even China’s fiercest nationalists do not seek imperial conquest or ethnic cleansing. China reminds me most of America at its own moment of transformation—the period that Mark Twain and Charles Warner named the Gilded Age, when “every man has his dream, his pet scheme.” The United States emerged from the Civil War on its way to making more steel than Britain, Germany, and France combined. In 1850, America had fewer than twenty millionaires; by 1900 it had forty thousand, some as bumptious and proud as James Gordon Bennett, who bought a restaurant in Monte Carlo after he was refused a seat by the window. As in China, the dawn of American fortune was accompanied by spectacular treachery. “Our method of doing business,” said the railway man Charles Francis Adams, Jr., a grandson and great-grandson of presidents, “is founded upon lying, cheating and stealing.” Eventually, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave us the slippery tale of James Gatz of North Dakota, who catapulted himself into a new world, in doomed pursuit of love and fortune. When I stood in the light of a new Chinese skyline, I sometimes thought of Gatsby’s New York—“always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” *   *   * In the early years of the twenty-first century, China encompasses two universes: the world’s newest superpower and the world’s largest authoritarian state. Some days, I spent the morning with a new tycoon and the evening with a dissident under house arrest. It was easy to see them as representing the new China and the old, distinct realms of economics and politics. But eventually I concluded that they were one and the same, and the contrast was an unstable state of nature. This book is an account of the collision of two forces: aspiration and authoritarianism. Forty years ago the Chinese people had virtually no access to fortune, truth, or faith—three things denied them by politics and poverty. They had no chance to build a business or indulge their desires, no power to challenge propaganda and censorship, no way to find moral inspiration outside the Party. Within a generation, they had gained access to all three—and they want more. The Chinese people have taken control of freedoms that used to be governed almost entirely by others—decisions about where they work and travel and whom they marry. But as those liberties have expanded, the Communist Party has taken only halting steps to accommodate them. The Communist Party’s commitment to control—to ordain not only who leads the country but also how many teeth a train attendant shows when she smiles —contradicts the riot of life outside. The longer I lived in China, the more I sensed that the Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The Party has unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history—and spawned, perhaps, the greatest threat to its own survival. This is a work of nonfiction, based on eight years of conversations. In my research, I gravitated most of all to the strivers—the men and women who were trying to elbow their way from one realm to another, not just in economic terms, but in matters of politics, ideas, and the spirit. I came to know many of them when I was writing stories in the Chicago Tribune and, later, The New Yorker. I followed them as their lives evolved and veered in and out of my own. For an American writing abroad, it is tempting to envy China’s strengths where America feels weak, and to judge the country harshly where it grates against my values. But I have tried, above all, to describe Chinese lives on their own terms. I have used real names, except in several cases that I have noted, in which I obscured an identity because of political sensitivities. All the dialogue is based on the accounts of one or more people present. Part I begins at the earliest moments of the boom; I introduce several men and women who were swept up in China’s rise from poverty, and describe the risks they took and the ideas that animated them. The more that people succeeded in their economic lives, the more they demanded to know about the world around them, and in part II, I describe the rebellion against propaganda and censorship. In the final part, those pursuits converge in the search for a new moral foundation, as men and women on the bottom rung of the middle class set out in search of what to believe. The story of China in the twenty-first century is often told as a contest between East and West, between state capitalism and the free market. But in the foreground there is a more immediate competition: the struggle to define the idea of China. Understanding China requires not only measuring the light and heat thrown off by its incandescent new power, but also examining the source of its energy—the men and women at the center of China’s becoming. PART I FORTUNE ONE UNFETTERED May 16, 1979 Under a sliver of moon, on an island off the coast of China, a twenty-six-year-old army captain slipped away from his post and headed for the water’s edge. He moved as calmly as possible, over the pine scrub to a ledge overlooking the shore. If his plan were discovered, he would be disgraced and executed. Capt. Lin Zhengyi was a model soldier, one of the most celebrated young officers in the army of Taiwan, the island province ruled by opponents of the Chinese Communist Party. For three decades Taiwan had defied Communist control, and Captain Lin was a symbol of that resistance: in college, he had been a star student who’d given up a placid civilian life to join the military, a decision so rare that Taiwan’s future president made a point to shake his hand, and the picture was splashed all over the newspapers, turning Lin into a poster boy for the “Holy Counterattack,” the dream of retaking mainland China. Lin Zhengyi (pronounced “Jung-yee”) stood nearly six feet tall, with ramrod posture, a broad, flat nose, and jug ears that protruded from the rim of his hat. His devotion had earned him the assignment to the most sensitive place on the front line: the tiny island of Quemoy, known in Mandarin as Jinmen, barely one mile, across the water, from the rocky coast of mainland China. But Captain Lin had a secret so dangerous to him and his family that he did not dare reveal it even to his wife, who was home with their son and pregnant with their second child. Captain Lin had awoken to a sense of history gathering around him. After thirty years of turmoil, China was appealing to the people of Taiwan to reunify the “great Motherland.” Any soldier who tried to defect to the mainland would be shot on sight. The few who tried were exceedingly rare, though the consequences were vivid; the most recent case had occurred less than a month ago. But Lin had heard his calling. China would prosper again, he believed. And he would prosper with it. In the darkness he found the sandy path that could lead him safely down a hill laden with land mines. The wind off the sea had bent the gnarled island pines. The water, a brilliant crystal green by day, was now an endless black mass, surging and withdrawing with the waves. To ward off an invasion, the beaches had been fitted with long metal spears that protruded from the sand to face the sea. Just before the captain left the tree line for the dash to shore, he loosened the laces of his shoes and stepped barefoot onto the soil and stone. He was ready to abandon his fellow soldiers, his family, and his name. *   *   * Virtually everyone else who had tried to swim those waters had headed in the opposite direction. In 1979, mainland China was a place to flee. In the eighteenth century, imperial China controlled one-third of the world’s wealth; its most advanced cities were as prosperous and commercialized as Great Britain and the Netherlands. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, China was crippled by invasion, civil war, and political upheaval. After taking power in 1949, the Communist Party conducted a “land reform” campaign that grouped China’s small family farms into collectives, and led to the killing of millions of landlords and perceived enemies. In 1958, Chairman Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, attempting to vault his country past Britain in just fifteen years. Some advisers told him it was impossible, but he ignored and humiliated them; the head of the national technology commission jumped out a window. The propagandists hailed one fantastical harvest after another, calling them “Sputnik harvests,” on par with the success of the Soviet satellite. But the numbers were fiction, and as starvation spread, many who complained were tortured or killed. The Party barred people from traveling to find food. Mao’s Great Leap Forward resulted in the world’s worst famine, which killed between thirty and forty-five million people, more than World War I. By the time Captain Lin defected from Taiwan, the People’s Republic was poorer than North Korea; its per capita income was one-third that of sub-Saharan Africa. Deng Xiaoping had been China’s paramount leader for less than six months. At seventy-five, he was a persuasive but plainspoken statesman, and a survivor—repeatedly purged from the leadership by Chairman Mao, twice rehabilitated. In the years since, he has often been described as the sole architect of the boom that followed, but that view is the handiwork of Party historians. Deng understood the limitations of his knowledge. On matters of the economy, his shrewdest move was to unite with Chen Yun, a fellow Party patriarch who was so skeptical of the West that he greeted the idea of reform by rereading Lenin’s Imperialism; and with Zhao Ziyang, a younger, progressive Party boss whose efforts to reduce poverty had spawned a saying among peasants: “If you want to eat, look for Ziyang.” When change came, it came from below. The previous winter, in the inland village of Xiaogang, the local farmers had been so impoverished by Mao’s economic vision that they had stopped tilling their communal land and had resorted to begging. In desperation, eighteen farmers divided up the land and began to farm it separately; they set their own schedules, and whatever they sold beyond the quota required by the state, they sold at the market and reaped the profits. They signed a secret pact to protect one another’s families in the event of arrest. By the following year, they were earning nearly twenty times as much income as before. When the experiment was discovered, some apparatchiks accused them of “digging up the cornerstone of socialism,” but wiser leaders allowed their scheme to continue, and eventually expanded it to eight hundred million farmers around the country. The return of “household” farming, as it was known, spread so fast that a farmer compared it to a germ in a henhouse. “When one family’s chicken catches the disease, the whole village catches it. When one village has it, the whole county will be infected.” Deng and the other leaders squabbled constantly, but the combination of Deng’s charisma, Chen’s hesitation to move too fast, and Zhao’s competence was startlingly successful. The model they created endured for decades: a “birdcage economy,” as Chen Yun called it, airy enough to let the market thrive but not so free as to let it escape. As young revolutionaries, the elders had overseen the execution of landlords, the seizure of factories, and the creation of people’s communes. But now they preserved their power by turning the revolution upside down: permitting private enterprise and opening a window to the outside world even if it allowed, as Deng put it, “a few flies” to get in. China’s reforms had no blueprint. The strategy, as Chen Yun put it, was to move without losing control—to “cross the river by feeling for the stones.” (Deng, inevitably, received credit for the expression.) In 1979 the Party announced that it would no longer tag people as “landlords” and “rich peasants,” and later Deng Xiaoping removed the final stigma: “Let some people get rich first,” he said, “and gradually all the people should get rich together.” The Party extended the economic experiment. Officially, private businesses were permitted to hire no more than eight employees—Marx had believed that firms with more than eight workers were exploitative—but eventually small enterprises began popping up so fast that Deng Xiaoping told a Yugoslav delegation that it was “as if a strange army had appeared suddenly from nowhere.” He did not take credit. “This is not the achievement of our central government,” he said. All over the country, people were exiting the collective farms that had dominated their lives. When they talked about it, they said they had been songbang—“unfettered”—a term more often used for a liberated prisoner or an animal. They began to talk of politics and democracy. But Deng Xiaoping had his limits. In March 1979, not long before Lin Zhengyi embarked on his adventure to the mainland, Deng spoke to a group of senior officials and demanded, “Can we tolerate this kind of freedom of speech which flagrantly contravenes the principles of our constitution?” The Party would never embrace “individualist democracy.” It would have economic freedom but political control. For China to thrive, there must be limits on “emancipating the mind.” *   *   * When change began to take hold on the mainland, Lin Zhengyi watched it from afar. He was born in 1952, three years after Taiwan and the mainland had embarked on the ideological and political standoff that would endure for decades. After losing China’s civil war to the Communists in 1949, the Nationalist Party fled to the island of Taiwan, where it declared martial law over the islands and prepared, in theory, for the day that it might return to power over China. Life in Taiwan was harsh and circumscribed. Lin grew up in the lush river delta town of Yilan, in a remote corner of Taiwan’s main island. His family was descended from earlier migrants from the mainland. The arriving Nationalist forces viewed the earlier migrants as low-class and politically unreliable, and they were subject to widespread discrimination in jobs and education. His father, Lin Huoshu, ran a barbershop, and his mother took in laundry from the neighbors. The family lived in a shanty on the edge of town. But the father taught his children about ancient Chinese science and statecraft, about a civilization once so advanced that it started printing books four hundred years before Gutenberg. He read aloud from the old books—The Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West—and he drilled into his children the dream of China’s revival. He named his fourth child Zhengyi because it meant “justice.” As a boy, Lin wondered why, despite China’s glorious history, his family could barely feed itself. His older brother did not ask their mother if they would have lunch, because it was an uncomfortable question, Lin recalled. “He would lean on the stove. If it was warm, that means we had lunch.” Otherwise, they went hungry. For Lin, the experience fostered a highly pragmatic streak. He came to view issues of human dignity primarily through the lenses of history and economics. In his teens, he gravitated to tales about engineering—the exploits of ancient Chinese leaders such as Li Bing, a governor in the third century B.C.E., in today’s Sichuan Province, who set out to control deadly floods by devoting eight years to digging a water channel through a mountain. He relied on thousands of workers, who heated the rocks with hay fires and cooled them with water to make them crack. The result was an irrigation system so vast and durable that it is often compared to the wonders of the world; it transformed one of the country’s poorest stretches into a region so fertile that it is known today as the “Land of Heaven.” Lin was the most promising of the sons, and in 1971 he won a coveted seat at National Taiwan University, to study irrigation. To pay his tuition, his three brothers left school and worked in their father’s barber-shop. Lin entered college just as the campus was roiling with debate over the future of Taiwan and mainland China. For years, young people in Taiwan had been taught that the mainland was run by “Communist bandits” and “demons.” The Nationalist Party used this threat to justify martial law, and it committed widespread human rights abuses against political opponents and Communist sympathizers. But as Lin arrived on campus, Taiwan’s status was eroding. In July 1971, U.S. president Richard Nixon announced his visit to Beijing. The mainland was gaining influence. In October the United Nations voted to take away Taiwan’s seat at the UN General Assembly and give it to the People’s Republic, acknowledging that government as the lawful representative of the Chinese people. In this climate, Lin Zhengyi found his voice. He became president of the freshman class and emerged as one of Taiwan’s most ardent young activists. At a student rally called “Fight the Communist Bandits Sneaking into the United Nations,” he took the microphone and appealed for an island-wide protest, an idea so radical in the era of martial law that even his fellow activists couldn’t bring themselves to support it. At another event, he vowed to go on a hunger strike, until the dean talked him out of it. When he announced that he was transferring to a military academy, he told reporters, “If my decision to join the military can arouse nationalism in every youth … then its impact will be immeasurable.” He had practical reasons as well: at the military academy he could study for free and receive a stipend. At a friend’s house one day during college, Lin met a young woman named Chen Yunying, an activist who was studying literature at National Chengchi University. After they graduated, they married and had a son. Lin spent two years studying for an MBA and then he was assigned to lead a company on the island of Quemoy, known during the Cold War as the “lighthouse of the free world,” because it was the final spit of land before the Communist shoreline. The two sides had once shelled each other so ferociously that Taiwan’s military honeycombed the island with bunkers, underground restaurants, and a hospital carved so deep into the mountain that it was designed to survive a nuclear strike. By the time Lin arrived in 1978, the war was more psychological than physical. The armies still shelled each other, but only on schedule: the mainland fired on odd-numbered days; Taiwan returned fire the rest of the week. Mostly they dueled with propaganda. They blasted each other with enormous, high-powered speakers, and they dropped leaflets from hot-air balloons. They floated softball-sized glass containers to the opposing shores packed with bundles of goods intended to lure defectors with glimpses of prosperity. Taiwan sent pinups and miniature newspapers describing the outside world, clean underwear, pop music cassettes, instructions on how to build a simple radio, and promises of gold coins and glory for anyone willing to defect. The mainland replied with liquor, tea, sweet melons, and pamphlets with photos of smiling Taiwanese diplomats and scientists who had defected to the mainland—or, as the Party put it, “traded darkness for light.” *   *   * In December 1978, Jimmy Carter announced that the United States was officially recognizing the Communist government in Beijing, and severing formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The news buried any remaining hope that the island might regain control of the mainland. In Taiwan, as a correspondent put it, people were “as nervous as a cat trying to cross a busy road with the traffic getting worse by the moment.” On New Year’s Day 1979, the Beijing government announced that it was ending its military bombardment of Quemoy, and broadcast an appeal to the people of Taiwan that “the bright future … belongs to us and to you. The reunification of the motherland is the sacred mission that history has handed to our generation.” It boasted that “construction is going ahead vigorously on the motherland.” On February 16, Lin was reassigned even closer to the mainland; he was put in charge of a tiny command post on a lonesome, windswept outcropping called Mount Ma, known among the soldiers as “the front line of the universe.” It was a prestigious post, but, according to military investigators, Lin resented the assignment because he was marooned on the outer islands when he could be teaching at the military academy, or taking the exam for senior military office. His post was a favorite stop for political grandees who wanted to be photographed on the front line with the young patriots in uniform. In April he took a leave to see family and friends; one night, he told an old college classmate, Zhang Jiasheng, that he believed Taiwan could prosper only if the mainland thrived. When he returned to Mount Ma, Lin was so close to the mainland that he could see the faces of People’s Liberation Army soldiers through his binoculars. His thinking had already begun to take a sharp turn. Although Taiwan and the Communists were enemies, ordinary people considered them two halves of the same clan, with a shared history and destiny. As in the American Civil War, some families were physically divided. In one case, a man sent by his mother to go shopping on the mainland just before the Communists cut off boat traffic did not get home for forty years. In the first years after the separation, some soldiers had tried to swim to the mainland, but fierce currents swirled around the islands, and the defectors washed back up, exhausted, and were arrested as traitors. To deter others, the army destroyed most of the island’s fishing boats, and the few that remained were required to lock up their oars at night. Over the years, anything that might be turned into a flotation device—a basketball, a bicycle tire—had to be registered, like a weapon, and the army conducted spot checks around the island, knocking on doors and demanding to see that all balls and inner tubes were accounted for. Earlier in the spring of 1979, a soldier had made the rare attempt to defect, but he, too, was caught. Lin was undeterred. He believed his plan was better, but he wanted to minimize the effects on his commanding officers. He was scheduled to move from one command to another in May; he believed that if he defected at the time of the transition, senior officers could plausibly blame each other for missing the clues and avoid much blame. What’s more, spring on the island was the season of fog, when the humid air met the cold water of the sea and draped the shoreline in a curtain of gray, a shroud that just might be heavy enough to conceal a figure slipping into the waves. With each spring day, the currents were growing, and by summer they would be strong enough to push a man back to shore, no matter how hard he fought against the waves. If Lin was going to swim to mainland China, he had to go immediately. *   *   * On the morning of May 16 he was at his command post. He asked the company secretary Liao Zhenzhu for the latest tide chart. High tide would come at four o’clock in the afternoon and then begin to withdraw. That night, after sunset, Lin attended a meeting at battalion headquarters and returned to Mount Ma for dinner. At 8:30 a company secretary named Tung Chin-yao visited his table to say he was going over to the battalion headquarters to pick up a new soldier. Tung returned an hour later, but Lin was no longer in the dining hall. He wasn’t in the barracks, either. At 10:50 p.m., two captains from the division recorded his absence in the log and organized a search party. By midnight, commanders had launched a full-scale search of the island—a Thunderbolt Operation, as they called it—involving a hundred thousand people, including soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children. They tore open farmers’ storehouses and probed the ponds with bamboo poles. Then searchers found the first clue: at the end of the mine-laden trail, from Mount Ma to the shore, were his sneakers, stenciled with the characters for “Company Commander.” They searched his room and discovered that items were missing: a canteen, a compass, a first-aid kit, the company flag, and a life jacket. By then, Lin was far ahead of them. From the command post, he had to cross just three hundred yards to reach the gray-brown boulders on the shore. From there, he slid into the waves. He had calculated that he needed to enter the water before low tide at 10:00 p.m., so that the force of the sea would draw him away from the land. He had taken one other crucial step: According to military investigators, two days before he swam, Lin inspected the sentry posts along the coast, and he addressed the young recruits assigned to watch the horizon. He told them an odd joke: if, at night, you see swimmers who show no signs of attacking, don’t bother to shoot; they’re probably just “water spirits,” and if you shoot, you’ll tempt them into retribution. Superstitions about omens and spirits thrived in Taiwan, and an offhand comment from a commander might have been just enough to make a nervous teenager think twice before raising the alarm over a mysterious flutter on the night sea. In the water, Lin swam hard and fast. The current tugged at him, but soon he was clear of the shallows and alone on the black depths, enveloped in water and sky. He needed only to make it to the middle of the channel, and then the rising tide would carry him the rest of the way. He swam freestyle until he was exhausted, and then floated on his back to regain energy. After three hours, with his legs throbbing and numb with cold, he was nearing land. It was the easternmost edge of Chinese soil—Horn Islet. It was just sixty acres of sand and palmetto scrub, home to nothing but Chinese guard posts and artillery guns. The shore, he knew, was laced with land mines. He reached into his clothing, where, sealed in a plastic bag, he had stowed a flashlight. His frozen fingers fumbled with the button. He flicked it on and signaled to Chinese troops, who began to mass on the shore. Lin reached the shallows. He had much to look forward to: the Communist pamphlets had promised a hero’s welcome and rewards of gold and cash. But in the darkness, a lone Chinese soldier waded into the water, edged toward Lin Zhengyi, and placed him under arrest. TWO THE CALL Every journey into China begins with a story of gravitational pull. The American writer John Hersey, who was born to missionaries in Tianjin, named it “the Call.” In my first year of college, I wandered into an introductory class on modern Chinese politics: revolution and civil war; the tragic, protean force of Chairman Mao; the fall and rise of Deng Xiaoping, who led China out of seclusion and into the world. Only five years had passed since the 1989 democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, when students, barely older than I was, built a tent city in the very citadel of Party power, a mini-state-within-a-state, alive with impulsive idealism. On television, they looked torn between East and West; they had shag haircuts and boom boxes and quotes from Patrick Henry, but they sang the Internationale and knelt to deliver their demands to men who were still buttoned up in Mao suits. A student protester told a reporter, “I don’t know exactly what we want, but we want more of it.” Their movement ended in bloodshed on the night of June 3–4, when official loudspeakers blared, “This is not the West; it is China,” and the Politburo turned the People’s Liberation Army on their people for the first time since the revolution. The Party was proud of suppressing the challenge but aware of the damage to its image, and in the years that followed, the Party scrubbed those events so systematically from its history that only the ghostliest outline has remained. Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me. Cameras had failed to convey how much closer it was, in spirit and geography, to the windswept plains of Mongolia than to the neon lights of Hong Kong. Beijing smelled of coal and garlic and work-stained wool and cheap tobacco. In a claptrap taxi, with the windows sealed and the heat cranked up, the smell stuck to the roof of your mouth. Beijing was cradled by mountains, high on the North China plain, and in the winter the wind that rose in the land of Genghis Khan whistled down and lashed your face. Beijing was a clanging, unglamorous place. One of the nicest buildings in town was the Jianguo Hotel, which the architect proudly described as a perfect replica of a Holiday Inn in Palo Alto, California. China’s national economy was smaller than that of Italy. The countryside felt near: most nights, I ate in a Muslim neighborhood known as Xinjiang Village, which belonged to the Uighurs, an ethnic group from far western China. Their tiny gray-brick restaurants had jittery sheep tied out front, and the animals vanished in the kitchens, one by one, at dinner-time. After the crowds thinned out each day, the waiters and cooks climbed on the tables and went to sleep. *   *   * The Internet had reached China two years earlier, but there were just five telephone lines for every hundred people. I had brought a modem from the United States, and plugged it into my dorm room wall; the machine let out a sharp pop! and never stirred again. When I visited Tiananmen Square for the first time, I stood in the center and saw, on three sides, Mao’s mausoleum, the Great Hall of the People, and the Gate of Heavenly Peace. There was no trace of the demonstrations, of course, and nothing in the square had changed since Mao’s remains were embalmed in a glass case in 1977. As a foreigner, I found it tempting to look at the Stalinist monuments built by the Party and conclude that the Party was doomed. That summer, The New York Times ran a piece headlined THE LONG MARCH TO IRRELEVANCE, in which it observed that “the once-omnipresent party has almost no presence at all.” One side of the square was dedicated to the future: a giant digital clock, fifty feet tall and thirty feet long, counted down the seconds until, as it read across the top, “The Chinese Government Regains Sovereignty over Hong Kong.” In less than a year, Great Britain was scheduled to return the islands of Hong Kong, which it had controlled ever since China’s defeat in the First Opium War in 1842. The Chinese bitterly resented the history of invasion, of being, as they put it, “cut up like a melon” by foreign powers, so the return of Hong Kong was to be a symbolic restoration of Chinese dignity. Underneath the clock, Chinese tourists were taking photos, and the local paper carried stories about couples who stood at the base of it to take their wedding photos. The return of Hong Kong fed a burst of patriotism. After nearly two decades of reform and Westernization, Chinese writers were pushing back against Hollywood, McDonald’s, and American values. A best seller that summer was entitled China Can Say No. Written by a group of young intellectuals, it decried China’s “infatuation with America,” which, they argued, had suppressed the national imagination with a diet of visas, foreign aid, and advertising. If China didn’t resist this “cultural strangulation,” it would become “a slave,” extending the history of humiliating foreign incursions. The Chinese government, wary of volatile, fast-spreading ideas even when they were supportive, eventually pulled the book off the shelves, but not before a raft of knockoffs sought to exploit the same mood: Why China Can Say No, China Still Can Say No, and China Should Always Say No. I was there that fall when China celebrated its National Day on October 1. An editorial in the People’s Daily, the flagship of the state-run media, reminded people, “Patriotism requires us to love the socialist system.” *   *   * Two years later, I returned to China to study at Beijing Normal University. Most of what I knew about the school was from the history of 1989, when it was one of China’s most active campuses during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations; there were days when 90 percent of the student body marched to the square to protest. But by the time I arrived, the most urgent priority for practically everyone I met that summer was a pent-up desire to consume. It’s hard to overstate how large a change this was. In the heyday of socialism, there had been a movie called Must Never Forget, which told the story of a man whose lust for a new wool suit drives him insane. Now there was a Chinese magazine called the Guide to Purchasing Upscale Goods, with features such as “After the Divorce, Who Gets the House?” An article on beverages had an entry called “Men Who Choose Club Soda,” which explained that they were known to have “strong self-respect, ideals, and ambitions, and a low tolerance for mediocrity.” The government was offering its people a bargain: prosperity in exchange for loyalty. Chairman Mao had railed against bourgeois indulgences, but now Chinese leaders were actively promoting the pursuit of the good life. The first winter after the democracy demonstrations, work units in Beijing gave employees overcoats, blankets, Coke, instant coffee, and extra meat. There was a new government slogan around town: “Borrow Money to Realize Your Dreams.” People were still adjusting to the idea of a life outside of labor. Only two years had passed since China reduced the workweek from six days to five. Then it had redrawn the old socialist calendar to create something previously unimaginable: three weeks of vacation. Chinese academics greeted it with a new genre called “leisure studies,” dedicated to this “important stage in the social evolution of mankind.” One weekend, I joined Chinese classmates on a trip to Inner Mongolia. The train was overcrowded, and the ventilation system inhaled diesel exhaust and exhaled it into the cabins. But nobody complained, because it was a small pleasure simply to be on the move. After college, I went to work as a newspaper reporter in Chicago, New York, and the Middle East, and in 2005 the Chicago Tribune asked if I wanted to return to China. I packed up an apartment in Cairo, and landed in Beijing on an airless night in June. China still had a quarter of a billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. The fact that this population, nearly the size of the United States, was often left out of descriptions of the new China was a mistake, but it was an understandable one, given the scale and pace of change going on around it. The city was unrecognizable to me. I went looking for the night stalls and the sheep of Xinjiang Village, but they had been swept away in a bout of beautification. Income had begun to soar at a rate never experienced in a big country. The last time I had been in China, per capita income was three thousand dollars a year—equivalent to the United States in 1872. The United States took fifty-five years to get to seven thousand dollars. China did it in ten. Every six hours, the People’s Republic was exporting as much as it did in the calendar year 1978, just before Captain Lin Zhengyi swam to the mainland. Economics led me to Lin’s front door. I was tracking down academics, trying to unravel what was driving China’s changes. By that point, Lin was a prominent economist in his late fifties with a gray brush cut, thick eyebrows, and wire-rim glasses that slipped down his nose. I knew nothing of his background. When I mentioned his name to another economist, he suggested that Lin’s own path might tell me more about the engine of China’s boom than my stack of books could. When I first asked Lin about it, he said politely, “This is an old story.” He rarely spoke about his defection. I understood, though my curiosity lingered. After our first meeting, I visited Lin many times; we’d catch up on his latest writings, and eventually he resigned himself to my questions about his past. I collected documents about his case, and I visited the shoreline where he started his swim. When he left Taiwan, he said, he had simply wanted to “evaporate.” *   *   * In the hope of finding the China that I recognized, I clung at first to the countryside. It was the China of literature and ink paintings. One month, I did nothing but walk and hitch rides beside the rivers of Sichuan Province. I slept in small towns that felt half-abandoned, because the call of the city had swept away everyone who was not too old or too young to feel its pull. The village ancients liked to joke that, when they died, there would be nobody strong enough to carry their casket. But if there was a time when Chinese cities felt like exceptions, like islands in a sea of impoverished countryside, this was less true all the time. China was building the square-foot equivalent of Rome every two weeks. (In 2012 the country became, for the first time, more urban than rural.) I began to sense something charged about entering an instant city, with its miles of unlined, untrammeled black asphalt, flanked by buildings with nobody yet inside. The endless churn was the only constant. When a Chinese friend asked which American cities to visit on his next trip to the United States, I suggested New York, and he responded as tactfully as he could, “Every time I go, it looks the same.” In Beijing, I never passed up an invitation, because places, and people, vanished before you had a chance to see them again. When I went looking for somewhere to live, there were advertisements for Merlin Champagne Town and Venice Water Townhouses and Moonriver Resort Condo. I chose the Global Trade Mansion. It was an outcropping in a sea of construction, and whoever had built it had installed soundproof windows, since it would be surrounded, for the foreseeable future, by constant noise. I was on the twenty-second floor, and in the mornings before work, I studied Chinese beside the window, peering down on a small army of workers in orange hard hats moving beneath a restless crane. At night, another shift took their place, and the light from the welders’ torches flared in the windows. The Global Trade Mansion seemed as good a place as any to figure out what the Communist Party meant by “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Nine years after the Times had heralded the Communist Party’s long march to irrelevance, the Party was richer and larger than ever, with eighty million members—one in every twelve adults—and no organized opposition. It was opening Party cells inside even the most Westernized technology companies and hedge funds. China was a highfunctioning dictatorship—a dictatorship without a dictator. The government answered to the Party; the Party appointed CEOs and Catholic bishops and newspaper editors. It advised judges how to decide sensitive court cases, and it directed the nation’s military generals. At the lowest levels, the Party felt like a professional network. A talented young journalist I knew in Beijing told me that she became a Party member in college because it doubled the number of jobs available, and because one of her favorite professors had pleaded with her to help fill a quota for female recruits. When I arrived, the Party was freshening itself up with what it called the “Educational Campaign to Maintain the Advanced Nature of the Chinese Communist Party.” This was upbeat by Party standards. Unlike the public denunciations and confrontations of the 1960s and ’70s, the Party was encouraging people to celebrate their “Red birthday” (the anniversary of the day they joined), and every member was expected to write a two-thousand-word self-evaluation. The market sensed an opportunity, and soon there were websites offering to sell “model” selfevaluations. They came drafted with the requisite apologies, such as “I didn’t pay enough attention to establishing a scientific worldview.” My journalist friend who joined the Party while in college tried to write her own selfevaluation, but when she read it aloud at the monthly meeting, she was criticized for failing to include the approved phrases, so she went back to the standard list. In the seven years I had been gone, the language had changed. The word for “comrade,” tongzhi, had been wryly adopted by gays and lesbians to describe one other. I was in line at the bank one afternoon when an old man, peering ahead impatiently, said, “Tongzhi, let’s hurry up!” and two teenagers cracked up. The word for waitresses and shopgirls, xiaojie, had been repurposed to refer mostly to prostitutes. And the new kind of xiaojie were suddenly everywhere in a country overrun with cash-rich new entrepreneurs on business trips. But the change that startled me most surrounded the word for “ambition,” ye xin—literally, “wild heart.” In Chinese, a wild heart had always carried the suggestion of savage abandon and absurd expectations—a toad who dreams of devouring a swan, as an old saying had it. More than two thousand years ago, a collection of political advice called the Huainanzi had warned rulers to “keep powerful positions out of the hands of the ambitious, just as one keeps sharp tools out of the hands of the foolish.” But suddenly I was seeing references to “wild hearts” everywhere—on television talk shows and in the self-help aisles. Bookstores carried titles such as Great Wild Hearts: The Ups and Downs of Pioneering Entrepreneurial Heroes and How to Have a Wild Heart in Your Twenties. *   *   * When the summer heat began to break, I set off to see a man I had read about named Chen Guangcheng. Chen was the youngest of five brothers in a peasant family in the village of Dongshigu, which had a population of five hundred. A childhood illness had left him blind, and he received no schooling until he was seventeen years old. His family read literature and adventure novels to him. He listened to the radio, and he took inspiration from his father, who had been illiterate until adulthood, when he went to school and earned a job as a teacher. Chen studied massage and acupuncture—virtually the only education available to the blind in China—but he was more interested in the law, and he applied to audit legal courses. His father gave him a copy of The Law Protecting the Disabled, and he asked his parents and siblings to read it to him repeatedly. Chen discovered that his family was not receiving the tax breaks that it deserved. Chen ventured to Beijing to file his grievance, and to everyone’s astonishment, he won. Not long after that, he married a woman he heard speaking on a radio call-in show. Her parents, like most in China, did not approve of her marrying a blind man, but she did it anyway. In Dongshigu village, where people grew wheat, soybeans, and peanuts, the masseur knew about the law, so people turned to him for help. In one case, he prevented local leaders from gaining control of land and renting it back to peasants at higher prices. In another, he closed a paper mill that was polluting the local river. When a reporter visited him, he said, “The most important thing is for ordinary people to know that they have the right” to complain. Chen was an oddity in the world of Chinese politics, not only because of the circumstances of his life but because he was a new kind of activist, something more ambiguous than a conventional dissident. When I heard about him in 2005, he was collecting accounts of women forced to undergo abortions and sterilizations after defying China’s one-child policy. When they refused or fled, the local government locked up their parents and siblings in an attempt to force the women out of hiding. When Chen helped the women file a suit, local officials locked him in his house. One day in late summer, I took a plane to Shandong, and then one taxi after another until I reached Dongshigu village. It was a drowsy afternoon by the time I reached the narrow dirt road into town. I left the cab and continued up the sloping path on foot. Chen lived in a single-story farmhouse, with a weeping willow over the front gate and flowering vines that reached up the home’s stone walls. There were faded red paper holiday banners hung beside the gate. Just before I reached it, a pair of men blocked my path. One was lean and bony, with red chapped cheeks; the other was stout and smiling. “He’s not home,” the stout man said. He smiled and stepped close enough that I could smell the remnants of his lunch. “I think he might be,” I said. “He’s expecting me.” Even if Chen was home, he said, Chen did not want any visitors. Other men began to arrive, in groups of two and three. One took my wrist and walked me back toward the taxi. A police car pulled up, and the officers asked for my passport. I was not permitted to be there, they said. They gave me a choice: I could go to the station with them “to rest for a while,” as they put it, or I could leave town. The stout fellow was no longer smiling. He wanted to know where I had heard about the blind man in Dongshigu village. “From the Internet,” I said. He blinked back at me, and from his expression, I sensed that the Internet meant as much to him as if I’d said I had been led there by fairies. He opened the door of the taxi and pressed me toward it. I slumped back into the cab, and we inched out of town, trailed by the police. The taxi driver was curious about the fuss. I explained that Chen was collecting complaints about abuses of the one-child policy, and the driver said he knew of another place nearby where people had similar complaints. He took me to a town called Nigou, where we pulled up beside a line of shops on the main street. There was a fertilizer store on the first floor, and above it, a fenced-in window. When I got out of the taxi and stood beneath the window, a woman stepped to the inside of the fence and peered down at me. I asked why she was there. “We cannot leave. We have no freedom,” she said. She was calm. She said that local family-planning officials had locked her there, above the fertilizer store, because her daughter-in-law would not agree to a forced sterilization or pay the fees for having too many children, the equivalent of about a year’s income. I peered up at the woman and asked, “How long have you been there?” “Three weeks,” she said. “How many of you are up there?” “Fifteen,” she said. It was an odd arrangement for an interview. I was standing beneath the window, and she was looking down through the fence. I looked up and down the block, where people were going about their lives. There was a hair salon on one side and a fruit stand on the other. The local family-planning office occupied a storefront across the street. I walked in and asked about the people detained above the fertilizer store. A man behind a desk named Wan Zhendong, the head of the office’s statistics department, said he knew nothing about any detention center, adding that people who complain about being detained are usually trying to avoid paying fines for having too many children. “The policy,” Wan said, “is accepted by ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people here.” Once I returned to Beijing, I called Chen Guangcheng, the blind masseur. Every time I dialed, the line was dead. I didn’t get through for months. A lawyer named Teng Biao wasn’t surprised when I described the scene in Nigou. People were beginning to call these detention centers “black jails.” It was difficult to figure out how many there were or where they were located. You had to look for them, town by town. “It is very hard for people there to get information to lawyers and the media,” he told me. “The local authorities will try their best to make sure nobody knows about it.” *   *   * The Internet was largely a mystery in Dongshigu village, but no longer in Beijing. Initially, the Chinese government had regarded the Internet as an opportunity: the country had arrived late to the Industrial Revolution, and Chinese leaders hoped that the information revolution could help the country close the gap with the West. But the enthusiasm cooled. In 2001, President Jiang Zemin identified the Internet as a “political, ideological, and cultural battlefield.” The week I returned from Shandong, the Ministry of Public Security expanded a list of information officially “prohibited” from the Web. Whenever possible, the government liked to organize the world by category, and it had already banned a list of nine types of information, including “rumors” and anything that “damages the credibility” of the state. Now it expanded the list from nine to eleven, including “information inciting illegal assemblies” and “information concerning activities of illegal civic associations.” The scale of available information was soaring. At the beginning of 2005, China had about one million bloggers; by the end, this figure had quadrupled, and the government ordered Internet companies to set up a system of “selfdiscipline” to censor and monitor the way people used the Web. Bit by bit, the Party was erecting what came to be known as the Great Firewall—a vast digital barricade that prevented Chinese users from seeing newspaper stories critical of China’s top leaders or reports from human rights groups; eventually, it blocked social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Unlike the physical Great Wall, the digital version grew or shrank to meet new challenges or convey a sense of openness. Often, I didn’t know something was off-limits until I typed it in and received an error code such as HTTP 404—the page cannot be found. The Party grew more determined to punish those who tried to undermine its control of information. The previous year, 2004, a journalist named Shi Tao, who worked at Contemporary Business News in Hunan Province, attended a staff meeting in which an editor relayed the latest instructions about what subjects could not be published around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. That night, Shi logged on to his e-mail account (huoyan1989@yahoo.com.cn) and sent a summary of the Party document to an editor of Democracy Forum, a prodemocracy website based in New York. Two days later, the Beijing State Security Bureau contacted Yahoo! China and asked for the name behind the account, the contents of the e-mail, and the locations from which the e-mail was accessed. Yahoo! complied, and on November 23, 2004, Shi Tao was arrested and later charged with “leaking state secrets.” His trial lasted two hours; he was found guilty and sentenced to ten years. The case was the clearest demonstration of the force with which the government would seek to maintain control over an uncertain new challenge. When human rights groups criticized Yahoo! for handing over the information, the company’s cofounder Jerry Yang replied, “If you want to do business there you have to comply.” Members of the U.S. Congress took note. At a subcommittee hearing on the Internet in China, Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, wondered, “If the secret police a half century ago asked where Anne Frank was hiding, would the correct answer be to hand over the information in order to comply with local laws?” Yahoo! held firm, and when Shi Tao’s mother sued the company for exposing her son to harm, Yahoo! filed a motion to dismiss. Over time, the pressure on the company became unbearable. In the fall of 2007, Rep. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to have served in Congress, called Yang and other Internet executives before the House Foreign Relations Committee and said, “Morally you are pygmies.” Shi Tao’s mother gave tearful testimony, and when it was over, Yang bowed to her three times and said, “I want to personally apologize.” Yahoo! settled with her family, but the son remained in jail. Inside China, the message was indelible: the Internet would never be a domain of free expression. *   *   * The Global Trade Mansion was too quiet and too expensive, and I needed more chances to practice Chinese: When I called my landlord to suggest that he keep the security deposit as my final month’s rent, I mistakenly told him to keep the security deposit as my final month’s “menstruation.” Large parts of the city had been demolished and rebuilt in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. The Beijing-born author Zha Jianying, who returned to the capital after studying in the United States, quoted a friend describing the city as a place where it was becoming impossible to find a place “to hang up one’s birdcage.” The few surviving sections of old Beijing consisted mostly of tiny alleyways lined by single-story homes of gray brick, wood, and tile. The arrangement had remained more or less the same for seven centuries, when sections of the city were laid out under the Yuan dynasty, which gave these streets the name hutong, a Mongolian term that came to mean “alley” in Chinese. The Mongols had designed the hutong to uniform widths of twelve or twenty-four paces. In 1980 the city had six thousand hutong; over the years, all but a few hundred were leveled to make way for office buildings and apartment complexes. Only one of the city’s forty-four princely palaces had survived intact. I asked around and found a one-story house for rent at No. 45 Caochang Bei Xiang. Most people in these old homes used a communal public toilet around the corner from my front door. But this house had been fitted with indoor plumbing, and renovated to comprise four modern rooms surrounding a small courtyard that contained a date tree and a persimmon tree. When I reported my new address to the Chicago Tribune’s driver, Old Zhang, he did not approve. “You’re going the wrong direction,” he said. “You should be moving from the ground into an apartment up in the air, not the other way around.” The walls of the house were porous; when it rained, the ceiling leaked, and when the winter overwhelmed the heating, I wore a ski hat around the house. Underfoot, there was a steady traffic of mice and beetles and geckos, and now and then I had to wallop a scorpion with a magazine. But it was a relief to live with the windows open, and I loved it. Across the alley, my neighbor kept a pigeon coop on his roof, as a hobby. He attached wooden pipettes to the birds’ feet so they whistled as they flew in great circles above our heads. The window above my desk was filled with a view of Beijing’s ancient Drum Tower, a soaring wooden pavilion built in 1272. For hundreds of years the Drum Tower, and its neighbor the Bell Tower, kept time for the people of the city, telling them when to sleep and when to rise. They were the tallest buildings for miles around. The Drum Tower contained twenty-four giant leather-covered drums, large enough that their thundering could be heard in the farthest reaches of the capital. Chinese emperors were obsessed with controlling the passing of the seasons and the hours of the day. In the spring, the emperor decreed the precise moment when members of the court could change out of their furs and into their silk; in the fall, the emperor decreed the right moment for the raking of leaves. Controlling time was so closely associated with imperial power that when foreign armies invaded Beijing in 1900, they made a point to climb the Drum Tower and slash the leather drums with bayonets. For a while, the Chinese renamed it the Realizing Humiliation Tower. THREE BAPTIZED IN CIVILIZATION The soldiers hauled Lin Zhengyi from the water and onto the beach. It was the dead of night, May 16, 1979. They suspected he was a spy; they had never encountered a soldier who had swum from Taiwan. Back in Taiwan, Lin’s commanders didn’t know what to think. They suspected he had tried to defect, but had he succeeded, the loudspeakers across the water, they thought, would be gloating about his arrival. Perhaps he had drowned. Or perhaps he had been a mainland spy all along. Regardless, the abrupt disappearance of one of Taiwan’s most celebrated soldiers was humiliating. The army classified Lin as missing, then dead, and awarded his wife, Chen, the equivalent of thirty thousand dollars in benefits. She was pregnant and alone, raising their three-year-old son. To protect her from retaliation, Lin had told her nothing of his plans. At the family shrine, Lin’s parents added a memorial tablet inscribed with his name. On the mainland, Lin was held in custody and questioned for three months. Once he had persuaded them that he was not a spy, he was released and allowed to travel. In a country where most people were still reeling from the Cultural Revolution, he regarded Mao’s legacy with the passion of the convert, and he made a pilgrimage to Yan’an, the wartime headquarters of the Communist Party, “to be educated,” he told me. He also went to Sichuan to see the ancient dam built by his hero Li Bing. From a ledge overlooking the roiling waters, he peered into the channel, which was often described as a symbol of how far China had fallen in the two thousand years since the dam was built. But Lin took it as a source of inspiration to do something bold. “I think that if we do something, we can change the fate of people, change the fate of the nation for a thousand years.” The exhilaration of defection was tempered by the shameful fact that he had left his family behind. “I love my wife. I love my children. I love my family. I feel responsibility for them,” he told me. “As an intellectual, I also feel strongly my responsibility for the culture and the prosperity in China. If I have a strong belief in what is right, then I need to follow that.” In the months after he arrived, contacting his wife was out of the question. Taiwan’s military government was undoubtedly monitoring her for clues about Lin’s fate. He remembered a cousin who was studying in Tokyo and he wrote him a letter: “You are now the only relative I can contact. But you must be careful. Don’t give the Nationalists any evidence they could use against you. I have a message to pass along, but you must deliver it verbally, and leave no traces.” Lin asked him to buy birthday presents for Chen and the children, and to sign them “Fangfang,” his family nickname. In his letter, Lin confessed, “Even though a man must have great aspirations, and be aware of his duties beyond emotions and attachments to family, I am more and more homesick by the day.” He worried about his parents, his son, and his newborn daughter. Of his son, he said, “Xiao Long is three years old now, the age when he most needs a father, but he only has his mother. Xiao Lin has never even laid eyes on her father … To all of them, words cannot express my apology.” He remained bitter that Taiwan’s government had assigned him tasks that were more about propaganda than advancement. “The Nationalists were only using me, never nurturing me,” he wrote. He gushed about the changes under way in China in the early months of the economic boom unleashed by Deng: “Almost everyone has enough food and clothing these days … Things are flying ahead in leaps of progress. People are full of vitality and confidence. I truly believe that China’s future is bright. Someday you’ll be proud to be Chinese, to stand up in the world with your head held high and your chest puffed out.” But once the novelty wore off, life for defectors was hard. Huang Zhi-cheng, a Taiwanese pilot who landed his plane on the mainland in 1981, recalled, “At first, it’s hello, hello, and then they leave you to fend for yourself.” Lin applied to study economics at People’s University in Beijing and was rejected. His official file, the dang’an, contained every suspicion ever raised about his political history. For Lin, defection would always be a cause for suspicion; in the language of the day, people said he had “origins unclear.” After the rejection, he applied to Peking University. Dong Wenjun, an administrator, worried that Lin might turn out to be a spy, but ultimately decided, as he put it later, that there was “no intelligence to be gathered in the economics department anyway.” Lin was accepted. Lin told his classmates that he was a student from Singapore. In return for his defection, he had asked the People’s Liberation Army not to publicize his story for propaganda purposes. He had seen the brochures that washed up in Quemoy, heralding defectors, but he didn’t want to be featured that way. He gave up the name Lin Zhengyi. From now on he would be Lin Yifu, which meant “a persistent man on a long journey.” *   *   * In his office one afternoon, I mentioned to Lin that people in Taiwan speculated that he had given military secrets to the People’s Liberation Army, to prove that he was trustworthy. He had heard this, too. He laughed wearily. “That’s nonsense,” he said. “I didn’t come with anything other than what I wore.” He noted that by the time he fled, China was calling for reunification, and a junior officer’s secrets would have been of limited use. He disputed the military investigators’ reports that he’d defected partly out of professional frustration, and that he had misled the sentries in order to conceal his departure. He framed his swim as an act of idealism. “I still believe that my friends in Taiwan had the same aspiration to make a contribution to China. I respect their aspiration. This is just the way I think I can contribute to China’s history. It was my personal choice.” It was, by mainland Chinese standards, a radical act: historically, personal choice was a low priority for the Chinese, for reasons both modern and ancient, including, in the beginning, the land itself. Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who studies cultural differences in how people see the world, found that in ancient China, fertile plains and rivers lent themselves to rice farming that required irrigation and compelled people “to cultivate the land in concert with one another.” By contrast, the ancient Greeks, who lived amid mountains and coastlines, relied on herding, trading, and fishing, and they were able to be more independent. In that history, Nisbett saw the makings of Greek ideas about personal freedom, individuality, and objective thought. The sense that an individual was embedded in larger forces ran through Chinese art, politics, and society. The philosopher Xunzi, in the third century B.C.E., believed that only social rituals and models could control individual “wayward” appetites, just as steam and pressure could straighten a warped slab of wood. One of China’s most famous classical paintings, an eleventh-century scroll by Fan Kuan entitled Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, is often called China’s Mona Lisa. But compared to Leonardo’s full-frame portrait, Fan Kuan’s work depicts a tiny figure of a horseman enveloped by vast, misty mountains. In imperial Chinese law, the courts considered not only motive but also the damage to the social order, so a defendant received a harsher sentence if he murdered someone of a higher social rank than someone of a lower rank. Punishment was collective: judges sentenced not just the guilty individual but also family members, neighbors, and community leaders. Liang Qichao, one of China’s leading reformers of the early twentieth century, hailed the importance of the individual in national development, but renounced that view after he visited San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1903 and concluded that the competition between separate Chinese clans and families was preventing Chinese people from prospering. “If we were to adopt a democratic system of government now,” he wrote, “it would be nothing less than committing national suicide.” He dreamed of what he called a Chinese Cromwell, “to carry out harsh rule, and with iron and fire to forge and temper our countrymen for twenty, thirty, even fifty years. After that we can give them the books of Rousseau and tell them about the deeds of Washington.” Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary who became president after the fall of the empire in 1911, concluded that China was weak because its people were a “sheet of loose sand.” His prescription? “The individual should not have too much liberty,” he said, “but the nation should have complete liberty.” He encouraged people to think of the government as a “great automobile” and its leaders as essential “chauffeurs and mechanics” who require a free hand to operate. China had always had poets, writers, and revolutionaries—whom the authors Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin have called the “unbound feet” of Chinese history—but Chairman Mao was determined to enshrine the idea that “the individual is subordinate to the organization.” The Party, he declared, must “eradicate all tendencies towards disunity.” It organized people into work units and collective farms. Without a letter from your danwei (“work unit”), you couldn’t get married or divorced, you couldn’t buy a plane ticket or stay in a hotel, or, for that matter, visit another danwei. Most days, you lived, worked, shopped, and studied within its confines. To identify and correct individualistic thinking, Mao relied on propaganda and education—“Thought Reform,” as he called it, which became known colloquially as xinao, or “mind-cleansing.” (In 1950, a CIA officer who learned of it coined the term brainwashing.) To enliven its message, the Party promoted models of sacrifice. In 1959, newspapers highlighted a soldier named Lei Feng who was five feet tall and called himself a “tiny screw” in the revolutionary machine. He appeared in a traveling photo exhibition, with images such as “Shoveling Manure to Help the Liaoning People’s Commune” and “Lei Feng Darning Socks.” After the army announced that the young soldier had died in an accident (struck by a falling telephone pole), Chairman Mao advised people to “learn from Comrade Lei Feng,” and for decades to come, local museums displayed replicas of his sandals, his toothbrush, and other effects—like the bones of saints. The pressure to conform was profound. A doctor who was terrorized during the Cultural Revolution—exiled to the western desert, where his wife committed suicide—later said, “To survive in China you must reveal nothing to others. Or it could be used against you … That’s why I’ve come to think the deepest part of the self is best left unclear. Like mist and clouds in a Chinese landscape painting, hide the private part behind your social persona. Let your public self be like rice in a dinner: bland and inconspicuous, taking on the flavors of its surroundings while giving off no flavor of its own.” *   *   * As change gathered speed in the 1980s, Chinese leaders warned that the nation must cross the river by “feeling for the stones.” In reality, many people swept into the current of China’s transformation found they had no choice but to plunge in and swim as fast as possible, with only the vaguest sense of what might lie on the other side. On paper, China remained suspicious of the individual; even after reforms were under way, the 1980 edition of the country’s authoritative dictionary, The Sea of Words, defined individualism as “the heart of the Bourgeois worldview, behavior that benefits oneself at the expense of others.” And nothing was more abhorrent to the Communist Party than the language of Thatcherist free-market fundamentalism. But China was enacting some of its most basic ideas: the retreat of public services, hostility to trade unions, national and military pride. All over China, people were embarking on journeys, joining the largest migration in human history. China’s extraordinary growth relied on a combination of abundant cheap labor and a surge of investment in factories and infrastructure—a recipe that uncorked economic energy stored up during the years of turmoil under Mao. Party leader Zhao Ziyang surrounded himself with economists who sought to emulate the growth of South Korea and Japan. To thrive, they had to be flexible. Wu Jinglian, a researcher in a state think tank, had begun his career as an orthodox socialist who persuaded his high school to give up teaching English and Western economics. But during the Cultural Revolution, his wife, the director of a kindergarten, was labeled a “capitalist roader” because her father had been a general in the Nationalist Army; Red Guards shaved half of her head. Wu himself was tagged an “antirevolutionary” and sent off to “reform through labor.” “I experienced a drastic change in ideology,” he told me. By the eighties, Wu was a leading expert on the free market, even though that term was too controversial to utter. Wu had to call it “the commodity economy.” Beginning in 1980, China designated special economic zones, which used tax advantages to attract foreign investment, technology, and links to customers abroad. The zones needed workers. Since the fifties, the Party had controlled where people lived by dividing households into two types: rural and urban. The distinction ordained where you were born, schooled, employed, and, most likely, buried. With few exceptions, only the Public Security Bureau could change your household registration, or hukou. But new machines and fertilizers demanded fewer hands in the fields, and in 1985 the government officially permitted rural people to live and work temporarily in cities. In the next eight years, the number of rural migrants reached a hundred million. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping let it be known that prosperity was paramount: “Development,” he said, after visiting a refrigerator factory that had expanded sixteenfold in seven years, “is the only hard truth.” Between 1993 and 2005, state-owned enterprises cut more than seventy-three million jobs, sending another flood of workers off to find a new source of income. Chinese leaders kept their currency undervalued, which made exports cheap, and these soared. In 1999, China’s exports had been less than a third of America’s. A decade later, China was the world’s largest exporter. Autonomy was creeping into daily life. In Mao’s day, it had been considered immoral to take a second job, because spare time belonged to the state. By the nineties, so many people were moonlighting that there was a boom in the business of printing business cards. The state media, which had once encouraged everyone to be “a rustless screw” in the machine, now acknowledged the new reality of competition: “You must rely on yourself,” the Hebei Economic Daily wrote. “Blaze your own path, and fight.” People made money in whatever ways they could. In poor areas, door-to-door blood buyers offered to help cover the cost of taxes and school fees. Jing Jun, a Harvard-trained anthropologist, found that people were donating so often that they ran up against physical limits. “So the blood contractors would hang people upside down by their feet against a wall to make the blood flow down into the arms,” he wrote. (The business proved disastrous; by the mid-nineties, the blood collectors had caused China’s worst outbreak of HIV. An estimated fifty-seven thousand people were infected.) The language of the individual filtered out through movies and fashions and music. Jia Zhangke, a filmmaker, recalled to me that when he was growing up in Shanxi coal country in the eighties, he would ride the bus for four hours just to buy a cassette of mushy pop ballads by Deng Lijun, a Taiwanese star so popular that Lin Yifu’s military unit on Quemoy had played her music over the radio to attract defectors. Since she had the same surname as Deng Xiaoping, the soldiers on the mainland joked that they listed to Old Deng all day and Young Deng all night. “Before that, the songs we sang were ‘We Are the Heirs of Communism’ and ‘We Workers Have Power.’ It was always ‘we,’” Jia told me. “But in Deng Lijun’s song ‘The Moon Represents My Heart,’ it was about ‘me.’ My heart. And of course we loved it!” Companies reinforced that message. China Mobile sold cell phone service aimed at people under twenty-five, using the slogan “My Turf, My Decision.” Even in rural areas, where things changed slowly, people spoke of themselves in different ways. Mette Halskov Hansen, a Norwegian sinologist who spent four years in a countryside school, found that teachers were trying to prepare their students for a world in which survival required “self-reliance, self-promotion, and the self-made individual.” Hansen watched a pep rally in 2008 in which students recited a pledge: “Ever since God created all things on earth, there has not been one person like me. My eyes and my ears, my brain and my soul, all are exceptional. Nobody speaks or behaves like me, no one before me and no one will after me. I am the biggest miracle of nature!” The desire to leave—to “go out,” as it was known—swept through villages. It didn’t necessarily engulf the men and women who were most successful or confident. On the contrary, it often settled on the misfits—the restless, the willful, the unblessed. On the day the teenager Gong Hainan was seized by the desire to leave, her mother and her father hesitated. She was their only daughter, and they were country people with no knowledge of the city. But once their daughter had an idea in her mind, she drove it like a mule. “They had no choice but to agree,” Gong told me. *   *   * Gong Hainan was born at the foot of a mountain in the village of Waduangang, in Hunan, the home province of Chairman Mao. Her parents met under benighted circumstances. During the Cultural Revolution, they were paired with each other because they shared a political affliction: their families had been classified as “well-off peasants.” A village matchmaker put them together. Gong’s family raised peanuts and cotton and chickens and pigs. She was the elder of two children, and she was small and sickly. She had narrow shoulders and thin lips, and her face at rest carried a wary expression. In the hierarchy of village life, this did her no favors. The local boys wanted girls with plump cheeks, and lips in the shape of a rosebud. “If anyone ever liked me, I have yet to hear about it,” Gong told me years later, when we got to know each other in Beijing. But even as a child, Gong had a restless energy. When her neighbors began to open tiny businesses, Gong badgered her parents to let her join the trend. They laughed. “We have three neighbors, and a mountain behind us. Who is going to shop here?” they asked. Undeterred, Gong enlisted her little brother, Haibin, into a business proposition: They would buy ice pops and resell them door-to-door. After one day of lugging a thirty-pound Styrofoam cooler around the rutted village paths, her brother quit. “I could’ve beaten him half to death and he wouldn’t go out again,” she said. But Gong made a map of the village that identified which parents were known to cave in to their kids’ demands, and she charted the optimal route. Soon she was selling two boxes a day. “Whatever you’re doing,” she concluded, “you have to be strategic.” There was something different about her generation, the young men and women born in the seventies. You could hear it in their speech, their comfort with saying “I” and “me,” where their parents would have used the plural: “our work unit” and “our family.” (Older Chinese took to calling her cohort the wo yi dai—the “Me Generation.”) When Gong was sixteen, her test scores earned her a place at the top local high school, a transformative moment for a farming family. Shortly before school was to start, she was riding into town on a tractor-taxi, on her way to restock her ice pop supply, when the tractor plunged into a ditch. The other passengers were thrown clear, but she had been sitting on the front bench. Her right leg was crushed, and her nose was nearly severed. She would recover, but when she got out of the hospital, wearing a hip cast, she discovered that a rural school could not accommodate a student unable to walk. The school suggested she withdraw. Gong’s mother, Jiang Xiaoyuan, would have none of it. She moved into the dorm and carried her daughter on her back—up and down the stairs to the classrooms, back and forth to the toilet. (Gong trained herself to use the bathroom no more than twice a day.) While Gong was in class, her mother hustled outside to the street to sell fruit from baskets to make extra money. I wondered if the story was a metaphor, until I met her mother. “There was one especially tall building, the laboratory, and her class was up on the fourth floor,” Jiang said, scowling at the memory of it. Gong had never seriously considered an alternative. “School was the only way out,” Jiang told me. “We never wanted for her to work in the fields like us.” *   *   * Gong’s medical bills plunged her parents into debt. “My accident made a mess of the family,” she said. It was 1994, and China’s epic labor migration was gathering. In 1978, nearly 80 percent of the Chinese population had been working on a farm; by 1994 this figure had fallen to less than 50 percent. Gong dropped out of the elite local high school and set off for the factories on the coast. As migration grew, the government tried to manage the course of the flood. One slogan urged rural people to find work close to home: “Leave the Land, but Not the Countryside! Enter the Factories, but Not the Cities!” The state officially named the new migrants the “floating population”—a term that shared Chinese characters with the words for hooligans and stray dogs. Police blamed crime on what they called “Triple Withouts”—migrants without a home, a job, or a reliable source of income. Cities sought to limit the number of new arrivals. In Beijing, the local government barred various categories of people, including “beggars and buskers, fortune tellers and other people engaged in feudal superstitious activities.” If they were found, they would be sent home. Beijing offered official “green cards” to parcel out access to public schools and housing, but it set the standards so high that only 1 percent of the new migrants qualified. Shanghai published a handbook called The Guide to Entering Shanghai: For Brothers and Sisters Who Come to Shanghai to Work, in which the opening chapter was entitled “Do Not Blindly Come to Shanghai for Work.” Still, they came. By 2007, 135 million rural migrants were living in the cities, and the “floating population” became known by the government as the “outside population.” The State Council ordered governments to improve insurance and workplace-injury protections, and to ensure the migrants were “baptized in civilization,” as the Party press liked to put it. In the city of Zhuhai, Gong found work on an assembly line making Panasonic televisions. She soldered two wires together, two thousand times a day, and sent money back to her family. If she finished early, the foreman raised her quota for the next day. The factory had an in-house newspaper, and after a few months Gong wrote a piece of spectacular propaganda entitled “I Love Panasonic, I Love My Home.” It had the desired effect; she was taken off the assembly line and promoted to editor. She’d found a kind of contentment in her job. Then one day a former classmate visited and spent the weekend regaling her with news of their old friends rising up through college and moving to exotic new places. In the confines of the factory, she’d come to see herself as a success; she worked with her mind, not her fingers. Yet hearing about what she was missing was shattering. She cursed her decision to drop out of school. “It was weak and naïve,” she said. China’s economy was rising on all sides of her, and she was trapped in the basement. Factories making televisions and clothes needed uncomplaining workers with no promise of job security or training or progress. Migrants like her were earning just half of what regular residents of Guangdong were earning, and the gap was widening. If she stayed in Guangdong, she could look forward to a life of second-class health care and education. She would have to pay five or six times what local parents paid to educate a child with a local hukou. More than three-quarters of all women who died in childbirth in the province were migrants with no access to prenatal care. In the electronics businesses, assembly-line bosses preferred female employees, because they were more conscientious about detail work. The only men in her factory were security guards and truck loaders and cooks. “If I ever wanted to settle down, those were going to be my choices,” Gong said. She knew the dangers of going back to the village. It was 1995, and already the income gap between the countryside and the city in China was wider than anywhere else in the world except Zimbabwe and South Africa. She had to get to a city. She said, “I decided to go back to school.” “Everyone in the village was against the idea,” she went on. “They said, ‘You’re a twenty-one-year-old woman. Go and get married!’” In the village hierarchy, the only person who ranked lower than a young woman was a young woman who had something better in mind for her future. But her parents supported her decision, and the school allowed her to reenroll in the eleventh grade. She scored the highest rank in the county on the national college entrance test, and earned a coveted spot at Peking University, where Chairman Mao, who arrived as a twenty-fouryear-old in the capital, once said, “Beijing is like a crucible in which one cannot but be transformed.” Before she enrolled, she, like Lin Yifu, changed her given name. She became Haiyan, a reference to the small, hardy seabird in an old revolutionary poem by Maxim Gorky, “The Song of the Storm Petrel.” It was one of Lenin’s favorites. She cared nothing about the revolution, but she loved the image of a bird that turns to face the storm —“one free soul,” as Gorky put it, that “floats unharmed above the chaos.” At Peking University, Gong studied Chinese literature and went on to Fudan University, in Shanghai, for a master’s degree in journalism. By her second year, she had gained a sense of professional momentum. But something was lacking: a love life. *   *   * Of all the upheavals in Chinese life, there was none more intimate than the opportunity to choose one’s mate. For centuries, village matchmakers and parents paired off young people of comparable social and economic status—of “family doors of equal size”—with minimal participation from the bride and groom. Confucius has exhaustive advice about justice and duty, but he mentions emotion, qing, only once in the Analects, a record of his teachings. Love stories didn’t become popular in China until the twentieth century. While European protagonists occasionally found happiness, Chinese lovers typically succumbed to forces beyond their control: meddling parents, disease, miscommunication. The stories were categorized so that readers knew which doom to expect: Tragic Love, Bitter Love, Miserable Love, Wronged Love, and Chaste Love. A sixth genre, Joyous Love, was not as successful. (The tendency to see love as a problem endured. In the 1990s, the researchers Fred Rothbaum and Billy Yuk-Piu Tsang analyzed the lyrics of eighty Chinese and American pop songs and discovered that the Chinese songs made many more references to suffering and “negative expectations”—a sense that if destiny did not ordain a relationship, it could not be salvaged.) In China, romance had a political side: In 1919, when Chinese students demonstrated for what they called Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science, they also demanded an end to arranged marriage. They called it “the freedom of love,” and from then on it was tied to a sense of individual autonomy. Mao outlawed arranged marriages and concubines, and established a woman’s right to divorce, but the system left little room for desire. Dating that did not lead to the altar was “hooliganism,” and sex was so stigmatized in the Maoist period that doctors met couples who struggled to conceive because they lacked a firm grasp of the mechanics. When the magazine Popular Films ran a photo of Cinderella kissing a prince, readers wrote in to denounce it. “I heard the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers condemning you for being so shameless!” one wrote. Though arranged marriages were banned in 1950, factory bosses and Communist cadres still did much of the matchmaking, and when a young intellectual named Yan Yunxiang was sent down from Beijing to the village of Xiajia, in China’s northeast, in 1970, he found an abundance of miserable love. Local women had so little say in whom they married that there was a village tradition of sobbing when you left home on your wedding day. It wasn’t until the eighties that the village elders began to relinquish control over local marriages. Yan Yunxiang eventually became an anthropologist and continued to visit the village over the years. He attended a wedding where the bride was marrying for love, and she confided to Yan that she was too happy to sob. She rubbed hot pepper on her handkerchief in order to summon the tears that her parents’ generation expected. In the heyday of socialism, every man in Yan’s village wanted to be seen as laoshi, “frank and simple”; the worst thing a bachelor could be was fengliu, “rebellious and romantic.” But all of a sudden, the laoshi men were known as dowdy and gullible, and everyone wanted to be as fengliu as Leonardo DiCaprio aboard the Titanic, in the most popular pirated movie of the day. In much of the world, marriage is in decline; the proportion of married American adults has dropped to 51 percent, the lowest ever recorded. But in China, even as rates of divorce have climbed, so much of the culture revolves around family and offspring that 98 percent of the female population eventually marries—one of the highest levels in the world. (China has neither civil unions nor laws against discrimination, and it remains a very hard place to be gay.) The sudden freedom had its problems. China had few bars or churches, and no coed softball, for example, so pockets of society were left to improvise. Factory towns organized “friend-making clubs” for assembly-line workers; Beijing traffic radio, 103.9, set aside a half hour on Sundays for taxi drivers to advertise themselves; and CCTV-7, the military channel, organized a dating show for grunts. But those practices merely reinforced existing barriers, and for vast numbers of people, the collision of love, choice, and money was a bewildering new problem. China’s one-child policy had exerted unexpected forces on marriage. By promoting the use of condoms on an unprecedented scale, it delinked sex from reproduction and spurred a mini sexual revolution. But it also heightened competition: When sonogram technology spread in China in the 1980s, couples aborted female fetuses in order to wait for a boy. As a result, China has twenty-four million men who will be of marrying age by 2020 but unable to find a spouse—“bare branches” on the family tree, as they’re known in Chinese. Women were barraged with warnings in the Chinese press that if they were still single at thirty, they would be considered “leftover women.” *   *   * “In China’s marriage market,” Gong explained to me one day, “there are three species trying to survive: men, women, and women with graduate degrees.” She discovered, while studying for her master’s degree, that Chinese men were wary of women who’d surpassed them in education. And in Shanghai, she said, “I didn’t know a soul in the city. My parents had an elementary school education. I could never be interested in the kinds of people they had access to.” Men and women with different hukou rarely married; this frustrated her. “Even though ‘free love and marriage’ was written into the law, we don’t actually have the freedom to choose,” she told me. In 2003 the Internet had just sixty-nine million users (5 percent of the population), but it was growing at 30 percent a year. That fall, a Web portal called Sohu reported that the most-searched-for name on its site, once “Mao Zedong,” was now “Mu Zi Mei,” a sex blogger. When Mu Zi Mei posted an audio recording of one of her assignations, demand crashed her server. (To those who gasped, she replied, “I express my freedom through sex.”) Gong Haiyan paid five hundred yuan (about sixty dollars at the time) to an early online dating service. She selected twelve men and sent them messages. When she got no response and complained to the company, she was told, “Look at yourself—you’re ugly, and you go after these high-quality men? No wonder you got no replies.” She tracked down one of the bachelors and learned that he hadn’t even registered with the site. The photograph, the vitals, the contact info—all had been cobbled together from other online sites. China had mastered the fake Polo shirt, and now it was turning to the counterfeit date. “I wasn’t thinking about being an entrepreneur—I was just so angry,” Gong said. “I wanted a site for people who were in the same position I was in.” She mapped out a simple design on Front Page, the website softwar...
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